Episode 664 - Eric Bogosian
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucking ears what the fucksters what the fuckaholics what's happening
Marc:Oh, it's me, Mark Marin.
Marc:This is WTF, my podcast.
Marc:Welcome.
Marc:I'm happy you're here, as you can probably tell, perhaps, unless these mics are absolutely fucking amazing, which they might be, but you could probably sense the room is different.
Marc:You can probably sense that perhaps tonally things are a little different.
Marc:I am in probably, I'm going to go ahead and say the second greatest city in this country.
Marc:I'm not even going to go into why one is one or what one is.
Marc:That's what a coward I am.
Marc:But I'm in Chicago for a couple of days doing a thing.
Marc:I don't even know if I can talk about the thing.
Marc:But God damn it.
Marc:I love Chicago.
Marc:I shot my special in Chicago.
Marc:For those of you who haven't seen that special, I know it's hard to find.
Marc:I know it's hard to get.
Marc:But go to epicshd.com.
Marc:And there's a way you could probably watch it.
Marc:You might even have epics.
Marc:And they have it on the thing there at the demand place at epicshd.com.
Marc:But don't worry.
Marc:In a couple of months, it will be on Hulu.
Marc:And we can all watch it together on Hulu.
Marc:A lot of people get the Hulu.
Marc:Eventually, all will see it.
Marc:More later with me, Mark Maron, taped right here in Chicago.
Marc:That was the last time I was here.
Marc:I'm here to do a Joe Swanberg thing that I'm not really supposed to talk about.
Marc:But it's a pretty cool thing.
Marc:I'm acting.
Marc:I'm doing some acting for me.
Marc:I think I'm okay at acting the part of me.
Marc:I can do it on camera for Marin.
Marc:I can also do it in other places.
Marc:And I can do it where you can change the name.
Marc:So this is the trick of my acting technique, is that my technique is act exactly like yourself, give or take a little bit.
Marc:Turn this down, turn that up, if you can make those kind of adjustments.
Marc:And then just have a different name for the character.
Marc:And then if people say, like, well, he's not really acting, maybe they don't understand the character.
Marc:That's how I justify and rationalize my acting technique.
Marc:If you'd like to learn how to act with the Marc Maron system, here it is.
Marc:Just try not to be too self-conscious.
Marc:Act like yourself.
Marc:React to things honestly.
Marc:And listen.
Marc:And then take some direction, like move over there, move over there.
Marc:Can you do an accent?
Marc:Probably not.
Marc:I probably can't.
Marc:But can you speak a little lower?
Marc:Yeah, but you might have to remind me because I do a lot of mic work.
Marc:Well, you're not even supposed to speak loud, but it's an enunciation thing.
Marc:But anyway, so I'm doing some acting, and I'm sitting here in my room.
Marc:This is morning before my call time, and there are actors I'm acting with that I'm pretty excited about.
Marc:There's people I haven't met, but I'm going to be acting with Jane Addams, who is very exciting to me because she's one of those actresses that...
Marc:I think I've met her, but I don't know.
Marc:I'm just very familiar with her work, and I feel like I know her.
Marc:And that happens a lot.
Marc:That's one of the reasons I think that the podcast functions the way it does, is I have a peculiar familiarity with people I've seen once.
Marc:But I guess the point I was trying to make, I'm also working with some young actresses.
Marc:I'm working with Emily Ratajkowski, and I'm working with...
Marc:Alexandra Marzella, who is a performance artist.
Marc:Emily is an actress.
Marc:They both seem like lovely young women, smart, talented people.
Marc:But the thing is, like, I don't know, like Alexandra, I don't know what she's a performance artist.
Marc:And all I know is I'll tell you this right now.
Marc:I'm in my room right now doing this.
Marc:I'm talking on the mic.
Marc:I'm being as honest as possible.
Marc:I don't feel great.
Marc:I feel a slight nag of a buggy kind of.
Marc:But, you know, I'm not that that's between me and you.
Marc:I'm just trying to, you know, kind of.
Marc:suck it up and do the work and she's probably in a room uh doing a naked um snapchat i don't know what snapchat is it was just shown to me recently and i don't know what this whole world of art is i don't know this immediacy i can't get involved with it am i just am i a dinosaur am i am i almost extinct uh with my intellectual context uh
Marc:almost diminished?
Marc:Is it culturally completely irrelevant artistically?
Marc:I mean, the woman I'm seeing, Sarah Kane, she's a painter.
Marc:I understand painting.
Marc:I understand a beautiful abstract canvas.
Marc:I understand the skill set that gets involved with that.
Marc:But there's a whole world of technological expression there.
Marc:art that uh i don't know man maybe i gotta get hip maybe i don't have time but uh it's it's interesting to see it i'm also working with david pesquese who's a chicago guy who i've known uh i have a couple of scenes with him why am i telling you all this am i just gloating no i mean i gotta tell you what's going on and exactly what is going on joe swanberg is uh directing and i love that guy maybe you guys uh
Marc:heard me interview him.
Marc:I think he's a great director and he's very fun to work with.
Marc:And today, you know, I have to act like I'm getting boozed up because it's Chicago.
Marc:So today's show, speaking of art, speaking of performance art, Alexandra Marzola is the new incarnation of performance art.
Marc:I was on the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the, I would think is the tail end of what was the performance art scene of the 70s and 80s.
Marc:I think it was sort of crashing down.
Marc:My point is Eric Boghossian is on the show today.
Marc:Eric Boghossian, the writer, actor, performance artist, playwright, one-man show inventor.
Marc:I think it was Boghossian, outside of theatrical presentations of maybe Hal Holbrook doing Mark Twain and some other stuff.
Marc:I think that Boghossian can be credited for...
Marc:Creating the modern one-man show and making us all feel that we could perhaps do a one-man show I've talked about goes in a couple of times and I've seen him several times and He was one of those guys that you know when I was in New York you'd see his books at st Mark's bookstore and you'd be like that guy's the guy sex drugs and rock and roll man and Drinking in America I think was one of the other ones and you know, he was just a he was a dude.
Marc:He was a force
Marc:down there i think i saw sex drugs and rock and roll two or three times twice as a works in progress and once as a finished piece and i i he was one of those guys where i was always sort of like i disguise really fucking good he's got a lot of momentum he's got a lot of power up there he's good at the characters but why isn't he just doing stand-up comedy and
Marc:Because he's going for the joke.
Marc:A lot of these characters are going for the joke.
Marc:And of course, me as a younger man, I was like, that guy's just a comic that doesn't have the guts to go in the comedy club where us men are doing stand-up comedy.
Marc:That was my attitude.
Marc:And obviously, whatever he did for himself provided him a very wide buffet of possibilities to grow as a creative person to the point where
Marc:It's not out of nowhere because he's been working on it a long time, but he's actually written a book that talks about a little-known story in relation to the Armenian genocide called Operation Nemesis about a bunch of, I think, I believe, Armenians that lived in America who arranged the assassination of many of the architects and executors
Marc:of the Armenian genocide, and Boghossian just went down that rabbit hole and started doing that work.
Marc:Man, I'll tell you, there was a time where I tried to do the one-man show thing.
Marc:I mean, some of you know that, but I remember when I did Jerusalem Syndrome, I gotta be honest with you, man, I was like, I didn't know what the fuck to do.
Marc:There's been so many junctures in my career that were sort of fueled by a desperation, a need to do something that could put me somewhere.
Marc:I worked really hard on putting that one-person show together, Jerusalem Syndrome, which became a book.
Marc:I used to do these fucking two and a half, three hour shows at this little place called Nada 45.
Marc:Me and Kirsten Ames, who was my director and dramaturge, just editing and recording and putting things together.
Marc:And then we got a run at the West Beth Theater.
Marc:We had a set decorator and...
Marc:It was like a big deal.
Marc:It was a big deal for me to not improvise, to stay on a script, to do actions when I was supposed to be doing actions, to make movements that were planned and written.
Marc:It was ridiculously difficult.
Marc:A couple of months I ran at Westbeth.
Marc:I don't know what I was thinking, but...
Marc:But I got a New York Times review, and the guy was like, he seemed to like the show, I guess, but I think his note was...
Marc:the character of Marin doesn't really transform.
Marc:And I'd never gotten that out of my mind, that a theatrical performance, something that's called a piece of theater, there should be some transformation.
Marc:I don't know whose fucking rule is that, or if that's just a rule that that's something that happens at the end of act two or whatever, if it's not just about story, it's some sort of transformation.
Marc:But it was a fairly positive review, and at the end he said, we'll see what happens.
Marc:with this Marc Maron character, this is where one person show ends up.
Marc:This was the painful thing in a way where, you know, because it was Jerusalem syndrome is roughly about a trip to Israel, but more about framing all of my weird obsessions and compulsions and some sort of spiritual context or religious context that, uh,
Marc:You know, I couldn't get a regular agent, you know, and I got a personal appearance agent that dealt with random people who did one-person shows, Janine Frank.
Marc:God bless her, does a great job.
Marc:But I started booking Jewish community centers.
Marc:Oh, man.
Guest:I'm doing so much better.
Marc:I don't know if you really know, you know, you really feel in your guts who you are and what you're doing and what it means and, you know, what you need to do to perhaps change your life when you're doing your off-Broadway show at a Jewish community center, you know, in Newton, Massachusetts, or...
Marc:I, you know, for like a half a house of people that were expecting something fundamentally Jewish and, you know, where you're cussing and you're doing your little bits to a lot of senior citizens, a few younger people.
