Monday, October 13, 2025

We Good?

I can’t say I ever truly understood podcasts. Firstly, I don’t take in information well through auditory means, which is the main reason why lectures leave me impatient and I loathe phone calls. I get that you want something to listen to while you handle the mundane shit of day-to-day life, and that’s fair, and some few podcasts manage to scratch that itch, but now that the market is saturated, and now that random men tell me to listen to someone’s podcast on the regular, I can’t muster the enthusiasm. It just seems like more detritus.

However, that wasn’t always the case. Before all three turned into the worst kind of culture-war slop, and before I stopped listening entirely, This American Life and Radiolab and 99% Invisible were regular favorites. The first balanced beautiful human nuance with hilariously bitchy snark – Sedaris for the win – and the latter two were the best kind of popularization, taking complex and thorny ideas in science and design and presenting them in an informative but still rigorous way. But the early podcast bros never did it for me. Adam Carolla was far funnier when he was bottomfeeding on Comedy Central’s Man Show and lowering the discourse on MTV’s Loveline than he ever was on his own podcast (Dr. Drew telling listeners how important communication was, followed by Carolla asking if they’d done anal yet). And long before his right-wing turn, I found Joe Rogan to just be kinda annoying, even when he was interviewing people I found interesting and admirable. 

Yet I’m not sure quite why I stuck with Marc Maron, whose WTF podcast ends this week.

Before every comedian had an interview podcast, Maron had one. 

I remember so distinctly when I first listened to him, sometime in 2011 or 2012, while working on a technical writing gig in late summer in suburban Seattle. And while I don’t exactly remember how I found him, I do remember the angry, weird, self-loathing comic style that drew me in. This in particular stands out.

And the podcast had the same spirit. You got to see how he dealt with all the people he’d wronged in the past, making amends with all the people he had been an absolute shit to in the cocaine-and-bourbon haze of the ‘90s NYC alt-comedy world. My team at the time consisted of a cadre of overeducated, boozy quasi-fuckups with humanities degrees, heavily stamped passports, and strong opinions on David Foster Wallace. Listening to Marc Maron as I took screenshots and instructed users on how to get the most out of their Tapout-branded Android devices seemed a natural response to the circumstances in which I’d found myself. We’re all in this shit together. Let’s hash it out. 

And while his personality carried the tone of the interviews – the deeply wounded man trying to get good with the world – the guest list largely consisted of other loveable disasters, figuring their shit out with someone else figuring his shit out, as they all admitted they hadn’t behaved like upstanding citizens after snorting absolute alligator tails of primo Colombian. And they still weren’t completely alright. Sure, they had writing credits on well-regarded shows, they had husbands and wives who managed to deal with their foibles, but they were at the end of the day the sort of broken people who have no choice but to put themselves on stage and try to connect. These were their war stories. In a world of slick packaged bullshit, WTF seemed a beacon of honesty.

For years, I listened religiously. 

That being said, I did fall off some time ago. As Maron’s fame grew, his guest list consisted of fewer and fewer second-tier comics who never quite made it, and more and more genuine A-listers on the award-season campaign interview circuit. Maybe the famed Obama interview, an ugly sort of softball utterly lacking in substance, was the moment where he jumped the shark, but it seemed to me more of a slow decline. Rather than actually connecting to something deep and human, too many Maron interviews seemed to have the form of sincerity but not the substance, and consequently were little more than kitsch. His penultimate episode, a 40-minute monologue, ended with a compilation of some of his most legendary moments, set to the Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize??” And it just felt manipulative.

He himself also got progressively more annoying. There was less and less cynical smirking counterpointed with genuine tears, and more whinging about the minor humiliations of Hollywood life and getting fat from craft services, as well as a fair bit of ignorant culture-war slop. And while I expected a certain misanthropy from him, it used to be barded with empathy. By now, his opening monologues have devolved into the groanings of a stereotypical wealthy California liberal who seems to genuinely despise and fear ordinary people, someone who seemingly hates them for their stupidity and just desires to wishcast them out of existence, while at the same time mewling about the importance of amplifying marginalized voices and listening to people’s trauma, assuming of course that they serve to assuage his sense of personal virtue. I came awfully close to smashing my phone when he harped about how people elected a fascist because they cared about the price of eggs. God forbid people, even if quite misguidedly, take their material conditions into consideration rather than their moral uprightness. Not all of us get infinite swag bags of vegan snacks, Marc. 

