This week on The Marketplace of Ideas, Colin Marshall talks to Sean 
Carroll, theoretical cosmologist specializing in dark energy and special relativity at the California Institute of Technology and blogger at Cosmic Variance. In his new book, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, Carroll explores possible answers to the question, “Why does time always move forward, never backward?” Addressing the issue necessitates drawing from various domains of physics, going all the way back to the origin of the universe.
The Marketplace of Ideas airs every Thursday at noon.
Because The KCSBeat is the Santa Barbara Independent’s column on all things KCSB, it can’t ignore Dave from the Grave, the station’s most enthusiastic fan. This week, Colin Marshall begins his investigation of the man, the myth, the listener:
To judge by the degree of enthusiasm that comes across on the phone, Dave is a man of strong opinions when it comes to music and broadcast media. Yet he never seems to vent the flip side of this: the negative opinions that he surely must have of about at least some of what he hears on KCSB. This positivity has been the salvation of many a young programmer, the flagging of whose enthusiasm is to be expected after a few weeks of wee-hours broadcasting. Dave’s calls, bearing his own unique brand of inspiration and guidance, come as a badly needed indicator of the one thing of which every KCSBer wants to be assured: Somebody’s listening.
But for all the kind helpfulness of his KCSB boosterism, a question remains: Who is this guy? How did he come to enjoy so many vastly different genres of music enough to call in and congratulate the deejays playing them? How does he manage to listen around the clock, expressing support for programs at dawn, midnight, and noon alike? Does he ever sleep? A certain mystique has grown around Dave from the Grave, fed by rumor, speculation, and anecdote circulating among current and former staff.
You can read all of part one here.
In The KCSBeat this week, Colin Marshall begins an ongoing series about the development of Poodle Radio, the official radio program of the Santa Barbara Independent. The show, which began on KJUC a little over a year ago, is now in the middle of its second quarter on the AM station, aiming ultimately for graduation the KCSB schedule:
Though I host, produce, and organize the program, I didn’t start it. That credit goes to senior editor Matt Kettmann and reporter Ben Preston, who, from October through December 2008, put together no fewer than seven shows on topics like gang violence, the state water supply, Proposition 8, and O.J. Simpson. Listening to this first iteration of the show—”proto-Poodle,” I’ve come to call it—I was favorably impressed. Each broadcast brought a bunch of Indy contributors, live, right into the studio to chat about their areas of expertise and what was currently going on in them. But putting together the weekly broadcast, and completing the KJUC-to-KCSB transition, can be a time-consuming endeavor, especially when piled atop already heaping plates of fulltime journalistic employment.
I thus took up the hosting and organizational reins of the renewed, rebooted Poodle Radio as 2010 began. My goals for the show have so far been twofold. First: to live up to the liveliness of the proto-Poodle broadcasts that came before. And second: to feature as wide a variety of subject matter and as many personalities as possible in order to capture what we all know to be the veritably kaleidoscopic Santa Barbara experience. Thanks, props, ups, and the like go out to the paper’s contributors who have donated their time and voices this year: Elizabeth Schwyzer on dance, James Donelan on the symphonic scene, Chris Meagher on the news, Aly Comingore with music, D.J. Palladino on film, and Charles Donelan on Sundance skiing conditions, to name but a few.
Get all the details here.
This week on The Marketplace of Ideas, Colin Marshall talks to Steven E. Landsburg, professor of economics at the University of Rochester, Slate’s “Everyday Economics” columnist and author of The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and Physics. A pioneer in the popular-economics genre with his 1993 book The Armchair Economist, Landsburg now focuses his quantitative mind on issues of epistemology, ontology, morality and otherwise that have heretofore remained mostly untouched by such analysis.
The Marketplace of Ideas airs every Thursday at noon.
This week on The Marketplace of Ideas, Colin Marshall talks to Jeremy Haladyna, director of UCSB’s Ensemble for Contemporary Music and composer of the sprawling 28-piece-and-counting Mayan Cycle. Drawing upon over twenty years of research and exploration, Haladyna has translated countless concepts from Mayan thought, art and architecture into music that counts strings, flutes, scratch turntables and even sampled paper towel dispensers among its sonic components. An album of selections from the Mayan Cycle is now available from Innova Recordings.
The Marketplace of Ideas airs every Thursday at noon.
This week on The Marketplace of Ideas, Colin Marshall talks to
Laurie Brown and Andy Sheppard, host and producer, respectively, ofThe Signal on CBC Radio 2. Since debuting in March of 2007, the program has evolved to provide a highly distinctive listening experience that offers two skillfully-curated hours of late-night contemporary music to listeners across Canada — and, via the internet, the world — that’s neither predictable nor easily genrefiable. Brown accompanies Shepard’s unusual sonic selections with commentary that’s long impressed fans with its friendliness, intimacy and wealth of odd stories.
The Marketplace of Ideas airs every Thursday at noon.
This week on The Marketplace of Ideas, Colin Marshall talks to novelist, screenwriter and Plazm magazine editor Jon Raymond author of the new Pacific Northwest-themed short story collection Livability as well as the novel The Half-Life. With filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, Raymond has also adapted two of Livability’s stories into critically-acclaimed feature films: Old Joy in 2006 and Wendy and Lucy in 2008.
The Marketplace of Ideas every Thursday at noon.
This week on The Marketplace of Ideas, Colin Marshall talks to Iranian-American filmmaker Ramin Bahrani, director of the critically-acclaimed films Man Push Cart, Chop Shop and the new Goodbye Solo, the tale of a Senegalese Winston-Salem cab driver and his uncommonly taciturn, self-destructive Southern passenger. Roger Ebert has called Bahrani “the new great American director,” “a gifted, confident filmmaker with ideas that involve who and where we are at this time.” In the New York Times, A.O. Scott named him as one of the vanguard of the “neo-neo-realism” movement in modern cinema.
The Marketplace of Ideas airs every Thursday at noon.
This week on The Marketplace of Ideas, Colin Marshall talks to Portland-based electro-acoustic musician and old technology enthusiast Ethan Rose. Rose’s newest album, Oaks, is assembled entirely from sounds recorded on a vintage 1920s Wurlitzer organ he stumbled upon at the skating rink of Portland’s historic, iconic Oaks Park. During the composition process, Rose came to know intimately the inner workings of this elaborate sound machine, working alongside its official maintainer, looking for ways to generate sounds like the organ had never made before and using computers to process them in ways its creators never would have expected.
The Marketplace of Ideas every Thursday at noon.
This week on The Marketplace of Ideas, Colin Marshall talks to
Thomas Lopez, audio drama producer and president of the ZBS Foundation. Since the early 1970s, Lopez has penned and produced hundreds of hours of radio fiction with ZBS’ trademark lush sound, wise insight and oddball humor, creating such iconic characters as the bumbling yet adventurous international (and interdimensional) explorer Jack Flanders and Ruby, the hard-bitten galactic gumshoe. ZBS’ latest series, Two-Minute Film Noir, packs full-fledged homages to the classic cops-and-mobsters sensibility, complete with gags and a soundtrack, into 120 or fewer seconds.
The Marketplace of Ideas airs every Thursday at noon.
