Oh, hey, Rob, you are not on your mic.
I don't think what are we going to pretend here that there's like, oh our our our, our broadcast standards are so high. Yes, okay, well we have we we do have them.
They're just we can't be met sometimes they can't be met. It's that simple. Wait a minute, Wait a minute.
You know this is excuse me a damn fine cup of coffee.
Welcome to the first glop culture of the second Trump administration, where we're we're nearing the end of January. I'm John pod Hornz in New York. Somewhere in the wilds of the state of New Jersey wilds, the place that has more townships than any other in the planet Earth is Rob Long. Hello wild, Rob Long. You're like, I look up my equipment. Rob is having sound. We're having sound issues with Rob, so we were going to try to
we're fixing those on the fly. And by we, I mean also Jonah Goldberg in Washington High Jonah, Hey, John, I know Jonah and I did a podcast together yesterday and then he went on Twitter and insulted me for the hours for the fact that I quoted you accurately an hour out of my day, he ask me, had the fly making fun of me? Okay, that's fine.
All all I say I did was quote you saying not to monologize.
That's okay. Well, that was consciousness of the fact that I was at that moment monologizing, and I think I think that that self knowledge should not become the object of your sport.
That's fair anyway, apologize.
That's okay. You know who else needs to apologize? The voters of the Academy of Motion Art, Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who today, as we're recording, gave thirteen nominations to a movie on Netflix that it is my estimation, according to my scientific study of these matters, that literally no one has watched from beginning to end. And that is a Melia Amelia Perez, Amelia Perez, watch saw twice, You saw twice your life? Can I just tell you?
I think we talked about this the last time. But Amelia Perez posits the following question, what if you made a French director made an opera largely in Spanish about how el Choppo is trans and wants to become a woman, and when El Choppo becomes a woman becomes a social justice warrior. And tries to save the world because now that he she is the person that she is supposed to be, that now she can be they can be
a good person. And it got thirteen nominations. And I'm telling you right now, I have not met a single person who has gotten past minute sixty of Amelia Perez. I have seen it all the way through because of my professional obligations, but I was doing wordal and the Spelling Bee through the second half, so fortunately I was really not paying that much attention. It is awful, It is comically awful, so it is of course a thirteen Oscar nominee.
Do you know you know what it reminds me of. It's a story you told, was it? John Hughes who had a horrible idea for a screenplay that he would test out on studio executives to see if they were yes men or not yes right. It was a bit like a botched abortion or whatever. And if they if they said that sounds great, he knew he couldn't trust their judgment. It feels like someone pitched that and no one realized it was a joke.
And then they got thirteen Oscar nominations. Because of course it's a movie, and now that one of the star of the movie, it was actually not the star of the movie, but it's the title character is a trans person named Carlo Sophia Gascon got an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, And we can get to the question of whether or not a person who was born male like Leah Thomas in the Swimming Pool should be well, that's good, Rob,
thank you came, yet you fix it anyway. We can talk about whether or not this person is stealing, is going to possibly steal an Oscar from an actual biological woman or not. But she's all not the star of the movie, because the star of the movie is Zoweys Saldana, who was actually good in it and is in the Supporting Actress category. Nonetheless, this is a fast because of course that's why it's nominated for thirteen Academy Awards, because
it's a movie about a transwoman. But the fact that that trans woman is el Choppo does not seem to have created any moral hazard for the Academy voters, who are perfectly happy to imagine that if you just take Yaya Sinhoar and you let Yaya Sinhar become a woman, Yaya Sinowar will become Gandhi. I mean that is essentially kind of like the theme of the movie. Now, I just want to say not to anologize that. Conclave, the other movie, another movie that I think has seven or
eight Academy Award nomination. You are muted, Rob, even though your sound was good there first.
Careful on the spoilers here, Okay.
I just want to say that there. It would be great if Carlo Sophia Skan presented the Best Special Effects Award along with the actor who plays the mysterious cardinal from Kabul in Conclave. And if you've seen the movie, you know what I mean. If you haven't, I'm not saying anything, so but that would be that would be fun. Yeah, Okay, if anybody here cared about so here the here are the Oscar nominees, and I would like to know if you guys have seen any of Okay, here's here's what
Here's what they got, Anora, I'm still here. A Brazilian movie, Wicked, A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan movie, The Substance Body Horror with Demi Moore, The con Conclave, The Papal Succession Movie, The Brutalist, The Three and a half hour epic of post war America and an architect and a rich guy and a Holica survivor. Uh, what's watch? What is your?
What is your?
Where are you going with this?
I was going to ask you if you've seen any of these films? Okay, that's what I would like to know if you, I think you have seen Conclave.
I've seen Conclave. I've seen Honora, you've seen.
Yes, and there are eight others and.
Substance.
Okay, okay, have seen any of these? Literally? Not seen?
He said Jonas Jonahs, taking the rob chair for this having not seen it.
Usual, I've watches more television streaming television than I do, certainly because of his many flights, many plane flights. So I I just think it's interesting that this is a mark of how movies have Really there's no question that they have shifted into a secondary place in our culture that they when for most of my lifetime they occupied the primary place in popular culture. The most. Everybody's happier in culture.
Everybody's happier in a way, right because they weren't going to give the oscars the movies that you like.
Anyway, Let's hear, since they give I mean I love, right, So now that's the one that I loved. But I mean, did I like no? Man?
Right, So so everybody's everybody's getting what they want. I mean, the people in show business are getting awards, which, by the way, is something that we definitely want in show business all the time.
I have a mind.
I have a Writer's Guild Award. I'm a Writer's Guild Award winner, along with other awards, but my Writer's Guild Award, it still says it. Am I buy a Writer's Guild Award winner?
I want?
I want the Writers Guild for the Earth Day Special in like I don't know, nineteen ninety something, and the reason, yeah, the reason it got was because everybody giving James. James, I'll explain it. I'll explain it if you let me. Awards, let me let me if you can, let me explain it here, not to monologize, but everyone on every show wrote a little sketch with their characters. So the writers did.
The Earth Day Special of that year had like one hundred and twenty seven writers, which and they all voted for themselves.
So that's what. So that's one fewer than SNL has now.
Yeah, so they all voted for themselves to get the get the Emmy.
So I have it, and for a long time I had it in the bathroom until someone said, you know.
That's everybody says, yeah in the bathroom. It's all. It's like such a thing to say.
Well, but the difference is that it says the Writers Guild Writers Guild Award Award for the Earth Day Special, So it does. That's where it belongs. It's not like you have to hear.
And realize you look at the ingredients.
So is it your contention that it's early yet, But basically cinema, right, film theater going cinema.
Yeah, use of cinema, by the way, is.
On the path towards where opera and ballet are today.
They still exist, right, bad analogy, that's a very good.
And popular culture, or you can call it or theater.
