WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 1047 - David Shields

Episode Date: August 22, 2019

David Shields is always looking to push the form forward, whether it’s by way of his writing, his filmmaking or his thinking. Using collage-style prose and film techniques to help draw connections, David intrigued Marc with what his art says about the world and our place in it. So the two of them had a talk about some of David’s recent work exploring war, journalism, race, masculinity, Donald Trump, and football player Marshawn Lynch. Both David and Marc try to find the connections, in the work and in their separate lives. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace, NHTSA, and Ben & Jerry's. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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T's and C's apply. Lock the gates! All right, let's do this. How are you, what the fuckers? What the fuck buddies? What the fucking ears? What the fuck sticks? What's happening i'm mark

maron this is my podcast wtf welcome to it how's it going are you okay i'm okay i think i don't know man some days you know i just uh well i guess the other day i was on conan o'brien show i i don't know if you caught that before I go off on that or talk about it in any real way, why don't we do this? I'm at the Majestic Theater in Dallas, Texas tonight. Then I'll be at the Paramount Theater in Austin, Texas tomorrow. That's Friday night. And Saturday, I'm at the Wortham Theater Center. Go to WTFpod.com slash tour for ticket info. And you can also get tickets to my upcoming dates in Vancouver, Seattle, Toronto, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Boston, Nashville, Atlanta, and San Francisco. Also, go to SwordofTrust.com if you want to see the movie I'm in. Find out where it's playing near you or how you can watch it on demand.

Oh, by the way, David shields uh is on the show today i don't know if you know him um but uh i'm sort of i was sort of fascinated with the guy and with his writing and i kind of wanted to you know kind of i wanted him to explain himself a little bit somehow i wanted to engage in a conversation with him about it, but I didn't feel very confident about it because he's a professor. He's a, you know, an intellectual guy, but I dug the way he wrote, but I wanted to make sure I was understanding it or, you know, could I wrap my head around, could I wrap my head around a conversation with this guy? And I was like, fuck it, let's do it.

Because I saw his recent documentary called marshawn lynch a history and that's available on itunes and amazon and vimeo and he's written a lot of books uh the most recent is the trouble with men reflections on sex love marriage porn and power he wrote a book about trump before that kind of it's he writes in a very specific way called nobody hates trump more than trump an intervention i have his coffee table book war is beautiful but there's a there's a way he structures things look i'll get into this with him i i'm just saying i was a little intimidated and going into it and i've kind of put this off talking to him but it turned out to be great.

I enjoy talking to him. So as some of you know, the Variety magazine, the show business magazine, ran a big cover story on podcasting. And Conan was on the cover. And they kind of framed it as the podcasting revolution. And, you know, it's fine fine i've seen these articles before i mean i've been doing this almost 10 years uh they've written articles like that on me not in variety but they've certainly written pieces on me in variety not that this is a competition or anything else but it just felt like all right so there's a reason right i'm no big believer in the big

unknown syncing up i'm not a things happen for a reason guy or hey this must be kismet or synchronicity or it's meant to happen but the article did come out the morning that i'm supposed to do conan show so i i thought maybe i could at least act like i was a little upset and uh and that's always a dicey thing you know know, I got that. I had them. I signed the segment producer signed off on it. And I went out there with the magazine and I'm like, so you're the guy, huh? You're the podcast revolution. And we did a little had a little fake kind of a what do you call it? Pissing contest. And but then it just gets like, you know, it's weird. I guess what I'm saying is this. But then it just gets like, you know, it's weird. I guess what I'm saying is this. You know, Conan and I have been doing our shtick for what? Since 1994.

He posted the first appearance I had on there. Right? 1994. 25 years. And, you know, I've evolved. He's evolved. But there's a very funny thing that's happening with me personally and in show business, I guess, in a way, is that I'm really not that same guy anymore. I mean, obviously, my success has changed me personally in the sense that I'm not freaking

out all the time, that I'm going to run out of money and not have a plan B or anything to do. But also, I think personally, I'm a little different, of money and not have a plan B or anything to do. But also I think personally, I'm a little different, a little more confident, a little funnier, a little more in control of my talent, a little less neurotic, I believe. But, you know, when you get into a dynamic with somebody you've had with them for years, you know, it was just funny to me that, you know, I get out there, we do our little thing, but it was just funny to me that I get out there, we do our little thing. But it was just interesting to me that within a few minutes, even though I'm comfortable and I'm happier in my life, that him and I fall into this dynamic that we have where

I'm like, oh, I'm just worked up. I'm alienating the audience. I'm uncomfortable. I'm aggravated. And am I that way, you guys? Am I still that way? Maybe I don't see myself properly, but I do know even in standup and maybe you guys can relate to this in your life where, look, I obviously we're, we're, we're all the same people on some degree. I mean,

you can stop doing certain things and you can, you know, make different decisions for yourself, but you have the same drive shaft and the same, you know, mental, uh, uh, machine, but, but, you know, as you get older, you know, certain things tend to, to, to matter less, you know, certain things matter more things shift, you know, hopefully you get a little more relaxed and you don't crumble into a cinder of bitterness of some kind, but. But it's weird that when you get used to a certain way of being, and I imagine it's the same when you get used to a certain job and you just keep doing it, that even if it doesn't quite jive with who you are at this particular time, you keep doing it because that's what you know, right?

And it's an awkward feeling. It's a little like, you know, who am I comedically if I'm not worked up? You know, is there a way for me to do what I do? And I think I am doing it to a degree. I'm obviously a lot more palatable than I was, you know, a decade or two ago in terms of my comfort level. And really what it comes down to is that, you know, am I honoring myself? Right. Isn't that sort of what we want to do? Isn't that the trick is to honor ourselves the best we can be true to ourselves the best we can. But when you got a gig that, you know, is based on an old version of you, what do you do? I'm just saying that I'm at a crossroads, folks. I'm a bit of a crossroads, not, and a crossroads. I'm not waiting for the devil.

I'm not waiting for the devil. I'm just trying to find the courage and figure out exactly, you know, what it is I want to do with my heart and mind, you know, on stage and perform. Sadly, I think I want to just play music. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm excited to do comedy. And, you know, you people that are coming out to see me this tour,

I've got about a good hour and a half of shit percolating. And some of it's pretty heavy, pretty good, pretty deeply funny, pretty jarring. But I'm sort of at a crossroads. You know, once this tour is done, and depending on what happens with GLOW, it might be time for some reflection.

Maybe do a little service work, maybe get out there and help some people or maybe just get out into the woods or into the desert. I'm at a crossroads and it might be in the desert and I'm looking for courage. You know what?

Maybe I am looking for the devil. So Satan, if you're listening, I might be ready to negotiate again. David Shields. Okay. Here's a little bit about me. Now, whether you know, I mean, look, you've known me a while, right? You know, we're not strangers here, right?

We're not strangers. right? We're not strangers. So there was a time in my life where when I was in high school, and I've talked about this guy before, when I was in high school, you know, junior, senior year of high school, I became, I worked down by the university. I hung out with college kids. I hung out by the university and at the frontier restaurant and at the living batch bookstore. And there was a guy who owned the Living Batch bookstore who was a professor and just a general, you know, sort of a wizard. He taught film, he taught art, he taught cultural criticism.

He was just an intellectual, all right? And I loved him and he was hilarious and he changed my life. I saw him as a mentor, even though I annoyed him, but I always aspired. I thought there was nothing more impressive than to be well-referenced and well-read and be able to integrate broad and intellectual ideas into conversation. I thought

that was impressive. And I thought if you could be funny integrating those things, which like he was, that was really the best you could be, is to be intellectually sound and well-versed and fucking hilarious. I was like, that's it. Now, sadly, I wasn't able to really compartmentalize very well. I took everything very personally in college in the way that I could only really apply a text to my exact experience. I could not separate myself. I could not read philosophy without trying to run it through me. I never understood that there was a language, a sort of math to the language of

philosophy. I was just looking for help. I was looking to complete my brain, but I could never really assess and contextualize systems of thought or even math or chemistry. No good. So if it didn't connect to my feelings i couldn't really grasp it but i studied film i studied uh you know poetry i wrote poetry i studied literature i took some philosophy but i never quite grasped it but i was present for it so my dream of being an intellectual once i got to college i realized i can't even manage a second language here folks so the whole sort of like i'm going to be an intellectual, spend my time in academia, talking about lofty stuff that started to dissipate. And I could have faked it. I don't think I do fake it. There was a point in time where I,

I kind of faked it, but it was not faking in the way where I was presenting myself as knowing things as much as it was presenting myself as I knew what you were talking about. At some point in my life, I realized, okay, you're smart. You do read all the heavy stuff. You get what you can out of it. And sometimes you blow your own mind and that influences or informs what you're doing,

which is fine because I'm a comedian. I'm not an intellectual. And if I can read the lofty books or I can get a little something out of them, you know, that kind of, you know, tweak my understanding of things, which I do often. Great. That's as close as I'm going to be to an intellectual. I seek to understand. I seek to have my mind blown.

