Colin Marshall

Me on TV

Just the other week, I appeared on my favorite Santa Barbara cultural institution, Channel 21’s The Creative Community with David Starkey:

David and I chat about The Marketplace of Ideas, Observer, cinema (the most-vital-director-of-our-time you see me forgetting is Sangsoo Hong), Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, the modern novel, and other important stuff.

Other interviews with me in the past few years include:

• Full-Stop.net with Michael Schapira
• Radio Causeway with Tim Grigsby and Pav Aulakh
• G.I.O. Get It On with Giovanni Giorgio (actually went on twice, but I can’t find the second appearance)
• Think Different TV with Ben Casnocha
• The Criterioncast on Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (not an interview, but I enjoyed doing it)
• Broadcasting Brain with Mark Dykeman (don’t know where the full thing went off to)
• The Nieman Journalism Lab podcast with Joshua Benton (this one still floats in the land of wind and ghosts)

An earnest, expansive, and rigorous discussion of Colin Marshall

Full Stop comes on the scene as the latest force for "an earnest, expansive, and rigorous discussion of literature and literary culture." The site does its bit by focusing on "young writers, works in translation, and books we feel are being neglected by other outlets." Sounds like a site I can get behind! If you read what I write, chances are you can get behind it too. In any case, it's gotten behind me; Full Stop writer Michael Schapira's interview with me just went up on its front page.

Michael does a solid e-mail Q&A. By way of proof, one question and its answer follows:

In a recent interview with C. Max McGee you both acknowledged working from a position outside of the academy (versus, for example, pursuing your interests within an MFA program or school of journalism). Many of your interviewees come from inside the academy, or are able to develop their work in some sort of productive relationship with universities. How you see your work in relation to the university?

I don’t see my work in relation to the university at all; if I’m lucky, I will continue not to see it that way. Some thrive in academia, but I find it brings out the worst of my slothful, autistic, obscurantist tendencies. I care strongly about how people engage with film, literature, and conversation in — forgive me for this term — the “real” world. How people engage with them in some department? Not so much.

Aw, what the hell. Here comes another, in part:

What have you learned from looking in-depth at a diverse set of podcasts over the past several years? Do you see any in particular pushing the medium?

I’ve learned that most podcasts consist of two twenty- or thirty-something white guys (or sometimes) bullshitting about “pop culture.” Some podcasters make an art of this — Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier on SModcast, Vernon Reid and W. Kamau Bell on The Field Negro Guide to Arts and Culture, or, again, Jesse and Jordan Morris on Jordan, Jesse, Go! — but most don’t. The best come from backgrounds other than “podcaster who’s seen some movies and television lately.” They’re comedians, broadcasters, musicians, filmmakers — not just podcasters, in other words, but three-dimensional people with accomplishments outside podcasting.

So thanks for making me think hard about what I do, Michael. It reminds me that, next time I get back on the other side of the interviewing game, I've got to do the same for my own guests. If you seek older interviews with me, you'll find a few on Mark Dykeman's Broadcasting Brain (which I can't seem to Google up at the moment), Tim Grigsby and Pav Aulakh's Radio Causeway, Giovanni Giorgio's G.I.O Get It On podcast, again on G.I.O. Get It On (but I can't find it), and Ben Casnocha's Think Different TV.

These "friends" you speak of

Of course I would want to read Geoff Dyer’s writing: operating free of career shackles to any particular subject (+1), he fills his books with formally distinctive (+1) essays (+1) about geographical self-displacement (+1); about culturally synesthetic experiences of visual, cinematic, and musical art (+1); and about avoiding real jobs (+1). He came up an only child (+1) and now enjoys ECM records (+1), cappuccinos (+1), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (+1), and not having children of his own (+1). So of course I would also want to interview him.

We met up to record a conversation on the balcony of a Sunset Boulevard café. As serious Marketplace of Ideas-philes know — boldly assuming such -philes exist — I refuse to summon the will to write questions in advance. Instead, I lazily spend weeks cramming my unconscious mind with material by my guest and, even more importantly, material around my guest. Then, come conversation time, que será será. But, sitting down with Geoff Dyer, I broke my own habit-as-rule, compelled to know one thing above all: how do you make friends?

However you interpret that question, you interpret it correctly. How does Geoff Dyer, specifically, make friends? I want to know that. How, generally, does one make friends? Yeah — that too. If you haven’t read his more personal or travel-oriented essays, I assure you they offer the impression of a man who collects pals like some collect those flattened pennies stamped with images of national monuments. In certain moments, he acknowledges the slight oddity in this: "I've got used to making new friends at an age when many people are living off the diminishing stockpile amassed at university," he writes.

But I stumble over the age less than that other cluster of attributes, the ones I share. I’ve met other only children who like their Tarkovsky films, their albums from ECM, their Thomas Bernhard novels, and their artisanal beverages. As a rule, we don’t make friends easily. In less sober moments, I sing the praises of my favorite elements of culture as tools to bring humanity together, to warm the pockets of frost between us all, but in more sober moments I wonder if these works of art don’t disconnect me from my fellow man even more often than they connect me to him. We endure the worst of this in middle and high school, a barren time that forces us to fashion identities out of our fleeting yet tribal likes and dislikes, but I don’t feel I’ve completely shaken that taint (to inadvertently evoke a disgusting mental image).

