{"id":2386,"date":"2014-08-29T09:32:21","date_gmt":"2014-08-29T16:32:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2386"},"modified":"2014-08-29T09:32:21","modified_gmt":"2014-08-29T16:32:21","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-culture-s4e52-the-big-pond-with-pete-mitchell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2386","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture S4E52: The Big Pond with Pete Mitchell"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"petemitchell\"Colin Marshall sits down in Pasadena with Pete Mitchell<\/a>, visual artist, game designer, zombie enthusiast, and lead singer and co-founder of the band No More Kings<\/a>, whose latest album III<\/em> came out this year. They discuss now as an opportune time to be into zombies; how his mom got him into not just zombie movies but Dungeons & Dragons; the “love letter to the 1980s” he wrote with the first No More Kings album; his early forays into game design, typing in code line-by-line and saving it on a tape drive, later struggling against the limitations of software like Game-Maker; Game-Makerish limitations as the true drivers of art; the experience of growing up in Rhode Island, and who thrives there; being a big fish in a small pond, being a small fish in a big pond, and the appeal regardless of the ultimately more interesting big ponds; the eternal struggle to finish projects, and what we can learn from the examples of such “obsessive” creators as Francis Ford Coppola, Shane Carruth, Jerry Seinfeld, and Jiro Ono; the things you make as diamonds compressed from the coal of your time; the wide reach of No More Kings’ “Sweep the Leg<\/a>” music video, which reunited the cast of The Karate Kid<\/em> and\u00a0continues to win the band most of its fans; his anxiety about becoming an “80s pop culture” act; specialized interests and the even more specialized places they overlap as the new stages for subculture; his time in Japan, motivated by the thought that he “can’t be the guy who only knows one language”; how, to learn languages or make things, you have to give yourself no choice in the matter; the “electric sense of potential” and “ambient ambition” in a city like Los Angeles, not often felt\u00a0even in “nicer” places; this city as the most internet-like actual place yet established; and the reasons not to want to go back to Old Economy Steve<\/a>‘s economy, or to the days of a powerful cultural mainstream \u2014 even if, as in the 80s, that mainstream produced a lot of neat stuff.<\/p>\n

Download the interview\u00a0<\/span>here as an MP3<\/a>\u00a0or on\u00a0<\/span>iTunes<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colin Marshall sits down in Pasadena with Pete Mitchell, visual artist, game designer, zombie enthusiast, and lead singer and co-founder of the band No More Kings, whose latest album III came out this year. They discuss now as an opportune time to be into zombies; how his mom got him into not just zombie movies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-los-angeles","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2386","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=2386"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2388,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2386\/revisions\/2388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}