Marc:But I.
Marc:Needless to say, my friends, I've hit a few bottoms in this life.
Marc:But now I'm in Chicago working with Joe Swanberg and some interesting people.
Marc:And I'm excited.
Marc:I talked to Boghossian about I always bring it up.
Marc:And we actually have a I like Eric.
Marc:I believe we are friends.
Marc:The times we spend together have been engaging and exciting.
Marc:He's a very excited and manic and thoughtful and bright guy.
Marc:And he's a creative guy and he likes to talk.
Marc:So it's great for me.
Marc:So enjoy this conversation that I had with Eric Boghossian.
Marc:Again, I'm not in the garage right now, so there will be no guitar playing at the end.
Marc:I don't even know why I'm telling you that now.
Marc:I don't want you to get your expectations up.
Marc:Eric's new book is called Operation Nemesis.
Marc:It's available wherever you get books.
Marc:All right, so this is me and Boghossian.
Mm-hmm.
Marc:So did you rent that Mercedes?
Guest:Yes, of course.
Guest:I have to.
Marc:I'm in Los Angeles.
Marc:Is that what your feeling was?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Because in LA, if you show up and you don't have a nice car, suddenly you're like a second class citizen.
Guest:They know all about you.
Marc:I was driving a 2006 Camry for years and I finally had that moment where I had to go to an event and I pulled up to the valet and I was like embarrassed.
Marc:I never thought about it before.
Marc:I was sort of like, fuck it.
Marc:You have to clean it.
Marc:I just got a new one.
Marc:I can't clean it.
Marc:I'm no good with it.
Marc:And I already fucked it up.
Marc:I have a car in New York.
Marc:You do?
Marc:But it's totally covered with dust.
Guest:What kind of car is that?
Guest:Just a Toyota Highlander.
Guest:That you drive in the city?
Guest:With 150,000 miles.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So what are you doing?
Marc:Why did you come out here?
Guest:I have been coming back and forth here for about a few months because I wrote this book about an Armenian revenge conspiracy.
Marc:Operation Nemesis.
Guest:Which is a true book, not a fictional book.
Guest:This is a real history book.
Marc:So at some point, you sort of locked into this story, and you're like, you're going to be a scholar.
Marc:You're going to learn it.
Marc:You're going to get to the bottom of it.
Marc:But that's a new thing, right, for you, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, and also something I didn't really plan on because this was going to be a screenplay like seven years ago.
Guest:Armenians were always saying, why don't you write something about the Armenian genocide?
Guest:I'm like, what am I going to write?
Guest:And then I heard about this young guy who had killed the leader of the Turks in Berlin in 1921 as a revenge against...
Guest:The genocide.
Guest:And I thought, oh, this will make a movie.
Guest:It should take me a couple of months to write it.
Guest:I started.
Guest:It all made sense that he got acquitted because they felt that since he'd seen his whole family massacred, he had a right.
Guest:This is what he had said in court.
Guest:An eye for 10 eyes.
Guest:And once I started doing research on it.
Guest:You can get the court transcript online.
Guest:The man's name was Sogomon Tetlarion.
Guest:Good luck with doing that.
Guest:The first hour you research is spelling that.
Guest:So have a good morning.
Guest:And learning how to say it.
Guest:And then I found out that, in fact, he was a member of a hit squad operating out of Massachusetts.
Guest:There was this obscure book that came out of France that I found in translation.
Guest:And it wasn't just him.
Guest:There were...
Guest:a couple of dozen guys and that they targeted six, they targeted all these Turkish leaders and they knocked off six of these guys.
Guest:Pretty much all the guys who committed the genocide were killed by Armenians five years after the genocide.
Marc:From Massachusetts.
Guest:Well, they were people all over New England, Massachusetts were the organizers.
Guest:They were these small businessmen and they recruited these gunmen, men who were like ex-militarians and other guys who are familiar with how to handle it.
Marc:But this was solely, this was not sanctioned by the government of Armenia.
Guest:This is historically a little vague, but no, they couldn't sanction it because the government army, it was a very small country at that time.
Marc:But was it like Munich?
Marc:Was it like the Israeli revenge for Munich?
Marc:Was there some sort of covert operation within the government that said like, you guys, we're not saying do this, but go ahead if you have to.
Guest:It was more of something that a political group had decided that they...
Guest:There had been devastation and different people were like, what should we do?
Guest:Should we save the orphans?
Guest:Should we raise money to get women out of Muslim bondage?
Marc:This is post genocide.
Marc:Now, before we go too deep into it, because I live right here at Glendale and the Armenians are part of my day to day life, actually.
Marc:And, you know, I hear about the Armenian genocide, but I'm ignorant of it.
Marc:So is this something you grew up knowing about?
Marc:Oh, absolutely.
Marc:So what happened?
Guest:When I was a little kid, my grandfather used to sit and tell me stories when I was five years old.
Guest:He'd say, if you ever meet a Turk, kill him.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, these were the kind of things.
Marc:Give me the numbers in the events in a short in a short way.
Guest:What happened?
Guest:World War One under the fog of war.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The the leaders of the what was then the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish government figured they can get rid of all the Armenians.
Guest:And when nobody's looking and take over that that turf.
Guest:Yeah, they could take their property, they could take their position, their mines, their factories, and also get rid of them because they were Christians in a Muslim country.
Guest:It's a horrible echo of what's actually happening right now over there.
Guest:And so in 1915, 1916 were the big killing years.
Guest:and the estimates are that over a million people were in the we're talking about civilians here we're talking about women children just going through the streets shooting them or actually camps well they send out uh soldiers if it's a small village you just bring everybody you just kill everybody right or you kill all the men cut their throats or whatever and then send the women on a deportation
Guest:caravan with their children, which goes into the desert, which you can't survive.
Guest:This is classic.
Guest:And so if they can possibly get to the place in Syria, which was where they were aiming them, which is this desert, and they might go in circles for weeks and then finally, you know, just wear them all out.
Guest:Anybody who got there, they were concentration camps, and then they died there as well.
Guest:In Der Zor, which is in the news all the time.
Marc:Now, as a Jewish guy, you grow up with these stories, the never forget, the Holocaust, generationally.
Marc:Even if I didn't have a family that died in the Holocaust, it was something that you were brought aware of culturally as a Jew.
Marc:So now as an Armenian kid, you're full Armenian.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So your grandfather would tell you these stories.
Marc:He saw his family get killed maybe.
Guest:Well, he saw things that he would tell me about, like they would round up everybody into the church, lock the doors and burn the church down with the people in it.
Guest:And that was something that he told me about.
Guest:Terrifying as a kid.
Guest:I don't know what I made of it.
Guest:It all seemed like it had happened very far away in a very first of all, I had no idea.
Guest:What is Armenia?
Guest:Where is Armenia?
Guest:Were we Middle Eastern?
Guest:Did they ride camels?
Guest:I didn't know any about that.
Marc:So you grew up with these rituals and habits and foods, you know, and culture.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And I loved it.
Guest:I love being Armenian.
Guest:In fact.
Guest:Just trying to embrace my roots, which, to be honest, coming into this Hollywood thing in the 80s, and I have an agent saying, if you fix your nose and straighten your hair and change your last name, you have a future in this business.
Guest:Did they really say that?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:He took me to the grill when I got signed at William Morris in 1983.
Guest:He looked at you.
Guest:You have a lot of talent.
Guest:Just do these things.
Marc:But then right after you said no, did he say, well, we'll cast you as a Jew.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's been my job pretty much.
Guest:I am the archetypical Jewish guy on everything I do.
Marc:Right, you did that Woody Allen movie.
Guest:Which one was that?
Guest:Where you played the brother-in-law.
Guest:Deconstructing Harry.
Guest:That was great.
Guest:Yeah, thank you.
Guest:I learned a lot about acting doing that particular bit.
Marc:Really?
Marc:From him?
Marc:Because he's pretty hands-off.
Guest:No, I only had a few lines.
Guest:I mean, I had a few pages with Carol and Aaron.
Guest:And I was like, today, I'm not going to go to craft services and hang out all day and complain about my age.
Guest:And I'm going to stay in my trailer, and I'm going to just keep doing these 12 lines over and over again.
Guest:And he goes fairly slowly, lighting and everything.
Guest:And I was in there like...
Guest:Six hours.
Guest:I already knew it when I got to set.
Guest:Going deep Jew.
Guest:And then I went, yeah.
Guest:But I really thought about what are you really saying here?
Guest:What's happening?
Guest:And I had never really done that deep work before.
Guest:And it was a choice.
Guest:Now I bring it to everything I do.
Guest:I say, wait a minute.
Guest:You think you know this.
Guest:You think you know your lines.
Guest:You think you know what the scene's about.
Guest:But stick with it.
Guest:There's more here.
Guest:You just haven't found it yet.
Guest:And so that's been sort of a new part of my journey.
Guest:Right.
Marc:So it's my assumption, like, you know, and looking over, you know, what I'm interested in about your life, that that this project, this Operation Nemesis, for whatever reason, you went down this rabbit hole at a time in your life where I think it was probably important to you to connect with your heritage.
Marc:and also like enlarge my sense of who I am which includes like who my grandparents are what it means to be Armenian and all this kind of stuff instead of sort of keeping it at arm's length like I'm a little or literally running away from it because I imagine not unlike me when you're young and creative and you want to make your mark there's a liability to getting hung up on tradition or your past or you just want to be who you are
Marc:And do your thing.
