Notebook On Cities And Culture

Colin Marshall sits down in Santa Monica with Jim Benning, travel writer and co-founder of World Hum, home of "The Best Travel Stories on the Internet." They discuss why Mexican food on other continents sucks so bad; the nature of a "weather lifestyle" site he previously edited; the old question of travel versus tourism; his relationship to the label of "travel writing"; whether hatred or love for a place can produce anything but uninteresting writing; our need for "hidden gems"; how Los Angeles offers the world within it, yet rewards travel outside of it; that feeling you get upon first waking up in a completely unknown city; the American traveler's anxiety about entering a foreign McDonalds; his multimedia production "Starbucks Versus the Traveler"; the English and American traditions of the travel writing of ignorance; the rant for a single-language world he found in his old diaries; the lost world of the Pan Am vacationer and the United States' "new humility"; LAX and the many other ways that Los Angeles

Colin Marshall sits down in the Hollywood Hills with Geoff Nicholson, author of such nonfiction books as The Lost Art of Walking and its more recent follow-up Walking in Ruins as well as novels like Bleeding London, Gravity's Volkswagen, and the new The City Under the Skin. They discuss which cities contributed to his concept of "the city"; the resonances between the novel's fictional Telstar Hotel and the LAX Theme Building, as well as the significance of their restaurants, revolving or otherwise; the failure of our intention to "build our way out of any problem"; when he first saw the "fading Hollywood" of the late seventies, and its process of de-ruination; how to take the "subway" to Stonehenge; whether cities ever develop except through bubbles and busts; how The City Under the Skin dramatizes the ever-present struggle for a city's future form; what everyone would draw if everyone had to draw a map of Los Angeles by hand; when all the murders, tattoos, and kidnappings got into the novel; his time at the

Colin Marshall sits down at UCLA with Jon Christensen, editor of Boom: A Journal of California, the recently re-launched magazine from the University of California Press. They discuss the meaning, if any, of the phrase "he lives in California" in an author bio; whether California's east-west divide bleaches out its much discussed north-south one; why we think so little about water, and whether Los Angeles actually has a problem with the stuff; how to see the world not just in this city, but in the whole of California; Boom's "What's the Matter with San Francisco?" issue; when a city's insecurity becomes useful; the axiomatic "brokenness" of Los Angeles, but the frequent elusiveness of that alleged brokenness; why Californians feel so pessimistic about high-speed rail; why it has become so difficult to sell the future to Californians, and indeed Americans; the changing idea of the role of the state, and what that would mean if California became its own country; the peripatetic life that led him to jump into Lo

Colin Marshall sits down in Culver City with Matt Novak, author of Paleofuture, a blog that looks into the future that never was. They discuss what goes through is mind when he sees LAX's Theme Building; why 1960s visions of jetpacks and flying cars have kept their hold on the American imagination; whether we only remember the wrong predictions of the future, or whether all predictions got the future wrong; why you always have to hedge about who predicted or invented what; how a society's visions of the future reveal that society's vulnerabilities; the problematic notion of "invention" itself; why we love the Nikola Teslas of the world, who give us a chance to tell "great stories" instead of messy history; Uber and Lyft as symptoms of a "broken society"; how their generation seems to have grown up on dystopias, not utopias; the technological signs of a new Cold War in the news; how "face-burning" technology ends up working for us in consumer electronics; Los Angeles' as a "city of reinvention that can somehow

Colin Marshall sits down in Sawtelle (also known as Los Angeles' "Little Osaka") with Eric Nakamura, founder of Asian-American aesthetic culture and lifestyle brand Giant Robot. They discuss the differences between the Sawtelle he grew up in and the Sawtelle he finds himself in today; how and where he got his doses of Japanese pop culture growing up; Los Angeles as a "gateway to Asia" then and now; the days when Giant Robot began as a photocopied zine, and what zinemaking means in 2014; Giant Robot's various manifestations, from shops to galleries even to a restaurant; the local titles applied to him including "Mayor of Sawtelle" and "Sawtelle Shogun"; what he learned about other cities like San Francisco and New York from operating Giant Robot branches in them; the first trips to Japan he remembers, and the American cultural exchange he saw going on in them; his "just hanging out" style of travel, sometimes with stray cats; how Los Angeles' lack of connectedness may have made it a more interesting place; (fo