I mean, actually, there are two thoughts about this, one of which is that it's a minority. It's a it's a pleasure that is enjoyed by six seven eight percent of the population. That the infrastructure that exists to provide that pleasure to people is too large and will shrink. Right. That is, these thousands of theaters and large buildings, right, and you know all of that, and they will they will shrink or they will they will become multipurpose spaces
where other things happen. And then in those spaces seven or eight times a year, something big might happen, like like there there are two possibly very big Marvel movies this year, and Superman and Wicked too, and you know Despicable Me seven and Zootopia two and things like that that that might have large audiences where they can be activated. And otherwise these spaces will either will become bowling alleys or bars or whatever they'll do. They'll they'll be games
to play or something like that. And that's one possibly. The other possibility is that they will essentially go extinct because the viewing experience of watching any program is now arguably better at home than in a theater, or at least be talking. You don't people talking, you don't have to go somewhere.
But the problem is you don't feel compelled. The thing about going to movie theaters. You used to feel like, oh, I better go. I got to go see this movie. Everyone's seeing it. I want to go see it. There's part of an outing. Now when you're in your house. You have this ability to think, well.
You turn off Amlia Perez is what you're.
Saying, or like or not today, I do want to see it. I just want to see it today, and you know, you can see it tomorrow if you want. Whereas a movie, you kind of had to go and see it.
Yeah, when we were kids, and when we were kids and there was a movie on TV that you wanted to see, you had to see it, right, there's no idea. Well, those were like the big ones. But let's say there was a movie that you had heard of and suddenly it's on either in prime time or it's on at eleven thirty, and it's a movie you'd heard abund the Maltese Falcon, and you're you know, you're our age and you're fourteen years old, and you better watch it because you don't know when it's coming.
It was the principle, yeah, right, the same principle that these movies were on. But I you know, in a sense, though everybody gets this is really just a question economic terms of the costs aligning with the with the actual upside, which is that the movies are really too expensive to make considering what they where they are and so everything's going to get pressed down. That's you know, It's that that's the difference between theater and and ballet and opera,
et cetera. So that you have very rich people basically supporting and subsidizing these art forms, and you're just I don't think you have that with movies. I can't imagine, although you do in a weird way. You do have to do right because you have it in this sense well, supporting the different things. It's a slightly different thing though, because because it's it's exciting.
People invest in movies because they want to be movie stars. That's why they do it.
They don't do it because they did a very very complicated economic analysis and they run in a team of consultancs. They decided that I alone can make you know, like nobody nobody hires McKinsey to figure out how to work the system at the win casino because there isn't one, you know, it's that's they're gonna lose money, so they do that.
I don't know.
I just to me, that's that's the that's what's gonna happen. Movies are just gonna and and and film productions is gonna go down I mean, the costs of it are going to go down, and the people who are gonna do it are going to be people who are more interested in doing but do it and having it doing it and then get launching it to a tequila brand.
That's the that's the smart move. But let me tell you a story. So the story is the movie The Brutalist, which is a remarkable piece of work, and I really do strongly urge people to go see it. It's a it's an American epic, and it's really remarkable and there's a lot to argue over it. And it is also remarkable because it's it's more than three hours long, and it costs ten million dollars to make, and it's an epic set from nineteen pretty much from nineteen forty six through nineteen sixty one.
Multiple thing you have said, none of the words you have just uttered yes, have in any way have encouraged me to see this movie.
I am I okay, I encourage you.
I'm looking at my crystal ball and in my crystal I don't know.
Much, but I know one hundred percent certainly you are that I will never see this freaking Moore.
You are.
There's nothing about it that I think is interesting.
Or entertaining and very interesting, and you will merely doubt that you are incorrect. But and I know you, and I know your taste, and I think you would actually you would find it.
Va you lost me at three hours.
Now, let me explain.
Sometimes you guys make me feel like I'm listening to my parents argue with each other.
But wait, let me explain why I brought it up.
You love the most.
Listen to me. It's three and a half hours long. It's an American epic. It's said in the past it costs ten million dollars to make in total. Wait, that's an extraordinary fact alone. And why did it cost ten million dollars to make? There's a little hint of why it cost ten million dollars to make. That is both encouraging and terrifying to people in Hollywood and probably to all of us. Okay, are you.
Going to tell us why?
Because they used AI. Now we only know that they used AI to help them strengthen. Some of the characters speak in Hungarian. That's Adrian Adrian Brody nominated for Best Actor, Felicity Jones nominated for Best Actress. Hungarian and they speak together in Hungarian, and there are scenes where there's Hungarian and apparently they used AI to strengthen the Hungarian, make it literate, make it make it correct. All of that.
I'm guessing that more than Hungarian was done here that is that involves AI.
That movie Queer is it's like this, there's tons of AI in that movie and it's almost terrible.
Okay, but I say, you used AI AI to do what well, I don't know.
Sets backwards Une Philadelphia, nineteen fifty one. But my point is that this means you can make a giant. You could make The Godfather for two million dollars. Well if you're bubbling, okay, if you use AI properly. But of course everybody in Hollywood, everybody in America is scared to death of AI.
Can we just here's what's interesting about culture and AI
and movies to me. In the movie Queer with Daniel Craig and then an actor whose name I forget now Daniel Craig, Clake, James Bond, there's a whole bunch of AI in there for like scenery and like Mexico City in the fifties and stuff it's like, and they shot it all on a back lot, so it kind of looks faky anyway, but like the AI kind of does okay, but it's gonna look like those really bad rear screen projections from the fifties, look like a bad Hitchcock rear
screen projection, which we all kind of like except now because it's Hitchcock.
But really it.
Looks terrible, right ye.
What's interesting about it is that they didn't use AI for the fairly graphic sex scenes between Daniel Craig and this other dude and Daniel Craig is an action adventure, and that just shows you how far we come, because you know, if you just say yeah, John Wayne, or even like Roger Moore, Sean Connery, you said, look, you're gonna be in bed with this guy, it's going to be pretty obvious what's happening. And there's really no other way to fake it. So it's going to be almost
like you're like, it's happening. You know, it's not going to be it's going to be very very intimate, But we're gonna use AI to do the Mountains of Tosco. If you're like Sean Connery, how about we do the AI for the sex stuff that we Actually.
It's even worse because Daniel Craig like took this big swing for the fences with this part and did not work an Oscar nomination.
And well that's because it's that he was he was stiffed.
He was stiffed, he was slewed, which is what you're saying.
People thought it because he did in the movie.
But the weird.
Thing about that is that it used to be like you would get an Oscar nom if you played somebody who was mentally handicapped or sad gay man. And now I think you don't. I don't know how you get. I don't know how you get.
Okay.
One other big thing is that you know yetity you play a drug dealer who becomes a woman.
Yeah, that's been got transit, here's and here's a big one, got a big one for you. You know how it used to be to every documentary every year, the best documentary.
We're just deserly trying to get some jokes in here. John, I don't know if you've noticed. You keep going back to the ospital.
Said stiffed. I'm the one who said I started that whole thing. I know, I know, okay, I don't. I just don't want to be accused of it.
But you finished too soon, That's what.
That's what he said. Okay, the documentary film category. Every year, there were always two films that involved the Holocaust, right, always two. There was like a Survivor, or there was like no, now we are moving what is now twenty twenty four? It is the and guess what, Guess what? There is a movie. There is no Holocaust movie, but there is of course a Palestinian Jenit are being genocided movie in the documentary category.