Guest:Yeah, and I also, I was that.
Guest:I mean, I was one of the first mall rats in the United States.
Guest:They built a mall near my home.
Guest:Where'd you grow up?
Guest:In Massachusetts, in Woburn.
Guest:So they built the Burlington Mall.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I used to just, me and my friend, we got busted there from smoking pot.
Guest:How old were you?
Guest:I'm 62.
Marc:So I'm 50.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So 10 years before, that was the first mall.
Marc:That was when it started happening.
Guest:So they didn't know when they built the malls that it would attract teenagers who would just go there and hang around.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we were in the parking lot smoking weed.
Guest:We'd actually just dropped acid as well.
Guest:And the cops busted.
Guest:I'm like, next thing I know, I'm in handcuffs.
Marc:On acid.
Guest:Tripping on acid in a jail cell in Burlington.
Guest:I'm actually trying to get my, what's the picture they do with the little number?
Guest:The mug shot.
Guest:The mug shot.
Marc:You can't get it.
Marc:Can't find it?
Guest:I asked somebody to look it up for me.
Marc:So what year was that?
Marc:So that was like 69?
Marc:That's 71, 71.
Guest:I had just gone to college.
Guest:I'd come back to hang out with my homies, and we didn't call them that.
Marc:So you're going to college that first year.
Marc:The entire culture is blown open by the 60s, and it's sort of just settling into just pure drugs and rock and roll.
Guest:Yeah, I was like a junior version of that, because that was all happening when I was still in high school.
Marc:Well, that's what I mean.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So the actual revolution was already subsiding and just now infiltrating pop culture in the form of music.
Guest:But I was already doing all that stuff.
Guest:I mean, I started doing bad stuff when I was in high school.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:What was the bad stuff then?
Guest:You know, acid.
Marc:Acid.
Guest:Acid.
Guest:And I worked in a drugstore, which wasn't helpful.
Marc:so but that was like the real acid right yeah that was the mythical kind of like that was the real shit well we had wuburn had uh bikers wuburn yeah so we would i would grab a bottle of something and i'd take it up to these guys yeah can i say this now is this like am i gonna bust it for doing no i think there's a statute of limitations fucking 50 years ago
Guest:White cross.
Guest:You know, I'd find a bottle of white cross.
Guest:And I'd find these bikers and they'd say, here, here's a bag of weed for that.
Guest:And that's because that's all I wanted was just some weed.
Marc:So those are like bennies almost.
Marc:There was like the little white speeds.
Marc:You got to take like five of them.
Guest:And I loved hanging around those guys because they kind of protected me.
Guest:I grew up in a town that, I mean, it wasn't, there were a lot of tough guys in my town.
Guest:I remember New Bern.
Guest:I wasn't tough.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So I needed the big guy.
Guest:And you were Armenian.
Marc:So you're surrounded by these New England townies, which are some of the hardest, most interesting people.
Marc:I know guys that come from New Bern.
Marc:I started doing comedy in all those towns.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:The satellite towns of Boston, all over New England.
Marc:And it's intimidating.
Marc:There's some intimidating cats out there.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I made sure I had one of them right now, because you'd be sitting there, you know, smoking weed at some party and having a drink, and there'd be some guy just watching you, glowering, like, who's this guy?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Who are you?
Guest:Who the fuck are you?
Guest:Yeah, and then Mikey would stand up and go, he's okay.
Guest:He's okay.
Guest:And then I wouldn't...
Guest:Now, years later, Mikey took a bite out of me when we were in the middle of a fight.
Guest:Like a bite bite?
Guest:Yeah, I had teeth marks for about six years after that.
Guest:Where's Mikey now, Eric?
Guest:He's six feet under, sadly.
Guest:Is he?
Marc:Yeah, he was a great guy.
Marc:So, growing up in New England, now, okay, so was there an Armenian community?
Marc:No.
Guest:Well, in Watertown, where I was a little kid, yes, and there was the St.
Guest:James Church, and that's where I was an altar boy, and I was an altar boy.
Guest:Catholic?
Guest:No, Armenians are Armenian.
Guest:Armenians are Armenian apostolic.
Guest:They have slightly different groupings, like especially down here in Southern California, you have the...
Guest:The more political Armenians, they're one group.
Guest:And then there's the guys that I came up with, which are like, but they're all Armenian.
Guest:Armenian is the oldest Christian religion pretty much in the world.
Guest:In 301 AD.
Guest:the Armenians decided to become Christian.
Guest:Maybe at the time it seemed like a good idea.
Marc:So there's still a few people that remember Jesus or had a grandfather that my grandfather used to run with Jesus.
Guest:Oh yeah, the first apostles went to Armenia.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, that's where they went.
Guest:Bartholomew.
Marc:Guess we're out of work.
Guest:We got to spread the word.
Guest:Unfortunately, a few hundred years later, you have the first giant Muslim empire, the Arabs.
Guest:They don't really like Christians.
Guest:And they're followed by the Turkish Muslim empires, the Mongols.
Guest:None of these guys are happy about Christians.
Marc:And it's still going on.
Guest:It's yes.
Guest:Sadly, sadly, on my way here today, I was thinking we're going to talk about whatever it is we're going to talk about.
Guest:And such bad shit is happening over there right now.
Guest:I wish we you know, I wonder to what degree just if we can take one second to be a little political.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:To what degree there's a kind of a racism against Middle Eastern people that people don't care about what's happening to all these Syrian refugees.
Guest:It's just some statistic.
Guest:And especially for us as Americans who started all this crap in the first place and why everybody's running all over the place over there.
Guest:What are we doing to help them?
Guest:It's going to start getting cold out there in a month or so.
Guest:And these are just families just stuck all over the place.
Guest:In fact, it was this kind of thing that kicked in my feelings about what were my roots back when Serbia and Bosnia was happening in the 90s.
Guest:I would watch these refugees coming out of these towns and I'd say, that must have been what it was like for my family and my people because...
Guest:this is what happens.
Guest:They come in.
Guest:These people are just living their life, not bothering anybody.
Guest:They're not even political.
Guest:They're not thinking about it.
Guest:And the next thing you know, an army shows up.
Guest:They take all the men off, and they put a bullet in their head, and then they take all the women, and they do stuff with the women, and then who knows?
Guest:I mean, 100 years ago, the children were valuable, too.
Guest:A child, you could keep that child to be like a slave for you, or it could be your child, adopt the child.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So at any rate,
Guest:I just think that we got to think about this is a major humanitarian screw up.
Guest:And I wonder to what degree, because these people are Middle Eastern, nobody seems to care that much.
Guest:I mean, people care.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:It might be that, but it's also just about American culture in general, that the level of distraction and immediacy to people's lives and their concerns are selfish, but also complicated.
Marc:I don't know that necessarily Americans are bad people or judging it as Middle Eastern.
Marc:It's just not here.
Guest:Yeah, but we started it.
Guest:That's the thing.
Marc:I think we have some responsibility.
Marc:Well, no, I'm not arguing with you, but I don't know if that occurs on a personal level.
Marc:I don't know that if the average American, if they really knew what was going on, I think they'd be like, well, I'd like to help.
Marc:But I think the leap for an average personal one-on-one American to go like, this is my fault, that's a different political issue.
Marc:But a humanitarian movement certainly should...
Marc:People should be aware.
Marc:But what I think is interesting about you is that you, early on in your career, have always been a voice of brutal satire of this country.
Marc:So your awareness of what America is, not necessarily a political level, on a cultural level, was intact now.
Marc:you know, from the beginning.
Marc:And as you get older and now you get wiser and you get more empathetic and your heart gets bigger, you're able to sort of broaden that, the understanding of what America's responsible for on a global level, you know, into this awareness now and this work with Armenia.
Marc:But like when I look at, think about you, you know, or whatever I...
Marc:Project is who you were on the Lower East Side in 1980 or whenever the fuck that started.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That, you know, you you were an angry, sweaty, you know, manic voice, you know, attacking America from the inside.
Guest:Classic, classic, angry young man who knows everything, knows better.
Guest:And with great indignation, I'm telling everybody off and I know what's right and you don't know.
Guest:And I'm going to tell you, although I did it all, as you say, in satire, sarcastic, ass backwards.
Guest:You know, the whole idea was to create a street people.
Guest:By the way, I just want to tell you that those old monologues that I used to do.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I have all my friends doing them now, and we have them online, 100monologues.com.
Guest:I just want to tell you that we've been spending a couple of years.
Guest:We've now got 50 of them.
Guest:Because it turned out over those 20 years, I had done 100 different bits.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Characters, a lot of them.
Guest:Yeah, and somebody was saying one day, I don't know who it was, one of my friends said, you know, I could do one of those.
Guest:And then we started shooting them and collecting them.
Guest:How do they hold up?
Guest:They're good.
Guest:They're funny.
Guest:They're really funny.
Guest:Some are better than others.
Guest:I mean, there's people on there like, I mean, Jen Tilly does one of the bits.
Guest:Michael Shannon does one.
Guest:Stuhlbarg does one.
Guest:I like that.
Guest:They're funny.
Marc:That guy.
Marc:So give me a sense of this because this is like a piece of the New York puzzle that I have not talked to anybody that, you know, that era of performance when I think performance art really started to have.
Marc:Don't say performance art to me, but okay.
Marc:No, just define itself.
Marc:That's what it's called.
