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Notebook on Cities and Culture S4E19: On the Wallpaper with Louise Sand

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Colin Marshall sits down in Copenhagen’s Nørrebro with Louise Sand (and her baby daughter Alice), who teaches the Danish language on the Copenhagencast. They discuss why the Danes speak English so well, yet still feel shy about speaking it; her experience teaching Danish to classrooms of foreigners; her original studies to become a Spanish teacher; her inspirational friendship with Japanese-teaching podcaster Hitomi Griswold of Japancast.net; how she learns one language after another, like a musician addicted to learning one instrument after another; the importance, and difficulty, of giving up goals like perfect fluency; how podcasting lets her approach Danish education in a “modern,” less traditionally academic way; that thoroughly satisfying moment when a native speaker of a foreign language first understands you; the cultural lessons you find your way to when studying language, such as the existence of the onsdags snegle; how the Danish language enriches Danish life, especially its sense of humor; why to study subjects you love in other languages; the last twenty years you spend mastering the last ten percent of a language; the surprising directness of Danish in contrast with other languages, and the elements of life evoked by its idiomatic expressions; what she’s learned watching her young children acquire language; how flash cards “increase the storage space in your brain”; and the new expansion of the Danish language, as manifested in the signature expressions of a well-known traffic broadcaster.

Download the interview here as an MP3 or on iTunes.

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A Los Angeles Primer: Torrance

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

“This section, to a greater extent than any other, is dependent on the automobile,” wrote novelist James M. Cain in “Paradise,” his 1933 essay on Southern California. “The distances are so vast, the waste of time so cruel if you go by bus or street car, that you must have your own transportation.” Many still believe this about the Los Angeles of eighty years later, sometimes wrongly, but sometimes rightly — or rather, in some places wrongly, and in other places rightly. Questions asked in and around Los Angeles, to continue Cain’s line of thinking, depend to a greater extent than anywhere else on where in particular you’ve come from and where you intend to go. When asking directions, you never hear the classic old New Englander’s response that “you can’t get there from here,” but you do hear quite often the equally frustrating response that “you can’t get there that way from here,” or in any case, that you certainly wouldn’t want to try.

So it has gone with my visits to Torrance, a town of just under 150,000 in the middle of the peninsular region known as the South Bay. Try as they will, the transit agencies involved have so far proven simply unable to get the trip from downtown to Torrance under eighty minutes or do it with fewer than three buses. The twenty-mile distance surely has something to do with this, although I can’t help but notice that you can quickly and easily hop a train in the developed swaths of Europe and Asia to make a similar trip. This holds especially true of one particularly developed bit of Asia: Japan. I have a more convenient transit experience going from Los Angeles to that country’s actual 47 prefectures than I’d have going from there to Torrance, which people used to jokingly call its 48th. The presence there of a number of branches of Japanese corporations has brought about a Japanese population of not quite ten percent (which, an unimpressive figure though it may seem, ranks second-highest in America), which in turn fosters in this quiet little city a surprising concentration of Japanese culture.

Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S4E18: Where Your Nails Are with Thomas E. Kennedy

Sunday, January 5, 2014

Colin Marshall sits down in one of Copenhagen’s many storied serving houses with Thomas E. Kennedy, author of the “Copenhagen Quartet” of novels In the Company of Angels, Kerrigan in Copenhagen: A Love Story, Falling Sideways, and the forthcoming Beneath the Neon Egg. They discuss whether one can truly know Copenhagen without knowing its serving houses; the drinking guide from which Kerrigan in Copenhagen takes its “experimental” form; his mission not just to know all of the city’s serving houses, but to incorporate as much of its culture as possible into his books and to capture the “light of the four seasons” which first captivated him in 1972; how he came to live in Copenhagen, and the breakthrough as a fiction writer the act of leaving his native America brought about; how he overcame his fear of writing Danish characters; what happens after the first toast at a Danish dinner party; how he managed to take notes for the corporate satire Falling Sideways during dreaded office meetings; what it means that Danes tend to greet everyone in a room in rank order; his immersion into the Danish lifestyle, and to what extend the much-touted Danish happiness comes out of reduced expectations; whether he counts as an American, mid-Atlantic, Danish, Irish-American, or American European writer; how one society’s clichés, such as the Danish expression “to hang your pictures where your nails are,” offer bursts of insight to another; the American tendency to cling to differences and identity; the noir Beneath the Neon Egg, which explores Copenhagen’s underbelly of violence, crime, drugs, sex clubs, and its famous commune Christiana; how his conversion into a full-time novelist fits in with his habit of “living life on fortune” (and why he may have written more with a day job); how Danes react to his depictions of them; and what his life in Denmark has taught him about the importance of taxes.

