"The success rate of getting to a candid place with politicians is very small... and this is somebody who’s divisive and controversial and has a history that’s somewhat sordid..."

"... not by any fault of her own, but I just didn’t see where I could go with that."

Said Marc Maron, quoted in "Liberal comic Marc Maron who helped popularize podcasting explains why he turned down Hillary Clinton interview" (NY Post).

Not by any fault of her own?! What suddenly happened to the asserted desire to speak from "a candid place"?

The article doesn't say the Clinton team pushed to have her on Maron's podcast, only that his producer "pitched Clinton, fresh off her loss... in the 2016 election." He said "You’re the guy to do this" and Maron "adamantly disagreed."

Was he afraid he wouldn't get to a candid place or that he, at least, ran the risk of being candid in a way that would hurt the Democrats.

"But yeah, all of a sudden, you know, you're old and you realize you've been doing something a long time."

"And this started, you know, the old garage, the, you know, just no one knew what a podcast was. I was coming out of a horrendous divorce. I was wanting to figure out how to continue living my life. Things were not looking good for me. Brendan McDonald, my producer... and I started this thing.... And it, it slowly evolved into the show. That became what you listened to twice a week, 16 years we've been doing this, and we've decided that we, we had a, a great run. And, and now basically it's, it's time, folks. It's time. WTF is is coming to an end, and it's our decision. We will have our final episode sometime in the fall. It was not some kind of difficult decision necessarily.... And, you know, God forbid we just keep plowing along and, and something diminishes. And we wouldn't wanna just keep plugging along because we can, at the risk of our burnout or our our sort of like, you know, passion, you know, starts to, to drift or it starts to get sloppy. We're just, we're just not those kind of people...."

Said Marc Maron, at the beginning of the new episode of his "WTF" podcast.

Larry Charles talks to Marc Maron about Scott Adams and Bob Dylan.

This is an excellent episode of Marc Maron's podcast, with Larry Charles talking about "Seinfeld," "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "Borat," and his new movie "Dicks: The Musical," but what I'm writing this post to highlight is something that surprised me: a discussion of Scott Adams, which is followed immediately by a discussion of Bob Dylan.

This isn't random opining about celebrities. Larry Charles worked with Scott Adams to develop the TV show "Dilbert." And Larry Charles directed the movie "Masked and Anonymous," which he co-wrote with Bob Dylan.

Start at about 1:23:00 in the podcast and you'll be at the first mention of "Dilbert," which prompts Maron to ask, "What do you think of that guy going a little off? Did you see that coming?"

"Laughter itself has fragmented. Just listen to it: You’ve got your gurgling, impotent The Late Show With Stephen Colbert laughter over here..."

"... you’ve got your harsh and barkingly energized Trumpist laughter over there; you’ve got your free-floating Joe Rogan–podcast yuks; and then you’ve got the private snuffling and seizurelike sounds that you yourself make when you’re watching Jay Jurden Instagram clips alone, on your phone, with your earbuds in. And for most of us, behind all of this, the feeling that we’re whistling past the graveyard: that the sludge is rising, politically; that the bullyboys are cracking their knuckles; that we’re 'just kind of half-waiting,' as Marc Maron put it in a recent HBO special, 'for the stupids to choose a uniform.' How did we get here? How did we arrive at a place where Jordan Peterson, who wouldn’t know a good joke if it ran him over, is instructing us on the importance of comedy as a defense against totalitarianism, while Dave Chappelle—one of the funniest men alive—burns up his comic capital defending his right to be mean about trans people?"

Writes James Parker, in "Comedians Only Care About Comedy/A new book cured me of any attachment to the idea of the stand-up as truth-telling philosophe" (The Atlantic).

"Some of the greatest movies ever" = "The French Connection" and "The Exorcist."

RIP William Friedkin. Ballsy director. Made some of the greatest movies ever. One of the best conversations I’ve had on the show. https://t.co/529RvAAMI7

— marc maron (@marcmaron) August 7, 2023

Vulture ranks the stools in stand-up comedy.

"The 100 Greatest Stools in Stand-up Special History." There are photos — in one case a video — with explanations, e.g.:

 

The one example is the last-place Joe Rogan. You can go directly to the NSFW video at YouTube, here. That is declared the least-funny thing not just among stools, but in comedy generally. 

