Colin Marshall

Do it; do it now; do it to crack yourself up

Despite having endured years and years of lukewarm expectancy about his movies (“Surely the next one will work as cinema. Hmm. Okay, the next one, then...”), I think I may worship Kevin Smith anyway. So he wears black hoodies and billowing jorts. So he writes scripts where characters say lines like “I didn’t have a roadmap to sexuality.” But damn, not only has he put together an uncommonly unified life and work, he’s hypnotized me with the sheer power of his words. I’ve listened to, like, six hours of The SMODCast in the past two days. And I have other things I need to listen to.

In my experience, the show’s formula works like this: come for the astonishing fact that Smith and co-host/producer/pal Scott Mosier can release wave after wave of dick jokes and observations about Namor the Sub-Mariner and actually make you laugh with them; stay for the weirdly penetrating insights about living life and making stuff. For these guys, living life and making stuff seem to have merged into one and the same, which I’ve long assumed the only viable long-term way to play it. They crack the dick jokes, make the Namor references — indeed, Namor dick jokes — shoot the movies, and record the podcasts, each as facets of the same big... thing. Therefore, any given subject, no matter how seemingly vulgar or juvenile, can well lead to observations that remind me of just that of which I must be reminded.

So first, on an episode where they talk about the details of their self-distribution plan for the upcoming Red State — a film that has drawn mainly eerily reserved responses so far, but never mind — Mosier points out that, when it comes to making stuff and getting it out there the way you want, you can’t truly fail. God, that sounds trite when I type it out, but bear with me: he and Smith go on to explain that, if you do your thing and all goes “successfully” according to plan, sweet — and you’ve got the story to tell on a podcast. If you do it and it sinks, well, then you’ve got, like, three stories. Doing = winning, in some sense, no matter what. Not that they spelled it out this way, but you also enjoy the self-respect that comes with acting on your ideas. You don’t get it as a consolation prize for forfeiture; in fact, I fear you don’t get anything.

Second, on one of the shows where they recall their days at the Vancouver film school where they met, they discuss the making of their first documentary short, Mae Day: The Crumbling of a Documentary. Groups had to come up with a documentary idea and pitch it to the class, so Smith and Mosier, simply wanting to win, came up with this super-earnest speech about nobly bearing cinematic witness to the gender journey of Emelda Mae, a local transsexual. This won over their classmates, as designed, but then the guys realized they didn’t actually want to do a project so fakily high-minded. Luckily, Emelda Mae suddenly skipped the country, which offered Smith and Mosier the chance to have actual fun making a jokey, self-deprecating movie about their failure to produce the cinematic gender journey, etc. Mosier drew a lifelong lesson from this: unless your projects amuse you, and thus you can amuse yourself making them, you’ve probably got nothin’.

Third, and in the same episode, Smith brings up a post from You Are Not So Smart about “present bias.” The relevant research found that, the sooner a subject had to watch a movie, the stupider a movie they would pick to watch. Which movie did the subject want to watch next week? Schindler’s List. Which movie did the subject want to watch right this second? Mrs. Doubtfire. This comes as old, old news to those interested in things procrastinatorial — that post even invokes the marshmallow kids — but perhaps it took a couple of Namor-dick-joke-making podcasters to bring my mind back to it.

“There is no future,” Smith says. “The future is an illusion.” The sharp, supremely capable, immaculately organized future versions of ourselves do not exist, so we’d do well not to lard them with all the challenges and responsibilities we feel unable to handle today. You won’t find future-you substantially more able than present-you — or you might, but it doesn’t help to assume you will. I feel I should make one of these claims: either “Whatever you’re not doing now, you’re not doing” or “Whatever you wouldn’t do now, you wouldn’t do at all.” A tired point, perhaps, and one I’m sure I’ve made before, but I consider my most of my thoughts about the past and future wasted, irrelevant: the present winds up dictating both of them anyway.

Despite the energizing observations from Smith and Mosier that moved me to write it, the process of cranking out this post has laid upon me an overwhelming weariness. Maybe I’ve simply grown weary of relaying things people have said about doing stuff, no matter how inspirational. Maybe the element of self-amusement has dissolved. So I guess I’ll stop doing it — right now.

Go to work

The hosts of one of my favorite film podcasts, Battleship Pretension, recently addressed an intriguing bit of negative listener feedback on the show. I forget his specific grievance, but the guy writing in took issue with the number of major films Tyler and David regularly admit to not having seen. A fair point, but, as Tyler and David replied, you’ll always leave certain movies unseen no matter how hard you watch, and unlike them, you probably didn’t go to film school. Plus, there are social lives to be had, beers to be drunk, pizzas to be eaten, etc.

