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Category Archives: Notebook on Cities and Culture

Notebook on Cities and Culture’s Korea Tour: Everything I Learned Was Wrong with Hyunwoo Sun

Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s Korea Tour is brought to you by Daniel Murphy, David Hayes, and The Polar Intertia Journal, an outlet for artists and researchers documenting the urban condition. In Seoul’s Mapo-gu, Colin Marshall talks with Hyunwoo Sun, founder of the Korean language-learning site Talk to Me in Korean. They discuss whether a […]

Notebook on Cities and Culture S4E67: Extremely Permanent with Doug Pray

Beneath the rock of Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Colin Marshall talks with documentarian Doug Pray, maker of such films as Hype! on the Seattle 1990s grunge scene, Infamy on graffiti artists, Surfwise on Doc Paskowitz’s traveling family, and Art & Copy on the advertising industry. His new Levitated Mass examines the complicated movement of the rock all the way […]

Notebook on Cities and Culture S4E66: Who Am I? with Craig Davidson

In a pub in Toronto’s Swansea, Colin Marshall talks with novelist Craig Davidson, author of Rust and Bone, The Fighter, Sarah Court, and most recently The Fighter, all under his on name, and author of horror fiction under the pseudonyms Nick Cutter and Patrick Lestewka. They discuss Toronto’s distance, geographical and in sensibility, from Niagara falls; his potential attraction to […]

Notebook on Cities and Culture S4E65: Unerotic City with Mark Kingwell

At the University of Toronto, Colin Marshall talks with Mark Kingwell, professor of philosophy and author of such books as A Civil Tongue: Justice, Dialogue, and the Politics of Pluralism, The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age, Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City, and most recently the collection Unruly Voices: Essays on Democracy, Civility and the Human […]

Notebook on Cities and Culture S4E64: The Greatest Point of Relevance with Alex Bozikovic

In Toronto’s Christie Pits neighborhood, Colin Marshall talks with Globe and Mail architecture critic Alex Bozikovic, who also writes for such publications as Dwell, Wallpaper, Toronto Life, and Spacing. They discuss whether Honest Ed’s has any architectural significance to go with its social significance, and what its imminent disappearance says about the urbanism of Toronto’s future; its Los Angeles-like interest […]

Notebook on Cities and Culture S4E63: Mementos Mori with Keith McNally

Out with the raccoons on the closed second-floor balcony of a Toronto bar, Colin Marshall talks with Keith McNally, the podcast auteur behind the shows XO, I Have a Ham Radio, and The Vinyl Countdown. They discuss the function and imminent disappearance of Honest Ed’s; podcasting as a 21st-century means of hanging out with “friends” and having man-to-man […]

Notebook on Cities and Culture S4E62: Nothing to Declare with Amy Lavender Harris

In Toronto’s Junction, Colin Marshall talks to Amy Lavender Harris, geographer at York University and author of Imagining Toronto, a study of the city as depicted in its literature. They discuss the psychedelically-illustrated, Toronto-centric poetry of Dennis Lee with which so many Torontonians grew up; how it took her thirty years from her Lee-reading days to […]

Notebook on Cities and Culture S4E61: Publishing Crushing with Alana Wilcox

Near the University of Toronto, Colin Marshall talks to Alana Wilcox, Editorial Director of Coach House Books and author of the novel A Grammar of Endings. They discuss the past twenty years’ boom in Toronto writing; what factors, including an embarrassing mayor in the nineties, made “mythologizing our own city” possible; why Coach House prints […]

Notebook on Cities and Culture S4E60: Having the City for Dinner with Corey Mintz

In Toronto’s Kensington Market, Colin Marshall talks to Corey Mintz, author of the Toronto Star column “Fed” and the book How to Host a Dinner Party. They discuss what makes a dinner party a Torontonian dinner party; the city’s “uptight” reputation; how he bottomed out in his initial cooking career, winding up working the kitchen at a dinner […]

Notebook on Cities and Culture S4E59: Walk, Don’t Brunch with Shawn Micallef

In Toronto’s Church-Wellesley Village, Colin Marshall talks to Shawn Micallef, editor and co-owner of Spacing magazine, Toronto Star columnist, and author of such books as Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto and The Trouble with Brunch. They discuss his first “long, deliberate” walk in Toronto, which happened by accident; what, exactly, caused this trouble with brunch; his youth in […]