Wesley Morris: How Critics at Large See the Stories We Miss

Speaker 1 It's fascinating to look at when Superman movies come back and when they don't.

Speaker 2 When they do well and when they don't. And like,

Speaker 1 there's a moment when America's telling a story about itself being exceptional and fighting the Russians and fighting communism. Superman's the thing.

Speaker 1 And then that story like fades away. Superman fades away.
And then the Superman that becomes popular and comes out is like a gritty, non-Superman-y Superman.

Speaker 2 That's the Trump. That's the first Trump Superman.

Speaker 1 that's like the, and then now the new, now the American Superman sort of thing is like back, and the parents are even more folksy. And the, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 It's like, it's, it's interesting to think about like what we're experiencing in our world. And then the question,

Speaker 1 then the question becomes:

Speaker 1 is the art imitating life or is life imitating art?

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Speaker 1 you guys both have like old men names um you know

Speaker 1 no but it's true though yeah like wesley wesley's a very like not now name wes is a young person yeah yeah wes wes but wesley i would like to see the birth certificates because i'm sure they're not even bothering with the league no but think about it wesley is a is like an older name in that way and then eugene is also a name Supermature, not older.

Speaker 1 I mean, you can take it the way you want. I meant it not as a slow or a slight, because I don't see age.

Speaker 2 What do you see?

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, I was just talking about women's names that you're just never going to get again.

Speaker 2 Like

Speaker 2 Ethel. Ruth, Ethel, Margaret.
My grandmother's name was Martha. Oh, I like Martha.

Speaker 2 That's kind of not dead yet.

Speaker 2 There's an

Speaker 2 Hazel.

Speaker 2 But Martha always felt incomplete. Why? My mother, Martha Ann.
You see? Martha Ann. Yeah.

Speaker 2 That was her. Yeah.
Martha Ann. Everybody called her.
People called her Martha, but only if they didn't know there was an ann.

Speaker 1 If you knew it was Martha Ann. Then it was Martha Ann.
It was Martha Ann. Yeah.
Where's your mom from?

Speaker 2 Philadelphia. Okay.
Judith. There's another one.
My mother's name is Judith. My father's name is Arnold.

Speaker 1 Arnold can come back. Really?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 1 What do you mean, no? I'm all the time.

Speaker 2 When's the last time you met him, Arnold?

Speaker 1 Yeah, but guys, guys, all these names, and I'm actually, you're the perfect person to talk to about this stuff. Why? It's perfect to have these conversations with you.

Speaker 1 And I want to say thank you and apologize to you for not giving you like a full idea of why we're here.

Speaker 2 Right?

Speaker 2 I had been asking and then I was like, you know what? I trust these guys. Thank you.

Speaker 2 So you i'm here but not ordinary i'd walk into a blind environment and not know what i have been but for negroes i will do it

Speaker 1 for two negroes i will definitely i will do it so so let me explain right the reason i say you're the perfect person is because of what i would like this episode to be I was trying to explain to a friend the other day what a critic at large is basically doing.

Speaker 2 See?

Speaker 2 I am that friend. Go ahead.
No, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 But I was, oh, yeah, it was you.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 1 for a second, I was like, oh, you're taking the other?

Speaker 2 And I was like, oh, yeah. It doesn't look alike to you.
It was you.

Speaker 2 We're all one. It must have been another.

Speaker 2 We were all. It was, we are all one.
So. What office are you running for?

Speaker 2 Okay. Trevor Burrus.

Speaker 2 So. Not even Pete wouldn't even try that.
Yeah, Pete wouldn't do that.

Speaker 1 Don't slander Pete like him.

Speaker 2 Okay, okay. You were right here with him.
Don't slander Pete.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 1 what I was trying to explain was like your superpower and i genuinely think it's a superpower okay it is the ability to look at culture notice trends that other people may not necessarily be necessarily be noticing okay but then go beyond that and understand what the trend actually tells us when you correlate it with something else its origins it's its moments its significance and i know someone listening or watching this might be like wait what did you just say you'll see it unfold and names is like a perfect place right you just said

Speaker 1 which name is never Judith, is never coming back.

Speaker 1 Arnold is never coming back.

Speaker 2 Those are my parents' names. Nethel's an aunt.

Speaker 2 So good.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but I'm saying.

Speaker 2 I think we're holding a sea aunt here.

Speaker 2 Did she also

Speaker 2 like wearing purple?

Speaker 2 Ethel? Yeah. A hundred percent.
Ethel was basically purple. I see her in there.
But that's that's alcohol.

Speaker 1 So, this is what I mean.

Speaker 1 Names are like a perfect place to start this conversation in

Speaker 1 because there's a generation that'll have a name, right? Yeah. So, now we go, oh, there's no more Judiths, there's no more Ediths, there's no more this, there's no more that.

Speaker 1 Then I go, yes, but all it takes is one moment, one elected official, one famous athlete, one

Speaker 1 movie star, like a name, a character, something, and all of a sudden it comes back.

Speaker 2 Right? Yeah. I like this.
This is, I, this is definitely persuasive. There's one problem.

Speaker 1 Let's go.

Speaker 2 Well, I think that the cycle has basically begun to eat itself, right? Oh. So, like, it's a, it used to just be maybe a line, but now it's a circle.
So, you know. Explain the line.
The line used to be

Speaker 2 people would get born. Yeah.

Speaker 2 They would die. The names wouldn't get too crazy because everybody

Speaker 2 was essentially... well there were cert goals and then the the browner the gayer the the more

Speaker 2 the less

Speaker 2 from england ireland scotland okay germany

Speaker 2 became less than less eurocentric yeah the more

Speaker 2 the more interesting the names got in terms of spellings

Speaker 2 in terms of just the variety of options but i think culturally i don't know i don't know when to say this started, but it definitely feels like in the last

Speaker 2 20 years,

Speaker 2 I think that like when you're talking about like what you need as a very famous person to then change the name conversation. Yes.
But I mean, think about it.

Speaker 2 It's all Taylors and Jacobs and Travis's and Jason's and Trevors. And well,

Speaker 2 not as many Trevors. Don't do that.
Trevor still would be like, what a gift. Thank you.
Thank you, Wiz. Sorry, Wiz.
Thank you. Sorry.
What a what? A gift. Of what?

Speaker 2 Of just

Speaker 2 of a kind of variety. Eugene, dead.
Wesley, dead.

Speaker 2 Right, so.

Speaker 2 No, no, no, no. You're you're out.
You're the last, Eugene.

Speaker 2 I just, I don't know. Like, we're going to get a lot, a lot less interesting names.
And I think in this country, in terms of, you know, I, the play, a place to look is like, what are

Speaker 2 like people from other countries, like, especially Asian countries, what are they choosing as their like American name? Right.

Speaker 2 Like, what are, what are those names? Because

Speaker 2 I just want to live in a world where like Yun is just, that's the new James in the U.S.

Speaker 1 That is the name. Right.

Speaker 2 They're like white kids walking around being called Yune. But I don't know if we really want that, but like the

Speaker 2 odds are low because of the way assimilationism works here. Like the assumption is you won't get into college if he's young.
You won't get a job with some white people if he's young.

Speaker 2 So he's, he's James, period. And I think for his, for as, I don't know what lots of other cultures are doing, but predominantly, if you come here and you want to make it, you can't be Sandeep.

Speaker 2 You got to be Sandy. You got to be Sam.

Speaker 2 I think that still feels true. Like I've meet a lot of people south asians for instance who have not changed their names or changed them but like ascribed some given themselves some new name yeah um

Speaker 2 but in the meantime in order for the name thing to change like

Speaker 2 here's a here's a test how many baracks do you know only one

Speaker 2 right exactly i think there's something about i also was like naming your kid jesus in a way

Speaker 2 right it is a bit like it's very unique yeah we had the same thought yes yeah um you did yeah you just you said Jesus what else do you have I have um five thousand dollars what do you

Speaker 2 we don't have the same thoughts anymore

Speaker 2 so you was that a thought to get five thousand dollars or to like have in your possession five thousand dollars

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 i don't know i they there are there are interesting like things

Speaker 2 okay I mean, Donald, that's a dead name. I don't care how powerful, how how cataclysmic.

Speaker 2 Nobody. Donald's not.
I don't care how much they love this name.

Speaker 1 Donald has become too ubiquitous, or it's become like too singular.

Speaker 2 It's old-fashioned. It's just not a cool name.
Then why didn't Barack catch on? I don't know either. He was lovely.
I think that's too ethnic. It's considered too ethnic.

Speaker 2 Just think about the U.S., right? Just think about the way that Americans brainwash themselves into believing that things have to seem, sound, feel American.

Speaker 2 Yes, he ran the country for eight years. Yes, many, many people professed to love him, but the real test is, would you name a baby after this person? And I don't think even Donald,

Speaker 2 have you heard about Donald? No. I don't know what the, we should look up the top 10 names in the last like 10 years, but I don't believe Donald is among them.

Speaker 1 So you see, what you've just done now. is why I wanted to have a conversation with you and why I wanted to have you on.
My dream and my goal is that by the end of this episode, you help us.

Speaker 2 This episode?

Speaker 1 Yeah, this episode.

Speaker 1 You help us to understand

Speaker 1 or help us learn how to process the world through the lens of a critic at large. Because I'll try and break down what you do and you'll correct me on the other side of it, wherever I go astray.

Speaker 1 When I think of what a critic at large does,

Speaker 1 The first thing I do is I have to separate it from a critic generally.

Speaker 1 So a critic is somebody who is criticizing or commenting on the elements of any particular thing, food, movie, et cetera, et cetera. But that's it.

Speaker 1 A critic at large is somebody who is looking at society, all of the elements that are within that society, and then tries to notice how the shifts in that society are telling us a story that the society itself doesn't notice.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean? And

Speaker 1 so, like,

Speaker 1 when I was thinking of examples, actually, I'll play this out with you and I'll see if I'm if I if I have it right here. Okay.

Speaker 1 Would you write about

Speaker 1 the U.S. Open just

Speaker 1 coming back to New York for another year?

Speaker 2 No. Okay.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 1 Would you write about

Speaker 1 Sinna, Yannick Sinna beating

Speaker 1 just like a random person in one of like the early rounds?

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 Perhaps. Okay, but it's not, that's not a yes.

Speaker 2 I mean, it depends on who one of one. He played Dennis Shapovalov in like the fourth round or maybe the fourth round, I want to say.

Speaker 2 That was a good match. He took a set off him, maybe the third round.

Speaker 2 But no, that was, I mean,

Speaker 2 that would be a data point. I would make a mental note.
Okay. Remembering that Dennis Shapovalov got a set off Yannick Center.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Would you write about people's reaction to Carlos Alcarez cutting his his hair off.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 100%. That's the Ed Lajpad.

Speaker 1 No-brainer. Do you see what? You remember what I told you? So now, I would love for you to explain why, because you love tennis.
Yes.

Speaker 1 You are observing a U.S. Open as it's playing out.
Yes.

Speaker 1 Why is it that Carlos Alcarez cutting all of his hair off and the reactions to it is what you would write about at the tennis and not the tennis itself?

Speaker 2 Well, it's connected to the tennis. Yeah, of course it is.

Speaker 2 It's that the U.S. Open is the place where people do the weirdest stuff to themselves.

Speaker 2 I mean, just like a recent-ish history of weird clothes and hair at the U.S. Open.
There's a player named Dominic Rabati, H-R-A-B-T-Y,

Speaker 2 who showed up at the open. I'm pretty sure it was the Open.

Speaker 2 And he had

Speaker 2 his shirt had two vents in the back. They were like cut out of the shirt, like two holes, like where wings might maybe have once been.

Speaker 1 Like angel wings. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And he played,

Speaker 2 I mean, I don't know, he maybe lasted to the third round. He was one of those, Roboti was one of those players, like he could give you trouble.

Speaker 2 every once in a while and he would he would make it to the third round of just about every tournament um but he wore that outfit and it's like what

Speaker 2 It's the story here. And, you know, he just got him a lot of attention.
It was a weird thing to wear and it made no aerodynamic sense. He claimed, I think the claim was that it did.

Speaker 2 It helped his tennis. Okay.
It helped something about the airflow on his back and it just felt really good to hit a backhand.

Speaker 2 Serena,

Speaker 2 every great,

Speaker 2 terrible thing she ever wore pretty much happened at the U.S. Open.
Wow. So into this history of like things people wear at the U.S.

Speaker 2 Open comes Carlos Alcarez, who was wearing in his sort of purple getup, you know, purple magenta, whatever, get up, you know, standard, pretty good thing to wear at the open.

Speaker 2 But he shows up with a haircut. It looks like he got

Speaker 2 30 seconds before he got on court. Yeah.
You could still see no one.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was a fresh, fresh, fresh, fresh, fresh buzz, fresh.

Speaker 2 So what I saw at the final was not

Speaker 2 actually the final result. Yeah.
No. Well, the final, it's like funny story about the final is

Speaker 2 we learned how fast hair can grow.

Speaker 2 Because by the end of the tournament, he looked like himself again. Yeah.
So when was the haircut in listening to the

Speaker 2 claim was that he wanted his brother to touch up his haircut maybe that day.

Speaker 2 And, you know,

Speaker 2 made a mistake. This is why you don't, I mean, there, this is.

Speaker 2 You don't buy it. Oh, I believe it.
100% I believe it. Well, wait.
Oh, my God. Do I not believe it?

Speaker 2 I didn't even give it a second thought.

Speaker 1 I believed it.

Speaker 2 Eugene doesn't believe it at all.

Speaker 2 I don't buy it. There's something also I don't buy at the U.S.
Open that I'll talk to you about. Wait, wait, wait.
So you don't buy it at all. I don't buy it at all.
Why did it fake happen?

Speaker 2 Here's a critic at large.

Speaker 2 No, no, no. But tell me why you don't buy it.
Here's a critical question. But tell me why you don't buy it.
Having a conversation about it. About it.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Because I feel like there's certain sports or certain arts where you need to do something crazy to stand out. And I think cutting your hair

Speaker 2 is one of those. But nothing.
Having a mental breakdown and a meltdown and and wait for winning but don't go but wait don't go far yes oh that's what i want to do

Speaker 2 we can come back to that wait but my question here okay so yes i want to know

Speaker 1 why you think the person wouldn't just cut their hair and then because i mean the days are gone of athletes like being afraid why do you think he wouldn't just say yeah it's my new look

Speaker 2 because i think he knows what the impact would be

Speaker 2 of him appearing different.

Speaker 2 Here's my rebuttal to this, because I've thought about this.

Speaker 2 I didn't think that I didn't think the way you were thinking, so hats off to you.

