Episode 1047 - David Shields
Marc:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck, buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fuck sticks?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast, WTF.
Marc:Welcome to it.
Marc:How's it going?
Marc:Are you okay?
Marc:I'm okay, I think.
Marc:I don't know, man.
Marc:Some days, you know.
Marc:I just, well, I guess the other day, I was on Conan O'Brien's show.
Marc:I don't know if you caught that.
Marc:Before I...
Marc:go off on that or talk about it in any real way why don't we do this i'm at the majestic theater in dallas texas tonight then i'll be at the paramount theater in austin texas tomorrow that's friday night and saturday i'm at the wortham theater center go to wtfpod.com slash tour for ticket info and you can also get tickets to my upcoming dates in vancouver seattle toronto chicago detroit
Marc:Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Boston, Nashville, Atlanta, and San Francisco.
Marc:Also go to sortoftrust.com if you want to see the movie I'm in.
Marc:Find out where it's playing near you or how you can watch it on demand.
Marc:Oh, by the way, David Shields is on the show today.
Marc:I don't know if you know him, but I'm sort of I was sort of fascinated with the guy and with his writing.
Marc:And I kind of wanted to, you know, I wanted him to explain himself a little bit somehow.
Marc:I wanted to engage in a conversation with him about it, but I didn't feel very confident about it because he's a professor.
Marc:He's a, you know, an intellectual guy.
Marc:But I dug the way he wrote, but I wanted to make sure I was understanding it.
Marc:Or could I wrap my head around it?
Marc:Could I wrap my head around a conversation with this guy?
Marc:And I was like, fuck it, let's do it.
Marc:Because I saw his recent documentary called Marshawn Lynch, A History.
Marc:And that's available on iTunes and Amazon and Vimeo.
Marc:And he's written a lot of books.
Marc:The most recent is The Trouble with Men, Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn and Power.
Marc:He wrote a book about Trump before that.
Marc:He writes in a very specific way called Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump, an intervention.
Marc:I have his coffee table book, War is Beautiful.
Marc:But there's a way he structures things.
Marc:Look, I'll get into this with him.
Marc:I'm just saying I was a little intimidated and going into it.
Marc:And I've kind of put this off.
Marc:talking to him but it turned out to be great i enjoy talking to him so as some of you know the um variety magazine the show business magazine ran a big cover story on podcasting and conan was on the cover and they kind of framed it as the podcasting revolution and uh you know and and
Marc:It's fine.
Marc:I've seen these articles before.
Marc:I mean, I've been doing this almost 10 years.
Marc:They've written articles like that on me, not in Variety, but they've certainly written pieces on me in Variety.
Marc:Not that this is a competition or anything else, but it just felt like, all right, so there's a reason, right?
Marc:I'm no big...
Marc:believer in the big unknown syncing up.
Marc:I'm not a things happen for a reason guy or, hey, this must be kismet or synchronicity or it's meant to happen.
Marc:But the article did come out the morning that I'm supposed to do Conan show.
Marc:So I thought maybe I could at least act like I was a little upset.
Marc:And that's always a dicey thing.
Marc:You know, I got that.
Marc:I had them.
Marc:I signed the segment producer signed off on it.
Marc:And I went out there with the magazine and I'm like, so you're the guy, huh?
Marc:You're the podcast revolution.
Marc:And we did a little had a little fake kind of what do you call it?
Marc:Pissing contest.
Marc:And but then it just gets like, you know, it's weird.
Marc:I guess what I'm saying is this.
Marc:You know, Conan and I have been doing our shtick.
Marc:For what?
Marc:Since 1994.
Marc:He posted the first appearance I had on there.
Marc:Right?
Marc:1994.
Marc:25 years.
Marc:And, you know, I've evolved.
Marc:He's evolved.
Marc:But there's a very funny thing that's happening with me personally and in show business, I guess, in a way.
Marc:is that I'm really not that same guy anymore.
Marc:I mean, obviously, my success has changed me personally in the sense that, you know, I'm not freaking out all the time, that I'm going to run out of money and not have a plan B or anything to do.
Marc:But also, I think personally, I'm a little different, a little more confident, a little funnier, a little more in control of my talent, a little less neurotic, I believe.
Marc:But, you know, when you get into a dynamic with somebody you've had with them for years, you know, it was just funny to me that, you know, I get out there, we do our little thing.
Marc:But it was just interesting to me that within a few minutes, even though I'm comfortable and I'm happier in my life, that him and I fall into this dynamic that we have where I'm like, oh, I'm just worked up.
Marc:I'm alienating the audience.
Marc:I'm uncomfortable.
Marc:I'm aggravated.
Marc:And am I that way, you guys?
Marc:Am I still that way?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Maybe I don't see myself properly, but I do know even in stand up and maybe you guys can relate to this in your life where, look, I obviously we're all the same people on some degree.
Marc:I mean, you can stop doing certain things and you can make different decisions for yourself, but you have the same drive shaft and the same, you know, mental machine.
Marc:But but, you know, as you get older, you know, certain things tend to to to matter less.
Marc:You know, certain things matter more.
Marc:Things shift.
Marc:You know, hopefully you get a little more relaxed and you don't crumble into a cinder of bitterness of some kind.
Marc:But but it's weird that when you get used to a certain way of being or you get and I imagine it's the same when you get used to a certain job.
Marc:And you just keep doing it that that even if it doesn't quite jive with who you are at this particular time, you know, you keep doing it because that's what you know.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And it's an awkward feeling.
Marc:It's a little like, you know, who am I comedically if I'm not worked up?
Marc:You know, is there a way for me to do what I do?
Marc:And I think I am doing it to a degree.
Marc:I'm obviously a lot more palatable than I was, you know, a decade or two ago in terms of my comfort level.
Marc:And really what it comes down to is that, you know, am I honoring myself?
Marc:Right.
Marc:Isn't that sort of what we want to do?
Marc:Isn't that the trick is to honor ourselves the best we can be true to ourselves the best we can.
Marc:But when you got a gig that, you know, is based on an old version of you, what do you do?
Marc:I'm just saying that I'm at a crossroads, folks.
Marc:I'm a bit of a crossroads.
Marc:I'm not waiting for the devil.
Marc:I'm not waiting for the devil.
Marc:I'm just trying to find the courage and figure out exactly what it is I want to do with my heart and mind on stage and performance.
Marc:Sadly, I think I want to just...
Marc:Play music.
Marc:And I that's there's nothing wrong with that.
Marc:I'm excited to do comedy.
Marc:And, you know, you people, they're coming out to see me this tour.
Marc:I got I got about a good hour and a half a ship percolating and some of it's pretty, pretty heavy, pretty good, pretty deeply funny, pretty jarring.
Marc:But I'm sort of at a crossroads, you know, once this tour is done and depending on what happens with globe might be time for some reflection, maybe do a little service work, maybe get out there and help some people or maybe just get out into the woods or into the desert.
Marc:I'm at a crossroads and it might be in the desert and I'm looking for I'm looking for courage.
Marc:You know what?
Marc:Maybe I am looking for the devil.
Marc:So Satan, if you're listening, I might be ready to negotiate again.
Marc:David Shields... Okay.
Marc:Here's a little bit about me.
Marc:Now, whether you know... I mean, look, you've known me a while, right?
Marc:We're not strangers here, right?
Marc:We're not strangers.
Marc:So there was a time in my life where...
Marc:When I was in high school and I've talked about this guy before, when I was in high school, you know, junior, senior year of high school, I became I worked down by the university.
Marc:I hung out with college kids.
Marc:I hung out by the university and at the Frontier Restaurant and at the Living Batch Bookstore.
Marc:And there was a guy who owned the Living Batch Bookstore who was a professor and just a general, you know, sort of a wizard.
Marc:He taught film.
Marc:He taught art.
Marc:He taught cultural criticism.
Marc:He was he was that he was just an intellectual.
Marc:All right.
Marc:And I loved him and he was hilarious and he changed my life.
Marc:I saw him as a mentor, even though I annoyed him.
Marc:But I always aspired.
Marc:I thought there was nothing more impressive than to be well referenced and well read and be able to integrate.
Marc:broad intellectual ideas into conversation.
Marc:I thought that was impressive.
Marc:And I thought if you could be funny integrating those things, like he was, that was really the best you could be, is to be intellectually sound and well-versed and fucking hilarious.
Marc:I was like, that's it.
Marc:Now, sadly, I wasn't able to really compartmentalize very well.
Marc:Everything I took, everything very personally in college in the way that I could only really apply a text to my exact experience.
Marc:I could not separate myself.
Marc:I could not read philosophy.
Marc:without trying to run it through me.
Marc:I never understood that there was a language, a sort of math to the language of philosophy.
Marc:I never I was just looking for help.
Marc:I was looking to complete my brain, but I could never really assess and contextualize systems of thought or even math or chemistry.
Marc:No good.
Marc:So if it didn't connect to my feelings, I couldn't really grasp it.
Marc:But I studied film.
Marc:I studied poetry.
Marc:I wrote poetry.
Marc:I studied literature.
Marc:I took some philosophy.
Marc:But I never quite grasped it, but I was present for it.
Marc:So my dream of being an intellectual once I got to college, I realized I can't even manage a second language here, folks.
Marc:So the whole sort of like I'm going to be an intellectual, spend my time in academia talking about lofty stuff.
Marc:That started to dissipate and I could have faked it.
Marc:I don't think I do fake it.
Marc:There was a point in time where I I kind of faked it, but it was not faking in the way where I was presenting myself as knowing things as much as it was presenting myself as I knew what you were talking about.
Marc:At some point in my life, I realized, OK, you're smart.
Marc:You do read all the heavy stuff.
Marc:You get what you can out of it.
Marc:And sometimes you blow your own mind and that influences or informs what you're doing, which is fine because I'm a comedian.