Download the interview here as an MP3 or on iTunes.

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Five favorite reads of 2013 on Conversational Reading

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Conversational Reading collected five of my favorite reads this year, new or old, a list which wound up hitting Los Angeles, Japan, Mexico City, China, and spanning the mid-1940s to this year:

Mario Bellatin (trans. David Shook), Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction.

Despite the excitement he reliably gins up among his readers, Mario Bellatin, the Peruvian-Mexican author of numerous short, unconventional books, has as yet barely entered the English language. Thanks to the young Mexico City-raised, Los Angeles-based poet and translator David Shook, however, the Anglophone world at least has one more of his categorization-resistant works to enjoy. But first, these Anglophone readers must to accept its title character, a 20th-century Japanese author driven by the trauma of his freakishly outsized nose to write esoteric works up to and including a book in a deliberately untranslatable invented language, as neither real nor fictitious. To their credit, both Bellatin, in the Spanish original, and Shook, in the English translation, somehow make the punishingly passive, borderline academic prose that lays out Nagaoka’s chronology entertaining, perhaps as a result of the contrast between the tone of the language and the utterly ridiculous life story it tells. (You can listen to my interview with Shook, conducted this year, here.)

Peter Hessler, Strange Stones.

As commercially viable forms go, the writing of place – or, if you prefer, the less accurate but more saleable label of “travel writing” – strikes me as the most versatile disguise for pure essayism. Peter Hessler, currently residing in Cairo but best known for River Town, Oracle Bones, and Country Driving, a trio of books written out of his years spent in China, here collects pieces composed not just in the Middle Kingdom but urban Japan and rural Colorado as well. Most of these, all driven by the vividly described personalities of his local subjects, originally ran in the New Yorker, which clearly hasn’t discarded its penchant for the long-form essay, nor for commissioning observations of parts lesser-known. How heartening it feels to see a fellow compulsive world citizen given an expansive space to practice his craft. (Incidentally, I also interviewed Hessler, and you can read it here.)

Read the whole thing there at Conversational Reading.

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Favorite Open Culture posts of 2013

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Every weekday I write a post at Open Culture, usually to do with literature, film, music, art, television, radio, or language. Here are ten of my favorites from the more than 250 I wrote in 2013:

See also my ten favorite Open Culture posts of 2012.

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S4E17: Off Cinema on Rådhusstræde with Jack Stevenson

Monday, December 23, 2013

Colin Marshall sits down at Copenhagen’s Husets Biograf with Jack Stevenson, programmer of the theater and author of books on both Scandinavian and American film. They discuss Lars von Trier as the world’s representative of Danish cinema; the difficulty of creating scandal within unshockable Denmark; revival theaters across the world as a nation of their own; the film education he drew from haunting the revival houses of Boston; his plan to serve ten White Russians during a screening of The Big Lebowski; Copenhagen as Scandinavia’s most “real urban environment” in which to show films; the slow emergence of the strengths of the current generation of independent cinemas; the question asked about both Denmark and Korea, “How does that small country make such interesting films?”; his own introduction to Danish film, through Lars von Trier and others; how, in the era in America when “Scandinavian movie” meant, more or less, “porno movie,” Danish film helped make porn chic; the ideal grind house experience evoked by Jack Kerouac in On the Road; the days when every train station in Germany, “a special place,” had a porno theater; America’s lack of an “off cinema” scene like the ones in European countries; why Danes can’t accept film noir (and don’t know about soul food); the history of the Husets Biograf’s 19th-century industrial building, overtaken by anarchist squatters in the sixties; the surprises of filmgoing in Brussels; his resolve to program Halloween shows in the face of Danish indifference to Halloween; and his current work with traditional Danish ghost stories.