What ended up at the top?

There's Marc Maron at #4:

Marc Maron explores the fusion of man and stool. Both lead to equally mind-bending results. Maron treats his stool like a performance-enhancing body-mod; when he sits on it, slouched and confessional toward his audience, knees pulled up to his chest like a wise cartoon toad, his neuroses and humor fold in on themselves. The stool closes up his posture and opens him up to the audience. Maron is a philosopher king, and the stool is his throne.

And Paula Poundstone at #3:

Look at Poundstone’s form, straddling this stool! With one foot over the seat and the other sprawled back, she’s a sprinter in suspended motion. Poundstone rides this thing like a Valkyrie, constantly shifting into new and strange configurations. Stand-up comedy is a fine dance, and the stool is her partner in the tango. 

That happened in 1989, and I saw it back then and always remembered it. She worked that stool. They only have a still photo at the link, but this one deserves video, so I found it for you:

"They were very, very proud to cast a Latino actress as Snow White, but you’re still telling the story of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.' You’re progressive in one way … but you’re still making that … backward story about seven dwarfs living in a cave. What … are you doing, man?"

Said Peter Dinklage, on the Marc Maron podcast, quoted in "Peter Dinklage slams Disney’s plans for ‘Snow White’ remake: ‘Backward story about seven dwarfs living in a cave’" (WaPo). 

From the comments over there: "I listened to the podcast before reading this article. The editors that picked the title should ask themselves whether they deliberately feed th[e] media hyperventilation. Dinklage didn’t 'slam' anything. He calmly discussed the issue and critiqued it in a thoughtful way. Stop ginning up controversy where there need be none."

In any event, Disney responded: "To avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film, we are taking a different approach with these seven characters and have been consulting with members of the dwarfism community. We look forward to sharing more as the film heads into production after a lengthy development period."

It seems to me that the original animated film made a big point of giving each dwarf an individualized characteristic — Sleepy, Happy, Grumpy, Sneezy, etc. — so isn't that the opposite of stereotyping? Or is it stereotyping to say that in this category people have one and only one outstanding characteristic — these are a one-dimensional — or 2-dimensional, if you count dwarfism — kind of person.

I remember a times when saying "dwarf" and "dwarfism" was considered politically incorrect and one had to use a euphemism, and I'd happily — not grumpily — do that if I were not taking the lead from The Washington Post and Disney. I don't know exactly when that changed.

"I'm very dismayed about what's happening to the United States... I mean, dude, we cannot let this go. You cannot let democracy slide off the table."

Said the filmmaker Ridley Scott, in Episode 1281 of Marc Maron's "WTF" podcast (at 50:27).

"From 2013, Marc talks with Carl Reiner about his journey from writing to acting to directing, as well as his collaborative relationships with..."

"... Sid Ceasar, Dick Van Dyke, Steve Martin and, of course, Mel Brooks. Carl died on June 29, 2020 at age 98."

Listen to that. I did. I'm in awe. What a life!

By the way, it's spelled "Caesar." There's a whole story about Sid's recognition of Carl's ability to imitate James Mason, so I give you this:

"Jerry thinks Marc is pretentious and Marc thinks Jerry is shallow."

From a Reddit discussion a year ago on the question "Any reason why Marc hasn’t been on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee?" "Comedians in Cars" is Jerry Seinfeld's show, and Jerry hadn't been on Marc Maron's podcast either.

Now, this week we got an episode of Marc's show with Jerry. Here. I listened. I can sum it up: Jerry thinks Marc is pretentious and Marc thinks Jerry is shallow. But that doesn't mean it's a bad show. I enjoyed the conversation. I would criticize Marc Maron for pushing the theory that Jerry is compulsive when Jerry was talking about the importance of writing. But Maron succeeds in getting Jerry angry... or at least getting Jerry to admit that something on the "anger spectrum" is a necessary element of comedy.

"Don’t do acid and drive. Control your set (i.e., the people you’re tripping with) and setting. Don’t ever look in the mirror."

"... or, alternatively, do look in the mirror. And, as Marc Maron says he was once told, during a bad trip: Just hang in there, man. According to Maron, that’s advice he still gives people today, although it sounds pretty banal."

From "Talking about LSD sounds funnier than taking it in 'Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics'" (WaPo)(reviewing a Netflix movie).

