Notebook On Cities And Culture

Colin Marshall sits down in West Hollywood with Michael Silverblatt, host of the literary interview program Bookworm from KCRW in Santa Monica since 1989. They discuss how he's managed to host a book show for so long "in Los Angeles, of all places;" the near-racist tradition of New York writers savaging Los Angeles in the thirties and forties; introducing the likes of Edward St. Aubyn to Angelenos and others well beyond; radio as a dreamlike "mad tea party," whether dreamt in one's car or at one's computer; the band Sparks as American humorists, the writes Krys Lee as an exponent of ethnic writing as both exotic and erotic, and how to recommend both without resorting to anything so uninteresting as opinion; being not a critic, and not a fan, but an omnivorous conversationalist; the lamentable rise of "patented hip taste;" how Terence Malick's Badlands drew him out to Los Angeles from the East Coast; the Angeleno phobia of cultural confrontation; Los Angeles' failure to insist upon or preserve its genius; not

Colin Marshall walks through Larchmont with Molly McAleer, co-founder of HelloGiggles and writer for CBS' Two Broke Girls. They discuss the definition of internet fame, especially when one's internet debut comes in a photo funneling a beer; whether moving to Los Angeles after graduating from the disappointingly party-free Boston College counts as a betrayal of Boston; her avoidance of the label "humorist," and thus any association with Mark Twain; her time at Defamer, which gave her a "magical" view of Los Angeles, and what she'd say to those who accuse it and every other Gawker site of hastening the decline of western civilization; joining Two Broke Girls at the height of the Whitney Cummings boom; Koreatown, her point of entry into Los Angeles after having lived in a frat house with 32 dudes; aging a thousand years after spending six in Los Angeles; how much of a discount on nail polish counts as a deep discount on nail polish; her struggle to be as popular with her friends as her mom; the resurgence of pre

Colin Marshall sits down in downtown Los Angeles with Pico Iyer, writer about place — both our dreams of it and its realities. They discuss his new book The Man Within My Head; how best to introduce Graham Greene's The Quiet American to new readers; how he started a book on being a pleasantly bewildered foreigner in Japan and finished a book about Greene, brush fires, and his own father; the roles of fathers both chosen and unchosen; the ultimate unknowability of other people, and the form of intimacy found in accepting that not-knowing; graduating from school into a British Empire twenty years dead; his Fowlerian perspective to Los Angeles' Pyle; England under the burden of too much past, California under the burden of too little, and his inoculation against the excesses of both by having oscillated between them; his return to England in the form of Japan; how Los Angeles anthologizes the world within itself versus how Japan does, and how Los Angeles handles its multiculturalism versus how Toronto does; his

Colin Marshall sits down in Atwater Village with comedy writer and music video director Scott Jacobson, who has written for programs like The Daily Show, Squidbillies, and Bob's Burgers, and made videos for artists like Nick Lowe, Superchunk, and The National. They discuss the comedic style of George Herriman's Krazy Kat and whether a place exists for it today; expectations, the enemy of comedy; what it means that the likes of Adult Swim and Tim & Eric can thrive in today's world, or if they indeed thrive in it; The Daily Show's rise alongside George W. Bush's, and the trickiness of presenting its voice as the voice of reason; the feeling of finally getting a foothold in New York, and the sense of personal failing that comes from not loving it; whether anyone else misses the obscure cruelty of Craig Kilborn's Daily Show; the "journalistic vamp" and other news filler, up to and including Glenn Beck's moment of popularity; the "trash compactor of reality" that is political coverage, and the solace offered b

Colin Marshall sits down in Westwood with William Flesch, professor at Brandeis University and author of Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction. They discuss José Saramago's way with obscure Biblical episodes; literary Darwinism and its discontents; why and how we get concerned with what happens to fictional characters at all; the difference between stories we care about versus stories we don't; how we recommend books, films, and shows to friends, thus caring about how they care about how characters care about one another; Michael Haneke's scary Funny Games viewed with an audience and Michael Haneke's ludicrous Funny Games viewed at home; what's so great about Wittgenstein; the trade-off between humanizing and monsterizing your viliains, as with Hitler in Max and The Boys from Brazil; the perfect biological pitching of Onion's 9/11 headline "Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell"; what makes the 19th-century novels of George Eliot, Anthony Trollop

Colin Marshall sits down in Larchmont with comedy writer Megan Ganz, who's written for the Onion and Important Things with Demetri Martin, and now writes for NBC's Community. They talk about easing her transition from New York to Los Angeles with the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink; Los Angeles as an unfurnished apartment to New York as a furnished one; her fond memories of aimless subway trips; what we don't know about growing up in Michigan, especially regarding the preparation of vegetables and local pride in Tim Allen; the Onion as something to aspire to in adolescence; the best comedy's tendency to happen naturally, without being in on its own jokes; what one would get wrong by assuming Community, the "show that can get away with anything," represents a model of sitcoms today; her use of the voices of various characters and institutions rather than he own; the comedy gold to be mined from misalignments between tone and content; community college-going as a hobby; and the lingering question that hangs over cer