Well, I got to get a movie's times.
That's what I'm saying. So the new thing is going to be It used to be Hollywood run by Jews, Da da da Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust. Now it's going to be Hollywood run by woke leftist lunatics, palastine genocide, palicying, and genocide palacy. So that's a fun that's a fun journey that we're taking, you know, as as the politics in America shifts radically in the other direction. But so, uh, did you like a Noura rob because I loved Anora.
Yeah.
That was fun. It was good.
I was like a real movie. Yeah, I mean it felt like a real movie. It felt like a movie, like I mean, I liked I liked the conclavet because it was.
It was.
I love all that like that specific weird Vatican stuff, you know, as a as a as a devoted Anglican. It it satisfies my need to to uh to look down on the papers, but also think, wow, that's a cool outfit.
Cool outfit, nice hallways like yeah, and also a part one hundred and two hotel rooms they somehow just constructed in the solely to have there so that they could have a conclave every now and then.
I just like it. I just thought that that was it was.
Pretty it has it has the worst last ten minutes of any movie I've ever seen that. Yeah, But nonetheless, anyway it is, it is so good. It is so fun until that point.
So that point's kind of fun.
That was a fun movie.
I was in London recently with my daughter, Yeah, and we saw two shows on the West End, two things at theater right, the Mysterious Case of Benjamin Button reset in a Welsh seaside town and uh the Stranger Things Play, which we can talk about in a second. But after we saw the Benjamin Button thing, which was the music which we liked, didn't love, but we liked. It was too early to get dinner, the hotel us too far away to go home, and so me and my daughter
loved going to the movies. So we went to the big Imax theater in Leicester Square and saw No s Faratu and biggest Imax theater I've ever been in, and I think except maybe with one at the Smithsonian. It's kind of nuts and not to go back to the opera versus ballet kind of ye. Yeah, the tickets for this might as well have been for La Bom at the Met. I mean I dropped again. I think between popcorn, soda and two tickets for this Imax thing, close to one hundred pounds.
That was the pop corn. Yeah. They don't put butter on their popcorn.
There, yeah they do. Nobody does. Americans know how to eat popcorn in general corn nobody else does.
Yeah. Well, also when you go when you go to Europe, they don't have ice. They don't have ice for drinks, that's the other thing. And they don't Yeah, they don't have and they don't have butter on the pape.
Now they have more ice than they used to as growing up as a kid, uh, and they don't. They still use the little the glasses with the etched in line that shows you legally in France anyway, how many sent a leaders, You're going to get no more no loves, so that there will never be no.
Like but anything, have anything.
It's just like it so barely quenches your thirst.
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Rob.
Can I ask you a question, Yeah.
Less about Luhman and more about your role now as the probationary spiritual advisor of this podcast. Yes, when you say, is it bad that when I hear you say yes, most people will give up their resolutions by February. And the thing that comes to my mind is I look at the calendar and I'm like, awesome, I only have to wait seven more days before I can give up.
Well, you know, as a well known now well known Episcopalian clergy member of the clergy recently said publicly and in front of the incoming president and vice president, mercy is at the heart of our faith. So I will pray for you, and I offer you only the mercy that God offers you as you break your covenants.
With yourself, because that's who you're letting down, Jennah.
Not me, not God, not John. You it's worse to let me down. You're okay with that from th So what did you like those rato.
It was pretty gross, I gotta say, and it was not necessary for imax, I gotta say. I guess I did It was such a.
Throwback in so many ways.
It did not feel like a movie made in twenty twenty five, released in twenty twenty five. It felt like it was an homage to a movie that was released in nineteen seven kind of thing. And uh, yeah it wasn't it kind of kind of like it didn't know what it wanted to be. Was it a horror movie?
Was it an homage?
Was I mean the guy who played No Saratu was uh the guy I think he was penny Wise? You know, he's a really penny Wise and they recent it. Yes, yes, yeah, he's very good at it. But like if I was watching with my dad, my dad would be like, why can't he blow his nose? Just like the way he talked was just really annoying.
So I liked it.
It was interesting to look at, but like you, there was no one to really sympathize with in the whole thing. No one are really root for and the handful And like when I heard that William Dafoe was going to be in No Sparatu I just assumed he was going to play No Faratu.
But by the way he did, I oh he did twenty years ago, twenty years ago, and he made a movie. He made a comedy about the making of the original No Speratu, the making of the movie in which he played Max Shrek, the actor who played No Saratu in the movie, made in Germany in nineteen.
It's strange though.
It's like place van Helsing or the version whatever the character's name is here in in nos Farta. I loved it. I loved it, I have to say much to my I thought it was beautiful. I thought it was it was really interesting. Look. I thought it was actually quite I actually was quite moved by it in ways. And I thought it was very intelligently made. But and it's a hit. It's a huge hit for a for an
independent movie of that sort. It's going to make a hundred million dollars at the box office, which for an R rated horror movie of that sustained grossness, which is a, by the way, part of a whole move. Honora's like this, the substances like this. No Speratu is like this, the Nicole Kidman movie, Baby Girl, and a couple of other things. Breasts are back on screen. Baby. It's been like twenty years we haven't seen a naked lady on screen and
let me tell you go to the multiplex. Oh yeah, you know, it's like going to the pussy Cat back in nineteen seventy two. We we have we have breasts, we have.
Since Rodney Dangerfield. But ladies and gentlemen, no, you're yeah, I think that's true. A lot of that's coming back.
You know what Rodney Denserfield could today be Leah Thomas. I think in the in Back of School he could be diving for the girls team. Sure, yeah, that would get on an Oscar nomination, Yeah, at a Nobel Prize. But I mean, I'm just saying, Nichole's naked, Mikey Madison
is naked, and Anora he's naked. Lily Rose depth in in No s Ferratu very mere to me more in the Substance, More is remarkable in the Substance, which is a really weird, weird, inventive fund weird movie that is so gross that if you can't if you can't handle the gross, you can't handle gross, don't see it.
But I was going to say that there's also kind of as people get used to it, you know, there's like it's the it's like the Willem Dafoe thing, you know, like when it's one of those when the cars new cars come out, because does cars look weird? Who's gonna ever want to drive a car like that?
It's weird?
And then a couple of years later you're like, oh, this car's are normal. When Willem Dafoe is in first appearing in movies like who's that weird guy? He's a weird looking freak, and now he's the you would never cast him as just ferrato because you have a freaker guy to do that.
And I think it's the same thing like it was happening now.
Is a lot of these older women, older actors in general, are you know, there's still kind of in good shape. And then of course the the to mean more the substance is really sort of about that subject. That's the subject of it. So uh and with a little bit of a I you know, you can you can probably take your pants down and tell you're well in your eighties.
It's getting them back up that becomes a problem in your age.
Well maybe hey, I can, I can do it for you.
So uh, all right, I'll tell you though, I will I'll tell you one uh weird argument we had with a standards or practices person in a network about a uh.
Yeah, so it's a tag and then and then all these guys are going to.
