Muse

I have 85. Do I have 90? I have 90 from the man with the face at table 4. This is terrible. You don't know what you're doing. Adam Sandler? Yeah, that's right. I collect antiquities. I'm a serious person. I'm writing a movie right now about the Russian Revolution. Oh, really? Who does Kevin James play in it? Uh-huh. It's a serious movie. Trotsky. Ah, there it is.

TBTN! Hey, somebody has run out on the field. Some goofball in a hat and a red shirt. Now he takes off the shirt. He's running down the middle by the 50. He's at the 30. He's bare-chested and banging his chest. Now he runs the opposite way. He runs at the 50. He runs at the 40. The guy is drunk, but there he goes.

Paint your bald spot? I don't. Do you paint your bald spot? Paint your bald spot? You're sick.

The world of cheeses is strange and intimidating, and frankly, it's terrifying to me. Sometimes a little comic relief is the best way to deliver a serious message.

I don't believe you're seriously considering listening to these movies.

Listen to that horn!

Oh my God! Oh, she's beautiful! She is beautiful! Yeah!

This party is going to be off of the hook.

Alright, hello, good morning, and welcome everyone to a Monday edition of TVTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live.

This song goes out to all the coffee lovers of the world.

My name is Luke Burbank, I am your host, coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center, located in Portland, Oregon.

Bring it back home, baby, bring it back home.

Feels nice to be broadcasting from home for one day. before I get on an airplane and go to San Francisco tonight to do some cold water swimming tomorrow and Wednesday in San Francisco Bay. I can't decide if I'm excited or terrified for it. It's got me in a bizarre, slightly euphoric state on this Monday morning. Oh, Lord. I'm sorry. I'm just in a silly, goofy mood. It's a rainy Monday morning here in Portland, But that's not stopping the guy riding one of those one-wheeled power. It's not a unicycle. I mean, it's sort of a... What do you call that thing? You know what's funny is all of the... Didn't know you like to get wet, though. I mentioned that it's raining. I feel I owe it to the listeners, really, to lay a little Denzel on them. This is something I hadn't really thought of. When I was a kid, I used to read B.C. comic. comics you know in the seattle times and the big joke in uh on bc comics was that or one of them was that there was a guy that was always wheeling around on one wheel and i remember as a kid thinking i get it cave cave people the wheel this is a joke but it made no sense the propulsion of it was just a stone wheel with like a piece of wood going through the middle of it little could I have known that, you know, 38 years later, I would be hosting something called a podcast and I'd be staring out the window and someone engaging in the height of technological advance ness would be flying down the street in Portland, basically on the wheel from BC. Let the fun begin. Just saying life comes at you fast. Here we are at episode 3574 in a collector's series. I was reading with extreme fascination this morning. This New Yorker profile of the actor Jeremy Strong. Jeremy Strong is on the TV show Succession, which I'm sure many of you are big fans of. It's a very popular show, and they are reaching the end of their particular season they're on. And so there's all kinds of publicity going on around the show Succession. This profile is written by Michael Shulman, and it is really, really fascinating. So fascinating that a lot of the friends of Jeremy Strong, the actor, think he's being unfairly maligned in it, and they're taking to the Internet to defend him, including Aaron Sorkin, the writer who doesn't apparently have social media. So he faxed a letter to the actor Jessica Chastain to post online on Aaron Sorkin's behalf defending Jeremy Strong, who they think was being besmirched.

In this business of show, you have to have the heart of an angel and the hide of an elephant.

So we'll dig into the profile coming up. Speaking of art, I saw some incredible art this weekend in Chicago.

For me to be able to condone that my artism is bigger than that.

Got to see Nighthawks, got to see American...

Gothic. I mean, you name it. Jackson Pollock, Rothko. It's all at the Art Institute of Chicago. I also saw some very bad artism, which was actually the main show that's in place there, at least bad in my opinion. I'm not, you know, I'm not writing currently for art in America, so I probably don't know. But an artist did something that made me viscerally angry and Not in the good way that like, oh, if art makes you have a reaction, it works. No, I wanted to actually throw the power switch at the Art Institute of Chicago to off to stop something from happening. So we'll get into that. And also an update on my physical degradation as a person of 45 years of age. It's rapidly increasing. I'm falling apart here. I noted it this weekend, so maybe we'll talk about that, too. We can't do any of that, though, before introducing this feller. The longest running co-bro of the show Maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships We have a busy and very active week of TBTL in front of us And he wants to get it going right But he's going to need a little bit of encouragement from all of us He is Andrew Please clap Walsh He's joining me right now from the Roosevelt neighborhood of Seattle, Washington Good morning, my friend Oh, you're actually clapping

Thank you, please I know, that was weird

Because I do have, like I have fake clapping too But I decided to go for the real thing, Andrew.

I, you know, wow, that must have been a long introduction because we're done with the music already. I was trying to.

I went on a meditation. I know you kind of work out for the intros, but just to update you, I went on a meditation about the B.C. thing. Yeah, I was eight up two minutes.

I was going to ask you, did you realize and I don't think that you intended to do it and I'm not trying to put you under a microscope. I found it enjoyable, but when you said the word nice, and I can't remember, it was before the BC wheel, you said nice in a way that sounded like it maybe was slipping into Borat, but then went all the way through Borat and became Johnny Five of short, short, short. Nice, soft wind. Did you sort of feel that as you were doing that? Nice.

I think I did, and I think I felt okay about it at the time. Of course, now you have me questioning.

No, I think it was a good incision. I just liked it because I didn't realize until this morning that even just taking you out of the equation, I believe Borat and Johnny Five are somewhere on the same spectrum when we imitate them or when one imitates them. But I did not realize that. Very nice.

I mean, it's terrible Borat. I don't, you know, I think we can agree that very nice is, oh, behave for, you know, a newer generation or at least a more updated take. But it's the same kind of thing. There's the person at your workplace who loves to say those kinds of catchphrases, and they've replaced oh, behave with very nice.

Yes. In fact, I'm trying to do the timeline on this. I am thinking of a very specific former co-worker of mine, somebody that's very far removed from from anything that you and I have worked together on. But like I haven't seen the person who said that the cake tasted like edible underwear. No, but similar era. And I know that wherever this person is like working now or living their life now, my guess is probably maybe the last person on earth still doing the Borat voice with very nice. Now, I want you to know something. I am making this kind of prediction or assumption, having known him during an era before that movie even came out. But I know his personality so well, because I think when when I knew him, he probably was still talking in the Austin Powers voice or whatever. Like he was the type of person who would would go in for those things. And then it would you know, he'd really get it. He'd really fall hard, you know, and he'd take that with him for years and years and years. So I'll bet you this person who will remain nameless is going around saying very nice and maybe even still doing some Monty Python stuff, throwing that in there as well.

Is Monty Python back now? Can we say it's just a flesh wound? And is it I mean, has it had has it been on the sidelines long enough that now it's funny again? Or is like, will there be a point in 20 years where saying, oh, behave once again, creates an actually comedic moment and not something just cringe inducing?

You know, I'm still like kind of quoting things from Get Smart, like the cone of silence. So maybe I'm not one to throw stones here. But maybe that's back. But maybe that's back.

Missed it by that much.

Would you believe a sandwich? Yeah, you know, I just think that maybe it's my generation's bias. But, you know, growing up and, you know, being of that generation where kids were, quote unquote, discovering Monty Python for the first time when you're in like, I don't know, sixth to eighth grade or whatever. It was a real almost like free. Freaks and Geeks vibe. I think in Freaks and Geeks, they were obsessed with Steve Martin, sort of. But you know what I mean? You have this group of, like, kind of nerdy friends who are kind of discovering Monty Python for the first time. And having that joy of discovery is wonderful and awesome. And I wouldn't trade that away. But then that same group of people just quoting, just keeping that with them through the college years and just quoting Monty Python at any given opportunity and just really wanting to just slowly put a pillow over their face. Like, it's just, it's rough. I don't think that that can ever hit the refresh button for me. I don't want to, I don't want to be living in a world or circling social circles where people are just like really relying on that as, as a conversation fodder.

What is the, despite it causing you to have a breakout in, you know, discomfort, what is the best line from Monty Python? Because I feel like I know what it is.

The best line from Monty Python.

Also, I am not a Monty Python expert. I've only seen probably two of the movies. So I am far from a completist on Monty Python. I never even watched this show or whatever, the other version that was on TV. I've seen some of the sketches. But from the two movies I've seen, I have a line that lives in my head, as they say, rent-free. And I still say it in my mind sometimes.

Well, why don't you just go? Because I've got to say, whatever I'm thinking of, I'm having trouble. I'm sure there's some line that I delighted in when I was younger, but right now all I'm thinking is all the obvious stuff. So what are you thinking of?

Well, let's see. Like I said, the knights, you know, the knights who say knee, that's only a flesh wound. That one gets a lot of play. From the sketches, from the TV version, that is an ex-parrot. When someone tries to return a dead parrot to the pet store, that one gets a lot of love. There is a scene in the life of Brian where these characters are trying to hear a speech from Jesus, but they can't. It's far away and they're not really hearing him. And someone says, you know, Jesus said, blessed are the meek. And someone goes, did I say blessed are the Greek? And I do not know why that line kills me. But I think about that probably once a week of all these years later.