"I have no patience for contemporary handlebar mustaches. They anger me. They look indulgent and ridiculous."

"If you have a handlebar mustache, that is pretty much all you are. You are a delivery system for a handlebar mustache. I saw a guy in Brooklyn once with a handlebar mustache, pierced ears, a fedora hat and jodhpurs. He was a collage of sartorial attempts at evading himself. It looked as if he were interrupted during a shave in the mid-1850s and had to grab some clothes and dress quickly while being chased through a time tunnel."

From "My Desperate, Stupid, Emotional Hunt for the Perfect Pants" by Marc Maron (NYT, 2013).

Listen to David Sedaris explain why he thinks — and has a good, sympathetic basis for thinking — that Roseanne is mentally ill.

It's in this podcast with Marc Maron.

Begin around 28:00 to get to the point, but the whole interview with Sedaris is excellent, including the very end, which is on the subject of eyeballs popping out.

"Jesus shows up and says, be like Jesus, right? But if you look at the Old Testament..."

"... there's nobody there you want to be like.... They's all screwed up. They're duplicitous and angry and wrongheaded an arrogant — just like you and me."

Said David Mamet, talking to Marc Maron (at 39:57).

AND: Here's Alice Cooper as Herod, singing at Jesus, in last night's live TV "Jesus Christ Superstar":

Marc Maron remembered "the room of an older kid who lived next door to his grandmother" —" [o]verflowing with magazines, records and books, it defined cool to his young eyes."

"He said the used-bookstore aesthetic of his garage was inspired by this childhood memory."

A caption for one of the photographs in "Tour Marc Maron’s Garage Before He and His Podcast Move."

I love interior spaces like this. Don't you? Did you ever walk into someone else's house and see a room that inspired you because you got a sense of the work a person does here or what the interior space of his mind might be like? What was in that room? Do you have a room like that? What's in your room?

IN THE COMMENTS: Charlie said:

I like the correction at the end

"Correction: March 1, 2018
An earlier version of this article included an erroneous name among the celebrities Marc Maron interviewed in his garage. He interviewed Mr. Williams at the actor's home in Marin Country, Calif."

Marin COUNTRY???

Heh. I know what they mean. I kind of live in Madison Country.

"The big step is empathy. Something I've had problems with, empathy. You know, when you have man brain..."

"... you are not capable of empathizing properly with women - which I don't think a lot of men are. And I'm not going to speak for all men, but I can speak for myself. To find that empathy it requires some sort of vigilance.... It's hard to understand that power dynamic is real and it exists because things have been the way they've been for a long time.... I'm 54 fucking years old and I'm surrounded by women in a work environment and it's not a problem for me to behave and it's not a problem for me to respect and appreciate and have boundaries and be in awe of the people I'm working with. I don't know that if it ever was necessarily a problem with me but I certainly have been a toxic male presence. I've been a very toxic male presence in my life. I think I operate now, it may be a 25 to 30 percent toxicity level but I've certainly been up around 90 in terms of being emotionally abusive, insensitive, angry, selfish, compulsive, and completely without empathy to the power structure that exists between men and women.... You know when you start to drift as a man into that the zone of like, yeah I don't see what the big deal is, [he] just jerked off in front of them, [he] jerked off on a phone, they could have left, [they] could have done this, they could have done that, you know he asked, that's not illegal. Yeah, but it's gross, it's creepy, it's massively inappropriate, it's potentially traumatizing.... To move from the toxic male, or just male disposition, of like what's the big deal, he didn't fuck em, he asked, he just jerked off, just kind of pathetic, it's like what's the big deal? Well the big deal is is that its boundary shattering, it is traumatizing, it is unexpected, it is shaming, and if you let yourself feel that, if you just let yourself feel what what all those women went through, even if it didn't seem violent to you, or like rape or any of that shit.... And look, I hope this doesn't come off as any sort of apology for anything, you know. I'm disappointed in my friend. He did some gross shit, some damaging shit, and people are like how are you gonna be friends with that guy? He's my friend. Now he fucked up and he's in big fucking trouble, so, well, what am I gonna do? I'm just - I'm gonna be his friend...."

Marc Maron monologues from his position as a comedian friend of Louis C.K., who has heard the rumors over the years and is under obvious pressure to explain himself.