Marc:I'm not an intellectual.
Marc:And, you know, if I can read the lofty books or I can get a little something out of them, you know, that kind of, you know, tweak my understanding of things, which I do often.
Marc:Great.
Marc:That's that's as close as I'm going to be to an intellectual.
Marc:I seek to understand.
Marc:I seek to have my mind blown.
Marc:I seek to put things in a different context than I'm used to seeing.
Marc:I seek to to grow as a person mentally and intellectually.
Marc:Fine.
Marc:Great.
Marc:And a nice poem, too, is good.
Marc:But at some point, I engaged a very important thing that you have to engage is the ability to hear.
Marc:Say it with me.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:You got to say that.
Marc:Like if you don't know, you can either sit there and let them project whatever it is onto you.
Marc:They think, you know, or or they know you don't know.
Marc:Or if they ask you if you if someone asks you a question or if you're listening to somebody, you really don't know what they're talking about.
Marc:Just say, I don't know what you're talking about.
Marc:Or if you're frustrated, you say, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Marc:Or if you you're hearing it and it doesn't make sense to you and you don't really want to know what it is that they're talking about, you go, that sounds like bullshit.
Marc:But no, I'm joking.
Marc:Basically, once I learned how to say, I don't know, I don't know what you're talking about.
Marc:I don't understand that.
Marc:I have no idea what that is.
Marc:Can you can you tell me or can you tell me what I should see?
Marc:It changed my life.
Marc:It's a big load off.
Marc:Not knowing is an accepting that big load off.
Marc:So David Shields was very intimidating to me because I tried to read his books, but they're not unreadable.
Marc:They are very readable.
Marc:They're just I've only read a few and he's written many.
Marc:But, you know, he kind of works in a he works in bits and pieces.
Marc:They're fragmented.
Marc:They're not narrative.
Marc:They're usually fragmented.
Marc:I would say that they're sort of like a longer essay, but he uses bits and pieces of conversations he's heard, bits and pieces of thinkers that he enjoys, bits and pieces of his own thoughts.
Marc:And he kind of structures the book like that.
Marc:And if you like reading like aphorisms or sayings, he finds it's more effective.
Marc:It's sort of a collage or a montage kind of way of putting text together.
Yeah.
Marc:And I found it compelling.
Marc:And I just I didn't know if I was fully, you know, understanding it or wrapping my brain around it or if I was getting everything I needed to get out of it.
Marc:And I found it a little intimidating.
Marc:So I didn't know really how to approach Shields because he's a professor.
Marc:You know, he's like a smart guy and he's a writer.
Marc:He's written a lot.
Marc:So when I finally decided to have him on, it was because I
Marc:I saw this new documentary, Marshawn Lynch, A History.
Marc:And this, again, is all bits and pieces.
Marc:There's no real narration.
Marc:Every once in a while, there'll be a heading of sorts or a saying, you know, to sort of frame the segments.
Marc:But it's all I don't know if you'd call it found footage, but it really is mostly found footage of Marshawn talking, of people responding, historical footage, some film footage, TV footage, news footage.
Marc:It's just it is a collage.
Marc:of uh that's in the form of a montage because it's film and i found it to be very poetic and very effective and very um provocative and then i was like and you know i'd been emailing with david i'm like let's do it man i'm ready but what you will hear
Marc:It's me wrestling with my own intellectual insecurity.
Marc:But I think I get through it.
Marc:And I think we connected in a deeper way than I thought.
Marc:And I think we're kindred spirits in a way.
Marc:And I'm glad I talked to him.
Marc:The documentary I mentioned is called Marshawn Lynch, A History.
Marc:It's available on iTunes, Amazon, and Vimeo.
Marc:The most recent book, The Trouble with Men, Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power, which I didn't think went deep enough.
Marc:But that's my opinion.
Marc:It's still readable.
Marc:The Trump book.
Marc:There's like 20 books.
Marc:But they're all available.
Marc:And this is me easing in to a conversation with David Shields.
Guest:How are you?
Guest:I'm good.
Guest:I mean, in what sense?
Guest:In general?
Guest:I'm good.
Guest:And I'm willing.
Guest:I've been enjoying re-listening to shows, and I'm willing, as you can probably suspect, I'm willing to talk about anything.
Guest:That's my major, is confession and intimacy and all that.
Marc:Well, I don't know what to do.
Marc:Sometimes I don't know exactly what to do with you, because in my mind,
Marc:There's an intimidation factor, because I know you're sort of a high-level intellectual on some point, for real.
Marc:I mean, you're an academic, you're a professor, you're a writer, you're a cultural critic.
Guest:You've read the same books I have.
Marc:I haven't read enough of them, and I don't think I've read them as seriously.
Guest:Well, no intimidation.
Guest:I'm intimidated by you.
Guest:Really?
Guest:I think, to me, take it.
Guest:I'm delighted to be here, and we'll talk about any damn thing.
Guest:All right.
Guest:I think we could start with we are serious sons of bipolar fathers.
Guest:Are you really?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But where'd you grow up?
Guest:L.A.
Guest:and San Francisco.
Marc:And so why those places?
Marc:What was the family racket?
Marc:What was your dad?
Marc:What was the business?
Marc:Why were you in those two places?
Marc:Those are sort of culturally progressive, interesting, show busy kind of, you know, kind of thinky places.
Guest:Yeah, that was my family.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Politically active journalists.
Marc:Oh, they were journalists?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My mom wrote for The Nation.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Early on?
Guest:The New Republic.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:My dad was a publicist and journalist and sports writer.
Guest:Sports writer.
Guest:It was very much a left-wing family.
Guest:My mother was part of the first effort to desegregate a California school district, and my brother was...
Guest:arrested in a drug ring at Berkeley, you know, in the 60s.
Guest:He was on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Did your mom write the piece?
Guest:That would have been the perfect circle.
Guest:So, you know, the family religion was that classic West Coast, secular Jewish political engagement, which is both part of me and part of something I've sort of resisted.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Well, in the sense that my work is not agitprop, but it explores.
Marc:Yeah, I know, and I feel that in there.
Marc:And that was sort of like one of the questions after I watched the documentary Lynch History about Marshawn Lynch, who I don't know a lot about.
Marc:I'm not a sports fan.
Marc:But one of the things I experience when I... I have a limited experience with your work, but when I get it, I read it.
Marc:I read the Trump book, and I read The Trouble with Men, and I think you must have sent me War is Beautiful years ago, and then I got another copy of it.
Marc:I've had them, and I don't know how I got them, but they come.
Guest:Publisher or whatever, yeah.
Marc:Somebody.
Marc:And, you know, I have this moment where you're where I watch the documentary, which is not traditional in the sense that it's a it's basically an hour and a half montage of of found footage.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Basically.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But there is a poetic, you know, through line.
Marc:And there is sort of an effect of that.
Marc:And I do believe the message is delivered.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You know, in a way where, you know, you're processing a lot of things.
Marc:There's a lot of things coming in.
Marc:But, you know, the idea of the black man who does not do what he is expected to do and the cultural reaction to that.
Marc:It's definitely in there and powerful.
Marc:But given what you're telling me about your past and about Agiprop or what have you, you know, my question is, when you do something like this that is powerful and does have a statement and you sort of relegate your expression to the world of art, you know, who is it for?
Guest:who is that film for or who is my work in general for?
Guest:Well, one could ask that about Hamlet.
Guest:I mean, one could ask that about anything.
Guest:I mean, I think it's an excellent question, but I was actually thinking about that the other day.
Guest:So much of my work is obsessed with the relationship between, on the one hand, political engagement and the other hand,
Guest:artistic passion, so much of my dialectic is putting those in act of warfare.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Because that's within you.
Guest:It totally is.
Marc:Because your resistance to surrender to art or the context of art as it is established is how your self-loathing manifests itself.
Guest:Play that out for me a little bit.
Marc:I'm not sure I see how that is self-loathing.
Marc:Here's my first impulse when I, maybe not self-loathing, but insecurity.
Marc:No, I definitely am self-loathing.
Marc:I'll totally own that, but I wasn't sure.
Marc:let me try to explain it because like when I read the things and I, you know, I'm a guy that likes, I like pieces of poetry.
Marc:I like, you know, bits, you know, I like sentences.
Marc:I like paragraphs.
Marc:I like, uh, uh, what's that guy's name that you must like.
Marc:I don't know how to pronounce his last name.
Guest:Sharon.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Sharon.
Marc:I'm a huge Sharon.
Marc:I would assume that you are too.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Yeah, but only in the sense that, like, I don't know if I remember a lot of it.
Marc:I like it when it goes in.
Marc:You know, I have the feeling it makes my brain do something.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It's like a joke, a good joke.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:There's a little piece of poetry or a little observation that kind of resonates, and I have faith that it's probably changing my brain somehow and making me look at the world differently.
Marc:But I just wonder, even in reading The Trouble with Men, Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power...
Marc:where you do have the through line of your own sort of wrestling with your own potentially submissive compulsion, but you could have written just that book.
Marc:So when I see the way you put these, I guess they're collages, I guess they're bits and pieces of things appropriated, bits of conversation throughout the narrative about you, and it is about you, I ask myself, well, what is he compensating for?
Marc:Why can't he just stay with himself?
Guest:Interesting.
Guest:I think that's a fair question.
Guest:And more than one person has asked me why that book goes away from myself as much as it does.
Guest:The book's a very short book, maybe 135 pages, maybe 30,000 words.
Guest:Of those pages, maybe only 30 pages are actually...
Guest:my thoughts on sex, love, marriage, porn, and power.
Guest:There must be 75, 80 pages of me quoting from other people.
Guest:And I've written a bunch of other books in which I'm more present.
Guest:But I think it's a really interesting point.
Guest:Why is that book as outsourced or almost crowdsourced as it is?