Uh this guy was sort of an aristocrat and he's gonna his father had come to visit him, and he expected his father to to basically say you're you're I'm cutting off all your money, but in fact his father had no money.
Run through it all.
But they were But they reconciled at his club and he went with his friends to the club and they all went up to the plunge pool in the club, which says the most disgusting place in the world because just a bunch of naked old men in the pool. And the last scene was the guy sort of in the pool waist up and one of them is like all ashen and he says it is is that?
What is that?
An old man?
Yeah? That's stuff.
I goes, y, Hi, hi Chip, How are you? Is Is he facing us?
Then?
Oh no, he's no. I actually I have no idea. And the standards of practices woman was like, you can't do that.
It's disgusting, Like.
What are you what's disgusting about? It's disgusting the idea that you wouldn't know that he's so old. And she had this whole thing and it was such a great it's great to work shop test right, because she was so horrified by the idea of age being so hideous that you wouldn't know. A naked old person just is like a melting candle. It doesn't have a front or a back. It's just a loose jacket of skin.
So apropos is literally other than changing the subject from this disgusting topic. I was watching Seinfeld last night, and which I sometimes do, which is waiting for like the news to come on, kind of thing, And I've seen them all so many times, like I very rarely i'll still laugh, but I know the laugh is coming kind
of thing. I completely forgot this scene, and I remember of the episode where George is dating a woman he thinks is ballimic, and he thinks that she goes to the bathroom to throw up after every every time he takes her out to dinner and hold to cannery about you know, catching her in the act and all that.
But anyway, when he goes back, when he first comes to this, when this thought first enterest his head, he goes back to the apartment and he's talking to Jerry and Elaine about it, and he's saying, I think she's balliemic. I think she's you know. And Elaine's like, and this concerns you, and he says, yeah, I'm not getting my money's worse.
I just paint that.
I completely forgot about that.
It was hilarious.
So anyway, maybe we don't have to come back to moldering blobs of flesh.
Eh.
I don't know, but it gives me at piles of vomited talk about.
Well, nobody has to be beliemic anymore because they could just take ozembic when they're twenty pounds underweight. There are people who are taking were taking these semiglue tides who literally are like they're now looking like they came out of the bioffran famine, you know, because they're doing it while being at a perfect weight and they're using it to get underweight. And you can see it all over the place, particularly in like Golden Globes or something like that,
where it really is like human lollipops. There are people who look like human lollipops. They have this like head that is that cannot shrink because of the there's nothing you do to shrink a skull. And then you know, and and the chin from the top to the bottom and the rest of their body just shrills away and they're just like walking along.
I don't get it, like Kathy Baits. Everyone from Kathy Baits to Mike Pompeo is obviously on these things right, and they can't admit it, Like I mean, Pompeo's is like, you know, just eating right and out the size. Catty Bates will not say that she's done it, And I mean.
You can tell. You can tell by the way you can tell Cathy because because the first half of the season of her hit show Mattlock, she looks like Kathy Baits and then she was after golden globes and pounds thinner and just three pounds thinner. And you know, she's a she's a she's a small woman. She's short, which I didn't really know because she was I don't know who she was staying.
I know a lot.
I'm just guessing thirty tiunds.
And I just say, say, Pompeo, I don't know about the time Pompei timeline on these because you know he started losing weight like four years ago like I thought he was running for president.
Everyth thought he's lady for president because he dropped a whole lot of weight. And that was really before these things.
Were there were still there was still I think he would.
Have done it the healthy way, just by throwing up after her.
No, I mean ozempic or the first the first one of those came around about four four years ago, as I as I recall, so anyway, I just think it's a it's a.
There.
It's like human AI. It's like human AI. They're they're they're they're using you know, magical, magical medicine to shrink into nothing, just as the brutalist shrank its budgets to nothing. And it has not it too, will not admit that it is using ozeva to get to get to ten million dollars for three and a half hours. But I mean that's that's sort of like where this is all going. And everybody is scared, right, everybody is scared, And I just remember, like this the world of people who are
not going to have jobs because of AI. It reminds me that the job, my first job in journalism as an adult, is in a category of job that stopped existing once the computer came in really once, once everybody was working on computers and could access the Internet. I was a researcher out of news magazine and there was a whole elaborate system of fact checking. Oh I love
that reporting and this and various other things and that. Basically, over the course of the ten years after I stopped doing it, it all the entire mid section of the news magazine staff disappeared, the separation between reporters and writers, to separate the fact that there were right, as I says, So that was like, that was the first stage.
Of the It was so amazing though.
I remember, like, no secretaries, right, the secretary is gone because people could type their own letters and form at them.
Yeah, I used to. I used to write a column for Newsweek International, and it was great because you just would write, you know, forty five percent of all overseas travel is a red eye, and then in big caps in parents you'd write, check.
Check and check it yes, and every now and then they would come back.
And say, actually, it's it's actually a tiny, tiny amount of of over the red eye, undermining your entire column. Do you want to rewrite it? You say, no, I think it still stands. I think this sus to just go out like it's a check was fantastic.
You know. One of the interesting things about the news magazine. You could do that because there's nobody was paying the slightest attention to anything. These magazine sold four million copies a week, and as Charles Grahamer would say, Charles Grammer wrote a column every other week on the back page of Time magazine, and every couple of years one of them would hit and become something that people talked about.
But that an article in The New Republic with a circulation of forty thousand would get more attention, would get more response, would get more letters, and would and would do him better in terms of his reputation, everything like that than a two page piece in a magazine with four million readers. And that is that. That was the conundrum of the of the news magazine. So Rob, don't worry. You could have made it. We could have said anything. Nobody was paying the Slice movie.
Nobody was paying the Slice except.
For the time. Except for the time that I let through as a as a as a fact checker, I let through the use of the word cement in the building of a dam between Brazil and Paraguay. And the word is not cement is the raw material. Concrete is what Adam is made out. And the magazine got twenty five hundred letters, twenty five one hundred letters saying, oh, you idiots client not cement, So that you know, And so I felt pretty bad. So thirty years ago, that was forty years ago.
I used to be buddies. I used to be buddies with a bunch of the editors at the Public Interest, the nerdy, very intense domestic policy journal edited by Irving Crystal and Nac Laser, and uh, you know, and Irving used to have a rule, you said, if we have
more than six thousand subscribers, we're doing something wrong. And and George Will wrote one of his rare two page Newsweek columns about an article in the Public Interest called Nation of Cowards, which was a very weird piece that my friend Ira Carnahan, who was editing at the time, let through about how everyone should have a gun because, uh, you should not outsource your own protection and the protection
of your women folk to the state. And you're a coward if you're not willing to exercise your right to self defense. And it was a very high falutinant philosophical thing, but that, you know, nation of cowards. Everyone should have a gun. George wrote a two page column about this.
The Publican just was inundated with subscribers, who by the time the next issue of this quarterly journal came out, which was full of stuff on you know, the efficacy of negative income taxes and all that kind of stuff like what the hell, what the hell magazine, what the hell is this? Yeah, so that was always the great Yeah, most new subscribers and most cancelations in one like cycle like that they'd ever seen.