Yet I kept thinking about the complainer’s core concern. On the surface, he seemed to claim Tyler and David hadn’t seen enough movies to have earned the authority to talk about the form itself. Down below, the complaint echoed a demand I feel myself having of anybody I listen to talk about anything, whether they’re talking about film, music, literature, visual art: how do I know you’re experiencing, exploring, and thinking about this stuff even when you don’t want to? I happen, for example, to have two tabs open with two different James Wood articles. His reviews instill in me confidence that he doesn’t read and analyze novels just when he feels like it; he goes to work. I wouldn’t trust his judgment if he didn’t.

Needless to say, “going to work” doesn’t necessarily mean turning up to an office every day — and, for most interesting crafts, rarely if ever does — but it shares an element with that. I sometimes think about this as habit, asking myself, “Does this creator do this work habitually?” I sometimes think about it as a system, as in, “Does this creator do this work systematically?” I need to know a creator is giving me only the tip of an iceberg built with great working regularity.

Unlike that one dude, I don’t think Tyler and David fail to go to work with Battleship Pretension. They record and release a show per week, almost like clockwork. They don’t seem to take “me” days. I realize, though, that the complainer objected to their film viewing, not their film discussion; while the show’s regularity makes clear that they must discuss films even when they don’t want to, I admit to having no way of knowing whether they watch them regularly, even when they don’t want to.

So if you want to make a life of some craft, it makes sense to institute a system, a schedule — no matter how basic — as soon as possible. Sure, I’ve conducted 150-some-odd Marketplace of Ideas interviews, but interviewing only becomes what I do to the extent that I do it regularly — which, pretty much, I have. I’ve been writing longer, but I’ve done it much less regularly; some of my print stuff and online columns run on a schedule, but the rest I’ve too often foolishly chained to the petulant beast of “what I feel like.” Filmmaking I’ve done least regularly of all, choosing so far to rely on the vanishingly rare fuel of inspiration. No surprise that I’ve done it the least. Unsustainable practice, as the enviros would say.

This looks the same from the consumer’s side as it does from the creator's. I respect most the work of creators who, broadly speaking, do what they want to do — especially when they don’t want to do it. Whatever you or I do whether or not we feel like it, that’s what we capital-D Do. (On reflection, you might find this is painting; you might also find it’s slinging macchiatos.) This remains only a suspicion, but I’ve come to think that I only really do what I do every day. Anybody I’d presume to consider an audience likely believes that about me anyway, so I think I’ll go ahead and get it tattooed on my wrist now.

A Smithian honesty

Despite having never been a Kevin Smith fan, I spent a chunk of the last couple days just listening to interviews with him. The richest two aired on The Adam Carolla Show and Marc Maron’s WTF; hearing them, I felt that few things in media could have compelled me as strongly at that moment as Kevin Smith being interviewed. Yet I have little if any desire to watch or re-watch any of his movies. What’s up with that?

Obvious but partial explanation: Smith’s a talker, but not so much a director. He acknowledges this more and more often with the passage of time; he even mentions it in both the aforelinked interviews, in the context of phasing out the filmmaking element of his career. Podthinking about his podcast, SMODcast, I wrote that a great podcaster by the name of Kevin Smith, born in 1980, hit his early-mid-twenties — that personal era of do-or-die ambition — in the early-mid-2000s, just as the medium of podcasting emerged. Alas, he exists only in an alternate universe. The Kevin Smith of our timeline, born ten years earlier, entered his early-mid-twenties in the early-mid-nineties, the dawn of the U.S. low-budget indie film boom.

Smith knows this; indeed, he seems to know himself well. In his conversation with Carolla, he says that, if he wasn’t Kevin Smith, he’d be Kevin Smith’s biggest fan, the leader of Kevin Smith’s fan club, maybe even Kevin Smith’s adulation-crazed assassin. And I believe him! You can tell that he makes exactly the sort of stuff he himself likes, a strategy that sounds stupidly obvious but which requires you to know what you like in the first place. Earning that knowledege with any kind of solidity, I find, turns out to be a non-trivial task.