Guest:And I would just say, I mean, it's a tough question.
Guest:This was as far as I could go.
Guest:With yourself?
Guest:In terms of sex and power.
Guest:I mean, the epigraph of the book is...
Guest:Everything in the world is about sex except sex.
Guest:Sex is about power.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which is, I think, a pretty powerful idea.
Guest:I don't know if you agree or disagree or if your audience, obviously, it's an absolute statement, which is neither true nor false, but it's a thought.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the book explores the ways in which sex is a theater of power.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It just is.
Guest:And so I feel that the book is, I hope, a powerful investigation of those themes.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So even if I'm not saying it, and I own that as a statement, to me that's as confessional as if I had written it.
Guest:I get that.
Guest:You know?
Marc:I get that.
Guest:I just sort of was feeling like, you know, I guess- It was sort of like, dude, tell us more about yourself, sort of.
Marc:Well, kind of, but like, and also I think there was something about your exploration of your particular situation or predicament or dynamic with your wife-
Marc:around your own sort of like, I wouldn't say that you're categorically as submissive.
Guest:No, it's a very subtle slight.
Guest:It's more theoretical than it is like, oh gee, I want to be whipped and dungeon on.
Marc:But you have this thing in your head
Marc:Right.
Marc:There is a sort of like, you know, well, why hasn't he gone the full way?
Marc:I know.
Marc:What is the confession here?
Marc:Really?
Marc:Is this sort of, you know, milk toasty, you know, in terms of your own sort of sexuality?
Marc:And then you add all this other stuff, which it's all pretty interesting.
Marc:But I was wondering, you know, more about about you.
Marc:But that but that that is not the device of the literary device that you engage in.
Guest:I mean, it's sort of like saying, I mean, this might be a little too meta for you, but, you know, it's sort of like, you know, what I know of your career, you know, you were, still are, you know, a stand-up, et cetera.
Guest:And in a way, there's this wonderful line of Ralph Waldo Emerson who says, the way to write is to throw your body at the target when all your arrows have been spent.
Guest:It's just sort of beautiful.
Yeah.
Guest:I'm all about that.
Guest:And so, you know, in a way, you know, your or narrative is, you know, the whatever, you know, that this quite successful podcast has come out of the burning to the ground, I gather, of your standup career.
Guest:Not to say that you're not still now quite, you know, a successful standup.
Marc:It built it.
Marc:It came to this act of desperation.
Guest:That you threw your body at the wall when all your arrows had been spent.
Guest:And exactly the same way, I had written three novels, relatively conventional.
Marc:Early in the 80s.
Guest:Yeah, 84, 89, and 92.
Guest:A conventional first novel.
Guest:A second novel that was a growing up novel about me growing up with a fairly severe stutter.
Guest:And then a third novel called Handbook for Drowning, a book about my family's politics.
Guest:And then I was trying to write my fourth novel about celebrity and mass culture, trying to write a novel kind of like Don DeLillo's White Noise.
Guest:That's a good book.
Guest:Or Mylon Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or Renata Adler's Speedboat.
Guest:And I just found myself...
Guest:I was colossally bored by all those conventional narrative architectural movements.
Guest:You know, let's establish plot.
Guest:Let's establish character, setting, long stretches of dialogue.
Guest:I was just bored out of my mind by it.
Marc:But were you bored reading it?
Marc:Did you feel like you had mastered those things and you didn't think you could utilize the accepted structure and take it to another level?
Guest:I mean, those are all fair questions.
Guest:It wasn't like I had mastered them by any means.
Guest:I had written three pretty good apprentice novels.
Guest:Trying to write my fourth book and returning to the West Coast, I felt a huge desire for work to have a compression, a concision, and a velocity that a lot of novels and conventional memoirs don't have.
Guest:Because they sag?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There's so much dead space in them.
Guest:I mean, it's sort of, again, I think that we as a, here we are, 2019 America, this hyper-digitalized culture.
Marc:On the brink of authoritarianism.
Guest:Or not even the brink.
Guest:We're here.
Guest:We're here.
Guest:And that I'm interested in bringing
Guest:The news now, you know, like I think what you're doing in an interesting way is sort of pushing back like, OK, how come Trouble with Men is not, you know, conventional memoir about your, you know, SM marriage or something or the Trump book.
Guest:Why isn't it, you know, a conventional book by Jane Meyer about, you know, the presidential election?
Guest:cabinet but it's like I'm trying to turbo charge the culture and the forms to push the forms forward and make them you know I think the charge of an artist is to push the form forward the form yeah like for instance that you admire a lot of stand-up comedians say prior or whoever what do we love about them
Guest:they weren't just doing Shecky Green.
Guest:They were pushing the form forward.
Guest:And not to say that I'm necessarily as revolutionary as that, but I'm trying to push the form of prose narrative forward.
Marc:Well, I guess, like, I don't know if I was craving conventionality, but, like, do you feel at the end of these, like, this is, like, you know, nitpicking, and it's not necessary, but, like, sometimes, do you feel at the end of those two books, specifically the ones that I've read, you know, about Trump and about men, that, you know, there was a knockout punch at the end?
Marc:Like I felt like the documentary, you know, does not.
Guest:Right.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:You know, I think that, you know, once you get through the arc of what you put together poetically and thematically and even narratively.
Marc:Right.
Marc:That, you know, through this a mass through this collection of found footage and documentary footage from from news shows.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Is that, you know, like it like it stayed with me.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:I think the other, again, I can't argue with your experience of either of Lynch, Trouble with Men, or Trump.
Guest:Indeed, I wouldn't have published those books if I didn't think they had what you call the knockout punch.
Guest:To me, the knockout punch of the Trump book is that we have met the enemy and he is us, to quote the old Pogo cartoon.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, I feel like that book is a real contribution to Trump studies, if we want to call that that, in that I hope it's not just everybody else's anti-Trump book.
Guest:It locates Trump as totally a symptom of American psychosis and says we are all hugely fucked up.
Guest:There's no way Trump, of course, would succeed if he weren't our worst self-realized.
Guest:And I even own some ways in which
Guest:You know, whether his megalomania, his narcissism, his performative bad boyness, I think he's even is related to he's a really talented insult comic.
Guest:He just is.
Guest:He's a genius.
Guest:I mean, he's in some ways a genius insult comic.
Guest:Going back to, you know, some people like, you know, even Sam Kinison or what's that guy?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:that really dirty comedian from the 80s, what was his name?
Guest:Dice?
Guest:Yeah, there's very Dice Clay about him.
Marc:Sure, yeah, and he empowers the legacy of Dice Clay.
Guest:Totally, and he appeals to a reptilian part of our brain, and that he has serious, Trump does, performative chops.
Guest:So too in the book Trouble with Men, again, if the book didn't have a knockout punch for you, I will give you your money back times two.
Guest:But...
Guest:I got it for free.
Guest:No, I'm just teasing.
Guest:But anyway, the knockout punch of that book, which is probably not news to you because you've thought about all this a lot, but the knockout punch of trouble with men, in my view, is...
Guest:And this is, you know, the theme of your show, of all your shows is, you know, we are all seriously wounded.
Guest:And the only thing that connects us is the scar tissue that we all have.
Guest:Trauma bonding.
Guest:I guess.
Marc:Or, you know, what I call the wound and the bow.
Marc:I think I did get that from that.
Marc:Like, you know, like that did land with me pretty well.
Marc:The wound talking.
Guest:See, the books did have a knockout punch.
Guest:You were just hiding from the knockout punch those books delivered.
Marc:They form in my brain.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:I guess I get used to the idea of a punchline.
Marc:And, you know, when you when you do what you do and you kind of got to move through it and you kind of got to stay in it.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Everything kind of comes together.
Marc:But, yeah, like I like I didn't refresh myself before I talked to you.
Marc:But, yeah, the wound, you know, I think I wrote something out of my notebook that that I thought of probably in relation to that.
Yeah.
Marc:about the talking wound.
Guest:Well, the thing I like to say, sort of my little mantra is collage is not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.
Guest:By which, I mean, that may sound a little bit fancy, but the point being,
Guest:Collage is not just, the literary collage is not this thing in which you just throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall and hope something sticks and call it spaghetti bolognese.
Guest:But that, you know, I argue, you know, again, I have some skin in the game.
Guest:Collage is a lot harder to pull off and do well than conventional narrative because if you do a conventional narrative, you have a solid baseline.
Guest:Yeah, A plus B equals the end.
Guest:Yeah, someone was talking with you about that, someone who was doing whatever.
Guest:But anyway, that...
Guest:I want the reader to feel like, oh my God, these pieces do come together.
Guest:All these shards of contemporary life that we think of as not forming a unity.
Guest:In this experience of Shields' book, which is my best readerly experience, it's not that many people or some people have that experience of the you experience.
Guest:Okay, some interesting pieces.
Guest:I'm not sure yet they've come together for me.
Guest:I would just say, please read it again and more carefully.
Guest:No,
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:I wanted to sort of push back a little, but I'm a fan.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:I mean, I wouldn't have you here.
Guest:Of course.
Marc:There are certain books.
Marc:I was intimidated, but there are certain books that come through.
Marc:I don't know what they are.
Marc:And when I look at your books, I'm like, what the fuck is this?
Marc:Where is this guy coming from?
Marc:Then I got to go talk to my buddy Sam Lipsight and go, who's this guy, Shields?
Marc:What's he up?
Guest:Yes, Sam and I are pals.
Guest:Sounds like you guys are pals.
Guest:We're good friends.
Guest:Sam's the best.
Guest:Yeah, he's a wonderful writer.
Guest:And he, you know, I think Sam is an interesting instructive, you know, he and I are interested in a lot of the same things.
Guest:Comedy as a veil for sadness, you know, sort of.
Guest:You say that like it's an intentional thing.
Guest:Yeah, it's a reality.