Marc:So it's not called stand-up comedy.
Marc:You know, you can call it theater.
Marc:We call it performance.
Marc:Let's call it performance.
Marc:That's fine.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:I'm just trying to, you know, the same people you want to take responsibility for Syria as Americans, we need to sort of broaden out, you know, performance art is what it is for them, but now they know it's performance.
Marc:All right.
Marc:But but what was it?
Marc:What was the scene?
Marc:Because you come out.
Marc:Would you go to theater school and then go to New York?
Marc:I mean, you're in Woburn.
Marc:How the fuck did you decide?
Guest:I was a theater guy.
Guest:I had never been to theater when I was a kid.
Guest:When I was a teenager, we did theater one day in English class.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I was like a fish to water.
Guest:I was like, this is this is great.
Guest:What is this we're doing?
Guest:What was it?
Guest:It was Shakespeare.
Guest:We were doing Romeo and Juliet.
Guest:I played Capulet.
Guest:I yell at Juliet for getting home late all the time or whatever.
Guest:And you're like, I can yell.
Guest:I can yell.
Guest:That was Woburn acting.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it was like a little drama club, and I started doing that.
Guest:And it was just, you know...
Guest:I really liken it to sports.
Guest:Like, everybody can play sports.
Guest:Everybody can do theater.
Guest:But there's always one guy who, for whatever reason, he can stand up there and he can hit six home runs in six games.
Guest:And I just had an ability to do this.
Guest:I think it was probably because I spent so much time when I was a kid locked in my bedroom talking to myself in the mirror.
Guest:But at any rate, I lived in this fantasy world.
Guest:And when I was given the opportunity, so there I am, an actor.
Guest:Somebody says, you're an actor.
Guest:You should be an actor.
Guest:You should follow this.
Guest:But I come from a very working class background where you don't go in the arts.
Guest:What did your dad do?
Guest:He was a bookkeeper.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And my mom was a hairdresser.
Guest:You got brothers and sisters?
Guest:I got a younger sister.
Guest:Yeah, she's great.
Guest:She's a school teacher.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:So I didn't think it was a practical idea.
Guest:And I went off to college.
Guest:I didn't do it.
Guest:And I ended up doing theater again in college.
Guest:And then eventually.
Marc:Not studying it, just a theater group.
Marc:Right, right, right.
Guest:And then I finally said, okay, look, I dropped out because I was doing too much acid and stuff.
Guest:And then I went back to fall.
Marc:I like that it was acid.
Marc:That was your drug of choice.
Guest:Acid.
Guest:Perfect.
Marc:That's a lot of work.
Guest:It is.
Guest:Don't worry.
Guest:I worked my way into the more relaxing drugs after that.
Guest:And note, and I have to say this because I know that the youngins are out there listening, stopped everything 31 years ago.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:That's a big chunk.
Guest:Half my life.
Guest:But for me, for this guy, for this junkie, I have to be clean and sober or I can't do anything.
Guest:I'm disabled.
Guest:It's a disability.
Guest:You give me a beer and I'm not going to show up for work.
Guest:I get that.
Guest:But like a lot of like, what year did you get sobered?
Guest:All right.
Guest:So this is like, you know, my kids say to me, how come you do so much stuff about being high and on drugs and everything when you don't do any of that stuff?
Marc:Yeah, but you did some fairly, you know, some very powerful work that, you know, life defining work, you know, career changing work when you were fucked up.
Marc:But I subverted everything.
Marc:No, no, I'm not saying it's a good thing.
Marc:I read dressing rooms.
Marc:I did all those.
Marc:I get it.
Marc:I'm sober, too.
Marc:And we talk about that here.
Marc:But it's sort of interesting that a lot of times people, and I'm not romanticizing it, but you had to hit the wall pretty hard and pretty publicly.
Marc:And you certainly explored the negative sides and positive sides of drug use and drinking in your work before you cleaned up.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I don't regret it.
Guest:I mean, I think, you know, everybody says that who's been down that route.
Guest:The only part, you want to survive it.
Guest:You don't want to come out the other end and be in a box.
Marc:That's no good.
Marc:On the right side of the grass, I think.
Marc:Is that what it's called?
Guest:The wrong side of the grass.
Guest:Under the roots.
Guest:So I gave up.
Guest:I gave up the whole... When I came to New York, I was so intimidated as an actor.
Guest:I graduated college.
Guest:And you just moved to New York?
Guest:I had come as a student, and then I decided I wanted to live here because it was just amazing.
Guest:You're talking 1975.
Guest:The city was insane.
Marc:It was like broken, wasn't it?
Guest:Yeah, I was living in Times Square, and I just thought this was the craziest, best thing I'd ever.
Guest:I wanted to be here.
Guest:It was just chaos, pirates, criminals everywhere.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:The cops would just leave at night.
Guest:Like 11 o'clock at night, they were gone, and everything just went into total chaos.
Guest:And the trains and everything.
Guest:And I was young, so I didn't care.
Guest:I thought this was...
Guest:And you romanticized it, I imagine.
Guest:Yeah, and I also was getting deeper into the adventure of drugs and everything.
Marc:So you go as a student and you check it out and you're like, holy shit, this is where it's happening.
Guest:But I can't compete as an actor, I feel.
Guest:I really, I give up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I end up in Soho around all these visual artists.
Guest:So I come up.
Guest:That's when you move there.
Guest:Yeah, in 76, 77, I worked at a place called The Kitchen.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And all my friends were either composers, choreographers, or visual artists.
Guest:I didn't have any theater guys.
Marc:But this was sort of the beginning of that artistic renaissance of sort of a whole new type of expression.
Marc:There was an art scene in New York that wasn't like the painters of the 50s and 60s that sort of evolved...
Marc:out of whatever the New York art scene was, and now was going into all these different areas and taking real chances, though, right?
Marc:Well, it had gotten very minimal, and it had gotten very esoteric.
Marc:Like, who were the people when you got there?
Guest:Well, just prior to that, you basically, Phil Glass is the king of music, or he's becoming... Just starting, right?
Guest:And there's everything, yeah, Donald Judd and, you know, really clean... High-minded shit.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My crowd is, you know, Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman and...
Guest:keith harring was over another neighborhood but that's all everybody's making pictures of things stuff that anybody can look at and go oh i get what this is and um and we were having fun we were also in the clubs like all the time and this was just it was what had happened what were the clubs like cbs or or the other ones like mud club and um tier three so at that time you know you're seeing a zillion young people showing up in new york just thinking what crazy shit can i do
Marc:All the music that's going on, that's the height of CBGBs, right?
Marc:And that's like the whole New York punk thing.
Guest:Music is being redefined.
Guest:I was not hip to the punk thing until somebody said, we're going to go.
Guest:And I'm like, I don't want to do that punk thing.
Guest:After Hendrix died, I didn't want to go hear any more rock and roll.
Guest:And they said, no, no, come hear this thing.
Guest:And I don't know.
Guest:I think it was like...
Guest:oh who was it the heartbreakers or something not tom petty no no johnny thunders johnny thunders and this stuff was like real down and great rock and roll kansas city yeah uh maxis kansas city and uh that was what i i was like i love this so and then i was just clubbing for the next three right but how what was the creative process when did it become apparent that you could that there was a new theater happening that performance was viable
Guest:Well, it was all about a community.
Guest:So there's all these lofts, and people are just doing the craziest stuff.
Guest:Some of it's like real theater.
Guest:Some of it's like not real theater.
Guest:Like Willem Dafoe's down the street doing stuff with Worcester Group.
Guest:And Spalding was around in those days.
Guest:Was he?
Guest:Of course.
Guest:That was the beginning of Spalding?
Guest:Oh, I saw Spalding when I first got to New York.
Guest:He was already doing Tooth of Crime by Sam Shepard.
Guest:That's a hell of a play.
Guest:He was a great guy, too.
Marc:What a big play.
Marc:What did he play in that?
Marc:He was Hoss.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I went backstage.
Guest:I was like, this kid?
Guest:yeah hi I just want to tell you I thought that was great he goes I said could I you know will you have a cup of coffee with me which people ask me all the time and he goes no but you can buy me a drink right we went to Magoo's and he was incredibly I never forgot the fact that this man was kind to me and we were friends sadly what did he tell you
Guest:You can tell me anything.
Guest:I mean, what can you tell anybody?
Guest:That's pretty much the smartest thing anybody could tell you is like, hey, kid, just go for it.
Guest:Only you know.
Guest:Just do it, right.
Guest:That's what everybody has always said to me.
Guest:That's what Oliver Stone said to me when I was writing talk radio, the movie of it.
Guest:It was like, I don't know what to tell you.
Guest:Just keep writing.
Guest:All right, so you see the Worcester group.
Guest:It's no good now, but keep writing.
Marc:You're running around.
Marc:There's all this vitality and weird shit going on.
Marc:I'm sure you saw some stuff where you're like, oh, what is that shit?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, oh, all the time.
Guest:But the main thing was we were entertaining each other.
Guest:We were like, who can make up some crazy shit that's going to make the other guys laugh as opposed to I'm going to make something that's going to go to Broadway or I'm going to make something that's going to be commercially.
Guest:And there's no commercially anything.
Guest:You've got some nights eight people in the audience, 20 people.
Guest:Oh, I know, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I had one place one time.
Guest:It was like six people and none of them spoke English.
Guest:And I'm playing to the guy who's taking the money at the coin buy.