Furthermore, as other comics imitated the style of WTF, it seemed less like a unique representative of a certain world and more part of the background chorus. How unique is it when Bill Burr has a comedy podcast, and Conan O’Brien, and Shane Gillis, and Hannibal Buress, and Iliza Shlesinger, and Anthony Jeselnik… and… and I didn’t even know most of those people had comedy podcasts, but all I had to do was go to the Wikipedia pages of some comics I liked, and lo and behold. It’s almost a requirement now.

But even with all of that said, he never fully devolved into shit. He never got the neon podcast sign, he never sliced his interviews up into TikToks with starburst subtitles. For every utterly pointless interview with a focus-grouped favorite, there were interviews with the sorts of weirdos I like hearing from, and at its best it was still a clarion call to those of us, who try, quixotically, to still pursue creative endeavors in this benighted era. Consider this beauty, with filmmaker Kelly Reichardt (and go watch Old Joy and Meek’s Cutoff while you’re at it).

Yet just as I’m writing this, final episode dropped. It’s Obama, he’s back. Will I even listen? It’s frankly doubtful – I don’t need to spend another second of my life with that empty suit. Just fuck you. But maybe that’s a representative choice of our first-as-tragedy-second-as-farce era, trying to drink the Amanita muscaria urine until the heat death of the universe. 

Which is a sign that it really is time for the curtain to fall. I’m not sad to go because of Marc Maron himself, as he is now, who is someone I feel less identification with, or because of his podcast, as it is now, as something that I feel has lost much of its original value, but because of what he and it were to me at one time in my life. Our lives disappear piece by piece, and for every graceful dismount, there are a half-dozen stumbles.

Thursday, September 25, 2025

The World You Were Born In...

You know the phrases. “Hold my beer.” “The perfect ___ does not exi…” You get the idea. The tired cliches plunged from the depths of the discourse, irredeemable mass-market quips. Some of them, to be fair, were once clever, before multiplying like anaerobic bacteria in the hogshit lagoons of 4chan, Reddit, etc., repeated by 14 year olds and bots until their mere invocation becomes repulsive. You can call them memes, but you could argue that all idioms, sayings, and turns of phrase were really just memes before we called them memes. However, these phrases are used more like memes – impervious to creativity and lacking defined by their repetition, they are a pure statement of one’s own social and discursive standing. Sometimes deployed sincerely, sometimes ironically, almost always repulsively.

But sometimes one actually makes an impact -- not much of one, perhaps, but enough to spark inquiry rather than a dismissive snarl. 

1970s grain, VHS font, doomed buildings. If it was in a gallery, it would get far higher praise.

A memory of years ago, right before I first stepped off American soil for a long period, for my first travel adventure in Asia. I sent out a Facebook message on blast to maybe 20 or so people one day, saying I’d be camped out at the Redwood on Howell and Belmont (RIP) that evening. And I drank dirt-cheap pints of PBR and read library books in the interim – I finished Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things and started Andrei Codrescu’s Wakefield if I remember correctly – and friends came by in ones and twos and threes, most of them not saying when or if they were swinging by, just coming and going, on their way to or from other loose hangout sessions, gigs, theatrical rehearsals, shifts at the bar or the café, while All the President’s Men played silently on the projector and someone put Guided by Voices on the jukebox.

It's hard to even imagine a world like that now.

But look a little bit further, and a certain hollowness emerges. The memelords, while they get the feels right, seem to lack that sort of long, telescopic view of their own past. They’re pretty young, and despite the aesthetic cribbing from other eras, they’re not talking about the longue durée of history, but like 2017. When you have fewer rings on your trunk, you think about time in more compressed terms. Remember those “Only ‘90s kids will remember this!” posts from back in the day, posted shockingly quickly after the ‘90s had themselves ended? That being said, the past decade or so in particular has been a motherfucker. COVID, of course, being the big thing, but many, many more things have happened in the interim – and it’s only natural for younger and youngish people to contrast the chaotic present with the more sedate if bovine world they associate with the ’90s and even ‘00s. 

