A Year in Seattle Preview: The Young Cynic with Peter Bagge
Notebook on Cities and Culture
In downtown Seattle, Colin talks with comic artist , creator of the legendary alternative comic series Hate, contributing editor and cartoonist at Reason magazine, and author of such graphic novels as Apocalypse Nerd, Other Lives, Reset, and Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story. They discuss whether Seattle is still the place to be for the Buddy Bradleys of the world; the cheap "place to invent yourself" he first found there; the ever-increasing importance of place in his work, and its necessity in telling longer stories; how Seattle won...
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Notebook on Culture's year in Seattle Kickstarts now (for five days only)!
Notebook on Cities and Culture
If we raise its budget, we'll spend an entire year in Seattle: the city of grunge, Microsoft, Amazon, the Space Needle, Buddy Bradley, Archie McPhee, sleeplessness, Starbucks, and much more we'll discover through at least 52 in-depth conversations with its novelists, journalists, comic artists, filmmakers, broadcasters, explorers, academics, architects, planners, cultural creators, internationalists, observers of the urban scene, and more. ...
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Korea Tour: Opting for Korea with Brother Anthony
Notebook on Cities and Culture
In an officetel in Seoul, Colin talks with Brother Anthony of Taizé, one of the most renowned translators of Korean poetry, president of the Royal Asiatic Society Korea Branch, and naturalized citizen of South Korea. They discuss the frequency with which he's heard "Why Korea?" in the 35 years since he first arrived as a member of Taizé; the Korean lack of belief that anybody would actually opt for Korea rather than their own homelands; what fills Korean taxi drivers with strong opinions; Korea's aging rural population versus Japan's even more aging rural...
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Korea Tour: The Style of the Time with Matt VanVolkenburg
Notebook on Cities and Culture
In Seoul's Sinchon district, Colin talks with Matt VanVolkenburg, author of , a blog on "Korean society, history, urban space, cyberspace, film, and current events, among other things." They discuss what it feels like to live in Seoul, of all places, without a smartphone; why navigating the city poses so much of a challenge to the newcomer; how he sees the relationship of the Korean media to foreign English teachers, "the new incarnation of the GIs"; what made it possible for the Korean media to talk freely about the acts of foreigners; the history of "Korea as a victim"; why...
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Korea Tour: Concrete Utopia with Minsuk Cho
Notebook on Cities and Culture
In Seoul's Itaewon district, Colin talks with architect Minsuk Cho, principal at , designer of the Golden Lion-winning Korean pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014. They discuss whether he talks about the use of space differently in English than in Korean; how copying, and especially while misinterpreting across cultural boundaries, counts as a way of creating; his earliest memories of Seoul's "building explosion" that grew the city tenfold over fifty years; the difference between current Seoul and the Seoul of his childhood; the "concrete utopia" in which he grew...
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Korea Tour: It Takes a Lifetime with Michael Elliott
Notebook on Cities and Culture
In Seoul's Sinchon district, Colin talks with Michael Elliott, creator of the English-learning site for Koreans and the Korean-learning site for English-speakers . They discuss why Koreans insist on the difficulty of their own language; whether and why he considers Korean difficult; what it means that "there are so many different ways to say the same thing" in Korean; the perennial issue of saying "you" in Korean; the "native speaker's privilege" to go a little but out of grammatical bounds; why the Korean alphabet has displaced Chinese characters more or less entirely; why...
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Korea Tour: Ruled by the Heart with Andrew Salmon
Notebook on Cities and Culture
In Seoul's Susong-dong, Colin talks with Andrew Salmon, author of To the Last Round: The Epic British Stand on the Imjin River, Korea 1951; Scorched Earth, Black Snow: Britain and Australia in the Korean War, 1950; and All That Matters: Modern Korea. They discuss how Korean culture has influenced the names of his cats; the dullness of London by comparison to Seoul, especially in drinking term; the provocative positions he has taken, such as finding the Koreans "a little unfair toward the Japanese"; how he sees the conflict between Korea and Japan over the Dokdo islets;...
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Korea Tour: Gangbuk Style with Daniel Tudor
Notebook on Cities and Culture
In Seoul's Hongdae district, Colin Marshall talks with Daniel Tudor, former Economist correspondent in Korea, co-founder of craft beer pizza pub chain , author of the books Korea: The Impossible Country, A Geek in Korea, and (with James Pearson) North Korea Confidential. They discuss the difference between Gangnam and Gangbuk style; the recently emerging trend toward Korean nostalgia, and what happens when you pull out an two-year-old mobile phone; what he discovered in Korea during the time of the 2002 World Cup; his time among the "studying machines" that...
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Korea Tour: One Long Bike Party with Coby Zeifman
Notebook on Cities and Culture
In Changwon, "Environmental Capital of South Korea," Colin Marshall talks with Coby Zeifman, former outreach coordinator for , the city's bike share system. They discuss what makes Changwon a cool town; why a feature like Nubija, despite its impressiveness, needed the kind of outreach he has tried his utmost to provide; Changwon's history as a manufacturing town for the conglomerate LG; what makes it a "Young City," including its plan modeled after Canberra; how the city expanded, and how Nubija expanded along with it; how he got to Korea in the first place, on nothing more than the...
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Korea Tour: ¿Por Qué Corea? with Sofía Ferrero Cárrega
Notebook on Cities and Culture
At a coffee house somewhere in Busan, Colin talks with Sofía Ferrero Cárrega, film critic and enthusiast of Korean cinema. They discuss whether she'd recommend other movie-lovers move to Busan; how the Busan International Film Festival attracted her to the city (and the importance of its parties); why, in Busan, "everybody says yes"; the state of Korean film criticism in Spanish; how she first encountered Korean cinema, and how its auteurs got her to know Korea; the bad first impression Korean culture can sometimes give on film; what happens when you mention kimchi in...
info_outlineAt Busan's Dongseo University, Colin talks with North Korea analyst Brian Reynolds Myers, author of such books as A Reader's Manifesto and The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters. They discuss why South Koreans don't care about the Sword of Damocles that is North Korea; how Korea's capital-centricity looks from relatively far-flung Busan; why Koreans from outside Seoul seem to lack "local patriotism"; why Busan feels, to him, more like an "aggregation of apartment buildings than a community," but nevertheless like home; the benefits he enjoys of his outsider status in Korean society; the intellectual questions he can ask about Korea that a Korean couldn't; what makes the Koreans as an "ahistoric people," like the Greeks and unlike the Egyptians (and more Confucian societies); why he thinks Koreans should learn Indonesian, and why they refuse to; the difference between what Koreans tell themselves and what they tell the world; why so many fewer expatriates in Korea learn the language than in Japan or China, and what makes it so hard; how he got his Soviet Studies degree just before the Berlin Wall came down; what the reunification of Germany has to teach us about the reunification of Korea; how he became well-known among arch-conservatives for a piece on Korea's lack of "state spirit"; why he got his higher degrees in Germany, where they didn't make him go to classes; his arrival in Korea in the time of 9/11, and what took the most mental readjustment from then on; his trial by fire of lecturing at length about North Korea, in Korean; what South Koreans seem to think America is, and why it still attracts them; what it means to "behave like an American" in Korea; the "expiration period" on a foreigner's respectability; what he has come to value about Korean "flexibility"; the free-floating aggression he dislikes about America but doesn't sense in Korea; how he sees the literary pretension situation as having changed in the years since A Reader's Manifesto (and since e-books have taken off); why he hasn't fully engaged with Korean literature and cinema; and one of the highlights of his time in Busan, meeting Isabelle Huppert on the street; and whether he sees more differences or similarities emerging between North and South Korea in recent years.