Guest:It's a reality, yeah.
Guest:It's an instinctive thing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that, you know, he, I think, has a stronger narrative gene.
Guest:I just think when they hand- He's definitely a narrative guy.
Guest:Yeah, when they handed out plot, I just said, what?
Guest:You know, I don't know what that is.
Guest:I mean, I just, you know, I'll go to a movie with my wife and I can tell her immediately after 30 seconds what the movie's themes are.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But I have no fucking idea what happened.
Guest:I can't follow plot.
Marc:But is that like some sort of pathology?
Marc:No, I mean, I'm exaggerating, of course.
Guest:You always want to go to pathology.
Guest:Is that a specific type of autism where I can't follow the story?
Guest:Like, I'm really amazingly bad at following plot.
Guest:Like, I can follow a plot.
Guest:I'm terrible with it when I read a script.
Guest:But often, oh, right, in the sense that you said like, okay, why am I doing that?
Guest:In the format, the format's bothers me.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Like, you know, I can't, no, it's like I read it, but I can't picture it when it's just a script form.
Marc:I need it a little more thorough, you know, and I can't hold on to things.
Marc:I think that's one of the reasons you appeal to me, and I don't want to.
Marc:you know, puts you on the defensive.
Marc:No, that's fine.
Marc:But no, but it's odd because Sam, I think, went the other direction because I think Sam's first novel, The Subject Steve, is difficult and the plot is difficult and it is sort of fragmented.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And then he sort of became more conventional in chasing down these things and the humor became richer, you know, as he became more plot heavy.
Guest:Right.
Marc:You know.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, you know, one writes the books that one can write, and then later that one goes back and justifies that with some sort of artistic credo.
Guest:You know, as I say, I wrote these three conventional novels in my mid to late 30s.
Guest:I was trying to write my fourth novel, and I just found those gestures—
Guest:I found, you know, dull.
Guest:And, you know, if the writer's bored, the reader will be bored.
Marc:Well, I think that's true.
Marc:And I think that the hardest thing when you read conventional novels is that, you know, a lot of times I used to have a hard time finishing the last 10 pages because I knew it was going to be disappointing.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:No matter what it was.
Marc:I know what you mean.
Marc:That there's something about the landing of a novel, usually.
Marc:And I don't read a lot of novels, because I'd rather read a book like yours, in a sense, where you have this weird mixture of things that are just kind of being thrown at your brain than...
Marc:Stay in the game with a novel because it has to be really well referred to me.
Marc:Somebody has to say you got to... Try it.
Marc:Someone I love has got to say you got to read this.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But the endings are always sort of like... I feel like that's a real sign of how truly unfulfilling an awful lot of conventional narratives are.
Guest:If the ending is this weird letdown, that's a sign that you have not...
Guest:been on a really serious journey to me, because that ending ought to feel, you know, existentially revelatory.
Guest:I find Eleanor Coppola's film, Hearts of Darkness, a better film than Apocalypse Now.
Guest:I think that's arguable.
Guest:And so that's sort of my model, this weird subterranean work that cuts to the chase more directly and more powerfully than all that architecture of pyrotechnics.
Guest:Yeah, I get that.
Guest:If you see what I mean.
Marc:No, it works for me.
Marc:And I think I'm in this weird sort of space in my head now where I pummel my brain with garbage out of my phone every morning in the form of whatever news I'm following.
Marc:And the reason why your style speaks to me is I have a fundamental sort of inability to compartmentalize or kind of emotionally prioritize what's coming into my brain.
Marc:Everything sort of comes in hot.
Marc:No matter what it is, whether it's me making a cup of tea or the news.
Guest:It's all connected.
Marc:Yeah, it's connected, but it kind of happens at the same frequency.
Marc:And then what's happened to me lately is I think some of my short-term memory is being annihilated by the amount of information I'm jumping into my head every day.
Marc:So the way you select, it's clear that there's an editorial process.
Marc:This isn't spontaneous.
Guest:I should hope so.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:They pretend to be these casual collections.
Guest:I'm talking about your work.
Guest:I know, that's what I mean.
Guest:I curate the hell out of these things.
Guest:Yeah, I can tell.
Guest:I spend years getting the mix right and sort of like saying,
Guest:You know, you look at, say, but anyway, I mean.
Marc:How is that process?
Marc:I guess my point is, is it works for me because, you know, there is a context.
Marc:It is compartmentalized.
Marc:You've taken the time to make these decisions, but it kind of goes in in the modern way.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:It's like, boom, pack it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah, pack it.
Marc:Boom.
Marc:And then my brain kind of puts them all together because you've contextualized them.
Marc:Whereas if I'm flipping through news stories, there's no context other than my phone and my fear.
Guest:That's a nice connection.
Guest:I don't know if you're a David Foster Wallace fan.
Guest:I was a big fan of Wallace's essays.
Guest:The novels do relatively little for me, but Wallace's essays I really like.
Guest:I think some of them you would love.
Guest:That Walls had this wonderful answer.
Guest:Somebody asked him, Laura Miller at Salon asked him, what's so great about literature?
Guest:Why does literature matter?
Guest:And he said that we're existentially alone on the planet.
Guest:You can't know what I'm thinking and feeling and I can't know what you're thinking and feeling.
Guest:And literature at its best is a bridge built across the abyss of human loneliness.
Guest:Strikes me as a really beautiful answer.
Guest:And I would argue, again, somewhat self-justifyingly of my own work, that my work at its best is this really, I hope, lovely bridge between myself and the reader.
Guest:Because if the work works, and it doesn't work for everyone...
Guest:The reader starts to feel how it actually sort of feels to be inside of my weird little brain.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So it's like, oh, my God, that text you got in the morning is related to that Instagram post you had here.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:To continue with your analogy about how it's very modern.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, oh, my God, you know, all these different layers, the political level, the cultural level, the anthropological level, the deep confessional level.
Guest:I think that brings us back to your first question is, you know, why not sort of do that conventional, let's just say, I don't know, whatever you want to call it, like Mary Carr, Tobias Wolfe, you know, good, solid modern memoir.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that I find it more exciting to show how everything is connected.
Marc:My problem is that I'm always looking, like when I look at your books, and I've talked about this with me, with other things, if I find it confounding, I understand your structure, and I understand how it all pieces together, and I understand the poetry of it, and I understand the form of it, but I initially come away thinking, am I getting this, or is he fucking with me?
Guest:That was the question the publisher asked of my first collage book, Sonny Maida at Knopf.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he published my first work of literary collage called Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Sounds like the subtitle of half of the stuff that you do.
Guest:That's the subtitle of my podcast.
Guest:Right, exactly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We'll be suing, yeah.
Guest:We'll be suing, yes.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:But Sonny Mehta said, you know, I think there's something there.
Guest:Is David really doing this?
Guest:Or is he just sort of fucking around?
Guest:Right.
Guest:And, you know, I couldn't be more serious.
Guest:No, yeah.
Guest:And I think, you know, but it's sort of like...
Guest:It's all about the undertow.
Guest:It's something in me that resists handing the meaning to a reader on a silver platter.
Guest:To me, it's more exciting when the reader has that OMFG moment of like, Christ, this stuff is connected.
Guest:Rather than me spelling it out, a la, like, you know, who's a journalist that I like?
Guest:Let's say Michael Lewis or somebody like that.
Guest:Like, it's all pretty much spelled out, and the meaning is there.
Guest:But it feels to me sort of more artistic and poetic, and frankly, more moving.
Guest:It's the way I work.
Guest:And, you know, some people have connected it to my childhood stutter.
Guest:You know, I had a really bad stutter as a kid, and my second novel, Dead Languages, is a sort of autobiographical novel about stuttering.
Guest:And there's a sense in which my kind of, you might call it, herky-jerky, stop-and-start, disfluent narrative is sort of a nicely metaphorical representation of stuttering.
Guest:Because, you know, you write a conventional novel, it has a sort of a fluidity to it.
Guest:And my work has a kind of, I hope, a kind of stuttering poetry, if that works.
Marc:And again, the more I think about it, you know, I'm glad I'm talking to you, because even like today, like I don't do many Instagram posts and I just do them spontaneously.
Marc:But I literally said, well, you know, authoritarianism is happening and I'm going to be in Raleigh.
Marc:Tomorrow through Saturday, I'm going to go look at some pottery because I like pottery.
Marc:But so you decide the context.
Marc:But those things are connected.
Marc:I mean, authoritarianism and my desire to look at pottery.
Marc:Totally.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So do I have to have an answer as to why other than my desire?
Marc:Or is it, you know, is the pottery some sort of kind of remedy to my fear and to the political realities?
Marc:And so I think that's the space you're leaving.
Guest:That's a really lovely example, because I would argue the pottery is connected to the Trump authoritarian regime.
Guest:I'm not sure what it is.
Guest:But I feel like the challenge of being alive and sentient now, let's call it, you know, around August 1st of 2019, is to say, like, how are these different parts of our lives connected?
Marc:Well, we can go from there to our fathers then.
Yeah.
Guest:I think that's a great connection.
Guest:Trump, his father was famously dictatorial, authoritarian, demolished Trump.
Guest:I don't think Trump has felt a thing for 60 years.
Guest:He's utterly numb, utterly without any pleasure at all.
Guest:Hates his father in unbelievably profound ways.
Guest:This is a little bit glib and armchair psychology on my part, but he clearly is visiting that punishment on the rest of us that he never articulated toward the father.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Isn't that funny, though, this sort of glib armchair psychology thing?
Marc:Because, you know, I remember at the beginning of the administration that that was a full press on behalf of the intellectuals in the world.
Marc:The father and Trump.
Marc:Well, just the armchair psychologizing about, you know, the nature of this guy's, you know, pathology.
Marc:And it just like didn't work.
Marc:It didn't take him down, yeah.