While I may not be totally into everything Smith does, I’m more than down with the fact that he does all of it. His filmmaking, podcasting, public speaking, and comic-book writing are my interviewing, writing, filmmaking, and sound manipulation. Of course, he has a certain something I lack, besides the ability to rock denim shants: success. No matter how unlikely a branch he adds to his career, he maintains an undeniable, unconflicted Kevin Smith-iness at its core; the majority of his work falls under the heading of “being Kevin Smith.” (The same goes, I would guess, for Carolla and Maron.) Most of what he shoots, writes, or says aligns with the very essence of Kevin Smith, and from that he draws great freedom. For all the variety of his ventures, he still leads a unified life, and his audience knows and appreciates this.

Can I claim the same thing? Doubt it. I wouldn’t even know how to go about describing what “Colin Marshall-iness” is. When I ask myself if product x, y, or z I’ve produced would truly please me were I not creator, I tend to assume it would, but I have no idea how to test that assumption. I envy Smith his seemingly unambiguous internal compass; sometimes mine just sort of spins. Even if I do know my own tastes, can I use them as a channel through which to connect with humanity? Smith seems to have done just that, mediating his own inclination toward Jedis and dick jokes to cultivate thousands upon thousands of people desperate to pay sixty bucks just to hear him talk. But how to develop a Smithian self-knowledge, a Smithian unification, a Smithian — dare I say it — honesty?

The Marketplace of Ideas: 10,000 in 2011 or bust

This will be The Marketplace of Ideas' final year. That is, unless the show reaches 10,000 podcast subscribers by the end of 2011. I'm still figuring out how to properly interpret my statistics, but getting to 10,000 surely requires somewhere between a doubling and a quintupling of the current subscribership. If you're reading this, you may well subscribe already, but you can still help ensure the program enters 2012 and run well beyond. How, you ask?

Blog/tweet/Facebookify about the show. If you enjoy a particular interview, please don't hesitate to write a little something about it on whichever social media outlet you prefer. Most of the stuff I currently like came from recommendations found on blogs, in tweets and what have you — less so from Facebook status updates, but hey, they're still important — and I do hope others can come to like (or "Like") The Marketplace of Ideas in a similar fashion.

Review the show on iTunes. This seems like it wouldn't do anything at all, I realize, but the iTunes staff move in mysterious ways. Each new review raises the show's profile within the iTunes podcast directory, which sometimes leads to appearances in featured spots. This gives the old subscriber count a certain shot in the arm — not that most of 'em stick around. (Why is that, anyway?) All you have to do is pull up The Marketplace of Ideas' page in the iTunes store, click "Write a Review >", and leave a few choice words and (ugh) a star rating.

Recommend the show to a friend. Simple as that. A sharp listener like you certainly has plenty of friends who are looking for something engaging to pipe through their earphones, to play in the car, or to put on the stereo during afternoon tea. You — you! — can improve their lives by pointing them toward this one such engaging thing.

Wield your awesome media power. Write for a paper? Have a radio show? Do a podcast? Responsible toward any kind of media outlet that demands a flow of interesting stories? You might consider one about The Marketplace of Ideas. Some fascinating facts about the show include that (a) I do it on one seriously low budget, (b) I've nonetheless featured guests like New Yorker book critic James wood, marketing mastermind Seth Godin, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, critic Clive James, Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly, NPR's Peter Sagal, pop alternastar Momus, KCRW Bookworm host Michael Silverblatt, and public philosopher Alain de Botton, and (c) I'm, uh, gunning for 10,000 in order to bring cultural conversation of unparalleled depth to the airwaves and the iPods alike? (And if you do some kind of interview-y type thing, I'll almost certainly be on it.)

Tell me what you think. Anything you want to hear more of on the show? Anything you want to hear less of? Guests, subjects, sensibilities, formal quirks: I want to know what you think about every aspect of The Marketplace of Ideas. This information helps me tweak the formula in ways that help the show evolve into something even more enjoyable, informative, immersive, edutastational, etc.

Join the mailing list. I’ve just started a mailing list geared toward the truly elite Marketplace of Ideas listener. It delivers weekly updates on the program’s current and future broadcasts as well as related internet interestingness. I think you’ll find it the most efficient and entertaining possible way to stay on the vanguard of The Marketplace of Ideas’ grand quest to bring long-form cultural conversation to its proper place of prominence. Want to join? Simply let me know your preferred e-mail address to add at colinjmarshall at gmail. We will march on a road of bones.

Three years of ideational marketeering

After I aired the first few Marketplace of Ideas interviews, I figured this e-mail was, give or take a few months, well on its way:

From: Public Radio Bigshot
To: Colin Marshall

Colin,

You have flawlessly reintroduced lively, intelligent conversation to the airwaves. To allow you to continue doing this without compensation of any kind would truly be a crime. I am prepared to offer practically enough money to sustain a decent existence.