I seek to put things in a different context than I'm used to seeing. And I seek to grow as a person mentally and intellectually. Fine. Great. And a nice poem, too, is good. But at some point, I engaged a very important thing that you have to engage is the ability to hear. Say it with me.

I don't know. You got to say that. Like, if you don't know, you can either sit there and let them project whatever it is onto you. They think, you know, or, or they know you don't know, or if they ask you, if you, if someone asks you a question, or if you're listening to somebody and you really don't know what they're talking about, just say, I don't know what you're talking about. Or if you're frustrated, you say, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Or if you you're hearing it and it doesn't make sense to you and you don't really want to know

what it is that they're talking about, you go, that sounds like bullshit. But no, I'm joking. Basically, once I learned how to say, I don't know, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't understand that. I have no idea what that is. Can you, can you tell me, or can you tell me what I should see? It changed my life. It's a big load off. Not knowing and accepting that, big load off. So David Shields was very intimidating to me because I tried to read his books, but they're not unreadable. They are very readable. I've only read a few and he's written many, but he works in bits and pieces. They're fragmented. They're not narrative.

They're usually, you know, I would say that they're sort of like a longer essay, but he uses bits and pieces of conversations he's heard, bits and pieces of thinkers that he enjoys, bits and pieces of his own thoughts. And he kind of structures the book like that. And if you like reading like aphorisms or sayings, he finds it's more effective. It's sort of a collage or a montage kind of way of putting text together. And I found it compelling. And I didn't know if I was fully understanding it or wrapping my brain around it, or if I was getting everything I needed to get out of it. And I found it a little intimidating. So I didn't know really how to approach Shields because he's a professor. He's like a smart guy and he's a writer. He's written a lot. So when I finally

decided to have him on, it was because I saw this new documentary, Marshawn Lynch, A History. And this again is all bits and pieces there's no real narration every once in a while there'll be a heading of sorts or a saying you know to sort of frame the segments but it's all I don't know if you'd call it found footage but it really is mostly found footage of Marshawn talking of people responding historical footage some film footage tv footage news footage it's it's just it is a collage of uh that's in the form of a montage because it's film and i found it to be very poetic and very effective and very um provocative and then i was like and you know i'd been emailing with david i'm like let's do it

man i'm ready but what you will hear is me you know wrestling with my own intellectual insecurity but I think I I think I get through it and and I think we connected in a deeper way than I thought and I think we're kindred spirits in a way and I'm glad I talked to him the documentary I mentioned is called Marshawn Lynch a history it's available on iTunes Amazon and Vimeo the most recent book the trouble with men reflections on sex love marriage porn and Vimeo. The most recent book, The Trouble with Men, Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power, which I didn't think went deep enough, but that's my opinion. It's still readable. The Trump book. There's like 20 books.

But they're all available. And this is me easing in to a conversation with David Shields. You can get anything you need with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So no, you can't get an ice rink on Uber Eats. But iced tea and ice cream? Yes, we can deliver that. Uber Eats. Get almost, almost anything.

Order now. Product availability may vary by region. See app for details. Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer.

I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. How are you? I'm good. You mean in what sense? In general. I'm good. Yeah. And I'm good. You mean in what sense?

In general? I'm good. Yeah? And I'm willing. I've been enjoying re-listening to shows, and I'm willing, as you can probably suspect, I'm willing to talk about anything. That's my major, is confession and intimacy and all that. Well, I don't know what to...

Sometimes I don't know exactly what to do with you, you know, because in my mind there's an intimidation factor because I know you're sort of a high level intellectual on some point, for real. I mean, you're an academic, you're a professor, you're a writer, you're a cultural critic. You've read the same books I have. I haven't read enough of them and I don't think I've read them as seriously. Well, no intimidation. You know. I'm intimidated by you. Really? I think to me, take it. I'm delighted to be here and we'll talk about any damn thing. All right. Well, I think we could start with, we are serious sons of bipolar fathers. Are you really? Yeah. But where'd you grow up?

LA and San Francisco. And so why those places? What was the family racket? What was your dad, what was the business? Why were you in those two places? Those are sort of culturally progressive, interesting, show-busy kind of thinky places. Yeah, that was my family.

Oh, yeah? Politically active journalists. Oh, they were journalists? Yeah. My mom wrote for The family. Oh, yeah? Politically active journalists. Oh, they were journalists? Yeah. My mom wrote for The Nation. Oh, really? Early on? The New Republic. Oh, yeah?

My dad was a publicist and journalist and sports writer. Sports writer. It was very much a left-wing family. My mother was part of the first effort to desegregate a California school district. And my brother was arrested in a drug ring at Berkeley in the 60s. He was on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. that would have been the perfect circle so you know the family religion was that classic west coast secular jewish political engagement which is both part of me and part of something i've sort of resisted yeah well in the sense that then my work is not agit prop but it explores yeah i know and i feel that in there and you. And that was sort of like one of the questions after I watched the documentary Lynch History about Marshawn Lynch, who I don't know a lot about. I'm not a sports fan.

But like one of the things I experienced when I have a limited experience with your work, but when I get it, I read it. You know, I read the Trump book and I read the the the trouble with men. And I've had I think you must have sent me Wars Beautiful years ago. And then I got another copy. Oh, I've had them. And I don't know how I got them, but they come. Publisher or whatever. Yeah, somebody.

And, you know, I have this moment where you're where i watch the documentary which is not traditional in the sense that it's a it's basically an hour and a half montage of a found footage right basically right right but there is a poetic you know through line but and there is sort of an effect of that and i do believe the message is delivered you know uh in in a way where, you know, you're processing a lot of things. There's a lot of things coming in. But, you know, the idea of the black man who does not do what he is expected to do and the cultural reaction to that is definitely in there and powerful.

But given what you're telling me about your past and about Agitprop or what have you, you know, my question is, when you do something like this that is powerful and does have a statement and you sort of relegate your expression to the world of art, who is it for? Who is that film for? Yeah. Or who is my work in general for? Right. Well, one could ask that about Hamlet. I mean, one could ask that about Hamlet. I mean, one could ask that about anything. I mean, I think it's an excellent question, but I was actually thinking about

that the other day. So much of my work is obsessed with the relationship between, on the one hand, political engagement and the other hand, artistic passion. Like so much of my dialectic is putting those in active warfare. Like, I don't know. Because that's within you. It totally is. Because, so your resistance to surrender to art or the context of art as it is established

is how your kind of self-loathing manifests itself. That's, I mean, play that out for me a little bit. I'm not sure I see how that is self-loathing. Well, I sense, like, here's my first impulse when I, maybe not self-loathing, but insecurity. No, I'm definitely, am self-loathing. I'll totally own that, but I wasn't sure. Let me try to explain it.

Because, like, when I read the things, and I, you know, I'm a guy that likes but I wasn't sure. Let me try to explain it. Because when I read the things, and I'm a guy that likes pieces of poetry. I like bits. I like sentences. I like paragraphs. I like, what's that guy's name that you must like? I don't know how to pronounce his last name. Chiron? Yeah, Chiron.

I am Chiron. I'm a huge Chiron. I would assume that you are, too. Yeah, but only in the sense that, like, I don't know if I remember a lot of it. I like it when it goes in. You know, I have the feeling it makes my brain do something. Right. It's like a joke, a good joke.

Exactly. There's a little piece of poetry or a little observation that kind of resonates. And I have faith that it's probably changing my brain somehow. Right. Making me look at the world differently. probably changing my brain somehow and making me look at the world differently. But I just wonder, even in reading The Trouble with Men, Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power, where you do have the through line of your own sort of wrestling with your own potentially submissive compulsion,

but you could have written just that book. So when I see the way you put these, I guess they're collages, I guess they're bits and pieces of things appropriated, bits of conversation throughout the narrative about you, and it is about you, I ask myself, well, what is he compensating for? Why can't he just stay with himself? Interesting. I think that's a fair question. And more than one person has asked me why that book goes away from myself as much as it does. The book's a very short book, maybe 135 pages,

maybe 30,000 words. Of those pages, maybe only 30 pages are actually my thoughts on sex, love, marriage, porn, and power. There must be 75, 80 pages of me quoting from other people. Okay. And I've written a bunch of other books in which I'm more present. Right. But I think it's a really interesting point.

