WTF with Marc Maron (it's a podcast)

Maron's intro - \sigh\"I did what I could." - was fair warning.

Really digging the Patricia Arquette interview, Albini was solid.

Epps was just okay I guess.

still no Lorne interview this week. I'm getting the feeling that when he finally plays it, it'll be dripped out a few minutes a week

they'd better fist fight atop a mountain at this point

the mantle of podcaster to the stars could not have fallen on a more tiresome, bloviating fule. i will finish the albini one but i had to quit in disgust.

ok David Cross would have been worse

Patricia Arquette interview is good, but lol @ Maron's pre-interview analysis depicting a defensive side of himself that keeps his social graces intact. Her description of the hippie commune and its failings was pretty subtle, and Marc chimes in with shit like "your parents found out that people who seek out hippie communes are fucked up" while also just assuming her time there was chaotic. My god I cringed.

lorne interview is up - kinda nervous to listen tbh

I was like "Who would they follow with on Thursday if Lorne's on a Monday?" Well, Elvis Costello.

It sounded like what Lorne was dancing around, and Maron seemed incapable of hearing, was that he didn't get hired because he appealed to an urban intellectual audience and SNL has to play in Kansas.

Also to Lorne that was just a meeting not an audition

"So who were your...primary influences?"

I loled.

These promoted interviews, with Aziz last week and Cross/Odenkirk this week, have their own funny energy to them. The tension Maron had in his early episodes comes back, the part of him that seems to be comparing success, who has the cooler projects. Or it's a different dynamic on the interviewees' part because they're there deliberately to promote a show.

And then the Aziz interview was awkward as far as "Hey, there aren't a lot of white people on your show. What's that about?" But I enjoyed listening to both.

That wasn't Marc being bemused though, it was giving Aziz an opening to talk about the issues of representation, implicit and explicit, in the work.

(Sometimes Maron says dumb, tone-deaf stuff on purpose for a point, sometimes by accident.)

(I wish Aziz didn't feel he had to make it a hook in promoting the show - it's fuckin chock-full of white people! - but it's something he's chosen to do.)

Today, Neil Strauss!

Mileage/results may vary, etc.

That McIntosh turntable that Maron has in the third season of his show starts $6500 apparently.

He's that dude. I think he said the tube amp cost him 5 grand.

The Neil Strauss interview was not only bearable and pretty compelling. Maron's in a mode somewhere between joshing and bullying, and Strauss is somewhere between guy-who-got-in-over-his-head and opportunist.

and *but pretty compelling

idk I think I'm going to have to New Year's resolve to stop listening to this asshole.

In that Bill Burr lovefest, Maron, the 50-something childless therapybro & 12 Stepping rage-o-holic, breaks out the word "pussified" about parents concerned with bullying.

Fuck this broken shell of a person for as many lifetimes as his dust rises.

Why the hell anyone would listen to Maron and Burr talk to each other is beyond me. I like Maron, but not in that sort of company.

it's very illuminating to hear him trying to suck up to knuckle draggers like Burr

I pretty much stopped listening to Maron like six months ago. Dude is losing the tortured part that balanced out the self-obsession and made him a little more sympathetic to listen to (and possibly as a human being).

holy crap at David Spade's life

GARRETT MORRIS you guys

I'm kind of excited about that.

I came to it with barely an idea of who he is, and left it with less. Except that he did a lot of cocaine for a long while, and I'm inferring from the hour-long catarrhic rattle, cigarettes.

so there IS something you don't know everything about

:)

Michael Moore is good in longform conversation vs. TV soundbites.

man the maron intro is just so unbearable though, the amy schumer thing, i have this awful image of the kind of posture of maron when he is Laying It Down on the mic, it is in some sense derivative of the framing used to portray lester bangs in almost famous, does he realise how much he has just fully come to embody this exact like Conservative Radio Truth Teller archetype

Yeah that Amy Schumer thing was pretty questionable from mr comedy ethics inquisitor

"Some comics you never heard of said some stuff yadda yadda yadda"

lol at marc kicking off his impassioned defence of amy schumer with a tale about how he once put together a total sausagefest of a standup night then magnanimously let her go on cuz she was jeselnik's girlfriend

also this was in 2011 when she was already pretty well-established as a comic and he apparently knew fuck-all about her

Dug the Cintra Wilson/Zach G ep. Two interesting convos for different reasons.

long one w friedkin today

I just caught up on a couple I'd not gotten to yesterday: Flea/Trujillo and Herb Alpert. Maron's musician interviews are definitely less painful now than they once were.

Only partway into Friedkin (2+ hours long), but really into it.

Is that the longest single WTF episode? It's up there, and it really started to overstay its welcome by the end (Jesus stuff), but I loved when Friedkin went off on 35mm print fetishists.

a funny part is how little marc makes of friedkin saying he used to run practice w the 80s celtics! that is amazing & rad but obv marc has no ability to engage w it on any level, which is fine to be fair

I prefer a host who doesn't care about that kind of stuff

Todd Rundgren tomorrow. Should be interesting.

The Herb Alpert one was good and so was the Michael Rapaport one, because they both talked so much that they blocked Marc out.

Friedkin was that way, too. Great interview, like an entire audiobook at 2.5 hours.

lol @ Rundgren geeking out about Melt Banana

caught up with the michael rapaport episode over the weekend, gave up when both guest and host started bitching about divorce and child support payments

I can't believe I made it through the whole Al Lubel interview. The guy was so insufferable that even Marc let out a little fake muffled laugh at one line toward the end of the interview as if to say "get the fuck out of my garage".

That dude's still around?! Man. I remember his bit being like a singing intro to his act and his strongest line was "it's a good thing my parents didn't name me Lou because then I'd be Lou Lubel..."

I've only been dipping in when there's a guest I'm interested in, and I'm very interested in the John Lurie one coming up.

^this delivered imo

really touching seeing his loneliness and need for connection creep out from behind that curmudgeonly wall. his Lyme disease stories were terrifying. can't imagine living with that.

jon lurie ep one of the best for a long time for sure