But the town belle doesn’t just jump on her first suitor. I figured this e-mail would follow shortly thereafter:

From: Another Public Radio Bigshot
To: Colin Marshall

Colin,

I cannot, in good conscience, let any other public radio bigshot claim you as their own. I would be remiss in allowing the depth and seriousness conferred by a program like The Marketplace of Ideas to accrue to any other public radio network. I am prepared to offer enough money to not only sustain a decent existence, but to rent an apartment with a garbage disposal.

I would be tempted — who wouldn’t? — but I would hold out a week or two longer for this e-mail:

From: A Third Public Radio Bigshot
To: Colin Marshall

Colin,

You have created a program that, once listened to, cannot go unlistened to. Clearly, you are the life force that will revitalize public radio, that will make it vital and engaging to millions. I am thus naturally prepared to offer a lavish compensation package, including a paycheck each month of an amount sufficiently high that some money will remain even at the beginning of the next. We will march on a road of bones.

I understood the real bidding war would be much larger, uglier, and more complicated; the imagination always streamlines these things. But strangely, as The Marketplace of Ideas enters its fourth year, I haven’t even gotten the first of these messages. I assume the public radio bigshots are getting my address wrong. It’s colinjmarshall at gmail, guys. Colinjmarshall. There’s a j in the middle.

So while they straighten that out, I’ll continue the yearly tradition of naming my five favorite MOI interviews of the past twelve months.



Hardly a day goes by when I don’t think about something I discussed with Nick Currie, also known as Momus, back in February. We somehow managed to cover about thrice as many topics as I usually do in an hour — old computers, boarding school, creating parallel words with lies where those lies are true, North Korea, Japan, Plato’s cave — all from the launching point of talking about the closure of his Livejournal, of all things. He shuttered it on his 50th birthday, the same day I aired the interview, so it was a pleasing coincidence of big events.



I got into North Korea in much more depth the very next week, when I talked to Brian Reynolds Myers about his book on understanding North Korea’s mindset through its propaganda. The conversation became very popular when I transcribed it for 3Quarksdaily. Distancing myself from the role of interviewer an reading or hearing it just as someone fascinated by North Korea — most people are — I can see why it’s fascinating. I especially like how Myers also gets into bits and pieces of his own background, especially regarding his drive to study closed societies. Yet this one didn’t seem to win me too many new subscribers, which I can’t quite explain. I wanted to tell these single-serving fans, “But all the interviews go this deep!”



If, when I was fifteen, you told me that in ten years I’d be talking to Wang Chung’s Jack Hues, I’d have freaked in the best possible way. (If, however, you told me that a t-topped vehicle would still remain nowhere in sight, I’d have freaked in the worst possible way.) You know those stories people tell about finally talking to creators whose work they’ve long admired and coming away disappointed? This was the exact opposite of that. If anything, he was even smarter, more candid, and more articulate that I could ever have allowed myself to expect.



This is what I find fascinating about our long tail-y media: a guy in a band that’s been a household name for 25 years is a celebrity to me, but so are two guys about my age who talk about movies in a North Hollywood apartment every Thursday. Whether or not this is the Age of Personal Celebrities, I met two of mine, Tyler Smith and David Bax of the movie podcast Battleship Pretension, by interviewing them. I wanted the conversation on my show to be as funny and freewheeling — “double-F,” I call it — as an episode of theirs, and I got my wish. But we also got surprisingly incisive about what cinema is as an art form (and how cinema is never not an art form).



Maybe this is recency bias, but I think my conversation with KPCC’s John Rabe might turn out to be one for the ages. The genius revelation dawned on me not long ago that, if I’m going to be a radio personality, it might be advantageous to include some of my personality in my radio ventures. Rabe and I got in touch after I reviewed his show Off-Ramp on Podthoughts. Our on-air talk that followed seems to me like a new high point in the “actually be a two-person conversation” aspect of MOI’s mission. It helps that we talked about stuff I can speak to, like the city of Los Angeles and the bizarrely low assumed audience engagement level of most radio programs.

By the time you read this, I’m pretty sure those public radio bigshots have gotten on the whole e-mailing thing. But until then...