Why is that book as outsourced or almost crowdsourced as it is? And I would just say, I mean, it's a tough question. This was as far as I could go. With yourself? In terms of sex and power. I mean, the epigraph of the book is, everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.

Yeah. Which I think is a pretty powerful idea. I don't know if you agree or disagree or if your audience, obviously it's an absolute statement, which is neither true nor false, but it's a thought. Yeah. And the book explores the ways in which sex is a theater of power. Right. book explores the ways in which sex is a theater of power. It just is. And so I feel that the book is, I hope, a powerful investigation of those themes. So even if I'm not saying it, and I own that as a statement, to me, that's as confessional as if I had written it.

I get that. I get that. I just sort of was feeling like, you know, I guess. It was sort of like, dude, tell us more about yourself, sort of. Well, kind of. But like, and also I think there was something about your exploration of your particular situation or predicament or dynamic with your wife, you know, around your own sort of like, you're not, I wouldn't say that you're categorically as submissive. No, it's a very subtle, slight, it's more theoretical than it is like, oh, gee, I want to be whipped and, and, and gungeoned. But you have this thing in your head.

Right. There is a sort of like, you know, well, why hasn't he gone the full way? I know. You know, what is the confession here, really? Is this sort of, you know, milk toasty, you know, in terms of your own sort of sexuality? And then you add all this other stuff, which it's all pretty interesting. But I was wondering, you know, more about you, but that is not the literary device that you engage in. I mean, it's sort of like saying, I mean, this might be a little too meta for you, but it's sort of like what

I know of your career, you were, still are, a standup, et cetera. And in a way, there's this wonderful line of Ralph Waldo Emerson who says, the way to write is to throw your body at the target when all your arrows have been spent. It's just sort of beautiful. I'm all about that. And so, you know, in a way, you know, your narrative is, you know, whatever, you know, that this quite successful podcast has come out of the burning to the ground, I gather, of your stand-up career. Not to say that you're not still now quite, you gather, of your stand-up career, not to say that you're not still now quite a successful stand-up.

It built it. Yeah, exactly. It came through this act of desperation. That you threw your body at the wall when all your arrows had been spent. Right. And exactly the same way, I had written three novels, relatively conventional. Early in the 80s. Yeah, 84, 89, and 92, a conventional first novel,

a second novel that was a growing up novel about me growing up with a fairly severe stutter, and then a third novel called Handbook for Drowning, a book about my family's politics. And then I was trying to write my fourth novel about celebrity and mass culture, trying to write a novel kind of like Don DeLillo's White Noise. That's a good book. Or Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being. Yeah. Or Renata Adler's Speedboat. And I just found myself colossally bored by all those conventional narrative architectural movements.

conventional narrative architectural movements you know let's establish plot let's establish characters setting long stretches of dialogue I was just bored out of my mind by it but were you bored reading it did you feel like you had you know mastered those things or and you just you didn't think you could utilize the accepted structure and take it to another level? I mean, those are all fair questions. I wasn't like I had mastered them by any means. I had written three pretty good apprentice novels. Yeah.

Trying to write my fourth book and returning to the West Coast, I felt a huge desire for work to have a compression, a concision, a huge desire for work to have a compression, a concision, and a velocity that a lot of novels and conventional memoirs don't have. Because they sag? There's so much dead space in them. I mean, it's sort of, again, I think that we as, here we are, 2019 America, this hyper digitalized culture. On the brink of authoritarianism. Not even the brink. We're here. We're here.

And that I'm interested in bringing the news now. I think what you're doing, in an interesting way, is sort of pushing back, like, okay, how come Trouble with Men is not a conventional memoir about your SM marriage or something, or the Trump book, why isn't it, you know, a conventional book by Jane Meyer about, you know, the presidential cabinet. But it's like, I'm trying to turbocharge the culture and the forms to push the forms forward and make them, you know, I think the charge of an artist is to push the form forward.

The form. Yeah. them you know I think the charge of an artist is to push the form forward the form yeah like for instance that you admire a lot of stand-up comedians say prior or whoever what do we love about them they weren't just doing Shecky Green they were pushing the form forward and not to say that I'm necessarily as revolutionary as that but I'm trying to push the form of prose narrative forward. Well, I guess, like, I don't know if I was craving conventionality, but, like, do you feel at the end of these, and, like, this is, like, you know, nitpicking, and it's not necessary, but, like, sometimes, do you feel at the end of those two books, specifically the ones that I've read, you know, about Trump and about men, that, you know, there was a

knockout punch at the end? Like, I felt like the documentary, you know, does not. You know what I mean? You know, I think that, you know, once you get through the arc of what you put together poetically and thematically and even narratively. Right. That, you know, through this amass, through this collection of found footage and documentary footage from from news shows.

Right. Is that, you know, like it stayed with me. Thank you. I think the other, again, I can't argue with your experience of either of Lynch, Trouble with Men, or Trump. Indeed, I wouldn't have published those books if I didn't think they had what you call the knockout punch. To me, the knockout punch of the Trump book is that we have met the enemy and he is us, to quote the old Pogo cartoon. I mean, I feel like that book is a real contribution to Trump studies, if we want to call that that, in that I hope it's not just everybody else's anti-Trump

book. It locates Trump as totally a symptom of American psychosis and says we are all hugely fucked up. There's no way Trump, of course, would succeed if he weren't our worst self-realized. And I even own some ways in which, you know, whether his megalomania, his narcissism, his performative bad boyness, I think he's even is related to, he's a really talented insult comic. He just is. He's a genius. I mean, he's in some ways a genius insult comic going back to, you know, some people like, you know, even Sam Kinison or what's that guy, You know, some people like, you know, even Sam Kinison or what's that guy, that really dirty comedian from the 80s. What was it?

Dice. Yeah. There's very Dice Clay about him. Sure. Yeah. And he empowers the legacy of Dice Clay. Totally. And he, you know, he appeals to a reptilian part of our brain and that he has serious, Trump does, performative chops. Yeah. and that he has serious, Trump does, performative chops. So too in the book Trouble with Men.

Again, if the book didn't have a knockout punch for you, I will give you your money back times two. I got it for free. Well, no, I'm just teasing. But anyway, the knockout punch of that book, which is probably not news to you because you've thought about all this a lot, but the knockout punch of Trouble with Men, in my view, is, and this is the theme of your show, of all your shows, is we are all seriously wounded. And the only thing that connects us is the scar tissue that we all have.

Trauma bonding. I guess. Or what I call the wound and the bow. I think I did get that from that. That did land with me pretty well, the wound talking. See, the books did have a knockout punch. You were just hiding from the knockout punch those books delivered. They form in my brain. Exactly.

You know, I guess I get used to the idea of a punchline. And, you know, when you do what you do and you kind of got to move through it and you kind of got to stay in it. So everything kind of comes together. But, yeah, like I didn't refresh myself before I talked to you. But, yeah, the wound, you know, I think I wrote something down in my notebook that I thought of probably in relation to that. Right. About the talking wound. Well, the thing I like to say sort of my little mantra is collage is not a refuge for the compositionally disabled. By which, I mean, that may sound a little bit fancy.

But the point being, collage is not just, the literary collage is not this thing in which you just throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall and hope something sticks and call it, you know, spaghetti bolognese, but that, you know, I argue, you know, again, I have some skin in the game, collage is a lot harder to pull off and do well than conventional narrative because if you do a conventional narrative, you have a solid baseline. Yeah, A plus B equals the end. Yeah, someone was talking with you about that, someone who was doing whatever. But anyway, I want the reader to feel like, oh, my God, these pieces do come together.

All these shards of contemporary life that we think of as not forming a unity, you know, in this experience of Shields' book, which, you know, is my best readerly experience. It's not, you know, that many people or some people have that experience of the you experience where, you know, okay, some interesting pieces, I'm not sure yet they've come together for me. I would just just say please read it again and more carefully no i think you know what i mean i don't i you know i i wanted to sort of you know push back a little but i'm a fan you know i mean i i mean i wouldn't have you here i mean there are certain books and like i i didn't i was intimidated but but there are certain books that come through

i don't know what they are when i look at your books i'm like you know what the fuck is this where's this guy coming from then i gotta go talk to my buddy Sam Lipsight and like, oh, like, you know, who's this guy Shields? What's he up to? Yeah, Sam and I are pals. Sounds like you guys are pals. Yeah, we're good friends. Sam's the best.