Well, that's such a it is. It's just a good observation, too. I remember Mike Peska making this observation, I believe, on the very first episode of The Gist. Wasn't this like an essay or something or an observation that he shared on the gist very early on, maybe even in the pilot phase? Because I think you told me about it and then I listened to it, but Game of Thrones was a going concern then. And he was just like, these speeches by the Khaleesi, who, like there's nobody except for maybe like the 10 people tops in the front row who can hear. And she's just like speaking to thousands upon thousands of soldiers. Like, what is the point? And can you imagine how uncomfortable that would be to be somewhere in that crowd? All you hear is, like, the shifting and rustling around you. And then somebody's probably, like, talking to somebody, like, two rows behind you. And it's both irritating and also it makes you nervous that they're going to get in trouble. Sounds awful.

Well, I mean, not to mention, and I don't know if Mike put this in his gist. What does he call those things? He's a spiel.

Yeah.

The gist is coming back, by the way, baby. Yeah. I don't know what I'm allowed to say about that, but it's on the horizon. Anyway, I don't know if you put this in a spiel or not, but the other thing is if the Khaleesi is giving a speech, the stakes are pretty high. You might be finding out that you're about to die or that you need to do something or not do something so as to not. I mean, just considering that at any point she may raise up a cow's heart and start eating it, this is information that is extremely important for you as the listener to get. So if you're I'm getting there early for a speech from the Khaleesi because I want to know exactly what's going. I don't want to be 20 rows back and getting a blessed or the Greek situation and then finding out that I I misinterpreted the information. As they say on TikTok, I misunderstood the assignment. And now I'm getting, you know, one of the blood riders is taking me down.

They should have handouts, obviously. Something a projection, an overhead. Yeah, I assume mimeograph machines are still even though that's a pretty old technology, still a little bit on the horizon for them. But they should definitely have some sort of handouts. I also reject the idea that you're getting there early, Luke. You are sauntering up late, and you are giving somebody a cougaranta thing. You're weaseling your way. You with the beer that you got at the Mariners game, you're weaseling your way to the front of the line showing up 15 minutes late. That is probably true.

I have a glass of mead. I have a flagon of mead. We're jumping around sort of historically here. I believe the word you were going for was Krugerrand, which is a South African unit of money made of gold. Actually, I don't know if Krugerrand is specific to South Africa or the one I found.

happened to just be from South Africa. But I'm wandering up with a, you know, with a Westeros equivalent of a Krugerrand, a cup full of mead, and I'm asking someone if I can, yeah, if I could pay them a little bit so that I could just sit next to them in line. Or they're holding my place.

Or just tell me what, just like, can you tell me? Like, you know, just tell me. I'm not even going to show up. You know, I'll be at the inn, but then you just tell me what I need to know. I'll be in Flea Bottom. Yeah, I'll be in Flea Bottom. I'll be at the inn in Flea Bottom and just let me know.

If being drunk and Fleabottom were easy, everyone would do it.

Exactly, right. You know, just do you need to worry about dragons this weekend is really all you need to know.

Actually, this makes me feel like I would actually do okay in Westeros. I wonder about those things, you know, because I have a very – I don't even know if I want to call it skill set. That would be overstating it. But I have a very specific set of BS that I am able to peddle to the world. And we live in a moment where there is at least a minimal interest in that BS. But that could change at any time And in a place like Westeros It seems like it would be Less valuable, but I don't know What is Littlefinger really doing other than a podcast?

Yeah, of course he's really Well, he's trying to undermine He's the TMZ

He's the TMZ of Westeros Maybe he's doing a TV show People are generating content, even in Westeros

Who do you identify the most with? I'm glad we're finally having this conversation

Well, I look the most like Varys But who character wise like I'm obviously Sam Samwell Tarly right like no no bones about it but like who are you I am probably Ramsey Bolton no that's not quite right I mean you do have that's I mean taste for flesh but aside from actually they don't really eat I don't think that well when I when a podcast falls below us on the iTunes ranking you know I make an example of that is true yeah so that is a similar let me think here I I have to be careful because I don't want to pick someone who seems overly grandiose. I can't say Jon Snow. I mean, I don't even think that that's true. Because Jon Snow is kind of the sort of quiet, silent type. He sort of gets it done but doesn't like a lot of talking or bragging. So I would be the opposite of that. But I don't think I'm – I don't actually think I'm Ramsay because I don't think I'm a sadist. So, you know.

You don't eat meat. Maybe a lesser Maybe a Maybe it is a little thing I mean it's showman There's going to be showmanship in here And a zest for life I mean I guess You got Tyrion Enjoys the finer things

I would love to be Tyrion but I feel like Tyrion Is actually pretty profound And I don't think I'm profound enough to be Tyrion I mean definitely have a complicated relationship with Mead So that's A Tyrion similarity but yeah or maybe like a a lesser baratheon or something like uh uh what's our lesser stark maybe they're like the stark that kind of i forget his name already but he's not you know he's kind of like one of the rob stark maybe rob stark doesn't he kind of rob stark kind of he sort of has it going on but then he kind of screws up and gets killed yeah i wonder whatever happened to him i feel maybe no you know what maybe i'm more of a um i don't know why i want to just keep picking the worst characters on the show but who was the guy where the red wedding

happened the guy with oh who is trying to marry his daughters oh right oh my goodness yeah yeah um i think it's the guy from dinosaur junior right is it jay mascus yes it is it's jay mascus

i believe why can i remember jay mascus's name from a indie band uh from the 90s uh and yet I can't remember. It's not Craster's Keep, but the similar vibe, because the guy at Craster's Keep. Frey.

Or maybe it's Frey in the show. Yes. Walder Frey. Walder Frey. Frey. Walder Frey. Maybe more of a Walder Frey type. I don't know.

I'm mad about that. I saw Joker this weekend on The Flight Home. This could be, we should really start a new segment called Luke Reviews Films Everyone Else Has Already Seed.

Did you see it? Yeah, I saw that in the theater. That must have been pre-pandemic, huh? because I saw that in the theater and I know it was not one of the first movies I saw after the

pandemic I was the flight home from Chicago was longer than I remember it being so I actually had time to watch two movies I watched The Big Lebowski which just these were just things that were being offered for free on the Alaska Airlines website when you're on the plane I there's so many things on there that I wanted to watch White Orchid was on there I've only like gotten a few episodes in there was and yet i go with the big lebowski which i've seen 50 times it was a strange decision but i enjoyed it nonetheless and then i still had two more hours so i was like well this seems like the ideal way to watch joker on your phone on the airplane and i did and i have to say i thought it was really good Thank you.

i i remember that movie being beloved and also kind of ridiculed like it just seemed like you either thought it was a really good piece of filmmaking or you just thought it was terrible so i was expecting it to have some scenes that i could identify as being whatever it was people had latched on to as far as why some people think the movie is really not great but i just thought it was i thought it was a fascinating way to sort of create backstory for this character um and even the you know his sort of laughing you know condition if you will or you know his trauma response like stuff like that i just thought it was i thought it was a really compelling film i also watched it on an airplane which ups i mean i honestly cried at the end of lebowski i'm not even kidding when they start playing dead roses by the stones although i think it's actually the towns van zandt version maybe and the bowling machinery is just kind of putting pins back together and balls are cycling i'll admit i got a little teary so that's emotionally where i was watching these films but i thought joker was pretty good what did you think of it yeah i mean

it's been a while since i've seen it but um and so i don't know exactly what the complaints you're talking about are i didn't really get into the i guess i didn't really like kind of dig into the any kind of criticism of it i just i kind of watched it not knowing what i was getting into and enjoyed it but yeah i think it was really good filmmaking and i think it really i mean it's such a it's interesting that you take this i don't know if you can say yeah i mean in a certain way it is like timeless right we're talking about this comic book world that can happen you can set the kind of batman universe whenever you want there is something incredibly of the moment you know what i mean about the the the the um mental decline and the role of i guess i don't know if i'm using this right in this context but the toxic masculinity potentially that leads to to some of the downfall of the joker and just somebody who's like publicly struggling in this way that seems like a very I don't know it seemed both like a timeless story but also a 20 a very 2019 story at the same time which I see here is when it came out it also I thought painted

a really interesting and to me informative picture of what mental illness can might feel like for people I'm somebody who has been privileged enough to not really deal with that in my own personal life at least that I'm aware of maybe it's way down there and it's animating literally every behavior I do but to watch the loneliness of this character and to see somebody who just is longing to make connections with people in fact I knew someone I don't think this person went on to become a super villain but I knew someone Andrew who was almost exactly this character in real life an aspiring stand-up comic who kind of latched on to me and was somebody who did not seem to be totally connecting to reality at all times and who was very lonely and reaching out and wanting to, again, be connected to people and saw stand-up comedy as this vehicle, but it didn't really work on stage. And I remember, if I'm being totally honest and I feel bad about this, just feeling a little bit uncomfortable about this association and having to kind of manage this person a little bit and them writing me some pretty long letters and things and me just trying to keep it all on the kind of normal side of a friendship, if you will. And watching this movie, I was like, wow that really reminds me of a situation that I kind of observed and it also just it painted for me or it let me in on how lonely that could probably feel to someone as somebody who has not themselves been through it so I thought that was an interesting element as well yeah and also

