Ep. 98: "A Mastiff of Spinach"
hello hey john hi merlin how's it going oh it's so early yeah it's really early it's early i i've never seen you use your phone so early i don't think well are you are you sick
I am sick.
Oh, God.
I have a kind of sickness that is a drug sickness.
I am on my third day of caffeine withdrawal.
Oh, my God.
You're the real hero.
Oh, no!
I woke up at 7 in the morning with shivers, and I feel like I was in a car wreck.
I feel like I rolled a car.
Every muscle and joint in my body is really, really protesting.
Oh, my goodness.
This is...
Are you sure you're up for this?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, my God.
You know, I like to get into the center of the pain and explore all the... I am the seven blind men describing an elephant of pain.
Wow.
So... When was the last time you quit caffeine?
Just cold turkey.
Well, oh, my gosh.
I've tried to cut down, but it's been a while since I've just said I'm not going to have any caffeine at all this morning.
Yeah.
And I've done it in the past, and it's really hard and a little crazy.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Are you feeling any psychological effects?
Oh, yes.
Oh, very irritated.
I am very irritated.
The thing is, it's so well documented, I guess, but there are all kinds of effects.
To begin with, caffeine to begin with, even on the best day, is a balance.
Even when you go pro, you have good days and bad days.
And what's funny to me about caffeine is the effects of having too much coffee can be kind of similar to the effects of having no coffee, but minus the energy.
Like irritability, a little bit of a headache.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you know, I'm a caffeine ranger and I, I use caffeine to explore all the universes and I, um, I have quit it a few times over the years and I, and I know what's in store.
You know, when I say like, okay, like I've got, I've, I've, I've been to the edge and I, I've stood and looked down.
And I need to cut it.
I need to cut it out.
And I know I'm looking forward to like...
a solid three days of gutting it out.
And each day has its phases.
Um, and you, you would think that by the third day it would be tapering off, but really the third day is the, is the toughest one for me.
And then on day four, like you, you, you walk out into the clear, like you're right.
You're out into the day again, but, but I don't know whether it's my age or whether I was using, um,
I was using well over the prescribed dosages of caffeine for a long time, but I really woke up this morning in a title match with my nerve endings.
I'm laughing, but I'm so sorry.
I know what you're talking about.
I mean, there's a reason that Excedrin puts caffeine in with the aspirin and that that's what they recommend when you've got a migraine because I think it – I don't know if it's your capillaries or whatever, but it definitely can help you get rid of a headache.
And if you don't have it, those little fellows just close right up.
Yeah, yeah.
Woo!
Can we explore this a little bit?
You pulled up your three-legged stool.
Yeah, absolutely.
You're sitting in the center of it.
All the lights are on.
Well, so this caffeine withdrawal is a part, it's a component of a larger project, a larger three-day project.
Hmm.
Which is that I am on a juice fast.
I'm sorry.
A thing which I find ridiculous on its face.
It's ridiculous.
Have you been reading Family Circle?
No.
Woman's Day?
What did you learn about that?
Is this the lemon juice where you poop a lot?
I have no idea why I'm doing it or what the point of it is.
But it was suggested to me, and I said, oh, sure, I can do a three-day juice fast.
I love juice.
I mean, let's just start out with an obvious one.
You're working on your body, you're doing some body work, and you enjoy a challenge.
That's right.
You're not against juice.
No, I was reading in Martha Stewart's Living about all the healthy juices that you can make from your orchards.
And I...
I own a juicer, because at one point, the Long Winters did some extensive touring with the band Keen, and they always had a juicer in their backstage area, and we would get off of these long...
brutal drives across Europe and we would roll into these stadium shows and there would be this juicer waiting.
As soon as we got out of the van, we would make these complex juices with ginger and lemon and we just felt like superstars.
And so when I got done with that tour, I was like, I'm going to get a juicer.
That's how, uh, that's how a man lives.
If you are a, if you're a real, like,
If you're a guy that knows how to tie a tie, you should have a juicer at your house.
It makes you feel vital.
It just fills you with nutrients.
It fills you with nutrients.
Or it fills you with sugar water.
What I can't figure out about juice is... So I'm making these juices, and they are very complicated.
I went to the store.
I bought...
All this spinach and kale and carrots and ginger and, you know, garlic and basil and all this stuff.
Oh, boy.
Oh, beets, beet greens.
Can't believe you missed the coffee at all.
That sounds wonderful.
Well, and I'm throwing it all into the juice.
A little garlic ginger juice to kick off the day.
Well, you kick off the day with some hot lemon water.
Mmm.
Mmm.
That'll get the pipes moving.
But I'm throwing this stuff into the juicer and I'm watching all the actual food just get shunted off into the garbage bag.
And what's left is this concentrated like purple sugar water basically.
It's like bilge.
You put in – I mean if you want to make spinach juice, it takes an extraordinary amount of spinach to make a tiny little – when you cook spinach, it just all kind of disappears.
But when you juice it, I mean doesn't it take like a whole giant basket to make like a half a cup?
Yeah, I put in the equivalent of a mastiff into the juicer.
A mastiff of spinach.
A mastiff of spinach.
And yeah, and it produces like two ounces of wheatgrass juice.
That's like six bucks.
And I go, okay, I mean, I guess that I'm getting some... But I'm really not getting much out of it.
I mean, it's probably, what, 600 calories a day of...
Of juice just because I think part of the juice fast, part of why it works is that it's so fucking complicated to make the juice and clean the juicer that you don't want to do it more than a couple of times a day.
And so you're basically just starving yourself and taking some sugar water in the interim.
You're not going to believe the timing on this and you're not going to believe how simpatico it makes me because you texted me this morning and I was like, obviously someone has hacked John's account because he's using his phone at something like 8 in the morning.
And I was sleeping in a little bit.
And I had recently been awakened by a horrific, almost medieval, grinding sound coming from our kitchen.
Uh-oh.
Because my family had decided to make some juices this morning.
Wow.
