Episode 354 - John Hodgman
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, Knicks?
Marc:What the fucking North Carolinians?
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Thank you, guys.
Marc:I know it's been a week or so, but I want to thank everyone down there in Raleigh and the surrounding areas for coming out to Good Nights to see me.
Marc:I had a great time down there.
Marc:I really had a great time.
Marc:Good Nights is a great club.
Marc:It's a hot room.
Marc:It was great.
Marc:How many times can I say great?
Marc:I hadn't been there in 15 years and something happened there.
Marc:I got some closure, people, on a couple of levels.
Marc:Seriously.
Marc:Seriously, some real psychological growth.
Marc:But I'll get to that in a minute.
Marc:Before I get in, let me just tell you who's on the show today.
Marc:John Hodgman.
Marc:Let me tell you something.
Marc:If this episode didn't work out, it would have been three strikes and that was it, man.
Marc:John Hodgman was on an episode.
Marc:It was the only episode that never aired because I lost the fucking file.
Marc:So that happened.
Marc:Then I had John Hodgman on a live one.
Marc:out there in Brooklyn at some festival that was a horrible show, and I didn't put that up.
Marc:So this is it.
Marc:This had to work out, and it did.
Marc:Me and John had a great talk.
Marc:We went places I didn't think we would.
Marc:We got into the books, man.
Marc:We got into the books.
Marc:Let me just tell you, North Carolina, great food, too much food.
Marc:I haven't done one of these riffs before.
Marc:I haven't done one in a while.
Marc:Got there immediately, within an hour.
Marc:I was eating chicken and waffles and chest pie, sweet potato chest pie.
Marc:Day two, roasted chicken, mac and cheese, greens.
Marc:Also had greens on the first night.
Marc:Bam, get to the...
Marc:The club.
Marc:Someone brings me a coffee cake.
Marc:Someone brings me German chocolate cupcakes.
Marc:Somebody brings me chocolate.
Marc:Somebody brings me cookies with episodes of my show on them that I couldn't eat because I want to frame the fucking things.
Marc:Then we go out to barbecue with Andy Forrester, Big A, who was hosting.
Marc:Me and Ryan Singer were on the shows.
Marc:And then we go to Poole's Diner.
Marc:We went to Beasley's that first night for the fried chicken.
Marc:I think the same person on Poole's Diner had more mac and cheese, had Brussels sprouts, had some sort of crab beignets.
Marc:It was nuts.
Marc:I've not recovered from that.
Marc:I'm still eating kale, like too much kale, in order to counteract North Carolina.
Marc:But it was great.
Marc:So here's what I want to tell you.
Marc:Got some closure.
Marc:Now, first of all, I know I told some of you guys the story about what happened to me when I featured there last time.
Marc:The story about the guy I was middling for and the pot and everything.
Marc:But I had forgotten.
Marc:I think I'd forgotten.
Marc:And maybe I told you this.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I'd forgotten.
Marc:The last time I was there, I was not doing well on stage.
Marc:I was featuring.
Marc:I was angry.
Marc:But something happened there that became part of a bit that I did for years.
Marc:North Carolina is the place where I was on stage bombing and in the middle of the set, not doing well, I just decided to say, you know what?
Marc:I'm a Jew.
Marc:Because I was down south and because, I don't know, I wanted to defy that.
Marc:I don't know what I was thinking.
Marc:But that is the place where right up front, without missing a beat, some guy sitting right up front, turns to his wife and says, I knew it.
Marc:And it wasn't malicious.
Marc:It sounded like he was answering a trivia question to a contest he was having in his own head.
Marc:But nonetheless, that became the sort of foundation of a bid I did for years.
Marc:So that kind of was full circle.
Marc:And I went down there and I killed.
Marc:We sold out a few shows.
Marc:We did a bunch.
Marc:I mean, it was amazing.
Marc:So I got a little closure on that.
Marc:You know, I went back somewhat victorious as a new person, new performer and had a great time down there.
Marc:But here's the other thing that was pretty spectacular.
Marc:And by the way, thank you for coming out for those shows.
Marc:I had a lot of people down there, and it was really a pleasure.
Marc:And the hospitality was great.
Marc:The club was great.
Marc:I can't say enough about it.
Marc:I mean, it was a great experience.
Marc:I love North Carolina.
Marc:But that being said...
Marc:I was doing the show Saturday night, I think it was, and I'm trying to work out this bit about a story I told here on this show when I was talking to John Oliver about being in center field, about getting hurt in center field, about the end of sports and how it was a pivotal part of my life, this moment in center field.
Marc:And I do this one part of the bit.
Marc:It takes place when I'm in Pee Wee Little League, and it's not essential.
Marc:I'm not going to tip the bit completely because I hope that you can see it when it's complete as a comedy piece.
Marc:But there's one part of the bit where I do something.
Marc:And this is a packed house.
Marc:A packed house.
Marc:It has to do with baseball.
Marc:So I do this bit.
Marc:It's a physical thing.
Marc:And everyone's laughing, but some guy sitting in the center of the room, he was a middle-aged guy, and he was with his wife, and there was another couple.
Marc:It was two tables of these people.
Marc:They didn't look like they were Marc Maron fans by any means.
Marc:This one guy is hysterical.
Marc:He's hysterical, and he literally looks up and goes, do it again, just do it again.
Marc:Now, I'm not really a dancing monkey, and yeah, I'd already done the bit, but this guy was so hysterical
Marc:He was buckled over.
Marc:He was crying.
Marc:He was like, please do it again.
Marc:And I couldn't help it.
Marc:You're having such a great time.
Marc:I've never seen anyone laugh like this so much before.
Marc:I'm going to do it again.
Marc:I did it again.
Marc:He buckled over again.
Marc:His little physical piece, his baseball piece.
Marc:Then someone at the table next to him says he's a little league coach.
Marc:So I must have just struck a nerve with this guy.
Marc:And he was hysterical.
Marc:I mean, he was just laughing his ass off and everybody was having a great time.
Marc:And I said, well, I need you to help me through this thing, because I was talking about that story where I, you know, I failed to catch a fly ball and I get hit in the face.
Marc:I tell the whole story.
Marc:And after that, after I tell the story, you know, it's a full house.
Marc:And I say that guy.
Marc:So what do you say, coach?
Marc:And he goes, he basically said, well, you tried.
Marc:It was a good effort.
Marc:And I said, I've been needing to hear that for about 40 years.
Marc:It was almost emotional.
Marc:I said, could you tell me to go back to the dugout, please?
Marc:And he says, all right, come on, everybody.
Marc:Let's get in the dugout.
Marc:And and it literally sort of I don't know if literally is the right word, but it worked.
Marc:I felt some emotional closure around this stuff.
Marc:And he came up to me after the show and he wanted to take a picture of me doing this pose that, you know, from the bit I did.
Marc:And it was pretty amazing.
Marc:I mean, it was it was really funny and really touching.
Marc:And it was and it's it's.
Marc:It's only in my memory, my heart and my mind.
Marc:It was not on tape, not captured, except for what I just told you.
Marc:But there was also another moment in Raleigh where I introed a bit where I talk about roosters.
Marc:Basically, I say I had a strange thing happen with a rooster.
Marc:this was another show i think and some some guy sitting in the audience said yeah like an old sort of wise southern voice just on that you know i had a powerful mom with a rooster yeah so i you know i can only assume that his his story was much better than mine you know i just i don't know what it was i could only speculate well i was younger and i don't know and you know i had a
Marc:I was angry, and I couldn't get girls.
Marc:I had that rooster wrestling with it and trying to get it to work.
Marc:Well, that's why I have one ball.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's the story I projected onto him.
Marc:I doubt that was the story.
Marc:Look, great time, North Carolina.
Marc:Now it's time to talk to Professor John Hodgman.
Marc:Finally, it's happening.
It's happening.
Marc:John Hodgman, this is his third appearance on the show.
Guest:It is in a way, in a way.
Marc:The first one I mislabeled and lost.
Marc:The second one was a train wreck, though.
Marc:I think that you probably I think that that might surface at some time segmented.
Guest:Well, it was a live show outdoors.
Marc:For drunk people.
Marc:For a few of them, none of them being WTF fans.
Guest:We can stipulate all live shows outdoors are for drunk people.
Marc:Okay, that's true.
Guest:And not just drunk people, but people who need an excuse to get drunk in the middle of the afternoon.
Marc:Right, and they were in an exclusive part of this festival.
Marc:It was the first year.
Marc:My issue with it was that, and I think you said afterwards, I mean, I think you were great on it, and I think Klosterman was great, but I was desperately trying to get through it.
Marc:And I was not enjoying what I was seeing in front of me, audience-wise.
Guest:You didn't enjoy a half-full amphitheater with people coming and going as they pleased.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And then loud women up front who were very drunk.
Marc:People who were at a food festival at which they apparently had no food.
Marc:Right.
Guest:So they were very angry as well.
Guest:There was problems.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:There was definitely problems.
Guest:It was a work in progress.
Guest:But performing outdoors.
Marc:No good.
Marc:It was a lesson.
Marc:It was a lesson to be learned.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But surely in your experience, you had confronted that before in the past.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:It was obviously- It's never- So had I. And even so, I was like, yeah, okay.
Guest:It'll be fine this time.
Marc:Why did we do it?
Marc:because it's never good festivals are never good because outdoors is never good yeah they used to do it a comedy day i'll tell you why i'll tell you exactly why i did it i can't speak for you because someone called up and said we want you
Marc:And I was like, ah, here I come.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I'm not even going to think about it.