Speaker 2 Because that is interesting. But what I thought was this is clearly a mistake because, first of all, it looks terrible.
It did. It looks like a mistake got made and they just decided, you know what?

Speaker 2 Shake the etch of sketch.

Speaker 2 Just, it never happened.

Speaker 2 You know, I'm going to say that to people who make mistakes now. Shake the etch of sketch.
Just, well,

Speaker 2 it is a great line shake the etch of sketch i mean just like we don't want to shake the etch of sketch anymore we're over we need to read keep drawing just keep turning them make something new don't shake it and then put it in the smithsonian and lock that up um

Speaker 2 no i thought It's got to be a mistake. You're in New York City.

Speaker 2 I don't know what the per capita barber situation is here versus the rest of the U.S. anyway,

Speaker 2 but there are more people who could give you a great haircut.

Speaker 2 And he's in Queens. Yes.
He could, I mean, I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 It's got to be a mistake, but also the idea that nobody said, like, like Francis Tiafo wasn't like, listen, when I'm in New York, here's where I go. Because you got to get a lineup or something.

Speaker 2 Just, you need to shape it up. Get a line.
Get something. Cause this is, this is not working.

Speaker 2 this is a mistake you can't go out there like that went anyway looked like he just fell out of a calf's butt is how is how fresh that haircut was he looked like he just got bored it just i don't know but what was interesting to me was that he addressed it and pseudo apologize and that's that's what made me think of you i went we don't expect this of you carlos

Speaker 2 yeah but you've got the best hair in men in men's tennis why would you do this to us

Speaker 2 That's the apostle. For exactly that reason.

Speaker 2 For exactly.

Speaker 1 Now you see, this is what I mean. This is what you're...
No, but this is what your brain does, though.

Speaker 2 But what were you thinking when you saw it?

Speaker 1 I won't lie.

Speaker 2 I wasn't thinking too deeply about it. Okay.
Because

Speaker 1 a few months ago, David Beckham was cutting his own hair. He cuts his own hair.
And then he was cutting his own hair, and then he messed up.

Speaker 2 And then I fall for these scams all the time.

Speaker 1 You calm down.

Speaker 2 You just calm down.

Speaker 2 Wait, what would the scam?

Speaker 1 And David Beckham just like, he was like, and he like just messed it up a a little bit. And then he made a video.
He's like, I messed up my hair.

Speaker 2 Oh, there we go. Right? But he, like,

Speaker 1 and then he just shaved it. I don't know what he did, but he like fixed it.
But he, he also did that. So I go, there's a good chance that you can mess up your hair.

Speaker 1 Carlos Alcareza's story made like boring sense to me. You're traveling, your barber couldn't get to you in the way you planned.
Yeah. So your brother's like, let me handle this.

Speaker 1 I've been in that situation where someone close to you is like, I got you. How hard can it be?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then they know firsthand how hard it can be using your head, right?

Speaker 2 They find out. They find out.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but that wasn't the thing that got me. The thing that made me think of you, because I knew you were coming on the podcast, obviously, was I went,

Speaker 1 why is this such a thing? They spoke about it the entire tournament.

Speaker 1 He kept on like acknowledging it. He had to keep on saying like, oh, what do you think now? And

Speaker 1 I found myself wondering, I was like, huh.

Speaker 1 What is this saying about the U.S. Open and the people who watch the U.S.
Open and the community of the U.S.

Speaker 1 Open that we don't know that it's actually saying or not saying, or like, is there a sport where the person wouldn't have had to address it? Would they ignore it?

Speaker 1 Would the commentators say anything about it? Like, what is it about that echelon?

Speaker 2 You know what I mean? I think it is a lot to do with who the person is and what the environment is, right? Like, think about

Speaker 2 where my brain goes when you put it that way. Yeah.
Is like

Speaker 2 NFL training camp 2012,

Speaker 2 I think,

Speaker 2 2011, 2011, probably.

Speaker 2 And Tom Brady shows up for camp, and he's got

Speaker 2 hair that comes down to here. This is a thing.
Nobody had seen this before. Why is Tom Brady's hair down to it? What's he trying to tell us? What's Giselle making him do?

Speaker 2 Because they were still together at the time. Like, it was a real story for like the first four games of the season.
Yeah. What is going on?

Speaker 2 And if he cuts the hair now, is it a Samson and Delilah thing where the season's over if he cuts it? It was a whole thing. Like, there are these occasions where a person's, where our idea of a person

Speaker 2 is challenged in some way because the person is like, you know what? Fuck it.

Speaker 2 I'm, I'm getting out of this prison. I want to, the thing that you think you love about me, I'm removing it.
Damn. I'm, I'm challenging it in some way.
It's not always hair or like clothes.

Speaker 2 It's like how I, how I, what roles I take.

Speaker 2 In Carlos's case, it was truly an accident, but he felt compelled to respond to it because he couldn't even win a match and go to a press conference without like the second question being,

Speaker 2 so what happened? Even though he had already addressed it. Like, this is a thing he's already talking about.
But then you start thinking about who else got bald?

Speaker 2 and had to like account for the baldness. It's usually women.
It's usually women who who get a haircut and then have to apologize for having gotten the haircut.

Speaker 2 Or

Speaker 2 what is a woman telling us when she does?

Speaker 2 I mean, Britney Spears, famous example of a woman who, you know, not, I mean, I guess you didn't appreciate how important the hair was to the getup until there was no hair. Right.

Speaker 2 Did Halle Berry go through such as well? There was a point where Halle Berry cut her hair off, right?

Speaker 1 When she cut it short.

Speaker 2 Right, it was short. Short.
And people were like,

Speaker 2 right. But she's still Halle Berry.
Like, it doesn't matter what Halle Berry does to her hair. Like, it just doesn't matter.

Speaker 2 Sigourney Weaver in that fourth Aliens movie, right? Like, what is Ripley, what is, what is going on, or the third aliens movie, I want to say. Is it the third one or the fourth one? I think

Speaker 2 the Winona Ryder one. Yeah.

Speaker 2 When women go

Speaker 2 short

Speaker 2 that way, it's just a scandalous thing.

Speaker 2 And it's usually received as some attempt to get closer to masculinity.

Speaker 2 But with Carlos Alcarez, because he's already so boyish, it just, it did, it neither toughened him up, it made him seem even younger somehow.

Speaker 2 Like, truly, like, he had just like

Speaker 2 climbed out of the call

Speaker 2 of,

Speaker 2 you know, that that

Speaker 2 protective coding that animals and people are born. Yeah,

Speaker 2 Like an alien movie, actually.

Speaker 2 And I think that, like, there was,

Speaker 2 it just was too much

Speaker 2 for people to accept that this had happened. And you could hear the buzzing when he took the first, yeah, took the court that first match.

Speaker 2 Like, you could just hear people being like, oh my God, what happened?

Speaker 2 What was he trying to say?

Speaker 2 But the truth is, like, he had to then say, I'm not trying to say anything.

Speaker 2 This was an accident.

Speaker 2 Hopefully by the end of the tournament, we won't be having this conversation anymore because I will have won it.

Speaker 2 And I was nervous that what I was really, the thing I would have tried to write about if I had jumped on it the night it had happened, because it was a night match.

Speaker 2 Because I sat on my sofa for about 20 minutes being like, should I do it? Should I do it? Should I do it? And then like, what should I do?

Speaker 2 And the story would have been

Speaker 2 seeing what night, what, like, if he makes it to round three. yeah like what round three is like like are we still talking about the hair is the hair still a story um

Speaker 2 so i sat there and i really thought about it but it was so clear i was like is it going to affect his play is it gonna like is he gonna be in his head about this um

Speaker 2 and it's just like a weird it's a burden that men never have to deal with right like is my appearance gonna cost me something oh damn And now, this is critic at large.

Speaker 2 Now, this is like a thing women always, I mean, in addition to all the other shit that women have to take on a tennis court with them, right?

Speaker 2 Like,

Speaker 2 you know, I hope my body cooperates.

Speaker 2 I hope I don't hear somebody say some stupid sexist shit in the third row, which happens not, I mean, I don't want to say not infrequently, but I've heard it.

Speaker 2 Like somebody saying something to Sabalenka about something.

Speaker 2 Amelie Maresmo, they called her a man.

Speaker 2 Would go to these tennis tournaments. I mean, they would just call her a man.
That's the thing she had to hear.

Speaker 2 I mean, maybe her whole career. Serena Williams, Venus Williams, the things that they, I mean, Sloan Stevens.

Speaker 2 Just like the things you have to put up with

Speaker 2 just because they're in earshot.

Speaker 2 Now here's a man. having to like explain his physical appearance in a way that I don't recall a male tennis player, male athlete really having to do.

Speaker 2 Unless you're Jokic

Speaker 2 or Luca, Luca Donchic,

Speaker 2 who it's the opposite problem. It's like he was being dogged for years for being overweight and then he

Speaker 2 lost a ton of it. Lost the weight.
And now everybody's like, well, I mean, I don't know how this is going to go. He lost the weight.

Speaker 2 This guy can't win.

Speaker 2 Like, got traded. Got into the best shape of his life because he needed to.
I mean,

Speaker 2 I don't know what Lucan needed, but like, it can't hurt that he's a bad shape. Oh, no, no.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's what LeBron said, right? He said he improved his longevity by years by dropping, I don't know the exact number, but it was, it was a pretty substantial amount. I think

Speaker 1 Stan to be corrected, maybe 20 pounds. Yeah.
Maybe

Speaker 1 it was just like it just, it just helped him last longer in the game.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, I liked that body because, you know, as a tennis player, that is Stan Vivrinka's body. Yeah.
Right?

Speaker 2 Like, Stan Vivrinka was built just like that, one, three majors against, you know, you know, during the big three era, beat all those guys.

Speaker 2 Did he beat Federer really in a meaningful way ever? No. But he beat Rafa and he beat Djokovic

Speaker 2 to win majors. And

Speaker 2 I don't know. I like that body.
But the idea that he now has to talk about it, he's going to spend however many months of the NBA season when it starts.

Speaker 1 Just talking about it.

Speaker 2 Just talking about like, you know, whether or not, depending on how the Lakers do,

Speaker 2 is it the new body? Does he need to get used to it?

Speaker 2 Is it just the wrong body for this guy playing this? You know, the dumb shit that people have to talk about. But men don't have to deal with it.
This is a woman problem.

Speaker 1 And so, wait, so what does it say that men are starting to have to deal with it then?

Speaker 2 Well, I don't know if they are. That's right.
I don't think they are. I think in this case, Carlos Alcaraz did.
Yeah, okay. But he could have caught him doing it.

Speaker 1 Oh, you're saying he could have just carried on playing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, none would have said anything.

Speaker 2 But now when you okay, okay so now i do think he was being asked about it that was the news right like this is now a thing that he has to it's the same this was happening simultaneously how about this the same tournament coco goff

Speaker 2 she was the other story of the tournament and that was the story of the tournament until she lost right they stop talking about alcaraz maybe by the third round yeah she loses in the fourth round and the story of the tournament is

Speaker 2 she's getting her serve fixed in real time.

Speaker 2 She's getting her forehand fixed in real time. Let us count the double faults.

Speaker 2 Let us keep track of every time Coco Goff double faults if she fixes her serve. She needed to fix it because she's got the most double faults on the tour.

Speaker 2 But she knows that and she's working on it. Maybe, because should she have stayed home and just worked on her serve until January?

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 2 That's not my business. But this this woman had

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 bravery, courage, determination to enter the tournament and see how this

Speaker 2 technique surgery was going in real time.

Speaker 2 And the tennis commentators, that's all they would talk about during her matches. That's all the press conferences were about when she won the matches.
And when she lost, she had to explain that too.

Speaker 2 It's just like, it's such a burden. It's such a burden having to, and this is not necessarily because she's a woman, but I don't recall any man

Speaker 2 changing how they play the sport that they play in real time

Speaker 2 and having to like constantly talk about it.

Speaker 2 And that, that gets in here. And I always worry with Alcaraz that, that all of that talk and self-explanation would get in his, get in his head.
But he played,

Speaker 2 he played, that was the best tennis I have ever. It was not the most exciting tennis, but he wasn't going to keep winning like this with exciting tennis.

Speaker 1 He just went in, he became a bull. He reminded me of Nadal in some ways.
It's like the Spanish

Speaker 1 pushing through similar outfit. But I want to go back to what you were saying about, I sat on the couch and I thought, should I write this? Should I write this?

Speaker 2 30 minutes.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And then you went, no, I'm not going to.

Speaker 1 I want to get into that.

Speaker 1 How do you decide what you should write and what you shouldn't write? Like, what was the last piece that you put out? Let's talk about that.

Speaker 2 Well, you know, well, it's funny because I'm making this podcast now. It's called Cannonball.

Speaker 2 And a lot of my time is being spent like figuring out, you know, how much time to spend making our show

Speaker 2 and how much time to spend writing these pieces.

Speaker 2 And I'm now at a place where like, I'm like, oh, I think I've struck a balance where writing, I can rate pretty much as often as I used to and still make this show.

Speaker 2 So the answer to your question, the last thing I think was published that was a piece that had nothing to do with the show was about how to look at art in museums.

Speaker 1 How to look at art.

Speaker 2 I'm going to be extra clear. How one should position oneself to not be cut off by some other art looker.
Right.

Speaker 2 Like how does one stand? How should one stand?

Speaker 2 How far away from a painting do I need to stand to keep your ass from cutting in front of me while i'm looking at it and to make sure i still enjoy the full yeah experience of

Speaker 2 i'm having a moment with this piece of art

Speaker 2 what like

Speaker 2 is it two feet is it yeah is it six inches you know i mean what now you see that that's such a left field turn for me

Speaker 1 why did you think that was significant art seems like such a like it's such a niche world it's such a you know, high-faluten world.

Speaker 1 Why did that...

Speaker 1 What were you, what did you get to in that piece

Speaker 1 that wouldn't be obvious when I read the headline?

Speaker 2 I think it's not the deepest thing I've ever written.

Speaker 1 No, no, no, but still, what did you well?

Speaker 2 I think it's just that everybody makes this mistake and nobody really thinks that it's a problem. It's the it's the it's the kind of etiquette, you know, I am probably

Speaker 2 15% Larry David,

Speaker 2 you know, only like oh no, no, really, because the 85% is why I'm I'm in this job and not, you know,

Speaker 2 doing Kirby or Enthusiasm. But I think the degree to which there's a Larry David in a lot of us,

Speaker 2 it meets up in these areas in which decisions are made on our behalf, allegedly to make them easier, but make them worse. I would identify packaging as this, you know?

Speaker 2 I mean, famously, there's a Kirby Enthusiasm episode.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the episode where he buys the scissors that open the package, but then he gets them in the package and he can't open the package without the scissors because the scissors to open the package are in the package to open packages.