It's real, real loud.
Oh, it's very loud.
That machine is a plant killer.
It is.
It takes them right out.
It's a phyto killer.
And anyway, the point being that then the one-two punch was then my daughter came in with a small glass of...
like a caramel colored liquid.
And she goes, drink this.
And I was like, I heard the noise.
I'm not drinking that.
She's like, no, drink it.
It's really good.
And she had a little, her, her, one of her little straws in it.
And it was so gross.
It was, there was, well, I think it was primary.
It was, there was some spinach and there was some carrots and, but it really, really tasted like celery.
Oh, that's right.
They, they say celery is the juice ruiner.
Oh, is that right?
That's good.
That's a hack.
Yeah, you put celery in any juice and it just ruins it because it makes it taste like celery.
It's like cilantro.
Right, exactly.
Yeah, so I'm feeling it for you.
And I said, really, I said, Eleanor, that's terrible.
That's an awful thing to put in my mouth while I'm still laying in bed.
Don't spill it on the bed because it's brown.
And so, so what, I mean, okay, seriously though, what, what led you, did you, you just decided, was this just a fun project or you said like, yeah, just a fun project.
Yeah.
There's no, you know, I, well, when I think back to the, the time that I decided I was going to stop eating wheat and sugar, I honestly, even a day later could not remember what I was thinking.
what was motivating me you know like i don't remember the idea that came into my head and i usually remember my motivations but looking back i was like i don't remember why i decided to do this what am what is going on with me and it's the same with this juice fast i cannot i cannot tell you how the idea got lodged in my brain i think i read something on an on an airplane
I think it was, I think I read something.
So many terrible projects start reading by reading on an airplane.
I think I was reading the in-flight magazine and then I was reading and then there was something snarky in the New Yorker and it just got this idea going like juices, huh?
Juices.
Maybe New York magazine had an article about a guy who was running a gym that also was a juicer and
And it just got in there.
Just the worm got in there.
And all of a sudden, here I am three days into a juice fast.
And every joint in my body is aching.
And what I want is, I mean, name a food.
I want it.
Yeah.
But what I have available to me is like beet juice, basically.
It seems like one of those things that they would do in the maze in Ireland, some kind of a prison thing, like when they give you the punishment loaf, they would put you on a juice diet.
I have to be honest with you.
First of all, I just want to say I applaud you, and this sounds like it could be really good for you, but I would find it so hard to look forward to anything in life if I knew it was going to be a day filled with juice.
Well, and this is the thing.
When you stop eating food, you realize how many of your projects, how many of the reasons that you're going out, how many of the things, the pylons that demarcate the obstacle course of your day are just food.
It's like, what do you want to do?
I don't know.
Let's go downtown.
Well, what should we do?
Well, let's go to that restaurant.
Well, we're not eating food.
I'm drinking juice right now, I'm sorry to say.
Oh.
Well, we could go to that smoothie place.
Yeah, but those are smoothies.
They're not juice, really.
Like already you're the most boring person alive.
It's like it was bad enough when you couldn't have French fries or something.
But now, I mean, I was going to say it's like being on a salad dressing diet, but it's not.
It's not even – I could see myself waking up in the morning and go, you know, a nice cup of like a couple shots at Thousand Island could get me going.
But it's a lot of work.
It's pretty costly too, I think.
It is costly.
Well, so the other night, two days into my juice fast, the presidents of the United States of America played their annual President's Day concert here in Seattle.
And I got up with them and sang a song.
I sang a song on their new record with them.
And so I got up and sang a song and then they launched into New Girl.
Whoa.
So we get done singing the song like, yay, that was great.
And then they just like launch into New Girl and they're all like, go, go, do it, do it, sing it, sing it.
And so we sang New Girl in front of their sold out crowd, which was super fun.
And then we get off the stage and we're hanging out backstage and I'm like, oh man, that was really amazing.
But I'm a little bit tweaking right now because I'm on a juice fast.
What do you think of that, guys?
And Chris Ballou has a very complicated theory about food.
And he was like, well, you know, actually juice is garbage food because it was, you know, most of those foods were developed by...
By human intervention, and we've robbed all of our foods of their nutrients over the course of millennia.
Is he really a conspiracy theorist, or does he try to... He's a knowledgeable eating well guy.
Chris is both things.
He is extremely knowledgeable, and also he goes on...
He goes on intellectual journeys where he discovers a new thing and then it becomes kind of like it's then central to his way of thinking for the time.
He becomes like a nutrition buff.
Yeah, he's read some interesting books and now he's really interested in the topic.
But then Jason Finn sitting, you're and my good friend Jason Finn sitting on the couch says, yeah, well, you know, I've done a seven-day master cleanse.
which is... That's the best of pooping one.
Yeah, seven days of lemon and... A cayenne pepper?
I think it's just lemon and molasses, maybe, in hot water.
No, he said not hot water, room temperature water.
And I'm like, seven days of... And he's like, oh, yeah.
Yeah, by the fourth day, you're really...
You're really seeing you're seeing dragons, you know, and you're and yeah.
And he, you know, he talked about the poop for a little while.
And certainly I was impressed that my three-day juice fast got one-upped so hard.
That was the first time I'd even gone out in public, and I already just got smacked down.
It's like you didn't even get the high five for John Roderick being on a juice fast.
Oh, three-day juice fast?
That's cute.
You should try a seven-day master cleanse where you just drink lemon water.
So it was a little bit like I went home, tail between my legs, but I stuck with my juice fast.
I didn't go home and start drinking lemon water and molasses, and I didn't have a hamburger either.
So here it is, day three, and I've got this glass here that is full of juice, and it's really bright red.
It's the color of cow's blood.
It's like I'm drinking a glass of cow's blood.
Well, you know...
The thing about a nutty system is that sometimes you just kind of stick with the nutty system.
Yes, thank you.
Hello.
It's not – I mean the thing is if you overthink it, I mean with any kind of diet or anything like that, I think the way to – if by succeed, we mean make it through for the amount of time that we say we're going to do it.