Another essayist, centuries older but still a friend-maker in his way, may point to the escape route. A couple weeks ago, I interviewed Sarah Bakewell, Michel de Montaigne’s latest biographer. I admire many things about Montaigne, not least having invented the modern essay form, but his lack of strong opinions really wins me over. In his work — point out the staggering oversimplification in this if you must — I see a man struggling so hard to be honest about himself that, in the process, he strips himself of his opinions. I’ve come to think of honesty as a solution that, poured on one’s own opinions, dissolves them. When we dig down to bedrock, claims like “I love Andrei Tarkovsky’s movies” and “I hate Andrei Tarkovsky’s movies” amount to little more than — well, grunts, right? We can’t credibly call them honest or dishonest, since their vagueness and rootedness in impulse takes them out of territory where that sort of truth and falsity applies.

Which isn’t to say that we should stop talking about the cultural products that attract or repel us. I just wonder if we should talk about them from richer angles than liking and disliking. In the best critics’ vocabularies, do words like good, bad, and any synonyms thereof have any place at all? In our interview, Geoff Dyer mentioned his current work on a book entirely about Stalker, in which — and only my own conjecture follows — he will not say “Stalker is good,” or even “Stalker is great.” I wager he’ll say something more interesting like, oh, “It's not enough to say that Stalker is a great film — it is the reason cinema was invented.” Hence, I suppose, the fact that I showed up to interview him, not the other way around.

 

Marc Maron and Tom Scharpling, making their things

Marc Maron does stand-up comedy and the podcast WTF, which, for my earbud time, has risen to become one of the best interview-y concerns going. Tom Scharpling does The Best Show on WFMU. Tom joined Marc on WTF and talked about the journey toward doing his own media thing. Resonant words:

Tom Scharpling: I was like, “I’ve got to get good at writing. I’ve got to dedicate myself to finding a job. I can’t have something like this, that’s taking me off course.” So I quit for a couple years.

Marc Maron: Quit radio?

Tom Scharpling: Yeah, I quit the station.

Marc Maron: That was that juncture where it’s like, “The radio thing — I’m not even getting paid for that. I’ve got to get out of [working at a sheet music store] or I’m going to get old there...”

Tom Scharpling: Exactly; I was going to be trapped.

Marc Maron: “... and I’m going to focus.”

Tom Scharpling: “I need to start writing and just get myself out of this place in my life.”

Marc Maron: It’s a horrible place.

Tom Scharpling: Because you can feel that you might never get out of it.

Marc Maron: [strangled noise]

Tom Scharpling: There’s no guarantees. On any of this stuff.

Marc Maron: Ever!

Tom Scharpling: You know people who never get beyond a certain point, for whatever reason. It’s like, “There’s no guarantee I’m not one of those people. There’s no guarantee I didn’t hit the ceiling, whatever I’m hitting right now.”

Marc Maron: “I might be done!”

Tom Scharpling: Yeah, “This might be it for me.” But then, in your head, you think, “No, this is not it. I’m still going on a journey. I still have other places to go.” Maybe you don’t. Maybe this is the end of your line.

Marc Maron: That’s a horrible struggle, because I don’t know who you are in your mind, but in those moments — it’s almost a moment where, literally, there’s a part of your heart that’s reaching out to your parents, almost, like, “Take me to the place, mommy!” There’s this moment, like, “How do I get there?” Then you realize, “I’ve got to cry, then I’ve got to do this work.” But there’s something about that weird area where the fear of success and the fear of failure is the same thing. Like, “If I finish it, what if it stinks? And if I don’t do it, what if I’m still stuck?” That thing? You ever get that thing?

Tom Scharpling: The fear of success is not the thing for me. The feat of failure is almost all of it for me. I feel that looming.

Marc Maron: But it doesn’t stop you from doing things, which is good.

Tom Scharpling: No, exactly. I’ve always thought, you know the amount of geniuses that there are out there? There’s like five of them, maybe. It’s like, Paul Thomas Anderson, that guy is on a different plane from all of us. Then there’s, like, the bottom twenty percent, the Rupert Pupkins of the world that are just completely talentless, don’t belong...

Marc Maron: But keep going!

Tom Scharpling: They have to learn that themselves, when the cards get dealt: okay, wasn’t for me. But that middle stretch: all it is that separates the people is just how hard you work on it, and if you keep your head in the game. I was just like, “I can do okay in that mix. I know I’m not a genius, but I’m pretty sure I’m not Rupert Pupkin. I know I’m not a fraud.”

Marc Maron: Right. The authenticity thing’s important.

Tom Scharpling: It’s like, if I do the best I can do, that takes care of a certain amount of it. I’ve always operated with that in mind.