Colin Marshall sits down in Santa Monica with Wade Major, senior film critic at Boxoffice, co-host of IGN's Digigods, and regular participant on KPCC's Filmweek. They discuss what Sucker Punch represents the coagulation of; whether it is a greater crime for Zack Snyder to make Zack Snyder movies sincerely, or for Zack Snyder to make Zack Snyder movies cynically; the importance of spontaneity, not formula, to creative business; the simultaneous democratization of criticism and of filmmaking itself; the world he emerged out of film school into; his father's career in silent pictures; the philosophical differences between the film schools at USC, UCLA, and CalArts; the possibilities of a new business model for criticism meant to be read after seeing the movie; Pauline Kael's conception of criticism as a means of keeping filmmakers honest; bigtime directors' assumptions that they can't make films about their real passions; The Artist as it taps into both filmmakers' and critics' fears of getting left behind; how

Colin Marshall sits down in Los Feliz with comedy writer, baseball reporter, and Twitter "suggested user" Alison Agosti. They discuss the preferred pronunciation of "Los Feliz"; Rancho Cucamonga's chief industry of teenage pregnancy; how Los Angeles looked while she was growing up in the Inland Empire; the promise of New York as a land of letters, art, and coats; her mass childhood purchase of used Woody Allen tapes, including but not limited to Husbands and Wives; the morning she woke up to 1500 e-mails from Twitter in her inbox; her realization that comedy writing could count as a job; what it takes to get on a Maude team; her struggle to coming up with new ways to write "hit the ball" or to present a narrative in a 2-1 game against the Diamondbacks; her music blog Headphones In; finding humor in the complicated, as unworkable as it can end up in a sketch; raking in the Twitter stars by mentioning eating something weird by yourself; her weariness of apologizing for Los Angeles, a city that doesn't work agai

Colin Marshall sits down in the Los Angeles Central Library's courtyard with John Rabe, host of Off-Ramp, KPCC's weekend pointillist portrait of Southern California. They discuss the merits of recording in a library courtyard and in Cheech Marin's house in Malibu; picking a road in Los Angeles and following it wherever it goes; the troubled history of Cypress Park and the truth about the Isabel Street shooting; the Los Angeles "churn" and the effect of constant neighborhood change on the historical consciousness; the historical bounty to be found in the Los Angeles Public Library's photo collection; the city's rising optimism and falling crime (and its lack of a mob); the McMartin preschool trial; his desire to live in a place with the word "gardens" in its name; his tendency to look ahead, not back, and to move randomly, not in patterns, and how that shapes Off-Ramp's character; his anger at drivers who slow down on the freeway with their brakes; his plan to banish citizens who break the social contract and

Colin Marshall sits down in North Hollywood with film and television critic David Bax, co-host of the podcasts Battleship Pretension and Previously On. They discuss his fifth-grade shoving match over Ghostbusters; the difference between criticism and the assertion of one's opinions; being a film and television critic while living right near the heart of film and television production; Chicago's advantages as a filmgoing city, including but not limited to the Gene Siskel Film Center; discovering a cinephile community on the bus; St. Louis and other cities' loss of local critics writing with local sensibilities; whether the aspiring critic must first reject working in production; the sharpening of his critical perspectives on formalism and structuralism as revealed by Michael Mann's Public Enemies; if a critic should tell an audience why they like a film, why the audience should like a film, why the audience should pay attention to a film, or simply how a film works; why the internet offers a superior medium fo

Colin Marshall sits down in North Hollywood at midnight with film critic Tyler Smith, co-host of the podcast Battleship Pretension and host of the podcast More than One Lesson. They discuss the strong associations between diners late at night and talk about movies; his struggle to stay in Chicago and ultimate move to Los Angeles; his choice between screenwriting and film criticism; film criticism's relationship with the kinds of conversations film geeks have; the impulse to start a podcast, and what it took to understand what makes a fascinating film discussion; how to talk to comedians about film, even if they claim not to care about the medium; his return to his old church in Nixa, Missouri to give a lecture about the film industry in Los Angeles; the concept of discernment not just in criticism, but in Christianity; the power and influence some Christian ideas about film ascribe purely to content; Fight Club and the attitude pictures hold to their own content; whether film reflects the personality of its c

Colin Marshall sits down at the Los Angeles Central Library downtown with Map Librarian Glen Creason, author of Los Angeles in Maps. They discuss the point at which Los Angeles becomes not just a place to live but a subject; riding the old Pacific Electric streetcars that prompted the city to grow so large in the firs place; using maps to see the influence of trains, water, the movies, and oil on the city's spread, growing up in the "Leave it to Beaver territory" of South Gate; early Los Angeles-boosters selling the city by employing mapmakers' sleight of hand; downtown's death in the sixties and seventies, and its more recent revival; learning little but having a lot of fun at UCLA during the Summer of Love; when the city "took a breath and reinvented itself," Los Angeles' uniquely dramatic geographical setting; how multiculturalism took hold from the very beginning; what it took to build the Third Street Tunnel; how miracles of civic engineering turned into freeway frustration; the non-disaster of "Carmaged