Colin Marshall sits down in Venice with Geoff Dyer, author of books all across the spectrum between fiction and non-fiction on such subjects as jazz, photography, travel, World War I, and Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker. His newest book Another Great Day at Sea follows his two weeks aboard the aircraft carrier the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush, and his first two novels The Color of Memory and The Search have just received their very first American editions. They discuss why America needs to land planes on boats; the call he received from Alain de Botton asking what institution he'd like to visit as a writer in residence; place as the nexus of interests on which his diverse body of work converges; his specific desire to write and reside on an American military ship, a place not full of Englishmen already "born worn down"; The Color of Memory's late-1980s London, "oily, dark, and full of harm"; the idyllic Brixton life he once led amid the city's near-total brokenness; how many "Geoff in Venice" jokes he's heard sinc

Colin Marshall sits down in Mar Vista with Streetsblog Los Angeles founder Damien Newton (and his young daughter). They discuss what Los Angeles transportation culture looked like from a distance before he came here (nonexistent); how he found himself covering the city's "turning point"; the advantages to getting around from just where chose to make his home, and the disadvantages that include having to take "the bus to the bus to the train to the train to the train" to Pasadena; the Expo Line's approach to his neighborhood, and what it has made him think about the ways communities can take advantage of new transit; Santa Monica as "basically paradise" (despite the rumors floating around there of  coming "soul-crushing traffic"); the relative prevalence of "kind-of car-freeness" in Los Angeles, and what makes the difference between it and other cities allowing absolute car-freeness; the city's early attempt at a bicycle network, like the time it put down "twenty miles of weird sharrows" over a weekend; the be

Colin Marshall sits down in Mar Vista with Edward Soja, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at UCLA and author of such books as Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, and now the new My Los Angeles: From Urban Restructuring to Regional Urbanization. They discuss downtown's Bonaventure Hotel back when he sat for a BBC documentary on it and now; how all of us may only ever talk about "my Los Angeles" when we talk about the city; why it surprises people to find Los Angeles has become the densest urbanized are in America; how the "metropolitan model of the city" became so deeply ingrained in our culture, and how that model itself now undergoes changes; how Los Angeles missed out in the 19th's century's phase of centralized urbanization, and what that means for the city today; what he's noticed by keeping an eye on the cross-streets; the "hot-bedding" going on at all those small motels nobody

Colin Marshall sits down under the cafeteria at Santa Monica College with beloved Los Angeles radio personality Madeleine Brand, now host of Press Play on KCRW, formerly of NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Day to Day, KPCC's The Madeleine Brand Show, and KCET's SoCal Connected. They discuss how much easier she has it waking up for noon radio nowadays instead of morning radio; what to call her format, a popular one in Los Angeles, where one host talks to a series of people, each with their own thing going on in the news; the distinctive difficulty of finding subjects that interest a large percentage of Los Angeles; her first decade in Southern California, and her later college years in Northern California as KALX's "Madame Bomb"; Los Angeles' unusually close relationship with the radio; the east-coastification she experienced in her years amid the "visceral humanity" of New York; how the heightening, densifying Los Angeles we see on the way (and imagined in Her) strikes her inner New Yorker; h

Colin Marshall sits down in Los Angeles' Miracle Mile district with photographer Mark Edward Harris, author of such books as Inside North Korea, Inside Iran, The Art of the Japanese Bath, and Faces of the Twentieth Century. They discuss filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami's introduction to his Iran book, and his rule about always excluding people from his own photographs; the importance of children in images of Iran and countries like it; how Bruce Lee may or may not have started his interest in Asia back in his San Francisco childhood; how his job on The Merv Griffin Show came to an end, leaving him free to travel the world and build up his first real portfolio; how he once processed film while traveling, and the lasting thrill he got from first seeing an image appear in the developer; when and how digital cameras first became acceptable; what he learned from Stanley Kubrick's early journalistic work with Look magazine (not to mention from Dr. Strangelove); the countries, of the 90 he has visited, that he finds himse