Speaker 2 It is the deepest, realest, but obvious, most obvious,

Speaker 2 one of the most obvious problems we humans face is like how to get something out of something, how to like remove something from something else.

Speaker 2 But another one is each other. Like, how do we deal with each other? Like, strangers.

Speaker 2 How do we comport ourselves in public space? That's a huge Larry David question.

Speaker 2 And for me, I hate it when I am looking at a painting, a sculpture,

Speaker 2 whatever,

Speaker 2 whatever the museum is

Speaker 2 asking me to stand here and look at. And somebody's just like, boop, boop, boop, breaking this connection that I'm having with the work.
I'm not trying to take a picture with my phone. I'm

Speaker 2 looking with my eyes.

Speaker 1 You're standing there.

Speaker 2 You're standing for too long with, I've got places to go to you've been here for five minutes i've been behind you

Speaker 2 come on eugene have you ever seen a cue for and mona lisa does not count where's the cue oh guernica at at the prado there's another i've seen a line to look at how did you know that's my

Speaker 2 one thing that i want to see here is what kernica oh it's in spain are you being serious yes it's it you got to go to madrid But what is that painting that Picasso has at the United Nations building?

Speaker 2 Oh,

Speaker 2 what is that? You should go.

Speaker 2 You should go right now, though, because they're coming next week.

Speaker 2 UN week is next week. So get over there now.
I want to see that.

Speaker 2 Oh, there is a Picasso. That is Genica.

Speaker 2 It might be a replica of it. It might be.

Speaker 1 When you go there, you should stand there.

Speaker 2 Yes, that makes sense.

Speaker 1 And then I hope Wiz cuts in front of you.

Speaker 1 I would never go there. While you're staring at.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 1 what was your conclusion? What did you come to? What's the rule? How far should you stand? How long should you stand for?

Speaker 2 I just don't know.

Speaker 1 Were you wrong?

Speaker 2 Who was wrong? I mean, I'm sure there's a world in which, like, I need to get over myself. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm open.

Speaker 2 See, the thing about me is I am open to the possibility that there's another way. Okay, cool.

Speaker 2 Um, which is why I'm not a world leader. Um, and I'm just a critic because I know that there's there's another opinion or another way of doing things that might be better than the one I've got.
But

Speaker 2 I think that the I mean, conclusion: I think you should just swear

Speaker 2 it was removed. Oh, okay.
It was removed. It was ceremoniously sold.
Oh, sent back to the Prado. The Prado took it back.
Yeah. Okay.
Yeah, in 2022, it was

Speaker 2 ceremoniously removed. The Prado, it comes home to the Prado.
I mean, it really should be in northern Spain with the Bosque people, honestly. That's where it belongs.
It should not even be in Madrid.

Speaker 2 But we'll take it because the Prado is one of the great museums. More people will probably go to Madrid than go to wherever they would put it.
I mean, maybe

Speaker 2 at the Guggenheim Bilbao.

Speaker 1 Do you think all art should be back where it's from?

Speaker 2 No. That's a great question.

Speaker 2 That's deep. Trevor, what do you think?

Speaker 1 You can't throw it back to me.

Speaker 2 All right, I'll think I'm not. You said no.

Speaker 2 I feel like it's not art if it's with its people. I feel like it's art when it's not home.

Speaker 2 When people get to view something that doesn't belong there and they get to stare at it longer. It happens when people are people watching.
I love that. Someone looks unfamiliar, they stare longer.

Speaker 2 I love that. So it becomes, it has significance when it's not at home.
That's why I think it was more at home here because I've been doing my research about it.

Speaker 2 And the one part that I missed was the fact that I'm three years late. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 I didn't even know. It was when

Speaker 2 to inform me that it's gone.

Speaker 1 Okay, so I like this for you. So you're saying you don't necessarily think that art should go back to where it's...
It's got for anything exotic.

Speaker 2 I really

Speaker 2 do. I like this.
Women, home design, athletes. The way you guys speak about Alcarez now is reminiscent of the Spanish bull, like you guys were saying with

Speaker 2 Nadal, yes, he's foreign. There's no way anyone local would have captured you like this because anything exotic and foreign is always going to be attractive.
It's going to be look at this.

Speaker 2 I look at the Paganizonda, for example, and I'm like, what a horrible car. Those teardrop mirrors, those gear knobs, the metal, the clanky clank.

Speaker 2 I mean, we buy cars now because they're quiet, and you buy that thing because it's loud and there's metal clanking on metal inside with the gear levers. So I'm like, we love it because it's exotic.

Speaker 2 It's one of a kind and it's foreign. Anything foreign will do.
Ice cream is the same.

Speaker 2 Ooh, it's in

Speaker 2 lies. It's just not from.

Speaker 1 Okay, okay, wait. So let me think then.

Speaker 2 Anything foreign.

Speaker 1 So you want every art to go where it's not from? Yes.

Speaker 2 Well, wait.

Speaker 2 There are some complications here. Tell me.
Well, I mean, looted art, for instance. What is looted art?

Speaker 2 The Jews in Austria, Germany, Poland, who had the Nazis looted in

Speaker 2 the arts. They took all the art.
Got it. That got take, that wound up in museums.

Speaker 2 The museums claim, well, we didn't know. We didn't know the provenance of these great artworks, these climps and, you know, et cetera, et cetera, and

Speaker 2 these Modiglianis. We didn't know how they got here.

Speaker 1 But that's personally owned. That's theft to me.

Speaker 2 100%.

Speaker 1 To me, looting is more like...

Speaker 2 But I mean, just like think about, let's just, but I'm thinking about this as like absolutely philosophical. Okay, go, go, go.
Yeah, yeah, go.

Speaker 2 I want to present the maybe the worst worst case scenario sure

Speaker 2 what's the difference between looting and pooty

Speaker 2 that is a very valid question you're not wrong you're not wrong actually yes just don't loot the pooty

Speaker 2 just just don't do that that's no

Speaker 2 so

Speaker 1 i like the let's let's go into the philosophical idea here so

Speaker 1 art exists somewhere yes

Speaker 1 it is held by someone or something there's a moment in time it shifts it moves it whatever.

Speaker 1 I think we can break it down into. Wait, let's start by breaking it down into like a few categories, right?

Speaker 1 There are things that have been owned by people directly. Yes.
That was stolen from you during a war, during a raid, during a theft.

Speaker 2 That's just theft.

Speaker 1 I think we can all agree on that. It's like theft.
Yes.

Speaker 2 Okay. Looted.
Right. No, that's theft.
Theft. Okay.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 Is a class of theft.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but no, but what I mean is, like, by looted,

Speaker 1 let's say somebody goes to,

Speaker 1 like, Egypt is a great example of this.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, like, let's go to let's go to ancient civilizations.

Speaker 2 Yes,

Speaker 2 right.

Speaker 1 One of the big conversations people are having now is: should all the Egyptian art that is everywhere in the world be given back to Egypt? No,

Speaker 1 now you say no again, okay?

Speaker 2 I don't,

Speaker 2 well, okay, no,

Speaker 2 but there's an asterisk next there, next to the, next to my no, because

Speaker 2 I think who's who says, right?

Speaker 2 Does the Egyptian government say?

Speaker 2 Do the Egyptian people say, right?

Speaker 2 Does the Egyptian exhibitor class have a say?

Speaker 2 Like, who makes the decision about where the art that's already, like, for instance, at the beautifully redesigned ancient civilization sections of the Museum of Modern, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

Speaker 2 Wait, what? Oh, well, how long are you guys here? Till Sunday. Okay.
Eugene. Yeah.
Go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Speaker 2 And like in the wake of this conversation, and keep it in mind, as you walk through this, you know,

Speaker 2 very pristinely renovated

Speaker 2 portion of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where all of this great craft work, you know, civilizational craft work, they call them antiques. Antiques, no, we're not doing that.
Okay.

Speaker 2 This is art that's just old. No one outside the house looked at this and goes, it was old 300 years ago.
No, it's just

Speaker 2 in the possession of a major art collection and therefore blah, blah, blah. But antique implies for sale to me.
There's a, there's a, there's a, okay, there's a negative presentation.

Speaker 2 There's a, there's a monetary value associated with antique to me. All right.
Um,

Speaker 2 these are, these are great craft pieces

Speaker 2 that both tell a story of a people, of a time, of a place. Um, they've done a really good job of positioning where in the world and in time these

Speaker 2 pots and tiles and little

Speaker 2 tiny statues are from,

Speaker 2 you know, shields and

Speaker 2 everything, everything, everything. But the question is, like

Speaker 2 the way we've been talking, is does where should Sumerian art go back to?

Speaker 2 Right?

Speaker 2 Where should Babylonian art be returned to?

Speaker 2 You know, these great Western African pieces, like what nation, what nation? They claim to them, yeah. Right.

Speaker 2 So in that sense, it's it's funky to say, well, let the American institution have them because I don't know, they've taken really good care of them at this point. Yeah.

Speaker 2 The provenance of a lot of these things is really still in question, right? Like we don't know, we don't, we neither, we need, we know neither the makers' names

Speaker 2 or

Speaker 2 in some cases, how they got in these collections.

Speaker 2 Well, we know, sorry, how do I put this? We know,

Speaker 2 by and large, it's a white person, who the white person was who went, you know, the stories that these places tell are like, you know, this very rich person liked to go off and load up his Jeep with

Speaker 2 spears and shields and skulls and stuff.

Speaker 2 And in a moment of absolute absolute generosity, he dumped some of it at

Speaker 2 the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Exactly.
Smithsonian.

Speaker 2 So, like, the thing that I love about

Speaker 2 no matter where the art winds up is responsible institutions will tell a story of where it was and how it got to be where it is. Yeah,

Speaker 2 right. And the sort of the mythos, the mythos of the pieces becomes important to the way the art is framed and positioned.
To want it back for the sake of having it,

Speaker 2 it kind of only gets you so far with art. Exactly.

Speaker 2 Especially with older art, because there's a story that you're then, I think, responsible for telling. I think art is sometimes meaningless without it being attached to some suffering of some sort.

Speaker 2 Pieces being stolen, an artist that cut off his ear because he was frustrated. Yeah, I mean, you're not wrong.

Speaker 1 The Mona Lisa is the Mona Lisa.

Speaker 1 It was nothing, really.

Speaker 2 Not nothing.

Speaker 1 Let's, you know, let's calm down, Trevor.

Speaker 2 This is like me. I went to a party once it was like, the Constitution's a stupid document.

Speaker 2 I had like 17 gay men looking at me like.

Speaker 2 I'm just saying, I think that, like,

Speaker 2 following a meant me, anyways.

Speaker 1 I'm not saying it, I'm not saying it's, but I do find it interesting to exactly what you just said, that the Mona Lisa owes a lot of its fame to the fact that it was stolen.

Speaker 1 And that begins its journey of before that, there was no lion,

Speaker 1 there was no famous anything. It was just one of the paintings.
But when the painting got stolen, the law of the painting made it what it is today.

Speaker 1 And so many, many art scholars will sort of argue, you know, obviously there's the mainstream, they'll go like, no, no, this is, it's the Mona Lisa, and it means this, and it means that, it means that.

Speaker 1 And then others will go, like, actually, this thing wasn't anything special in that that way yeah until it got stolen and when it got stolen it became this story of like the greatest art heist and where's this painting and what is the and why was it stolen so it's interesting that you say that because sometimes that is you know like to come back to like a critic at large it's like it's funny how these things are shaped in ways that we often don't look at

Speaker 1 oh yeah but even art

Speaker 1 and value and not like when you said that you said these people are generous driving a jeep going and picking up spears and shields and dropping them off at a museum anonymously no no, no.

Speaker 1 The first thing I think of beyond anonymously is I think to myself, what a brilliant way to create value for your collection. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 So if I went somewhere in the world and I found six pieces of ceramic art wherever I am from 500 years, 1,000, 3,000 years ago, what better way to make that ceramic collection more valuable than by giving some of it to a museum?

Speaker 1 Because if I give them three pieces and I keep the remainder, those three pieces can become prominent because they're on display and they get a story told.

Speaker 1 And then someone will be like, we still wonder where the other pieces are.

Speaker 2 And then you're like, ah, look who has the other piece. Surprise, surprise.
And you create, you can create, you can create value that.

Speaker 1 And I'm not even saying it in like a conspiracy way.

Speaker 1 I just, you can create, it's the same way artists, big, great artists, will have some of the biggest jumps in their prices and their prestige when their art is on display.

Speaker 1 in these museums and in these these galleries. The art was already there.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 But because it is now in this space, it's hallowed in a different way.

Speaker 2 But this is now raising these other concerns to me. Like, we have not quite settled the question of, like, does Egypt get its shit back?

Speaker 1 No, but here's the question. Actually, you know what? You know what? I wonder.
This is, I like that you both asked the question through the lens of people,

Speaker 1 but I didn't hear either of you ask the question through the lens of time. And I think that's actually the more complicated one to answer.
Right.

Speaker 1 Is like, what I mean by this is:

Speaker 1 if your people, your family, your city, city, your country, your whatever you want to use, have agreed or done something in a different time to you, whose time gets to supersede the other person's time?

Speaker 1 So this is what I mean. There was a time when the Egyptian government welcomed

Speaker 1 archaeologists from England

Speaker 1 who were funded by some rich person who just wanted to have like stuff nobody else had.

Speaker 1 They paid for all of these expeditions and they paid for the like they were the ones who were like, yeah, go and do this because we get to benefit from what you're doing in some ways, but that's a time.

Speaker 1 And then you find like today's government, not just of Egypt, of any country, might go, no,

Speaker 1 we want our stuff, but you were given it by another time. And that's where I think it actually becomes more complicated.

Speaker 2 Yes, 100%.

Speaker 2 Because again, like who who adjudicates? Who votes? Yes. Like what,

Speaker 2 you know, I think with respect to time, I think you learn from it. Right? Yeah.
You just

Speaker 2 give the looted stuff back to the people, the descendants of the people from whom it was stolen.

Speaker 2 But I think maybe we're talking about a statute of limitations. Yeah.
Like there's a statute of limitations, and anything,

Speaker 2 let's just, let's just, I don't, there could actually be one, and I don't know, but I've never heard of

Speaker 2 these collections spoken of in this way. But like, let's just say that the statute of limitations is like a century,

Speaker 2 right? Yeah. There's like beyond a certain point in

Speaker 2 1900 with exceptions for

Speaker 2 looting

Speaker 2 or theft, right? Like just outright theft. But that's sort of more of a

Speaker 2 that is a sort of interpersonal

Speaker 2 legal question, whereas we're talking about kind of international law.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm talking more like a thing that didn't even happen between people per se. Right.