Yeah, he's a wonderful writer. And he, you know, I think Sam is an interesting, instructive, you know, he and I are interested in a lot of the same things. Comedy as a veil for sadness, you know, sort of. You say that like it's an intentional thing. It's a reality. It's an instinctive thing. Right.

And that, you know, he, I think, has a stronger narrative gene. I just think when they had- He's definitely a narrative guy. Yeah, when they handed out plot, I just said, what? You know, I don't know what that is. I mean, I just, you know, I'll go to a movie with my wife and I can tell her immediately after 30 seconds what the movie's themes are.

Right. But I have no fucking idea what happened. I can't follow plot. But is that like some sort of pathology? No, I mean, I'm exaggerating, of course. You always want to go to pathology. Is that a specific type of autism where I can't follow the story? Like, I really am amazingly bad at following plot.

Like, I can follow a plot. I'm terrible with it when I read a script. But often, oh, right, in the sense that you said, like, okay, why am I doing this? In the format, the format's bothersome. Right. Like, you know, I can't, no, it's like I read it, but I can't picture it when it's just a script form. I need it a little more thorough, you know, and I can't hold on to things. I think that's one of the reasons you appealed to me.

And I don't want to, you know, put you on the defensive. No, that's fine. But no, but it's odd because Sam, I think, went the other direction because I think Sam's first novel, the subject Steve, is difficult and the plot is difficult and it is sort of fragmented. Right. And then he sort of became more conventional in chasing down these things. And the humor became richer, you know justifies that with some sort of artistic credo. As I say, I wrote these three conventional novels in my early or my mid to late 30s. I was trying

to write my fourth novel and I just found those gestures, I found dull., if the writer's bored, the reader will be bored. Well, I think that's true. And I think that the hardest thing when you read conventional novels is that, you know, a lot of times I used to have a hard time finishing the last 10 pages because I knew it was going to be disappointing. Sure. No matter what it was. I know what you mean.

That, like, there's something about the landing of a novel, usually, and I don't read a lot of novels because I'd rather read a book like yours, in a sense, where you have this weird mixture of things that are just kind of being thrown at your brain than stay in the game with a novel because it has to be really well referred to me. Somebody has to say you got it. Try it. Someone I love has got to say you got to read this. But the endings are always sort of like, you know, I mean. I feel like that's a real sign of how truly unfulfilling an awful lot of conventional narratives are. If the ending is this weird letdown, that's a sign that you have not been on a really serious journey to me.

Because that ending ought to feel you know existentially revelatory i find eleanor coppola's film hearts of darkness a better film than apocalypse now i i think that's arguable and so that's sort of my that's my model this weird subterranean work that cuts to the chase more directly and more powerfully than all that architecture of, you know, of pyrotechnics. Yeah, I get that. If you see what I mean. No, it works for me, you know, and I think I just, I'm in this weird sort of space in

my head now where, you know, I pummel my brain with, you know, garbage out of my phone every morning in the form of whatever news I'm following. And I have, the reason why your style speaks to me is I have a fundamental sort of inability to compartmentalize or kind of emotionally prioritize what's coming into my brain. Everything sort of comes in hot, you know, no matter what it is, you know, whether it's me making a cup of tea or the news. It's all connected. Yeah, it's connected, but it kind of happens at the same frequency. And then what's happened Yeah, it's connected, but it kind of happens at the same frequency. And then what's happened to me lately is like,

I think some of my short-term memory is being annihilated by the amount of information I'm jumping into my head every day. So like the way you select, it's clear that there's an editorial process. This isn't spontaneous. I should hope so. Of course.

They pretend to be these casual collections. I'm talking about your work. I know, that's what I mean. I curate the hell out of these. Yeah, I can tell. I mean, I spend years getting the mix right, and it's sort of like saying, you know, you look at, say, but anyway, I mean. How is that process? I guess my point is, it works for me because, you know, there is a context. It is compartmentalized. You've taken the time to make these decisions, but it kind of goes in in the modern way. You know what I mean? It's like, boom, pack it. Boom. Yeah, pack it. Boom. And then my brain kind of puts them all together because you've contextualized them. Whereas if I'm flipping

through news stories, there's no context other than my phone and my fear. That's a nice connection. I don't know if you're a David Foster Wallace fan. I was a big fan of Wallace's essays. The novels do relatively little for me, but Wallace's essays, I really like. I think some of them you would love. But that Wallace had this wonderful answer. Somebody asked him, Laura Miller at Salon asked him, what's so great about literature? Why does literature matter? And he said, that we're existentially alone on the planet. You can't know what I'm thinking and feeling, and I can't know what you're thinking and feeling. And literature at its best is a bridge built across the abyss of human loneliness. Strikes me as a really beautiful

answer. And I would argue, again, somewhat self-justifyingly of my own work, that my work at its best is this really, I hope, lovely bridge between myself and the reader. Because if the work works and it doesn't work for everyone, the reader starts to feel how it actually sort of feels to be inside of my weird little brain. So it's like, oh my God, that text you got in the morning is related to that Instagram post you had here, you know, to continue with your analogy about how it's very modern. And, oh, my God, you know why not sort of do that conventional let's just say i don't know whatever you want to call like mary carr tobias wolf you know um good solid

yeah modern memoir right and that i find it more exciting to show how everything is connected my problem is is that like i'm always looking like if i don't like when i look at your books and i've talked about this with me you know with other things if i find it confounding you know what you know i understand your structure and i understand how it all pieces together and i understand the poetry of it and i understand the form of it but like i i initially come away thinking like am i getting this. Or is he fucking with me? That was the question that the publisher asked of my first collage book, Sonny Maida at Knopf.

Yeah. And he published my first work of literary collage called Remote Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity. Yeah. Sounds like the subtitle of half of the stuff that you do. That's the subtitle of my podcast. Right. Yeah. Sounds like the subtitle of half of the stuff that you do. That's the subtitle of my podcast. Right, exactly. We'll be suing, yes.

Oh, good. But Sonny Mata said, you know, I think there's something there. Is David really doing this or is he just sort of fucking around? And, you know, I couldn't be more serious. No, yeah, for that. Right. And, you know, I couldn't be more serious. And I think, you know, but it's sort of like, Christ, this stuff is connected. Well, it's all connected. Rather than me spelling it out a lot, like, you know, who's a journalist that I like, let's say Michael Lewis or somebody like that.

Like, it's all pretty much spelled out and the meaning is there, but it feels to me sort of more artistic and poetic and frankly more moving. It's the way I work. And, you know, some people have connected it to my childhood stutter. You know, I had a really bad stutter as a kid. And my second novel, Dead Languages, is a sort of autobiographical novel about stuttering. And there's a sense in which my kind of, you might call it herky-jerky, stop and start, disfluent narrative is sort of a nicely metaphorical representation of stuttering. Because, you know, you write a conventional novel, it has a sort of a fluent fluidity to it.

And my work has a kind of, I hope, a kind of stuttering poetry, if that makes sense. And again, the more I think about it, you know, I'm glad I'm talking to you. And again, the more I think about it, I'm glad I'm talking to you. Because even today, I don't do many Instagram posts, and I just do them spontaneously. But I literally said, well, authoritarianism is happening, and I'm going to be in Raleigh tomorrow through Saturday. I'm going to go look at some pottery because I like pottery. But so you decide the context, but those things are connected. I mean, authoritarianism and my desire to look at pottery. Totally.

Right. So do I have to have an answer as to why other than my desire or is the pottery some sort of kind of remedy to my fear and to the political realities. And so I think that's the space you're leaving. That's a really lovely example, because I would argue the pottery is connected to the Trump authoritarian regime. I'm not sure what it is, but I feel like the challenge of being alive and sentient now, let's call it around August 1st of 2019, is to say, like, how are these different parts of our lives connected? Well, we can go from there to our fathers then. So I am assuming that... Well, I think that's a great connection.

Trump, you know, his father was famously dictatorial, authoritarian, demolished Trump. I don't think Trump has felt a thing for 60 years. Yeah. He's utterly numb, utterly without any pleasure at all. Hates his father in unbelievably profound ways. And this is a little bit glib and armchair psychology on my part, but he clearly is visiting that punishment on the rest of us that he never articulated toward the father. Yeah. Isn't that funny though, this sort of glib

armchair psychology thing? Because I remember at the beginning of the administration that that was a full press on behalf of the uh intellectuals in the world the father and trump well just the armchair psychologizing about you know the nature of this guy's uh you know pathology and then it just like didn't work it didn't take him down yeah it. It's just like, you keep coming at it. It's a wall of shamelessness. Sure. It's impenetrable. You probably know Louis Theroux's work.