And hopefully that's sane.
I mean you're not going to do this for a month probably.
But if you said you're going to do this for five days, seven days, something like that, then I think you've got to –
It helps me anyway to get to a place where I'm not thinking about it too much.
I'm doing what I got to do, but to make it sustainable even for more than two or three days, even for more than a day, you have to get to someplace where it's just kind of routine.
And you're like, well, this is the thing I'm doing.
I don't know if it makes sense.
Jason Finn has given me some things to think about, but I'm going to just stick with this and do this thing.
And then maybe another time I'll do the Lemon Diet.
Well, that's exactly right.
And what's amazing about this is that the side effects, usually when I quit caffeine, it is that I get super sick.
Like, that's how I quit.
Really, honestly, that's how I quit.
That's your body's response to a lot of things, I think.
That's how I quit drinking and drugs.
It's how I quit smoking cigarettes.
It's how I, like, end most of my relationships.
I get really sick, and I just go off into a corner to die.
And then when I come back, I'm phoenix rising from the ashes.
Yeah.
I was going to say, it's like your body has to burn itself down so it can rise from its own ashes.
That's right.
And so what's happening right now is this caffeine withdrawal is just a byproduct of it.
But honestly, the first thing I thought about when somebody said three-day juice fast, I was like, ooh, that would be a tough caffeine burn.
I mean, whatever else was going on, no matter how hungry you were, your knees would hurt.
Your fingernails would hurt.
But when it's over, then I have accomplished this, what is actually a pretty daunting task, which is this caffeine withdrawal.
And then I'm going to try and stay off of the coffee, which is actually a better way to live.
It really is.
When I don't drink the coffee, I am...
You know, you're living in the light.
So if you're going to go through all this, I'm sorry to repeat what you're saying, but just so I understand, you're going to try and stick with this for a while.
The juice thing is a temporary thing.
You'll enjoy it.
You'll enjoy your mini blood red juices for a while to get through it.
But you're thinking you'll probably, having gone through this dark night of the soul with coffee, you're going to try and just stay off it after this.
Yeah, I think so.
For a while at least.
For a time, yeah.
Because I don't like dependency.
It's the overarching theme of my life.
I cannot abide dependence.
And I am dependent on caffeine.
And it makes me uncomfortable.
I think arguably, I don't know, in my cultures, I think that like historically, like smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, it's more than something that everybody does.
It's kind of like almost like a default.
Like you described with food, like what do you want to do?
Well, let's get something to eat.
That's kind of like just the thing that you do.
And if you don't know what to do, you have a cup of coffee or you smoke a cigarette.
And you don't notice how often that becomes the default.
I'm not trying to say one way or another, good, bad, or otherwise.
But with coffee, you don't notice it.
I mean once it's gone, you really notice how often you had that little hankering.
And then just knowing you can't have it.
Right.
Right.
Or I remember especially when I was doing the Atkins diet, I never wanted french fries so much in my entire life.
I'd go to a place and I'd get this giant and really honestly, physiologically, completely satisfying big bacon burger with no bun with lettuce.
I mean, that's all the food a person needs.
It's like you and me talking about how can you have a steak without noodles?
It just doesn't make sense.
Why would you not have noodles with your steak?
It's just a thing you should do as a gentleman.
But when you know you can't have that, it's so strange how your brain, at least my brain, can cook up this...
I guess anxiety or kind of like unease about the possibility that I can't have that.
It makes me feel very scared.
Oh, it's a profound anxiety.
And this is the number one mind game of quitting all drugs is that it isn't really the physical addiction that defeats you.
It is the...
It's that anxiousness that comes into your mind that says, I'm never going to have another French fry.
I can't live like this.
Right.
And like, what would you do with your time?
Right.
If you spend, if you spend a third or half your day drinking and then you don't like, what do you do to fill that time?
Do you just suddenly go and start volunteering?
I mean, it's, it's a lot of time to fill.
Well, and you, and you can only, I had a conversation last night with a guy, a middle-aged guy, let's say kind of like this one.
I don't like this conversation.
Yeah.
Well, I should preface this by saying that I went to see Miley Cyrus last night.
Was she performing?
Yes.
I went to see a Miley Cyrus concert last night at the Tacoma Dome.
Because I got an email from a friend of mine.
who is working at a sort of a high level in her production.
And he said, you'll never guess what I'm doing now.
I'm doing X for the production of this Miley Cyrus concert.
Do you want to come?
And I said...
Yes, I will come and see this Miley Cyrus concert.
Because I think mainly because everything that I had, every little post-it note in my head that I had about Miley Cyrus was negative.
Like, I don't think I like Miley Cyrus.
Just as a thing.
I didn't like Hannah Montana.
You didn't like that at all?
You didn't think it was catchy?
Well, I didn't know anything about it.
Get some catchy tunes.
I just instinctively didn't like it.
Because when I go into thrift stores, I see these little plastic guitars that have Hannah Montana stickers on them.
And I go, oh, that's garbage.
And I don't think I liked Billy Ray Cyrus, although I don't know what that sounds like either.
But I don't like what it represents, even though I don't really know what it represents.
I just don't like it.
I didn't like it.
I didn't like his haircut.
I didn't like that brand of what I think is that brand of country music.
People kept using that phrase, boot scoot, and it made me uncomfortable.
I don't like that boot scoot.
I don't want to hear that.
And so, Hannah Montana, Disney creation, just kind of, you know, and it's not like I hate it.
I just don't like it.
I don't know anything about it.
I don't like it.
I'm going to say, but the evidence mounts that, like, I'm not seeking out information about this enterprise, but every new, as you say, post-it note of information about this is not making me feel positive about this.
And that accumulates.
Right, it does.
It accumulates.
And then, oh, Miley Cyrus is reinventing herself.
Now she's a bad girl.
Well, I don't like that.
I don't like that the Disney girl is now reinventing herself as a bad girl.