Marc:Yes, here I am.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:All right.
Marc:No, that was my same experience, too.
Guest:And then the other thing was that we had had the conversation.
Guest:We had done the show.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:The WTF show.
Marc:Yeah, before.
Guest:In New York.
Guest:And I don't know if I ever told you, but I walked into that thing utterly terrified.
Guest:In my manager's office?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Terrified about what?
Guest:Utterly terrified.
Guest:Because...
Guest:A couple of reasons.
Guest:All right.
Guest:One, you are a really good comic who I've been seeing perform and admiring for a long time.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Oh, I used to see you down at Luna Lounge.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He's angry about something.
Marc:That fella.
Marc:Is that what you said?
Guest:For a long time, I knew you just as angry feller.
Guest:But I also knew you were a decent guy because I saw you at Bumbershoot.
Guest:My friend Amy, who is such a fan of yours, said, could you introduce me?
Guest:And I said, I've barely ever met him once, but you were very nice to her.
Guest:You may not remember it.
Guest:Maybe there was some adjustment to your medication at the time, but you were very nice to her.
Marc:No medication.
Marc:I've proudly gone unmedicated for many years.
Guest:Amy who?
Guest:You won't recall.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Well, I'm glad I was nice.
Marc:You were terrific.
Marc:I'm never not nice.
Marc:I'm sometimes misunderstood.
Marc:That's the way I'm going to frame it.
Guest:Exactly so.
Guest:And I also knew from the show that you were a really good interviewer and that you would go to places that needed to get gone to.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:And then for me, it was the perfect, what I consider to be the perfect storm.
Mm-hmm.
Guest:Because I had and have achieved a career in comedy through a very unusual route.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:I never intended to be a stand-up comic.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I don't describe myself as such now.
Guest:That is an art form that I appreciate.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And insofar as I contributed to comedy and contributed to comedy, it was always as a literary humorist.
Guest:Right.
Guest:A guy who would get up on stage and read from pages and produce some, you know, low chuckles for the arched eyebrow set.
Guest:So, you know, my whole life is predicated on fraud.
Right.
Marc:Stop it, John.
Marc:I'm not going to let you seek humility through self-effacing.
Guest:That's absolutely fair.
Guest:No, I think you're right.
Guest:I could go down that rabbit hole.
Marc:We got into the rabbit hole thing in the living room.
Guest:Yeah, Mark was showing me his new... My new stereo.
Guest:Stereo system, which has a bunch of... I mean, it literally looks like something out of Forbidden Planet.
Marc:Well, yeah.
Marc:Well, that's sexy, though.
Marc:Vacuum tubes.
Marc:Glowing vacuum tubes.
Marc:This is how latent nerds have midlife crisis.
Marc:You know what?
Marc:I'm not going to buy a car.
Marc:I'm going to buy a fucking tube amp and sit there and look at it and think it's doing something, which it is.
Marc:These are the consolations of men who feel their mortality.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Feel the mortality and don't buy fast things.
Guest:Yes, exactly.
Marc:Don't put their bodies under hurling pieces of metal.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:To push the limits of that mortality.
Guest:Yes, yes, yes.
Guest:But the rabbit hole thing- The morbid and sedentary.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Turn to vacuum tubes, things that spin slowly.
Marc:The pathologically nostalgic.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Reaching back into the sort of little packets of emotions that are hopefully still there and unopened since high school.
Guest:Oh, yeah, precisely.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It just feels like there's a whole range of culture that is designed to hit those pleasure centers of nostalgia.
Guest:Like, you remember that show, Super Train?
Guest:Remember that show?
Guest:Remember the cartoon version of Planet of the Apes?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And and that's where culture I mean, that's sort of where the culture ends.
Guest:You know, like there's a whole there's a whole subset of culture born of the Internet, I think.
Guest:Well, it's just designed to poke those pleasure centers in your brain and do nothing more than that.
Guest:Well, I think it's just a sort of remember this.
Marc:Remember this.
Marc:Remember.
Marc:Well, yeah, I think it started happening when they started building TV shows around or stage shows.
Marc:Maybe even, well, nostalgia has always been something, but I think in a smaller technological universe, it was limited to oldie stations.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Like for our parents' generation.
Marc:Right.
Marc:They could sit and listen to the big bopper on some weird AM dial.
Guest:And then when they- Dum, dum, dum, dum, dum.
Guest:We're spinning the oldies here with two middle-aged men.
Guest:It's a new podcast.
Marc:So your dad did that too?
Guest:No, no, that was me.
Guest:Come on!
Guest:I was the one.
Guest:Oh, no, Mark, seriously.
Guest:I was the one who was buying all of the old-timey radio albums in my house.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I liked him too because of my father, though.
Guest:Yeah, but no, no.
Guest:It was not my parents.
Guest:I was just a weird, sedentary only child in Brookline, Massachusetts, who was buying old-timey radio albums and listening to the Captain Midnight episodes especially.
Marc:Did you listen to War of the Worlds?
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:Of course I did.
Guest:I went into the library.
Guest:I went into the library.
Guest:Right, the library to listen to Orson Welles.
Guest:You go into the library and you'd queue it up and you'd listen to the old-time age.
Guest:You'd have your little room and your shitty headphones.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:So, you know, New Year's Eve, I was watching the all-night Twilight Zone marathon on the UHF channel.
Guest:Like, that was...
Guest:That was how it was for me.
Guest:That's how you were built?
Marc:That's how the brain was built?
Guest:I was born at the age of 40.
Guest:I'm only just beginning to age now.
Guest:Thank God.
Guest:Now that I'm 41.
Marc:You're finally coming into it.
Guest:I would rush home from Brookline High School in order to make sure that I could listen to Fresh Air.
Marc:Popular, were you?
Marc:But no, I think that the turn for me, when I first acknowledged it, when I was an angrier man, was when they made a stage play out of the Brady Bunch.
Marc:They made camp out of our childhood experience through television.
Marc:And I think that that opened some Pandora's box of nerd nostalgia that took over the culture.
Guest:Yeah, and it hit the internet hard.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:Because all of a sudden, not only did you have the nostalgia impulse, which I think is kind of universal, but...
Guest:an incredible resource for mining, documenting, and sharing nostalgia.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:It's unbelievable.
Marc:I don't even get involved with it.
Marc:To me, it was such a more earnest and interesting thing when I had to take a drive or a walk to a store that might have something.
Marc:We talked a little bit about this on the- You're saying nostalgia was better in the old days?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:That's what you're saying?
Guest:That's when nostalgia was better?
Guest:Wow.
Guest:You just broke my brain in half.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What part of the- You know when nostalgia was better?
Guest:In the old days.
Marc:but let me know what i miss nostalgia let me make my point if i found something like when you had to order something through the mail yeah that took a while to get to you or you had to take a drive or you're in a town that had a store that might have a thing you would make a pilgrimage the process of the nostalgia was uh was it was a lot uh it took more time and there was more poetry in it than me you know clicking on two things and and then getting it a day later oh and then being disappointed
Guest:Absolutely.
Marc:I mean, that was that was part of the journey.
Marc:What happened?
Guest:The smell of the old comic books at Million Year Picnic in Harvard Square.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:That was a that was a pilgrimage to a holy place where you would take your limited funds and take the take the train.
Marc:So what happens to this generation that are going to be journeyless in their in their quest for for the past?
Guest:I think they're going to be fine.
Guest:And they're if they're not already laughing at us, they will be doing so soon.
Marc:We can't beat ourselves up for for being our age.
Guest:John.
Guest:I'm not.
Guest:I am not beating myself for being my last feel that I have.
Guest:I have the the portly body and weird facial hair of the middle aged man I was always meant to be.
Marc:But let's talk about this literary comedy thing and then go back in time to.
Guest:Right.
Marc:So Massachusetts, because you grew up around the corner from where I lived for four years.
Marc:We you ate at the Busy Bee.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:Yes, I did.
Marc:With Peter, the guy who owned the Busy Bee?
Guest:Well, I was not on a first name basis with him because I was but a child.
Marc:But his son worked there as well.
Marc:And it wasn't necessarily good.
Marc:And there was always that feeling that this is just one step to the side of hospital food.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, I went into the Busy Bee in my teenage years growing up around there.
Marc:That's Brookline Avenue and Carleton Street.
Guest:Beacon Street in Carlin.
Guest:Beacon and Carlin, yeah.
Guest:Still there.
Guest:I just drove by there the other day.
Marc:But your family house is no longer with your family?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:My father sold that house and moved down to Coolidge Corner.
Guest:They went uptown.
Guest:Yeah, they went uptown.
Guest:To be near the big shops.
Guest:Yeah, so they could walk to the stores.
Guest:Yeah, the Brooks Drugs.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:I worked at, I don't know what your memory of that area is, at Coolidge Corner.
Marc:I worked at Edibles.
Marc:Do you remember?
Guest:Of course.
Guest:Of course I remember Edibles.
Marc:This weird- This nostalgia hour with John Hodgman and- A post-hippie sort of restaurant.
Marc:Maybe you went in there with your family and I made you pancakes.
Guest:No, but I bet you- When did you work there?
Guest:Do you want to say the years off the air?
Guest:No, no.
Marc:I have nothing to hide.
Marc:I'm just being silly.
Marc:Oh, it would have been 19 sort of- Let me put it to you this way.