Twentysomething white guy-induced weariness

The two-year anniversary of my assuming the position of official Podthinker for Maximumfun.org passed just the other day, which means I've reviewed around 120 podcasts in that capacity. (Some single reviews cover multiple shows.) I've forgotten most of them, even the pretty solidly good ones, some so completely that I can't quite believe I listened to them in the first place. A few have now naturally concluded, failed to take off or or otherwise "podfaded" (a term that itself hasn't quite gotten aloft). Others, recipients of Colin the Podthinker's gold stars, stood out when I reviewed them and continue to shine. To name but a few: XO, The Tobolowsky Files, the Airborne Event Dronecast, The Japanofiles, The Night Air, The Thomas Jefferson Hour, Entitled Opinions.

Why those? I can't help but notice that none of the podcasts I've just named are TTWGBACs. This is an abbreviation — some call it an acronym, but I don't think that's true since its letters don't form a pronounceable word — I came up with early in my Podthinking career which stands for Two Twentysomething White Guys Bullshitting About Culture, later expanded to Two/Three Twenty/Thirtysomething White Guys/Girls Bullshitting About Culture. It quickly became apparent that I'd need such a piece of shorthand, since the bullshitting about culture turned out to be, by far, the most common practice of podcasters, who are, overwhelmingly, white guys (and the occasional girl) in their twenties or thirties. Maybe this sounds racist, ageist, formatist, etc., but as a podcasting twentysomething white guy myself, I feel it's somehow "okay" for me to say it, like a Jew telling a Jewish joke.

What's wrong with TTWGBACs? Nothing, inherently. Part of the reason for the landslide of them across the podcasting landscape is that a few early ones did what they did so very well indeed — Maximum Fun's own Jordan, Jesse, Go!, say — that an onslaught of imitators was inevitable. Add to that the fact that most of the people first aware of podcasting or equipped to podcast happened to be young, tech-savvy dudes who spend a lot of time on the net absorbing various media, and the surfeit's more than explained. But jeez, I'm just so tired of them.

I don't exempt podcasts from what I generally find to be true about art: form is much, content little. Walter Benjamin's line about all great works either inventing a genre or dissolving one holds as well for literature as it does for everything else. Given the medium's effectively limitless potential, I'm not hearing as many genre-founding and/or genre-dissolving podcasters as I'd like. Such strict adherence to one form, TTWGBAC or otherwise, would thus be bad enough by itself, but in this case, the content is all wrapped up in the form; the bullshitting is always about "culture," loosely defined, mixed in with a fair to medium amount of material, usually complaint, about the bullshitters' everyday lives, few of which seem unusual enough to merit intellectual attention.

And alas, the content itself is an issue. I'll spare you a quotation of the observation about what ubiquitous, smelly orifice opinions are just like and why, but all these scattershot, conveniently-made judgments ultimately run together into a single queasy current. Lost isn't what it was and my production assistant job sucks and nobody appreciates Perfect Strangers on the level I do and jeez, scope out that KFC Double Down sandwich and what good is the iPad anyway and I can't get my girlfriend to watch all seven seasons of The Shield with me and oh man, remember Fantastic Max and Obama isn't delivering what he personally promised me and STOP STOP PLEASE STOP

There's something to be said for media that communicates to its audience in a natural, unaffected manner about just the sort of topics discussed by the audience itself. I'm fairly sure that's how Kevin Smith's movies have gained so much traction. (As a side note, when I Podthought about Smith's podcast, I found the form suited him much better than cinema ever has.) But what could it mean that so many listeners stick to podcasts that don't say anything they couldn't say themselves, whose hosts are no more (or less) equipped to discuss what they're discussing than their audiences are? TTWGBACers often talk about funny or entertaining things, sure, but I'm starting to wonder what position of interestingness, real or imagined, they could possibly be speaking from.

Axes of interviewing impossibility

David Pierce at Digitizd wrote a neato post running down fifteen podcasts he thinks "your brain and ears will love." Among them are such universally-bowed-to greats as You Look Nice Today, The Moth, TEDTalks, MacBreak Weekly, Fresh Air, Adam Carolla and... The Marketplace of Ideas? Zuh?

Yeah, I know, right? I wonder how I snuck into that ultra-august lineup too, but if the wave's there — to use a metaphor tailored to my city of residence — I'm sure as hell gonna ride it. In his brief comment on my show, Pierce dropped a line I found resonant indeed. While I've thought this and have to some extent even written it, hearing someone else put it in their own words makes me consider it in a more sustained way than I had before:

The more I consume information, the more I realize that what’s interesting are not theories or events; what’s really interesting are the people behind those things.