I just don't.
I don't care about it, but I don't.
I just don't like it.
And then that performance where she twerked at the... I don't know.
This is where she did her little dance with the finger?
Yeah.
She had a big foam finger and stuff.
Yeah, right.
And she was with the blurred lines guy.
Yes.
I didn't even see it.
I just saw it talked about in the chattering culture.
It was very uncomfortable to watch.
Yeah.
But I didn't like it.
I didn't like the conversation about it.
I didn't like the pictures that I saw of it.
It made me uncomfortable.
So going into all of that, this friend of mine is like, you're not going to believe what I'm doing right now.
I'm working on the Miley Cyrus tour.
And I said, I will go to this.
And he said, great, you got two passes.
See at the show.
And so I spent the afternoon trying to get somebody to go with me to the show.
And I asked a handful of friends that are usually game if I want to go see Michael Schenker or if I want to go see a monster truck rally or if I want to go to a motocross race.
And all of my go-to show buddies were like, what?
No way.
I'm like, no, it'll be fun.
It'll be funny.
We'll go see Miley Cyrus.
It'll be hilarious.
And they were like, no, absolutely not.
And there was a different kind of pushback, like, no.
I draw the line here.
There's nothing funny about this.
And it was this... Like going to a Klan rally or something?
Yeah, right.
And it increased my perception that there was this negative, this kind of knee-jerk negative...
uh, feeling about her, this take on her that everybody has that increased my desire to go so that it was a stormy night last night.
There was a, there were a lot of reasons why it's a, you know, 45 miles to Tacoma.
A lot of reasons why I normally would have said, yeah, I'm not, I'm just not going to do this.
But I was like, no, you know what?
I'm going to go see this Miley Cyrus concert.
Um,
because now I'm suspicious.
I'm suspicious of my own bias against this person because I'm seeing it reflected in all these other people.
And I'm realizing, like, I don't know anything about Miley Cyrus.
Why do I feel so strongly that this girl who sticks her tongue out is, like, this thing that isn't just bad.
It's, like, despicable.
Yeah, like cultural anathema.
Yeah, right.
So I get in my car and I drive down there and I park and I'm walking to the show and it's just sheets of rain.
And all around me on the streets are girls dressed
very provocatively and they are all i mean i was expecting it to be a bunch of 10 year olds and you know like hannah montana 10 year old type of thing and and some and some preteens or whatever but everybody is 20 everywhere i looked everyone is 20 years old
And they're all dressed like pretty sexy.
But it's a rainstorm, a cold rainstorm.
So there's a lot of shrieking and sort of high heel running to get to the venue.
Everybody's covering their hair with their plastic bags.
And I'm walking up.
I'm well protected in my raincoat and dad hat.
And I'm like, I am really wrong here.
Like, this is going to be weird and wrong.
But I made no attempt to look cool.
Just to be clear that you were by yourself.
I was by myself.
Okay.
I was by myself.
And actually, I was carrying a walking stick that had some bells on it.
at first i was worried about that yeti in the hat but i noticed he had a jolly little walking stick and then he rattled his jingle stick at me and i feel safe so i get into the venue and i walk in just as she takes the stage
And there's a giant, you know, 10-story tall picture of Miley Cyrus.
And the mouth opens on the picture somehow.
Like the jaw opens in a kind of almost Monty Python way.
And a giant tongue unfurls out of the mouth and reveals itself to be a slide.
And then Miley Cyrus appears in her own mouth.
waves to the crowd, and then slides down her own giant tongue to the stage.
And I'm standing there in a wet raincoat watching this and thinking, okay, what the fuck is this?
That's kind of a bad trip almost.
That's a heavy trip.
If this were 20 years ago,
And I took my usual regimen of pre-concert hallucinogens.
I would be really freaking out right now.
That's a heavy image.
A lot for the mind to take in.
And she starts walking around the stage and I go looking for my...
looking for my seat, and I realize I'm in a stadium, and both the average age and the mean age is 20.
There's no variation.
There's no one, I mean, that I can see.
No one that is 30, and no one that is 15.
It's like, I've never, I can't think of a time that I've ever been in a room with
with the eight to 10,000, 20 year old girls.
And they are, uh, you know, really like digging the show.
And so I, I said, so I, I get to my seat and it turns out I'm, I have a front row seat and,
You have reserved seating?
Well, yeah.
Oh, because she comped you a really good seat.
Yeah, my friend is just like, yeah, here's your tickets.
And it's like, I'm front row of the seating.
Do you have a beard right now?
I do have a beard.
And I have sort of wet, uncut hair.
I was wearing my Kim Jong Il glasses.
So my, you know, my like North Korean functionary glasses.
And then every other aspect of my attire was like basically stern dad.
They made me check my jingle stick.
And I watched this entire show in utter amazement
Because my first instinct, every new thing that came out, every new set piece, every thing she was pushing, my first instinct was, oh, my God, no.
No.
And then in the course of the tune, it was revealed that, in fact, Miley Cyrus is completely in control of every aspect of her presentation in her career.
She is, like, overwhelmingly positive.
Everybody in the place is having an overwhelmingly positive time.
And the takeaway from the show was like, this was the most culturally interesting and, dare I say it, empowering kind of...
show of its type that i could ever remember seeing i don't think there was ever a madonna concert that that was this casually empowering you know uh it was extraordinary and i came out of there just i mean really like not not just with a whole new impression of what miley cyrus is and represents but like a real uh
push back on my own cultural instincts now like to to and i think i feel i feel like the entire culture is the kind of lined up to dismiss her and as a result she has this
she has this real credibility with 20 year old girls.
She is a 20 year old girl and she has a, she has a direct line to them and is talking to them directly.
And they are responding to her directly.
And there's no, no one else is allowed in almost, you know, her, her show is too dirty and,
for teens.
So, like, the Katy Perry show makes sure not to be too scary because she's trying to get all the ten-year-olds.