Guest:Tough crowd.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I would be, when I was writing, I started creating these characters, these monologue things.
Guest:And of course it was like, when I first started it, this was very intimidating.
Guest:I mean, now people are so used to seeing this stuff, but to do an old bum or something,
Guest:crazy yelling at you kind of bump yeah who had done that you know the only person who you know they always forget that robert klein was the guy who first started doing street people when he did that bit please do you remember please please yeah he said this guy in the street uh he did junkies comedian so and then prior did it too well in prior these guys are a big influence on me the energy they'll like come out and
Guest:Yeah, the first prior live movie knocked me out.
Guest:And I said, I want to do that kind of energy in a theater because I am so bored with what's happening in the theater.
Guest:So I started doing this stuff and it was very aggressive.
Marc:Never thought comedy, though.
Marc:I think we've talked about this before because there wasn't really a comedy club scene there.
Marc:So I'll give you a pass on that.
Marc:But was there ever a thought to that?
Guest:Well, there was.
Guest:Sure, because at a certain point, they started lumping me together with the new comic scene, which was breaking.
Marc:Catch a Rising Star.
Guest:Well, you know, Gilbert was doing his stuff.
Marc:Richard.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And so they would say, you're a part of this.
Guest:Like Esquire wrote a piece about it or something.
Guest:So I go, okay, I'm going to go do that.
Guest:So I went to catch.
Guest:I stand up there.
Guest:And, you know, they have a green light and a red light.
Guest:As soon as I started talking, they started blinking the red light.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I'm feeling like I'm being run over and mugged at this.
Guest:I could not do it.
Guest:There's two things I will always have tremendous respect for.
Guest:One, stand-up comics, which I can't do it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And two, radio talking.
Guest:You know, I did the guy in the movie.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But to do it for real?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's fun.
Guest:It's hard.
Guest:I've been guessed.
Guest:I've guessed it for people.
Guest:They say, hey, why don't you take the show for a night?
Guest:Vince Skelso would have me do it.
Guest:And I'm trying to think of what to say.
Guest:I can't think of anything.
Guest:Because if I have a month to write a line for a character, then I'll play the guy.
Guest:Yeah, just to fill that dead air.
Guest:Keep going.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And also, I don't think people realize that everything you say, you've got to be ready to stand behind.
Guest:And if I have time to think about it, I can do that.
Guest:But to be a guy who says, this is my view of life, and it's going to be consistent.
Marc:Yeah, but a lot of times it becomes a character.
Marc:It's all a character.
Guest:Everything you do is a character.
Guest:You're a character right now.
Guest:I'm a character right now.
Guest:I'm nothing like this in real life.
Marc:I know.
Guest:You're quiet.
Guest:You rarely talk.
Guest:You're strong.
Guest:Well, I was thinking about you with your cats, and I was thinking if people could only see how I actually spend my day.
Guest:I have plants.
Guest:I water my plants, and my big moment of the day is checking the mail to see if I got a residual check.
Marc:$4 from talk radio.
Marc:It's running on some cable channel.
Marc:Yeah, I'm going to get a coffee.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:All right, so, okay, so you're doing this, and you're like, I'm going to bring this intensity, this energy, these characters to theater.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I was in like a loft scene.
Guest:I was in like all kinds of clubs.
Marc:What was that other one that was, yeah, the other loft that lasted a long time?
Marc:It wasn't the kitchen.
Marc:It was somebody's, it seemed like someone lived there.
Marc:It wasn't quite in Soho.
Marc:It was upstairs, and they had a lot of performances.
Guest:Or Arlene had her place.
Guest:What was it called?
Guest:I don't know, Arlene's or something.
Guest:There were so many places.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But that's where it took place.
Marc:So when you're saying performing- Lower East Side.
Marc:Right.
Marc:When you're performing for your friends, that was also a community of people that were interested in seeing this stuff.
Marc:So it wasn't just you and Spalding or you and Cindy or whoever hanging around.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:People would know that something was happening and you'd all go see that thing.
Guest:Eventually, the neighborhood got so big that you could have 100 people or whatever.
Guest:And eventually built and built and built.
Guest:I think Laurie Anderson was the first one to start doing set shows repeatedly, which-
Guest:In a loft situation?
Guest:Usually you did one night and that was it.
Guest:And then you never did that bit again.
Guest:But she would make a particular show.
Guest:And then I did the same.
Guest:I started thinking, yeah, this is like do a set show.
Guest:With several characters.
Guest:Yeah, I would do a dozen characters.
Guest:Did Franklin Furnace, all these places, The Kitchen.
Guest:Was the first show drinking in America?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:The first show was called Men Inside, then Fun House, and then Drinking America was the first one I did Sober, which was like a hit show.
Guest:By then, Joe Papp had scouted me, brought me to the public theater.
Guest:I'd done a couple of shows there.
Guest:Then I did that at American Place.
Guest:Because Joe said I couldn't come back and do any more solos at The Public because we don't do solos anymore.
Guest:Then I do Drinking in America.
Guest:It's a huge hit.
Guest:And Joe Papp comes to the show and goes, why did you leave us?
Guest:I said, well, you kicked me out.
Guest:That's why.
Guest:He said, well, you come back and you can do whatever you want to do.
Guest:You are in the slot now.
Guest:Whatever it is you want to do will open in January 1986.
Guest:and I said, well, I have an idea for a thing about a talk radio guy.
Guest:He goes, great.
Guest:You got anything written?
Guest:I had 20 pages.
Guest:I was already in their calendar for the next year.
Marc:And that was based on the Berg thing?
Guest:No, no, that came in later.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Well, the guy that I created was- What was his name, Daniel Berg?
Guest:Alan Berg.
Guest:Alan Berg, yeah.
Guest:It was very similar to the character I had created for the play.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And when we were going to make the movie, I said to Ed Pressman, this is very complicated, but anyway, I said to Ed Pressman,
Guest:There's a book about this guy who got gunned down in Colorado.
Guest:He was in Colorado.
Guest:Yeah, in Colorado, Denver.
Guest:And we better buy this book because my play sounds so much like, believe me, I did not base the play on this guy.
Guest:But when we did the movie, I merged the two stories.
Marc:And you had optioned the book.
Marc:So you were able to do it.
Marc:Yeah, we had the book as part of our package.
Marc:And you had Creepy Rockets Red Glare come in at the end.
Marc:Rockets.
Guest:Poor old Rockets.
Guest:He was so great.
Marc:Did you know Rockets?
Marc:I saw him towards the end, around, because I was living on a second between A and B in 89 to 91, 92.
Marc:And I don't remember where I saw him, but I was excited.
Marc:And I didn't even know what his place in the whole scheme of things was, but I knew he was in your movie, and I knew he was sort of a guy.
Guest:Rockets was a famous character of the scene, famous junkie, big junkie, and kind of a doorman at various places.
Guest:The secret to Rockets, which I only knew from working with him, was that his brother had been one of the people who established Microsoft or something, and had cut off a chunk of...
Marc:of stock for him that cost two cents had given it to him and become worth all this money and then he was able to keep up his junkie life based on microsoft stock or something like that that's a great thing about new york that you don't see a lot in the same way is that there are actual characters within the scene that don't necessarily do anything but they're an organic part of the scene that add to the to the whole sort of energy of the environment and that happens a lot in new york it's like that's that guy
Guest:Well, we had such a huge community of amazing people, and when AIDS came, it just was... Leveled.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:It was horrible.
Guest:The people we lost.
Guest:So many beautiful people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Ethel Eichelberger.
Guest:Herring.
Guest:Klaus Nomi.
Guest:Herring.
Guest:So many...
Guest:And then dope did its job too on a few people.
Guest:And so, yeah, it was, but I, I don't know if that always happens or doesn't happen to community in that.
Marc:And it was truly, I think it's a singular event, the Lower East Side.
Marc:I think that, you know, what happened there and because it's, it's never recovered from it and it sent generations searching for it, you know, for decades after what you guys started, you know, like long after when I was there,
Marc:In the 90s, there was still this sort of like the residual idea of living a performance life on the Lower East Side, but it didn't have the vitality or the originality necessarily that you guys had because you were at the epicenter of it.
Guest:And it was cheap.
Guest:We had cheap housing.
Guest:I mean, it comes down to like if you don't have to pay that much in rent.
Guest:If you can live there, right.
Guest:You're 23 years old.
Guest:Of course, you're going to live a rock and roll existence.
Marc:But between you and Spaulding, and I guess, I think in some weird way, you know, Karen Finley brought a lot of attention to, you know, what was going on down there.
Marc:But also, but in a way that people were able to mock it.
Marc:Because I don't, you know, performance art became this like, what are you going to put yams in your pussy?
Marc:You know, so it sort of got minimized by mainstream culture because of characterization.
Guest:Saturday Night Live did that amazing bit that time where they were like,
Marc:making fun of it world world federated performance art or something and adam sandler's pretending to be me and he has like a curly wig on and he's doing something like my bits and i think that anytime something happens you know culturally that that can be seen as show business whether you want it to or not and and it isn't show business then show business is eventually going to gut it yeah they're either going to steal it or they're going to gut it
Guest:Well, what was weird is it became very successful.
Guest:By the time I did Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll in 90, 90 or 91 or something.
Guest:I mean, we rolled up the biggest advance on an off Broadway show ever.
Marc:I saw that show four times.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:It was weird because like I always had a little bit of a problem with you.
Marc:I was like, you know, is he a comedian?