Well, it's like it's like the greatest ad ever taken out in variety was taken out by Oscar Hammerstein the week after Oklahoma premiered in nineteen forty two. It was the biggest hip Broadway I'd ever seen, sort of like the Hamilton of its time. And Hammerstein had been through this long fallow period in which he had had show after show after show after show that had flopped, and then he got together with Rogers and they wrote this
show and it was a huge thing. And Hammerstein took out a full page ad and he said I failed before, and don't worry, I will fail again, Oscar Efferstein second, and that is same thing. It's like, we're just going to be right here publishing our articles on the negative income text. That piece is an amazing piece of writing, actually a Nation of Cowards by a guy named jeff Jeffrey Snyder. No, I don't think. Yeah, he kind of didn't.
Nothing much came of it. Okay, we're going to take a quick break here.
And we're back, and we're back.
Should we have a band playing or something.
That would be good? You remember those cards. There was always a card on the Light Show where it would say will be It would say, we'll be right back. But that was the card that they showed just when they were coming back.
And well, because that was the card they showed, because remember they would they would they would brought be broadcast three time zones, three different ways, and a guy had to do that, like a guy in the control thing would have to take care of all that. There's a story that you know, if you'ple watching the old Bob
Newhart Show. The end of a lot of the old Bob Newhart shows, it would be Bob and Emily, his wife in bed, and they'd be having kind of an argument and they say good night and turn off the lights, and then there'd be a beat and then one of them just couldn't stand it would turn the light.
Back on right.
And there's a famous sort of the guy some guy in New York, the guy New York, because in New York what they what they would do is they would show it was like a coupler because it was a thirty five millimeters print and it went right into the broadcast camera. So they had the project They projected it into the camera. They somehow they did that and they had a projection as a good guy in the control room and at one point he just kind of I
gotta know it was breeding porn mag or something. He wasn't paying any attention and he suddenly looks up and the Bob Newhart Show has gone black and he goes, oh no, and then he quickly cuts to the news or something. He does something got commercial whatever, and it's like there's till two minutes left of material.
There's a whole scene that then ends up the turning on the lights and they have the end.
Of the show.
He just he just forgot that that was happening. About NewART, It always comes out of one person, you know, one guy.
So there is this movie that did not get nominated for Best Picture called September fifth, which is about the day in Munich when ABC Sports ended up covering the kidnapped, you know, the hostage taking and the merger.
Amazing, he has come out here, it is out.
I've seen it. It's what's what's remarkable about it is it is a movie a about how ABC Sports covered the technical deficiencies and dealt with the technical problems of covering this story in the Olympic village. And that's what it's about. There are sort of moments where they're like are we doing the right thing? Are we doing the wrong thing? But most of it is like how do we get the film out, how do we get on the satellite? And can we make a chiron? How are
we going to make the right chiron? CBS has the right to the satellite and not us, And it is I loved it because that stuff fascinates me. But it's literally like looking through the wrong end of a binocular at an issue in the United States, do you know what I mean? Or an issue on the planet, because what happens to the hostage is almost incidental it's like the mcguffin almost of the How did they make a show in nineteen seventy two with all this all this antiquated technology, It's.
A really good show.
Was this way to look at it? Yeah?
It was international terroristic like, and I think it's very.
Yeah, yeah, it's very I mean it's it's the fact is it's made by these like guys who weren't even alive when it happened.
So that is that is becoming less and less of an unusual I know, But I mean the fact that.
They had, the fact that they were so interested. I don't know if you can hear my my dog is going crazy for some reason, if you're here, I heard.
Well that in this way, I did hear a piece of bad news. I'm not nobody I knew very well, but I just heard the news that a woman died to something. She died and she was unexpected her death, and like, oh my god, it's terrible.
Yeah.
Some say, yeah, you know it's terrible because you know, she's sixty two, and I'm I'm still the person, even though I'm not physically that person who says, well, in my mind, I was like, well, let me sixty two. You know, it's it was a good run. Uh and I turned a big round number this year. And I have a hard time adjusting to the fact that actually, you know, it is unusual to die at sixty sixty
two is a young age to die. But I still have I need to make that transition psychologically to hearing that news instead of saying in my head, well, you know, saying, oh my god, we have to do something about this.
Well, there's there's always those. Yeah, there's always those epic That's all I can say. You know, you can, you can. You can defeat anything withuticals. You know, this guy Barry Weis interviewed him and he's got this documentary out and he's trying to live forever, same as Brian Johnson or something like that.
He tweets very unusual.
Because he's busy, because it's unusual for him to tweet, because he has to follow his OCD two hundred and fifty steps a day routines to do the things that are going to keep him alive forever.
But though hearing him talk like what it's not a way you want to live? Well, but yeah, here's how weird he is. He tweeted this I really I think he tweeted like an hour or two hours.
A side by side comparison chart comparison including number, duration, et cetera, comparing his nighttime erections to his nineteen year old son's nighttime erections.
Saw that that was him.
Okay, yeah, yeah, he said his duration is two minutes more than his, which I guess he says, which Hey, but I'm like, this kid's nineteen, and I think that when that's.
When that's what you're measuring, there are other things going on.
I guess I'll say that I don't think you should be measuring your son's the length of your son's ended excited member, I I mean I I think it's probably only one of the three of us who has a son and I I so he's asleep.
But the well's I think it's a there's a machine that used.
Isn't like Louis, It's like, I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, it's ultimately there's an app for that, right, But no, I there's one thing. It's one thing to measure such things, and that's problematic in all sorts of ways. It's another thing to tweet about it.
To tweet about here's all the categories, so you know, so you know the categories, the number of erection episodes, the total duration of erection episodes, the average erection quality, which I think is understare that's that's who's judging that now, And and sleep efficiency.
That's the fourth.
M you know, the the uncategorizable writer and one of the grosser into it. I can just yeah, so the
the uncategorizable writer. Neil Stevenson sort of a science science fiction writer who is just a poly math of remarkable depth and as I wrote a cycle of novels about the dawn of the scientific age in London in the seventeenth century called the Quicksilver the Baroque cycle, and Quicksilver features a portrait of Isaac Newton, who is one of the characters in the book who is portrayed as somebody who we would now say is very much on the spectrum.
And what Isaac Newton wants to do at the beginning of this book is he's trying to figure out how what's going on inside the huge an eye, and so he Stevenson describes how in the book and other characters who are dealing with him, that's that he puts a lens in between his eyeball and and his eyelid and kind of like moves it around and it's like, you know, scratching his eye. But you know, this is the only
way you're going to get this information. And it's part of the part of the brilliance of this book is this portrait of these guys who were trying to figure out things about the human body and how the world and how the world in the universe works that no
one had ever looked into before. And so they didn't There was no path, there was no there was no system, There was no scientific method really as yet, and so they were themselves guinea pigs or they were body snatching and you know, dissecting corpses from you know, graveyards and stuff like that. And and so that this guy reminds me of that, that is, he thinks he is Isaac Newton. He thinks he is one of these guys. He is the jet He is going to figure out how to
live forever. And therefore everything must be measured, everything must be calculated and calibrated, and you have to be and it is like, maybe this information will live hundreds of years later to our human benefit. The way Isaac Newton's experiments with gravity and things like that have But.