Speaker 2 I think that a statute of limitations really does kind of make the make the questions of claim and

Speaker 2 reappropriation a little easier, easier to adjudicate. And so I would say that anything that is in these great museums or even like these small museums,

Speaker 2 but it's work that

Speaker 2 has no known owner.

Speaker 2 you know, no known maker.

Speaker 2 Just leave it. And when I was...

Speaker 2 Sorry to disturb you here. No, no, no.
We were talking about houses. Someone was renovating a former school building to become their own personal house.
They went antique shopping.

Speaker 2 They found pieces, decorated the house. Very beautiful.
And myself and Ryan said, if someone buys this house two years from now, they'll look at all of this as trash.

Speaker 2 They'll be like, what?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 But that person was like, I love these things. These things are so beautiful to me.
And here's the thing for me with African art, West African art, and all those places, and also Egyptian art.

Speaker 2 And like, there's two distinct differences that I draw here.

Speaker 2 West African art and that kind of art, East African art as well. How sure are we that when it was acquired, it was art?

Speaker 2 It could have been an art and crafts market, and a European was walking around going, I like this, I like that, I like this. There was no museums, these were things that were used by people.

Speaker 1 They bought a plate from a flea market.

Speaker 2 Yes, if you bought, if you got yourself as a sailor all those centuries ago a Ming dynasty vase, you probably bought it. You didn't have to steal it.

Speaker 2 Where are you going to run to clanking, clanking, clanking with a gigantic ceramic vase?

Speaker 2 I don't think they were running anyway. Exactly.

Speaker 2 They just put it in a bag and walked. And Trevor said it quite well with the Egyptian art.

Speaker 2 And I think the Egyptian art, even the battle of getting the art back, does a lot for Egypt and its popularity than getting the art.

Speaker 2 I mean, than getting the, because that is not art that was stolen there. It was stuff from the valley.

Speaker 2 Yes, and burial rituals. And the mask of Tutankhamun, which I'm a big fan of.
I've seen it in a couple of exhibitions, the copy of it, is what made me interested in the story of Egypt.

Speaker 2 I think Tutankhamun as a king, he didn't do much to be lured as a great leader of Egypt. In fact, he wasn't a leader long enough for Egypt.
It was just the process by which.

Speaker 2 But the mystery of the chariot and the mask

Speaker 2 and the burial chamber is what attracts me to Egypt. So, if anything, it made me realize that there's a great king, Khufu, who's done far more who built the pillars of the future.

Speaker 2 It's the stories, it's truly the story of the lore of the pieces themselves that

Speaker 2 sort of create an interest, not only in the pieces, because you know, it's crazy that, like, I don't know how I became the person who's now talking about artifacts in museums because

Speaker 2 that's the part of the museum I always skipped, right? I'm just in love with somebody right now who that's one of his favorite parts of the museum. No, you can't.

Speaker 2 No, we just met, but give me a second.

Speaker 2 Just give me a second. I can see it.
Okay. I can see it.
But just hold on.

Speaker 2 I feel like

Speaker 2 now I go and I'm really paying attention to all the stuff that I'm asking these questions.

Speaker 2 I'm much more aware of

Speaker 2 or I'm much more

Speaker 2 unsure of and questioning what the difference is between craft and art, right? There's no doubt, there's no doubt, there's no doubt that these people are artisans, right? Yes.

Speaker 2 I mean, because it's the question around, you know, the way that they, the way that

Speaker 2 all diasporic black people are sort of talked about, what inheres in us and what we had the skill, education, knowledge,

Speaker 2 prolonged experience to do, right? It wasn't that, you know, for instance, you know, enslaved Africans just

Speaker 2 were born knowing what to do with soil. Exactly.
They had to, this was a cultivated knowledge that took centuries of

Speaker 2 studying, learning by trial

Speaker 2 to figure out. And so I think that the point at which artisanship

Speaker 2 yields, can yield the craftsmanship, right?

Speaker 2 Or the places in which craft and art meet, sort of where they meet,

Speaker 2 those are the the places in these artifact collections that

Speaker 2 I'm fascinated by because the parts stand in for a whole. And you kind of need one, you need these big institutions in some way to have the capacity to have enough pieces to tell a story.

Speaker 2 So the reason I love these places now is like, oh, plates, forks, bowls.

Speaker 2 but but i'm like wait a minute yes they had tuesdays yes they had thursdays like they

Speaker 2 they ate with utensils yes yes with vessels and i would love to know what they look like they took time to paint these these ceramic bowls yeah you know like just there will be times when i'm sitting there looking at a comb and i'm just like wow

Speaker 2 They took the bone

Speaker 2 and just, I don't know how you turn a bone into a comb, but like, but they did it. Somebody did it.

Speaker 1 Don't go anywhere because we got more what now after this.

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Speaker 1 It makes me think of the idea that maybe the mistake we make sometimes in society is we search for a concrete answer that will that'll exist for all time

Speaker 1 but maybe the answers are always shifting

Speaker 1 and if we can if we can get comfortable with that, if we can get comfortable with that, maybe then we'll be better at answering the questions because we understand that the question is not permanent.

Speaker 2 Trevor,

Speaker 2 you should just run. Just run.
Run away.

Speaker 2 From here.

Speaker 1 No, because here's why I say this. Okay.

Speaker 2 That's a good one. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I love what you just said about stories and arts and the people. Because

Speaker 1 let's start with, you know,

Speaker 1 a simplistic idea of where this journey begins.

Speaker 1 there's a tribe somewhere in africa they're making their crafts pottery pottery yes plates whatever they're making jewelry you know the zulu were smelting gold long before europeans were etc etc so they're just doing their thing and mapungubi they were making rhino statues exactly exactly so they're just doing their thing

Speaker 1 At that point, I would argue, a lot of the stuff that they have is not art.

Speaker 2 I would argue, right?

Speaker 1 You find some of it is, but I think for the most part, it's just a thing that they're making. it's crafts and they're enjoying it.

Speaker 1 Then you

Speaker 1 develop a world where there's now global trade and then, obviously, pillaging as well, right? The two coexist at the same time. So, some stuff is traded.

Speaker 1 So, the Europeans bring hair dye and they bring different spices and they ding and then they get traded, mirrors, and but whatever, people are trading, people are trading.

Speaker 1 So, some things go legitimately, some things go illegitimately, as in they're taken, okay?

Speaker 1 They go to museums, they exist in different places, then people's houses, they you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 I would argue at the time when Africans are making this stuff originally, it doesn't hold that much value even to African people because they're just making it and they're making it at the time.

Speaker 1 I mean, no, but now, but now it then leaves after a combined period of both trade and pillaging.

Speaker 1 Other people presented in their museums telling a story, whatever.

Speaker 1 But I think when Africa is now in a place where the narrative about it is that it can get nothing done, It has come from nowhere. It means nothing.
It has no intelligence. It has no advancement.

Speaker 1 It has no... Now all of a sudden,

Speaker 2 that plate, that comb,

Speaker 1 that statue is no longer just a plate, a comb, or a statue. It's now proof

Speaker 1 that these people

Speaker 1 whose stories were stolen, actually happened.

Speaker 1 It's now like, do you get what I'm saying? So now it becomes, even beyond art, I can see it now being, you know, like in a

Speaker 1 civilization. Exactly.
And in a perfect world, I would almost argue that a New York museum should go, Hey,

Speaker 1 we have a bunch of your stuff, but right now, the stories that are being told about you are that you've never had stuff.

Speaker 1 So we're actually going to give you this stuff so that you have an opportunity to showcase to your people and to other people who come to you

Speaker 1 the fact that you had stuff.

Speaker 2 See, I actually think it's the converse of what Eugene's saying.

Speaker 2 Because

Speaker 2 I think, I mean, I think both things can be true. I think that a people needs to know its story and the value of the story, right?

Speaker 2 That the artifacts represent a whole that kind of dignify or re-dignify a people.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 re-dignify, yeah.

Speaker 2 And I also think it is important to advertise the dignity

Speaker 2 to the world

Speaker 1 of these of these other sounds.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, no, that's true.

Speaker 2 Because, you know, I just will say as a, as a black American,

Speaker 2 the, the, the points of pride just to stay in the museum space, right? The idea that some curator

Speaker 2 thought to put a Horace Pippin painting. Well, no, in the Prado, in the Prado, in Madrid,

Speaker 2 there are no, there's very little African-American art. There's lots of American art, very little art by African-Americans.

Speaker 2 There's a Horace Pippen

Speaker 2 that is just in the

Speaker 2 American 20th century art section.

Speaker 2 It's just sitting there next to Ad Reinhart

Speaker 2 and,

Speaker 2 you know, I don't know, Mel Gusow.

Speaker 2 And, wait, Mel Gusow is a critic at the New York Times. Forget that.

Speaker 2 He should be there. Like, he should not be there.

Speaker 2 Like, right next to Joseph Stella. Right.

Speaker 2 And this, like, Horace Pippen is just like a little tiny or not insignificantly sized Horace Pippen. It's just among these great white artists.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it just fills you with pride. Like, I came all the way over here, didn't need to see any black.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But here we are.

Speaker 2 Just like a great and it's like it is a story. You know, I don't remember which one, which, which Pippin is at the Prado, but it's a, or is it a Bearden? Now I'm just all over.

Speaker 2 You can just say names, and I'm going to stay here because I don't know.

Speaker 1 I don't know the names of any artists.

Speaker 2 I believe it's actually not Horace Pippen, it's Romer Bearden.

Speaker 1 You can call it, you can say Judith, you can say Arnold. You can, I'm just going to be like,

Speaker 2 there's a great Romero Bearden that lives at the Prado.

Speaker 2 And it's just there among all these great artists and these great white American artists. But he's just, to the Prado, an American artist.
Yes. Right? They're not like the great black artist,

Speaker 2 you know, Romer Bearden. He's just like, this guy's the same as everybody else in this room.

Speaker 2 They, we probably don't, we might know he's bull, I mean, at the museum, they know, but like, they're not, that's not the story they're telling. The painting tells the story.

Speaker 2 Um, but I think there's a real power in

Speaker 2 letting these, like,

Speaker 2 I guess the sort of literary poetic term is like, um like it's a metonym it's like a piece that can stand in for the whole and that piece signifies something to everybody who bothers to go look in the look in the vitrines and you know like me who skipped it for years and years and now like you know i want to talk about indonesian art let's just talk about it because

Speaker 2 I didn't have any feelings 10 minutes ago, but I got a lot of feelings now because I spent two hours just walking around looking in these cases. I have a lot of questions.

Speaker 1 Is that why Trump and his people are so

Speaker 1 adamant about Trevor?

Speaker 2 You know the answer.

Speaker 1 No, no, no. I don't necessarily know the answer.
I never assume that I know the answer.

Speaker 2 You have a sense.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but that doesn't mean I know it.

Speaker 2 But complete your thoughts. Sorry, I know.

Speaker 1 We might get further together.

Speaker 1 We talk about the world of art and these museums. They're very hoity-toity.

Speaker 1 Most people would go like ah who cares and who doesn't i found

Speaker 1 i found it particularly interesting

Speaker 1 that like trump and his close cohorts took a special interest in museums on day one basically i was like this is such a who cares world is is what people often say

Speaker 2 I was like, why does he care about this so much?

Speaker 1 Why does he care so much about what the exhibits are and more importantly, what the exhibits say.

Speaker 2 I think you have the answer.

Speaker 1 Do you get what I'm saying? No, but what it made me realize is

Speaker 1 as much as people

Speaker 1 will roast Trump and maybe his people for being uncultured and uncouth.

Speaker 1 I was like, what do they realize about art and its power

Speaker 1 that a large swath of the population doesn't?

Speaker 2 You get on the side. Oh, 100%.

Speaker 1 Like, most of the time, when people have conversations about museums and galleries, people are like,

Speaker 1 artists such a niche, da-da-da. But for Trump on day one to go, yo, museums, we need to.

Speaker 2 He's not saying my kid could do that.

Speaker 2 He's saying

Speaker 2 this shit is powerful.

Speaker 1 That's what I mean.

Speaker 2 And it needs to be stopped. Right.
And you know what's crazy? I don't know if you remember this. He went to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture,

Speaker 2 like

Speaker 2 the month after the inauguration,

Speaker 2 got a tour from Lonnie Bunch,

Speaker 2 like who's now the, who now is the director of the entire Smithsonian system.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 he left the tour and like gave remarks and was like, you know,

Speaker 2 this was some powerful shit.

Speaker 2 I don't think I saw everything, but I'm going to come back. And

Speaker 2 Everybody needs to see this because this is a very important American story. This is very important.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 you know, there's a lot to be proud of here, but you know, there's still, I mean, I'm now paraphrasing, but like, there's a lot of work to do. And this museum is an important part of that work.

Speaker 2 Lonnie, I salute you. This museum's a real success.
Wow. Can't wait to get back.

Speaker 2 To your point, the question isn't why is he doing this now?

Speaker 2 The, the, I mean, you kind of, you are right, Trevor. Like,

Speaker 2 he's doing it because he already knows

Speaker 2 the power. Now, the real question.

Speaker 1 I love the fact that, because I didn't know that part of the story.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 No, I only knew the part where like Trump very recently said, hey,

Speaker 1 National Museum of African American History and Culture,

Speaker 1 you guys better get your shit together and stop being so anti-whites, right? That's like basically the

Speaker 1 mandates. He was like, you are very, very anti-white.

Speaker 1 And the way you make it seem like slavery was just white people, it's not cool, man. Who else?

Speaker 2 It's not cool.

Speaker 2 But now,

Speaker 1 the way you tell the story,

Speaker 1 but the way you tell the story now almost feels more like it's weird that, like, what? He was like walking through this museum.

Speaker 2 I have been thinking about this. Like,

Speaker 1 what was he doing when he was...

Speaker 2 Do you get what I'm saying? I really have been thinking about this.

Speaker 2 And I don't know.

Speaker 2 I don't know what,

Speaker 2 you know, there's a kind of person who just doesn't have the patience to try to sit in his brain to figure it out, but I want to. Like, I'm not scared to be in there, right? Like, I have a shower.

Speaker 2 I know how it works.

Speaker 2 I,

Speaker 2 but I think that, because I do think that to the extent that he is like no other American,

Speaker 2 he also is quintessentially, deeply,

Speaker 2 like, inexorably

Speaker 2 like the apotheosis of America.

Speaker 1 The what?

Speaker 2 The apotheo, like the sort of ultimate example of something. Wow, yeah.
Damn, apotheosis. Well, quintessential, no, in some ways, because quintessential implies

Speaker 2 that there's something to measure you against. Well, preservable.