Thus far, I've consciously steered The Marketplace of Ideas by a bright but hard-to-locate star: "What stuff is interesting, and who's associated with it?" If I'm intrigued by a book, album, blog, film or wrought thing of most any kind, I find out who's behind it and invite them on the program. But I've taken it as less a mandate than a helpful tip that I should, in time, get behind the boilerplate to the real person and their real thoughts, opinions, reactions. Should promote that bit to raison d'être? Should the whole shebang be "a show about the people behind the ideas"? How much is it already that?

This adds another impossibility to my interviewing task. The first impossibility, which I believe I laid out on Twitter — and various e-mails to people, which are my crackpot ideas' proving ground — is that the ideal interviewer must speak directly and one-on-one to the guest, and directly and one-on-one to the listener. The trick is holding a genuine human conversation with the guest without making the audience shouldn't feel like a lousy pack of eavesdroppers. This, of course, can't be done.

The freshly-minted impossibility is that of holding conversations that are both idea-oriented and people oriented. I touched on this in my list of tips as follows:

Whenever possible, interface with your guest as a human being, with all the complications that entails, rather than as a mere vehicle for ideas. The danger here, of course, is that you might lose sight of the value of ideas and turn into StoryCorps. The trick, to the extent that I've figured it out so far, is to conduct ideas-oriented conversations on a human level. And not, you know, to make Eastern Europeans weep in a bus.

But I didn't realize that this was just the same form of impossibility as speaking straight to both guest and listener. Naturally, twice as many impossibilities makes interviewing twice as fascinating, and I want to accomplish its goals twice as much as a result. If you can think of a third axis of interviewing impossibility, I'd appreciate it.

Talking my way through Denver

In New Zealand, I took more or less speechless field recordings. In the "Mile High City" of Denver, Colorado, where I spent last weekend and a healthy chunk of last week, I've recorded a narrative travelogue. There for the 2010 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference — and, of course, to explore some urban terra incognita — I kept my Zoom H4n in tow to yammer into whenever a question or observation struck me. If you think it takes a good deal of mind over matter to unselfconsciously walk around an urban center talking into a recorder, you are right. But the transformation happens quickly. Yet another inhibition shed! Damn inhibitions.

So submitted for your enjoyment is my Denver travelogue (MP3, 17:30, 16.1mb), the first in what I imagine will become an irregular series of city podcasts. Subjects covered include:

• Denver's preponderance of brown-brick-and-glass architecture
• A presentation from artist/animator Kota Ezawa
• The Hyatt Regency's elevator-based ambient television
• Denver's unusually high amount of public sculpture, included but not limited to Claes Oldenburg's "Big Sweep" ("no fondling the broom, no caressing the broom")
• Lessons about publishing and creative work in general learned while browsing the AWP bookfair (more on this to come)
• What a glass-encased Quizno's is a synechdoce for
• What you have to do when you forget to pack any boxers

I now travel somewhere interesting at least once a year — and if things go right, that number will rise steadily — so expect more where this came from. Suggestions are welcome, though I realize I should've captured more conversations with other people. Maybe when I go to Mexico City. I still have some of my, uh, high school Spanish.

Two years of ideational marketeering

Well, that went by pretty fast. The Marketplace of Ideas saw many changes in its second year, including but not limited to improved sound quality (amazing what happens when you stick a windscreen on your mic), widened guest variety (welcome, musicians, broadcasters and filmmakers), a greater number of interview-conduction methods (love those tape-syncs) and some more formal creativity (love those thematically-linked multi-segment specials). In the name of tradition, I'll once again highlight my five favorite conversations from the past year, though with one restriction: they can only be with first-time guests, not returning ones. Why? 'Cause I feel like it.

So, off the top of my head:


The opportunity to converse with one's childhood heroes comes rarely, if ever. I thus siezed/carved out the chance to interview Thomas Lopez, president of the ZBS foundation and creator of the finest modern audio dramas. Hearing one of ZBS' productions at age nine — specifically, the Jack Flanders adventure Dreams of the Amazon — revealed the vast world of audio experience to me. Were I to write my autobiography, you could easily trace the threads from my discovery of ZBS straight to my current pursuits in radio, podcasting, field recording, music, etc. Not without prompting did sound become so important to me.