Marc:You keep coming at it.
Marc:It's a wall of shamelessness.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:It's impenetrable.
Guest:You probably know Louis Theroux's work.
Guest:Yeah, sure, I talked to him.
Guest:Did he...
Guest:He has a wonderful line in the Trump book in which he says, in a culture of shame, i.e.
Guest:America, being shameless gives you, i.e.
Guest:Trump, enormous leverage and power.
Guest:I think it's really the key to Trump's strategy.
Guest:Isn't that a brilliant line?
Marc:It is.
Marc:It's the nature of, you know, it all just coincides with sort of the end game of capitalism where, you know, you mine people's desires to the point where,
Marc:they no longer really know what they are, what they're attached to, so they don't have any real anchor to their personalities in general.
Marc:The fact that confounds me, and I'm trying to deal with it comedically, is that the brain turns out to be a very primitive recording device.
Marc:Outside of survival mode, it's just very willing to attach real belief to garbage based on feelings.
Marc:And repetition.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Repetition is a tool for branding and for fascism.
Marc:So it's all sort of happening.
Marc:The end times prophecies of Christianity are sort of dovetailing with this sort of late stage capitalism.
Marc:And someone's hedging their bets.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Do you have any as a stand up yourself?
Guest:Do you have any particular insights into how Trump manages to be the performative black magician that he is?
Guest:Like, I'm not a stand up comedian.
Guest:I'm a writer and I can analyze it.
Guest:But he has mad performance chops.
Guest:And I'm wondering if you have a specific observation as a practitioner.
Marc:Well, when I talk to comics, I think the one, he's got several gifts, most of them horrible.
Marc:Right, but they're gifts.
Marc:But he also has this incredible capacity to make people feel great.
Marc:Like, you know, all the comics I've talked to have had experiences with him because he was around.
Guest:Right.
Marc:He was just one of this weird, freaky guy.
Marc:But Jackie Mason was the guy I was trying to think of.
Marc:This guy's a fucking monster.
Marc:I've heard that.
Marc:But no, but like Trump is sort of like a tremendous, like, huckster salesman.
Marc:He really can make you like, you know, you talk to him and he makes you feel like a million bucks just to be hanging around him.
Guest:That's just classic salesmanship.
Guest:No, totally.
Guest:That's just like the oldest trick in the book.
Marc:Totally.
Marc:And the fact that he's become this portal for the worst, most corrupt, fucking shameless garbage out of the religious sector, out of the business sector, out of the graft sector.
Marc:When people compared him to Hitler, I was like, no, he's Satan.
Marc:That's good.
Marc:If you're going to believe in prophecy, this guy is the guy.
Marc:I mean, Satan had to be charming.
Marc:He had to have skills.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:He always has...
Guest:The best lines.
Guest:The best lines are always Satan's.
Guest:Just think of how much more interesting Trump is than, say, Hillary.
Guest:He just was a more galvanizing figure.
Guest:But he's also a chaos addict.
Marc:He can remain powerful as long as everything around him is just in complete chaos.
Marc:He loves it.
Marc:He thrives on it.
Marc:Whereas Hillary, it's a management position.
Marc:I'm sorry.
Guest:My latest thought about it is that...
Guest:Where are the people who are willing to blow up their career in order to save the republic?
Guest:Where is the IRS agent who just simply throws Trump's audits, you know, has tax reports online?
Guest:Where is the person at...
Guest:At Deutsche Bank who just presses sand.
Marc:But they're around.
Marc:But the problem is, is that, you know, if you really have like, I think the biggest problem is if you really have a large portion of the population that no longer has any sort of barometer for facts or truth.
Marc:I mean, and they're who he's counting on.
Marc:It doesn't.
Marc:I know.
Marc:You can counter any fact.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And you can put it into it.
Marc:You can wedge it into a conspiracy.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You can dismiss it.
Marc:And a frightfully large part of the population will be like, it is bullshit.
Marc:Because the bullshit guy said it was bullshit.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And I think to me what's interesting, because it's easy for us as supposedly woke white guys to say it all, but it's sort of like...
Guest:It's not clear to me how you push back because everyone says, oh, you know.
Guest:It's the biggest trick.
Guest:If I were there in Nazi Germany in 1933, I'd have been terribly prescient.
Guest:I would have been this very brave.
Guest:No, you wouldn't.
Guest:I mean, you might have.
Guest:But, you know, here we are.
Guest:This is real.
Guest:This is 1933.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:And if you think about that.
Guest:And yet it's not.
Guest:It's not.
Guest:You know, he's not.
Guest:No, it's not going to go that way.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He's going to rely on weird sporadic events by militia operations and loners with guns and just the fact that most people in places that aren't big cities are afraid to talk at work.
Marc:It's an internal censorship.
Marc:The totalitarianism of authoritarianism is going to be regulated by us as individuals because of the nature of the narcissistic personality or culture that we live in, right?
Marc:So I don't think those people exist because they're concerned about themselves.
Marc:And by the way, the smart move turns out to be in 1933 Germany was to get the fuck out.
Marc:I mean, like, you know, whoever said they were going to stand up to it or whoever did, it didn't fucking matter.
Marc:The smart ones fucking left.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But I think that's the play.
Guest:I guess to me, what's interesting for me is that.
Guest:I mean, it's more than interesting.
Guest:It's rather traumatizing.
Guest:Rational discourse, a la, let's say, Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, who I'm a fan of, but it's not doing anything.
Guest:It's just preaching to the proverbial choir.
Guest:On the other hand, who is that person who can fight demagoguery with demagoguery?
Guest:That doesn't play well on the left.
Guest:Who would be that person who would have as much...
Guest:stage presence, camera presence, possibly Kamala Harris or somebody.
Guest:And so for me, how to dismantle... I mean, basically Trump is an assault upon discourse itself.
Guest:That's his magic potion.
Marc:Discourse, democracy, culture.
Guest:But anyway, all rational discourse is over with him.
Guest:It's all...
Guest:All circus, all circus antics.
Guest:And so basically, it's not clear to me.
Guest:Is it clear to you?
Guest:How do you fight, as you say, chaos addiction?
Guest:He sort of knows America, obviously, loves circuses because he loves circuses.
Guest:He's the elephant.
Guest:He's the elephant that we're cleaning up after.
Guest:So part of it is bully psychology.
Guest:I'm fascinated by bullies.
Guest:Are you one?
Guest:I've been bullied as a kid.
Guest:I was, you know, I was like the one Jewish kid among my jock friends.
Guest:I had this speech impediment.
Guest:I was this lefty kid amidst my suburban San Francisco conservative friends.
Guest:And I was, you know, seriously bullied.
Guest:I think, you know.
Guest:Because I have bully in me.
Guest:I'm certainly capable of being a bully in minor ways at work, but I'm not wildly bullied.
Guest:But to me, a lot of it is bully 101.
Guest:The bully is always a baby in disguise.
Guest:We all know that.
Guest:How do you go after a bully?
Guest:You go after him every step of the way.
Guest:The moment he sees ground, the bully will take it.
Guest:And then beyond that, I can't play it out.
Guest:He has literally, as they say, the bully pulpit.
Guest:He has the presidency.
Guest:So how do you go after the bully when the bully has this enormous megaphone?
Guest:I just know.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I'm trying to find some stupid answer here.
Guest:Hopefully he has a brain event.
Guest:He's close.
Guest:He's close.
Marc:You know, like if it becomes indisputable that he's, you know, you know, just mumbling and, you know, everything's completely.
Marc:How far can you defend somebody?
Guest:I know.
Marc:But getting back to something else, like the other thing that I've been obsessed with lately just in the last week or so is this.
Marc:What we're talking about, and I think even in the form of fiction and what you do and how we live our lives, is there seems to be some intentional, that we have to live in a sort of imposed, personally imposed cognitive dissonance, right?
Marc:And I think that that's... In what exact sense, do you mean?
Marc:In the sense that, like, in order for us to have a quality of life that we think we've earned or deserved or want to have, or if happiness is something you're pursuing, or you're at a point in your life where you'd like to enjoy it because you think it's that time,
Marc:against the backdrop of this seemingly hopeless situation and this authoritarian kind of momentum, you struggle sort of like that comes in, it fucks you up, and then you're like, well, I want to have a nice breakfast.
Marc:And that's really sort of weighing on me, and I think that there is some element of that to the collage.
Guest:I think that's nice connection.
Guest:That I would want to say that my work is saying, sorry, you can't have that nice breakfast.
Guest:I'm going to insist as you're having that bagel and latte, I'm going to say, no, you cannot compartmentalize your breakfast that way.
Guest:I'm going to impose that Guardian headline on that bagel and that latte.
Guest:Well, that's what happens.
Guest:Which I think is really, I think that's a real contribution.
Guest:I'm the person who's bringing bad news to breakfast.
Guest:I'm the bad news bear, you know?
Guest:Yeah, in little bits and pieces.
Guest:But then I'm going to say it again, you know, to make this case, you know, I'm not just this person who's going to say, guess what?
Guest:Your purchase of the pottery in Raleigh NC is not unrelated to the Trump authoritarianism in some way I can't quite articulate, but that...
Guest:Well, sure.
Guest:I can articulate it.
Marc:It's a sort of a kind of like desire to get to something sort of organic, to something handmade, to something unique, authentic, and a craft, and a craftsmanship, and sort of a life behind it.
Marc:Somebody toiled over a wheel on a heart level.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:That is the only thing we have is the humanity of the potter.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:I mean, you probably know, do you know, the Kuleshov effect in film, that basically if you juxtapose two things together, you have a boy who's... Oh, there's a Russian thing.
Marc:Yeah, where you are looking at... The language of montage.
Guest:Yeah, you have a boy, and then you have a Russian train, you have the boy and the bowl of soup, you have a bowl and...
