[S4E36] Sleep Fighter
The crew battles the sleepy guest of the manor that they awoke unceremoniously from its slumber, with the hopes of making the quaint trayzure room all their own. Cheers from the whole Nerd Poker crew on making it through 2020 with us, we criterally couldn't have done it without you!
[S4E36] Sleep Fighter
The crew is continuing to hack their way North-East (or whatever up and to the right is on the moon) to break out the cosmic being known as Jnrei D'Nah and stop the moon from crashing into the planet below. But they're starting to realize just how bad an operation this whole moon prison idea was, and how a moon prison riot means there are cosmic beings everywhere. Good luck sleeping after listening to all of this one!
On the Bandcamp side, check out Ensamble Calavera and Rebelation, (look for other bands you love too!), Kultura Infame on Apple Music, and the Prizefighters on the Viva! The Freedom Songs Benefit Comp.
The Kickstarter drive for Notebook on Cities and Culture's sixth season launches now. 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.
In Seoul's Sinchon district, Colin talks with Michael Elliott, creator of the English-learning site for Koreans English in Korean and the Korean-learning site for English-speakers Korean Champ. 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 Koreans rarely acknowledge the language itself as a driver of interest in Korea; the different, more intense ways trends manifest themselves in Korea than in America; whether we can call English education in Korea a "craze," and why Koreans spend so much money on it to so little apparent result; the degree of parental involvement in English education and how "keeping up with the Joneses" drives it; the trouble with studying the languages of "poor countries" in Korea; the dominance of "the right way and the wrong way" in Korean thought; what it takes to make it to the highest level of Korean study, and why that sets off suspicion in Korean people; how tired he's grown of explaining to those "back home" why he went to Korea to study Korean in the first place; how he got an exemption not just from Korean trends but from American hipsterdom, or indeed any kind of "team"; how he came up with his new Korean Champ videos shot on the streets of Seoul; what would happen to the Cheonggyecheon Stream if built in America; how he studied multiple levels of Korean at once; the importance of observation when learning languages, and the general resistance to it; the "little bit of a scoff" with which Koreans sometimes correct Korean-learners; and the sleep he loses on the rare occasion he says something incorrectly in Korean.
Colin Marshall sits down in the Los Angeles Central Library's Maguire Gardens with Nathan Masters, writer interested in all things Los Angeles, especially the history of the city, about which he writes as a representative of Los Angeles as Subject for KCET and Los Angeles Magazine. They discuss how he regarded the distant downtown Los Angeles skyline while growing up in the Orange County town of Anaheim; the changing ways the county of his youth has regarded itself relative to Los Angeles; how far back you can go into the history of southern California and still have it bolster your understanding of the place, even to the era of allegedly "sleepy little village" of Mexican Los Angeles; why observers have insisted that this city has had little interest its own history; how he didn't need to spend time away from Los Angeles to appreciate it; the debate over whether actual orange groves inspired the "Orange" in Orange County, and his grandfather's home-movie footage of the uprooting of said groves; why observers have insisted that this city stands atop a desert; the competing boosting and demythologizing narratives; where he finds the greatest historical surprises, especially in the "old, weird" American 19th century; why knowing your history might get you driving more safely down the Arroyo Seco Parkway; how each foreign culture engages with Los Angeles in a different way, and how Los Angeles has no one way of accepting, absorbing, or digesting these influences; the seeming impossibility, given all this, of writing an overarching narrative of the city; the eternal struggle here between optimism and nostalgia; readers' love of stories of "lost geography"; the creek bed hidden in Koreatown; his own love of stories about trees; and the elusive stories of history's ordinary Angelenos. 041b061a72