Lawrence Osborne has, in recent years, become one of my favorite travel essayists. (As distinct from the "IF YOU GO" sidebar-writing "travel writers.") Given his dual interests in Asia and in wine, I suppose it's no surprise that I've latched onto his stuff. I thus naturally rushed down the opportunity to book an interview when Bangkok Days, his impressionistic collection of pieces on his long, colorful relationship with Bangkok, got a U.S. release date. He turned out to be even more articulate, thoughtful and funny than his writing had prepared me to expect. Pieces of our conversation have floated to the forefront of my mind on a near-daily basis since we had it: how, in contrast to Asia where life is really going on, London and Paris have become "bureaucratic museums"; how Bangkok's never-colonizedness has lead to its remaining a truly foreign culture on the deepest level; how, when thinking of old Blighty and its boiled dinners, he says, "To hell with that!"; how European publishers disregard subtitles but American publishers insisting on slapping them on at all times, even if badly misrepresentative.



Longer-time readers no doubt know that I spend quite a lot of time thinking about how to do stuff. In fact, the practice probably cuts into the time I should spend, y'know, doing stuff, but never mind. Though he puts out a bunch of admirable net stuff (and is currently writing a book) about the workings of the creative mind and how to actually accomplish accomplishments, Merlin Mann could win me over with his relatively newfound loathing of clicky distractions, unhelpful "tips" and "user-generated" content alone. I could go over all the helpful, hilarious, digressive stuff he had to say in our conversation, but perhaps I'll just excerpt my favorite writing of his, the essay "Better":

What makes you feel less bored soon makes you into an addict. What makes you feel less vulnerable can easily turn you into a dick. And the things that are meant to make you feel more connected today often turn out to be insubstantial time sinks — empty, programmatic encouragements to groom and refine your personality while sitting alone at a screen.


Don’t get me wrong. Gumming the edges of popular culture and occasionally rolling the results into a wicked spitball has a noble tradition that includes the best work of of Voltaire, Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde, and a handful of people I count as good friends and brilliant editors. There’s nothing wrong with fucking shit up every single day. But you have to bring some art to it. Not just typing.

Ah, the conversation that — I suspect — landed The Marketplace of Ideas on the front page of iTunes' podcast directory. I've long admired Michael Silverblatt's KCRW program Bookworm for its unusual brand of intimacy, lighthearted seriousness and earnest appreciation of text and reading. As it is not unusual for a disciple to climb Mount Everest to seek pearls of wisdom from the master who resides, still and cross-legged, on its peak, I figured I would take a flier and see if Silverblatt was interested in coming on my program. The result, if I can be bold, is an interview that's something of a hybrid of the Bookworm and Marketplace of Ideas aesthetics. I've listened to it many times, and in each I pick up on something new — plus, I always enjoy reliving the experience.



Years ago, I read Patrick Humphries' groundbreaking biography of Nick Drake. When I began interviewing, I regretted that I came a decade too late to credibly invite him on my program to promote the book. However, it dawned on me that the 40th anniversary of Drake's first album, the pretty-much-perfect Five Leaves Left, loomed on the horizon, so maybe I could find a tie-in. My production sensibility grew more ambitious as the far-flung year of 2009 approached, so by the time Five Leaves Left neared the big 4-0, I felt comfortable challenging myself to bring not just one but all of Drake's biographers on board. Though my conversation with Humphries constitutes, I believe, the bulk of the show, both Trevor Dann, author of 2006's Darker Than the Deepest Sea: The Search for Nick Drake and Peter Hogan, author of 2008's Nick Drake: The Complete Guide to His Music, were happy to talk and shared plenty of wisdom about both the man and his music. I very much enjoy the effect of three different perspectives on the album sometimes coinciding and sometimes colliding; it paints such a full picture of the work discussed.

* * *
I've come to grasp one thing over the past year, however tenuously: when it comes to self-marketing and self-promotion, I am the suckiest man who has ever lived. I have some friends who are absolute self-promotional aces, but they have not, as yet, lent me their mad skills. I'd worked backward from the astute saying that "marketing is the tax you pay for unremarkability," assuming that I could simply create a remarkable product and thus let the rest take care of itself by word of mouth and what have you. I must conclude, at this point, that I am not making a remarkable product. Perhaps that's not the real problem, but a good chunk of me still believes that the most effective, long-lived form of self-promotion is simply to create good stuff. The case of Nick Drake, I realize, continues to insist otherwise.

Whatever the barrier, though, I grow more obsessed by the day with finding a way to break it. If I don't, the mantra of "Man, I gotta quit x; man, I gotta quit x; man, I gotta quit x," where x is any of my endeavors that don't get little response — radio, blogging, writing of any kind, etc. — will continue to haunt my dreams, louder and more insistent by the night. If you guys have any suggestions, I'm more than open to 'em.

