Notebook on Cities and Culture
(Formerly The Marketplace of Ideas.) Colin Marshall sits down for in-depth conversations with cultural creators, internationalists, and observers of the urban scene all around Los Angeles and beyond.
To Japan by cow: Nick "Momus" Currie, musician, writer, and artist

Colin Marshall talks to musician, writer, and artist Nick Currie, also known as Momus. Having recently relocated from Berlin to Osaka, he returns to the program to discuss his brand new book Solution 214-238: The Book of Japans. The novel follows up his previous book Solution 11-167: The Book of Scotlands with a similarly humorous exercise in social geography but one within a richer narrative framework — a narrative framework that pits twelve Japan "experts" against twelve Japan "idiots" — dealing with issues of imagination versus experience, monoculture versus diversity, and foreign versus future.

Direct download: MOI_Nick_Currie_2.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 6:01am UTC

The world dreamed but not judged: traveler and writer Pico Iyer

Colin Marshall talks to essayist, novelist, traveler, and "global soul" Pico Iyer. Since Video Night in Kathmandu, his journey through the rapidly changing Asia of the mid-1980s, Iyer has told us all about what it feels like and what it means to exist in and pass through places from Atlanta to Kyoto to Asunción to Pyongyang. Having been born to an Indian family and grown up equally between England and Santa Barbara, California, he both embodies and tirelessly describes the hybridized, cross-pollinated, geographically conversational world culture in which we all find ourselves.

Direct download: MOI_Pico_Iyer.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 3:08pm UTC

The surreal life of Mexico City: bilingual bicultural binational journalist Daniel Hernandez

Colin Marshall talks to Daniel Hernandez, bilingual bicultural binational journalist, blogger at Intersections, and author of Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the 21st Century. In 2007, the Mexican-American Hernandez moved to Mexico City to explore its spirit of adventure, its multitude of youthful subcultures, its undercurrent of chaos, and its sheer day-to-day surrealism. His first book collects pieces on Mexico City subjects as far-ranging as fashion parties, kidnappings, original punk rock, death, cellphone-thieving transsexuals, a particularly intense native sauna, and the "emo riots" of 2008.

Direct download: MOI_Daniel_Hernandez.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 6:18am UTC