Marc:85-ish.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:So-
Guest:Yeah, I went to Edibles when I worked at the Coolidge Corner Theater, the movie house, from 1989 until, and then I went to college, but I came back and worked summers probably until 1995 or six.
Guest:Was Edibles still hung on until 1989?
Guest:In 1989, it was there for sure, 88, 89.
Marc:My girlfriend worked at the Coolidge Corner movie house.
Marc:What was her name?
Marc:Sarah Rubin, but she would have been probably a little before.
Guest:The name does ring a bell.
Guest:It was a close-knit community of weirdos.
Guest:No, there used to be a guy.
Marc:Who was the guy that had the longish hair that always wore the cowboy boots and boozed?
Marc:Harry Snyder.
Marc:He was there.
Marc:That guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah?
Guest:By the time I worked for him, he had recovered and was off the booze.
Guest:Great.
Guest:One of the funniest people I've ever met.
Guest:A huge influence on me.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Harry Snyder.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Why?
Why?
Marc:Really smart, really funny.
Marc:Film stuff?
Marc:He was that guy that's sort of like, wow, you can be smart and funny for you?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He and then the projectionist at the theater, Harry Friedman, were pals.
Guest:And when you work in a movie theater- How old were you?
Guest:Well, when I started working there, I was 17 or 18.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was like my last year of high school, and then that summer, then I went away.
Guest:The theater closed for a little while, reopened as sort of a nonprofit, and it kind of lost—it was still a great place to work, but it lost a lot of the grime.
Guest:Because when I started working there—
Guest:It had been for many years a repertory.
Guest:I started working there because I loved nostalgia.
Guest:I would go there to see Marx Brothers movies.
Guest:Marx Brothers triple features on a Saturday afternoon.
Marc:The traditional sort of 70s repertory, two movies a night kind of thing.
Guest:And different every night.
Guest:And by the time I started working there, once again, nostalgia wasn't as good as it used to be.
Guest:It had become a second run.
Marc:Right, and they'd also run new foreign films.
Guest:And they started revamping the foreign films.
Marc:I saw the premiere of Dennis Hopper's Out of the Blue at the Coolidge Corner, one of the most disturbing movies ever.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:No, I've never seen that one.
Marc:And I saw a documentary called Huey Bluey.
Guest:I saw that, too.
Guest:When he was there?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I was there.
Guest:But do you know what, Mark?
Guest:This is what I'm going to say.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This was Terry Zweigoff directed Huey Bluey, which was about an elderly black blues violinist or string band music.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:And Terry Zweigoff, who went on to direct Crumb and Ghost World.
Guest:A great director.
Guest:And I saw that too, but I saw it at the Brattle.
Guest:And I saw him perform at the Brattle.
Marc:Wait, was that... Am I mixing up my theaters?
Guest:Well, the Brattle is a similar theater for those of you still with us.
Marc:That must have been it.
Marc:It may have been that they did two different... No, they wouldn't have done that.
Marc:That must have been where I saw it.
Marc:My mistake.
Marc:That's my memory.
Marc:You know what else I saw at the Brattle?
Guest:But we could have been in the same room at the same time.
Marc:Well, he only did one night.
Marc:He was old and he was kind of an oddball.
Guest:We must have been there at the exact same time.
Marc:I saw Spaulding... I was with my friend Damon Graff.
Marc:I saw Spaulding Gray perform swimming to Cambodia at the Brattle.
Guest:I did not see that, sir.
Guest:I went in for nostalgia.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And by the time I started working at the movie theater, they had moved on and already I was nostalgic for nostalgia.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I saw a lot of great theaters, but mostly it was a great.
Guest:I saw a lot of great movies.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:And mostly I just it was a great, amazing work experience.
Guest:But do you remember the one that- And I will say, so Harry Snyder made a joke that reverberates with me even today.
Guest:It was one of those foundational jokes that you hear someone say.
Guest:It was a movie called Le Souf Occur, Murmur of the Heart.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the name of the director is eluding me at the moment.
Guest:But it was a French film from the 60s about a young French boy who is sexually initiated by his young mother.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Sure.
Marc:That's one you got to go home really thinking about.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so Snyder...
Guest:I remember it was a big hit in Brookline, so we had two people ripping tickets.
Guest:That's how you knew.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There were a lot of people coming in.
Guest:Yeah, calling the second guy.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And Snyder was ripping tickets across from me, and he goes, that's straight ahead for Lesouf Okur, or known in English as, coming mother...
Guest:So the double entendre got you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was just like, I was like, you know, that that was one of those those one of those jokes that opened went deep that opened my brain to a whole new level of joke.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, and the beautiful thing about working in movie theaters as well as working in in video stores, you know, when you know, when America had such things.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Was that if you were someone who liked, you know, movie, the arts, popular culture of any kind.
Yeah.
Guest:You got to see a whole lot.
Guest:And then you also just got to sit around a whole lot and talk.
Marc:That was that was something that we were talking about a bit in the last episode that we did live was that, you know, when you go to a comic book store, you went to a record store like I literally used to when I lived in the Lower East Side and I was starting as a comic, I didn't nothing.
Marc:You know, I would drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, maybe smoke a little weed and then make these rounds.
Marc:Around the Lower East Side to the record store to the guitar store.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Just to sit and talk to the guys in there.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:About whatever.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You know, and you'd have these real discussions about movies and you'd like to be there.
Marc:It would be like the way you'd spend an afternoon if you could.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you would learn.
Guest:I mean, you would learn about stuff and you would learn about people's lives and you would learn about jokes.
Guest:And grown ups.
Guest:You would learn how to banter and grown ups.
Marc:I mean, that was the real appeal.
Marc:It's like I'm here in this place that's grown up where people understand things that I don't.
Marc:And they're allowing me to hang out because I must have what it takes to hang in.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that's how I learned anything.
Guest:And it was sort of like, you know, an apprenticeship.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:In in in in grown up culture.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And in popular culture and in humor culture and whatever.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And for me, though, it was always sort of like I really think that in this is probably going a little deeper, but I definitely sought out, you know, male role models.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Who, you know, were not my dad.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because my dad was limited.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And there were these times where I'd be like, why can't my dad know this?
Marc:And then at some point you cross a line where it's like, well, he just doesn't.
Marc:So you're just going to have to hang out with these guys that can teach you other things.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I'm an only child.
Guest:I was super close to my mom and dad.
Guest:My mom's no longer living.
Guest:My dad and I are still very close.
Guest:But when you're an only child in an intact family, that becomes a three-legged stool that is very sturdy.
Guest:Is it a lot of pressure?
Marc:I mean, sometimes when I think of Only Childs, I'm like, well, they didn't have any other ones.
Marc:I better not fuck up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, I think that there was an element of that for sure.
Guest:But what's interesting is that I experienced it as pure pleasure.
Guest:I don't have to share anything.
Guest:I don't have to share any toys.
Guest:I don't have to share any space.
Guest:By the time I was 14 years old,
Guest:uh i had i didn't have a room of my own i had kind of a suite of my own do you know what i mean like floor of the house yeah yeah you know i was like that's why you like the chateau so much yeah yeah it's very it's very similar to my growing up i'm nostalgic i'm nostalgic for my for my growing up when i would pretend that my room was an apartment in a city yeah and i would buy a fern and i would put it next to did you sure come
Guest:Yeah, I would put it next to I would create this whole little adult life for myself in this room because my parents bought bought a house in Western Brookline in Chestnut Hill, which is now a very Tony suburb at the time out by the mall.
Guest:Yeah, closer to the mall.
Guest:And it was kind of a middle.
Guest:At the time, it was an upper middle class suburb.
Guest:There were some people around us who were very wealthy.
Marc:There's a Legal Seafood and a Bloomingdale's, I think.
Guest:Over by the mall.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I think those things are still there.
Guest:I don't know for sure.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:No reason to fact check now.
Guest:That's fine.
Guest:But you're bringing up many flash memories.
Guest:Route 9, was it?
Guest:Yes, Route 9.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Maybe that's why I'm here, to sort of confirm some of your memories of the Boston area?
Guest:Maybe I misunderstand what this podcast is all about.
Marc:It's to walk you through your childhood and for me to identify with the landscape.
Guest:First R-rated movie I saw was at the General Cinemas.
Guest:At the Chestnut Hill Mall.
Guest:At the Chestnut Hill Mall, which was at that time the world headquarters of General Cinemas.
Guest:I don't know if that corporation still exists.
Guest:And hang on, I have to clear my throat for a second.
Marc:General Cinemas, was that... Is that...
Guest:yeah it was very jazzy yeah very jazzy pre pre-trailer yeah with the little dots coming out of the projector yes this is getting great really nostalgic yeah no very nostalgic what uh what was the movie so my first r-rated movie was uh 1984 starring john hurt right and and the and the occasional moaning sounds of annie lennox and you had read the book of course
Guest:Yeah, because I was a pretentious, weird... Child.
Guest:I was a pretentious, weird man-child who was fond of the arrhythmics.
Guest:I had heard about them on NPR.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Saw that they were doing the music for 1984, was interested.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I knew it would be Richard Burton's last film.
Marc:And your parents let you go?
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, yeah.
Guest:But I mean, here's the thing.
Guest:I was so I was not allowed to be in an R rated movie.
Guest:So I had to have been.
Guest:Well, it was 1984.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was that was when the movie came out.
Guest:That's why it was.
Guest:That's the only reason in the world they would make the movie 1984, because when you go back and look at that movie, it's crazy that they made it.
Guest:It's it's terrifying.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That movie is so uncompromising and and grim.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And beautifully so.
