Notebook On Cities And Culture

Colin Marshall sits down at Hugo's Tacos in Los Angeles' Atwater Village with Adrian Todd Zuniga, founding editor of Opium magazine and impresario behind the international reading series Literary Death Match. They discuss what might make Los Angeles "the new Berlin"; his aim to make the city the literary center of the world by 2022; the hatred that flows into Los Angeles, but not out of it; Literary Death Match TV, the project that moved him here, and his battle against the idea of its being "too smart for television"; December 12th's live pilot shoot at Hollywood's Florentine Gardens; his experiences putting on Literary Death Matches in cities like Tulsa, Helsinki, Amsterdam, and Beijing; his love of his collaboration, whether or not it comes from growing up as the last of eight kids and always wanting to hang out with the most interesting people; how to "explode what literature is in the current pop culture landscape"; his frequent travel, his use of flights as a writing environment, and the thousand-page n