Guest:a mother, that we see that boy very differently based on what he is... That's the thing that Eisenstein took off on.
Guest:Yeah, that's all a film.
Guest:And it's, in a way, my work in which, you know, watch me juxtapose in the Marshawn Lynch film a, you know, let's say 1920s lynching with...
Guest:some media press conference and watch the shrapnel play out or, you know, in the Trump book, you know, again, to use our analogy, you know, watch what happens when we push the pottery up against authoritarianism and that basically it's not just that sort of simple juxtaposition, but if we do, let's say sort of 500 of these juxtapositions, watch how they're building a larger argument.
Guest:I like it.
Guest:You know, I mean, so, yeah.
Marc:I like it.
Marc:You know, I like that you're fleshing that out for me.
Marc:I thought that was like, you know, obviously the name Lynch, you know, has its implications and those are intentional.
Marc:But, you know, some memorable thing, one of the more memorable, you know, fucking 12 seconds of, you know, what is...
Marc:500, 15 to 30 seconds, two minute pieces was, I don't know where it came from, but that Southern guy saying we're afraid of reprisal.
Guest:That's an amazing passage.
Marc:I mean, but that was like, that's like the portal in.
Marc:It really is.
Marc:To the whole, why?
Guest:It's the answer to why.
Guest:It really is.
Guest:That's a staggering passage in the film.
Guest:I mean, for those few people in the world who have yet to see the film, it's this fellow with a Southern accent.
Guest:In just a few seconds, he explains the last sort of 400 years of American history in a really awesome way.
Guest:He says that we are white people are afraid of retribution.
Guest:And then he adds a couple of other words.
Guest:And, you know, he basically owns American guilt and that, you know, there's black rage and white fear.
Guest:And that is, you know, it's the undergirding.
Marc:And the fear that, you know, because it can't be owned, it becomes rage.
Exactly.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Precisely, which is, you know, that explains the 40 million people of the Trumpian base.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:And Trump plays to it, you know, almost hour by hour.
Marc:Because, you know, the options with fear are, you know, a movement through it, an understanding of it, you know, grief, acceptance, humility.
Marc:Or, you know, I think the shame that that is the shame.
Marc:So if you're going to be one of those sort of like, you know, fuck that.
Guest:Like the one thing like deflect, deflect, deflect.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Then all of a sudden, if you're empowered to go like, no, no, fuck them.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I mean, it's just so that's the end of discourse.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:I mean, just I mean, it's like, you know, as you you you may know is, you know, Trump for years had Hitler speeches on his bedside table.
Guest:It's just a fact, you know, it's reported by many people.
Guest:And.
Guest:He's gone to school on all that.
Guest:I think so.
Marc:I don't like the idea that he's just shooting from the hip.
Marc:I think he did have a plan.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:When he knows that he can harvest the AOC squad, he has relatively reptilian instincts for those moments, whether going after Elijah Cummings or he's going after Baltimore, that he uses, of course, the classic language.
Guest:of stigmatization, scapegoating, demagoguery.
Guest:So, you know, it's just classic, you know, calling people animals, calling them vermin.
Guest:I mean, it's all just so standard.
Guest:And that, I don't know, it's so easy to be sort of having shared misery, but what's the route out?
Guest:You just want to say to people, I mean, that you travel the country probably more than I do, you know.
Guest:Do you ever try and talk to Trumpian voters and say, don't you see what he is doing, and do you get zero response back?
Marc:No, no, I mean, I know a couple of people, like one guy in particular, who I like and who I think is funny, and he is of that ilk, and he's Christian, he's a Southerner.
Marc:He doesn't know a lot necessarily, but he goes with the flow.
Marc:But I think that the general consensus around that is they don't care if he's full of shit.
Marc:You know, they he is servicing an emotional satisfaction for them.
Marc:And he's also facilitating, you know, everything the Republicans have been working on for 30 years.
Marc:So once you're willing to to be an apologist in the way like, yeah, he's crazy, then it's all it's lost.
Marc:It's over.
Guest:I agree.
Guest:I think the key is that he's giving financial satisfaction to a relatively small group of people.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:But emotional satisfaction.
Guest:But emotional satisfaction to a wide swath.
Guest:I mean, just trying a billiard shot here, trying to connect up Lynch, film.
Guest:Trouble with Men and the Trump book.
Guest:I mean, I've just somehow what you were saying sort of I was seeing some connection, which I'm not sure I can quite bring to consciousness, but something to do with my go to move, I guess, which is the great liberating movement to me, whether it's the Trumpian movement.
Guest:whether it's sort of sexuality and dominance and submission.
Guest:To me, the great liberating gesture, which I find sort of freeing,
Guest:is to be honest, to own your own woundedness.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Which, you know, I know is your go-to move too.
Guest:But, you know, and then to me, that's what's so powerful about, say, Marshawn Lynch is that he, I'm not sure if he owns his own woundedness, but he manifests resistance to the dominant cultural discourse in this very powerful way.
Guest:And so if I see, you know, the three things of mine that we've been talking about, you know, like I see what I- But that speaks to a historical wound.
Guest:Totally, and that's a great connection.
Guest:And what I really love, the people, the artists I love from ancient writers to very contemporary writers are people, and maybe this is why I'm such a collage writer and filmmaker, is that that collage work tends to bring together people who tend to be wounded.
Guest:E.M.
Guest:Chiron was famously dark, pessimistic, sad.
Marc:Well, I definitely know what that, because I speak from the wound and I know who my audience is.
Guest:Right.
Marc:I see them.
Guest:And even, say, Nietzsche, Pascal, all the great collage writers were famously broken.
Guest:Whereas in a way, if you're more, you know.
Marc:And that's why it makes sense that they write like that.
Guest:Precisely.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Like, it's like, that's all I could write on that.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Because I'm so depressed I have to go back and lie down.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Or it's sort of like next thing.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:That sav helped me through that moment.
Guest:That's nice.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Almost like these little packets of grief balm.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, like boom, boom, boom.
Guest:Like jokes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I was so influenced by stand-up as a kid.
Guest:You know, I grew up in San Francisco and on, I think, KNBR, you know, they would have from 8 a.m.
Guest:till 12 noon, all the great stand-ups of that time that could go on radio.
Marc:I think, like I have said before,
Marc:is that like for me the reason stand-up was what I was destined to do was that these guys had a handle on things and they could present large ideas very quickly and give you some closure.
Marc:Like if you were raised by self-involved parents or bipolar father like you said, you're not getting much closure on your sense of self.
Marc:So there's this sort of like these tendrils of like how do I, what is my identity?
Marc:That, you know, intellectually, if you if you watch a stand up, you're like, oh, that guy's got a handle on that.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And it just happened in 50 seconds.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:And now I can get that.
Marc:That'll cap that for now.
Guest:Like a friend of mine once said, he said, what I like about your work is that it's weirdly utilitarian.
Guest:That is to say.
Guest:I'm trying to create toolkits that are actually sort of useful for people's lives.
Marc:Yeah, a reference point.
Guest:Like, here's how to think about Trump.
Guest:Here's, I think, how to think about sex.
Guest:Here's how to think about, say, race and sports.
Guest:And it's like, I think of the work as sort of, you know, as interventions.
Marc:No, no, I like that.
Marc:And I agree with you.
Marc:And I think that's why it probably resonates with me.
Marc:Because, like, I am a big fan of great lines.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And I think it is poetry.
Marc:And, you know, and by avoiding the sort of contextual trap of being a poet.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like a capital P poet.
Guest:Right.
Marc:You know, where it's already sort of once removed from, you know, cultural language in a way.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But, you know, freeing yourself to do this collaging and have bits and pieces that work together in a poetic fashion, you know, there's a little something for everybody where you don't have to labor.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:You're like, what the fuck does this mean?
Guest:Right.
Marc:I mean, I like the way it feels when I say it, but I'm not.
Marc:But like there was a guy, Dan Vitale, used to do this line about being fucked up.
Marc:And the line was like, when you hit bottom, folks, you'd be surprised at just how much give that floor has.
Marc:See, that's beautiful.
Marc:And it's the word give.
Guest:It's give.
Guest:That's beautiful.
Guest:That's beautiful.
Guest:That's lovely.
Guest:That's a good one.
Marc:I like that one.
Marc:So when you were coming up in this environment, it seemed like your parents had loftier agendas than parenting.
Marc:How did that, in retrospect, in your self kind of inspection, what kind of trajectory did your father's bipolarity send you on?
Marc:How did that affect your creativity or your choices in life?
Guest:Well, that's a big one, obviously.
Guest:I mean, I've written about it in part.
Guest:I'm trying to give how to answer that in a way that... Is he alive?
Guest:No.
Guest:My dad died at 99.
Guest:And my mom died a while ago as well.
Guest:So, I mean, it's huge.
Guest:I think my father's what we called manic depressive.
Guest:So for me...
Marc:But you know what's amazing, though?
Marc:He died at 99?
Marc:Yeah, it was this sort.
Marc:So he didn't kill himself.
Guest:No, tried many times.
Guest:Did he?
Guest:And failed many times.
Guest:He would drive to the Golden Gate Bridge virtually monthly, threatening to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.
Guest:My dad used to drive around with a gun in his car, but we weren't sure who he wanted to use it on.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And he's, was this in Albuquerque?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that, you know, basically the line I flash on is I quoted in Trouble with Men this rather devastating line in which an ex-girlfriend says, your father never taught you how to be a man.
Guest:which was rather a nasty line, but it stayed with me.
Guest:That basically when people think- Well, that's one of those ones.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:That basically when I think of paternity, and I'm a terribly devoted father to my 26-year-old daughter, and I'm very much a father to her, but-
Guest:Basically, the point being like masculinity was problematized to me from the very beginning that my mother was this rather draconian, authoritarian, dominant figure, quite harsh, quite chilly, quite distant.