and I know you're trying not to dox anybody but everything worked out well for Lindy West so you don't have to I assume that's who you're talking about I'm not sure I um I don't want be more specific okay but it rhymes with harry minefield interesting that is interesting oh so

this is your new york days gotcha this is back during my time in new york um speaking of art reviews can i tell you a little bit about the worst art installation i've ever had to be associated with by that i mean have paid money to see um becca and i on saturday in chicago went to the art institute there which is incredible and they have i mean every room you go into you're like whoa they have i mean monet's they have mayonnaise they have and i mean the painter manet not the condiment oh they probably have that in the cafe it's more of a dressing though right uh they have you know sculptures by rodin they have it's just it's amazing to see they have serrat so you know i don't know if you heard andrew because it wasn't reported much but Stephen Sondheim passed away and um you know uh Sundays in the Park with George uh was a sort of a a musical he wrote about um George Surratt the painter and so I guess the actual painting in question that that um that the that musical revolves around or at least is pivotal in that musical is actually in this museum and it's quite something to see anyway it was really a really lovely afternoon I got to see a lot of this very cool art but the whole thing was based around the art of someone named barbara kruger and i kept seeing because it's what they're advertising it's the kind of the main it's the i guess you would say it's the the installation of the moment in this museum all the other stuff is like probably kind of in the permanent collection it's kind of always there but this was an installation and it's really taken over chicago it's advertised everywhere they've done all these things on like you know subway overpasses and stuff about it and i guess i mean our listeners who know more about art than me would would say oh yeah Barbara Kruger we all know her she's somebody who I guess works typically in I don't know what you'd call it kind of media like you know writing statements and putting them on things kind of seems to be the work but it was we're looking at all this if we're looking at you know American Gothic we're looking at Nighthawks and then we just are we hear this sound that's almost like a the sound of a in a in a slasher film when the murderer is showing up and it's very ominous and weird. And we're like, what room is that coming from? And we're walking around trying to figure out the source of it. And we walk up to a security guy and say, do you know where that sound is coming from? He goes, listen, I spent two months trying to find that sound. It's just a hidden speaker somewhere. I go, it's not part of anything. He goes, it's just to put you in a mood, I guess, while you're in here. This is from the Barbara Kruger thing. It is the most unsettling sound. It just makes you uncomfortable, makes you immediately want to leave the area you're in andrew but if you do stick around you get to see such gems from barbara kruger as a big piece of text that says i shop therefore i am which just stands out in my mind because i feel like i would

like to reach out to the artist and say do you feel like you are the first person to point out the consumerism of our society this is really something that we think is making an artistic statement i shop therefore i am like how is that and and many things along that along those lines of of of creativity and of uh you know blowing one's mind andrew just all pasted all around this one part of the gallery was all these kind of like some of them were on digital screens that were cycling through them some of them were just like pasted up on walls it was just statements along the lines of i shop therefore i am and i was just i was blown away that this is something that is being presented as as is important art in 2021 huh i'm completely unfamiliar so i can't

weigh in on this is kruger somebody that you because you know me i'm a dingus i don't think that i've come across kruger before in any of my edumacation or or um museum going is kruger somebody that you've known about for a long time i'm reading no i mean i probably had seen her name

you know i used to be uh long ago i happened to be married to someone who was an installation artist so I spent a lot of time around art stuff most of which went way over my head a lot of which I now kind of have more of an appreciation for looking back on it so I don't know in 20 years maybe I'll be like I shop therefore I am wow nailed it Kruger but I just couldn't believe it in in the midst of all this really incredible art that was on display there and not just paintings because I know there's a lot of different ways to express yourself artistically it doesn't just have to be a famous painting it could be any number of things but when we finally got to like i said kind of the the big uh well-promoted sort of star of the show if you will it was so underwhelming to me it just felt like it was just a bunch of these very and i don't even think these were obvious statements that were that was then a meta statement like it wasn't a state it wasn't an art statement about someone making the statement i shop therefore i am it appeared to me to be that was the art that's the art like that was the the thing was supposed to blow my mind because of the the putting forward the idea that somebody might only feel sort of like they exist if they're shopping because it gives us a short emotional kind of uh feeling that that we use uh because we all feel a certain sadness inside you know an ineffable sadness like i just think that's what the art was now if it was a meta statement about bad um uh and i wish i could remember the exact terminology for this kind of art because like i said it's mostly just like words at various sizes on various backgrounds the other thing that i thought was kind of weird was all of the imaging for all the imaging for this campaign so anywhere you would go in chicago you would see these things hanging off the light poles and things for barbara kruger and it was Very unmistakably in the font Of the N.W.A. album Straight Outta Compton And it felt kind of racially

Am I picturing this correctly Is that N.W.A. font Almost like giving you the feeling of a stamp Of like a rubber stamp Yes

And this The font that they used for all this Barbara Kruger stuff And I think it's like That piece was like Let's talk about you And then the you is crossed out and it's like

I mean let's talk about me And then the me is crossed out And then it's like I mean let's talk about you That's like the piece And that's all in like NWA Straight out of Compton font Which feels to me sort of racially coded Now that font probably existed Before they put it on the NWA album So you know font heads Don't get at me I'm sure that that was somewhere before They put it on the album But now in my mind that means NWA And if you are a white artist and the font tells my brain this is an nwa related thing that gets also a little a little weird for me like i was just in in this day and age where we should all be thinking as carefully as possible about how we're coming off what we're appropriating and maybe i'm over analyzing that but it was also that was just also a strange choice to me i don't know the whole thing was

kind of weird yeah i see early on in her biography it says personal pronouns like you and i are staples of kruger's practice bringing the viewer into each piece so yes i shop ding therefore i

am i felt very brought into the piece i don't know though i mean you know i said this at the top of the show and maybe i don't even agree with myself from 20 minutes ago but i said it made me angry but not in the way that like you know people will say if art provokes any response in you then it's working maybe it is working but I don't think for the reasons it thinks it is I also wonder and

again I'm I really kind of don't want to get sucked into this because I don't don't want to be giving opinions on art that I'm completely unfamiliar with and have not seen but looking at some of the examples of her work and knowing that she was born here so she was born in the 40s and started working in the 70s I also wonder if some of this some of this art that I'm looking at here which is very text heavy with kind of pop art backgrounds it's such a staple of the type of stuff we grew up with and album covers and stuff and i'm just wondering if when um when she was making this stuff if she was actually if it was more groundbreaking then because she was breaking this ground but i don't know very possibly very possibly um i think i'm also just

mad because i feel like this is art i could make like i'm mad she thought of it first because if If we can do this, because I can't paint, I can't sculpt, I can barely podcast, Andrew. But if I knew I could just have a tote bag that said too big to fail, and fail is upside down, if I knew that was art that I could do, that people would buy as art, I mean, they would agree this, you've made art, Luke. Luke, you just did an art. I would be in on it, because I can, too big to fail, but then guess what? Fail is upside down. That's irony.

i'm not going down that i could make that art road with you could make this art you could put

too big to fail on a tote bag and put fail upside down you could absolutely do that i feel pretty safe that of the many things we could criticize on this show the barbara kruger stans will be understanding with us i think there's so many things i think you always assume when i don't

want to jump on something that i'm scared of getting hollered at that's not the case i'm not scared of getting hollered at i'm just saying that i don't know what's going on and art is i mean what i mean no offense but one of the biggest cliches in the world i mean how many new yorker cartoons are based on the idea of somebody staring at art in a museum and saying i could do that you know like that's it's just kind of like i and again i'm unfamiliar with this stuff so i just don't want to weigh in because i don't want to be like slinging around like hey i could make this art therefore it's not art i mean it all has to be part of something bigger than just the piece

or the tote bag right well i think it's art i just think it's very boring obvious art just like there's things that are music that are boring and obvious to me and comedy and things like that so i don't think it's not art i just think it's not it's not blowing the minds that it thinks it's blowing but um anyway all right let's do this let's take a quick break and then when we come back um i want to talk about this new yorker profile of the succession guy and uh we'll do some emails and V-mails, and a bunch of other stuff, I'm sure, in just a moment here on TBTL. All right, let's thank some donors of the day. Fine folks who are making today's episode possible with their financial support. thanks to Molly Jameson of Tallahassee, Florida. Nice. I've been to Tallahassee once. It's a cool place. It's in that kind of, well, it's obviously the state capital of Florida, but it's also way up in the northwest of the state, I believe, if memory serves. You're almost up there in, like, you know, Georgia.

As they say, North Florida is South Georgia. Strong Tom Petty vibes. I don't know. I don't think he was from Tallahassee, right? I think he's from Gainesville, maybe? Okay, yeah, yeah. I find that so weird that Tom Petty was from Florida for some reason.

Like, because...