Therefore, it’s unfortunate but unsurprising that the term in question has its origins and has had its greatest currency in the world of online “traditionalists,” a cadre that seems to mostly consist of alienated boys and men, mostly young, but with quite a few divorce dads and the like in there, who in their worse moments fancy themselves as Saxon warriors or Goldwater Republican picket-fence patriarchs deprived of their destiny. Men who believe that in a better world they would be slaying Saracens right now, or puffing their pipe in the study while wifey massages their shoulders and pours them another dry martini (although something tells me many of their taste buds are nowhere near mature enough to enjoy an actual dry martini). Plenty of ink has been dedicated to this kind of modern creature, but it’s hard to see how this could be anything other than the logical end result of a mirror maze of signifiers without signified, and every single moment of one’s life becoming a consumer choice, with minimal regard to what it is to be human. Their solutions are idiotic and often psychotic, but their instincts are not too far off. 

I would like to dance through the chaos, to take this Spinozist joy in the present, even amid the ugly world, but it’s tough to find the energy. Beer and peanuts and Paul Auster at a long-gone Seattle tavern. Did any of us know what was coming?

Monday, September 1, 2025

Twilight of the Public Access Idols

It’s a long-time cliché of art history that kitsch eventually turns into a high art. It wasn’t that long ago, for example, that Victorian gingerbread was seen as the disgusting affectation of a less enlightened time, and it was only in the past 10 years that Anglo-American brutalist architecture has been reappropriated as the signifier of a more optimistic era rather than just some gray concrete shit. If we’re going to extrapolate further, it’s so easy to mistake age for wisdom, and stupidity for prelapsarian virtue, that I always have to caution myself against it, to put certain automatic skepticism triggers in place, lest I be deceived.

But if you have that crate-digger mentality, a desire to go through the archives and find past ideas and expressions, you’ll always be tempted to find enlightenment therein. It’s something I used to do a lot, in the hope that I could somehow recontextualize and redo what I saw, to make my mind palace into a Joseph Cornell box. Like most people, as I have aged, immediate and quotidian requirements have taken precedence, and yet there will always be an allure in the grainy filmstrip, the library book last checked out in 2003, the potshard. 

And in that context I recently watched 2004’s Public Access Hollywood (available in its entirety here), and it was an opportunity to revisit one such strange world, the legendary LA public access channels, widely regarded as the best in the country, and the strange personalities who inhabit it.

I’m not sure how many people under the age of 30 have even watched public access, but I’m sure many of them know the aesthetic of it – grainy video stock, ill-fitting polyester, primitive digital effects, and general amateurism and incoherence. Famously crappy, famously occasionally very weird programming produced on non-budgets in local cable markets across America, a frequently parodied (see any number of classic SNL sketches from Wayne’s World to Goth Talk) format from a pre-Youtube era where the idea of any audiovisual media beyond the family vacation video being homemade was novel. A clear lineage to the two ferns that Zach Galifianakis sits between (by god, is even that reference long-outdated?). Even by my day, public access was viewed as a strange and quaint thing, something we found through early Youtube clips. The last memory I have of even watching it on an actual tee vee was in my early 20s, in the margarita-and-marijuana haze between viewings of Project Runway with my gay housemates. 

The first viral public access clip I remember was The Spirit of Truth, in which a borderline street preacher randomly cites Bible passages without quoting them from what looks like a telephone book while insulting callers, against a backdrop of Yosemite while Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove” plays. Across America, his quotes were dropped in the same way Antwone Dodson’s would be a decade later. He’s not in Public Access Hollywood – a little too ephemeral.