Marc:And I was like 20, 20 years old.
Marc:So you were and it was real.
Marc:You were 13 or 14.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So so I was 71.
Guest:So I was 13 years old.
Guest:And the only like it ends in the most terrifying, grim, awful, pessimistic way as it should.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:Some sort of silo in a chair.
Marc:I mean, I think you're thinking of Brazil.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Sorry.
Guest:But I mean, you know, six, six of one.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Half a Terry Gilliam of the other.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But like the fact that that movie was made at all exists solely because they're like, oh, it's almost 1984.
Guest:I guess we have to make a movie of 1984.
Marc:It's a nostalgia thing.
Guest:Yeah, we have to do it.
Marc:We have to ruin that book.
Guest:But they didn't ruin it.
Guest:But that's the thing.
Guest:They didn't ruin it.
Guest:If you if you you should see that movie if you haven't seen it or if you haven't seen it since then.
Guest:I haven't.
Guest:I Netflixed it up the other day.
Guest:And Richard Burton is astonishing in it.
Guest:It's an amazing movie, both for what it is and for the fact that it is so grim and uncompromising and terrifying and awful, as it should be.
Guest:And they made it within a year of making Top Gun on either end.
Guest:I don't know when Top Gun was made.
Marc:So you see it as sort of a...
Marc:It's a total anomaly.
Guest:A risque anomaly.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:It's a total anomaly for movies of the 80s.
Guest:You can't even see it as a throwback to the movies of the 70s.
Guest:The only reason it exists is because some marketing person said- We can sell this.
Guest:Yeah, we can sell this because it is now the year 1983.
Guest:I didn't read the book, but it sounds like a good hook.
Guest:Yeah, we might as well get someone to do this because everyone's going to be talking about it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You always wonder about those marketing decisions because when I first heard- Do you remember when Nike was running commercials-
Marc:in movie theaters, and Iggy Pops, I think it was Search and Destroy, was the... Oh, yeah.
Marc:Well, I got a buddy in the music business who said that the only reason that song got used was some marketing dude was searching song titles.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:And I think it was Search and Destroy and said, I wonder what this sounds like.
Marc:I don't know who this guy is.
Marc:Yeah, there you go.
Marc:And that turned Iggy Pop's career around.
Guest:Yeah, that's how it goes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's the gift.
Guest:What I'm hoping for is in about five years, someone hears this podcast of the two of us going, tsk, tsk.
Marc:and they go we could probably use that in a holo commercial and a hologram commercial and then didn't the drum pick up it did a little of that at the end it did it did a little buddy rich at the end so uh all right wait your dad was a an academic no my dad was a was and and is now an academic he was a businessman
Guest:And what that means is, I would say it to his face, still vaguely mysterious to me.
Guest:I mean, he was- He called himself that?
Guest:Well, he was a business administrator.
Guest:I mean, he had gone to law school for a year, didn't like it, got a degree in accounting, and then came and started working as CEOs of emerging technology companies in Boston.
Guest:And he was a business manager.
Guest:He was a executive manager.
Guest:Doing those sorts of things.
Marc:Do you know what they do?
Marc:I mean, no, I still don't.
Guest:I still have no idea.
Marc:I can't tell you how many people I've talked to that were unclear about what their fathers actually did.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Like what the day to day was.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, I mean, you know, he would go in and have meetings and run everything going in your department.
Guest:He would run companies.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:And this department seems like it's not holding its own.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Maybe we need a new guy in there.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:And, you know, he was one of these professional CEOs, you know, to some degree for whom the company itself.
Guest:He wasn't he knows a lot about entrepreneurism, but he's not an entrepreneur.
Guest:He didn't start companies.
Guest:He would be hired from one company to the next to sort of get things moving along.
Guest:He could have run for president.
Guest:He could have run for president.
Guest:If you ever saw a photo of him, he looks like a retired president.
Guest:He should be a president.
Guest:And he worked for Mike Dukakis for a couple years as the director of employment security, which when I was a little kid for the state of Massachusetts, which you asked me what it means...
Guest:I have no idea what he did all day.
Guest:But he was in government.
Guest:I know he had a bathroom in his office.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I know we had a state car.
Guest:We had a bone white Oldsmobile Cutlass Cruiser.
Guest:Nice.
Marc:It was a sweet ride.
Marc:Isn't that weird what you hang on to when you go to your dad's work?
Marc:You're like, wow.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Do you remember the first time you go to your dad's office and just to see what's on the desk, you're like, wow.
Marc:where'd you get this yeah what what is this where do i get a blotter like i literally was you know of the mindset well it's clear that i need a desk a desk set my dad was a surgeon so he had all these these like uh like he had um i don't know models of of knees and and and connecting things he was a orthopedic so i was like that is the coolest thing how can i bring one of those home
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Why don't I have one of these just for work, Mark?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Just for work.
Marc:That's a work thing.
Marc:That's cool.
Guest:But I didn't.
Guest:So, yeah.
Guest:So my my my dad, my dad's work was kind of a mystery to me.
Guest:And and I think that that's why, to some degree, I really became early on fascinated with working and working in jobs that I kind of could put my hands on and understand what was going on.
Guest:Like ripping tickets in a movie theater.
Guest:Like I get what's going on here.
Guest:But not you're not at a lathe.
Guest:Is that what it's called?
Guest:I was not.
Guest:No, I never.
Guest:I never worked at a lathe.
Guest:My first job was at the stock in the stock room.
Guest:Oh, yes.
Guest:Boxes.
Guest:And do you remember in Boston?
Guest:There had been the, you know, speaking of movie theaters, there had been the Exeter Street Theater.
Guest:Yeah, sure, that's where they ran Rocky Horror.
Guest:Right, exactly so.
Guest:And then it became a Fridays.
Guest:Half a Fridays, yeah.
Guest:Fridays downstairs, and they turned the upper thing into retail.
Guest:They turned the theater into retail.
Guest:I remember that.
Marc:There was a horrible day for everybody.
Marc:There was a fight, I think, a small fight to keep the Exeter intact.
Guest:There was, I think, a small fight to keep all of those art houses intact.
Guest:But they all went away.
Guest:The Hole in the Wall.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The Brattle.
Guest:The Orson Welles.
Guest:The Brattle might still be there.
Guest:The Orson Welles.
Guest:Where was that?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was in Cambridge.
Marc:I remember that theater.
Marc:Hold on.
Marc:It's not coming.
Guest:The Janice.
Guest:The Janice.
Guest:Remember the Janice?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But the Orson Welles.
Marc:I'm trying to remember where that was.
Marc:I can't.
Guest:It was a good time to grow up and a good place to grow up for a human being like me who was born at the age of 40.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, yeah.
Guest:Because I had access to so much great art house theater.
Marc:Art house theaters, art in general, the academic world of Boston and Cambridge.
Guest:And also it was still a time pre-cable where the UHF band was flooded with old TV shows.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Three Stooges.
Guest:Three Stooges.
Guest:Marx Brothers.
Guest:Marx Brothers.
Guest:Bowery Boys.
Guest:Bowery Boys.
Guest:Get Smart.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:Was in big rotation.
Guest:What's the one?
Guest:Oh, Honeymooners, of course.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Twilight Zone.
Guest:Lucy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Did you say Louis C.K.?
Guest:Lucy.
Guest:Louis C.K., you remember that old show?
Marc:Just Lucy.
Guest:No, Lucy.
Marc:Yes, of course.
Yeah.
Marc:So you were this weird little kid wandering around with a mustache and glasses.
Guest:I did not have a mustache.
Guest:I could not grow one, but I was looking for one.
Guest:I did not have eyeglasses much to my- Where'd you go to high school?
Guest:Much to my frustration, I did not have eyeglasses.
Guest:I went to Brookline High School, the public high school.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Very good public high school there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I grew my hair long.
Guest:I dressed like Doctor Who.
Guest:I watched a lot of public television.
Guest:Did you have friends?
Guest:Carried a briefcase.
Guest:Yeah, I had friends.
Guest:The nice thing about Brookline was that Boston- They're all kind of nerdy kids.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, Boston overall is a jock town, jock town USA.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:But there was, you know, there there were deep pockets of nerdery throughout throughout New England, especially in the Boston.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Where they live, because between MIT, you know, Harvard and, you know, and I wouldn't say BU, but I mean, most of the academics, the biggest academics in the world lived in the area.
Marc:So their kids were not generally monsters.
Guest:Right, unless they were trying to compensate.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Fuck you, Dad.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:But, you know, I hung with the weirdos.
Guest:And, you know, this was in a period of time when nerd culture was still very marginal and inchoate.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:But it wasn't a culture.
Marc:It actually had integrity to it.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:It was a culture, but it was just a way kids were.
Marc:It wasn't a fashion culture.
Marc:oh yes that's for sure that uh you know you had your chess club you had your dnd players you had the people that were watching the tv shows you were yeah but there weren't many people going i want to be like those guys no no no no not at all that didn't happen until a few years ago there were no there were no there were no fashion trends and media empires based on yeah no it seemed like those those kids had found this thing and thank god they did because well because they saw you know we we we found we found solace
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:Like in each other's company.
Marc:And that's what all subcultures are.
Marc:And generally more a little more intelligent, I would think.
Marc:I don't know if you like it seems to me that or at least a little more obsessed with something at an earlier age.
Guest:Smarter than you stoners, that's for sure.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:But but there were some stoners within the nerd culture.
Guest:Oh, sure.