Download the interview here as an MP3 or on iTunes.

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Podthoughts: Dear HK

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Vital stats:
Format: talk about Hong Kong, but mostly talk in Hong Kong, from two chatting 23-year-old friendst
Episode duration: 30m-1h
Frequency: weekly, but with gaps

I read quite a bit about Hong Kong, not because I have any business there, nor because my fascinations in Asia incline that way (I’ve invested more in Japan, and far more in Korea), but because the place has proven a rich object interest for some of my favorite writers. Dated as they may now seem, books like Jan Morris’ Hong Kong and Christopher Rand’s Hongkong: The Island Between have put in my head all manner of captivating images of an omnisensorially vibrant entrepôt, bustling beyond bustle, where East meets West with both a time-worn casualness and a constant hum of undissipating commercial energy. Then again, other favorite writers regard the place more guardedly; Pico Iyer’s description of “a dream of Manhattan, arising from the South China Sea” has gained traction with the tourism bureaus, but I also remember him calling the place what you’d get if Manhattan’s financial sector completely absorbed the cultural one. Hong Kong, then, perhaps falls under the category of places you just have to go see and judge for yourself, but until that day comes for me — sooner, surely, than later — I figure I’ll prepare myself with podcasts.

Hong Kong’s English-language podcasting industry, while hardy mature yet, has produced a handful of intriguing shows. Dear HK [iTunes] in particular pitches itself by invoking “Stinky Tofu, Smokin’ Tai-Tais, and a Smashing Harbour,” declaring a mission to “talk all things Hong Kong.” Having smelled (though not eaten) stinky tofu last summer at a night market here in Los Angeles, I decided to start downloading. I must have done so before reading the unfortunate second half of its blurb: “Join Charlotte and Felix in their weekly random ramblings!” Oh dear. To ultimately devolve into aimless, unstructured gab has by now become a standard podcast syndrome, but what to make of a show that out-and-out declares it as a form? Most discerning podcast listeners would, I imagine, preemptively chuck it onto that enormous and ever-growing heap of probable time-wasters, atop the shows by 23-year-olds, the shows made up of nothing more than a couple of friends chatting, the shows produced in a parent’s basement, and the shows whose hosts talk about nothing of greater consequence than whatever they happen to have watched or eaten lately.

Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun.

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Join me at Exosphere’s 12-Week Entrepreneurship Boot Camp next year in Santiago, Chile

Friday, December 20, 2013

Next year, do consider joining me at Exosphere, an alternative education platform where unique learning experiences cultivate the discipline, knowledge, and curiosity for building new enterprises that solve real problems. Its second 12-week Entrepreneurship Bootcamp, designed to accommodate people from all stages of life with a diversity of experience and ideas, happens from March to June 2014 in Santiago, Chile. I’ll be there for you as a full-time fellow, as will a whole faculty in residence specialized in coding, design, development, marketing, and emerging technology to help you develop your business and yourself. You can apply now through January 15.

 

 

More on Exosphere’s vision, which I can’t help but share:

We believe in a renaissance of humanism that puts curiosity, learning, and creation at the forefront of the human experience. We see technology as an artistic expression of human talent — in service of other people — making life healthier, more meaningful, more efficient, and full of variety. As creative beings, we delight in variety. We believe in a world where each person can delight in the variety of her own creation and in the creations of others.

Such a world can only exist when people are free — both politically and existentially. Entrepreneurship is the path to freedom, and simultaneously gives people a sustainable outlet for their creative energy.