Guest:Perhaps as she needed to be given my father's evacuation of that station.
Guest:He was shuttling back and forth to electroshock treatments at
Guest:the mental hospital and so for me it was the evacuation of masculinity like I'm used the whole idea of man being authoritative and mother being nurturing I have no idea what that that even means do you know what I mean like to me my mom was not in any way classically nurturing and my dad was just like
Guest:the empty patriarch.
Guest:And so for me, that would be the beginning of it.
Guest:And then you sort of laid on to it.
Guest:I've been hugely influenced by my parents.
Guest:I mean, I am their son in the sense I am a writer the way they were.
Guest:I'm politically engaged, not as overtly as they were, but I am politically engaged.
Marc:But you said earlier that you have an aversion to that.
Marc:What is it?
Guest:Well, the aversion is, you know, I'm not a political pamphleteer.
Guest:You know, I try to, you know, some of my work, like say, War is Beautiful, The New York Times, Pictorial Guide.
Marc:Yeah, explain that, because I have that.
Marc:That's the coffee table book.
Marc:That's the David Shields coffee table book.
Guest:Well, the anti-coffee table book.
Marc:Right, but it is, it's on the table.
Guest:You know, that book is a critique of New York Times war photography in which I was arguing that at the New York Times for years during the Iraq and Afghanistan war wars, they were running.
Guest:appallingly beautiful pictures on a weekly level of those wars, seemingly oblivious that you can't just run color pics on page one every few days and not have that be sending unbelievably powerful, cheerleading, subliminal messages.
Marc:Well, how many photographers were they drawing from?
Guest:You know, dozens around the world.
Guest:You know, and they were tended, you know, and that was an interesting...
Marc:But does that have something to do with the evolution of photography?
Guest:I mean, that's what people would push back.
Guest:It's like, hey, people can make amazingly beautiful pics.
Guest:But I studied every front page of the Times from 1991 to 2012.
Guest:And I could not find a single example of a picture that captured, to me, anything like...
Guest:The hell of war that seemed to be a relatively conscious decision to have the design department running the war department.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That basically I argued, you know, that famous line war is hell.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:To me in the times was like war is heck viewed from a very far distance because, you know, the times, frankly, its audience is not going to war.
Guest:Those wars are far away.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Whereas, say, during Vietnam, it might be a New York Times reader who would have to serve in Vietnam.
Guest:So anyway, the book argues that, in a way, that's the first book of mine that in a way fulfills my parents' mission of trying to create overtly political work of art.
Guest:But in general, in previous books of mine, whether a book like Black Planet, Facing Race During the NBA Season, or earlier books, are more skeptical of by-the-book liberal agenda.
Guest:I don't think we have solutions to life's problems.
Guest:I'm a total tragedian.
Guest:I just think that we're fucked, both on an individual level and on a cultural level, that I think the planet's doomed, et cetera, et cetera.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Whereas my parents' whole agenda was, we're going to solve life's problems.
Guest:And I just think, you know, I became devoted to art.
Guest:You know, there's that wonderful line of Schopenhauer says, may the world perish.
Guest:let truth prevail, which is a rather awful thing to say, kind of fascistic, but I'm sort of in bed with that.
Guest:Trying to tell the truth matters more to me than anything else.
Guest:It doesn't sort of mean I'm right.
Guest:Your truth, though.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:It seems like when you take into consideration in terms of philosophy and in terms of being a tragedian is that it just seems that might partnered with bullshit
Guest:Totally.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't say I'm right.
Marc:No, but that becomes- Oh, my partner with bullshit.
Marc:Right.
Marc:That becomes a prevailing truth, which fascism is seeking to solve the same problem.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:Well, that's where it gets scary is that that's what the Trump book tries to get into.
Guest:I say at one point in the book, Trump is the world's worst, best personal essayist.
Guest:Because he wires everything through himself.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The way that in a way that your stand-up act does, the way that my writing does, the way a lot of the actors and comedians and monologous do.
Guest:I mean, you probably, I assume that you share my admiration of people like, say, Spaulding Gray.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And Joe Frank.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, it's like, you know, everything got wired through them.
Guest:Spaulding Gray couldn't be involved in a movie about Cambodia without sending it back to him.
Guest:Right.
Guest:is weirdly like them and like us for deeply nefarious reasons.
Marc:But he mythologizes himself immediately.
Guest:Right, exactly.
Marc:And I tried to make a line work on Sadrum that Trump is the...
Marc:It was just like he's the best narcissist because he succeeded in actually making everything about him, literally everything.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:I guess to me the big question for him among many, I'm curious what your take is.
Guest:does he know he's full of shit or is he, has he actually convinced himself or, and are his politics as awful as he pretends or is there part of, like for instance, I'm sure he's paid for numerous abortions, but he pretends to be against him.
Guest:Like for instance, how aware is he of the shtick?
Marc:Well, I think he, I, you know, I think he's like, I think it's,
Marc:I think it's instinctual, but I think he, you know, in his quiet moments with people he trusts, he's just a straight up asshole.
Marc:But I think he knows the con job.
Marc:Does he?
Marc:Definitely.
Marc:I think that's right.
Marc:I think that's right.
Marc:I mean, I don't think he says, you know, he plans what he's going to say.
Guest:No.
Marc:But he says, just watch this.
Marc:I'm going to make these people.
Marc:I think that's right.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Watch what I can do.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:I think he has that.
Marc:I agree.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So ultimately, you think that this new film, it seems to be that whatever medium you're working with, this seems to be the evolution of everything you do.
Marc:You would say that it doesn't matter whether it's a book or the pictures in The War is Beautiful.
Marc:or this film, this seems to be a perfectly realized piece of art, you know, based on your approach.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:I mean, you mean, in a sense, the Marshawn Lynch film in particular?
Guest:I mean, I think, I mean, it is a funny evolution where you, the first novel I wrote, published, my God, 35 years ago, it was just, did one review, actually, in the L.A.,
Guest:weekly said it's almost a parody of the conventional novel.
Guest:The first book I wrote was just unbelievably straight ahead novel.
Guest:You know, all the standard things.
Guest:And then over the last sort of 35 years, you know, I've written over 20 books and just almost step by step by step by step, they've gotten less linear, less narrative, less plotted, more pixelated, more montage-y, more collage-like.
Guest:And
Guest:I think there would be a way to argue the Lynch film bringing together politics, race, sports, collage is... I hope I have more gestures to make, but it does seem like a nice gathering of my impulses.
Marc:Yeah, I don't think it's like the end, but I'm just saying that it seems to be exactly what you're working towards.
Marc:Seemingly.
Marc:I imagine that drawing from images is probably...
Marc:I would imagine, you know, kind of labor intensive, but somewhat more exciting than drawing from words.
Guest:I mean, to me, it's the whole thing of, yeah, exactly.
Guest:I mean, part of me feels like I'm running out of words in certain ways.
Guest:I mean, maybe like, say, going back to Trouble with Men.
Guest:Like, I didn't have more to say about it.
Guest:Like, this was as much as I could say.
Guest:I mean, part of it with the Marshawn Lynch film was that...
Guest:that we approached him and said, you know, would you like to participate in the film?
Guest:His eloquence is his silence, or his silence is eloquence.
Guest:So thankfully, Lynch said no, that I won't block it, but I won't participate either.
Guest:Necessity being the mother of invention, if that's the right phrase, you know, that we said, okay, we have no Marshawn Lynch.
Guest:Let's scour the web.
Guest:Let's find every clip that we can ever find.
Guest:Let's intercut them with quotes and American history.
Guest:And this plays to my strains.
Guest:Part of me was hugely relieved when Lynch said no because it forced me back on, as you say, my go-to moves, which is culling, curation, thematizing.
Guest:juxtaposition, bringing together pottery and Trump.
Guest:Boom, watch what happens.
Marc:Right, and the way you let yourself off the hook in a way but didn't is that your place in it was the assemblage.
Marc:Precisely.
Marc:And not like your voice.
Guest:Per se.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, a few people want, like the book that it is very loosely adapted from is a book called Black Planet Facing Race During an NBA Season, a book I wrote 20 years ago.
Guest:I kept a fan's journal of the Seattle Sonics, 94, 95 NBA season.
Guest:And you're a sports fan.
Guest:I am.
Guest:It's a huge guilty pleasure.
Guest:But it's also an amazing cultural theater.
Guest:Sure, of course.
Guest:I mean, I could tell you everything.
Guest:Yeah, I wish I had it, but I don't.
Guest:I mean, you've saved yourself tens of thousands of hours.
Marc:But you're your father's son, I guess.
Guest:Totally, and I've written now three or four books about sports, and as they say, there's nothing you need to know about American culture you cannot see through the Super Bowl.
Guest:It's all freaking there.
Marc:And so basically- That was a template somehow?
Guest:Oh, yeah, Black Planet, because that book is about race, media.
Guest:And in that book, I'm very present as a guilty white liberal who sometimes has racist attitudes.
Guest:I sometimes identify with the owners, sometimes with the coaches, sometimes with the media, sometimes with the players that book tries to unpack.
Guest:an NBA season as an inverted mirror of NBA race relations at the time of Rodney King, Clarence Thomas, and the OJ trial.
Guest:And yeah, I think it's a good book, but you couldn't write that book now.
Guest:And so I was trying to adapt that film with the actor and director, James Franco, and that we tried to do it, and it just came to an end.
Guest:And that pivoted nicely into the Marshawn Lynch film
Guest:In which, as you say, I vanish.
Guest:But again, as with the quotes, I think I'm hugely there.
Guest:When I juxtapose a quote from Richard Wright saying only jailers believe in jails with a passage from Little Boosie, I couldn't be more present.
Marc:No, yeah, no, definitely.
Marc:I think that's right.
Marc:But it's not you reflecting on you as you.