Marc:What the fuck does that guy?
Marc:No, I don't.
Marc:What does that guy do?
Marc:Because I was a diehard comic, and I'm like, he just wants to be a comic.
Marc:And then I went to see, because I'd read about you, and I'd probably seen talk radio by that point, and I'd never seen you live before.
Marc:But then for some reason, I went to see it, and you were still workshopping it.
Marc:It was at the place where Stomp was, right?
Guest:Yes, that became the Orpheum.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So I saw it in some version, and then in a smaller place, I don't know where- PS122, I used to do all my stuff with them.
Guest:We're gonna do a benefit over there in a couple weeks.
Marc:And then I saw all these different characters, and I'm like, holy shit, this guy's great.
Marc:And then I watched some of the characters, and then I went to see it again, and some of the characters were gone, and I was thinking, they're like, why'd he take that guy out?
Marc:You know, what happened to that guy?
Marc:And then when I saw it finally at the Orpheum, I'm like, so this is the final show.
Marc:But I still was sort of like, well, I miss that one guy.
Marc:Where's that guy?
Marc:The one guy, I still remember which guy I miss.
Marc:Was the doctor with the prescription?
Marc:No, it was the guy with the bong.
Marc:Like, I'm a rebel.
Marc:The guy who was like the outlaw, but he was just sitting on his couch smoking a bong.
Marc:Oh my God, I don't even remember.
Marc:You don't?
Marc:And then there was the guy with the Coke can.
Marc:I have a huge cock.
Guest:oh yeah that guy stayed in though that guy right he was great yeah coming down i've got a long thick well-shaped prick the kind girls die for yeah you're laughing so what yeah fuck you yeah yeah and he's just sort of like this isn't that everybody's fear is that like there's some guy you know who's a moron kind of yeah yeah i mean he's still good at work he has no money but he can get any woman yeah yeah oh yeah those guys massive schlong
Marc:But after that, I was sort of like, wow, this guy's, you know, really something.
Marc:And, you know, I'm not, you don't need this validation, but that was my.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So, so it all builds up to sex, drugs and rock and roll.
Marc:That was, but was that, was that before Talk Radio was after, right?
Guest:Right after.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was sort of like the pith of everything going really right for me right then.
Guest:I did that.
Guest:And then a couple of years later, I did Pounding Nails on the Floor of My Forehead, which
Guest:I even liked better.
Guest:I saw that show too.
Guest:And Suburbia at Lincoln Center.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then I did the Seagal movie around the same.
Guest:1994, it was hitting all the cylinders, full blast.
Marc:And when did you meet your wife?
Marc:Your wife's a theater director, right?
Guest:80.
Guest:We've been married 35 years.
Guest:So she met you drunk.
Guest:Joe Bonney.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I'm drunk more than drunk.
Guest:And I said to her, this is my lifestyle.
Guest:This is who I am.
Guest:Take it or leave it.
Guest:And she would, like, cry and say I was sad.
Guest:And then four years later, I mean, she's getting up every morning at 8 o'clock to go to work.
Guest:I'm still, like, out of it.
Guest:And I'm, hey, some people need 10 hours of sleep a night.
Guest:You know, it's medically necessary.
Guest:Horrible man.
Guest:Terrible.
Guest:And then it just...
Guest:I don't even know what happened.
Guest:I mean, somebody just said, you know, how are you doing?
Guest:And I said, everything's great.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:Like no income.
Guest:I'm waking up with sweats every morning.
Guest:And they said, well, come with me to the thing.
Guest:To the thing.
Marc:Yeah, the secret society.
Guest:I talk about it.
Guest:And that was what a mitzvah, right?
Guest:Said the Armenian guy.
Guest:Honorary.
Guest:You can come to my bar mitzvah.
Marc:Okay, good.
Marc:Let me know when it is.
Marc:I'll write you a check.
Marc:I'll give you an Israeli bond.
Marc:I'll give you a $25 Israeli savings bond.
Marc:A tree.
Marc:Give me a tree in Israel.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, I'll give you a tree.
Guest:But you collaborate with her too, right, a lot?
Guest:Well, she directed all those early shows, and then she sort of peeled off and was direct, not sort of, she peeled off, did her own shows, and now she's one of the premier directors in New York.
Guest:She does stuff with Neil LaBude and Susan Laurie Parks and Lynn Nottage, all the big, very, very smart, Pulitzer Prize-winning...
Guest:now from that from that era do you know how many friendships do you maintain are you friends with cindy sherman do you are you still like close to the the core group i mean yeah i mean we don't see each other all the time i mean you get older and you have slightly but yeah we do see each other we um we all love each other very much um so there's still that sense of community my circle of friends is sort of enlarged into another world of all the theater and
Guest:And even movie and TV people who are just kind of my pals.
Guest:I basically play poker now.
Guest:So that's who my circle of friends are.
Guest:Do you play cards once a week?
Guest:Almost once a week.
Guest:But like an actor guy, Liev got me started in this thing when we were doing talk radio on Broadway.
Guest:And he said, I'm having a poker game.
Guest:And it's like, I don't gamble.
Guest:I don't play poker.
Guest:I don't do anything.
Guest:I don't like the numbers, nothing.
Guest:And that was seven years ago.
Guest:I'm like sick into it.
Marc:Right, well, he must have been like, well, yeah, we really want you to come.
Marc:And then you lost hundreds of dollars until you figured it out.
Marc:No, the problem was I won that night, and that was since then I've lost nonstop.
Marc:They always love the guy, especially in an established game.
Marc:If you go, like, I don't really know how to play.
Marc:Oh, you really got to come.
Marc:And then they all know each other's tells, but you don't even know what a tell is, and you leave broke because you lucked out the first night.
Marc:Yeah, and I've played everybody, and it's a lot of fun.
Marc:But...
Marc:So how do you get from, like, you know, you do sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
Marc:You're starting to do movies.
Marc:You're writing books.
Marc:I mean, you write novels, too.
Guest:Yeah, that was after the play thing kind of stopped in the late 90s.
Guest:I had kept writing plays.
Guest:I still write plays, but they just weren't getting produced.
Guest:And so I was fascinated by, I mean, there's all kinds of things that the internet have changed things.
Guest:And the fact that you could buy a book anywhere, it changed the way.
Guest:Or watch people fucking on your phone.
Marc:It's a big one.
Marc:That's an amazing world we live in.
Guest:So you can get a book to somebody in Nebraska that they couldn't get at their local bookstore, and that changed everything.
Guest:I mean, David Foster Wallace and all the kind of great stuff that was coming in that period, Dave Eggers, I'm like, I don't know.
Guest:I like books.
Guest:So I started writing books, and I wrote three novels, and I don't think I ever found that audience, but...
Guest:The thing about a book is it's still there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I had been doing so much ephemeral stuff.
Marc:If you look around us, there's so many of these books here.
Marc:And you know what?
Marc:I haven't read most of them.
Marc:Don't tell anybody.
Guest:Any of them.
Marc:A few of them I've read.
Guest:Read the book that I gave you.
Guest:I will.
Guest:That Perforated Heart is so, like, navel-gazing existential.
Marc:What are you saying, Eric?
Marc:Look, I got through it.
Marc:Maybe it'll help you.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Don't kill my voice, man.
Guest:Also, I think you can do things when you're young that you can't do when you're old, and there's things when you can do when you're older.
Guest:So I can do long form now and have the presence of mind to stick with it until I have 300 pages done.
Guest:Whereas when I was writing those short things, I had a million ideas, but I could never complete.
Guest:So that's about all I could do was about a three-minute monologue, and I could write that and work on that.
Guest:And now I'm in this other zone where maybe my ideas aren't so great, but I can write something very...
Marc:You have discipline.
Marc:You have a different type of patience.
Marc:You have creative confidence in a way.
Guest:And I had been writing all through this period.
Guest:Once I did talk radio, I was working for the man here in Hollywood.
Guest:CSI, right?
Marc:Or one of them?
Guest:No, I was an actor and CI for Law and Order.
Guest:That was more recent.
Guest:But I worked as a screenwriter for... Oh, yeah?
Marc:Like a doctor?
Marc:Like, give it to Boghossian?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:or you get a book or something and you adapt it I mean none of them got made into movies but I got paid I got paid WGA so like you got health benefits and stuff so that was like my invisible job right nobody knew I was doing right and I did that for about 15 20 years and it was good yeah you have kids right I have two boys yeah how old are they
Guest:28 and 24.
Guest:Holy shit.
Guest:Yeah, holy shit is right.
Guest:So they're like... How are they doing?
Guest:Great.
Guest:Good.
Guest:Yeah, they're not in college anymore.
Guest:So now I can start to do my own life again, run around.
Guest:Do you hang out with them?
Guest:Oh, absolutely.
Guest:I mean, that's...
Guest:I'm not going to say, I mean, my relationship with my parents was fine, but it was typical of that time, which is they're the parents and I'm the.
Guest:But I had that completely.
Marc:I love you, but fuck you.
Marc:I got to go.
Guest:And I'm angry at them and I'm not around and I go away for a long period of time.
Guest:But my guys, I mean, I spent a lot.
Guest:First of all, I'm the generation of dads who spent a lot of time changing diapers and doing all that stuff and always around them.