Because, I mean, and that's the thing, too. You get out of, like, Miami, and Florida becomes very rural. It becomes very, and again, the further north you get, the closer you are to places like Georgia. It feels, North Florida feels very much like it's part of the south. But still, like, if you told me Tom Petty was from Kansas, I would believe it. If you told me Tom Petty was from, you know, I don't know, Kentucky or Georgia or South Carolina, I would believe all that. Something about Florida, though, just strikes me as not where I'd expect him to be.

Do you think it's weirder, though, that Neil Young is from Canada? That's one that I always have trouble wrapping. I think if the connection didn't go down, I'm pondering. Yeah, no, that's just one that I always have to remind myself, oh, that's right, he's Canadian. He seems, you know, because he traffics so much in what I think of as very American, like, roots music.

I think that, to me, it seems like Neil Young should be from Ohio. Sure. But he should be from where you grew up or something. He should be from maybe even more rural than that. Although, to be honest, I don't know where he's from in Canada. Sure, Kentucky would work with those sideburns. I could see that. I could hear that. Well, Molly Jameson, thank you so much for supporting the show from there in Tallahassee, not far from where Tom Petty was from and very far from where Neil Young was from. Thanks also to Christopher Morrow in Seattle, Washington. I can't believe Sir Mix-a-Lot is from Seattle, Washington. Honestly, I kind of can't do that. If you said Manitoba, sure. If you said Los Angeles, sure. Even Spokane, but Seattle, Washington. Interesting place for both Sir Mix-a-Lot and Christopher Morrow to be from. Jim Okbina is in New York City.

Now that, yeah, Jim is very New York.

I can't imagine Jim from anywhere else. Absolutely tracks. Alexa Rader is in Everett, Washington. We did a whole, sorry, Alexa, to lean into the name thing here. I'm sure it's probably a daily conversation you have with folks. But we had that whole chat the other day about the people with that name and how the Amazon device has made life a hassle. So hope that you're doing fine, Alexa. Alexa's name was Google Home and she changed it. Yeah. Oh, man. Of all the names that changed it to. She changed it and now and now we see how that has gone. No, Alexa, thank you so much. Really appreciate you. Also, thanks to Andrew and Lydia Scarvey in Dauphin, Alabama. Now, that's Lydia the cookie queen, right? Yeah, the baker extraordinaire. I still think... Do you still have any of those cookies frozen in the freezer? I don't think so. I don't think so. Those were both delicious and artistic. Thank you, Lydia. Also, I believe, well, no, I've slightly lost track of our friend Bruce from Lake Stevens' whereabouts, but I think it's possible we have two groups of listeners, two families, two households in Dauphin, or we did at one point, which is definitely more listeners in Dauphin, Alabama than I would have thunk.

Bruce might be, I don't know the geography of Alabama well enough, but I think that's Athens. I think it's okay for me to say, isn't he in Athens, Alabama? Oh, yeah, you're probably right.

Yeah. All right, well, listen, Andrew and Lydia, thank you, as always. And then Bill Esseltine is in Concord, California. Twist ending there. Uh-huh. You were thinking of Concord, Massachusetts, but no. No. Concord, California. Thanks, Bill. Thanks to all of our donors of the day. We wouldn't be here without you. Bye.

Thank you, baby.

hello and welcome to top story i wanted to pay off one other thing that i mentioned at the top of the show i don't know if this will qualify as paying it off or not andrew but at least fulfill the promotion that i put out into the world which is this weekend in chicago and even up until last night i have noticed like last night we went and it was becca's mom's birthday so we had a little we got together with her family at a restaurant in lake oswego and i noticed there and i noticed it extremely in chicago i cannot hear for shit anymore like i've known we've talked about this on the show that my hearing is is kind of not great and working in this business and wearing headphones all the time is is a potential issue but the combination of people in masks and loud any kind of background noise after the show on thursday night Becca and Peter and Cristela Alonzo and I The four of us we went out And got a little late night food It didn't help that the only Literally the only restaurant left open in Chicago After 10pm at least where we were in the loop Was playing

the loudest music i have ever heard in my life in an in a restaurant space i mean it was a sports bar slash restaurant it was ball lasting we were all just screaming the whole time to try to be heard but just throughout the weekend anytime somebody was saying something to me and particularly if they had a mask on but even if they didn't if they were like two people away from me and it was a room that had any other kind of noise going on i would go huh huh and then at dinner last night like i and i'm not saying this glibly or like this isn't you know a funny anecdote this is an observation that i i need to get my ears checked on my hearing i feel like i lost like 10 or 15 percent of my hearing in the last like month like it really seems pronounced and again i also realize how much lip reading i've been doing i mean not officially but just getting the gist of what people are saying because i can see their mouth and now that a lot of us are masking back up a lot more because of omicron and stuff i have no idea what anyone's saying like half of the time yeah

you and i have a i don't think we've talked about this but you and i have a mutual friend who um i actually i actually know this from her conversations with genevieve that she didn't kind of realize how bad her hearing had degraded until we went to start wearing masks all the time during the pandemic and she realized how much she had been depending on a certain um a certain style of lip reading you know not not officially not trained in any way but suddenly when she couldn't see people's mouths that's when she realized wow I have a real hearing issue and she had to go see

a doctor about it I have known that my hearing is not super great and so I was like well that's that's not news to me but the other thing I've started to notice in the last month is my eyesight I have always really prided myself on my eyesight I have good vision and as everything else on my body you know continues with its inevitable slide towards middle age and and and and beyond my eyesight has always been really keen i can see really far still but what i cannot see anymore things that are close up and before we did the um chicago architecture tour on friday um we were in the uh there's like a gift shop at the architecture society and they had like very stylish actually like readers and i put them on andrew they totally cleared up what i was trying to look at on my phone like that i was holding two feet from my face and i know you you're not going to um sprain a tear duct crying for me over my vision problems at age 45 considering that you've been wearing glasses your whole life um but i will say that i have just always been like kind of proud of my eyesight and and thought you know i i definitely over i i attributed too much of my own self-esteem or attached too much of it to this idea that like i can still see things pretty okay because that's like that means i'm not getting older and now if if like if becca hands me her phone says what do you think about this or if i'm if anything is within like three feet of my face i can't really read it anymore i got to move it like at all the way out at arm's length and so in the same weekend realizing that i need reading glasses and i can't hear for shit it was rough well as marcellus

wallace once said that's pride effing with you because once you can get over the pride aspect of it i think that you will be i think you'll enjoy wearing glasses you know what i mean like you love

a good stylish accessory you know do i say oh i'm into it if i get some nice square glasses which will counteract the natural roundness of my face i can get into that um i even i yeah but the quite the thing that i'll have to figure out is when is it actually practical and because right now i can still read lots of things and what i have to do is just not read something six inches from my face i have to just have it be two feet away so is that worth carrying glasses around at all times to address that one thing now once two feet no longer works once i can't read things unless someone puts them on like an archery target across the room from me then i definitely need to get readers because that's going to happen, you know, that's going to be something that happens a lot. I'm in this middle part where it's like, it's probably more work than it's worth to carrying them around. But once I actually get into the whole fashion of glasses, I'm kind of excited

about that part. I'm wearing my first pair of progressive lenses right now. And I got these, I don't know, less than a year ago, I think. And honestly, from the get go, I think my complaint is they didn't make the, you know, progressive lens is basically like a bifocal without the line, right um there's some increased magnetism there's some increased magnification when you look down out of the bottom part of the lenses so that you can read now i'd never had an issue with nearsightedness before i'd only been you know i've only been far side i'm sorry um yeah no i've always been i get that mixed up i think i you know i could never see far away which means i was nearsighted but now of course i need help with both so this is new but i feel like i'm one of the rare people who feels like they did not make my, the reading part of my glasses strong enough. I don't know if that's.