It's saucy, but it doesn't inhabit that level of, like, bacchanalian spectacle.
Right.
Exactly.
It sounds like a spectacle.
It's an absolute spectacle.
And, like, there are just way more vaginas in a Miley Cyrus show than you are going to see
in a normal presentation.
But it's not... That's like elements of set design or stagecraft?
Yeah, it's just like the Beastie Boys come out with a giant set of inflatable boobs or Mick Jagger's bouncing around on a huge blow-up microphone and Miley Cyrus effectively has... I mean, there are a lot of blow-up animals in her show.
And some of them are, I mean, some of the visuals were fully into the realm of, this is trippy, trippy shit.
That is, I kept coming back to like, if I had taken some mushrooms before this show, I would be weeping.
A lot to process with no coffee.
Well, a lot to process with no coffee, and also this cultural mash of Japanese anime, punk rock, metal, rap, country...
and youtube culture photoshop culture burlesque kind of uh sex worker stuff too though right total total pole dancing scene all the time like every every physical gesture is derived either from pole dancing twerking or uh i mean but like a 21 year old's
sense of what sex is and i mean and i would have walked into that a modern 21 year olds idea right if you if you had put a microphone in front of me as i'm walking in if there had been a reporter that was like you there with the jingle stick come here what are you going into the miley cyrus show you know what do you think she's sexy i would have said a 21 year old girl is not sexy she's skinny and she doesn't know like what she doesn't know how to have sex she's a she's a she's a child
But coming out of that show, I'm like, oh, 21-year-olds know how to have sex.
What was I thinking?
21-year-olds, I mean, they don't...
uh maybe they aren't like all experts at it but they're not she's not a child she's 21 you know she's she is um a lot older than mia farrow was when she married frank sinatra so so yeah coming so coming away from it but but but but but my mind was trying to process this torrent of images and
That was a complete, like, well, basically, if you'll allow me, a fruit juice of all, of basically everything the culture has produced.
You know, African drumming.
Snuff videos.
Wendy O. Williams.
You know, like, and it's all happening like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
And I don't think everybody in the audience knows what every reference is to.
But in a way, they do.
In a way, they're much more attuned to this torrent of micro-image.
And they're more comfortable with that, like a barrage of iconography, knowing that it is iconography.
Yeah, very comfortable with it.
They are not sitting there like borderline grand mal seizure like I was.
Yeah.
But also, I don't, and this is maybe part of what's interesting about it to me.
Like, they aren't trying to parse every image.
And part of what is making it overwhelming to me is I'm like, whoa.
And I'm like, I'm looking at every image and it's igniting this part of my brain that has a cultural association with it.
So I'm like, what?
Oh, hey, whoa, what is that doing there?
Jerk!
And they're not doing that.
They're just taking it in.
From a place of pure sensation and honestly unmitigated joy.
So the whole event was completely unironic.
No irony about it at all.
There was no cynicism to it.
And so the net result was total positivity.
And looking around the room at the 8,000 to 10,000 20-year-old girls all dressed like sex workers, you realize that they are not dressing like that for the male gaze because there are no men here.
They're dressing like this for one another, for their own pleasure, and
In homage to Miley, and she's dressing like that for them.
And the other amazing thing was not a single person ever looked at me like I was a creep.
Like every single person, every single girl that made eye contact with me, which was hundreds and hundreds of them.
They all smiled and were like, hi, or excuse me, or, you know, like, everyone was polite.
And I never for a moment had that feeling of like, oh my God, what are you doing here?
Like, that was absent from the place.
Hmm.
No booze, no Satan worship.
I mean, unless it's a very complex and subtle Satan worship that everybody has read.
Everybody read a pamphlet before they went in explaining that this was all in service of Satan.
But I didn't see it.
I saw just, you know, kind of joy.
Miley Cyrus' joy at being 21 years old, rich, and able to just...
do whatever she wants.
I haven't been to many things like that in my life.
There were much clearer poles to almost everything that I've ever gone to that were about some kind of differentiation or, you know, certainly punk rock shows, but maybe Flaming Lips.
I'm trying to think of, you know, like when they were first getting into their – the spectacles that they would put on, very positive and, you know, freak-friendly kind of stuff.
But this – I'm glad you went.
It sounds like this was a good experience for you.
It was, and I'm still chewing on it.
And I did not live tweet it.
As I was walking in, I was like, I'm going to live tweet the shit out of this Miley Cyrus concert, and it's going to be really hilarious on Twitter.
And I got in, and immediately it was like, this is so over my head.
To live tweet it would be to do it and myself a disservice.
I'm not going to be out of this experience.
I'm going to just be rooted in this experience and try and figure out where it's coming from.
Because when I was that age, when I was her age or her fans' age, I was at Scorpions concerts and punk rock shows.
And we were all dressed for one another, too, in denim and leather.
But there was no average age at a Scorpions concert.
Yeah, you might see burnouts in their 50s and kids who snuck in that are way too young to be there.
Sure, and it was mostly dudes, or almost entirely dudes.
But the whole age range...
And what the Scorpions represented, what their message was...
I mean, I was forced to ask myself last night, what was the Scorpions' message?
Well, and they just essentially wanted to know if you were ready to rock and roll, I think.
That's right.
Yeah.
And we were.
We were ready.
I was ready.
I was ready to rock and roll.
Look at me.
And so, you know, I was going to shows all the time then, and they were profoundly important to me.
And there was a lot less sensory experience than there was last night at the Miley Cyrus concert.
But then, of course, I'm reflecting on the fact that my own daughter is not even a member of this generation at all.
These people, Miley Cyrus is going to be
mature and legendary artist by the time my daughter is going to her first concerts.
Miley Cyrus will at that point be 25 years into her career.
And so this experience does not even give me a toehold on understanding what the culture is going to be like
And the degree to which I'm going to need to be at least capable of experiencing and understanding the culture 15 years from now.
You're making me think of something.