Colin Marshall sits down at Bourgeois Pig in Hollywood with Eliza Skinner, comedian, musical improviser, comedic rap-battle impresario, writer, and the woman of the one-woman show Eliza Skinner is Shameless. They discuss a Scotsman who left his wife possibly due and possibly not due to what he felt in her onstage spirit; the one-way intimacy of performance; the proper cultivation of one's personal brand; the odd confluence of skills required for the non-career (absent an eccentric billionaire) of musical improvisation, and the fear some have of practicing them; when New York felt like one big "last call"; the apparent ease of performing in Los Angeles as a buoy for the spirit; breaking the shackles of "musical improviser" as an identity; the women of Shameless like Amy and Karen, who compulsively complicate their lives in ways they don't understand; matching mother-daughter breast implants; the lack of female characters who are lovable yet not likable; the fact that nobody, given that everyone plays the hero

Colin Marshall sits down at Fat Dog in West Hollywood with comedian and actor Jordan Morris, co-host of the comedy podcast Jordan, Jesse, Go!, writer on the web series MyMusic, former host of Fuel TV's The Daily Habit, and creator of satirical commercials for "Gamewave" and the "Action Circle." They talk about growing up in Orange County with the solace of ska music; The Simpsons' un-overstatable influence on the current generation of young comedy writers; whether and how "Family-Guyization" is affecting comedic culture; the usefulness of college as "a place to be bad for a while"; how those who move to Los Angeles from other major cities have gone blind to their hometowns' sources of suckiness; the prohibitive cost of a bedazzled T-shirt; what kind of a golden calf Conan O'Brien's show represents for today's comedic minds; "gab podcasts" and the rapidly diminishing viability thereof; the temptation to pander to your audience, whichever audience your medium determines you have; whether working at an "action s

Colin Marshall sits down at the La Brea Tar Pits with David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times book critic, editor of the anthologies Writing Los Angeles, Another City, and Cape Cod Noir, and author of The Myth of Solid Ground, The Lost Art of Reading, and the upcoming novella Labyrinth. They talk about his attitude as a young New Yorker moving to Los Angeles; his approach to everything in life through the filter of books; his "graduate education" writing for the mythologized oasis of writerly cool that was the Los Angeles Reader; the importance of competition in print journalism; criticism as the search for the most important questions; how to talk about a city that doesn't know how to talk about itself; how to have a coherent conversation about a city that resists coherent conversation; the "sacred ordinariness" of Los Angeles; how literature of exile became literature of place; ersatz public and protected pseudo-urban space; whether the city will feel the same ten years from now; whether we'll still have what arch

Colin Marshall sits down in Hollywood with comedian, actor, and novelist DC Pierson, man behind the one-man show DC Pierson is Bad at Girls, one-third of the Mystery Team of Mystery Team, and the author of The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To. They talk about innate, unchanging age; teenage blogging; Daria; the compulsion to read criticism; moving to Los Angeles from New York; avoiding falling into the standard complaint-driven narratives of young New York writers who move to Los Angeles; whether and how Los Angeles is shinin'; the mysteries surrounding how many Hollywood residents earn their income; building things rather than tearing things down; becoming the butt of your own jokes; blogging one's first hundred days in Los Angeles; and the inherent criminality of existing in one's twenties. (Photo: Zac Wolf)

Colin Marshall talks to Alan Nakagawa; sound artist; visual artist; installation artist; founding member of Los Angeles' long-running, multi-disciplinary, multi-ethnic, soon-to-be-dissolved arts collective Collage Ensemble; director of the experimental music Ear Meal webcast; L.A. Metro public art executive; member of Otonomiyaki, the Southern California Soundscape Ensemble and Ear Diorama Ear; and very serious eater indeed.

Recorded on location in Mexico City, Colin Marshall talks to David Lida, author of First Stop in the New World, Las llaves de la ciudad, Travel Advisory: Stories of Mexico, and the blog Mostly Mexico City. A native New Yorker, Lida moved to Mexico City in 1990 — a year considered by many to have been the megalopolis' absolute nadir in terms of crime, crowding, and pollution — and hasn't looked back, becoming the best-known English-language chronicler of el Distrito Federal in the 21st century.

Colin Marshall talks to Laurie Ochoa and Joe Donnelly, founding editors of the new Los Angeles literary journal Slake. The magazine, which has just released its third issue, combines fiction, poetry, essays, reportage, photography, and several different kinds of visual art into a regular exploration of Los Angeles from every angle — and an exploration of the rest of the world from a Los Angeles angle.

Colin Marshall talks to J. Hoberman, senior film critic at The Village Voice and author of books on such cinematic subjects as 8mm and Super 8 pictures, Dennis Hopper, the 1960s, midnight movies, and Yiddish tradition. In his latest title, An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War, he examines the American decade from 1946 to 1956, a time of "cavalry Westerns, apocalyptic sci-fi flicks, and biblical spectaculars, atomic tests on live TV, God talks on the radio, and Joe McCarthy bracketed with Marilyn Monroe."