because for your first pair, they don't want you to get that real, you know, they always want you to get used to it. There's, everybody's warning you, oh, for your first pair of progressive lenses, they're going to make you kind of feel dizzy and it takes a long time to get used to. It didn't take me a long time to get used to this at all. In fact, I wish they were stronger at the bottom because I'm already, I don't know what, eight months into wearing these things, I'm already going back to that thing where I'm taking off my glasses to look at my phone and I didn't even realize I'd been doing it. Genevieve caught me doing it the other day and she said, I thought those are progressives and i was like oh i didn't even realize i somehow fell back into my old habit of like taking off my glasses and holding my nose and holding my phone like basically up to my nose

in order to read yeah i i remember when we traveled together before you had those that that would be kind of your um sort of falling asleep ritual of like reading maybe a book on your phone or something and i always wondered like that i mean obviously you you've been doing it for a long time so it works for you it's comfortable but it it's it's i wondered if it like if it looked to me like it would tire my eyes out but i guess you've got a system well i mean as opposed to what i know right sometimes people say andrew's holding his phone too close to his face as opposed to

compared to what i because i don't know and that's right but i didn't really yeah but like i remember because i remember you commenting on that when we um we shared a hotel room in new hampshire right and i think i kept you up for like two nights in a row with my loud snoring i assume um but i remember you commenting the next day like oh yeah i saw you falling asleep and it didn't even occur to me you know like yeah i was um reading my book on my phone as i often do and you said yeah you're holding it right up to your face but that was long before there was any any conversations with my doctors about uh about having special reading glasses so yeah i don't know if they missed something or also if i was damaging you know what i mean if if reading off of a digital screen that's pushed up to my face is also compounding the problems i have no idea man but this is just like this is some real this is just some real 45 year old guy stuff right or person stuff i should say oh by the way quick update hey that booster shot kind of knocked me out i was really surprised i told you that i was kind of like well i sort of mind over mattered my second dose but after you know i talked to you on tbtl we did the show and i told you i was starting to feel kind of spacey and out of it. And I was even, even off my game, whatever my game is. Um, so I wasn't super proud of my kind of Friday conversational skills. I told you I had some tasks that I needed to get done after the show. And then after that, I was just going to like crash out for like an hour or something. Well, I got that stuff done and I went upstairs around two or two 30 and I was like, okay, I'll just lay down for a second. Usually I want to, in that scenario, I want to take a nap maybe for about an hour but i'll sleep for maybe 20 minutes and then i'll bite my tongue in my sleep and wake up and never fall asleep i do the same thing it's been happening constantly lately i'm sure it's because everything's just going great and i'm taking care of myself and i'm not super stressed um but uh i slept luke for four hours straight in the afternoon that is not a that is not a nap i woke up at six o'clock and we're going over to our friend's house for his birthday kamara kevs sort of really really chill just a few people over to have some pizza and watch some old christmas movies and i was like okay i'm waking up from this four-hour nap i felt like somebody had just like rolled the rock away and i came out of the cave like you know just had that feeling of just like waking up just like a weeping mary magdalene standing there yeah um and then i was like okay but i just am now having the after effects of waking up from a nap something that i'm terrible at of all the things i'm bad at waking up from a nap is one of the worst But I couldn't shake it Like an hour later Veeves and I have taken a shower now Veeves and I are in the Whole Foods We're getting ready to like kind of We're buying some booze And then we're going to call a car from Whole Foods To take it over to Kevin and Anita's And I'm still wondering Can I get in this car Like I was feeling kind of a little bit dizzy And again I'm not saying this like Oh you shouldn't get your booster shot It didn't like I can't explain it It didn't hurt It wasn't like It's not like a super super unpleasant experience It just makes it hard to kind of Be out and about

Like, I was just sort of swimmy feeling, and then my back did kind of ache a little bit, and then by about 10 o'clock, so that's well over 24 hours after, that's like, you know, what is that, 30, 35 hours after the shot, it finally just wore off in the middle of, kind of in the middle of the night.

So did you end up kind of making an earlier than normal exit from the festivities because you were feeling so lousy?

No, because I knew like it was one of those things where if you're it's so it's so weird, I think, or so hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of I feel this way very specifically because I have received a shot and I know what's going to wear off at some point, as opposed to if you're under the weather and you're starting to feel these symptoms and you don't know what's going on with you. You think, oh, I'm, I don't know, getting the flu or I've come down with some bug. I better go home because I am contagious. Or I don't know if this is going to get worse. Where am I on this ride? But I just kept thinking. And I probably wasn't the best company. I know that I don't really, I don't think I suffer in silence all that great. Like everybody in the room knew that I was like, that I was kind of feeling achy and space cadet-y. But I was just like, but I know eventually this is going to end. It's not going to get worse. It just needs to wear off. And it did. Like we were still there when it wore off probably around 11 o'clock at night or something like that.

well I'm uh I'm glad that it did wear off eventually and uh I feel ever I feel increasingly or hearing that I feel even more lucky that I for some reason it didn't hit me um so bad on the third one uh because it seems like most other people I know have been pretty have been pretty knocked down by it but again as we will as we've already said and of course would continue to say uh it doesn't mean you shouldn't get your booster yeah no and again for the love of god if I were

at home too i might not have noticed it as much you know what i mean if you if you probably you know going out and socializing was a little bit more difficult i'm so glad i did it but like it was more noticeable because i was trying to function but like when i was asleep or if i was laying in bed watching tv or or laying on the couch watching tv or laying in bed reading or something it's not like it's not like some terrible terrible experience you just feel a little run

down let's talk about this uh profile in the new yorker of this guy uh who is uh in do you watch

succession no this is one of those things where i mean i know it's a huge cultural phenomenon and i also know that at some point and i have no idea what's going to trigger it i'm going to get into it whether it's yeah five years from now ten years from now or two months from now um and so it's weird so i haven't been delving into any of the cultural articles or anything about it too because I'm kind of like, well, I don't have the context for it. And maybe there's a spoiler thing there. You're kind of in the same boat, right?

Like, yeah, I think I might have watched the first episode, maybe the first two episodes. And I remember thinking, oh, this is, you know, I was entertained enough to want to watch the next episode. But then also some part of me was sort of like, I don't know if I care that much about the super wealthy in Manhattan. like you could also say why do you care so much about uh you know um mafia people in new jersey i don't know there's no explaining why if some things click for me and other things don't uh certainly though obsession uh sorry succession is an obsession for a lot of people and there's so much coverage of it right now because it's uh they're in their they're ending i think it's their third season or something what i started to see about this particular event was people posting things on twitter this is how so much information now comes into my life i see like our friend the stew bot or someone else posting something on twitter that goes like this aaron sorkin doesn't have social media so he asked that i post this and then it's some you know i don't know what some like the zodiac killers letter or something and then i see other people doing it with different versions and i'm like what did aaron sorkin do and then i'm googling around And then I realized it's Jessica Chastain, the actor, posting something on behalf of Aaron Sorkin, defending the actor Jeremy Strong from this profile that Michael Shulman wrote in The New Yorker, which I just have to say is an incredibly good profile. now Jeremy Strong's friends and people he's worked with which is a long list of people at this point would say that it kind of it misrepresents him or makes him sound like he's a bit of a kook and like the people he works with on Succession kind of don't like him and so like Aaron Sorkin directed him in a couple of different productions including that what was it the Chicago 7 the trial of the Chicago 7 or something um and so aaron sorkin is quoted in the new yorker piece talking about this guy the the the main thing is this guy's method acting approach the super serious way in which he approaches his acting and doing all of these sort of daniel day lewis-y kind of things lewis where he like you know he will only according apparently at least according to this article And I want to, you know, I want to say this is written from the perspective of this writer, Michael Shulman. So this is how he wrote it. I cannot verify any of these things because I don't know any of the people involved. But based on what this piece says, this guy, Jeremy Strong, just is super duper method. Like he wears the outfits of like Kendall Roy, his character. He will borrow clothes from wardrobe and just wear them around in his life so that he's more immersed in the character. He only will get his makeup done when everyone else is done. Like he'll go in the makeup trailer whenever he wants to be alone in there.

He is apparently pretty distant from his from his co-actors, which. could be attributed to him wanting to because his character kendall roy it kind of in a way doesn't fit in with everyone else in the family i mean this is a this is a show about it's basically about the murdochs more or less or you know a family that kind of stands in for them this very wealthy kind of media empire in new york it's headed by this this actor brian cox plays like the dad and the dad is basically you know rupert murdoch or something like that and all of his children vying for his attention and approval and money is, I think, kind of what the show is about overall. But anyway, so now all of these other actors who have worked with him, like Jessica Chastain, directors like Aaron Sorkin, other people are all jumping online to basically say this guy is not a nutcase. He's a very dedicated actor and a fun person. Although I'll tell you what andrew he doesn't sound not nutty in this profile i have to say and a lot of the quotes well the reason aaron sorkin wanted to jump in was because he felt like the quotes that michael shulman used for the new yorker piece made it sound like he was being critical like there was one quote when he was talking about that chicago seven the trial of chicago seven where apparently this guy jeremy strong wanted to be tear gassed um because they were these you know they were these protesters uh he was playing one of these protesters that had in real life been tear gassed and aaron sorkin said something to the effect of i don't really like saying no to jeremy but considering there was 250 other actors in the scene this protest scene i told them we couldn't tear gas him yeah and he also tells this story of like uh aaron sorkin does of that same shoot i guess these these protesters were on trial were also they in real life had been sort of making fun of the judge or something like that happened in real life I don't know if it was in to the judge's face or behind his back or whatever well the judge is portrayed by Frank Langella or Langella that actor and apparently what this guy Jeremy Strong was doing was in between takes he was reading excerpts from Frank Langella for Frank Langella the actor the real person Frank Langella has a memoir that was out and Jeremy Strong was sitting there reading quotes from Frank Langella's memoir in a funny voice and he put a fart machine under the desk like a sound effect box that made fart sounds and he was like activating it and Aaron Sorkin would have to tell him sometimes you have to stop.