That is probably useful for me to think about, you know, we talked a lot and you especially talked a lot about this whole, the authenticity problem and how, you know, we've talked about it plenty, right?
I mean, this whole thing of like, especially in rock and roll, there's all this concern about, you know, who's truly authentic.
Who has more authenticity?
Who can display that?
I mean, who's closer to the blues?
Who's more rock and roll?
And it's funny because I'm – this is kind of a big thought.
But you think about –
excuse me think about what happened in like a post dylan post uh beatles era and even if you were not doing your own songs there was still a primacy to creator to like artist created rock and roll it was the idea that like i'm not up here mouthing something that some timpan alley guy did unless i'm doing that for some kind of an ironic point
I'm here because I am the person who made this show.
I'm the person who made this song.
This is about my life, and even if it's not really about my life, it still works in the service of a certain kind of authenticity that in some ways goes straight back to Dylan.
I think that's been... I guess what I'm trying to say is, in brief, is that one reason a lot of stuff like this is so confusing and weird to people like me, and presumably you, is that this really is generationally one of the first really...
One of the first major generational changes in popular music in quite a while.
I mean, even up through indie rock.
Indie rock is still heavily, even today, still so heavily rooted in that singer-songwriter tradition.
Absolutely.
And the fact that I'm up here, and I may be playing the drums on somebody's motorcycle helmet, but that's authentic because we made this – I don't want to put too fine a point on it, but I don't think that –
The way that you and I have historically looked at that, the way that our generation looked at that, I don't think that matters to people today.
And that's not a judgment at all.
That's just an observation.
I think this is – it really is its own thing.
She has put this team together that – or somebody put a team together for her that is really brilliantly leveraging the way things have changed.
in music and culture.
So like, you know, we've talked so much before again about like you work, you put all this money into making an album.
You talked about this when you were on my Curly show, you put all this money into like making an album and put it out.
It used to be, you could, you know, if you're Steve Miller, you could ride on that for a year or two.
Right.
Or if you were, uh, you know, the Eagles or anybody, you could get four singles off an album and tour off it for a year or two.
Like you put out two albums and tour for two years.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And now today, people want this constant dribble of culture that is not facilitated by putting $100,000 into an album, putting it out, and then sitting around and waiting for the checks to arrive.
So it's a big issue, but it seems like there are people today that are much more comfortable with going like, hey, I'm putting out a pop culture product, and that doesn't make me a worse person than you.
I – this is a job that I do and people love this and I'm going to narrow cast this to these 20-year-old girls who love this.
And if you don't like it, that's OK, but that's not going to make me do this differently.
And your concerns about my authenticity are going to fall short of their target because that's not even what I'm trying to do.
I'm being me.
And me as this team of people and production designers and songwriters and musicians and lighting people that make this kind of product, you know, I'm not trying to make a quotidian, but do you know what I mean?
I think that – do you see that difference?
Like, you know, you saw so much pushback on the punk rock article.
You see so much pushback on the whole kind of authenticity thing, like, you know.
And, you know, all along we've all been trying to find the product that, like, meets our needs.
And it sounds like she's giving that to people here.
Well, what was... That was a lot of stuff.
Sorry about that.
No, no, no.
That's right in line with exactly where my mind was going and where my mind is going trying to process it for myself.
Because also, authenticity is a huge and maybe the singular...
like criteria of hip hop, right?
Like hip hop's whole trip is, is it real?
Are you real?
And I mean, I don't know enough about that culture to, to critique it deeply, but the, the, the, the gangster and the,
sort of authenticity trip that... Like the hardcore nature of this.
Sure, that that scene has been caught up in for almost its entire life.
I mean, when you think about the original hip-hop, it was so merry.
It was so pretty, like, fun.
It was like party music.
Party music, right.
And it was only... I mean, it was only sort of run DMCs like...
tougher than leather vibe that started to establish that that eric b and rakim direction where it was like no no no this is righteous and for a long time there were those two sides of hip-hop right the della soul over here that are intellectual but also fun and then nwa just pushed it in
Well, and Public Enemy really pushed it in this direction.
No, but I mean, like, let's remember, there was a time when there were articles about the feud between Cool Mo D and MC Hammer.
Uh-huh.
About who was more real.
Who was more real?
I think probably history will record that inasmuch as that was a contest, I guess Cool Mo D won.
But who was more real than Hammer?
Yeah.
Hammer was a ball boy for the Oakland A's.
Like, come on.
This guy was, like, as real as they come.
It's just that he's wearing Sinbad pants.
But you needed, in all those cases with hip-hop or anybody else, but I guess especially hip-hop, no, really with all of them, it's important that that be authentic so that you can be authentic.
You wouldn't want to follow somebody who's, like, a big poser.
No, who's a poser.
But last night at the show, Miley...
As part of the show, there's a middle section where she goes out to a little stage that's way at the back of the arena.
So she's playing for the people in the cheap seats.
And this is a little pop-up stage that it wasn't evident to anyone was there.
And she's putting on this enormous spectacle.
And then all of a sudden, she disappears.
Multiple times in the show, she disappears in a little elevator beneath the stage to change costumes.
And there's and in the meantime, there's a big video show that's in some ways like the craziest part of the show.
But all of a sudden she pops up at this little mini stage.
dressed in a total like glitz b-boy outfit like uh glitter hat glitter baseball hat kind of turned to the side giant sort of justin bieber t-shirt except instead of justin bieber's face it's miley's face she's there with a giant picture of herself on her shirt and like dressed in a costume that immediately um
Like, again, my instinct was, I don't like that.
I don't like that costume.
It looks like something the Fly Girls would wear on Living Color.
And I don't like it.
It's appropriated from something that I didn't like the thing initially.
And now I don't like the appropriation of it.
But she gets out on this little stage in this outfit and does two covers.
She does a down-tempo acoustic cover of Hey Ya.
That was, for the most part, like a very cool...
indie rock cover.
If I had heard Tegan and Sarah do it, or if I had heard St.