But it's also fair to say that, actually, son, yeah, nothing good can come of it.
If this is the guy that lives forever.
Rights always, that's always the problem. It's like the reincarnation problem, right, It's always like why why? Yeah? Why is everybody Cleopatra? I'm sorry, Caesar, I'm sorry. You know what you're gonna be. You're gonna be like you're going to be the guy who car at the age of nine from Typhus, Like that's that's who you are. You're more likely you're ninety nine percent likely to be somebody who dies of strep throat.
Well, if you're if you're a scientologist, yes, and you're operating Theayton level seven or something, you are the reincarnated great warrior in the thought in the intergalactic battle against Xenu or Xena or whatever Xenu, which means that the scientologists that we know of now were actually great warriors, which I was strange I would work with Christy Ally was a lone woman, but I worked with her for a long time scientologists. I thought, like, I don't think
Kirsty was a great warrior in a past. I don't she had skills. I'm sure she's very you know, very the runs.
Very very fast. Yeah. And there is a trailer for the for the I guess eighth Mission Impossible movie.
Uh.
And of course in this trailer, the trailer is, you know, you must know that in the human you know Ethan Hunt world, the world will end and you will watch the world end as I laugh. Ha ha ha ha, says some villain. And then you see basically Tom Cruise running across the top of a pyramid, Tom Cruise running across the tower bridge, Tom Cruise running, you know, at the top of the you know, Machu Picchu, like he's just running. All he does is run. He's like eighty
five years old and he's running. And my question is is he running or they is he walking slowing the camera down?
No?
No, he does like this is famous, does his own running thing. He does his own stuff.
It's like, actually it's a real problem in the ensure in the completion bond business.
Right, but the running. But the running he doesn't have to do.
So it's going to an airplane, you might as well do the running.
So the last Mission Impossible, which I thought was really not not very good. Does have this one absolutely fantastic scene in the middle where which is slapstick just sheer slaps to comedy where he and uh this actress Whateverna Haley Atwell are are are handcuffed together in the wrong position in a carr and they have to get away from and they're running right and they're driving through Rome and like it's it's it's hilariously funny. Which is which is?
I don't know why I brought that up, because there's another one coming, but that the movie is otherwise lousy, and so this is the sequel to it, so they're making a lousy movie sequel. I don't know what is going on. My phone is ringing, my dog is for me. I'm free, It is okay, I'm free to okay. Uh Severance, Jonah, are you gonna watch? Did you watch the original Severance? Have you watched the first episode in the first season?
My wife has decided that she's not interested in the second season, and she's told me, you go watch that by yourself. So I have not gotten around to it yet. I did not love it as much as a lot of people did, but I was interested in it to see where it was going, but it felt a little it felt a little bit like I was getting set up for a lost style bait and swet, well.
That is that is the danger. That is the real danger here. And if they, if they, if they don't solve the puzzle, or at least three quarters of the puzzle,
then yeah, we will have been taken yet again. I quite like the first episode to say, and I will say this, I rewatched a lot of it with my son who was fourteen, who wanted to see it, wanted to see the first season before the second, and uh, there was a there was a big There are nine episodes and there is a big reveal at the end of the eighth episode that nobody but nobody sees coming. And I saw my son and then my my daughter
told me who is who is? Who is abroad for a semester watched it on the plane or something like that, having downloaded it, and they I saw my son gasp and like go like you know that that. I was like, oh, well, you know what, this is effective?
Like the the.
That really worked, and it only worked as I really spent time building it up to get to this surprise. And you know a lot of these shows really don't ever really surprise. They're just they're just puzzles without solutions. But I thought this was a pretty good first episode for a puzzle show second season. But I don't know, it's like who knows what's what's going to happen that I tell you about the Billy Crystal Show. So there's a Billy Crystal show on Apple which is a which
is a called before that is a puzzle show. He's a he's a child psychiatrist, and there's a there's a seven or eight year old kid who he comes across his path who is appears possessed or haunted by eighteenth century Dutch people who live in upstate New he is somehow having or reliving or he can speak Dutch. Also
weird stuff. And Billy Crystal is fantastic, And the show is so annoying because it's basically like in the end, the resolution is you know, as banal as you imagine it's going to be, and you know a lot of
unbelievable things happen. But I have to say he's a very good he's a very good dramatic actor and is very convincing, and it plays a very flawed character and the shows are in the episodes are thirty minutes long, Which wouldn't it be great if there were like more streaming dramas that were thirty minutes long instead of sixty Like I like it, like I kind of enjoy the uh enjoy the thirty minute drama. They're never Why why did that? Why couldn't that have been a thing? Like
why was that separation so plain? That comedy sitcoms were thirty minutes and dramatic shows were sixty minutes? Rob?
Do you know?
Is there an answer to no idea?
I do think comedy doesn't really work at sixty minutes, so comedy was sort of like always going to be thirty.
I'm much like, I don't know when that happened, Like there were weren't there drama?
I mean like obviously there were anthology dramas that were thirty minutes.
Well minutes, yeah, right, so there were that.
So there's that.
So I'm not sure.
I mean, so what was the last what was the last thirty minute drama on real TV? I don't know, I mean, honestly, I can't think of one. I mean an hour, right, I mean I was like, yeah, Adam twelve was.
There's an hour Dragon emergency.
Yeah, there's call those training.
We're now back, we're back into you know, the sixties here.
But there was a there was a trend for unfunny comedies to be called comedies that were thirty minutes. They were like over to drama, ye, and that they didn't really last for the drama. I mean liked care days and it was an hour. Maybe, but there were no I don't think no. I maybe there were.
Sort of action comedies that we're in now, right because like the Intensive Hazard do they have a tense speed.
And brown Shoe which I love?
Good for you?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that guy that guys made tense, right, I mean you can do it in an hour if it's also a detective thing, right.
Yeah right yeah, But yeah, I don't know. There should be more things that are shorter. I think that's what that is all September fifth, is that it's ninety minutes long. I saw a really wonderful new musical on Broadway this week called Maybe Happy, ending an hour and forty minutes long, no intermissions, like that dream.
When I first moved to New York.
That's like the sex scene with Daniel Craig that's right, but for.
Real, I went first through New York.
I had lunch with a bunch of people, and I'm one of the guys that to the guys say were Broadaly producers, and uh, and we're just also talking generally.
And then they said so then they sort of got on this jack.
He said, you know, we need.
Ninety minute no intermission. Ninety minute no intermission. It's money in the bank.
And I said, really, that seems like a pretty that's how hard is that to write a ninety minute no intermission comedy. And then they made me promise to write one because they were so which I ever did, but they were so obsessed with the idea, like not even an animation. Did you show up? You see the play, you'll laugh, and then you go to dinner, you know all along you're gotta get out, you know, you know you're out of there.
It's great.
And that that was a thing that even though that is where really where the sweet spot is financially, it's still hard to get people to write that or produce that, or to act in it or do you know it's so even a thirty minute drama which would be a thirty minute drama which would be really good if it was a really good drama.