Guest:my wife was working a lot so i'm with and so now they're these men that i have i have a relationship with i don't have with anybody else and you know what they make me laugh and that's all that's all i care about in relationships and they don't know drunk eric make me laugh right no never that's great yeah they didn't never see me drunk they heard the story they saw me rageaholic though i was early on when i was first getting sober and they were a little daddy could get a little they call me crazy daddy and everybody would like leave the room because i'm going nuts
Marc:How'd you deal with that?
Marc:Because I'm just reckoning with that now in the last few years.
Marc:At 16 years sober, the rage problem finally exhausted itself.
Marc:It literally exhausted.
Guest:That's about when it burns out.
Guest:Well, more and more, there's less and less to, like, what am I being so freak?
Guest:What am I so crazy about?
Guest:What am I so afraid?
Guest:What am I afraid of?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What am I afraid of?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:For me, it came to a sudden end because a friend of mine's son died from a drug overdose when he was like 18 years old, one of my best friends.
Guest:It was mind-blowing.
Guest:Heartbreaking.
Guest:Just...
Guest:And it changed my whole notion of what's important, what isn't important in my life, and what am I losing my shit over this?
Guest:Because he didn't do the Spanish homework.
Guest:Who cares?
Guest:And so I just stopped.
Guest:I just said, I don't care.
Guest:Because it was all about fear, like they're not going to get into college or something.
Guest:Oh, right.
Guest:Really?
Guest:You never cared about this shit in the first place.
Guest:Why is this something that you're losing?
Guest:You're going nuts.
Guest:And so I just stopped.
Guest:I said, if this kid ends up on the couch for the rest of his life smoking weed, which they never did any of that stuff.
Marc:But it's interesting what kicks in.
Marc:Despite whatever you grew up with, there is that idea that you want your kids to have an opportunity to find their way in the world, to do the responsible thing.
Marc:Even if they're, you know, they think that they don't want it now.
Marc:There's that, I imagine, with a kid where it's sort of like, you may think that you want to be this way now, but you're going to regret it.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And there must have been some shame you were carrying.
Guest:Well, we had more frank conversations than I ever had with my parents.
Guest:I mean, I would say to, like, Harry when he was 12 or something, I said, look, look.
Guest:I just want to tell you this.
Guest:This is my first time being a dad, okay?
Guest:So you've got to cut me some slack here.
Guest:Just go with it a little bit, right?
Guest:And I would say stuff like, you know, you know how you kind of feel weird around girls and you're shy?
Guest:Smoke weed, it'll be like multiplied by 10.
Guest:So if you want it to be a lot worse, start smoking a lot of grass and then you'll never talk to a girl again.
Guest:And it's great because he was, well, he had a girlfriend and he got laid a lot more than I did when I was.
Guest:And that's a whole other problem.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You're going to be like, how'd you do it?
Guest:That's called statutory rape, Harry.
Guest:You can't do that.
Marc:So you've had all these different sort of lives creatively as a performer and actor, screenwriter, novelist, and collaborator with other people and stuff.
Marc:And so I imagine this brings us to this point where you want to own your heritage.
Marc:And then this book...
Marc:Like, I just have to assume that, and I'm projecting, and you can tell me if I'm wrong, that, you know, when this thing started to blossom and sort of, you know, reveal all these things to you, not only about the Armenian genocide or about the history, that your sense of family and everything else must have just kind of converged as well on this.
Marc:Oh, sure.
Guest:I mean, you respect...
Guest:Look, when you're a kid, old guys are just old guys.
Marc:You love them.
Guest:But they don't seem to have.
Guest:And then you go, oh, I get it.
Guest:He went through all this stuff.
Guest:This is what being this guy is.
Guest:I mean, for me, it was a reversal of I had rejected myself as a sort of ethnic.
Guest:I was not going to be this ethnic guy.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:And more recently, I was like, no, you are.
Guest:Own it.
Guest:Love it.
Guest:The music, the food.
Guest:You know, when I was little, when I was in the 60s, if I ate yogurt or something, which is an Armenian food, we call it, the little kids in the neighborhood, they watch me eating it.
Guest:Like, how do you eat?
Guest:How can you eat that stuff?
Guest:That's disgusting.
Guest:And now everybody eats yogurt, shish kebab, all the things that were things I grew up with that were so weird and foreign.
Guest:But that's me, you know?
Guest:Now, we are a pretty anti—I mean, I said this earlier, but, I mean, Middle Eastern people are kind of like endlessly put down in our society, and that's what I look like.
Guest:I look like a guy who's an Arab or a Jew or whatever.
Guest:And I have to kind of get past that.
Guest:You know, it's weird.
Guest:We live in a society—I actually said this to Spike Lee one time—where black people can be like heroes, and white people are heroes, but brown people—
Guest:aren't you know and i i think that's changing that's changed lately but pretty much the united we in our society every country we have ripped off we claim that they're the ones that are doing like the arabs are the sneaky people because we've been stealing their oil for like right 75 years the mexicans are lazy because we we're
Guest:All these people, they're somehow bad or less than us.
Guest:Black people are violent.
Guest:I mean, come on.
Guest:Black culture is actually more warm and embracing than other cultures that I know of.
Guest:So now with...
Guest:put down all these people and I accept this idea of who I am in some way kind of less than, that's crazy.
Guest:It is a little hard for me.
Guest:One of the things about having kids is that I look at my boys and they are beautiful and wonderful and I remember when I was their age I was so self-conscious about
Guest:My hair, this curly hair, people come up and touch it, or my skin is a little darker than other kids.
Guest:And I look at my kids like, how could I have ever thought that about myself?
Guest:What a horrible thing.
Marc:So the act of Operation Nemesis, the act of creating this book, not only... It's an act of integration, yourself into your heritage, and also the history of what you're talking about into the fabric of our culture.
Marc:That you're raising awareness, and also now you're a celebrated Armenian, I would imagine.
Marc:I mean, you're here to...
Guest:Oh, the community, particularly the people who are – the Armenian community has a very political side and a very non-political side.
Guest:In the political side, I was never part of that world.
Guest:The Armenian National Committee, who are actually having this big banquet this weekend and have –
Guest:and are honoring me with giving me an award.
Guest:They have been so supportive.
Guest:They are also the people who made sure everyone was aware of the Armenian genocide, the centennial of it last April, which just happens.
Guest:I don't know if this is some kind of mark or something, but I was born on April 24th, which is the day that they commemorate the beginning of all the killings.
Guest:At any rate, I've gotten to know these communities that are super tight Armenian communities here in Southern California, all over the place.
Guest:I was in Vegas the other day there.
Guest:I was like visiting the church there.
Guest:Do they think you got it right?
Guest:You know, I was very wary of that as I was working on the book because I'm talking about some stuff that they were involved in.
Guest:100 years ago.
Guest:And finally I gave it to them.
Guest:And in March, some of the big guys in the community took me aside at this event and they said, we're with you.
Guest:We like the book.
Guest:And supported it and had told all their people to...
Guest:To read it and buy it.
Marc:And this is a new story to a lot of Armenians.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The old story, the original Tetlarian story of the kid, the engineering student who shot Talat Pasha in Berlin is a story that a lot of Armenians know.
Guest:The story of Operation Nemesis, that there was this huge conspiracy operating out of New England that knocked off six major Turks, who, by the way, like I say, if you're going to talk about the Armenian genocide, you've got to mention that five years later they did this.
Guest:That's news to a lot, a lot, a lot of people.
Guest:And I think it's interesting not just as an Armenian, but in terms of world history.
Guest:I don't know of any story.
Guest:I mean, Munich is kind of related to it, but they basically knocked off a whole government.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:It would be like if a Jew had found Hitler and Goering and Goebbels and all these guys and killed them.
Marc:Wiesenthal, he tried.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, he got a few.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And it has the same kind of like with Eichmann going into another country and doing this thing.
Guest:This is not legal.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So you're stuck with this thing of like it's kind of illegal.
Guest:It's not kind of.
Guest:It is illegal what they're doing.
Guest:More criminal.
Guest:They're kind of murder incorporated going after these guys.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, you mean them?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And then there's this sort of sense of like, what is God?
Guest:What is justice?
Guest:And then justice.
Guest:And then you basically say, what's right?
Guest:And if these guys are really and they are responsible for murdering a million people, then some people felt it was their job to go and not let them get away with it.
Guest:Or maybe come back to power later and keep killing more Armenians, which was another part of it.
Guest:By the way, I have to say, they had already been condemned to death by trials after the war.
Guest:There were war crimes, trials, and all these men had been.
Guest:It was already established in court in Turkey.
Guest:But at any rate, this story blew me away.
Guest:I didn't know it.
Guest:Honestly, working on it, I thought I was going to get it done a lot faster.
Guest:I'm good friends with Sarah Vowell, and she was sort of like rabbi'd me through this thing a little bit.
Guest:And so I thought, oh, I can write a popular history.
Guest:I'll just learn all the facts, and then I'll kind of put it in my own voice.
Guest:But it turned out to be a much more serious and hard thing.
Guest:So about halfway through it, I realized I was really in deep with a complicated story.
Guest:But what are you going to do?
Guest:You've got to finish it.
Guest:So I kept going.
Guest:It's good you had that discipline.
Guest:And you wrote something that could... I really had nowhere else to go.
Guest:I mean, I had to finish it.
Guest:What, are you going to climb a mountain and go halfway?
Marc:It's going to be a text story.
Guest:It is a text.
Guest:And there's an audio book, too, so it's me reading, and I don't know how to pronounce any of these Armenian names, so it's just insane trying to say all this stuff.
Guest:I don't even know how to pronounce my own last name.