Vincent do this cover of Hey Ya, I would have been like, that's great.
That's a great, great sad song.
And it was a very sad tune.
And frankly, watching Miley Cyrus, I had to say, that's amazing.
Like, that's great.
She's singing Hey Ya right now, and it's making me sad.
And that's tremendous.
I mean, she's doing it in an arena, and she's got a picture of herself on her shirt.
And I'm genuinely moved.
And then her second cover is a full-throated...
Just straight ahead, honest cover of Jolene.
Is that the Dolly Parton song?
Yeah.
Wow.
Just at the top of her lungs, just Jolene, Jolene.
And I'm like, that's fucking incredible.
Like, that is an amazing tune.
And sung by someone who obviously has been singing it since she was a little kid.
And there's no...
There's no reference made.
There's no wink in it.
It's like sad country version of Hey Ya, full-throated version of Jolene, and then back to the stripper show.
And at no point does anyone stop for a millisecond and go, see what we did there?
Because that element of it is gone.
And that whole see-what-we-did-there impulse is still tied to this authenticity problem that you pose.
There's no slideshow of poor kids in Mississippi or vintage photos of Dolly Parton.
Nope.
We are putting country and hip-hop together.
We are putting...
We are doing these things because we are smarter than these things, and we are able to manipulate these building blocks of culture and appreciate us for that.
And that's the authenticity argument ultimately is like, I know I'm a white kid playing the blues, but my acknowledgement of it, my recognition that I'm doing it makes it forgivable, makes me, you should admire me.
Not just because of what I'm making, but also because of my intention, my self-knowledge, my purpose, my, you know, all of these secondary questions that are threaded through the question of authenticity.
And there wasn't any of that.
Or if that's in there, it's just now it permeates the culture to the degree that no one has to do it anymore.
We all know that we all know everything.
We all know that there's no difference between... The message of her show is there's no difference between people and there's no difference between things.
There's no... African drumming and Japanese imagery belong together.
Because everything is possible all the time.
So look what I made.
And I can't find fault with it.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Well, so something I think about a lot – I don't want to drag this out.
I think it is fascinating and I'm glad you talked about it because it's – and I'm glad you went.
One thing I think about a lot when I'm watching a TV show or a movie that I think also applies a lot –
to pop music is, for example, if you're watching Doctor Who, you're watching Star Wars, you're watching any kind of a show, I think it's always interesting to watch for sort of like who we're supposed to sympathize with to the point where maybe better, like who we want to be in this thing.
So like in Doctor Who, a lot of people talk about Doctor Who usually has a companion, often a woman, somebody who's with them who's sometimes as little as just the, oh, Doctor, what's happening here?
And it gives him a reason to explain it.
But it could also be very an emotional connection
that's just short of romantic a lot of the time but there's something where like there's some character in this where you're supposed to see yourself right there you are you are the person on this journey i think this is probably true with lord of the rings in star wars maybe that's uh luke skywalker in episode four but you know what i mean there's always there's somebody that you're supposed to sympathize with did you just say episode four yeah i know i'm sorry that's what it's officially what it's called come on
You know it's officially called A New Hope?
This is a safe space here.
Okay.
You don't have to talk the cult language here.
It's not a cult anymore, John.
Star Wars.
Star Wars is what it's called.
You should make some juice.
It's called Star Wars.
The Star Wars.
It's called...
To me, this gets really interesting in pop music because, like, who am I supposed to – obviously, you're there because you – by and large, you're there unless you really are at some gritty British punk rock show.
You're there because you like that performer.
You like what they do.
You –
Probably you kind of want to be them, sort of, right?
I mean, you want to be them or you want to be with them.
Maybe you want to kiss them.
But there's something to it where you see yourself – and I think this is where the authenticity thing has been such a bugbear in the past – is it's difficult for us to want to be Klaus Mina if we feel like Klaus Mina is not authentic.
Right?
Right.
You know what I'm saying?
And in this instance, it, you know, it sounds like she's pretty unabashed about saying like, you want to be me and I want to be you.
Like we're, as you say, we are doing this for each other, which I think to do that in a way that is guileless.
And again, I don't want to overstate this.
I wasn't there, but to do that in a way that it's guileless is, is pretty unusual for stuff that I've been to in the past.
It would be a little fruity for me to say, Oh, John, John Roderick is so dreamy.
I wish I could sing car parts.
Yeah.
Or I guess Mick Jagger or whatever.
But I think that's such a big piece of this is wanting to see ourselves up there and wanting to see what it would be like to be that person.
So I don't mean to get all Roland Barthes, but I mean for her to be up there in the equivalent of what somebody would wear in a hip-hop Capri Sun commercial with her being that guy –
right with her shirt with her own face on it well that's because that's that that could be you you want that to be you so when you go out and you wear that shirt you're doing the same thing that she did and it's it it's it's got a like a one-to-one um relationship i don't know i don't know if that makes sense but again that's the kind of thing where like the last thing in a million years that you would say as a cool rock fan is like um
man, I really want to be Michael Stipe.
That would have not been a very cool thing to say in 1984, probably, although I probably would have said it, to be honest.
But do you know what I mean?
It sounds like those, you felt like, at least from your perspective with your hat-check jingle stick, that those barriers were not there in a way they were 20 years ago for us.
Well, and so much of it is in the visual culture now.
Watching the...
watching this panoply of images unfold and realizing that that
We are living in a selfie culture now.
I was having a conversation with somebody on the phone the other day and realized that they had never taken a selfie because they were an old person.
And I said, you really need to get past the barrier here.
And I took a picture of myself and I was like, see, here's a selfie.
I'm driving in my car.
I'm taking a picture.
Here's a picture of me.
How do you feel about that?
And they were like...
You know, it's really nice to see a picture of you.
I'm really like... They had psychological barriers to taking a selfie that were all related to...
Shame about self-aggrandizement.
It's antithetical to pretty much everything I grew up with.
You don't take your own picture.
Right, right.