Marc Maron: We’re probably similar in the way of the amount of pressure we put on ourselves.

Tom Scharpling: Oh yeah. That’s part of why I quit.

Marc Maron: You hit a wall. It’s like, “What else am I going to do?” You feel like you’re spinning. You’re like, “I’ve done this. It’s not changing!”

Tom Scharpling: My thing is also, it’s a listener-supported station. There’s no way to ever monetize what I’m doing there. I’m working for the greater good of this noncommercial station, which I am completely on board with.

Marc Maron: But did that function also support, not your self-sabotaging element, but the idea that there’s something noble about it, number one, and also number two, there’s integrity built into it?

Tom Scharpling: Yeah. But you get tired at a point. I got so tired of this thing that just felt like it would never end. It felt like I had a certain amount of responsibility to the station to be earning a certain amount of money to keep the thing going, which was not really true. I do make a good amount of money when it’s the fundraiser, but the station has survived the big DJs coming and going. It’s always managed to survive. But I put an unrealistic thing on myself, thinking, “I have to be here every week.” The thing that was fun for everybody else kind of became a job for me, a job that I can only lose money on, this job that I can only lose money on — and it will never end. I just got sad.

Marc Maron: It’s like a sentence.

Tom Scharpling: Exactly.

From Put This On, Tom Scharpling’s three rules:

1. DO THE WORK. Can you look yourself in the mirror at the end of the day and say that you did the best you could?
2. BE THE BEST POSSIBLE VERSION OF YOURSELF. Don’t shortchange yourself or pull your punches because of some internal negative voice!
3. WRITE DOWN WHAT YOU NEED TO DO. It helps. Do those three things and you’ll be more alright than not.

Ira Glass on being interviewed by Marc Maron:

Being interviewed by Maron reminded me of an old axiom about interviewing: that an interview is a party you're throwing and your guest will mirror your behavior. Marc is an insanely intense guy, and stares into you as you talk — it really feels like his eyes are piercing inside you — and then when he speaks he reaches inside himself and talks in the most heartfelt way possible. In a room with that, you'd have to be made of stone not to respond in the most soulful way you can summon up. He's emotionally present and he makes you emotionally present. I don't think that's any kind of calculated move, it's who he is when he's performing. And of course it gets amazing results.

Cavalcade of Cavettosity

Interviewing geeks rejoice: Hulu now hosts 19 episodes of The David Susskind Show, free for the streaming. Susskind’s name may not ring a bell, but if you’re at all into long-form interviews, he was of the original gods. Quoth Wikipedia, “his program, Open End, began in 1958 on WNTA-TV in New York City, and was appropriately titled: the program continued until Susskind or his guests were too tired to continue.” I mean — nice.

Along the way, Open End switched to its more Susskind-y title, and Susskind had Dick Cavett on. Though he hasn’t maintained a consistent television presence since the nineties, he’s drawn attention lately for his NYT blog and remains a beacon of wit, depth, and urbanity to which us Gen-Y interviewers compulsively look. (In fact, Jesse Thorn talked to him on The Sound of Young America

JESSE THORN: I don’t know a lot about pommel horse.

DICK CAVETT: What?

just the other week.) But won’t you take a trip back to 1974 with me and behold this prime piece of interviewer-on-interviewer action?

(I plan, if I make more appearances in the visual media, to wear Cavett-style turtlenecks as an inside joke. I tried to do it in high school, but no one understood.)

Now square this interviewer-on-interviewer circle by fast-forwarding to 2011, when Cavett drops by Charlie Rose to talk about the bookified version of his blog. I do hope Charlie makes good on that promise to let Cavett host, though I somehow can’t stop being haunted by Cavett’s response: “You must be my best friend! The position is open.” I found similarly revealing insights in a 1972 New Yorker profile, especially this quote about his concept of the interviewer’s role:

The interviewer's role should not necessarily just be questions. I don't know where I got obsessed with the idea that interviewing is simply asking questions. It's so much nicer when it's more of a dialogue, it's so much easier when you have that breakthrough — something that resembles actual speech without the pressure of the lights or the camera. It isn't necessarily just the penetrating question.

And really especially this quote about his early inclination toward celebrity:

I thought, "If I ever become famous, I'll talk to everybody who wants to talk to me, I'll be nice to people, I'll drop in at little houses on side streets where they don't expect me and dazzle and thrill them, and that'll be the fun of being famous. I'll stop in at drugstores and sit at counters and give the people a look at me and a little something to talk about."

If anyone else has ever drilled down closer to the core of the drive to become well-known, to cultivate as large an audience as possible — as least as I personally experience it — I don’t want to know about it.

And now Clive James, who wrote a chapter on Cavett in his book Cultural Amnesia, one of the few volumes on my must-own-not-borrow list:

There will be no Dick Cavett of the future. We should count ourselves lucky that there was one in the past. I count myself blessed that I knew him when he was still a small but seductive part of the American landscape. Eventually that landscape seemed to change its mind about wanting to include him, but it is possible that he had the idea first.