Guest:I mean, there were, there were, there were obviously, look, you had, you had your, you had your jock stairs, you had your freak stairs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You had your heavy metal stairs.
Guest:You had all the stairs where people hung up.
Guest:I had to.
Guest:But then there was a quadrangle where everyone.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Marc:Because of my sense of humor, I was, I had to pass through all quadrants.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That was my, that was my existence.
Yeah.
Guest:Well, I led an extremely untortured life.
Guest:I was not overly bullied.
Guest:Even though I was clearly an eccentric, I was not tortured.
Marc:Not an intentional eccentric.
Marc:You were genuinely peculiar.
Guest:No, an entirely intentional eccentric.
Guest:I was an incredible catalog of affectations.
Marc:Like, what were some of your favorites?
Marc:Let's get nostalgic.
Marc:Beside the briefcase.
Marc:The briefcase I like.
Guest:The briefcase had been my dad's briefcase.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And you made the decision it was time.
Guest:I'm not going to be carrying a backpack.
Guest:I'm going to be carrying a briefcase.
Guest:Drenchcoat.
Guest:No, an overcoat.
Guest:You know, I was very influenced sartorially by Tom Baker, the fourth Doctor Who.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:So a long overcoat, long scarf.
Guest:I wore a long hair.
Guest:I had long hair because my next door neighbor who was older than me, Peter Rosenmeier, had long hair and he was cool.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And I wore a black fedora.
Marc:Really?
Guest:On top of my long hair.
Marc:The sophomore high school-ish?
Guest:Yeah, I would say sophomore, junior.
Marc:That's when you start making the big clothing decisions on your own.
Guest:Yeah, you know what?
Guest:I'm my own person.
Guest:Yeah, I'm going to start sewing my Spider-Man costume now.
Guest:I've got ideas.
Guest:D&D, chess, where were we at?
Guest:D&D, I was totally, I was on board with D&D.
Guest:Sure, you supported it.
Guest:Which is ironic because it is a boardless board game.
Guest:I was on board with D&D, totally had more in common with those kids than many others.
Guest:I loved the idea of sitting around with your male friends in a place of sexual calm.
Yeah.
Guest:And creating landscapes.
Guest:And creating landscapes in your mind where you were heroic or powerful in any way.
Guest:The fact that I had to fucking roll dice and do math seemed extraneous and complicated to me.
Guest:And I still, you know, I think that's part of the reason why I don't quite understand what my dad does because I'm a pretty smart dude and I got to a certain degree in math, but that stuff does make my...
Guest:Eyes crossed to a certain degree.
Marc:Yeah, I'm not.
Marc:No, thank you.
Marc:Don't have the temperament for it.
Guest:I watch a lot of public like, you know, and that's the thing about being an only child is that you are you are part of a trio.
Guest:And so it's like once you hit teenagerdom.
Guest:I never felt like rebellion against my parents.
Guest:They were my pals.
Guest:I kind of felt like my parents were my roommates as much as they were my parents.
Guest:I had a lot of freedom to go and do and associate with whomever I wanted.
Guest:And consequently, I didn't really do a lot other than sort of maybe...
Guest:go with some kids who hopped in a pool.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:Well, they lucked out.
Marc:You weren't a fuck up.
Guest:I wasn't a monster.
Guest:Like the worst thing, the worst thing I didn't was probably, I agreed to go to a murder mystery dinner party at a nerd's friend's house.
Guest:And that was a moment.
Guest:That was an intense moment.
Marc:That was a big transgression for you?
Guest:Well, no.
Guest:They wouldn't know what it was.
Guest:I knew what I was getting myself into, but I didn't appreciate until I was in there.
Guest:It's like, you know what?
Guest:There are limits.
Guest:There are limits to the nerdery that I'm going to partake in.
Guest:That was too nerdy?
Guest:It was too... It was really...
Guest:What happened?
Guest:You know what I'm talking about?
Guest:A murder mystery dinner party where you go.
Guest:It's like a live clue game.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like it's a lot.
Guest:It's you know, LARPing is live action role playing.
Guest:Oh, OK.
Guest:You know, there's people who dress up as.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:But it's not a sexual thing.
Guest:No, no, no, no.
Guest:You weren't.
Guest:No, no, no, no, no, no.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:There was not.
Guest:It was.
Guest:It was.
Guest:Well, actually, there were some girls came.
Guest:to the murder mystery dinner party, which was really terrifying and exciting.
Guest:And I remember, what I remember the most about that evening was, I had to have been a freshman or sophomore year.
Guest:And I had fallen in with some friends, many of whom are still pals, you know, who liked movies and who liked science fiction, who liked, you know, weird stuff and comics and underground culture that I dug in a nerdy vein, right?
Guest:And they said, we're going to go over to this dude's house and we're going to have this murder mystery dinner party.
Guest:And I'm like, well, I am already a middle-aged man with no shame.
Guest:And you have the fedora.
Guest:And I've got the fedora.
Guest:So I will go.
Guest:And I think that I actually was assigned...
Guest:A character of a deranged millionaire.
Guest:I think that that was my character.
Guest:And then there was the Texas oil tycoon was this one guy and the mysterious figure.
Guest:And then they had made friends with some other nerds, some nerd girls from across the border in Newton.
Guest:And they came to this thing and it was very terrifying, exciting and eye-opening to know that there could be nerd girls in the world, which is great.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And the two things I remember from that moment were when one of the guys that I didn't know very well and one of these girls that I didn't know at all realized that they knew each other from online.
Guest:And this had to have been 1984 or 85.
Guest:So the beginning of it?
Guest:Early, early adopters.
Guest:AOL shit.
Guest:Well before that.
Guest:CompuServe.
Guest:CompuServe, if that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:Right.
Marc:So they were real nerds.
Marc:They were online before anyone else.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They knew each other by their screen names on some weird bulletin board that they were hooking up to by putting the telephone into a cradle.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:And so that was like, oh, here is the future.
Guest:There's one future.
Marc:I will play a role.
Guest:There's one future that I'm really interested in, which is that.
Guest:And there's another future in which I do this again.
Guest:And that can never happen again.
Guest:That future has to end now.
Guest:I think I was wearing a suit with shorts.
Guest:That was my eccentricity.
Guest:And I was like, this is too much even for me.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:You're way out of your comfort zone.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's just like, you know what?
Guest:I got to I got to maintain some like I'll do the I'll do the overcoat and the and the weird David Byrne to two huge suit and the long hair and the and the whatever.
Guest:But I need to I need to have some one toe in cool or else it's not all will be lost.
Guest:It's not going to be OK.
Marc:You know, when did the drinking start?
Guest:Oh, well, that, you know, it's interesting that I was not politically, but effectively straight edge throughout high school.
Guest:Never did a drug, never took a drink.
Guest:Senior year, I fell under the sway of some charismatic pals who were, it turned out, alcoholics.
Marc:Those are the future killers, I call them.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I could go either way with the charismatic pal.
Marc:How far down the rabbit hole are you going to follow that charismatic pal?
Guest:I'm lucky because I liked alcohol the moment I drank it.
Marc:I guess that's lucky.
Marc:If you're not saying this at a meeting.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:I liked it as much.
Guest:And I certainly, by the time I got to college...
Guest:You know, wanted to see how I experimented with some.
Guest:How far can I push this?
Guest:Not appropriate behaviors.
Marc:Well, who are your alcoholic heroes?
Guest:Oh, well, I think it would be complicated to name them by name.
Guest:But they were two friends who are still friends and are dudes who I love dearly and who were two of the most profound personal, emotional, comedic, intellectual influences upon my life.
Guest:Who also were and are drunks and in different stages of recovery, depending on what year it is.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:Really?
Guest:So they're full on?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I don't know.
Guest:I don't know precisely where their sobriety is at this time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I'm a 41-year-old person, and I spend a lot of time worrying about them and helping them and being disappointed by them by realizing that they were going to go and do the things that drunks do, which is...
Guest:uh you know ruin your life yeah you know yeah you know and lie even to their closest friends yeah and that sort of thing but it was it was it was not even a hard stretch for me to forgive them and i'm in touch with both of them and i love them and wish them all the best but uh you know they they still struggle you know what i mean sure and i you know i emulated their behaviors because i was like this is great these guys are fun these guys are fun and they're pirates
Guest:Their pirates are terrific.
Guest:They show me an alternative way of living.
Guest:I mean, I'm still going to go to AP class and get all A's because I got to go to Yale.
Guest:You know what I'm saying?
Guest:But, you know, and then once I was in Yale, which is where it's an accredited four-year college that I went to.
Marc:I've heard of it.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:It's one of the big ones.
Guest:Once I was in college, I pushed, you know, I pushed the behavior in ways to just sort of see, you know, daytime.
Guest:Drinking, sure.
Guest:Drinking, all the time drinking, that kind of thing.
Guest:But it didn't sink in.
Guest:Didn't stick.
Guest:No, it didn't.
Guest:Good.
Guest:I feel incredibly lucky.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And the other thing about Snyder, whom I've already named as a recovered alcoholic, so it's out there now.
Guest:But he was a recovered and is a recovered.
Guest:And unless something has happened in recent years that I know nothing about, it would be completely...
Guest:And uncharacteristic and unbelievable is, you know, has been sober, straight cold sober since the day I met him.
Guest:And he had been sober for about a year at that point.
Guest:And like all recovered drunks, we wanted to talk about it.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And that was, you know, a huge problem.
Guest:Huge learning experience for me to be listening to a guy talk about alcoholism and be, by the way, like the dudes that I was that were my pals who were leading me down this path.