Colin Marshall sits down at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law with Ethan Elkind, an attorney who researches and writes on environmental law and the author of Railtown: The Fight for the Los Angeles Metro Rail System and the Future of the City. They discuss the reason visitors and even some Angelenos express surprise at the very existence of the city's subway; the roots of the assumption that Los Angeles would always have a 1950s-style "car culture"; why something as essential as a rail system has required a "fight"; the persistent Roger Rabbit conspiracy theory about the dismantling of Los Angeles' first rail transit network; why so may, for so long, failed to consider the city's inevitably dense and increasingly less car-compatible future; Los Angeles' long-standing anxiety about joining the ranks of "world-class" cities, and how the absence of a subway fueled it; how Californian rail systems, Los Angeles' especially but the San Francisco's Bay Area's BART as well, physically embody the

Colin Marshall sits down in Santa Monica with architect and urban designer Doug Suisman, author of Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-Rays of the Body Public, soon out in a new 25th anniversary edition. They discuss the difference in cycling to his office on Wilshire Boulevard versus Venice Boulevard; the conceptual importance of "path" and "place" in any urbanism-related discussion he gets into; his arrival in Los Angeles in 1983, after years spent in Paris and New York, and the mixture of disappointment and fascination he first felt on the boulevards here; what it meant that he sensed movement as well as abandonment; how Los Angeles wound up with the its destructive-car-culture rap, and how its freeways have less to do with that than the way its boulevards also became a kind of freeway system; the mistaken notion that the city "doesn't have transit," and what specific kinds of transit it actually does still lack; his work with the design of the Metro Rapid buses, and why they've struggled so long just to get a

Colin Marshall sits down at Monocle magazine's offices in Marylebone, London with Andrew Tuck, editor of the magazine, host of its podcast The Urbanist, and editor of its book The Monocle Guide to Better Living. They discuss how the London experience for a Monocle reader differs from that of others; how the magazine came to view the world through the framework of cities, and what they look for in a good city experience; the importance of aesthetics in all things, when aesthetics means stripped-down, timeless vitality rather than whatever more and more money can buy; the importance of slowness in everything Monocle touches; the magazine's launch in 2007,  the global economic crash that happened soon thereafter, and why it began to matter even more that they covered "tangible things"; his notion that every Monocle reader has a business in them; what he found when he first came to live in London at eighteen; what he sees on his 40-minute walk to work each day, always on a different route; the city's internationa

Colin Marshall sits down in Knightsbridge, London with Jacques Testard, founding editor of the quarterly arts journal The White Review. They discuss the re-issue of Nairn's Towns featuring past guest Owen Hatherley; London's surprisingly small literary culture and what, before founding The White Review, he didn't see getting published; the "deeply stereotypical Williamsburg existence" he once lived in New York (in an apartment called "Magicland", no less); his path from his hometown of Paris to London, and what those cities throw into contrast about each other; the conversations he's had with his also-bilingual brother about the differences between reading and speaking English and French, and the fact that they can take both languages "on their own terms"; the lack of genre distinctions in the French literary market; the amount of material The White Review publishes in translation; how a 21st-century magazine must, above all else, avoid disposability; the interviews they run, with Will Self and others; a "goo

Colin Marshall sits down in London's West End with Melvyn Bragg, Lord Bragg of Wigton, host of Sky Arts 1's The South Bank Show and BBC Radio 4's In Our Time as well as the writer of many works of fiction and nonfiction including, most recently, The Book of Books: The Radical Impact of the King James Bible and his latest novel Grace and Mary. They discuss when he began seeing culture as a whole, unstratified entity; what he learned in his working-class northern upbringing;  his brief days with his own pop group; his first getting an arts program on BB2 "almost by accident," and the opportunities he realized it gave him to showcase a "rainbow" of arts, rather than a "pyramid" with opera, no matter how lousy, ever at the top; when he began as a writer at Oxford, the institution that gave him his first "proper free time"; his enjoyment of not just the act but the discipline of putting pen to paper; how he gives In Our Time an edge by doing it live, with a minimum of beforehand interaction with his invited expert

