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.
A dozen years of particularly gripping cinema: film critic Dave Kehr

Colin Marshall talks to Dave Kehr, former film critic at the Chicago Reader and Chicago Tribune and current DVD columnist for the New York Times. In his first collection, When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade, he brings together his writings on some of the finest films and filmmakers of the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties, including Jean-Luc Godard, Manoel de Oliveira, Blake Edwards, and Albert Brooks.

Direct download: MOI_Dave_Kehr.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 4:58am UTC

The literary in-between: translator Susan Bernofsky

Colin Marshall talks to Susan Bernofsky, author, scholar, and translator of such German-language writers as the Swiss Robert Walser, the Japanese Yoko Tawada, and the German Jenny Erpenbeck. New Directions recently released a strong lot of Bernofsky-translated books from Walser, including the novels The Assistant and The Tanners, as well as Microscripts, a collection of short, hard-to-categorize works originally written in a one- to two-millimeter-high pencil script of Walser's own devising.

Direct download: MOI_Susan_Bernofsky.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 1:45am UTC

Portland noir: filmmaker Aaron Katz

Colin Marshall talks to Aaron Katz, director of such films as Dance Party USA, Quiet City, and the new Cold Weather. Continuing his established tradition of examining the sphere of urban twentysomethings who aren't quite sure how their lives got to this point or where they're going next with a strikingly aestheticizing gaze, Katz incorporates a near-Sherlock Holmesian plot into his latest film. His central characters, a Portland ice-factory worker, his DJ buddy, and his sister, find themselves embroiled in a forbiddingly seedy mystery when a girl goes missing and it falls to them to find her.

Direct download: MOI_Aaron_Katz.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 4:36pm UTC

Boredom, the vital subject of our time: novelist Lee Rourke

Colin Marshall talks to Lee Rourke, literary critic, contributing editor at 3:AM Magazine, and author of the story collection Everyday and the novel The Canal, winner of the Guardian's 2010 Not the Booker Prize. A book ostensibly about boredom, The Canal also illustrates, within a brief span of literary time, how boredom isn't really boring — or even how boredom isn't really boredom as we usually conveive of it when we actually sit down and face it, as does the book's protagonist, who one day walks out of his office job and never walks back.

Direct download: MOI_Lee_Rourke.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 1:59pm UTC