Yeah, sure, I talked to him. He has a wonderful line in the Trump book in which he says, in a culture of shame, i.e. America, being shameless gives you, i.e. Trump, enormous leverage and power. I think it's really the key to Trump's strategy. I think so. Isn't that a brilliant line? It is. It's the nature of, you know, it all just coincides with sort of the end game of capitalism where, you know, you mine people's desires to the point where they no longer really know

what they are, what they're attached to. So they don't have any real anchor to their personalities in general. You know, the fact that confounds me and I'm trying to deal with it comedically is that, you know, that the brain turns out to be a very primitive recording device, you know, outside of survival mode, you know, it's just very willing to attach, you know, real belief to garbage based on feelings. And repetition. Yeah. Repetition is a tool for branding and for fascism. You know, so it's all sort of happening. You know, the end times prophecies of Christianity are sort of dovetailing with this sort of late stage capitalism. And, you know, someone's hedging their bets. Do you have any, as a stand up yourself,

Someone's hedging their bets. Do you have any, as a stand-up yourself, do you have any particular insights into how Trump manages to be the performative black magician that he is? Like, I'm not a stand-up comedian. I'm a writer, and I can analyze it. But he has mad performance chops. And I'm wondering if you have a specific observation as a practitioner well i when i talk to comics that i think that the one he's got several gifts most of them horrible right but they're good but he's also has this incredible capacity to make people feel great like you know all the comics i've talked to have had experiences with him because he was around right he was just one of the this weird freaky guy guy. But Jackie Mason was the guy

I was trying to think of. That guy's a fucking monster. I've heard that, but yeah. But no, but like Trump is sort of like a tremendous like huckster salesman.

Sure. He really can make you, like you know, you talk to him and he makes it feel like a million bucks just to be hanging around him. That's just classic salesmanship.

No, totally. That's just like the oldest trick in the book. And like, and he can, the fact that he's become this portal for the worst most corrupt fucking shameless garbage out of the religious sector out of the business sector out of the graft sector it's just he's it when people compared him to hitler i was like no he's satan that's good he's like if you're gonna believe

in prophecy this guy is the guy. I mean, Satan had to be charming. He had to have skills. Sure. He always has the best lines. The best lines are always Satan's. Yeah. You know, just think of how much more interesting Trump is than, say, you know, Hillary.

I mean, he just was a more galvanizing figure. But he's also a chaos addict. Right. You know, he can remain powerful as long as everything around him is just in complete chaos he just he loves it he thrives on it whereas hillary you know you're gonna yeah it's a management position i'm sorry you know i mean my latest thought about it is that you know where are the people who are willing to blow up their career in order to save the republic. Where is the IRS agent who just simply throws Trump's audits, his tax reports online? Where is the person at Deutsche Bank who just presses send?

But they're around. But the problem is that if you really have, I think the biggest problem is if you really have a large portion of the population that no longer has any sort of barometer for facts or truth. I mean, and they're who he's counting on. It doesn't, I know. You can counter any fact. Right. And you can put it into a, you can wedge it into a conspiracy. You can dismiss it.

Right, right. And a frightfully large part of the population will be like, it is bullshit. Right. Because the bullshit guy said it was bullshit. Exactly. And I think to me what's interesting, because it's easy for us as supposedly woke white guys to say it all, but it's sort of like, it's not clear to me how you push back. Because everyone says, oh, you know.

That's the biggest trick. I don't know what it is. If I were there in nazi germany in 1933 i'd have been terribly prescient i would have been this very brave no you wouldn't i mean you might have but you know here we are this is real this is 1933 but yeah but exactly and and if you think about that it's not it's not you know he's not no it's not gonna go that way yeah he's gonna rely on you know weird sporadic events by militia operations and and and and loners with guns and just you know the the fact that you know most people in places that

aren't big cities are afraid to talk at work it's going to be it's an internal censorship the totalitarianism of authoritarianism is going to be regulated by us as individuals because of the nature of the narcissistic personality or culture that we live in. Right. So I don't think those people exist because they're concerned about themselves. And by the way, the smart move turns out to be in 1933, Germany was to get the fuck out. Right. I mean, like, you know, whoever said they were going to stand up to it or whoever did, it didn't matter the smart ones fucking left right but i think you know for me i guess to me what's interesting for me is that i mean it's more than interesting it's rather uh traumatizing you know

rational discourse a la let's say rachel maddow on msnbc who i'm a fan of but it's not doing anything it's just preaching to the proverbial choir. On the other hand, who is that person who can fight demagoguery with demagoguery? That doesn't play well on the left. Who would be that person who would have as much stage presence, camera presence, possibly Kamala Harris or somebody? And so for me, how to dismantle, I mean, basically Trump is an assault upon discourse itself. That's his magic potion. Discourse, democracy, culture. But anyway, all rational discourse is over with him.

It's all circus, all circus antics. And so basically it's not clear to me, is it clear to you, how do you fight, as you say, chaos addiction? He sort of knows America obviously loves circuses because he loves circuses. He's the elephant that we're cleaning up after. So part of it is is bully psychology. I'm fascinated by bullies. And I've thought- Are you one?

I've been bullied as a kid. I was, you know, I was like the one Jewish kid among my jock friends. I had the speech impediment. I was this lefty kid amidst my suburban San Francisco conservative friends. And I was, you I was seriously bullied. I think, you know. Because I have bully in me. I'm certainly capable of being a bully,

in minor ways at work, but I'm not wildly bullied. Right. But to me, a lot of it is bully 101. The bully's always a baby in disguise. We all know that. How do you go after a bully? You go after him every step of the way. The moment he sees ground, the bully will take it. And then beyond that, I can't play it out. He has literally, as they say, the bully pulpit.

He has the presidency. So how do you go after the bully when the bully has this enormous megaphone? Like, I just know. I don't know. I'm trying to find some stupid answer here. You know how. Hopefully he has a brain event. He's close. He's close. You know, like if it becomes indisputable that he's, you know, you know, just mumbling and, you know, everything's completely. How far can you defend somebody? I know. But getting back to something else, like the other thing that I've been obsessed with lately, just in the last week or so, is this, what we're talking about, and I think even in the form of fiction and what you do and how we live our lives, is there seems to be some intentional, that we have to live in a sort of imposed, personally imposed cognitive dissonance, right? And I think that that's- In what exact sense, do you mean? In the sense that like in order for us to have a quality of life that we think we've earned or deserved or want to have, or if happiness is something you're pursuing, or you're at a point

in your life where you'd like to enjoy it because you think it's that time, you know, against the backdrop of this seemingly hopeless situation and this authoritarian kind of momentum, you know, you struggle sort of like that comes in, it fucks you up, and then you're like, well, I want to have a nice breakfast. Right. You know, so like, and that's really sort of weighing on me. And I think that there is some element of that to the collage sort of. I think that's nice connection that I would want to say that my work is saying, sorry, you can't have that nice breakfast.

I'm going to insist as you're having that bagel and latte. I'm going to say, no, you cannot compartmentalize your breakfast that way. I'm going to impose that guardian headline on that bagel and that latte. Well, that's what happens. Which I think is really, I think that's a real contribution. I'm the person who's bringing bad news to breakfast. I'm the bad news bear, you know. In little bits and pieces.

But then I'm going to say again, you know, to make this case, I'm not just this person who's going to say, guess what, your purchase of the pottery in Raleigh NC is not unrelated to the Trump authoritarianism in some way I can't quite articulate but that um well sure it's a you know basically I can articulate it it's it's it's a sort of a kind of like desire to get to something sort of organic to something you know handmade, to something handmade, to something unique, authentic, and a craft, a craftsmanship,

and sort of a life behind it. Somebody toiled over a wheel on a heart level. Exactly. That is the only thing we have is the humanity of the potter. Exactly. I mean, you probably know, do you know, the Kuleshov effect in film, that basically if you juxtapose two things together, you have a boy who's. Oh, there's a Russian thing.

Yeah. Where you are looking at, you know. The language of montage. Yeah. You have a boy and then you have a rushing train. You have the boy and the bowl of soup. You have a bowl and a mother that we see that boy very differently based on what he is judging. That's the thing that Eisenstein took off on. Yeah, that's all a film. And it's, in a way, my work in which, you know, watch me juxtapose in the Marshawn Lynch film a, you know, let's say 1920s lynching with some media press conference and watch the shrapnel play out or, you know, in the Trump book, you know, again, to use our analogy, you know, watch what happens when we push the pottery up against authoritarianism. And that basically,

it's not just that sort of simple juxtaposition, but if we do, let's say, sort of 500 of these juxtapositions, watch how they're building a larger argument. I like it. I mean, so, yeah. I like it. I like that you're fleshing that out for me. I thought that was, like, you know, obviously the name Lynch, you know, has its implications and that those are intentional.