The Bat Segundo Show (Edward Champion, 2004 - )

First, three overarching questions: why isn't this show huge? Why isn't it in the pantheon of podcasts to which everyone insists you must listen? Why isn't its creator a big star?

The Bat Segundo Show [iTunes link] is an interview program where "young roving correspondent" Ed Champion, creator of the litblog whose current iteration is called Reluctant Habits, roams New York with a portable recording studio and converses with authors of all stripes. He talks to them in diners, in lobbies, in apartments, wherever. Champion's pure hustling ability impresses me; he not only keeps tabs on where authors will turn up in the city, but also goes to them, lugging recording gear all the way, which on the subway must be no mean logistical feat.

A focus on literary fiction means that the show's guests tend to be writers of it. Some favorites include Cynthia Ozick (who seems like such a delightful old lady) [MP3], Nam Le (whose sheer coolness convinced me to read his work) [MP3], William T. Vollman (the intensity of whose writing and life is matched only by the laid-backness of his demeanor) [MP3, first appearance] [MP3, second appearance], and John Updike (who probably needs no parenthetical detail) [MP3].

And since it's the Max Funsters I serve, I'd be remiss in not highlighting a few of the Maximum Fun-y ("Maximum Funny"?) Segundo guests as well: you've got your Amy Sedaris [MP3], your Neal Pollack [MP3], your Austin Grossman [MP3], your George Saunders [MP3], your David Hajdu [MP3], and your Grandmaster Flash [MP3].

Plus, there are the wild cards: eccentric filmmaker David Lynch [MP3], world's best documentarian Errol Morris [MP3], semi-relevant but entertainingly outspoken Senator Mike Gravel [MP3], and crackpots like Naomi Klein [MP3] and Nicholson Baker (who became one so gradually, I didn't even notice) [MP3].

But enough with the linking; how's the podcast itself? When introducing The Bat Segundo Show to friends, I always find myself using the construction "As soon as you get used to x, you'll like it", where x is almost any element of the program. The host, for instance. Champion asks detailed, probing, observation-laden questions — that, unlike those of certain very-long-time public radio interviewers who shall remain nameless, indicate he's actually read the book in question — and sometimes takes his guests to the mat when he disagrees — which indicates that he, unlike some very-long-time public radio interviewers who shall remain nameless, knows that conversation is a two-player game. But he does this sincere questioning with oddly insincere-sounding inflection, the kind you usually only use while nudging your interlocutor in the ribs; he's a cross between Bookworm's Michael Silverblatt and a deep-cable game show host.

For another instance, well, you're probably wondering why it's called The Bat Segundo Show. Until recently, almost every interview was introduced by the titular character, a washed-up, tequila-swilling radio DJ played by none other than Champion himself, doing a voice simultaneously sleazy, bombastic, and somewhat effete. He'd introduce the "young roving correspondent" only after first being introduced himself (in what one iTunes reviewer called a "Spanish shouting theme tune that almost defies the listener to keep listening despite its glass-shards-in-the-eardrums assault") and giving a short monologue about his recent activities, such as being arrested for masturbating in a video store or desperately trying to arrange a tryst with his ex-wife. Yeah.

So that's hugely divisive, which might explain the character's recent "disappearance". I've heard that Champion has pitched the show not-quite-successfully to radio stations, and while I'm not totally against Bat Segundo himself — hell, I just friended his Facebook page the other day — I wouldn't be surprised if he's what's been holding the program back. In his absence, other goofy (though, admittedly, well-produced) introductions have occupied his stead, but they still feel a tad out of place. This might be a case where less is more; some people get by just fine with "Welcome to the broadcast."

But my point is this: Ed Champion should be on public radio. He finds stellar guests, and his interviewing skills are on the top tier of the podcasting world. For me The Bat Segundo Show comes second only to The Sound when I've got the interview podcast jones. And since the show has been in a spot of trouble lately, it needs your fandom. That is, if it's the sort of thing of which you're a fan.

I will now do the program the ultimate honor of making it a drinking game:

• When Bat Segundo references a sexual misadventure, drink
• When Champion starts an interview with the word "okay", drink
• When a guest breaks down and admits they "don't understand the question", drink
• When Champion bases a question on an assumption about the author's intention and the author flatly denies having that intention, drink
• When you hear a cement truck, a cop car, gunfire, or a Top 40 song in the background, drink
• When Champion bases an entire question on a single written word, drink
• When a waiter comes to the table and diverts the guest from the interview, drink
• When a guest shows surprise at the fact that Champion has done, like, research, drink

[Originally published at Maximumfun.org.]