So can I untangle this? So because the real life people who are being portrayed in this biopic for lack of a better word because they will reportedly made fun of the real life judge during these proceedings he felt like as an actor he needed to sort of mock the actor playing the judge that is what i took

away from that section of this profile because again he's reading it's not like he's reading from the bio of from a memoir of the judge who actually ruled in the case he's reading from the actor yeah frank langella's memoir so he's trying to get in the heads it would appear he's trying to get in the headspace of someone who has complete derision for this person that they're dealing with but he's attaching it to the real actor the fart sound box that's a real that's right out of left

field that's a head scratcher yeah that's a real i didn't that's a booty scratcher i didn't expect i will say i didn't expect the fart box but then again nobody ever does that's right and that's

that's where the comedy comes from you don't expect it um so uh what's what's really anyway Aaron Sorkin's point is that he he feels like Shulman only used the quotes about the fart box and made it sound like he was trying to say that this guy, Jeremy Strong, is like over the line. And he was clarifying that he loves Jeremy Strong as a person and as an actor and that he's great and that this New Yorker piece mis mischaracterized his feelings, which I'll side with Sorkin on this. Like he knows how he feels and he feels like that wasn't a that was not an accurate depiction of his feelings. My guess is that this writer, Shulman, who is a very good writer, realized that he had some really great anecdotes and he decided to kind of lean into that because it was a more interesting piece. And like I said, it is a corker of a profile. He gets some really great quotes from Kieran Culkin, who plays another character on Succession. um um like so for well let me start by just mentioning this is one of the quotes from jeremy strong as to what his um what his sort of uh what is what would you call it what his system is like he doesn't like to rehearse scenes he says i want every scene to feel like i'm encountering a bear in the woods that was the end quote and this is what uh then the writer says uh despite the wishes of his fellow actors and then back to his quote it's hard for me to actually describe his process because I don't really see it, says Kieran Culkin. He puts himself...

In a bubble, before I interviewed his castmates, Strong warned me, I don't know how popular the way I work is amongst our troupe. So points for self-awareness, right? Like what I took away from this piece was this guy does take this shit very seriously. It gets on the nerves of his castmates. He knows it. They realize it's just part of the cost of doing business with him and having this person who by all accounts is a very fine actor. So at least he's in on it. At least he knows, right? I give him some credit for that. This is what Culkin says. The way Jeremy put it to me is that, like, you get in the ring, you do the scene, and at the end, each actor goes to their corner, Culkin told me. I'm like, this isn't a battle. This is a dance. So it sounds like Culkin is kind of like would rather they were dancing than battling. But this Jeremy Strong dude just wants to be, like, completely somewhere else and then, like, come into the scene and then do battle and then leave. That's his system. Culkin said of Strong's self-isolation. That might be something that helps him. I can tell you that it doesn't help me. So, like, that's a real quote. Now, we don't have the full text. I mean, maybe he went on to say, but I love and respect that he does this. But it sounds, it reads to me like everyone on the set kind of notices that this guy is kind of eccentric. But, again, they're not shy about telling him. He hears it. He's got his process. It doesn't seem, I don't know, it feels like it's sort of more or less working. There was one other thing that I wanted to mention on one of his co-actors or whatever. So the guy who plays the, I don't know what his name is on the show, but basically the Rupert Murdoch dude, his name is Brian Cox. Oh, Logan is the name of his character. When I asked Brian Cox, who plays Logan, the patriarch, to describe Strong's process, he struck a note of fatherly concern. the result is that jeremy the result that jeremy gets is always pretty tremendous he said i just worry about what he does to himself i worry about the crises he puts himself through in order to prepare cox a classically trained british stage actor has a turn it on turn it off approach to acting and his relationship with strong recalls a famous story about laurence olivier working with dustin hoffman in the 1976 film marathon man on learning that hoffman had stayed up partying for three nights before a scene in which he has to appear sleep deprived olivier said my dear boy why don't you try acting which is just one of the greatest coming from one of the recognized great actors of you know maybe all time my dear boy why don't you try acting it's just so genius

to me i love it yeah like pretend you're that person you know i think that um maybe even especially we as the american movie consuming public have those of us who have not acted like myself i mean i did do one turn as i believe santa number two in the valley city uh you know christmas pageant back in 1985 and you were a california raisin and just more music than acting but i consider you a double threat yeah but and i did have to you know i you know i lived weeks leading up to that i lived in a vineyard um and just to like kind of like get to know the process of going from a grape to a raisin sure that works there's no whining in football

but every august football comes to wine country no but i mean we look at the the um

The mixture of Hollywood actor and celebrity, I think, can kind of skew our perception of the craft itself. But as you just said, a lot of people have a lot of different approaches to this stuff. But, like, I think it's totally normal that a, you know, a starting pitcher in baseball should not be talked to or messed with in between innings when he's sitting on the bench. If he's throwing a no-hitter. but just generally speaking like you don't you know you kind of take it's my understanding that you sort of take your cues the rest of the teammates will take their cues from uh from a pitcher in other words like some of them don't like to like when they're not on the mound they are just focusing they're doing things inside their head they are just like blocking out distractions I've heard stories of pitchers who have a completely different personality um on the day that they pitch and that all seems normal to me because what they're doing out there is so singular and something that i completely cannot understand and then on the other hand you got brad pitt and i just expect that's brad pitt he's just cool all the time you know and then when it's time to act he just acts but like no like there is there's something about like you know it is also you know it's an art and it's a skill that i completely don't understand so when we hear about somebody who has their own who has their own kind of process it can come off as nutty now obviously there are all i'm not like i'm not really making

Thank you.

a statement here like there's all kinds of gradations between that I don't know really what I'm talking about or what the line is between having like you know isolating yourself and doing some some mental preparation versus you know doing whatever Nicolas Cage is talking about doing in that piece of tape we play where he talks about dressing up like a shaman or something like that like I don't I don't know where the lines of appropriateness are but I do sort of feel that like especially like me i look at i just look at somebody like tom cruise i'm just like yeah he's just tom cruise all the time you know but no actually acting is something that when it's done well you can forget that it's acting sure and actually you know that last

week when i was doing some shoots for a company that i can't maybe disclose at the moment but it's me a not actor and then they cast real actors and it's interesting working with people who are real actors because they're good at it and like in the scene i'm like saying the thing i'm supposed to say i'm kind of sort of waiting for my turn to do my thing and they're like you know they're listening to me they're responding they're doing all kinds of things that real actors do that make it more believable when they're doing stuff as opposed to what i'm doing which is just like waiting for my turn and trying to remember exactly what my line is and stuff like that which is really not acting at all but um uh I just wanted to also tell you about this one other thing in the I mean so the the gist of the profile which I highly recommend everyone read is is that you've got this person who's very committed to their craft and uh who's very good at it and and uh and and you know has a lot of friends and and colleagues who speak very highly of him but also who could be seen by some people who are quoted off the record as actually being Sort of a climber Like he was obsessed apparently I don't know if obsessed is the right way to put it But he had three This piece opens with The writer talking about The three posters That he had on his wall as a kid And they were like It was like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot And Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon And what's fascinating was is that throughout his life uh in his young life this guy jeremy strong orchestrated these ways in which he could actually meet and work for all of those people actually less pacino but we'll get to pacino in a moment he somehow got a job doing uh being daniel day lewis's personal assistant on this is i think when he was like maybe in college or something and he got into yale he comes from a pretty middle-class family jeremy strong but he got a scholarship to yale he would always always been into acting as a kid anyway he basically scored some kind of like you know very low level production job working uh working being daniel day lewis's personal assistant and spent this whole summer in like british columbia where they were shooting this film just like as like his his you know his servant basically just anything daniel day lewis needed he did it for him and he like studied him and and you know the thought is maybe that's where he got some of his stuff he also i think he did something with hoffman similar to that where it was like he worked he worked on a movie that dustin hoffman was in and got to be in close proximity to him and then there's the al pacino thing during his junior year year at yale this is i'm reading again from michael shulman's piece strong managed to arrange for al pacino to come to the yale campus to teach a master class the heavily promoted visit was largely sponsored by the yale dramat which is

the school's undergraduate theater program or maybe dramat i don't know if i'm saying that right many alumni recall the visit as a debacle pacino's acting advice was vague strong had appointed himself the intermediary between the dramat and pacino's office and the costs of town cars posters and a celebratory dinner blew up the budget to lure pacino strong had persuaded the dramat to concoct a prestigious sounding award and the students commissioned a pewter chalice from maury's a new haven tavern on which the winner's names would be engraved each year but pacino took the chalice home adding to the enormous bill basically this is a quote basically in order for jeremy to have his fantasy of meeting al pacino play out he nearly bankrupted a hundred year old college theater company an alumnus said but he had a wonderful night of getting to hang

out with al pacino i love this so pacino so he wants to make like the al pacino award for excellence in university acting and um and al pacino's like huh you got me an award thanks and he takes it home that was not my best al pacino actually sadly that was my best al pacino um yeah i mean that's

just a beautiful detail in this piece that like i mean in that you know that kind of to some degree builds the case or at least puts out the possibility that this this person who again I keep returning to this but all accounts are he's a very fine actor and appears to be happily married and has kids and seems you know like I don't think that I don't think anyone would say this is this guy is a bad dude but he seems a bit quirky and some would say he has been his folk he has had a singular focus his entire life of being of getting to the point that he got to which you kind of got to respect to take it back to the sports comparison you know tom brady it's you know his it's his self-discipline and commitment and you know throw russell wilson in there folks like that their commitment their obsession with being good at this thing if you break it down i mean russell wilson's sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber or some shit it gets weird yeah in order to be this good at something some people the way they get there is through some pretty extreme means and we we think of it as being kind of valiant when it's a you know tom brady not eating nightshades and you know working out 365 days a year or whatever but then we we hear about this jeremy strong guy we're like this guy's losing

his marbles and it's different um you know you would before giving these latest examples of him kind of getting a start and putting himself in positions to meet his heroes for lack of a better word um you know if if what he's doing is is he's putting himself in this position and it means more hard work or even doing kind of grovelly jobs you know like maybe you know yeah with daniel day lewis he's only putting himself in that position so there's no issues there you know what i mean like you said like you know maybe some indication that he was kind of a climber it's like well if you're a climber and that means self-sacrifice and working hard there's nothing wrong with that It's when you sort of sell out somebody or something, you know, when you sell out somebody or something or your own values. And in this case, the story of the Pacino Award for excellence in college acting that, you know, it sounds like he was he was using others and the program to get what he wanted. So that's a bummer.