Speaker 2 Like, worth, worth, like, this is the quintess, this is like the absolute essential. Now, I could be displacing my own feelings about my own

Speaker 2 word choices. I would not use

Speaker 2 quintessence or quintessential to

Speaker 2 describe Donald Trump, unless we're like talking about the quintessential cheeseburger eater, right?

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 2 Wow, wow, wow. He went from the porter to the cheeseburger eater.

Speaker 2 I just said the quintessential cheeseburger eater. Okay, can you? I'm going to use them for somebody.

Speaker 2 You've just got to walk past somebody having a meal and be like, well, well, well, if it isn't the quintessential cheeseburger eater. Oh, my goodness.
Who isn't the hamburger, by the way?

Speaker 2 Can't be the hamburger.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 2 But I think that, like, he is, like, he is the apotheosis of this country in many ways, right?

Speaker 2 He is, he is the, he is a very good example. There are lots of, like, great Americans.
Trump is, Trump at the end of the day, no matter what you say, is, is one of the great Americans in

Speaker 2 the purest sense of the word great.

Speaker 2 It is enormous. It is vast.
It has great capacity to contain lots of aspects, things, ideas,

Speaker 2 moments. Wow.

Speaker 2 And I think,

Speaker 2 oh, God, like in his mind,

Speaker 2 to just be in there for a second.

Speaker 2 You know, to listen to him talk about the things he thinks he deserves, the Nobel Peace Prize,

Speaker 2 Montrushmore, Mount Rushmore, the Kennedy Center Honor,

Speaker 2 there's a world in which I think,

Speaker 2 depending on like how depending on what the Smithsonian

Speaker 2 body chooses to do in response to the threat,

Speaker 2 I think there's a world in which, you know, forget the presidential library. Like, one of those museums becomes his.

Speaker 2 Right. And it is filled filled with

Speaker 2 not just his version of American history, but the history of him.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 He thinks, I mean, it's, I don't, I can't recall a person who simultaneously, you know, I'm not a historian. Like, I'll let like the Smithsonian staff like come at me when I say this

Speaker 2 because they would know better than I would. But

Speaker 2 I can't think of a living person of that level of prominence with that degree of power who also

Speaker 2 simultaneously knows nothing about

Speaker 2 history, but also has a deep understanding that he is making it as he goes.

Speaker 1 That's fascinating. What a conundrum.

Speaker 2 Right? Yeah. And so he

Speaker 2 I'm going to say he doesn't like that history, not only because

Speaker 2 it

Speaker 2 defaces white people, like blames white people.

Speaker 2 It's that he honestly can't imagine himself in that story. He can literally say he never owned slaves, right? He can say he never enslaved anybody.
He can't say he never rented to a black person.

Speaker 2 He can't say. He can't say,

Speaker 2 I never, he can't say, I never didn't. He can't say, I never denied a home.
You You know, there are lots of things he can't say he didn't do. He can't imagine himself.

Speaker 2 He cannot, he can't, he doesn't have the empathy

Speaker 2 to

Speaker 2 understand

Speaker 2 the degree to which, or he's denied himself access to that, to an empathy, because he, he performed it once.

Speaker 2 He went on that tour and came back and was like,

Speaker 2 works for me.

Speaker 1 So I think

Speaker 1 you might be a little more generous in your reading of him than I would be.

Speaker 2 Probably, probably. I am.

Speaker 1 I no and I'll tell you why I'll tell you why I the thing that

Speaker 1 in many ways scares me more with Donald Trump is

Speaker 1 I feel like he is completely shaped By the people he is with at any given time that's true. That is true.
That is true. That is true.
And so I think

Speaker 1 his worldview in any given moment can change depending on who is next to him telling him the story.

Speaker 1 Now someone will go, no, but he's been pretty consistent. He hasn't really been.

Speaker 1 In fact, he's shown these blips of inconsistency that like one of them was,

Speaker 1 do you remember when there was that bombing in Syria? I've got to get more specific, but it was the image of a kid who his face was covered in white ash and dust.

Speaker 2 And it was this image of this young boy in an ambulance.

Speaker 1 And this picture went around the world. And that's when Trump was like, he launched a strike against Syria.
Do you remember? And people,

Speaker 2 I didn't remember the question.

Speaker 1 This was his first term. And he was very proudly even then saying,

Speaker 1 we're not going to get involved. He's like, we're not fighting.
No fights for us. Nothing for us.
Not getting involved. And then he launched a strike.
Right.

Speaker 1 And then they said to him, what changed?

Speaker 2 And he said, Ivanka showed me a picture of the little boy. So sad.

Speaker 1 Little boy.

Speaker 2 No, but that little boy.

Speaker 1 And I remember at the time, a lot of people were like, oh, he doesn't care. And I was like, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 He did. And that it's a weird thing, but he did because Ivanka showed him the picture, right? It's the same way he didn't toe the line.
Do you remember when

Speaker 1 the images were coming out from Palestine of the children starving? And then Netanyahu was like, no, no, no, these images are fake. This is not a thing.

Speaker 1 Someone showed it to Trump, and then he, they asked him, and he's like, he's like, those are real. I know, Star, that's real.

Speaker 2 You can't lie about that.

Speaker 1 It's terrible. It's terrible.
And it completely went against his position, quote unquote. And you see it with all of these things.
Like, I've seen Trump.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, you've seen these moments when Trump gets surrounded by, like, let's say,

Speaker 1 the heads of HBCUs or something.

Speaker 2 Oh, well, the famous, yes.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Trump is in a room with famous people and they're telling him something. Trump will walk out of that room and he'll be like, What has happened to African American terrible, terrible times?

Speaker 1 And we got to fix it. We got to change it.
We got to fix it.

Speaker 1 And people go, Oh, but then he doesn't do it. And I'm like, Yeah, but I know this sounds crazy.

Speaker 2 If you took his administration and just replaced it with, like, yes, the Obama, the Obama people,

Speaker 2 yes,

Speaker 2 we would be in a different situation.

Speaker 1 But that's what I mean, because I found every time, because remember, the HBCU presidents visit him, but they don't stay with him.

Speaker 2 What is the HBCU? Historically black colleges and universities. Spelman, Howard, you know, Fisk.
I mean, many, many others.

Speaker 2 Historically black universities. There was a famous moment in, I believe, 2017.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Where all of these, was it 2017?

Speaker 2 Where all of, you know, the presidents and chancellors of all these historically black colleges and universities are going to the White House for what they think is just like a, like a, like a visit.

Speaker 2 And at some point, they, I don't know how this happens to people, but it happened, it apparently happens a lot.

Speaker 2 They're going for a visit, and then all of a sudden, they're walking down a hall and a door opens and they're in the Oval Office. Yes.

Speaker 2 And these 20-something, like very senior, very executive-oriented Negro people

Speaker 2 find themselves in the Oval Office with Donald Trump. It's who is, you know, ready to take a picture.
I don't, the meeting did not occur in the Oval Office. This is a photo opportunity.

Speaker 2 And there's a very famous photo

Speaker 2 of these people standing around, some of them looking really like,

Speaker 1 yeah, what just happened?

Speaker 2 Are you fucking

Speaker 2 and Donald Trump? It's an amazing photo because Donald Trump is standing at the desk

Speaker 2 and just looking so pleased with himself. Like, I got him.

Speaker 2 I got him. Look at this photo.
It's amazing. I can dine out on this photo for four years.

Speaker 2 And the composition of it is great.

Speaker 2 Like his tie clears the death. debt.
It's just an amazing image.

Speaker 2 But to your point, like

Speaker 2 if those people were also suddenly, if they also found out that day, by the way, guys, guess what? You've got new jobs.

Speaker 2 You're no longer going to be heads of these elite universities, these great black American institutions. You're working in Trump administration.
Good luck.

Speaker 2 I actually think

Speaker 2 if those, if the people who found themselves, I mean, I guess that's slavery, actually. That actually is exactly how it's just

Speaker 2 a surprise. One minute people were walking, the dogs were there, the next day they were there.
They're important, powerful people.

Speaker 2 And the next minute, they're working for some white man forever.

Speaker 1 But let's say in this instance.

Speaker 2 But let's just say in this instance, like they signed a document and there was a paycheck involved and they had the hospital say no, but they sweetened the deal. Whatever.

Speaker 2 Just let's play Twilight Zone for one second.

Speaker 2 Like,

Speaker 2 how different would things have been according to your theory of his impressionability? Yes. Would it have been if you had had,

Speaker 2 you know, a room full of black men and women helping him advise the country instead of Stephen Miller? Yes.

Speaker 2 I'm down, I'm down to find out. But I'm not that down because no die has been cast.

Speaker 1 But no, but this is what I'm trying to say is like strange about him in that way: is that I don't think that Donald Trump holds any values beyond Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 Okay?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 he said many times,

Speaker 1 if you like me, I like you. He says it very simply.

Speaker 1 Doesn't matter what you say about him in the past. If you're just cool with him now, he's cool with you.

Speaker 2 Well, this is.

Speaker 1 He brushes it away quite quickly, actually, because it's almost like wrestling to him. He's like, no, no, let's keep it moving.
Let's keep it. I understand that plot's done.

Speaker 1 And now we can move on, right?

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 1 I love that you said he is the, say that word again?

Speaker 2 The apotheosis

Speaker 2 of America.

Speaker 1 Because in many ways, I would argue. Like an apotheosis, I would argue that he's an apotheosis of most people in that

Speaker 1 he holds the ideas of the people who are closest to him,

Speaker 1 and he feels that those are the most important ideas.

Speaker 1 And so I argue if Mar-a-Lago was predominantly black,

Speaker 1 if the golf clubs that he was in and around were predominantly Hispanic, if the places where he was,

Speaker 1 think of the small things that Trump has revealed, right? He said, immigration, I don't want it. But then he went, well, except for, of course, like

Speaker 2 all the people in my life who I know, right?

Speaker 1 No, no, no. But then he said, he said, but I'm not, I'm not talking about Sommeliers.
No, no, he said he didn't say Sommeliers. I'm saying Sommeliers.

Speaker 1 He said, he called them wine choosers or something like that. I don't know if you remember that actually.

Speaker 2 Wait, what was this? No, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 He said, that was like second term right now now. Like he said it, oh man, he didn't say sommeliers because I remember correcting it in my head, but he said.

Speaker 2 Wine choosers.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he said wine waiters, wine choosers. What did he say, Ryan? It was wine choosing.

Speaker 2 He's not talking about the people who work on the.

Speaker 2 He's not talking about the actual

Speaker 2 opinion, right?

Speaker 1 He's talking about the person who comes to you and helps you select your wine. I know that for a fact.

Speaker 2 The wine picker.

Speaker 1 But you could see, it was so interesting that in his head,

Speaker 1 the good type of immigrant is the one that he encounters all the time who brings him his food and his wine. And he's like, that immigrant should stay, of course.

Speaker 1 But the one that he sees on Fox News and on his social media crossing a border and then killing a family, he's like, that one mustn't come in.

Speaker 2 You hear what I'm saying? Yeah, of course.

Speaker 1 And so, like, I, I, the reason I say that he is, he's a great apotheosis in that way is

Speaker 1 it's very seldom that a country is run by somebody

Speaker 1 who is swayed as much as the average citizen of that country is swayed.

Speaker 2 The only difference is they have so much power.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 1 Like that, like that, that thing always gets me with Trump is where I go like, man,

Speaker 1 you just get him in the right room in the right. You know who knows this?

Speaker 1 Almost all the leaders in the Middle East. Well, this is Saudi Arabia, Qatar, et cetera.

Speaker 1 They know. You get him in the room.

Speaker 1 The man will come out and all of a sudden he'll say something slightly different to what he said coming in because he's had time with you.

Speaker 2 But the problem is, like, talk about shaking an etch a sketch. It's so easy to shake his etch a sketch.
Yes. right? His etch a sketch gets shaken every day.
Yes, and somebody

Speaker 2 somebody's always gotten the knob

Speaker 2 So to speak

Speaker 2 I just but see the problem with that I mean what you're saying is I believe that that is a very cogent way of thinking about Trump

Speaker 2 But then there is

Speaker 2 I mean, the part that does feel like he is like a metaphor in action

Speaker 2 is that it never amounts to anything because

Speaker 2 he's also so aware

Speaker 2 of

Speaker 2 his own. If he understands the value of anything, it's him.

Speaker 1 Yes, definitely.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 it's never like,

Speaker 2 you know, I'm for immigration because my homie from Wharton,

Speaker 2 you know, came up from Chile to get an education just like me. It's never, no one is ever equal to him.
He's never, he's, he's rarely an has an equal. His equals are, you know, Putin, Kim,

Speaker 2 Kim John.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, but even or conversely, you know, in the business world, right? Like, who are the people? He's never really aspiring to be Steve Jobs. No.

Speaker 2 His, I mean, he's never said this, but I mean, he's much closer to like the obvious people, like a, like a, like a Gotti or something like that.

Speaker 2 I mean, those are the, and those would be, that's a, that's an applicable model to, uh, to an aspect of his governance, which is,

Speaker 2 you know, using a kind of threat tactic, bullying tactic, to get people to just yield

Speaker 2 or give him what he wants. But, you know, and then, but these never sort of make their way into policy, right? It's not like the whispering in the ear for things ever results in, you know,

Speaker 2 more housing for people.

Speaker 1 But I'm saying it's because they're not around enough. Right.

Speaker 2 And I mean it honestly. I believe that

Speaker 1 they're just not like, you can't do it in one meeting and you're not going to be around him for more than one

Speaker 1 enough. But the people who were around him long enough.
And I think that's why there's so much infighting around him amongst his own people to get other people away from him.

Speaker 1 So Steve Bannon fights with Stephen Miller and then that person fights with that person because they know.

Speaker 2 Once you've got his ear. If you can keep his his hair, I want his ear.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you keep his ear,

Speaker 1 you've got his power. But if you, if, if it's like, that's why the Elon Musk thing threw everyone off because it's like, Elon's whispering this, the other people are whispering that.

Speaker 1 And then he's like, I like Elon, but I hear this about him. But at the same time, I also think Elon's a lot of people.

Speaker 2 He wasn't there 24 hours a day.

Speaker 1 And he wasn't.

Speaker 1 He was when he had the most power. Right, right, right.

Speaker 1 There was a point where he was at Mar-a-Lago 24-7. He was basically living there.
He was around Trump.

Speaker 2 But he had to doge. You see? And he doge was work, and it it meant he had to actually go to these agencies.

Speaker 1 There you go. And when he was out doging, then now someone's whispering in Trump's ear, yo, man, what's up with this Elon?

Speaker 1 Yeah, when he's out doging. But listen, I don't want to spend all the time talking about Trump because everyone does.

Speaker 2 But he is like a fascinating cultural

Speaker 2 figure, right? Yes.

Speaker 1 Because he's the defining cultural figure for now.