 

So who is in the documentary? The focus is on the mainstays, who, while perhaps, less intense in their insanity, are their own variety of eccentric. There’s David Liebe Hart’s Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson Program, starring his puppet Chip the Black Boy, with crack-is-wack messaging and songs about helpful aliens. More intentionally weird, there’s Dan Kapelovitz and the team behind Three Geniuses, slashing the media form of television to bits, and commenting on the rebirth and “re-death” of psychedelia, a stage of weirdo anti-humor somewhere in its evolution between Andy Kaufman and Devo on one end and Gen Z Dada on the other. Or the bro version, Zuma Dogg shouting shit on Sunset in his Oakleys and ‘90s condom beanie, a kind of demonic Ashton Kutcher. For more informative content, there’s Dr. Susan Block’s sexual education program, a cavalcade of bizarre proto-sex-positive theater, dressed in vinyl and spanking her guests. Mediating it all, the sort of cultural arbiter was Michael Devine of Hollywood and Devine, whose variety show featuring the lovely freaks and weirdos of Los Angeles feels like a chopped and screwed version of Letterman. And the one who garners the most screen time and most pathos, there is Francine Dancer, chubby and dancing in her lingerie while maintaining that she would never do something so classless as to dance nude, confined to a wheelchair when she’s not dancing. No fixed address, much beloved within her niche community but at best an absurdist artifact outside it.

I think you get the idea. Cranks who interrupt municipal council meetings worldwide, desperate souls, who, above all else, want other people to listen and understand, pranksters and ironists in it for the lulz who could probably cite Baudrillard and Debord off-camera, or at the very least Tony Wilson and Malcolm McLaren, and the dreamers in rattrap apartments who still believe they can make it in real Hollywood, despite their often-dire circumstances. This studio was their home, and you kind of love it for them. 

But what the makers of Public Access Hollywood didn’t know was that in 2004, they were already at the end of an era.

One thing they acknowledge is that by that point, reality TV had already become an institution. From its inception point in the late ‘90s, it had spread to become the standard for the cable networks, deliciously cheap to produce and packed with mass appeal. Like the public access stars, it provided an ostensibly (adverb doing some heavy lifting there) authentic appeal, and a lurid opportunity to see one’s fellow man at his ugliest and most depraved.

And what they further probably couldn’t have anticipated was that the ecosystem of public access television, one which claimed to bypass the gatekeepers of audiovisual entertainment, was about to expand to the whole damn world with the rise of Youtube (the irony being that that is the very platform where I watched the documentary). 

It logically follows that this is something that the drive towards algorithmic correctness inevitably destroys, not only preventing us the audience from seeing the wilder and weirder side of things and trying to get us to watch preapproved slop, but also incentivizing creators into producing things more algo-friendly (with the occasional oddities like Elsagate videos representing a genuine flaw in the system, fucked up as they are). Sure, previous forms of media were beholden to a hooting and hollering public, but the algorithm seems even worse.

Which might be why, despite the similar hypothetical freedom, few of the public access stars would find a home on this new platform. And beyond that more coldly rational lack of economic incentive, there’s also a deluge of competing content, rather than a particular zone of permitted bizarre. In a world where everyone is a weirdo, and you can turn on or shut off their weird at will, it’s irrelevant. But when you turn on the television and randomly flip to public access, it’s something different entirely. 

I miss TV… Some of this may sound stupid. I miss commercials that were louder than the programs. I miss the phrases ‘Order before midnight tonight’ and ‘Save up to fifty percent and more.’ I miss being told things were filmed before a live studio audience. I miss late-night anthems and shots of flags and fighter jets and leathery-faced Indian chiefs crying at litter. I miss ‘Sermonette’ and ‘Evensong’ and test patterns and being told how many megahertz something’s transmitter was broadcasting at.’ He felt his face. ‘I miss sneering at something I love. How we used to love to gather in the checker-tiled kitchen in front of the old boxy cathode-ray Sony whose reception was sensitive to airplanes and sneer at the commercial vapidity of broadcast stuff.’…

The man tended to look up at him like people with legs look up at buildings and planes. ‘You can of course view entertainments again and again without surcease on TelEntertainment disks of storage and retrieval.’ 

Orin’s way of looking up as he remembered was nothing like the seated guy’s way of looking up. ‘But not the same. The choice, see. It ruins it somehow. With television you were subjected to repetition. The familiarity was inflicted.”