Guest:It's Boghossian, Boghossian.
Guest:What is it?
Guest:The correct pronunciation is Boghossian.
Marc:Yeah, that's not going to work.
Marc:That's a little too true.
Marc:Who?
Guest:Well, I used to do, when I did talk shows and stuff, when I first started my career, they'd be like, today we have Eric... How do you say that name?
Guest:I mean, I'm like, come on.
Marc:Really?
Guest:You're going to have me on as a guest and you're going to do this to me.
Marc:It's hard.
Marc:I get it all the time.
Marc:Moran, Moran, moron.
Marc:Fucking horrible.
Marc:Mine, I think, is simple.
Marc:It's a lot less complicated than yours.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:So, what part of New England did these guys work from?
Guest:Boston, then there was a guy in Albany, there was a CPA in Albany, there was an insurance agent in Hartford, Connecticut, and they were all part of the same political party, and they basically said, this has to happen.
Marc:It reminds me of the Cubans, too, with the plot to kill Castro.
Marc:There are these expats who want to do what's right.
Guest:So they knew that this kid...
Guest:had shot and killed somebody in Constantinople who was seen as sort of a traitor.
Guest:And they recruited him.
Guest:They brought him to Boston.
Guest:They looked him over because they knew they wanted him to get caught so that then in the trial, he could talk about the Armenian genocide.
Guest:They wanted people to hear about it.
Guest:So they needed a guy who would be presentable.
Guest:And he was a very sympathetic character with this.
Guest:Did he know he was going to get caught?
Guest:Yeah, the plan was to get caught and then get as many witnesses into the trial as possible to talk about the Armenian genocide, which is what they did.
Guest:So this was a very famous trial in 1921.
Guest:New York Times covered it.
Guest:It was covered all around the world.
Guest:And this guy was so sympathetic because everybody thought that he had been the survivor of these massacres.
Guest:He had seen his mother beheaded right in front of him.
Guest:And he was just this engineering student, happened to see this guy in the street and went and got a gun.
Guest:Of course, none of that was true.
Guest:He knew exactly what he was doing.
Guest:In fact, I even referred to a CIA manual on how to kill people and the way he killed the guy, which was to shoot him in the back of the neck right at the top of the spine.
Guest:That is the most effective way to make sure that you're one shot.
Marc:He killed all six of them?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:He killed him.
Guest:And then there were other assassins who were operating all around Europe.
Guest:There were all kinds of people.
Guest:There were Armenians who spoke Turkish, who pretended to be Turks.
Guest:And there was one guy who actually got circumcised so that when he was in the Hammam, that Turks, if they saw him, they would think that he was Muslim because Muslims get circumcised like Jews do.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Oh, right.
Guest:So he anyway, all these different guys were all over the place in Rome.
Guest:They knocked a guy.
Guest:They got the Grand Vizier.
Guest:They went back to Berlin.
Guest:They killed two more guys there.
Guest:They got somebody in Constantinople.
Guest:They got Jamal Pasha in Tbilisi.
Guest:And they basically one other guy got caught.
Guest:He also got cut loose based on some idea of temporary insanity.
Guest:And they they basically grew up.
Guest:Most of them are old men here in California by the 1960s.
Guest:There's pictures of them hanging around each other.
Guest:I can show you in the picture.
Guest:This guy killed two people.
Guest:This guy killed three people.
Guest:This guy out here like in Glendale, San Francisco, Los Angeles.
Marc:Well, they kept in touch.
Guest:Yeah, oh, yeah.
Guest:They knew each other.
Guest:Although they never, they didn't talk about it.
Guest:One of the interesting things about this whole thing was it sort of came out of nowhere.
Guest:These were all nobodies.
Guest:They were all like nobody ever knew these people.
Guest:And then once they shut the operation down, they basically put all the stuff away and didn't talk about it ever again.
Guest:So when I heard this story, it was like, what?
Guest:And where's the book on this?
Guest:Where's something about this?
Guest:And I couldn't.
Guest:There was this one obscure book coming out of France by Jacques de Rogier.
Guest:And I used that for some source.
Guest:And then I did my own research, found out that British intelligence probably helped these guys out.
Guest:British intelligence wanted these Turks killed as well.
Guest:And they thought, well, we could kill them or we could just tell the Armenians where they live.
Guest:And so I think they slipped the address to the Armenians.
Marc:It's fascinating because like, you know, you did this great service for the community and for history and for everything else.
Marc:And you just, you know, the impetus was like, I'm going to write a movie.
Marc:And then all of a sudden it became a bigger responsibility.
Marc:It became a humanitarian responsibility.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Well, obviously, whatever the compulsion was, you were like, how is this story not been told properly?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it wasn't an, I didn't see how there was no upside for ego.
Guest:There was no money upside.
Guest:I mean, Little Brown paid me in advance, but it wasn't that.
Guest:that was like a in it for that how did that feel for you doing something relatively selfless i don't know why i do anything i just do stuff i mean come on you're too sober to say that no listen i did i i met mike when i was working with richard link letter i met mike judge down in austin i said i love beavis and butthead do america beavis and butthead
Guest:And if you ever want anything, he goes, well, we're going to do this movie, Beavis the Butthead to America.
Guest:And so I said, well, anything.
Guest:So he had me do three voiceovers in that movie, you know, scale 500 bucks or something.
Guest:And I forgot about it.
Guest:And, you know, whatever it was, $50,000 later with all the royalties and everything, because the movie was a huge effect.
Guest:It's probably the biggest hit I've ever been involved with.
Guest:But I'm...
Guest:I try to lead with, well, let me put it this way.
Guest:I try to lead with have fun, keep things interesting.
Guest:And every time I try to do something for money or I got this big plan.
Guest:I wrote an action movie one time because I thought I would sell it and get millions of dollars.
Guest:It never works out.
Guest:All those plans don't work out.
Guest:I'm no good with the plans.
Guest:I started a production company.
Guest:I was going to make a live video, which exists.
Guest:Spent $60,000 on this thing.
Guest:Nothing.
Guest:Couldn't get anybody.
Guest:Nobody wanted it.
Guest:It doesn't exist.
Guest:I mean, you can go on the 100monologues.com site and see those things.
Marc:So you're doomed to operate from your passion.
Guest:I'm doing to having being clueless.
Guest:I just don't know.
Marc:You get possessed.
Marc:The first thing I write your compulsive person.
Marc:I mean, nobody writes in Armenian history book just because, you know, like, yeah, I think I'm going to.
Guest:It just makes sense to me.
Guest:You know, when I'm working on anything writing and I know you've had this experience, it can it quickly becomes a dead end.
Guest:Or it like opens up like a flower and you go, oh, wow, I found this thing.
Guest:This works.
Guest:That's what you're looking for.
Guest:That's the moment.
Marc:You can hope for that, but you can't plan it is basically what you're saying.
Guest:No, you don't know what.
Guest:And I don't know where it's coming from.
Guest:And I've kind of given into, let's see what happens.
Guest:It makes life a little more exciting because since I'm not planning everything.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Who knows what's going to be next year?
Guest:I mean, you take the law and order thing.
Guest:I mean, my friend Warren Light calls me up one day and says, come over to the offices today and say hi to everybody.
Guest:I go, I'm really busy today.
Guest:I can't come over.
Guest:He goes, well, Dick's here.
Guest:Come over and say Dick Wolf.
Guest:I said, I really, Warren.
Guest:He goes, I really think you should come over and say hi to Dick.
Guest:So I come over.
Guest:Dick Wolf says hi to me and says, do you want to be the captain on Law & Order?
Guest:And 60 episodes later, I've had the time of my life, and it was a blast doing that thing.
Guest:Did not see that coming.
Guest:And you made a living doing what you do.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's good.
Guest:Yeah, I was having cups of coffee.
Guest:I walk in the room, say four lines, drink a cup of coffee, and get to be in that beginning, the header of the show.
Guest:What did they do?
Marc:And he wrote this amazing book about this untold Armenian.
Guest:Yes, that paid for it.
Guest:That paid for it.
Guest:That paid for the book.
Marc:It's an exciting life you lead.
Marc:And Operation Nemesis just came out a few months ago, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you are an active part of a community that you just, through youthful condescension, detached from.
Marc:And now you have done this amazing gift for them.
Guest:Now I realize how lucky I am to be one of these amazing people called Armenians.
Guest:So that's what I am.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Well, it was great talking to you, Eric.
Marc:Thanks, Mark.
Marc:That's it.
Marc:That's the show.
Marc:Thank you for listening.
Marc:I appreciate it.
Marc:Did I tell you?
Marc:I mean, Eric goes, man.
Marc:That was great.
Marc:It's always good to see him.
Marc:It's exciting.
Marc:Talking to Eric Boghossian is like being on an amusement park ride.
Marc:Good times.
Marc:What else do I got to tell you?
Marc:WTFpod.com.
Marc:Get your stuff.
Marc:Do the thing.
Marc:If you want posters for Christmas, it's getting tight.
Marc:It's getting tight now.
Marc:You know, we might be able to make it under the wire.
Marc:Don't know.
Marc:But enjoy yourselves, and I'll talk to you Monday.
Marc:Got some big shows coming up.
Marc:What else?
Marc:I got to brush my teeth and get dressed and go be an actor.
Marc:Do a character that's vaguely like me.
Guest:Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do
Guest:It's a little muted jazz trumpet for the end.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:Boomer lives!
Boomer lives!
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