Audio here. Transcript here.

"I loved [classical music], but once I heard The 4 Seasons, forget it. That sound!"

"And when The Beatles came out, you know, initially, I didn't even care. I was still reeling from having seen The 4 Seasons on 'Ed Sullivan' doing 'Big Girls Don't Cry.' There was something about that sound. The way they looked! We didn't have guys that looked like that... or sounded like that... He was high. They said 'Walk like a man/sing like a girl.' He could get up there. But the whole vocal sound they had was just amazing. You heard the sound of the city. I said Get me down there."

Said Paul Shaffer in the new episode of "WTF with Marc Maron."

Shaffer was listening to the radio in the early 60s, at the same time I had my most intense radio experiences, and I had exactly the same reaction to The 4 Seasons and to the early Beatles. (What was the big deal in a world that already had The 4 Seasons?!). (Paul Shaffer is about a year older than I am... and exactly the same height (5'5").)

Shaffer wanted to get down there, because he was in Canada, in Thunder Bay, whence you had to drive 4 hours just to get to Duluth, the city Bob Dylan had to get down out of. Shaffer was listening to the radio at night so he could get a station in Chicago, and was blown away when "Sherry" came along.

And here's how that "Ed Sullivan" show looked:



That was a big moment for me too. I was 11. Shaffer, 12, wanted to be like Frankie Valli. Now, that is a man. I wanted to marry him.

ADDED: Frankie Valli looks so tiny there. How tall is he? He's in the 5'5" club with me and Paul.

"When we found this house, it became, like, the clubhouse, where guys would go every day and hang out... like a street gang."

"And it was a place to go, like a workshop... And this had been a dream of mine: If we could only have the clubhouse, where we could go every day, and we could lock ourselves away from the world and create something that we are meant to do, that we are on a mission to do."

I'll leave that quote unattributed for while. I didn't transcribe it to make a guessing game, but apart from the context, it's some fascinating psychology, perhaps distinctly masculine.

ADDED: Meade read this post and, without reading any comments, immediately gave the right answer: "He's talking about Big Pink."

Earnest Prole, at 7:30 a.m., gives a wrong answer that I believe is a humorous way to reveal he knows the right answer:

Obviously you’re referring to Hell House, an old cabin with a tin roof located in the Florida woods where the band One Percent wrote and perfected their music in the blazing Southern heat. You may know One Percent as the band later called Lynyrd Skynyrd. Sadly, Hell House and Lynyrd Skynyrd took the night train to the big adios, as we all shortly will.

3 minutes later, perhaps taking Earnest Prole's comments as a prompt, Amadeus 48 spells out the correct answer:

Robbie Robertson talking about "The Band" and music from Big Pink?

Here's Robbie Robertson on the Marc Maron podcast that went up this morning.

"David Crosby readily admits that he probably shouldn't be alive. Drug addiction, alcoholism and health issues..."

"... have taken their toll but have not knocked David out. He's still making music and going out on tour, but he had a little time to talk with Marc about The Byrds, CSN, Neil Young, Jerry Garcia, Jimi Hendrix, Woodstock, Altamont, Melissa Etheridge, and much more."

It's not Marc Maron at his greatest, but it was nice hearing from David Crosby, who has acquired some wisdom and humility in his old age... some of it by spending a year in prison in Texas where being a celebrity got you nothing.

If you're like me and you love David from his time in The Byrds — my first rock concert was The Byrds at Newark Symphony Hall on March 27, 1966 — you'll be pained by how little Marc knows or cares about The Byrds. Marc, born in 1963, hangs out in the Crosby, Stills & Nash period. But I did learn that The Byrds kicked Crosby out, and according to Crosby, he deserved it because he was an asshole.

"I don't believe in the devil. I believe in stupidity."

Said Werner Herzog — on the new episode of WTF with Marc Maron. Yes! Herzog and Maron! That was great to wake up to on Monday morning. Herzog has a new movie. It made Marc Maron dream about spiders, causing Herzog to relay his own dream — he only dreams once a year — about being told to renounce the devil.

ADDED: Here's the trailer for the new movie, the one that made Maron feel doomed. It's about the internet — which isn't evil, just stupid, per Herzog — "Lo And Behold: Reveries of the Connected World":



"Have the monks stopped meditating? They all seem to be tweeting."