Speaker 2 No, I mean, and so it is, he is fascinating to talk about, even though there is a kind of danger

Speaker 2 you can't forget the other things

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 figureheadness is

Speaker 2 is also doing.

Speaker 2 And that's always the sort of moral tension among discussants when it comes to Trump.

Speaker 2 Also, yes, keep in mind, though, that like there are people being disappeared. Keep in mind, though, that he's about to take over another

Speaker 2 American city with a predominantly with a significant black population.

Speaker 2 So I don't know. It's tough.
Like, you know, I'm a person who loves to try to figure out and unpack

Speaker 2 cultural figures, including presidents. But,

Speaker 2 you know, it kind of runs aground. I mean, for instance, you know, I wouldn't have spent, I didn't spend very much time talking about George W.
Bush

Speaker 2 during his presidency, although there was, because there was so, because also there was so much culture around that presidency, like responding to it in real time. There's no culture.

Speaker 2 He is the culture, right? Oh, that is true. There's no, there's no filmmaking that is like responding to this presidency.
First or how? But how could you? People are terrified. I think though.

Speaker 1 And when I mean people, I mean like the money is terrified. I don't mean like the people.
Oh, yes.

Speaker 2 But what's interesting is these things have a way of happening anyway anyway yes right so i think that's really fascinating that like the horror movie is like the most interesting things happening at the movies in at least in this country involve horror right involve you know the un

Speaker 2 like the darkest grimmest

Speaker 2 and not just like you know there's a there's a crazy person at the door but like there are mysterious things happening that don't seem to make a lot of sense

Speaker 2 And it's interesting to me that like our death drive is on the charts, right? Like, I'm obsessed with the fact that Die with a Smile,

Speaker 2 this lady gaga, Bruno Mars song that that won't die, is called like, is still in the top 10. Is as of this, as of our conversation right now, it is number 10.
It has been in the top 10 for a year.

Speaker 2 Like, when we were kids, songs didn't last. You'd You'd like if you got a song to last in the top 10 for a week.

Speaker 2 So the idea that you've had a song that's been in the top 10 for a year, like it probably more than a year at this point,

Speaker 2 is just mind-blowing to me. And maybe it's not more than a year, but it's definitely almost a year.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it's about like, you know,

Speaker 2 I'd rather like, you know, it's coming back to me. The melody just hit me.
It just

Speaker 2 like washed over me.

Speaker 2 You're, you don't have to deal with this. I don't know if you're doing the Grammys this year, but you don't have to deal with this song.
Because you thought that was the lyrics.

Speaker 2 It was last year's second. You thought that was the lyrics of the song.
I was like, no. All right.

Speaker 2 They do. No.

Speaker 2 I think it's just fascinating to me that that song is about, not about like spending the rest of my life with you. Not about like,

Speaker 2 but, you know,

Speaker 2 I'm, if I get like, you know, another, another bit of time with you, I will die with a smile. Like, it's just, it's a beautiful sentiment, but it's just telling the song it's called die with a smile.

Speaker 2 I'm kind of a literal-minded person. You put it, you put it on a plate like that.
I'm, I'm going to put my fork in it.

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Speaker 1 I wonder then, when, so when you

Speaker 1 see that, that's what I mean about like how you see these things and how you think about them. Going back to what you said about horror movies,

Speaker 1 I don't think I would think about that

Speaker 1 just off the bat.

Speaker 1 But we do have to ask ourselves why certain things are more popular when they are and what they're tapping into, when they're tapping into it.

Speaker 1 Like, you know, there's more obvious ones that you can see in hindsight, like movies like Rambo and all of those things.

Speaker 1 America was telling itself a story and it needed to tell itself the story and it did it successfully, you know.

Speaker 1 And even in like the cartoons and stuff like that, like when I think of like Popeye, Popeye was telling me a story,

Speaker 1 you know, and and

Speaker 2 domestic violence?

Speaker 2 Who was

Speaker 2 Pluto? Pluto and olive oil. Oh, no, no, I thought you were saying Popeye.
I was like, Popeye hit Olive.

Speaker 1 I was like, damn, bro, which ones did you watch?

Speaker 1 No, no, no, no, no. But I mean, but I'm saying the story

Speaker 2 and human trafficking. No, but if you look at the lucky.
What's going on in Popeye?

Speaker 1 Superman, the stories that Superman was telling, you know, and it is interesting to now when I'm when I'm thinking through your brain, I go, huh,

Speaker 1 it's fascinating to look at when Superman movies come back and when they don't, and when they do well and when they don't, and what it's like, there's a moment when America's telling a story about itself being exceptional and fighting the Russians and fighting communism.

Speaker 1 Superman's the thing.

Speaker 1 And then that story like fades away. Superman fades away.
And then the Superman that becomes popular and comes out is like a gritty, non-Superman-y Superman. That's the Trump.

Speaker 2 Trump, that's the first Trump Superman.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's like the, and then now the new, now the, the American Superman sort of thing is like back, and the parents are even more folksy. And the, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 It's like, it's, it's interesting to think about like what we're experiencing in our world. And then the question,

Speaker 1 then the question becomes,

Speaker 1 is the art imitating life or is life imitating art?

Speaker 2 Like, you know, I think that art has a weird way of corresponding to moods. Because the people that make this stuff are basically us right

Speaker 2 like they have the same neuroses or like not dissimilar neuroses part of the problem truly with movies right now is that i think there aren't enough geniuses who don't who aren't like us to show us like how we how we could be right like so or to like to like elevate Well,

Speaker 2 I think that

Speaker 2 talk about, like, we're talking about, we never never really quite got to the bottom of the name thing, but the there is a way in which

Speaker 2 because Hollywood is no longer making as many movies as it used to, just to stick with the movies, because the movies are an important, talk about a thing that you put in a museum to tell a story of a people and its priorities and who it was.

Speaker 2 Like, like the movies are the museum in action, right?

Speaker 2 Like a like a video store when we had them, those were museums

Speaker 2 of

Speaker 2 world civilization. It was time traveling.
Right. But it was both it was both that and artifacts of peoples.
Yes.

Speaker 2 And without them, it's really hard to know.

Speaker 2 Well, not really hard because we've got this whole,

Speaker 2 I would say, quarry of social media, right? Where like you could, you could dig through there to find that one chunk of marble that like is worth keeping, but there's just a lot of rocks in there.

Speaker 2 But the movies are this kind of like

Speaker 2 determined,

Speaker 2 like cultivated art form where even when they suck or like don't have aspirations to greatness, still wind up telling you a story. They do.
It's, it's, it, and it's, it feels true.

Speaker 2 And I think that we are no longer, we are so addicted now to

Speaker 2 whatever it is the superhero gives us in terms of a feeling of, of

Speaker 2 I'm giving these movies more credit than they probably even need, but like there might be something here about the way these movies make us feel as a people. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 2 Like it's great to watch these people stop the world from ending over and over and over and over and over and over.

Speaker 2 And what no longer happens is regular people no longer exist in this world, right? Oh, like

Speaker 2 there's a world in which I, for as strange as I found Clark Kent's parents in this new Superman movie, I was kind of fascinated by how these two people raised that.

Speaker 2 Right? No, unfortunately.

Speaker 2 You would have heard about that.

Speaker 2 You'd have heard about that. You know, you would have heard about it.
I thought we got Ariel.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you got stuck with Ariel.

Speaker 2 That's as good as it's going to get.

Speaker 2 But I think that, you know, I grew up in a time, and this is not a nostalgia. This is not a, this is not nostalgia that I'm talking about.

Speaker 2 It's the value of storytelling, which is not a nostalgic observation. But you got a really robust

Speaker 2 menu of stories, even when they didn't explicitly feature people who were black, were Asian, were gay, you got stories that were human enough

Speaker 2 to trick you into thinking that you were Molly Ringwald, right? Yes, could trick you into thinking you were Clint Eastwood, for as problematic as that even is, right?

Speaker 2 You would be seduced into identifying with lots and lots of different people who did not wear a cape. You're right.
It's almost like there's certain parts of making a movie that have been removed.

Speaker 2 The kitchen,

Speaker 2 the dining table,

Speaker 2 the couch and the TV, the remote, holding the remote,

Speaker 2 the driveway, the garage, the car have all been removed. And those were the things that

Speaker 2 the bicycle lying in the driveway, you know, and the lawn and the sidewalk. Those things have been removed to make movies more efficient.
And if you look at old movies, those things were always there.

Speaker 2 Always there. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Even when they looked fake, right?

Speaker 2 They were still present. I always say the first time I experienced a beer

Speaker 2 in in cinema

Speaker 2 was through cinema, I mean. When someone just opens a can of beer after coming back from work and holding a six-pack.
It told a story. For the longest time, I never thought you drank beer cold.

Speaker 2 So when you see commercials on the end of beer is cold, you're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. After a long, hard day's work, you take a six-pack,

Speaker 2 and then I experienced a hangover, and I'm like, how do you go to work tomorrow after

Speaker 2 drinking six warm beers?

Speaker 2 So all of that has been removed. You're right.

Speaker 2 A real human being and the aspirations that a normal human being would want to have of having somewhere to go to and somewhere to depart from have been removed. They don't exist anymore.

Speaker 2 Looking through a window has been removed. Yeah.
I mean, well, I mean,

Speaker 2 because you now have these giant like hangars where all the action takes place, right? Like they call them headquarters.

Speaker 2 You know, I mean, they could, they're just giant sound stages that seem like sound stages in the movies themselves. And so, I don't know.

Speaker 2 I just, I'm not saying I want more farm movies, but there was a value to watching Sally Field try to keep her farm from going under, which is a kind of movie that happened every week.

Speaker 2 Like Jessica Lang, Sally Field, there was a farm movie a week with some

Speaker 2 great white woman trying to keep the farm going. And Danny Glover was on every single one of them being like, I got you.
But you know what?

Speaker 1 I'm going to help. You know, it's funny you just say that.
You say that now. I do think there's something powerful

Speaker 1 in that imagery and what story it tells us. Because let's think of like, you know, like Danny Glover and that type of story.

Speaker 1 Lethal Weapon.

Speaker 1 Oh, here's a great example. Do you know what I mean? Lethal weapon or die hard or any of those types of movies.

Speaker 1 As much as these people are quote-unquote professionals, there was also like a very everyman-ness to the story.

Speaker 2 They spend so much time in Danny Glover's house once they realized that was a real relationship between Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. Exactly.
You got to know his family.

Speaker 1 That's exactly what I mean. That's exactly.
But to what you just said now, which I've never considered, is you don't have that with the Avengers.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 1 You really don't. Do you know what I mean? Their family only exists as a device to give them an origin story.
But beyond that,

Speaker 1 we don't see

Speaker 2 why...

Speaker 1 This is their family or who these people are, who they mean to them, or how they shape them, or how they... But what it does more importantly is, I think of the effect that it has on us

Speaker 2 in

Speaker 1 questioning or even imagining where safety comes from.

Speaker 2 You get what I'm saying? Absolutely. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. Think of how, if you just grew up now watching.
Oh, the good one.

Speaker 2 That was good. No, but think about it.

Speaker 1 If you grew up watching like Rambo or if you grew up watching

Speaker 1 that era of movies, diehard. You believed that you, as an individual, can make an outsized influence in the world.

Speaker 1 I don't care if a band of terrorists has taken over a building, you can do something about it.

Speaker 2 In your tank top and bare feet.

Speaker 1 You can indeed, but you can do something about it. And then Avengers comes along and it's like, listen, listen.
All you are going to do is be in your office screaming.

Speaker 2 That's your only role.

Speaker 1 And then Superman,

Speaker 1 Hulk or whoever, DC or whatever.

Speaker 2 Gonna destroy your big office.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but your only role is to scream and run and then pray Superman swoops you off the ground before the thing falls on you and pray that you know storm creates a little tornado to protect.

Speaker 1 But that's your only role. They don't even like help the superheroes.
There's not even like a thing where it's like, if it wasn't for you, people of Earth, this wouldn't know.

Speaker 2 It's like y'all wouldn't be anything without us.

Speaker 1 Your job is to have your hot dog cart that gets blown up

Speaker 1 and all you do is run away. Your job is to have your car fall off a bridge and then that superhero comes and lifts it and holds the bridge and then you get out with your family.

Speaker 1 That's your only purpose.

Speaker 2 But that's us turning everything over to these powers.

Speaker 1 But that's what I mean. But I'm saying, like, you don't, you don't think of the power of that because, and I'm sure some people watching this will be like, come on, man, movies.

Speaker 1 But one of the best analyses that was like, like, of sociology was the Eddie Murphy special when he talked about Rocky. Do you remember that bitch? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 And he talked about like what it did for like white working-class male.

Speaker 2 Yo, rock up! Hey, rock up!

Speaker 1 And I think it was very astute. It made a lot of people who are like, oh, that's me.

Speaker 2 I'm a quote-unquote nobody, but you know what?

Speaker 1 I'm a somebody.

Speaker 2 I could come to a draw in a ring with Leon Sphinx.

Speaker 2 Just let me. Just let me.
All I got to do is run up an art museum steps

Speaker 2 and beat up a cup of like a hanging, hanging cut of beef.

Speaker 2 Let me, let me at Leon Sphinx. I will

Speaker 2 him up. Yeah, but that's powerful.

Speaker 1 We take that. Take for granted how powerful that is.

Speaker 2 I mean, just think about what it takes for people of at least my parents' generation. but I mean, really, anybody who grew up as a non-white person

Speaker 2 in

Speaker 2 a society of oppression, right? You grew up in the Jim Crow South, you grew up in apartheid South Africa, and you get these stories that are asking you to

Speaker 2 spend some time with white people who don't ostensibly have anything to do with your situation. But it's a story about somebody trying to overcome something,

Speaker 2 somebody caught in a plot that they need to get solved by the end of the hour and 40 minutes.

Speaker 2 You are suddenly forgotten about your situation and you have completely invested your hour and 40 minutes into this other person's situation. And there's a world in which

Speaker 2 some of the images from this experience, whether it's like terrible, like the movie itself is not very good. It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.

Speaker 2 Because

Speaker 2 you're wrapped up in a story. And maybe by the end, you're like, this doesn't really work.
But what you did was you watched an avatar

Speaker 2 for your own self in some way go through something that you couldn't imagine going through until you... Do you think I ever thought for one second that

Speaker 2 Bruce Willis,

Speaker 2 like, I never thought once about trying to save people from a hijacked skyscraper. Never once.
You've tried to help them from someone blocking them from viewing art.

Speaker 2 And that's about it.

Speaker 2 That is a superheroic act that a regular person can do every day. But the power of the movies,

Speaker 2 big and small, is like when they're focused on what regular people are dealing with and going through, you just

Speaker 2 learn something about how to be in the world. Just period.