That's a very weird thing to do that for a long time, not to beat this to death, but people who look like they wanted to be perceived as sex workers would do.
For a long time, it used to be that that was just the domain of girls who took 45 pictures of themselves in the bathroom mirror until they got the one that they liked.
And now today, everybody, John Hodgman can't stop.
And he won't stop.
Frankly, no one can stop now.
We have crossed the Rubicon, and selfies are a form of art.
Selfies are part of...
our awareness of ourselves and i mean i knew people who would get a roll of film back from the drugstore and like throw away the pictures of themselves just because even owning a picture of themselves taken by somebody else was too much vanity for them it's like it's like it's like it's like asking for your own autograph it doesn't you need a second party for that to make sense
Yeah, right.
And you take the pictures of you and you give them to other people because why would you want to look at a picture of yourself?
But now the culture has completely embraced the idea that pictures of yourself, that taking thousands of pictures of yourself...
is a way of exploring your identity and understanding your ego and basking in it.
And what's missing is the shame that we used to feel about it.
And so watching this show last night in this cascade of images and a lot of pictures of Miley Cyrus in her own show, including on her own T-shirt, and including at the beginning when she literally slides out of her own mouth...
I still can't get over that image.
And I'm not sure when they were thinking it up, it was like, yes, that's amazing.
But they obviously... Either they have an incredible... Either they have no on-staff theorist or they have an incredible on-staff theorist who's just like, yes, definitely slide down your own tongue.
That is fucking great.
You know, like somebody is... I feel like maybe her choreographer and her showrunner are both...
like uh art phds or something i mean it really feels like there's that much uh there's that much intention behind some of this stuff that's just like that couldn't be an accident but but this cascade of images is being received by an audience of people who are
Who are so much more comfortable with images of themselves and like, I mean, one of the best bits in the Miley show was she's out on the runway and she's just grabbing people's phones and like videotaping herself for a second and handing the phone back to them.
Which is kind of like an autograph.
Right, and an amazing gift to give to somebody.
If you're a Miley Cyrus fan enough that you are right up against the stage and she grabs your phone and touches it with her own hand and makes a little personal video for you and hands it back, it's just like fan for life.
But also, what does that...
I do feel like everyone in the audience is putting themselves in her shape because they all can make videos of themselves.
They're making videos of themselves right now.
And those videos are part of the... I guess this is what I walked away with.
We always thought at the dawn of the internet that...
I think a lot of us could see that here was the potential for all of human knowledge to come to one central clearinghouse.
We could compare and contrast, finally.
You didn't have to go get lost in the stacks with seven books open, trying to figure out where the Koran and the Bible and the Bhagavad.
But all the existing stuff.
with our mental model right is that where you're going the mental model of the library like you don't get to go in and like scribble in a notebook and put it on the shelf right we were gonna this was the here was the internet and it was going to be this place where we finally had a consensus place and if we had and this is kind of the this is the liberal mentality like
If we just get all the information in one place, then the truth will be known.
And once we have all the information and we have the truth, then we will have achieved nirvana.
Or, you know, then strife will disappear because the truth is available.
And the only reason that we have war, the only reason that there is, you know, that there is so much anger in the world is that we are confused.
We don't know the truth.
This person's angry.
He doesn't see the other person's side, etc., etc.
And the Internet had this enormous possibility.
Well, what we're in now, I think, is this, like, post-Internet.
Where, yes, all the information is available.
Or if you want to look for it.
I mean, it's all here.
And what it has created is not...
This intellectual underpinning or this consensus.
In fact, the culture has gone the other direction and all things are equal and there is no consensus.
But what it has produced is this art culture where every single thing that's ever been made is cut up and pasted back together together.
And there isn't a differentiation between anime and tribal drumming and punk rock.
Those things all just sit not just comfortably beside one another, but as if they had always been together.
And so, in a sense, it is the achievement of the sum total of human knowledge all brought together, but it's happening in
this mashup of music and image rather than in this like, uh, sort of bookish theoretical place.
And it's, um, and I, I guess I, I, it's not what I expected, but it's, but it, it, it bodes, I guess it, I guess it bodes well.
Like I'm excited to see, uh,
what it produces what i mean i'm excited to see what that means well and what especially you're talking about your your daughter my daughter you know what it means for somebody who didn't grow up with this as a transitional thing or as a new thing for somebody who uh for for whom like somebody born today for whom miley silas cyrus sliding out of her own mouth on her own tongue
is something that's uh i mean it's not like that's the craziest thing in the world no although you have to see it really no i just know it's really disturbing to me if mick jagger had done it at any point it would i mean if he'd done it 25 years ago we would that image would be burned in our brain i'm just in his 60s then but i mean if you think about this like somebody from western china
comes into the world now and says, I play the one-string violin.
It's the instrument of my people here in Western China.
It's our traditional instrument, and I am the master one-string violinist.
Until very recently, the...
The response to that would have been to give this guy a show at Carnegie Hall or, you know, his record would be the new NPR kind of favorite.
Or he would do a world tour like, look what we found.
Look what has been introduced to us.
Right.
Like he would have done something with Eddie Vedder or like when the monks came to Lollapalooza.
It would have been some kind of like, you know, we're sponsoring this culture.
Yeah.
Look at this.
But this new Miley Cyrus culture would just instantly assimilate that.
They'd be like, oh, cool, one-string violin guy.
You know, like, his one-string violin sound would be automatically appropriated and, like, he'd get up and do a song with Miley Cyrus, but it wouldn't be, like, there wouldn't have that...
The reverence that we used to accord that kind of like, here he is now going to play his traditional music.
Instead, it would just be like, that's a cool sound.
That guy's cool looking.
And in a way, that's more...
I mean, in a way, that seems like true kind of globalism or like more in line with the idea that all of humanity is one, that we are all on one course together.
And that, you know, I guess that's my takeaway from this show is like her message, if there is one, is that, I mean, one planet, one people almost.
You should make some coffee, John.