Guest:you know, worked in Coolidge Corner too, and we would hang out.
Guest:Sure, and drink.
Guest:And, well, I was still easing into it at that point.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:I think I, you know, but Snyder was the one who would sort of point them out to me and say, you know what's going on here, right?
Guest:Like, they have a problem.
Guest:And I was like, oh, I don't agree with you at all, sir.
Guest:These are my friends.
Guest:He's like, no, they do.
Guest:And I just remember that utter,
Guest:That other sort of nonjudgmental honesty being incredibly affecting to me.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:Because it really I think, you know, I resisted what he was saying.
Guest:But if we're not for if we're not for his counsel, then.
Guest:I might have approached drinking a different way.
Guest:More importantly, I might have dealt with my friends in a different way.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I might not have been able to let them be who they are and help offer them help and appreciate when that help was not taken.
Guest:But and then most of all, and this is like creatively, it was a big eye opener, like utter, utter nonjudgmental honesty.
Guest:is the thing that I kind of strive for in everything that I do.
Marc:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:Yeah, it's a tall order.
Guest:Yeah, do you know what I mean?
Marc:Yeah, because more so than not, there's a sort of slight heartbreak to it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That the really realizing that, you know, someone is going to be what they're going to be and that you don't have control over others and that.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:You have to decide whether or not you're going to allow your heart to invest in that.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:And if you do, there there is there's a bit of a price to pay, but sometimes it's worth it if love is there.
Guest:Precisely so.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then also being able to just say what is plainly right in front of you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That maybe other people don't want to see.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You've got to be careful with that one.
Guest:Well, no.
Guest:No, I agree.
Guest:I mean, it's a dangerous weapon in the terminology of Dungeons and Dragons.
Guest:That's a vorpal blade.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Well, that's it.
Marc:It's like, where is that?
Marc:How do you approach that type of honesty where it's not coming from a competitive or ego driven place and not used as a weapon, but used as sort of a matter of fact or a helpful thing?
Marc:It's tricky.
Guest:Well, yeah, but I mean, it's also acknowledging you can't, you know, all you can do is say what you see.
Guest:And then the world, the person in front of you determines what they do with that.
Guest:And that is outside your control.
Marc:But you've also got to pick your moment where you declare that.
Guest:Well, that's presuming that you can affect anybody else's decisions or actions.
Guest:And I think that what I took in an interpersonal way from Snyder was you can't.
Guest:People come to their own decisions and actions.
Guest:And whether or not they drink, whether or not they are an addict of any kind, that's true emotionally all the time.
Guest:People are going to do what they're going to do.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:And either they're going to learn or they will be humbled or they will be bitter.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they'll take from it what they take from it.
Guest:And that was an incredibly freeing thing for a dude who...
Guest:I had to burp there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Who had no brothers and sisters, you know, whose interpersonal relationships were primarily dude friends.
Guest:You know, we didn't talk about feelings a whole lot.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I, you know, mom and dad with whom I was always very close and pals, but there was sort of this weird combo parent roommate situation.
Guest:Mm hmm.
Guest:I was growing up and had not had a lot of confrontation in my life, had not had a lot of hard challenges in my life, and had not had a lot of girlfriends, you know what I mean?
Guest:And this was eye-opening to appreciate that you can't affect other people.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:Like, no, the good thing to know.
Guest:And then and then creatively, you know, it was also sort of like, yeah, that's that's what makes a joke work.
Guest:You know, you you see you see something plainly in front of you and you just say it.
Guest:Sometimes that's the biggest taboo.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Marc:Oh, being honesty is the new edge.
Guest:Yeah, but it was always this.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, nostalgically speaking, we can agree it used to be a lot better, right?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Whatever it is we're talking about.
Guest:Back in the day, honesty was a lot more honest.
Guest:A lot more honest.
Guest:It was a lot more honest and funkier and it sounded better.
Marc:Sure, and it was less cluttered.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:Right, because you had to go- You only could get it at one place.
Guest:You had to go to that store.
Yeah.
Guest:The truth store.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, the truth.
Guest:You had to go to that weird truth store with the beaded curtain.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:If the guy was there, sometimes it was closed.
Guest:Right, right, right, right.
Marc:That was the worst thing is you take two hours to go to the truth store.
Guest:Was that in Davis Square?
Guest:I think so.
Guest:Was that in Davis Square?
Marc:Before they changed it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The old Davis Square.
Guest:Yeah, it was across from...
Guest:It was across from the restaurant with the fireplace logs on the wall.
Marc:Do you remember logs on the wall?
Marc:Sure.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I remember there was a place in Davis Square called K and Chips that opened at 2.30 in the morning.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:And there was a weird sort of slide your tray type of restaurant.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:Right around from where I live.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And that was right.
Marc:And then there was that railroad car.
Marc:Yeah, I never went in there.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then there was the, what was it?
Marc:Golden Nuggets.
Marc:Nuggets.
Marc:Nuggets Records.
Guest:Nuggets Records.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They sold some truth there.
Marc:Oh, they definitely did.
Marc:I was on Cottage Ave in Davis Square living in an attic that was painted blue.
Marc:I was there when Red Bones was built before they changed the theater around.
Guest:You have mega cred with me right now.
Marc:I was there at the beginning of Red Bones.
Guest:You have mega cred with me.
Marc:I knew Karen and Linda over there, and I think Rob was the other guy.
Guest:Now you're getting a little braggy, okay.
Marc:I was there when they first started making the wrong pickles.
Guest:I'm glad we were able to go into this fugue state of nostalgia to rescue us from the dark, serious personal shit we were talking about beforehand.
Guest:We have to take those kind of breaks.
Guest:No, but that's what nostalgia is for, is to... Please get me out of now.
Guest:Please get me out of now.
Guest:I want to go back.
Guest:I want to go back.
Guest:Precisely so.
Marc:But you dodged a bullet with the booze, and you didn't have the bug, and that was good.
Marc:Yeah, no, no.
Marc:I feel very grateful about it.
Marc:Now, you know, it's like I still...
Marc:You do the Malort thing.
Marc:We talked about that.
Marc:Did we?
Marc:I didn't do Malort.
Guest:We talked about it?
Marc:Was that outside or inside?
Marc:I met you.
Marc:Were you at Max FunCon when I was there?
Marc:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And then there was a big Malort thing, and then I didn't know what Malort was, and it's something that you're known for, and I still don't know what it is.
Guest:Malort is a, it's like an aquavit.
Guest:It's like a flavored vodka, basically, but flavored with- Where does it come from?
Guest:With darkness and pain.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It is native to Chicago.
Guest:It's made in Chicago?
Guest:Well, now it is made in Florida, but shipped exclusively to Chicago, the only place where it is sold, via, I presume, a secret Malort tunnel.
Guest:from Chicago to Florida from Florida to Chicago and they send the bottles it's not based on a Ukrainian thing or I think it's Swedish or Scandinavian of some kind and it is it is a you know it's like aquavit which is essentially grain neutral spirits that are flavored with different botanicals like gin the botanicals that it's flavored with are wormwood and other bitter sort of medicinal type of botanicals and thus it tastes like pencil shavings and heartbreak mm-hmm
Marc:And you like to drink that.
Guest:Well, you know, I am a fan of esoteric things.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I'm a fan of and always have been.
Guest:Of the weird and the out of the way and the regional and the undiscovered and the secret history type stuff.
Guest:Right.
Marc:But what is that, like that impulse or that personality trait?
Marc:I've often, you know, I have a bit of it.
Marc:But isn't there something to that where you become the, I have the secret wisdom.
Marc:I know the thing that nobody else knows.
Marc:Let me introduce you to something that I have discovered.
Guest:There is, I will say.
Guest:What would you call that?
Guest:Well, I mean, the problem is that...
Guest:It borders very closely on loathsome hipsterism, which is just the pursuit of esoteric knowledge for status, basically.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.
Guest:Like, I know the band that you don't know.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Or I know the place to go that no one else knows.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And if anyone else ever knows about it, I'm not ever going to go there again.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I call it loathsome hipsterism because of the loathing that I have for it.
Guest:That's how those words work.
Guest:That's not how I feel about these things.
Guest:I just am fascinated with weird, forgotten stuff.
Guest:And my impulse is to share it because I want everyone to know about it.
Guest:And I want everyone in the audience to drink this malort that someone has brought to me from Chicago because I want everyone to experience that pain together.
Guest:Is it painful?
Guest:I don't mind it that much.
Guest:I think it tastes okay.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:Like, I like bitter stuff.
Guest:I don't have any, I don't, and I've never had any kind of sweet tooth.
Guest:That's because you're not a bitter guy.
Guest:Maybe that's, well, no, I can be pretty bitter, but.
Guest:About what?
Guest:Wait a minute.
Guest:All right.
Guest:You're going to have to walk me there.
Marc:What could your complaint be?
Guest:See, that's the thing.
Guest:What could your complaint be?
Guest:There's nothing I have to complain about.
Guest:And that's, well, anyway.
Guest:Well, that's when I walked into the first interview.
Guest:I was like, how is this going to go?
Guest:Because, you know, I had a happy childhood, well liked by all my friends and peers, did very well in school, went to a very nice school.
Guest:called Yale, achieved in everything that I tried and had a sense of humor that I deployed in a certain way that suddenly and rather unexpectedly shot me into a career that I did not seek that some people call comedian.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:So how is it going to be when I sit down across from a comedian?
