{"id":1984,"date":"2013-12-09T01:15:20","date_gmt":"2013-12-09T09:15:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1984"},"modified":"2013-12-09T01:15:20","modified_gmt":"2013-12-09T09:15:20","slug":"podthoughts-you-cant-eat-the-sunshine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1984","title":{"rendered":"Podthoughts: You Can’t Eat the Sunshine"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/center><\/p>\n

Vital stats:<\/strong>
\nFormat: comments on Los Angeles and the changes therein, followed by interviews with those tied to the region\u2019s past
\nEpisode duration: 1h-1h30m
\nFrequency: weekly<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never taken a trip with\u00a0Esotouric<\/a>, which offers \u201cprovocative and complex, but never dry\u201d bus bus tours of greater Los Angeles which mix \u201ccrime and social history, rock and roll and architecture, literature and film, fine art and urban studies into a simmering stew of original research and startling observations\u201d on such territories as \u201cHot Rods, Adobes, and Early Modernism,\u201d \u201cHaunts of a Dirty Old Man\u201d (i.e. Charles Bukowski), and \u201cPasadena Confidential with Crimebo the Crime Clown.\u201d Until such time as I cough up the sixty bucks to board an actual Esotouric bus, I\u2019ll opted for the next best thing:\u00a0You Can\u2019t Eat the Sunshine<\/em><\/a>\u00a0[RSS<\/a>] [iTunes<\/a>], a weekly podcast hosted by the company\u2019s proprietors, the husband-and-wife team of near-obsessive Los Angeles enthusiasts Kim Cooper and Richard Schave. Each episode opens with a local place-name-checking theme song by a ukulele-playing lady known as the Ukulady, who looks, as\u00a0her site<\/a>\u00a0reveals, exactly like she sounds, thus embodying a perfect union of form and substance. The podcast on which she plays enjoys a similar alignment between its own expansive form and that of the city\/county\/\u201dmega-region\u201d\/half of the state of California it examines.<\/p>\n

You Can\u2019t Eat the Sunshine<\/em>\u00a0doesn\u2019t make the obvious choice of offering audio versions of Esotouric tours, but it surely burns as much gas each time out with its actual mandate: to track down unusual people \u2014 poets, craftsmen, professors, impersonators of historical figures \u2014 living in Los Angeles and its environs, most of whom have strong ties to the place\u2019s past, and interview them. On some episodes this just means going downtown; on others it means rolling to Long Beach, Eagle Rock, UCLA, Downey, La Mirada, or Lake Elsinore, the names of which wear me out in the typing alone. \u201cWe were born here,\u201d announces Cooper in the 90-second back-and-forth spoken intro that precedes the Ukulady, and indeed, I\u2019ve come to notice a certain divide between native Los Angeles appreciators and those transplanted. I fall into the latter group, having moved here for no better reason than that it fascinated me more than any other city in America \u2014 well, that and its robust revival cinema scene \u2014 and now my current projects include not just\u00a0a book on the place<\/a>\u00a0but\u00a0an interview podcast<\/a>\u00a0more than half of whose episodes deal with Los Angeles. By all rights, I should have taken every available Esotouric journey already, if not up and launched a competing provocatively complex, research-and-observation-stewing bus tour company of my own.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vital stats: Format: comments on Los Angeles and the changes therein, followed by interviews with those tied to the region\u2019s past Episode duration: 1h-1h30m Frequency: weekly I\u2019ve never taken a trip with\u00a0Esotouric, which offers \u201cprovocative and complex, but never dry\u201d bus bus tours of greater Los Angeles which mix \u201ccrime and social history, rock and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-los-angeles","category-podthoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1984"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1985,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1984\/revisions\/1985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}