Colin Marshall sits down in Hackney, London with Iain Sinclair, author of numerous books, all rooted in London and all operating across the spectrum of fiction to nonfiction, including Downriver, Lights Out for the Territory, London Orbital, and most recently American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light. They discuss the momentarily impossible-to-define issue of Hackney's identity; the need to walk the neighborhood to know it — but to then do it your whole life; the re-making of the landscape in Hackney as elsewhere in London; the surprisingly functional London Overground's only partial integration into the city's transport consciousness; the way commemorative plaques "fix history," which forces you to find the reality for yourself; the operation of London hierarchies as he witnessed it in his book-dealing days, and how he then came to see uniformity set in; why students today never seem to get all the way through his books, drawing instead "a series of cultural cartoons" from excerpts and immediately app

Colin Marshall sits down in Winchester, England with PD Smith, author of books on science, literature, superweapons, and, most recently, City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age. They discuss whether London has all the elements of the archetypally ideal city; the essential quality of "a place where you meet strangers"; the need to avoid writing only about buildings; the recent moment when half the world's population found itself living in cities; the factors that have made city life more possible today than ever before; what on Earth Prince Charles talks about when he talks about architecture and urbanism; the enduring impulse to knock cities down and start them over; the un-knocked-down city as a palimpsest-like store of knowledge, perhaps with its own "latent consciousness"; Tokyo and the metaphor of city as body; whether, in experiencing cities or writing about them, to focus on one element at a time or to try to take them whole; what Germans get right about city-building; when and where Starbucks starts to see

Colin Marshall sits down for bangers and mash in Woolwich, London, England, with writer on political aesthetics Owen Hatherley, author of the books Militant Modernism, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, A New Kind of Bleak, and Uncommon, on the pop group Pulp. They discuss the relevance of the combined sentiments of the Pet Shop Boys and the Human League to his critical mission; his sickness of "where's my jetpack"-type complaint; the new limits of the possible; whether one more easily sees politics expressed in architecture in England that elsewhere; the coincidental rises of the welfare state and modern architecture; the nature of England's north-south divide, one starker than that between the former East and West Germany, the unexpected tasteless drama of northern building, and the "ruin porn" richness of towns like Bradford and Liverpool; housing as the chief political issue of modern Britain; the shamefacedness of new English building, and the tendency of it to bear little relation to its own loc

Colin Marshall sits down in Canterbury, England with Jack Hues, founding member of the rock band Wang Chung and jazz band The Quartet. Wang Chung's latest album Tazer Up came out in 2012, and The Quartet's next album Collaborations Volumes 1 & 2 comes out this fall. They discuss what makes the "Canterbury sound"; the differences between Wang Chung's "English" and "American" albums; what recording in another city or country, and drawing in its "vibe," gives a project; music as a language, and how different styles of music feed into each other as do different languages; the "librarian mentality" that has many of his students talking initially about musical genres rather than about musicians; what growing up with the Beatles made possible; his Haruki Murakami reference in Wang Chung's "City of Light", and how he works into songs other things simply happened upon in life; his formation of The Quartet after 9/11; how he gets to balance teaching, The Quartet, and Wang Chung now that the latter doesn't demand an

Colin Marshall walks through Stratford, London with John Rogers, author of the blog Lost Byway book This Other London: Adventures in the Overlooked City. They discuss how one should approach one's first London shopping mall, a built phenomenon that has changed dramatically over the decades; his memories of playing soccer with rotten fruit in the older of Stratford's indoor shopping centers; whether knowing the "other" London requires you to first know the standard London; how "ramble books" got him writing about unwritten-about places; the importance of feeling proud of wherever you live; the unshrinking "London Book" industry, whose robustness possibly owes to the difficulty of pinning the city down; comparisons with Los Angeles, where myths and easy definitions go uncontested; when Leytonstone went from part of Essex to part of London, and what that meant; the historical John Rogers, who got burnt at the stake; what constitutes his walking "practice," which has earned him a reputation as "the drinking man's