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:And I was terrified.
Guest:Wrongly now, I appreciate.
Guest:But I was terrified and perhaps even in an unconscious way wishing to be called out and be called the fraud that I have felt myself to be all my life because I am always.
Guest:All your life?
Guest:Well, you know.
Guest:I'm a I'm a dude who put on a fedora hat at the age of 14 in order to pretend to be a grown up yeah you know that dude I want to yell at that dude do you know what I mean what would you yell at him I mean stop it dummy and do what look good no but but no but I think you wanted to you knew but some part of you whether it was insecurity or not said I'm special go fuck yourself well maybe that's so maybe that's all I'm saying is all I'm saying is with all respect yes
Guest:I my concern was and, you know, I was self-conscious about particularly like I've done a lot of things and I paid a lot of dues in different worlds.
Guest:And I know what I I know.
Guest:I have faith that what I do is worthwhile.
Guest:But I did get into this position of being on television almost entirely by accident.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:I don't think anyone begrudges you your comedic place in the world.
Guest:Well, that is nice that you believe that.
Guest:But, you know, all art is, you know, faking it to some degree.
Marc:For a while.
Guest:Well, anyway, the point is that I came in there terrified.
Guest:You could not have been nicer.
Guest:We had a great conversation.
Guest:We went deep immediately.
Guest:I remember telling you stories, as I've done just now, that I've never told anyone else in public talking about my alcoholic friends.
Guest:For heaven's sakes, Marc Maron, what weird magic you do, right?
Guest:And I walked out of there going, that was amazing.
Guest:And then a week later, this email going,
Guest:Yeah, I lost the hard drive.
Guest:I'm like, oh, he got me.
Marc:That was his plan all along.
Marc:I felt so fucking bad.
Marc:No, you shouldn't feel bad.
Marc:But I think we've done it again.
Marc:We've done.
Marc:We've totally done it again.
Marc:But wait, what about this?
Marc:OK, so what were you going to say?
Marc:Well, Yale, I mean, what was the what was your studies?
Guest:I studied literary theory.
Marc:Oh, good.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So let's get into this then, please, because this is the question I've been waiting to ask.
Marc:Okay, good.
Marc:I pulled this out of my shelf.
Marc:Could you pronounce his name for me?
Marc:Roland Barthes.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Roland Barthes.
Marc:I interviewed Colt Cabana, who is a wrestler, and I wanted to read his essay on wrestling again to somehow get a perspective on professional wrestling that wasn't condescending.
Marc:And it worked.
Marc:I don't know that I took it in as much when I first read his stuff, but to read it now was great.
Marc:It gave me a beautiful perspective on that.
Guest:What you can't see at home is that Mark is...
Guest:Holding Roland Barthes.
Guest:Holding Roland Barthes mythologies, which is something I have not read.
Marc:1957.
Marc:Since college.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So I read the, I think it's The Art of Wrestling, maybe is the name of the essay.
Marc:But could you please, as a teacher now, to me, put Walter Benjamin in perspective?
Marc:What, I mean, I got the books up there and I'm a little obsessed with cultural theory.
Marc:I'm not so much obsessed with lit theory.
Marc:And I've always wanted to be able to read it with some success, but I can't penetrate him.
Guest:No, he's he's pretty opaque.
Guest:I mean, Bart, I think, is fun to read.
Guest:It's great.
Guest:And so Bart Bart was I call him Bart because he's my pal.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:It's my little nickname for him.
Guest:You know, so the takeaway from him for me always was the author is dead.
Guest:From Barth.
Guest:From Barth.
Guest:That was his whole thing in terms of how you approach not just literature but all culture is that you have to, and it was very controversial at the time, you have to end the tyranny of authorial intention.
Guest:Which is to say that when you go and see a Woody Allen movie, let's say.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You know, there there has been or read a book or whatever.
Guest:There's a lot of literary criticism and cultural criticism was based around the idea.
Guest:What did the author mean here?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What was he trying to do?
Guest:Did he succeed in what he was trying to do?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And what Bart was saying with the author is dead is stop it.
Guest:You will never know.
Guest:Any narrative that you create about what the author was trying to do is fake.
Guest:That itself is a fiction that you are writing around this piece of work in order to explain it and understand it yourself.
Guest:Even if the author comes to you, like Marshall McLuhan and Annie Hall or whatever it was, and says, you know nothing of my work.
Guest:This is what I intended.
Guest:Even he is lying because he doesn't even know.
Guest:And that's what really resonated with me, is that we don't know the effect.
Guest:We go into a piece of work with some intention, but what it becomes comes out of places that we are not cognizant of.
Guest:And that's one of the things that I understood in writing right away.
Guest:And now, and I think understand even better, stand-up comedy is formed in front of an audience.
Guest:You write it out, but then it becomes something else.
Guest:The moment you're saying it, you're making new connections.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's growing and changing in that atmosphere.
Guest:And you're like, I didn't even know what I was talking about before.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So from a literary critic point of view, it's kind of dry in the sense of like, so what you do is you take the text and you unpack it and you try to make sense of it intrinsically rather than try to write some paternalistic, you know, hierarchical story about what the author meant.
Guest:This is all boring.
Guest:Throw that away.
Guest:The important thing is that like you not even you know what you intend.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:So that's the foundations of postmodernism.
Guest:Yeah, I would say.
Guest:Sure, let's say that.
Guest:Yeah, I would say so.
Guest:Now, Benjamin.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You don't have to read any of that stuff.
Marc:Oh, God, thank you.
Guest:I keep a lot of books here.
Guest:I can only give you what I took away from that.
Marc:I got a lot of books here that I think in some day, just by them sitting there, I'll understand them.
Guest:Fight your way, if you can, through art and the age of mechanical reproduction.
Marc:That's the one.
Guest:That's the one.
Guest:And that basically is saying that, you know, Benjamin was talking about a time when mechanical reproduction meant printing presses.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:And copies and mass copies.
Guest:Nostalgic.
Guest:And in particular, sculpture.
Marc:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:That you can mass produce a piece of sculpture with a mold.
Guest:Yes, exactly.
Guest:Got it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And what were the problems with that?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was talking about nostalgia to some degree.
Guest:And, you know, what does it mean when art, you know, there used to be art that was made and you would have to go and see it.
Guest:And reckon with it.
Guest:You would have to go and reckon with it.
Guest:You would have to go.
Guest:The one piece.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was the one thing.
Guest:You would have to go to that one store in town.
Guest:You'd have to make that pilgrimage to engage with what Benjamin called the aura of the authentic.
Marc:Oh, that's worth everything.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, we now we now live in a time when that is that kind of distinction is almost meaningless because we live in a culture that is made entirely of copies.
Guest:Reproduction is the way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:So there is no degradation.
Guest:You know, one of the things that Benjamin was writing about was the degradation of the copy.
Guest:A copy of a copy of a copy gets thoroughly degraded.
Marc:So digital killed that.
Guest:Digital, there is no more degradation.
Guest:Every copy, do you know what I mean?
Guest:Right, is exactly like the other copy.
Guest:Is exactly the same as the equal.
Guest:And if you are creating something digitally itself, like if you're, and I don't want to besmirch any particular form of expression, but if you're building music on a computer, you know what I mean, that is not designed to be performed,
Guest:then even the authentic, the moment of your creation is almost identical to the copy that someone will get down the road.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:Compared to, say, if you're singing into a tin can and recording it, that moment that you're singing into a tin can is clearly a different experience.
Marc:Right, but the actual digital product will remain, will keep its authenticity for whatever that's worth in a digital world ad infinitum.
Guest:Right, exactly so.
Marc:But I like the whole idea that, but you don't know or you don't remember, I don't know that we'll tell unless you go.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:And you talked about photography was a big issue here.
Marc:Well, photography's always been a big issue because if anyone can do it and there's no way to tell the difference between each print, where does it stand in relation to that concept of art, to authenticity?
Guest:Precisely because it was mechanized art that required none of the skills that a painter would have to go to school for years.
Guest:This is probably still an ongoing fight.
Guest:It was a technological art.
Guest:Within our critics world.
Guest:It's a fight between if you're a musician or if you're a DJ.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:Right.
Marc:Like.
Marc:But also photography was tricky because it was, you know, deciding the aesthetic integrity of an image.
Marc:They had to break it into art photographs and documentary photographs.
Marc:And then there's a whole school of photograph of historians that think like, well, once you manipulate the negative or you manipulate the print, are you disrupting the integrity of the medium?
Marc:And then once they introduce like the Briny McGee camera to where everybody could take a picture.
Marc:Right.
Marc:How does it hold up as as an actual art form?
Guest:Yeah, do you remember the Busy Bee?
Guest:Could we go back to that now?
Marc:Sure.
Marc:This is where all this stuff was dumped into my head.
Marc:No, I love it.
Marc:At that time, when I was sitting at the Busy Bee, probably sort of sweating over notes from an art history class, that was the history of photography.
Marc:It was a year-long survey course that started in the first semester at the cave paintings and did not get to the introduction of photography until the second semester.
Guest:And what Benjamin is saying is that the aura of the original.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:This is important to me.
Guest:If anything, it's anti-nostalgic because he refers to it as the cult of the aura.
Marc:So it replenishes itself.
Marc:I mean, it's not nostalgia.
Marc:Every time you go there, you will be confronted with the aura of the authentic.
Marc:And how you take that in at any given point in your particular experience may be different, may not be different.
Guest:And that the aura of the authentic may not necessarily be...