Speaker 2 There were no CEOs in movies. Well, there were.
There were just regular working guys. There was a really robot.
But here's another aspect of this.

Speaker 2 To your point about diehard, there was a whole moment in the 80s that you probably remember, because I know you saw these movies, where like every week you'd get some young person who thought they could do a better job making money than the people who went to Princeton to do it.

Speaker 2 Like Working Girl, Secret of My Success.

Speaker 2 These movies came out all the time, or they were like the descendant, they were the children of these people.

Speaker 2 Like Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the story of a yuppies kid who just decides, I'm going to just act like my dad all day. I don't even realize I'm acting like my dad all day.
That day was. Yeah.

Speaker 2 You hated it. I loved it.
Oh, you loved it. Okay, good.
We should try recreate it.

Speaker 2 You and me? Yeah, I mean, you can bring a friend or two, and then we're going to have the longest day ever in an Ferris Bueller. Exactly.
What would it look like for a bunch of old men

Speaker 2 to do Ferris Bueller? I think, I don't know, but I feel like...

Speaker 2 Matthew Broderick, you know, yeah, just like you, he would take, I mean, he's actually, didn't he do a Ferris Bueller commercial or something? He did, yeah.

Speaker 2 As his old self, as his regular current self no way like yeah he did it um but that's the other thing right like that we have given the keys to our to our to our to our civilization over to

Speaker 2 I'm gonna say the algorithm to decide right like these executives who make our movies don't care about telling stories that reflect the lives that we are living currently. They care about mergers.

Speaker 2 They care about like making sure that I don't actually know what they care about, but I can tell you what they don't care about because we don't get it. Yeah.
Right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I'm not saying I want places in the heart every week, but I wouldn't mind it now, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I was thinking the other day, I don't know how long it'll be before we see another movie like Forrest Gump in the cinema.

Speaker 2 Oh my God. That's a great forex.

Speaker 1 That's an example of a film where I go, I don't know a single person who could watch Forrest Gump and not find themselves somewhere in the story.

Speaker 1 I don't care who you are. That story touches everyone.
It touches everything. It touches race, class, disability.
It touches war. It touches capitalism.
It touches

Speaker 2 everywhere.

Speaker 2 It's about going everywhere.

Speaker 1 Exactly. And can that story exist today? And someone might go, oh, but who cares? And I'm like, yeah, but

Speaker 1 if you look at it

Speaker 1 on the smallest level, do you remember what you would do as a kid when you were done watching a movie?

Speaker 2 You'd watch it again. You'd enact everything you saw.

Speaker 1 You would enact everything. You would go, I'm going outside.
You would watch it again.

Speaker 2 And where's what? critic?

Speaker 2 He's like a five-year-old critic. What was that?

Speaker 2 Where's it like? I want to know how that works. Where's the back?

Speaker 1 Where's like a five-year-old critic at large? Right.

Speaker 2 All right. Well, this time, this time I'm making a lot of money.
There's no movies that you probably shouldn't be reenacting. Oh, damn.

Speaker 2 When I was 11, I saw Fatal Attraction Lake three times in the movie theater.

Speaker 2 So, guess what I'm not doing? So, you don't want to know how much

Speaker 2 you watch Sharon Stone doing the leg cross game. So, now, yeah, but what I'm saying is, is like, what you would do is you would go out and want to be.

Speaker 1 You would try the kick.

Speaker 2 Goonies is a great example. Yeah, you would.

Speaker 1 You would go on the adventure.

Speaker 1 You would imagine yourself, to your point, in that world, or you would imagine that that world could happen to you, right?

Speaker 1 And so as we look at the shift of storytelling, You know, when you tie all of these threads together, the museum, the story that is telling you of you and the possibilities that you and your people may contain.

Speaker 2 Movies,

Speaker 1 it's exactly the same thing. It's like, yeah, names.
It's telling you the story of you, the possibilities that you contain.

Speaker 1 And then within that framework,

Speaker 1 you now act.

Speaker 1 I just remembered something I wanted to ask you, and I wondered how this fits into everything.

Speaker 1 Why do you think it is that so many critics at large, you know, whether they focused on fashion or art or whatever, why do you think so many of them were black men?

Speaker 2 What do you think is

Speaker 1 no genuine question?

Speaker 2 No, I'm thinking about this because there's also Margot Jefferson, who is a

Speaker 2 great

Speaker 2 American critic and memoirist and a black woman.

Speaker 2 I think it really, I mean, I'm like, we should name who we're, who some of the people we might be talking about, like Hilton Als, Vincent Cunningham,

Speaker 2 Margot, of course,

Speaker 2 some other great person that I'm not remembering at the moment. But basically, I think,

Speaker 2 well, I mean,

Speaker 2 I think there's like an innate curiosity about like you get trained to be curious, right?

Speaker 2 Like, I mean, if you have the luxury of being able to think broadly about things or like making these connections, because so much of,

Speaker 2 I mean, a lot of my life was really about like my childhood anyway, was my mother sort of encouraging me to, to just

Speaker 2 think for myself, right? Like, if you've got a question, you go find the answer because I actually don't know it.

Speaker 2 So you'll have to look it up. And there was no internet.

Speaker 2 So I would, you know, I, I became very good at encyclopedias, for instance, which is where you got the answers to these questions if you, if you, if you had them. Um,

Speaker 2 I think a lot of the people that we're talking about are basically the same age.

Speaker 2 I also think,

Speaker 2 I mean, I'm younger than those guys, but I also, well, and Vincent is younger than I am. But I think that you,

Speaker 2 there is something about

Speaker 2 seeing things and wanting to be free enough to not just ask a question, but like to connect them to something else.

Speaker 2 And also, it's like, it's a little dissatisfying because you learn this. I was a movie critic for a long time.

Speaker 2 And you realize, at least in in my practice,

Speaker 2 that I was spending a lot of time doing critic at large work anyway. Right.

Speaker 2 Because movies

Speaker 2 are a fascinating art form because they already incorporate so many other art forms to exist.

Speaker 2 I mean, there is,

Speaker 2 you know, the visual, the audio,

Speaker 2 the compositional, right? They have to be written.

Speaker 2 I mean, more than typed. You hope you got a screenplay that was written and and not just typed.

Speaker 1 Does the fashion

Speaker 2 costume?

Speaker 2 There's the soundtrack or the score. There's so many.
I mean, if we're, I mean, architecture,

Speaker 2 there's just an opportunity if your eye is open

Speaker 2 to

Speaker 2 making these connections among all these different disciplines and art forms that are being assembled and harnessed to tell,

Speaker 2 you know, any kind of story.

Speaker 2 And these are things that you frequently, as a moviegoer, you just take for granted. Yeah.
But I

Speaker 2 learned at some point, for instance, I usually stay for all the credit.

Speaker 2 I worked at a movie theater for a number of years and I would have to stand at the back of the theater while people left and watch the credits.

Speaker 1 Well, what were you doing at the movie theater?

Speaker 2 I was an usher. Oh, wow.
Yeah. I was an usher from like 16 to 19.

Speaker 1 Wait, so what did you do back then as an usher? Because I feel like ushers have changed over the years in movie theaters. Like, what was your job

Speaker 1 taking the ticket? I would showing them.

Speaker 2 rip a ticket yeah like if it was an older person or a disabled person I would take them to their seat okay um you'd wait at the back of the theater for the first 15 minutes of every show to make sure the picture was right doesn't happen anymore oh no I'm like I'm like where were you you know how many movies I how many movies are blurry these days and I'm like whoa where is I didn't even know there was someone who's supposed to do something about however I go and report and now I didn't like doing it in the old days because when something was wrong, there was one projectionist, at least in Boston, where I lived for a while, who and you know that person might get in trouble if something was wrong but then and i've you know there are a lot of things to be happy for james cameron for one of them that's not so great is that like that momentary advent of 3d that was terrible which changed projection right it helped change projection i'm gonna blame james cameron and avatar but it could have been some some other thing i don't i don't blame him I blame the people chasing the money behind him because Avatar did it for real, for real.

Speaker 2 Oh, it did do it for real.

Speaker 1 And And then everyone else was just like, it's 3D. And it's like, no,

Speaker 1 they took pictures, man.

Speaker 2 But Trevor, they would leave the lenses on. They would leave the 3D.

Speaker 2 They would leave the some theaters would leave the 3D projector on for 2D movies or the lens that you needed to flip off man for a 2D movie.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, there's a lot of things about the movie going experience that suck. But like my job back in the day.

Speaker 2 with a film print was just to make sure the picture was straight, the sound was good, there were no issues with the print.

Speaker 2 And then I cleaned the bathroom. A lot of bathroom cleaning.
Spent a lot of time cleaning the bathroom.

Speaker 1 What's the worst bathroom to clean, men or women?

Speaker 2 Great question.

Speaker 2 Women, easily. That's the worst? Oh my God.
I've had horror. Ellen DeGeneres, one of Ellen DeGeneres' greatest bits.
Oh, I thought, you know, I didn't know where this story was going.

Speaker 2 I thought you were going to say Ellen DeGeneres uses female bathrooms all the time.

Speaker 2 How dare you?

Speaker 1 I thought he was going to say, Ellen DeGeneres took a dump.

Speaker 2 So like, I didn't know where that was was going.

Speaker 1 I didn't know where that joke was, where that story was going.

Speaker 2 He went like, women, bathrooms are the worst. Ellen DeGeneres.

Speaker 2 No, Ellen DeGeneres never came to the Richard the Borse where I worked for a bunch of years. But Ellen DeGeneres informed, I was doing this bathroom work.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 before I saw Ellen DeGeneres' great bit about her own questions about what is going on in the ladies room.

Speaker 2 And she at some point is like, I went into the ladies' room and I just thought that a bomb had gone off in here, except the dirtiest bomb of all time. This is like from like the late 80s.

Speaker 2 I thought it was cleaner. Oh, no.
And she's like, I, when I go in there and I see what's on the walls and on the floor, I'm like, what are these ladies doing?

Speaker 2 Like, and then she, she's like, they go, do they go into the, were they using the, the, the disabled bars in the, in the, in the handy, in the disabled stall to like, to not sit on the toilet?

Speaker 2 Because that's what I did. And I'm swinging around doing a, doing a, doing a, a high bar routine in the ladies' room.

Speaker 2 And then she, I think the punchline is like, so I got down and I looked around what I did and I was like, oh. This explains it.
Oh, damn. This is why they're in such bad shape.
You thought that.

Speaker 2 All the women going in there are doing gymnastics. Yo.
Any place with a queue and high foot traffic can never be clean. Also, I just,

Speaker 1 I don't know why. Okay, because I assumed, you know why, because whenever I'm in a man's bathroom, it's always, there's always pee on the floor, it's always sticky for some random reason.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no random reason.

Speaker 2 That reason is not random. Don't go spreading lies on this podcast.
There's no random reason why the floors are sticky.

Speaker 1 So, so I would always go like, this is disgusting.

Speaker 1 Surely the other side can't be worse because I went

Speaker 1 people aren't just like peeing on the floor the way the men are. Now you've just blown my mind because I've never, I've never

Speaker 1 worked in cleaning men's and women's toilets.

Speaker 2 So yeah, the women didn't even want to clean the women's room. Damn.
Like, I mean, that's how, I mean, it was, you know, I worked with, with, I won't, I mean,

Speaker 2 I'm sure

Speaker 2 Loden

Speaker 2 was one of the women who worked. She just, Loden would never clean.
She would refuse. She wouldn't do it.
She also was too cool. That was one of the coolest people I've ever worked with.

Speaker 2 Joe Novak, Fritz,

Speaker 2 we wound up cleaning the

Speaker 2 and Greg. Oh, man, I loved Greg.
Anyway, yeah, it's like, why do you even ask a question like that? Because what made you?

Speaker 1 What you wanted to know?

Speaker 2 Because whenever I talk about it, I really, that's how I remember it was, I can't believe the women's room.

Speaker 1 No, that's what I wanted to know.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so, but my question is, where does this model high horse come from when you live with a woman and should always criticize our bathroom etiquette when their public stalls look like that.

Speaker 1 That's what I maybe that's also another thing because, like, that would be like a thing that maybe even my mom would say, just yeah, it would be like, oh, it's like a men's toilet in here.

Speaker 1 At school, they used to say something similar as well.

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 1 I mean, now I'm hearing it, Derek. Maybe this was like a big

Speaker 2 conspiracy theory.

Speaker 2 Well, this is wild.

Speaker 1 But I interrupted you. Sorry, let's go back.
So we're in the movies. You're in this world.
You are, your job is to make sure that everything works.

Speaker 1 Yes. Rewinding to that.
Sorry, I took us off, everybody.

Speaker 2 No, that's fine. I mean, I now I'm curious about the males

Speaker 2 that you guys are going to bet about

Speaker 2 pristine women's rooms. But I will tell you firsthand, I've spent three years

Speaker 2 cleaning two sets of bathrooms and one, one I did not dread cleaning. Damn.

Speaker 1 Well, this is good to know.

Speaker 1 So, going back to what you're saying,

Speaker 1 I wonder if the gist of it is:

Speaker 1 is it that it's easier to look in when you are not in? Is that what it is?

Speaker 1 Is there a correlation between being able to critique a society and look at it through an objective lens when you are not

Speaker 1 held within the deepest ven of

Speaker 1 that society? Is that what it is? Or is it just how your mind works? Like, what do you think informs how you're able to be a great critic at large?

Speaker 2 It's probably both.

Speaker 2 I mean, you know, I'm going to answer this, but I'm also like in sitting here talking to you and being familiar with the work that

Speaker 2 goes on, work, like, especially.

Speaker 2 I mean, it is where's have you seen us, though? Where have we been for the last hour and a half?

Speaker 2 Work, you've been working,

Speaker 2 like, this is a this is a mine, this is an act of mine.

Speaker 2 Um, but I mean, I think

Speaker 2 I mean, one of the things that you know, one of the great thrills of

Speaker 2 my cultural diet in my lifetime was

Speaker 2 like spending time with you during the pandemic. Oh, damn.
Thank you. Right.

Speaker 2 I mean, you were doing the work that I do just in this highly concentrated, I would say almost like vertiginously difficult form, right?

Speaker 1 Vertiginously.

Speaker 2 Just, you know, like, oh man. Man, we need to slick.
Yo. It doesn't matter.
You can cut it. Yo.
No, I'm not cutting anything.

Speaker 1 We just need a.

Speaker 2 whoo.

Speaker 2 But anyway, the point is, like, this man's vocabulary. I think there's a world in which some of my interests, yes, vertiginous, vertiginous, like vertigo, you know, like,

Speaker 2 no, no, no, I'm with you. Okay.