There are two pains in life that we believe are the source of most of our everyday suffering: doing work that is out of alignment with our calling, and broken relationships with other people. With entrepreneurship, we can resolve the former, and in Community, we can heal the latter.

We see education as the entry point for this battle. Rather than talking about education reform, we are actively experimenting with alternative models and formats for inspiring and helping people to pursue a life of intentional, self-directed learning. We envision a world where this style of education starts in kindergarten and continues into old age.

We see the transformation of education as the essential first step to making science and technology accessible to more people.

(Only 20 spots left now, I might add, so jump on that application sooner than later.)

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A Los Angeles Primer: L.A. Live

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

“Los Angeles is the most beautiful city in the world, provided it’s seen at night and from a distance.” You usually hear that line credited to the filmmaker Roman Polanski, but the observation at its core has proven so resonant for so long that the variations and attributions have multiplied. Often it comes delivered by a longtime or even native Angeleno, proactively expressing their distinctive combination of shame and pride. I tend to think some of this attitude comes from living in a city universally known by name but difficult to recognize by skyline, and even that depends on which sets of distant buildings you consider part of it. In search of a logo, the popular Los Angeles news site LAist simply accomplished by graphic design what many of us, especially the tourists, wish we could accomplish in the built environment — placing City Hall, the Capitol Records Building, the Disney Concert Hall and the Hollywood all together, right next to a palm tree. Part of me wishes that, given this suspension of geography, they’d gone ahead thrown in the Century Plaza Towers too.

But unless the much-discussed Big One strikes, necessitating a complete reconstruction of the city, Los Angeles will never put all its icons in one place. Hence the emphasis instead on the whole strikingly vast basin-draping blanket of lights against the darkness you see flying into LAX, or from high ground at the Getty Center or Griffith Observatory. Even if the remarkable development of recent decades hasn’t yet made downtown into a symbol of all Los Angeles, its glittering towers certainly give it the look of a jewel in the crown. A good deal of this post-sunset slickness now emanates from L.A. Live, an “entertainment complex” opened in 2007 at downtown’s southwestern corner. Comprising restaurants, bars, a couple of music venues, a hotel, condos, offices, broadcasting studios, an enormous movie theater, and the Grammy Museum — not to mention copious amounts of parking, with even more copious amounts promised to come — it also enjoys something of a symbiosis with the adjacent Staples Center. NBA enthusiasts thus count themselves as among the part of the population, with reasons to pass many of their nights at L.A. Live. Others still know it only as a point of light, albeit a 2.5-billion dollar one.

Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S4E16: Baby Steps Begone with Mikael Colville-Andersen

Sunday, December 15, 2013

Colin Marshall sits down in Vesterbro with Mikael Colville-Andersen, urban mobility expert and CEO of Copenhagenize. They discuss where Los Angeles, with its “pockets of goodness,” ranks on the global scale of Copenhagenization; what it takes for a city’s population to become “intermodal”; his experience growing up in an English-Danish-Canadian household, biking all the time before the onset of the “culture of fear”; the qualities of a mainstream bicycle culture, including a lack of specialized cycling clothes of the type worn by the sport cyclists who have “hijacked” the practice; learning how not to promote cycling from environmentalism, the greatest marketing failure of all time; the need, in some places, to sell urbanism before you can sell urban cycling; his work busting myths about why Copenhagen allegedly differs so much from all other cities; why he settled in Copenhagen himself, beyond not needing to explain his name so often; the photo he took that “launched a million bicycles” and made him into a modern-day Jane Jacobs; the failed science of traffic engineering and how to rebuild it; cycling’s “modal share” and what it tells you about a city, especially when it rises above five percent; the bicycle as “the symbol of the future, man”; how helmets kill cycling culture, and his TED Talk on riding without one; our innate need, as human beings, to fear stuff; and what urban cycling promoters can learn from the success of automobiles, and especially their introduction of the term “jaywalking” and the very concept of playgrounds.

Download the interview here as an MP3 or on iTunes.

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