But, you know, some memorable thing, one of the more memorable fucking 12 seconds of what is, you know, a 500, you know, 15 to 30 seconds, two minute pieces, was, I don't know where it came from, but that Southern guy saying we're afraid of a reprisal. That's an amazing passage. I mean, but that was like, you know, that's like the portal in.

It really is. To the whole why. It's the answer to why. It really is. That's a staggering passage in the film. I mean, for those few people in the world who have yet to see the film, it's this fellow with a Southern accent. So it's this fellow with a Southern accent.

In just a few seconds, he explains the last sort of 400 years of American history. And really, our moment, he says that white people are afraid of retribution. And then he adds a couple of other words. And he basically owns American guilt. And there's black rage and white fear. And that is, you know, it's owns American guilt and that, you know, there's black rage and white fear. And that is, you know, it's the undergirding. And the fear that, you know, because it can't be owned, it becomes rage. Exactly. Precisely. Which is, you know, that explains the 40 million people of the Trumpian base. Absolutely. And Trump plays to it, you know, almost hour by hour.

Because, you know, the options with fear are, you know almost hour by hour because you know the options with fear are you know a movement through it an understanding of it you know grief acceptance humility or or you know i think uh the shame that that is the shame so if right if you're gonna you be one of those sort of like you know fuck. Like the one thing- Like deflect, deflect, deflect. Yeah, yeah. Then all of a sudden, if you're empowered to go like, no, no, fuck them. Right. I mean, it's just so- That's the end of discourse.

Exactly. I mean, just, I mean, there's like the, you know, as you may know is, you know, Trump for years had Hitler's speeches on his bedside table. That's just a fact, you know, it's reported by many people and he's gone to school on all that. I think so. I don't like the the idea that he's just like shooting from the hip. I think he did have a plan.

Totally. You know, when he knows that he can harvest the AOC squad or I mean he know he has relatively reptilian instincts for those moments, whether going after Elijah Cummings or he's going after Baltimore that he, that he uses, of course, the classic language of stigmatization, scapegoating, demagoguery. So, you know, every, it's just classic, you know, calling people animals, calling them vermin. I mean, it's all just so standard and that I don't know. It's just so it's so easy to be sort of having shared misery. But but what's the route? You just want to say to people, I mean, that you travel the country probably more than I do. You know, do you ever try and talk to Trumpian voters and say, don't you see what he is doing?

And do you get zero response back? No, no. I mean, I know a couple of people like, you know, one guy in particular who I like and who I think is funny. And, you know, he is of that ilk and he's Christian. He's a Southerner. You know, he you know, he doesn't know a lot necessarily, but, you know, he goes with the flow. But I think that the general consensus around that is like they they don't care if he's full of shit. at the general consensus around that is like they don't care if he's full of shit. You know, he is servicing an emotional satisfaction for them. And he's also facilitating, you know, everything the Republicans have been working on for 30 years. So once you're willing to be an apologist in the way like, yeah, he's crazy, then it's all it's lost. It's over.

I agree. I think the key is that he's giving financial satisfaction to a relatively small group of people. That's right. But emotional satisfaction. But emotional satisfaction to a wide swath. I mean, just trying a billiard shot here, trying to connect up Lynch, film, Trouble with Men, and the Trump book. I I've just somehow what you were saying, sort of, I was seeing some connections, which I'm not sure I can quite bring to consciousness, but something to do with my go-to move, I guess, which is the great liberating movement to me, whether it's the Trumpian base, whether it's sort of sexuality and dominance and submission. To me, the great liberating gesture, which I find sort of freeing, is to be honest, to own

your own woundedness. Yes. Which, you know, I know is your go-to move too, but, you know, and then to me, that's what's so powerful about, say, Marshawn Lynch is that he, I'm not sure if he owns his own woundedness, but he manifests resistance to the dominant cultural discourse in this very powerful way. And so if I see, you know, the three things of mine that we've been talking about, you know, like I see what I- That speaks to a historical wound. Total. And that's a great connection. Right. And that what I really love, the people, the artists I love from ancient writers to very

contemporary writers are people, and maybe this is why I'm such a collage writer and filmmaker, is that that collage work tends to bring together people who tend to be wounded. E.M. Chiron was, youan was famously dark, pessimistic, sad. I definitely know what that, because I speak from the wound, and I know who my audience is. Right. I see them.

And even St. Nietzsche, Pascal, all the great collage writers were famously broken. Whereas in a way, if you're more, you know. And that's why it makes sense that they write like that. Precisely. Exactly. Like it's like,

that's all I could write on that. Exactly. Because I'm so depressed I have to go back and lie down. Yeah, or it's sort of like next thing. Exactly. That salve, you know, helped me through that moment.

That's nice. Right. Almost like these little packets of grief bomb. Right. You know, like boom, boom, boom That's nice. Right. Almost like these little packets of grief bomb. Right. You know, like boom, boom, boom. Like jokes. Yeah.

I mean, I was so influenced by standup as a kid. I grew up in San Francisco and on, I think KNBR. You know, they would have from 8 a.m. till 12 noon, all the great standups of that time that could go on radio. I think like I have said before is that like for me, the reason standup was what I was destined to do was that these guys had a handle on things and they could present, you know, large ideas, you know, very quickly and give you some closure. Like if you were raised by, you know, self-involved parents or bipolar father, like you said,

you're not getting much closure on your sense of self. So there's a sort of like these tendrils of like, you know, how do I, what is my identity that, you know, intellectually, if you, if you watch a standup, you're like, oh, that guy's got a handle on that. And it just happened in 50 seconds. And now I can get, you know, that'll cap that for now. Like a friend of mine once said, he said, what I like about your work is that it's weirdly utilitarian. That is to say, I'm trying to create toolkits that are actually sort of useful for people's lives. Yeah, a reference point. Like here's how to think about Trump. Here's, I think, how to think about sex.

Here's how to think about, say, race and sports. And it's like, I think of the work as sort of, you know, as interventions. No, no, I like that. And I agree with you. And I think that's why it probably resonates with me because, like, I am a big fan of great lines. Right. And I think it is poetry. And, you know, and by avoiding the sort of contextual trap of being a poet.

Right, like a capital P poet, right. Where it's already sort of once removed from cultural language in a way. But freeing yourself to do this collaging and have bits and pieces that work together in a poetic fashion, there's a little something for everybody where you don't have to labor. Exactly. Like, what the fuck does this mean? I mean, i like the way it feels when i say it but i did not but uh but like like there was a guy that dan vitale used to do this line about you know like uh you know being fucked up and the line was like you know when you hit bottom folks you'd be

surprised at just how much give that floor has. See, that's beautiful. And it's the word give. Like, it's give. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's beautiful. Like, that's beautiful. Yeah. That's lovely. That's a good one.

I like that one. Yeah. So when you were coming up, you know, in this environment that was, you know, it seemed like your parents had, you know, loftier agendas than parenting. Mm-hmm. had loftier agendas than parenting. How did that, in retrospect, in your self-inspection, what kind of trajectory did your father's bipolarity send you on?

How did that affect your creativity or your choices in life? Well, that's a big one, obviously. I mean, I've written about it in part. I'm trying to think of how to answer that in a way that... Is he alive? No. My dad died at 99. And my mom died a while ago as well. So, I mean, it's huge.

I think my father's what we called manic depressive. Yeah. So for me, there's... But you know what's amazing though? He died at 99? Yeah, it was this sort of... So he didn't kill himself. No, tried many times and failed many times.

He would drive to the Golden Gate Bridge virtually monthly threatening to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. My dad used to drive around with a gun in his car, but we weren't sure who he wanted to use it on. Exactly. And he's, was this in Albuquerque? Yeah.

And that, you know, basically the line I flash on is, I quoted in Trouble with Men, this rather devastating line in which an ex-girlfriend says, your father never taught you how to be a man. Which was rather a nasty line, but it stayed with me. That basically when people- Well, that's one of those ones. Yeah, exactly. That basically when I think of paternity, and I'm a terribly devoted father to my 26-year-old daughter, and I'm very much a father to her. But basically the point being masculinity was problematized to me from the very beginning that my mother was this rather draconian, authoritarian, you know, dominant figure, you know, quite harsh, you know, quite chilly, quite distant. Yeah. Perhaps as she needed to be given my father's evacuation of that station, you know, he was shuttling back and forth to electroshock treatments at

the mental hospital. And so for me, it was the evacuation of masculinity. I'm used to the whole idea of man being authoritative and mother being nurturing. I have no idea what that even means. To me, my mom was not in any way classically nurturing, and my dad was just like the empty patriarch. Right. He was just, and so for me, that would be the beginning of it. And then you sort of laid onto it. You know, I've been hugely influenced by my parents.