It's hard to get people to do it, even though they make money.
John is just a factual question, a point of information. Maybe I'm just misremembering from my own childhood because I saw Nicholas Nickel and a couple of things like that. But I feel like that used to be a thing where they had sort of expedited dinner things where you would get fifty minutes during intermission to go get a meal at a nice restaurant and then you go back to the second half. Does that still happen? Did that ever happen beyond the Yeah?
Well, the only show that that has worked like that was basically a cash grab, and that was the Harry Potter two part play The Curse Child, which was originally staged as two plays. You get to buy two tickets and you would buy you would see the matinee and then you would see it in the evening, and there
was like ninety minutes for dinner. But that was a cash grab because they turned out they could cut it very easily, cut it down to three and a half hours or three hours, and it's now on Broadway three hours.
But an Angels in America.
Was that too too?
Right?
No, I was the two parts were maybe they stayed when they when they revived it, maybe they did it that way, but.
Nobody America thought, you know what, just going at a quick bite and got right back.
But you know who, you know who invented this was Eugene O'Neil, who was a gas bag of unbelievable proportions and wrote two or three shows that were five or six hours long and did have and did have meal
breaks in them. I think more Stately Mansions and Strange Interlude both had literally had meal breaks in them so that you could be yelled at for three at people's scream on stage for three hours, and you go and you eat and come back and you get screamed at for another three hours by an alcoholic, drunken family revealing its secrets to each other in dark, great Dark.
I think it was a long day's Journey in Tonight that I remember seeing on Broadway, and they were bragging about how they figured out a way to cut like forty minutes out of it by having no one knew, by having the actors talk over each other, because the whole thing was like normal people when they have arguments. They don't wait for the other person to finish. They yell, so like if you overlap the sentences by ten percent
on each end. Sure, it's totally brutalizing to the audience, but it does save you forty minutes.
Yeah.
Also, they keep saying, what's wrong with mom? I mean at this point, like she's high. That's what's wrong with it.
She's high.
You want to call from the from the audience.
This is not a mystery, So can I can I just say this that in nineteen ninety seven I saw an extraordinarily brilliant production of The Iceman Cometh, which is one of the two great O'Neil plays as far as I'm long day serving the Time being the other one, the I s Men Comets set in the bar, and it's it's about to observe the people, the losers and wastrels and the tragic figures in this bar. And everybody in the bar is waiting for this character Hickey to
show up. In the first half hours, people talking about Hickey and where's Hickey, and when's Hickey coming, and where's Hicke And then Hickey enters and Hickey has a twenty five minute long monologue. That is one of the great challenges in modern acting to memorize this monologue. It's a challenge for the audience too, by the way, it is well unless you have a genuinely great, like absolutely transfixing performance.
Jason Robarts famously made his reputation his career by playing this part off Broadway and becoming Jason Robarts as a result. And I saw this amazingly brilliant performance that just had you at the edge of your seat. And it was by Kevin Spacey. So is all in Kevin. Kevin Spacey, he was a stage and an even better molester of fourteen year olds and you know, completely acquitted. No, he
would he wasn't acquitted. He was he wasn't acquitted of doing what he did to Adam Rapp, who he acknowledged that he had basically taking this fourteen year old boy and carried him from the kitchen at a party into a bedroom and had like had his way with him. It was just I don't think he had his way with him.
I don't think.
I don't think he knowledged that it was drunk and didn't remember and Rap said it happened, so he didn't remember I don't know whatever. Okay, uh So, I think it's like you.
Guys can't keep this podcast from going dark.
Now we have to go dark by talking about David Lynch. Scott, our producer tells us, So, David Lynch, who who got the problem with this? Is that like.
It's been all over So, I mean it's been everyone has written there David Lynch articles. So I don't know what to say except that I remember there was I can't remember the name of the restaurant on Beverly Boulevard. He would go there everything.
Bob It's a big boy. He did go to a Bob's wing Boy every day.
You go to this restaurant on Beverly Boulevard every day for lunch. And he always had a tomato soup. And if you went there and you said, I think I'll have tomato soup, they would say, we don't have that on the menu. He somehow managed to even be weird about his weird and mysterious about.
His lunch order, which I think I've always enjoyed.
I think here's the thing about David Lynch. The Elephant Man is a genuinely great and remarkable and extraordinary movie. I think Blue Velvet is one of the is a great though very hard to watch movie, and the first six episodes of Twin Peaks are among the best things
that have ever been done on television. But don't let anybody fool you into wasting your time now that he is dead watching the eighteen hour Twin Peaks The Return, which was his last work, which was on Showtime six or seven years ago, because it was agonizingly boring, agonizingly boring, and the whole point of it was to be agonizingly boring.
His whole purpose was to make to test the patience of every human being on earth who would bother to watch it, to see whether they would sit for watch a guy mop a floor for four minutes, which happens at the end of like one of the like the third episode, and it's a guy in a bid and he's mopping the floor and he mops the floor, and he mops the floor, and he mops the floor, and he mops the floor, and then the end credits come up. And the entire time you're watching, you're waiting for something
to happen, and nothing happens. So I got to give him credit for taking one hundred and fifty million dollars from Matthew Blanket Showtime and making a show seeing whether people could be fooled into watching somebody mop a floor for four minutes. It's like, it's like this way to
the Egress story about Pt. Barnum. You know when when the when the Barnum circus was too crowded, he would put up a sign to try to get people to leave by saying this way to the Egress, and they would think, oh, there's I'm going to see an animal called the egress. And of course egress means exits, so they would walk out. They would walk out the exit, and that was Barnum's way of clearing the room and making sure that other people could get in.
So that was saying Long Day's Journey in Tonight starring I will say it's funny.
I was looking through his movies and I completely forgot that he directed The Straight Story, which I loved.
Yeah, that is one. That is the strangest. Yes, that is that is the strangest thing on his resume, even though you think the strangest thing as the resume is, you know one of his strange movies. That's right.
The fact that it's like when when a freak does something totally normal and sweet, you're like, WHOA, that's weird. But the straight story is just a lovely G rated movie which was actually produced by my friend Neil Edelstein, So.
There you h It is a beautiful movie about a seventy nine year old man who has to get to see his brother before his brother dies, and he has no way to get there except to drive his tractor, right, and not a tractor. It's sort of like it ends up. It's a kind of version of what we now call it jazzy. He kind of jury rigs a motor vehicle that will drive him. It's kind of like miles an hour, right, he basically, And it's a real story.
It's a good movie.
It is a good movie. And and and he made several good movies. And he made several absolutely unwatchable movies like Lost Highway and Inland Empire, which are unwatchable, and and Dune, which is unwatchable though it has some pretty amazing imagery in it. I mean, but we did think that Dune was unfilmable until these last two Dunes came out, right, and I think we're pretty good, right, I mean, they're they're pretty good. They're not great, though, but they're pretty good.