- David Foster Wallace, The Book You Should Read Even Though People Will Call You a Lit Bro 

But concomitant with the rise of Youtube was the rise of another media machine – Adult Swim. Here, the aesthetics of public access, along with industrial video, low-end public broadcasting, and every other ephemeral form of media from the cable-and-VHS era would be recycled into the lysergic mandalas of Tim and Eric et al. We could view the original vomit of the era on Youtube, and we could view the avant-garde pisstakes on Adult Swim. Indeed, Heidecker, Wareheim, and Co. had the wisdom and foresight to bring some of the LA public access idols to the national stage. I’m guessing a lot of the readership will be more likely to know David Liebe Hart in this capacity. All the food is poison. Keep your meat ice-cold.


But his story seems to be one of the few successes here, and even that success is pretty circumscribed. 

Maybe they would have always been fated to obscurity, but maybe they could have been fortunate enough to breach containment and find their improbable sliver of success. I’m reminded of another LA icon, Angelyne, the bleach-blonde daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors known more for her billboard poses – an early stab at guerrilla marketing – than any of her purported entertainment talent. It would be hard to imagine her transposed to today without a couple seasons on Bravo, or at least a horny Twitch following.

Part of the reason the documentary works in 2025 is that it plays at this historical disconnect, and part of the reason it would have worked upon release 20 years ago is that it plays on the very fundamental feels of the desperate attempts to keep a dream alive. One of the oldest of LA cliches is that of a graveyard of aspirations, a place where the ideology of individual merit runs headlong into bitter reality. And every year, we hear new stories that reinforce the trope, whether lasciviously documented for TMZ, or as the backstories for stalkers and mass shooters. 

I put in some hours, but the fate of most of the performers in Public Access Hollywood is difficult to suss out in casual searches. David Liebe Hart’s latest credit involves Lloyd Kaufman of Troma / Toxic Avenger fame, so he’s continuing to participate in weird media. Dan Kapelovitz still seems to be invested in making fucked up shit, and for that he is to be saluted. The latest project in his IMDB profile is 120 Days of Sodom… Literally, a cut-up of Pasolini’s Salo with a 120 day runtime (feel free to watch it streaming, it’s ongoing), and he seems to be pursuing a side passion for left-wing electoral candidacy (seeing someone else tragically ahead of his time?). Zuma Dogg still seems to be doing pranks in his sunglasses, to a tiny audience. Susan Block simultaneously had a career as a sex therapist and regular on Real Sex on HBO – raise your hand if you remember furtively watching that in the basement, only to be deeply deeply disappointed – and still has the Susan Block Institute, but the website looks like something from 1998, which seems awfully appropriate for a woman seemingly designed for that very 1990s precise balance of lewd, subversive sociosexual commentary. Michael Devine seems to have died from cancer in 2006. And Francine Dancer is still out and about in Hollywood, occasionally popping up on someone’s Instagram, still smiling.

But all of that being said, I ran into quite a few dead ends. Whole swaths seem to be likely dead media, and I doubt I could find much more than the minima I’ve already found, unless I were to chase down moldering basement VHS collections and chase the performers for follow-ups (something I’d totally do if I wasn’t doing this whole thing on top of a full-time job plus freelance writing for actual cash money). Honestly, more than anything else, I just wanted to find signs of life, and maybe it was parasocial, maybe it was morbidly curious, but I wanted confirmation that they were OK. 

Maybe I held hope because in their own way, these were truly the last bohemians, scraping by on the fringes of Hollywood. They said fuck it, did their own thing, on the public commons, with minimal regard as to market incentive. The things that followed inevitably come off as moneymakers, aping authenticity as part of their branding. Reality television, of course, or the monstrous sponsored-content machine that Youtube has become. Even those weirdo Adult Swim shows, as much as I love them, are shaped by the requirements of the advertisers, and Tim and Eric’s legendary, absurdist late ‘00s Absolut ad series were at the end of the day still Absolut ads.

So what we get is real folk art from a lost world. And the documentary, 20 years on, its cri de coeur.