I mean, I am their son in the sense I am a writer the way they were. Yeah. I'm politically engaged, not as overtly as they were, but I am politically engaged. But you said earlier that you have an aversion to that. What is it? Well, the aversion is, you know, I'm not a political pamphleteer. You know, I try to, you know, some of my work, like say War is Beautiful, the New York Times pictorial guide.

Yeah, because I have that. That's the coffee table book. That coffee table book that's a david shields coffee well the anti-coffee table right but it is it's on the table you know that book what was the idea of it is a critique of new york times war photography in which i was arguing that at the new york times for years during the iraq and afghanistan war, they were running appallingly beautiful pictures on a weekly level of those wars, seemingly oblivious that you can't just run color pics on page one every few days and not have that be sending unbelievably powerful,

cheerleading, subliminal messages. Well, how many photographers were they drawing from? You know, dozens around the world. And they were tended, and that was an interesting... But does that have something to do with the evolution of photography? I mean, that's what people would push back. It's like, hey, people can make amazingly beautiful pics.

But I studied every front page of the Times from 1991 to 2012, and I could not find a single example of a picture that captured to me anything like the hell of war. That seemed to be a relatively conscious decision to have the design department running the war department. That basically, I argued, you know, that famous line, war is hell. Yeah. To me, in the Times, it was like, war is heck, viewed from a very far distance. Because, you know, the Times, frankly, its audience is not going to war.

Those wars are far away. Yeah. Whereas, say, during Vietnam, it might be a New York Times reader who would have to serve in Vietnam. So anyway, the book argues that, in a way, that's the first book of mine that in a way fulfills my parents' mission of trying to create overtly political work of art. But in general, in previous books of mine, whether a book like Black Planet, Facing Race During NBA Season, or whether a book like Black Planet, Facing Race During an NBA Season, or earlier books, are more skeptical of, by the book, liberal agenda. I don't think we have solutions to life's problems. I'm a total tragedian. I just think that we're fucked, both on an individual level

and on a cultural level, that I think the planet's doomed, et cetera, et cetera. Whereas my parents' whole agenda was, we're going to solve life's problems. And I just think, you know, I became devoted to art. You know, there's that wonderful line of Schopenhauer who says, may the world perish, let truth prevail, which is a rather awful thing to say, kind of fascistic, but I'm sort of in bed with that. I want, trying to tell the truth matters more to me than anything else.

It doesn't sort of mean I'm right. Your truth, though. Yeah, exactly. It seems like when you take into consideration in terms of philosophy and in terms of, you know, being a tragedian is that, you know, it just seems that,

you know, might, might partnered with bullshit. Totally. Yeah. I don't say I'm right. No, but that,

you know, that becomes my partner with bullshit, right. You know, that, that becomes a prevailing truth, you know, which,

you know, fascism is seeking to solve the same problem. Of course. Well, that's where it gets scary is that that's what the Trump book tries to get into. I say at one point in the book, Trump is the world's worst, best personal essayist because he wires everything through himself, the way that in a way that your standup act does, the way that my writing does,

the way a lot of the actors and comedians and monologues do. I mean, you probably, I assume that you share my admiration of people like say Spalding Gray and Joe Frank. It's like, everything got wired through them. Spalding Gray couldn't be involved in a movie about cambodia without sending it back to him right and in a way trump is weirdly like them and like us sure for deeply nefarious reasons but he mythologizes himself right immediately exactly and i i tried to make a line work on stage where i'm like you know that uh you know trump is the it was just like he's you know, he's he's he's the best narcissist because he succeeded in actually making everything about him. Literally everything. Exactly. Like and that I guess to me, the big question for him, among many, I'm curious what your take is.

Does he know he's full of shit or is he, has he actually convinced himself or, and are his politics as awful as he pretends or is there part of, like, for instance, I'm sure he's paid for numerous abortions, but he pretends to be against it. no, no.

Yeah. Like for instance, how aware is he of the shtick? Well, I think he, I, you know, I think he's like,

I think it's, I think it's instinctual, but I think he, you know, in his quiet moments with people he trusts, he's just a straight-up asshole. But I think he knows the con job. Does he? Definitely. I think that's right. I think that's right. I mean, I don't think he says, you know, he plans what he's going to say. No.

But he says, just watch this. I'm going to make these people. Right. I think that's right. Yeah. Watch what I can do. Exactly. I think he watch this. I'm going to make these people. Right. I think that's right. Yeah. I think that's right. Watch what I can do. Exactly. I think he has that.

I agree. Yeah. So ultimately, you think that this new film, it seems to be that whatever medium you're working with, this seems to be the evolution of everything you do. You would say that it doesn't matter whether it's a book or, or the, you know, the, the pictures in the war is beautiful, uh, or, or this film, this seems to be a, a, a perfectly, um, realized, uh, piece of art, you know, based on your approach. Thank you. I mean, I mean, I mean, I, you mean in a sense the Marshawn Lynch film in particular, I mean, I think, I mean, it is a funny evolution where the first novel I wrote, published, my God, 35 years ago, did one review actually in the LA Weekly said it's almost a parody of the conventional novel. The first book I wrote was just unbelievably straight You know, all the standard things. And then over the last sort of 35 years,

you know, I've written over 20 books and just almost step by step by step by step, they've gotten less linear, less narrative, less plotted, more pixelated, more montage-y, more collage-like. And, you know, I think there would be a way to argue the Lynch film bringing together politics, race, sports, collage is, you know I think there would be a way to argue the Lynch film bringing together politics race sports collage is you know I hope I have more gestures to make but it does seem like a

nice gathering of my impulses yeah I don't think it's like the end but I'm just saying that it seems to be exactly what you're working towards seemingly yeah you know, in that, like, I imagine that drawing from, you know, images is probably, I would imagine, you know, kind of labor intensive, but somewhat more exciting than drawing from words. I mean, to me, it's the whole thing of, yeah, exactly. I mean, part of me feels like I'm running out of words in certain ways. I mean, maybe like, say, going back to Trouble with Men, like, I didn't have more to say about it. Like, this was as much as I could say. I mean, part of it with the Marshawn Lynch film was that we approached him and said, you know,

would you like to participate in the film? His eloquence is his silence or his silence is his eloquence. So thankfully, Lynch said no, that I won't block it, but I won't participate either. Necessity being the mother of invention, if that's the right phrase, you know, that we said, okay, we have no Marshawn Lynch. Let's scour the web.

Let's find every clip that we can ever find. Let's intercut them with quotes and American history. And this plays to my strains. You know, part of me was hugely relieved when Lynch said no, because it forced me back on, as you say, my go-to moves, which is culling, curation, thematizing, juxtaposition, bringing together pottery and Trump. Boom, watch what happens. Right. And the way you let yourself off the hook in a way but didn't is that your place in it was the assemblage.

Precisely. And not like your voice. Per se. Right. Well, a few people want like the book that it is very loosely adapted from is a book called Black Planet Facing Race During an NBA Season, a book I wrote 20 years ago. I kept a fan's journal of the Seattle Sonics' 94-95 NBA season. And you're a sports fan. I am.

It's a huge guilty pleasure. But it's also an amazing cultural theater. Sure, of course. I mean, I could tell you everything. Yeah, I wish I had it, but I don't. I mean, you've saved yourself tens of thousands of hours. But you're your father's son, I guess. Totally.

And I've written now three or four books about sports. And as they say, there's nothing you need to know about American culture you cannot see through the Super Bowl. It's all freaking there. And so basically- That was a template somehow? Well, yeah, Black Planet, because that book is about race, media. And in that book, I'm very present as a guilty white liberal who sometimes has racist attitudes.

I sometimes identify with the owners, sometimes with the coaches, sometimes with the media, sometimes with the players. The book tries to unpack an NBA season as an inverted mirror of NBA race relations at the time of Rodney King, Clarence Thomas, and the OJ trial. And I think it's a good book, but you couldn't write that book now. And so I was trying to adapt that film with the actor and director, James Franco,

and we tried to do it, and it just came to an end. Yeah. And that pivoted nicely into the Marshawn Lynch film, in which, as you say, I vanished. But again, as with the quotes, I think I'm hugely there. Sure.