Marc:And I think that if Marshawn had agreed to be part of it, you would be forced into a conversation that would have been different than what you got.
Guest:I totally agree in that.
Guest:I'm present a little bit.
Guest:You'll hear me ask questions in the movie.
Guest:But I know, I think, does the culture at this point want to hear about the ambivalence from a middle-class white Jewish filmmaker?
Guest:I would argue probably not.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, but that's not the film we're dying to see.
Guest:I don't think.
Marc:But it's also I guess.
Marc:But, you know, but if you frame it like that, I mean, you know, it's sort of a disservice that, you know, I remember being very angry when Entertainment Tonight, you know, first started airing because I'm like, you know, that's private.
Marc:You don't have news about what's going on behind the scenes.
Marc:And now it's the whole culture.
Marc:It's the whole culture.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So the thing is, the work, I know that it becomes part of the criticism or the commentary around it.
Marc:Everybody, it's like, what about that guy?
Marc:Who is that guy?
Marc:Whatever.
Marc:But when I watch the thing, I have a hard time keeping all that stuff in my head.
Marc:I didn't know you from anybody.
Marc:And I saw what the film was going to be in the first five minutes.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And I chose to lock in.
Marc:And what I come out with, I think I got, we mentioned it earlier, what was the through line and what I was supposed to get from it.
Marc:But what I also got from it was these, it becomes very clear that when someone of color doesn't meet cultural expectations that they will face a punishment.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:No matter what it is.
Guest:And that there's a great, the power of silence is a form of protest.
Guest:For sure.
Guest:It's very beautiful.
Guest:And in fact, somebody asked me last night, I did a little event that we showed the film.
Guest:Mina Kimes from ESPN was the talkback guest after the screening, and she was great, and she has a lot of good questions.
Guest:And she said, you know, how did you know how to read Lynch's silence as inherently political?
Guest:And sort of what you've implied, like I was born to understand that between growing up in the Bay Area, having very political parents, having a lot of black men and women living in our house throughout my childhood as my parents, you know, they were just sort of free, you know, they would have free rent in our house.
Guest:And again, going back to my little wound, you know,
Guest:stuttering.
Guest:As a kid, I could hardly talk.
Guest:And that basically, I know how much anger there is in silence, whether imposed or self-imposed.
Guest:And I feel like I locked in on Marshawn Lynch's silence super early on.
Guest:There was eloquence in that silence.
Guest:You know, that's the through line in the film is it's this love song to Marshawn Lynch's politics by any means necessary.
Marc:And instinctual.
Marc:I agree with you.
Guest:And very Oakland, incredibly Oakland.
Guest:Right.
Marc:He was like, you know, fuck you if you think I'm going to do what you want me to do.
Marc:I'm here to play football.
Marc:Go fuck yourself.
Marc:This isn't part of the agreement.
Marc:And when it was imposed on him, he was still, fuck you, I play football.
Guest:And I'll triple down on it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which, you know, in an amazing way is his assault on discourse.
Guest:If there's a Trumpian assault on discourse over here, where Trump for nefarious... I sort of love people who break the fourth wall.
Guest:Like, that's... I just...
Guest:You know, and I don't love Trump, but I got interested in trying to understand.
Guest:I mean, I think a key thing of Trump is that he does break the fourth wall.
Guest:Yeah, all the time.
Guest:And in a very, very different register, Lynch always, always breaks the fourth wall.
Marc:Well, there's an interesting thing that, you know, in light of your book and me not knowing anything about sports is that there's a basketball star, Blake Griffin.
Marc:who started doing comedy.
Marc:Oh, that's right.
Marc:And he did a bit, and this speaks to another part of what you're dealing with, but it's not as loaded, but he did a bit with Fallon, I was on Fallon a couple weeks ago and he was the other guest, but he did a bit on Fallon about the problem with being interviewed post-game.
Marc:Wow, I wish I had heard.
Marc:You should go watch it.
Guest:Was this doing panel or actually doing stand-up?
Guest:No, it was panel.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Marc:Because he played it out.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:He had Jimmy stand up, and he stood up.
Marc:Uh-huh, that's a great bit.
Marc:And he said to Jimmy, like, all right, just do like 15 seconds of jumping jacks or running in place.
Marc:So he had Jimmy do this, and then he goes, okay, stop.
Marc:How do you feel right now?
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:That's a great bit.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And that's the beginning of it, you know.
Guest:And Griffin's interesting because he's biracial and he's very good looking.
Guest:Nice guy.
Guest:And he's, you know, he's done a lot of successful commercials and that's fan.
Guest:He's actually is doing stand-up now.
Guest:Yes, he's doing stand-up.
Guest:Wow, that's amazing.
Guest:And the absurdity, it'd be like the moment you came off set, you did an hour and a half set, because it's a very primitive, visceral, ecstatic pleasure, and now suddenly you're going to totally empty it out and turn it into platitudinous,
Guest:corporate business speak.
Guest:Buzzkill, yeah.
Guest:And Lynch is holding on to joy.
Guest:It's so obvious.
Guest:Yeah, that's right.
Marc:It's like the best part of the new Dylan movie, The Rolling Thunder Review.
Marc:Which I haven't seen yet.
Marc:You should watch it because there's one moment that makes the whole fucking movie because I know it was genuine.
Marc:I think he had just come off stage after performing the first concert and he's literally walking off stage and the guy with the camera says, how do you feel?
Guest:And Dylan turns around and goes, about what?
Guest:That's great.
Guest:That's a great...
Guest:Dylan is a progenitor of all this, isn't he?
Guest:Because you go back to, obviously, authenticity is a bit of a fiction.
Guest:But I think what I'm interested in, what you're interested in, what Marshawn Lynch is trying to be authentic.
Guest:You're going to probably fail.
Guest:There will be sort of a fictional apparati that intercede.
Guest:But I love art.
Guest:I love people who are trying, at least semi-trying, to be authentic.
Marc:When you say authenticity is fiction, because I've been playing with that on stage a little bit, you know, with these words now, you know, like authenticity, mindfulness, doubling down.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But for some reason, those are outstanding, normalizing.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But this authenticity trip, you know, which gets hung on me, and I don't mind it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But, you know, there is 23 more hours in my day after I talk to you.
Guest:Right.
Marc:So, you know, what does it mean?
Marc:What do you mean when you say authenticity is a fiction?
Guest:Well, that's obviously an enormous topic.
Marc:I mean, I think that- Well, tighten it up into a little packet.
Marc:You're good at that.
Guest:There you go.
Guest:What's my little go-to aphorism here?
Guest:Let's see.
Guest:I mean, I just think, like, I guess I would just sort of make the point that you and I are trying to have a real discussion.
Guest:This feels more real than, of course, you being on Conan or whatever.
Guest:Although, you know, it's more real.
Guest:We're trying, you know, we'll swear, we'll be real, but we'll cough, we'll hiccup.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And it's more real, but, you know, obviously, on some level, I'm still performing, that you're still performing.
Guest:We are mask upon mask.
Guest:We don't always know each other.
Guest:You know, we don't know ourselves.
Guest:So I'm just sort of making that pretty standard postmodern point that it feels to me different, I don't know, the kind of work I try and do and say...
Guest:a novel by J.R.R.
Guest:Tolkien, where it's trying to be as fantastic as possible.
Guest:I'm trying to be as real as I possibly can, but let's not totally kid ourselves.
Guest:I mean, there's finally My Blood and Bones, which will ultimately be dead.
Guest:That's real, that I will die.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:And then the work, the work is trying to be real, but...
Guest:You know, I might lie at the edges.
Guest:All of my nonfiction work takes enormous poetic liberty.
Marc:Well, I think also there's something about, you know, despite whatever we do, no matter how authentic or whatever we're talking about in this moment, however present or real we are, you know, we're still not necessarily really answering to what's going on in our heads.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And how do we do that?
Marc:You can't.
Marc:I think we'd be in trouble if you could do that.
Guest:But we try.
Guest:For some reason, I think of like... But I think you do do it.
Guest:I do.
Guest:I feel like I do it.
Marc:I think the collage structure is as close as you're going to get to manufacturing that.
Guest:There's a good word with that hard pressure on manufacturing.
Guest:I mean, like, you know, my wife sometimes says, I mean, one nice thing that my wife says, she says, you know, like, if we have to write a card to someone, say, a condolence card or a thank you card, you know, I just sort of, I just pull out a pen and we have a card and I just write something very direct.
Guest:She goes, how do you do that in a sense?
Guest:And I just feel like I have...
Guest:As they say, no filter.
Guest:I have a relatively tight wire between what's in my head and what's in my hand.
Guest:I just go there.
Guest:And yes, there are probably layers of bullshit there and layers of self-protection, but I just think 40 years of writing practice, I've built up a relatively tight...
Guest:connection between the stuff in my head, which I'm relatively not afraid of, and that's what I'm going to say on the page.
Marc:The reaction.
Guest:Yeah, and I think if people like the work, they're saying, like, I'll meet you halfway.
Guest:Like,
Guest:This is a bridge across the abyss of human loneliness.
Guest:Whereas sometimes with my work, especially a while ago, they would say, that dude's fucked up.
Guest:It shields his problem.
Guest:Whereas I want to say it's all of our problem.
Guest:And I just have the temerity and stupidity to actually say it.
Marc:Well, I'm glad you do.
Marc:And thank you for talking.
Marc:I think we did all right.
Guest:I did too, Mark.
Guest:Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Marc:So that was, I thought that went well.
Marc:I felt good after that.
Marc:Again, the documentary we were talking about, Marshawn Lynch, A History, is available on iTunes, Amazon, and Vimeo.
Marc:His most recent book is The Trouble with Men, Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power.
Marc:That's available.
Marc:Now let's kind of play some dirty guitar.
Marc:Boomer lives.