Have you seen did we discuss the Bob Dylan movie. Either you've seen I have not seen it. I have not seen it, Okay, because because Timothy shallow May, of course, who was the star of Done, plays Bob Dylan. And it's a pretty interesting one two punch to have been you know what, Deep in Dune Part two at the beginning of the year and to be Bob Dylan at the end of the year. That's that's one of those like,
you know, star polls. You know, this is like, that's why we're going to be watching him for the next forty or fifty years, because he can do that. He can do both of those things.
So what I I have not seen the movie. I've never been like obsessed with Bob Dylan. I mean, I like dog Bob Dylan, but like I stopped smoking pot a really long time ago, and so that took some of the appeal away. And I'm not trying to denigrate him a great lyricist all that kind of stuff. Have just never been obsessed with them. And but I've always you know, there are these cottage industries in egghead world
that I just love. And one of them is the Bob Dylan's a closet conservative, or at least he's not a stalinist sub genre, which Ron Radosh has been big on.
There are a bunch of people. I'm sure you got him to write about it for the Weekly Standard, and that it it's like, you know, I can't remember what the word for it is, but there are there are kinds of trees that have to wait for a forest fire for their seeds to germinate, so they can lie in the oil for century, literally centuries until there's a forest fire, and then these trees start to put So this movie comes out and all of a sudden, it's
like it's like the game of Telephon where they're you know, they're active at these sleeper People holding receipts on this fight are activated from across the land.
And that's a lovely, dark and deep yeah.
Yeah, yes, but I have promises.
To I H yeah, I I I.
Missed.
I missed Bob Dylan.
I just missed it. I missed it.
I was too young or something. I just never it was never a thing. And then when it was a thing where I listened to it, thinking, well, I should I should like this, right, it's this is officially approved art. I should like it, and I just never kind of got into it. And yet some of the songs are great, and then that, but the covers are good. You know Girl from the North uh Country County which is from.
The North Country, Yeah, which is basically the same song as Scarborough Fare right, But that's literally it's the same version of the same song.
The Roseanne the Roseanne Cash cover is beautiful.
But I.
I just never I don't, I don't care.
His cover of the Facts of Life theme song was fantastic.
Well, it was because he was the original cast.
Yeah, you don't forget that he was.
He was, he was.
He was married cheerily to three of the three of the girls we're to get from the word gay. Oh I don't know.
Yeah, I.
Speaking of Bob Bilds. I wrote a piece about a complete Unknown which I talk about this fact that the movie implicitly is about how Dylan would not did not want to be used by the old Stalinists as their vehicle for cultural domination. And yeah, I got a lot of male from people who are like, but you didn't talk about this lyric and what about that Weather chose that he that he wasn't really And there is that
one song. There is that one amazing zion Zionist song came out of nowhere Neighborhood Bully, released in nineteen eighty three, which could be the sort of like commentary theme song about you know they call you the neighborhood bully because all you're trying to do is defend yourself and then they attack you for it. And where it just came out of nowhere and that was he did it, and it's there and you can listen to it if you like. And now we are going to I say this because.
On the the in Santa Monica, there's a coffee place called the eighteenth Street Cafe, which is in the middle of a kind of a weird neighborhood at least what was back then, and it was kind of a little bungalow thing was because the coffee hit place and it was where you'd go, uh. It was near a couple of fancy preschools and so like you if you were young writer on TV or something and you lived on
the West Side, that's kind of you were. You'd be hanging out there like one thirty in the afternoon waiting to pick up your kid. Uh, and so you know, we'd go and that's I would go and meet people there all the time. And in the basement, the rumor was always that there was a boxing gym owned by Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan would spend his time in this boxing gym in the basement of the eighteen Street cafe.
And I remember I wasn't there for this, but a friend of mine told me the story.
He's in line, he's getting a cup of coffee and another dad from the one of the pre school d behind him or next to him, and they're going to get their coffee. He goes, is you here in this rumor? They're like downstairs, this is like a boxing gym owned by Bob Dylan. And his friend was like, that's kind of hard to leave. Bob Dylan boxes hey getting boxy? Yeah, yeah, it's like I don't see him boxing. I don't see him as a boxer. And behind them little man sid
why not? And it was Bob Dylan who was just getting a coffee on his way downstairs to the boxing gym that was actually below it.
So yeah, there's a photo of Barack Obama hanging the Metal of Freedom around Bob Dylan's neck like in twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, something like that, and I'm like, oh my god, that's like my uncle shloyme like it was. You know, He's like, you know, we had he had he had weird hair and whatever. You know when you saw his face. Paul Simon is the same way. By the way you look at Paul Simon, You're like, look, you know, it's an old juice. He would be he would be in Boca yeah, jazz.
But Paul Siman's like, oh, look, it's an old Jewish lady and her husband Billy Crystal or by the way, who looks like late Crystal.
Billy Crystal Crystal is also look is also an old Jewish man.
Yeah, and you know Billy Billy Crystal. But Warren Baby, well that's.
True, but Billy Crystal now looks like the wizard in the Princess Bride. We shouldn't make fun of. He lost his house. Billy Crystal's house burned down in the fire. So got to feel sorry for Billy Crystal.
But if you're in if you're in a fancy men's club, you'll never know if he's facing you or not.
We've done we've done. No, we've done.
No politics here, and I don't want to start. But in the inaugural inaugural address of a current president, he starts talking about the fires in California and that some of the richest, most famous people in America had their homes burned down. And then there's this long pause and then he goes, which is very interesting, What did that mean? What was he trying to imply there? I don't I don't get.
I think he was implying that poor people deliberately set the fires. To do you think that? I don't know. I don't know. That's the only I mean, what what else? What else would be interesting?
I think people just say that Harry Shearer used to do this very very niche impression of mister Blackwell, who was a fashion kind of weird oddity character, a.
Real person made the ten worst dress.
All that an he talks like this.
He thought he talked the ten best dressed. It's a Dolan sleeve. But no, no, yeah, this is the way he talked. Actually is the way mister Blackwell talk. And he would do this impression of mister Blackwell. And he would and he said that the restaurants in Beverly Hills. There's a bistro. There's a bistro, Godden. Interesting.
Interesting, That's that's what Trump is. Trump is basically mister Blackwell at this point.
All right, all right, mister. The the connection, the classic glop connection being made between mister Blackwell and Donald Trump. And it was fair because Melania did wear that hat that made her look like Zoro. That's all I gotta say. I love that, and I thought that, I like that. I like that, but she did look like Zoro, and I thought it was a kind of reach shout out to the Mexican people who are about to be slapped with a two hundred and.
Fifty percent like the black coated spy and spy vers a spy.
Oh yeah, yeah, that's good. I think that's that. Yeah. Or Zora, I'm still I'm still I'm still going with Zora or Cappuccin and the pink panther and Zora. Anyway, all right, Scott Emmigrant says the Hamburglar. So we're gonna let him have the last word. Milania looks like the hamburg all right, Please please don't be offended. We're just trying to amuse you.
We're just running acting here.
This is until next time. Here's why they don't do this.
Here's why they don't do one hour comedies.
Exhibit A.
Bye, Where is that fellow's friend? He probably owes your money. Huh, well, I'll ask you.
Esthetic can't talk.
Look who knows so much? Well, it just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all that. Please open his mouth.