Speaker 1 I'm like, yeah, I'll catch up.

Speaker 2 All right. I learned words, me.

Speaker 2 Might be a long one for me. Oh, no.
Look out. Fasten your seatbelt.

Speaker 2 He's already there.

Speaker 2 Wow. It usually takes takes me a drink

Speaker 2 to start working for MASA.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 just saying,

Speaker 2 I did, we did just, we, well, whatever.

Speaker 2 My point

Speaker 2 is that I think I'm hearing what you say. And I think that there is

Speaker 2 there's something about wanting to understand how the world works. Yeah.
And there's an understanding.

Speaker 2 you develop an understanding, especially as a young person, that like art, art is a version of how the world works. Yes.

Speaker 2 It is a world unto itself that is also

Speaker 2 in one way or another reflecting the world you live in, even if like the properties within that world aren't one-to-one

Speaker 2 yours. I mean, I think that one of the most amazing things about the way that I grew up,

Speaker 2 and Nicole Hannah Jones and I talk about this a lot,

Speaker 2 just in terms of with a sense of wonder, which is, you know, we grew up like millions of people grew up at a time, black people grew up at a time where,

Speaker 2 you know, if you go back and watch the movies of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, like there were very few flattering depictions of black people from Hollywood, at least.

Speaker 2 And it never mattered, right? It never mattered because, A, I mean, I knew what my family was like.

Speaker 2 I knew I was, I was a part of a family that had no bearing.

Speaker 2 Like, you know, there would be these ways in which like people would seem to overlap with members of my family, like this actress, Anna Maria Horsford, when she would show up like as Harrison Ford's secretary and presumed innocent.

Speaker 2 I knew that movie wasn't about her and I wasn't silly enough to think it should have been. But there was also a part of me that was like, why shouldn't it be?

Speaker 2 What's she doing while this woman's getting murdered over here in the office like i i just wondered about things like that but i also was just fascinated by

Speaker 2 how

Speaker 2 these made things like had meaning They meant something, like the stories amounted to something.

Speaker 2 The prolonged exposure to individual stars or individual story tropes, they wound up meaning something. Like,

Speaker 2 what is a Glenn Close performance when you've watched 10 Glenn Close movies in, you know,

Speaker 2 seven years? Um,

Speaker 2 you know, who is Spike Lee? Who is this guy Spike Lee once you've seen, you know, four or five Spike Lee movies? Um,

Speaker 2 what are soundtracks doing? Like, so you're telling me there's a world in which there's music playing in this movie and the people in the movie can't hear it? Whoa, but I can hear it.

Speaker 2 And this music has nothing to do with the, with anything happening in the world of the movie.

Speaker 2 But well, in the world of the characters, but in the world of the movie, this soundtrack is like a conveyor belt of action and emotion. Right.
And a feeling.

Speaker 2 Like that is, I just, I became obsessed with how soundtracks worked in movies. Now there are no soundtracks.
Yeah. Right.

Speaker 2 There's a music supervisor who makes sure like there's vintage music in a lot of these movies or cool, cool songs. But

Speaker 2 at one point in time,

Speaker 2 you were getting original music. Some of the greatest pop songs ever written were written for movies.
My heart will go off.

Speaker 2 I mean, yeah. That is like, that is an elite example.

Speaker 2 Highway to the fucking danger zone, right? Like

Speaker 2 a song that

Speaker 2 it's so written and could only exist for Top Gun.

Speaker 2 Like you couldn't put that, you just, you couldn't put that out as a song without knowing there was a, there was that fighter jet attached to it.

Speaker 2 What is Kenny talking about? What's he talking about? Highway to the danger zone, but you know, because you would have known that Tom Cruise, well,

Speaker 2 you would have known that Top Gum was attached to it. Tom Cruise was not quite yet.
He's not the big star that he's the Tom Cruise. He became a star.
in part because of that movie. But I don't know.

Speaker 2 I just really wanted to figure out what the meaning of things were. Like I can tell you, like reading all of those people as younger versions of themselves, that they also had these questions.

Speaker 2 And frequently, the thing that made someone like Margot Jefferson great was that she

Speaker 2 really wanted to understand,

Speaker 2 for instance, because she wrote about music for a long time.

Speaker 2 why all these white artists sounded black.

Speaker 2 Right. Like she just was hearing black music in these white artists sounds and wanted to try to taxonomize and kind of theorize a little bit about what she was hearing.

Speaker 2 And, you know, she wrote one of the greatest pieces of criticism I've ever read

Speaker 2 about,

Speaker 2 like mostly built around Elvis.

Speaker 2 um but also just around like 1970s rock and roll and its its relationship to 1950s rock and roll in the US.

Speaker 2 Do you guys like, are there like

Speaker 2 South African critics that

Speaker 2 you like a lot? Well, there was one that Trevor brought up the other day,

Speaker 2 which we grew up watching on television every Sunday. Oh, Barry Runger.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he was legendary.

Speaker 2 Okay, I'm into that. But

Speaker 1 he was a film critic, but he was every Sunday.

Speaker 2 Barry Runger? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Okay.
Passed away many, many years ago.

Speaker 1 But like, he was the first person I think most of us encountered where he wouldn't wouldn't tell you like the movie was cool or fun or he did he didn't use any of those words or ideas he

Speaker 1 he critiqued what it was trying to do and what it meant and how it would but in a way we're like i remember sitting in front of the tv as a 10-year-old and i felt like i needed like a monocle and a glass of tea no because of how sophisticated he made me feel oh interesting do you know what i mean like i would i would and then when i would go to the cinema i would stand there with my friends and i'd be like ah yes i've heard that it relies too heavily on tropes.

Speaker 2 I was like, I don't know what any of this means,

Speaker 1 but you know what it made me do is like, at least around that time, it gave me the first invitation to think beyond what was presented

Speaker 1 and also include how it was presented and what that meant. Yes, and he, like, I think he did that in a big way, where it was like, oh, he made you realize when things were derivative.

Speaker 1 He made you consider why it wasn't, you know, because you'd be like, it's a dope action action movie.

Speaker 1 And then by the end of his review and his critique, you'd go, huh, this is not, it's not really a great story or it's not a, you know, and I, that's, I would say that's like one of those where we, he had an outsized influence, I think, in a lot of South Africans' lives.

Speaker 2 Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, I'd never heard of him.
I'm, I'm definitely, I will spend some time watching some YouTube.

Speaker 1 Some beauty.

Speaker 2 I wonder if they'll be on YouTube and his bejazzled waistcoat.

Speaker 2 He used to have an interesting. No, not one of those critics.

Speaker 2 There's always. I forget how he dressed.
He used to have a waistcoat and like a white long shirt.

Speaker 1 I actually forgot how he dressed.

Speaker 2 It was sequined? Yeah, some. Yeah, he was flamboyant.

Speaker 2 Fascinating. You don't remember that part.
No, no, no. So the important part got through, though.
Huh? Yes.

Speaker 1 I guess, yeah, but I'm like...

Speaker 2 If I ever got information about a movie, I was like, I'm never wearing a waistcoat in my life, ever.

Speaker 1 But a jacket with sequins. Count me in.

Speaker 2 Oh, man. Your worst.

Speaker 1 This has been great, man. Thanks for having me.
No, man, like, because genuinely,

Speaker 1 I hope people get what I get from you. And it's like, I don't know.

Speaker 1 Here's what it is. I think as we've come to live in a world that gives us more faster,

Speaker 1 it means we have less time to digest.

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 1 So just like food, you're just getting it shoveled at you, shoveled at you, shoveled. But now it's in like tiny little bites and it's like, it just moves on and it's gone.

Speaker 1 And when you're in that world, you don't necessarily notice the story of the meal that you're getting.

Speaker 1 You don't see the trend.

Speaker 1 You don't really understand

Speaker 1 what just happened or what you might be part of or what story you're hearing. And what I really love about your work is it just reminds us and invites us to do that in a really cool way.
Like

Speaker 1 I think a lot of people love movies, but not many people think about what a movie does to them and how it makes them feel, how it can make a country see itself or not, how it can make a people see itself.

Speaker 1 So like, thank you, man. I appreciate your work, your vibe, coming and hanging with us.

Speaker 2 Thank you. Yeah, man.
I'm gonna.

Speaker 2 It was an honor. I appreciate you guys a lot.

Speaker 1 You gotta come back again. Truly, I appreciate you.
I will come back. You gotta come.

Speaker 1 What's the best movie you've seen this year?

Speaker 2 This year.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I know a lot of them were terrible. What's the best one you saw this year?

Speaker 2 From this year. Yeah.
Okay. I mean,

Speaker 2 it's tricky. You know, I saw this.
There's a few... There's a few movies I've seen that I liked.

Speaker 2 I just, well, I liked Warriors a lot. Warriors, sorry, weapons.

Speaker 1 Weapons, weapons. I liked weapons a lot.

Speaker 2 I don't know why I keep calling it Warriors.

Speaker 2 Weapons. You know, has all the, when you were talking about the

Speaker 2 granularity, the sort of like native granularity that is going out of the movies,

Speaker 2 just like, you know, the things that give a movie or any work of art, be it a novel or a painting, a sense of place. Texture as well.

Speaker 2 There's a, have you seen this movie? No, don't spoil anything. I won't spoil anything.

Speaker 1 But I know it's from the same director and and I think writer of Barbarian. Yes, yes.
And some of the imagery that you're sort of even alluding to is similar.

Speaker 1 Like you felt like you were somewhere with people who live a certain life and it felt very

Speaker 1 like us.

Speaker 2 This movie has a sense of place,

Speaker 2 even though it doesn't tell you exactly where it is. I see some Pennsylvania license plates.

Speaker 2 And in the distance, you can see a city that is not Philadelphia, but you know you're somewhere like small towny.

Speaker 2 but you also,

Speaker 2 there's a really important shot in the movie. It doesn't spoil anything, but I think about it a lot in terms of the way

Speaker 2 some production person and perhaps even the screenplay itself

Speaker 2 wanted us to notice something without drawing our attention to it explicitly.

Speaker 2 There might be a close-up of what I'm about to tell you, but I noticed it before the camera told me to, which is a bunch of newspapers piled up in a driveway,

Speaker 2 like newspaper delivered.

Speaker 2 And they just, these plastic bags of newspaper just littering a driveway

Speaker 2 in the background of a different shot, of a shot that had, you're not necessarily, you're free to notice whatever you want because it's a painterly image, right?

Speaker 2 The image is a long shot. It's framed in such a way that your eye is free to go wherever it wants.

Speaker 2 It's a very democratic piece of filmmaking, this movie, in a lot of ways, in terms of what it's allowing you to keep your eye on.

Speaker 2 But I noticed that and I was like,

Speaker 2 I don't really care what else happens in this movie because the person who made it

Speaker 2 cares about the things I care about. He thought about us.
Right. He thought about like

Speaker 2 what a regular human might

Speaker 2 be like living day to day.

Speaker 2 So I don't know. I mean, that's a great, but also, sorry, I got, I tried tried to connect that to what we were talking about earlier.
The movie's just suspenseful.

Speaker 2 It's just a very great work of suspense. Okay.
I had, it hit my dread, my dread area. I rarely experienced dread the way

Speaker 2 I did in this movie.

Speaker 2 You might hate the ending.

Speaker 2 The ending changed nothing for me. I like the ending just as much as I liked everything else.

Speaker 2 Sinners, you know, Sinners is not... Sinners, it's funny.
I was watching weapons and was like, I think this is a better made movie than Sinners.

Speaker 2 Because it almost really is,

Speaker 2 but Weapons doesn't have what Sinners has, which is like an active mind that is really determined to make you wonder

Speaker 2 what is really going on here. Yeah.
Right? Like you're imagin your imagination as a moviegoer is free to, I mean,

Speaker 2 I'm still not sure about Sinners in terms of like what is going on. 100%.

Speaker 2 Whereas Weapons,

Speaker 2 it's pretty, there's some ambiguities, but it ties it up. Its ambiguities aren't really its selling point.

Speaker 2 It's the crispness of its filmmaking and its real attention to how to build and generate and exploit suspense.

Speaker 2 But Sinners is just like...

Speaker 1 God damn it. It's a great film.
Like,

Speaker 2 the first hour of that movie alone, I could have watched two of of that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's just like a film film.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and this is like, and it's just a very satisfying

Speaker 2 work of ideas.

Speaker 2 And sometimes a work of ideas is almost better than a perfectly made movie.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, those are the two.

Speaker 2 And then there's this movie that's going to come out in the fall by Kelly Reichardt called Mastermind. That's about, that's got,

Speaker 2 oh my God, what's that guy's name? I'm not used to saying

Speaker 2 he's the Irish guy who is in Challengers, who is not Mike Feist.

Speaker 2 Irish guy in Challengers. Anyway, that guy, whose name will occur to me while I'm saying this to you,

Speaker 2 he tries to commit, you're not going to believe this, an art heist.

Speaker 2 Full circle moment. And the question is,

Speaker 2 is he going to pull it off?

Speaker 2 And I won't ruin it for you, but this movie has, it's just, you, it's thrilling because you're watching a director whose movies you've been, I've been watching for years. I've been yearning for.

Speaker 2 And she,

Speaker 2 she's just really, she's an art house, she's an art director. She doesn't care.
I don't think, I don't know if she cares where her movies get played, but like, she just

Speaker 2 all, she's into texture. She's into like atmosphere.
Plot is not really her thing. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 This woman was like you know what i want to i want to tell a story beginning middle end suspense surprise this movie is the the ending of the year oh wow it's got words

Speaker 2 um it's called mastermind it is it is very very good with that irish actor that you're gonna see all over what is it josh o'connor is that it's josh o'connor we we we believe in no googling in our future

Speaker 1 eugene and i have a pact whoever Whoever can say the answer the most convincingly, we go with it. We go with that.

Speaker 2 I've been convinced many times this afternoon. Yeah, we're just anti-Googling.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Wesley, this was great. Thank you for joining.

Speaker 2 Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 And good luck in the you have the podcast.

Speaker 2 Yes, cannonball is happening every week for the foreseeable future. Forever, forever and ever and ever.

Speaker 1 Forever and ever.

Speaker 2 And you know,

Speaker 2 I'm going to go right tomorrow.

Speaker 2 Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 This is dope. Thank you.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 1 This episode is presented by Whole Foods Market. Whole Foods Markets has everything you need for the holidays, whether you're a guest or hosting the big dinner.

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Speaker 1 What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Day Zero Productions in partnership with Sirius XM. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin, and Jess Hackle.
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Speaker 1 Our development researcher is Marcia Robiou. Music, Mixing and Mastering by Hannes Brown.
Random Other Stuff by Ryan Harduth. Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 1 Join me next week for another episode of What Now.

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