Yeah, although I would have absolutely done that in college. I mean, not that I was Pacino obsessed, but and it doesn't make it right just because I would have done it. But it's like I could I identify very much with that thing of him wanting something to happen, which is he wants to meet Al Pacino. And so then he's just kind of manipulating whatever he needs to do to me. And also, you know, yeah, he probably wanted to impress him and he wanted to. So it's not his money. It's Yale. It's the Yale drama programs money. So at every turn, when Pacino's handlers are saying we need this level of town car to show up, you know, and we need a fleet of them and whatever. Also, how much was the pewter trophy? What does a pewter trophy go for?

Yeah, I don't know. What's the going rate of pewter these days? Right? I have no idea. Yeah, and that also, even just in the way you've told it here, again, like, I just, I don't know these stories, so I shouldn't weigh in. But the way you tell it here, it also just sounds like a story of something getting out of hand. It doesn't, you know, it doesn't sound like he's like, okay, I'm going to run the scam. He really, okay, I'm going to, yeah, I want to meet my hero, but also, hey, a master class. That's a real thing. Like, I love the subtlety of saying that it was that his advice was vague because that's another thing, too. Right. Like, yeah. I mean, you have some actors who will be able to come in and talk about theory and all of these things. And then you have other actors who are going to be like, I don't know. I go out there and I do it. Right.

That sounds I don't know why, but that feels much more Pacino to me, too. Just like that. That would be his advice. You know, I don't I can't think of a good example, but somebody who famously sort of. Well, a Daniel Day Lewis comes to mind. But then Pacino's just kind of like in there, you know, he's just like Pacino-ing it up and being just kind of, you know, although it's also, it's funny that that was someone noted that, like they noted it enough to tell it to Michael Shulman that not only was it this kind of a little bit of a boondoggle where it just kind of cost a lot of money, but it's, they actually noted how vague Pacino's, it reminds me of going to my friend's high school graduation from Roosevelt High School in Seattle. This would have been in 1994. I went to the commencement, and the commencement speaker was the actor Richard Karn, I think is his name. He was the other guy in the Tim Allen, whatever that show was called. Oh, Home Improvement? It wasn't called Tool Time. Home Improvement.

Oh, his Tool Time buddy on set? Okay, yeah.

Yeah, his kind of sidekick on Tool Time. That guy is from Seattle. And so he gave the commencement speech. and i remember it to this day because it was the most incoherent thing i'd ever heard it felt my sense was he just thought i'm a professional entertainer i'll just crack the mic and i'll just kind of i'll just talk off the top of my head for a while and it didn't have i don't think it really had the effect that he was going for now do you think that this is something

with Where during or after he himself was also probably like, wow, that didn't go well? Or was it just like, wow, that check cashed?

It's funny. You know what? It didn't even occur to me that he was getting paid for it potentially. Oh, yeah. That's true. I don't know what the deal is there. But putting that to the side, I would guess that he thought it was fine. And no one wanted to tell him that maybe I was the only one who thought it was bad. But I just remember being a high schooler and thinking, this guy didn't prepare for this at all.

That's such a bad feeling as an audience member.

This is so weird. Like, we're at, like, I feel like I could be wrong. My memory is that it was, like, at Memorial Stadium in Seattle, and, you know, we're in the stands, and all the graduates are down on their chairs and their caps and gowns, and I'm just listening to it, and I'm like, this is not going anywhere. What is happening? I've given many a speech like that, as I've talked about on the show extensively, so I really know, I know from aimless speeches that aren't landing with the audience. This was definitely on that list. So I kind of imagine Pachito in a similar situation where he's just rambling and talking about things and saying, and that's the magic. And everyone's just kind of like, okay, what?

Here I go once again with the email. Every week, I hope that it's from a female. No, man, it's not from a female.

all right email or a female that is yeah seemingly fascinating to you seemingly i have i'll be the

judge yeah i know i have a voicemail here that i can play um did you have any emails by the way i feel like you know because i've been emphasizing um voicemail so much i don't want to sleep on if

you got any emails that you would like to share all i have are emails from people who are mad that

i insulted a thing they do wear drive the truck thing is amazing i every time i check the voicemail line like to this day i mean wasn't it two weeks ago that we had the conversation about backing a truck up like and again most of them tonally are not like yeah you know they're all good people just saying oh no like i got a really uh i'm not gonna play it here because i don't have it prepped but a very long voice and we've just done this right but um a long voicemail from somebody whose daughter is into horses and and like drives a big truck and all the reasons to back it up like i have a feeling we will for the rest of our lives get voicemails about why it's important to back trucks into parking spots that is now the most important thing that tbtl can cover i think as a

and i i've been saying you know on air and on emails to people uh sorry if i and you're right everyone's tone that i've seen it's been i have appreciated that no one's come ham for me they've just been mostly it's been like well i actually park back or i back into my parking spot and this is why or this is why my work has me do it which all seems reasonable to me now i'm hearing from 11s who wear black rifle coffee company sweatshirts and uh would like to remind me or explain to me that it's not not everyone who's wearing that is trying to make a particular political statement which i'd kind of kind of lump that all together and we certainly have at least one listener uh who's an 11 like i said an occasional listener who is wearing black rifle coffee company gear but is not buying into all of those things that i was saying about the other folks i'd seen so i had to say sorry for that i had to say sorry for besmirching public defenders it's mostly just me emailing people back saying sorry that i said sorry i said something about a thing that is very uh personal to your life i didn't mean it to make you feel bad oh here's something that i here's

something i can mention i don't know if i should apologize for this i think in fact i should not apologize for this at all uh we made an announcement in the tbtl newsletter last week that we haven't talked about this on the show at all you me genevieve and kamarakev sat down and watched the movie home alone a couple of uh a couple of nights ago i guess a couple of weeks ago now i thought you were applauding me again i kind of like that and uh and we recorded another riff track it's kind of like what we did for lord of the rings only we kicked out your brother because he doesn't know anything about after his performance of not knowing anything about the lord of the rings i think we decided we needed to bring in he embarrassed himself and our family i put in the newsletter david couldn't join us for this one and he was like i didn't know about this when he texted me he's like i wasn't invited i don't know if i like this language of i didn't i wasn't able to i was able to we've reached out to david burbank for comments and have not heard back i was like Well, I was trying to massage the language there a little bit because we were recording in Seattle this time. But anyway, yeah, it was a lot of fun. You, me, Genevieve Kamarokhev watched Home Alone and recorded ourselves watching it and talking. We didn't just sit there in silence eating popcorn. And we made another little riff track thing, and it's for an end of the year TBTL little fundraiser. So if you want to donate anything from five bucks up, just go to tbtl.net, hit the donate button, and you can get that thing like right away, actually. because Luke, as I said in the news,

letter i i consider home alone to be a christmas movie and i know that that's you know pretty controversial i know but uh there you go so thanks to anybody and everybody who is interested in

doing that it was really fun the recording of it was fun and and like you said genevieve i didn't even realize this at the time because you and i were trying to decide well what movie should we riff on and we we ended up landing on home alone but thank god we had genevieve there because she is to Home Alone as David was to Loader. And so we just need to always make sure that when we do these in the future, we've got some person who's just, has an encyclopedic knowledge of the thing. And yeah, it was really fun. If you enjoy our Lord of the Rings one, you're going to love this one as well. And same universe,

right? Lord of the Rings and Home Alone as far as I think. Yes.

There is some websites where it's part of an extended universe. The one, the older brother who's kind of a jerk, is an orc, and the Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern are ringwraiths. It really actually overlays surprisingly consistently if you do it. And Gandalf, I think, was a wet bandit.

They had a slightly different name for it.

No, Gandalf is the neighbor, the older neighbor, who has a cut hand when he comes into the pharmacy. He's disappearing. He comes back. He has a beard. He's not allowed to see his children.