Guest:critical or important to art.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:I think I need a refresher course.
Guest:Well, no, I didn't have any real expectation, but I like the aura of the authentic.
Guest:The thing that always stuck with me from Benjamin was the aura of the authentic, that special place.
Guest:And I won't necessarily say better or more positive place,
Guest:I'm not making a value judgment.
Guest:It is a special relationship between someone who takes in culture and an engagement with the authentic thing.
Marc:Yeah, I love it.
Guest:And that is all performance.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:That's the charge that you get whether you're seeing a stand-up, whether you're seeing a play.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:That realization that you have as an audience member that what is being sculpted in front of you is being sculpted right now
Guest:In a very specific context that will not be repeated and the sculpture is smashed at the end of it.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:That's the best kind of performance.
Marc:And there are moments when that happens where either out of insecurity or laziness, sometimes one feeds the other.
Marc:You know, where you don't actually record or you don't have.
Marc:It's almost stupid in the time we live in to not have something recording you at all times.
Marc:We happen to be doing this on purpose.
Marc:But I mean, if I'm going to go do a performance, why not throw something up there that's going to capture something?
Marc:Sure.
Marc:But those moments that happen on stage, I know will never happen again because they're so specific to whatever was going on in that moment.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I know like, well, that was that.
Marc:And that was great.
Marc:And I can appreciate it.
Marc:But sometimes you're like, why didn't somebody reproduce that?
Marc:Right.
Marc:So I could at least have it.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, I feel the same way a lot of the time, but I know that those moments, those rare times I do record something that I'm doing live.
Marc:Yeah, and it fucks you up knowing you're recording it.
Guest:Well, no, I'll go back.
Guest:Like if I felt that one really, really great and everyone's in agreement.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I go back and I listen to it and go, well, it wasn't that good.
Marc:They were deluded.
Guest:It was actually, you know, because that is what happens in a, you know, I've been performing more and more this year.
Guest:And I love it because that is what happens in a theater is mass hypnosis.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:And they're also excited that you're you.
Marc:I mean, there's a difference between who you were, you know, like people.
Guest:You know, whatever it is, it is what it is, what it is.
Guest:And that moment when you're in a theater and you're performing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it is, you know, spell-like.
Marc:Do you read still?
Guest:No.
Marc:What is your performance now?
Marc:What would you call it?
Guest:It's, you know, it's now a... I... It's...
Guest:It's an imitation of stand-up comedy.
Marc:I don't like that you keep saying that.
Marc:I mean, look, you're a comedic performer.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:It is comedic performance, I'll say that.
Marc:And, you know, you have a role.
Marc:There have been wits and intelligent people that go up on stage and share their funny things forever.
Guest:Many of them have mustaches.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Robert Benchley, absolutely.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Mark Twain.
Marc:Mark Twain.
Marc:But I've become a little more lenient in my opinions and my approach to comedic performers.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:I think maybe stand-up comics are their own band of rogue gypsies that have a system by which they think things are done.
Guest:Look, I don't say imitation stand-up comedy in order to beat myself up.
Guest:I say it to say that stand-up comedy is a craft that I respect and one that I appreciate and one that I don't take lightly by saying, yeah, I just go up and do my stand-up comedy.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Until about a year ago, I was presenting material from my books, which is the comedy that I write.
Guest:And I was I started out my tour reading, but then becoming more and more familiar.
Guest:And by the end of the promotional tour for that book, I wasn't touching the book anymore.
Guest:And I was enjoying being in the moment.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So then I decided to go out and tour last spring, the spring of this year, which is 2012.
Guest:because I wanted to try that out more.
Guest:And so I basically, you know, I no longer, it was the case that I had memorized the material that I wanted to present.
Guest:I just knew it.
Guest:And I went out there and took the feeling of the room, started talking, presented the material more or less in the order that I wanted it to, but made adjustments and would go on digressions and interacted with people and
Guest:It is that moment of the aura of the authentic.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:Congratulations, you've become a stand-up.
Guest:It's about time.
Guest:I think that's something I'm getting better at.
Guest:And a lot of it is, I think, much more in common with...
Guest:Spalding Gray at the Brattle Theater, do you know what I mean, than the great stand-ups of our time.
Guest:But it is authentic to me.
Guest:It is my own weird, you know, it is my comedy.
Guest:It is my comedy of preoccupation with esoteric fake facts.
Marc:But I think Spalding also, but in my recollection, he always had a text in front of him.
Marc:Oh, did he?
Marc:I think so.
Guest:It may be.
Marc:Maybe I only saw him workshopping, but he never looked at it much.
Guest:It was hard to tell how much of that was needed or a theatrical problem.
Marc:Or maybe just a teddy bear.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:And he sat down.
Guest:Yeah, he did.
Guest:It was sit-down comedy.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Which I think is I think that's what I would say that I do, even though I'm standing up.
Guest:It's sit down.
Guest:It's sit down.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:I mean, whatever it is, whatever it is, whatever it is, I don't apologize for what it is.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:That sounds great.
Marc:Are you performing?
Marc:Can I come see it?
Guest:Yeah, I am going to do.
Guest:So, you know, the show that I effectively put together, the one man show that I realized had a beginning, middle and end.
Guest:It derives from my book, which is called That Is All, which is my last book of fake facts.
Guest:And it deals with all of the facts that I was too scared to deal with in the first two books.
Guest:So that's money, wine, sports, and the end of the world.
Guest:So those are the four topics, more or less.
Marc:Well, that sounds great.
Marc:Before we finish our time together, there's a chunk of personal history that we didn't hit.
Marc:Yeah, let's.
Marc:Was that you did not start as a comedic writer.
Marc:Right.
Marc:After college, you entered the world of literary publishing.
Right.
Guest:Yeah, because I was, you know, I was super serious.
Guest:I was pretentious.
Guest:You were an editor.
Guest:I was a literary agent.
Marc:Oh, that's worse.
Guest:But I'll tell you that I came out, and so in college I read all this Walter Benjamin and the Roland Barthes.
Guest:I didn't read Northrop Frye.
Marc:It's impossible.
Guest:I'll look into it.
Marc:No, don't do it.
Marc:It's no reason now.
Marc:I came out with a lot of ideas.
Marc:You seem to be fine.
Guest:I also had merged with alcohol and the literature of alcohol.
Guest:So I was very into Raymond Carver and Charles Bukowski, like all right-thinking white 20-somethings in the late 80s, early 90s, who had not lived, right, who had romantic ideals.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I had read Borges, who is an Argentine short story writer, who is still my utter favorite.
Guest:Have you ever read Borges?
Guest:I will send you a copy of his book, Ficciones.
Guest:Guess what that means in Spanish?
Guest:Fictions.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was my book because he would write these weird short stories that often masqueraded as other things.
Guest:So he would write a story about an author, a short story about an author that masqueraded as a literary essay, that sort of thing.
Guest:I love that kind of playfulness.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I came to New York after that wanting to be a writer of short fictions that had Raymond Carverian boozy epiphanies and also Borgesian sort of wordplay and mind games.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I knew that there was probably not a huge market for these things.
Guest:And so I sought a job in publishing.
Guest:And much like the 40-year-old nostalgic that I always was, I looked expressly for the most old-timey publishing concern that I could find.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And I interviewed at a place called Writer's House, which still exists in the former brownstone that had belonged to the Astor family with beautiful leather sofas and dark corners where I could take publishing industry naps and books lining the walls and ferns and wood paneling.
Guest:And I'm like, this is it for me.
Guest:And I worked there for seven years as the receptionist and then as an assistant.
Guest:And then I started helping other writers get...
Guest:get rather mediocre book deals because I was not a terrifically good agent because my goals were elsewhere.
Guest:I really wanted to write and was embarrassed by that desire and was trying to avoid it for a while.
Guest:But then I couldn't avoid it anymore.
Marc:And The Deli Show came about from an essay you wrote?
Guest:From my first book.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So after I quit the agency, I then worked.
Guest:I had been freelance writing for magazines already.
Guest:Made that my profession for about four or five years.
Guest:And through various circumstances, decided to write this book of trivia in which all the trivia was made up by me.
Guest:So it was a standard book of book of list style trivia.
Guest:But instead of the nine U.S.
Guest:presidents who were insomniacs, it would be the nine U.S.
Guest:presidents who secretly had hooks for hands.
Guest:And the stories of how no one ever noticed their hooks.
Guest:No one ever noticed that FDR had a hook for a hand.
Guest:And a polio, yeah.
Guest:Well, no, his hook was shaped like a wheelchair.
Guest:That's why it was never discussed.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Jokes, right?
Guest:There's a joke.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And so I went on The Daily Show to promote that book.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we had a good time talking about books for hands and polio jokes.
Guest:And I was asked to come back and do comedy on the show.
Marc:And the rest is history.
Guest:The rest is ancient, ancient history.
Guest:Nostalgia.
Marc:Nostalgia.
Marc:Thanks, man.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:That's our show.
Marc:I hope you enjoyed that.
Marc:John Hodgman and me.
Marc:Trying to fill some gaps in my intellectual sphere with a guy who knows.
Marc:Great talking to him.
Marc:Great guy.
Marc:Always fun to talk to John.
Marc:Look, people, you know the score.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com for all your WTFPod needs.
Marc:Get some merch.
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Marc:Got a new poster there.
Marc:Check, look around.
Marc:I, you know, oh, go check out the dates for my tour.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, I feel, I still feel fat from North Carolina.
Marc:Seriously.
Marc:Boomy lives!
you