When I juxtapose a quote from Richard Wright saying, only jailers believe in jails with a passage from Little Boosie, I couldn't be more present. No, yeah, no, definitely. I think that's right. But it's not you reflecting on you as you. And I think that if Marshawn had agreed to be part of it,

you would be forced into a conversation that would have been different than what you got. I totally agree in that I'm present a little bit like you'll hear me ask questions in the movie. Yeah. But I know I think does the culture at this point want to hear about the ambivalence from a middle class white Jewish filmmaker? I would argue probably not.

So yeah, but that's not the film we're dying to see, I don't think. But it's also, I guess, but if you frame it like that, I mean, it's sort of a disservice that, I remember being very angry when Entertainment Tonight first started airing because I'm like, that's private. You don't have news about what's going on behind the scenes uh-huh that and now it's the whole culture it's a whole culture right so so the

thing is is like you know the work you know i know that it becomes part of the the criticism or the commentary around it you know the everybody it's like what about that guy who you know who is that guy whatever but you know when i watch the thing like i have a hard time keeping all that stuff in my head. I didn't know you from anybody. And I, you know, I saw what the film was going to be in the first five minutes. And, you know, and I chose to lock in and, you know, what I come out with, you know, I think I got, we, you know, mentioned it earlier, you know, what was the through line and what I was supposed to get from it. But what I also got from it was, you know, these, it becomes very clear that, you know, when someone of color doesn't meet cultural expectations, that they will be,

they will face a punishment. Sure. No matter what it is. And that there's, there's a great, the power of silence is a form of protest. For sure. It's very beautiful. And in fact, somebody asked me last night, I did a little event that we showed the film. Mina Kimes from ESPN was the talkback guest after the screening, and she was great. And she has a lot of good questions. And she said, you know, how did you know how to read Lynch's silence as inherently political? And sort of what you've implied, like, I was born to understand that between growing up in the Bay Area, having very political parents,

having a lot of black men and women living in our house throughout my childhood as my parents, you know, they were just sort of free, you know, they would have free rent in our house. And again, going back to my little wound, stuttering. As a kid, I could hardly talk. And that basically, I know how much anger there is in silence, whether imposed or self-imposed.

And I feel like I locked in on Marshawn Lynch's silence, like super early on, like there was eloquence in that silence. You know, that's the through line in the film is it's this love song to Marshawn Lynch's politics by any means necessary. And instinctual. I agree with you. And very Oakland, incredibly Oakland. Right, he was like, you know, fuck you if you think I'm going to do what you want me to do. I'm here to play football.

Go fuck yourself. This isn't part of the agreement. And when it was imposed on him, he was still, fuck you, I play football. And I'll triple down on it. Yeah. Which, you know, in an amazing way is his assault on discourse. If there's a Trumpian assault on discourse over here where Trump for nefarious, I sort of love people who break the fourth wall.

Like that's, I just, you know, and I don't love Trump, but I got interested in trying to understand. I mean, I think a key thing of Trump is that he does break the fourth wall. Yeah. You know what I mean? All the time. And in a very, very different register, Lynch always breaks the fourth wall. Well, there's an interesting thing that in light of your book and me not knowing anything about sports is that there's a basketball star, Blake Griffin, who has started doing comedy. Oh, that's right. And he did a bit, and this speaks to another part of what you're dealing with, but it's not as loaded. But he did a bit with Fallon. I was on Fallon a couple weeks ago, and he was the other guest.

But he did a bit on Fallon about the problem with being interviewed post-game. Wow, I wish I had heard. You should go watch it. Was this doing panel or actually doing stand-up? No, it was panel. Because he played it out. Sure. He had Jimmy stand up and he stood up.

Uh-huh, that's a great bit. And he said to Jimmy, like, all right, just do like 15 seconds of jumping jacks or running in place. So he had Jimmy do this and then he goes, okay, stop. How do you feel right now? Exactly. That's a great bit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's the beginning of it. And Griffin's interesting because he's biracial and he's very good looking. Nice guy. And he's done a lot of successful commercials and that's fan. He's actually is doing standup now? Yes, he's actually doing standup now. Wow, that's amazing.

Yeah, yeah. And the absurdity, it'd be like, you know, the moment you came off set, you know, you did an hour and a half set. You know, it's so ridiculous because it's a very primitive, visceral, ecstatic pleasure. And you're going to ruin it. You're going to totally empty it out and turn it into platitudinous corporate business speak. You know, and it's like and Lynch is holding on to joy. It's so obvious. Yeah.

It's like the best part of that of the new Dylan movie, the Rolling Thunder, which I haven't seen yet. You should watch it because there's one moment that makes the whole fucking movie. I know it was genuine is I think he had just come off stage you know after performing the first concert and he's literally walking off stage and the guy with the camera says how do you feel and Dylan turns around and goes about what that's great that's a great Dylan is the progenitor of all this isn't he because you go back to um obviously authenticity is a bit of a fiction but I think what I'm interested in, what you're interested in,

what Marshawn Lynch is, is trying to be authentic. You're going to probably fail. There will be sort of fictional apparati that intercede. But I love art. I love people who are trying, at least semi-trying,

to be authentic. When you say authenticity is fiction, because I've been playing with that on stage a little bit, you know, with these words now, like authenticity, mindfulness, doubling down. Right. But for some reason those are normalizing.

Right. But this authenticity trip, which gets hung on me, and I don't mind it. Right. But there is, there's 23 more hours in my day after I talk to you. Right. So what does it mean? What do you mean when you say authenticity is a fiction? Well, that's obviously an enormous topic. I mean, I think that-

Well, tighten it up into a little packet. You're good at that. There you go. What's my little go-to aphorism here? Let's see. I mean, I just think, like, I guess I would just make the point that you and I are trying to have a real discussion. This feels more real than, of course, you being on Conan or whatever. Although, you know, it's more real. We're trying, you know, we'll swear, we'll be real, but we'll cough, we'll hiccup. And it's more real. But, you know, obviously, on some level, I'm still performing, that you're still performing. We are mask upon mask. We don't always know each other.

You know, we don't know ourselves. So I'm just sort of making that pretty standard postmodern point that it feels to me different. I don't know the kind of work I try and do and say a novel by J.R.R. Tolkien, where it's like it's trying to be as fantastic as possible. I'm trying to be as real as I possibly can, but let's not totally kid ourselves. I mean, there's finally my blood and bones, which will ultimately be dead. That's real, that I will die. That's right. And also, I think that- And then the work, the work is trying to be real, but I might lie at the edges. All of my nonfiction work

takes enormous poetic liberty. Well, I think also there's something about, despite whatever we do, no matter how authentic or whatever we're talking about in this moment, however present or real we are, we're still not necessarily really answering to what's going on in our heads.

Right. And how do we do that? You can't. I think we'd be in trouble if you could do that. But we try. For some reason, I think of like- But I think you do do it. I do do it.

I feel like I do it- I think the collage structure is as close as you're going to get to manufacturing that. There's a good word with that hard pressure on manufacturing. I mean, like, you know, my wife sometimes says, I mean, one nice thing that my wife says, she says, you know, like if we have to write a card to someone, say a condolence card or a thank you card, a card to someone, say a condolence card or a thank you card, you know, I just sort of, I just pull out a pen and we have a card and I just write something very direct. She goes, how do you do that in a sense? And I just feel like I have, you know, as they say, no filter. I have a relatively tight wire between what's in my head and what's in my hand. I just go there.

And yes, there are probably layers of bullshit there and layers of self-protection, but I just think, you know, 40 years of writing practice, I've built up a relatively tight connection between the stuff in my head, which I'm relatively not afraid of, and, like, that's what I'm going to say on the page. The reaction.

Yeah, and I think if people like the work, they're saying, I'll meet you halfway. This is a bridge across the abyss of human loneliness. Whereas sometimes with my work, especially a while ago, they would say, that dude's fucked up. It shields his problem. Whereas I want to say, it's all of our problem.

And I just have the temerity and stupidity to actually say it. Well, I'm glad you do. And thank you for talking. I think we did all right. I did too, Mark. Thank you so much. So that was, I thought that went well. I felt good after that um again the documentary we

were talking about marshall lynch a history is available on itunes amazon and vimeo his most recent book is the trouble with men reflections on sex love marriage porn and power that's available now let's kind of play some dirty guitar. Thank you. Boomer lives. It's a night for the whole family. Be a part of Kids Night when the Toronto Rock take on the Colorado Mammoth at a special 5 p.m. start time on Saturday, March 9th at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton. The first 5,000 fans in attendance will get a Dan Dawson bobblehead 5 p.m. start time on Saturday, March 9th at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton.

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