Hey, Luke, Gandalf was literally the only character name I can think of on the fly. I mean, we watched a three-hour movie with a Lord of the Rings expert, and I was trying to come up with a Wet Bandits joke. And the only name I could remember from—who's the really cool guy? Aragorn, right? But that's not an easy name to remember. I'm not kidding. Anyway. Legolas. Legolas, right. Aragorn. There's dozens of them. Anyway, here, let's play a quick voicemail here. This is somebody, I don't think they left their name, but they were listening to us taste test cookies on the show last week and had a visceral response.

Hi, TBTL. It is a listener. I'm just preferring not to leave my name this time. But I was just listening to your Oreo episode, and I am newly in, you know, quote, the family way. I'm not really telling anyone But what comes along with that For a lot of people

So this is interesting We know about this pregnancy Before some friends and family But we don't know who the person is No But we know they're pregnant So anyway Is this a paternity suit? How does this voice move?

What comes along with that For a lot of people Is just a lot of nausea And so like Especially when I think about food Or I hear about food Or I see food and hearing about the Oreos was just like bringing up those feelings. Anyway, I wanted to share a quick story. And that was I started having my nausea basically on Thanksgiving related to a few different things. And I feel like listeners going to family holiday meals could probably relate to this because our family members are all really special and unique. And in my case, my mother-in-law is an amazing chef, But she has the sort of Great Depression mentality that she needs to save all foods at all times and then use them later. And sometimes it really grosses me out, even before I was ever pregnant. But for Thanksgiving, she made her famous stuffing. And I'm eating the stuffing, and I'm feeling okay about it, until she mentions, And, oh, yeah, you just throw all your old bread scraps in the recipe. That's the secret. And I was kind of like, what? What does that mean? And she said, yeah, I saved some homemade barbecue chips. They were homemade at a restaurant where I went, and I had to save those. And I saved some old tortillas and some old tortilla chips. Basically, she's been squirreling away bread products all year in preparation for the stuffing. Even talking about it right now just makes me kind of want to throw up a little bit. But I thought I would share that because I can't be the only one who's heard this kind of thing, especially while they were eating a holiday meal. The other thing was...

Before we get into the other thing, like you've mentioned that before. You know, when Genevieve makes dressing or stuffing for Thanksgiving, she buys some sort of bread. I think she buys it maybe a little bit in advance. But essentially, she lets the cooking, you know, she follows a recipe and that's the cooking process, prepare the bread however it needs to be prepared so that it has the right consistency. You've mentioned a lot that I think it's your mom or maybe another family member. My mom takes a lot of pride in the fact that this is something to do with old bread. But are we I don't are we collecting restaurant chips like that turns my stomach and I'm not in the family.

way to me that it's not that their restaurant i've never heard of that for the record but the restaurant chips it's it's not even that they were they were potatoes that they were barbecue potato chips that seems from a flavor standpoint like a tortilla like a tough fit um my mom does not i does not take pride in throwing i'm trying to remember what she was throwing in this year It was very random One year she was throwing in like Sarah Lee Like low carb bread Like what my mom does is She buys like wheat Very strange marked down bread products You know that'll be like Some attempt from a company To like create a new market for something And then it fails And then those things are just Bargain priced at grocery outlet but she buys that stuff when she sees it and then she saves it all year because she knows that she can just thaw it out and use it for stuffing so what my mom really likes about that is the fact that she feels like she's alchemizing this cheap these cheap bread products that she can save forever because it doesn't matter if they're stale or whatever she can throw them into the stuffing and and and that that's what she really enjoys about i think she feels like she's kind of

getting a deal in that whole way and this is a little bit different um but i understand you know they call me the bone collector for a reason you know um sure kind of stumbled on that good because otherwise i could come back to to haunt me but um the reason they call me the bone collector is because i murder people and then i yeah oops sorry wrong script uh the reason morgan freeman

and i have been chasing you for years and we are getting very close i can tell this whole thing has

been just a big trap now um you know i love i love the feeling of either making or buying a roasted chicken and then cutting all the meat off and saving the carcass and then once i have a bag with a car carcass in the freezer then i start saving little ends of like yellow onions or the the butt end of a celery yes celery has a butt you know what i'm talking about so there celeries have a butt um so anyway i i do like that idea of saving this stuff but there's also something about the process of boiling something down for literally five hours at least, if not seven or eight, if I'm feeling kind of ambitious about it, that I really feel like you're really grabbing the essence of something and cooking any impurities out, right? And also, I have very strict rules. Like, if a bone has touched somebody's plate, that is not a bone you save. I think that's obvious, right? I don't need to see that. We're not boiling bones that people have eaten off of.

Right. I mean, I'm sure that that is a thing that people would do, you know, in the olden days or in more hardscrabble times or places where it's, you know, harder to come by that stuff. But yeah, I think in the modern era, based on the resources that we have, you don't need to be making stock out of bones that other people have already kind of gummed.

Like you went to the wing dome and you just like brought all your little buffalo wing bones back and you made a soup.

anyway what do you think that looks like by the way i mean it's probably it's probably actually uninteresting in that if you were to open that dumpster it's just lots and lots of garbage bags that inside the garbage bags are lots of little bones but i mean could you imagine just if they threw all of that stuff just into the dumpster without bagging it and just like the absolute the sheer number of wing bones that get generated in a given week at a b dubs that's a good point i

would yeah i mean you wonder if composting do they have a composting situation there

even some of those like thai restaurants uh you know i don't know why i picked thai it was just the place i had heard of but restaurants that cook in a lot of oil i remember long ago in la i think maybe when i was working at day-to-day there was somebody who had figured out how to make their their car run on cooking oil oh yeah and they had a they had a kind of an agreement with various they'd go around and get all the spent cooking oil that the thai restaurants would dump into this vat you know to that after they'd used it and then this guy could put this in his car and power and he said it just vaguely smelled like peanuts all the time when he was driving

around yeah that was called biodiesel right that was really big when i was living in new hampshire and there were restaurants that would purposely have like a dumpster style bin that would hold the liquid so that people could come like and the people who were part of this community and drove these cars they would know where they could go to fuel up i remember that being a thing and that's what everybody always said it it would smell like you you said peanuts i remember people sometimes saying it would smell like french fries kind of vaguely as they were driving down the street i don't remember what this listener's second point is but let's uh let's let them

these family members really believe in storing things on the back deck like a second refrigerator or freezer but you know unless it's snowing outside it's not free

So I don't I kind of cut in there in a funny way. But what the listener is saying is, is they don't these family members, they don't have a refrigerator or freezer on the back deck. They just put food out on the back deck because it's cool out there. And they think that that's good enough.

storing things on the back deck, like a second refrigerator or freezer. But, you know, unless it's snowing outside, it's not freezing. Well, necessarily, I don't know, depending on where you are. And that just kind of grossed me out, too, because I've taken food handlers training, and I know you're not supposed to do that. Anyway, just a random phone call about food. Hope you all enjoy your JoJo's slash Oreos power out.

well congratulations I hope that you share the good news yeah Mazel for you and your family

that's right and I'm I very much understand why people want to wait sometimes to spread that news because of timing of things and this and that but also it sounds like a sticky situation to be eating your mother-in-law's stuffing and almost retching it back up because of being in the family way but not being able to explain why so then they just think you're

grossed out by their cooking right right right um hey did you have any i i just for some reason i said biodiesel so i thought of the song biomusicology by ted leo but frankly i don't even remember how this i think i remember how the song goes i'm not married to this at all did you have anything that you uh would rather go out with i don't think so i don't um i don't

know the music of ted leo isn't and doesn't he also have some pharmacists with him uh yeah does

Yeah, the Pharmacists, I believe. Is that like his backing band? We're on this journey with him. Yeah, this album is called The Tyranny of Distance, and it's Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. Yeah, 2001.

My goodness.

Yeah, that was a name I always saw on shows, and he was coming to town, and people love to talk about Ted Leo plus Pharmacists, but I couldn't tell you much about his music, so I'll learn about it right here, right now with this song. I have an email that I want us to read tomorrow, Andrew. from an actual medical professional on the subject of cat breastfeeding. That's all I'm going to say about it. It's an interesting one. So we'll do that tomorrow. And there's a little forward promotion for you. And yeah, let's go out with Ted Leo and the pharmacists. Thanks for listening, everyone. We're going to be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you. I'll be in San Francisco. And then Wednesday, this will be fun, our friend Jen Flash Andrews is stopping by, producer emeritus of the

program. Here in studio in Seattle

with me, I believe. At the office of Walsh Walsh and Dormat, just to hang out and have some fun. Not because of any intense topic or because we've lost someone we're remembering, just because we love Jen and you all love her and it's going to be a fun day. So that'll be Wednesday's show. Anyway, we're done here for today. We'll see you tomorrow. Until then, have a great Monday. Stay safe, take care of yourselves and each other and please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck

to all.

I'll come from out of a handsome wind candle To a bar in the basement while all the wild rain I'll come around to the friendliest of faces Handsome-est in ugly places We'll come from out of the tunnels we dig in We say the tunneling's not living The working doesn't work We'll come to find the love in this labor The labor's life and life's forever

I'm not trying to be disrespectful or anything, but I kind of feel like you're winging this and it's going bad. Power out.