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.

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 "good writer's" ability to transcend subject matter; the engagement and/or existence strategies that apply in New York versus those that apply in London; class in Britain as tied to education, and class in America as tied to money; his experience at the Jaipur Literary Festival; and what to expect in The White Review's current issue.

Direct download: NCC_S4E33_Jacques_Testard.output.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:35pm UTC

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 MaryThey 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 experts on the topic of the week; how his writing feeds ideas into his radio work; why, despite losing belief in "the finer points of Christianity," he felt nonetheless compelled to write a study of the importance of the King James Bible; his love of television and radio as "scatter media," offering an education at the push of a button; how he realized culture seemed to have displaced class as a means of identification; the benefits of not worrying about what you personally like or dislike, believe in or don't believe in, but the "why" of it, understanding making for a much more interesting experience than condemnation; what he found in the stratified London in which he first arrived in the early 1960s making thirteen pounds a week; how, subsequently, "people became the culture" there; and how London, in its current cultural moment, retains its status as "quite a city."

Direct download: NCC_S4E32_Melvyn_Bragg.output.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 3:42pm UTC

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 DownriverLights Out for the TerritoryLondon 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 applying them to their own project; why he's never had the sense of writing about London, per se, a subject to which he'd never expected the public to connect; the way the city's irrationality tends to drive those who write about into the realms of fiction; the criticism he takes for including "too may references" in his books, and his readers' freedom to pursue those references or not; the involved pub conversation that ensued when a Frenchman walked up to him and asked, "Is this London?"; what might have counted as the center of London in the seventies, and what might now; what results from asking, "What is this the center of?"; Geoff Dyer's years on Effra Road, and the associations its very name brings to mind; how he knows when one of his books  (or the latest continuation of his "one big book" of a career) has come to an end; taking on another country in American Smoke, and discovering the disappointing London in the mind of the Beats; and his notion the he has only ever "articulated aspects of place," still the most robust nexus of interests and influences available.

Direct download: NCC_S4E31_Iain_Sinclair.output.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 6:00am UTC

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 seem like the most foreign place you could go; the globe-spanning "cities" of the airport, the high street, or any other non-place; what it takes to make London strange again; the detective as a quintessentially urban figure exhibiting a mastery of his sensationalistically grim, dark, troubled environment; and the challenge any interesting city issues its resident: "Figure out how to live in me."

Direct download: NCC_S4E30_PD_Smith.output.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 8:25pm UTC

Colin Marshall sits down for bangers and mash in Woolwich, London, England, with writer on political aesthetics Owen Hatherley, author of the books Militant ModernismA Guide to the New Ruins of Great BritainA 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 location; his view of buildings like the now-demolished Tricorn Centre in childhood, before he'd internalized "what architecture should look like"; how the still-standing Preston Bus Station demonstrated that a provincial city wasn't parochial; the long-gone heyday of the City Architect; his upcoming book on architecture and communism, and what he's discovered in his exploration of eastern Europe; why he might feel the need for a disclaimer stating that he already knows about the gulag; and how he found that the Soviet regime generated much more nostalgia, in its buildings and otherwise, than people think.

Direct download: NCC_S4E29_Owen_Hatherley.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:58am UTC