If I described how the train car smelled, none of us would be happy. I’d walked onto it after lunch at Philippe (the Original), with a friend whose job was consumed by the winter storm. I’d taken the bus to meet him, and he gave me a ride to Union Station, where I walked onto the line that would take me most of the way home.
Regret, immediately. Everyone on the train was either muttering to someone only they could hear or (like me) wearing headphones to block out the muttering. No one made eye contact. But all of us had phones that started blaring within 10 seconds of each other, and we glanced down to see flash flood warnings. There was that much rain? There was. I made one quick trip to The Last Bookstore, then found a bus home, partly out of cheapness and partly curiosity about two days of rain was doing to the city.
That was as adventurous as I got. There was one quick trip to Tucson and back, but most of my work was talked out on the phone or poured into a google sheet. We saw “Ant-Man 3” because it was half-off on Tuesday, and we expected nothing from it. We got tickets for Brennan Lee Mulligan and Izzy Roland’s improv show because Margarita watches everything Mulligan does, paying for access to the Dropout comedy network and showing me the best bits, to convert me.
I wasn’t all there yet, but appreciated what it was - pure, earnest, improv comedy, powered by silliness and an internal star system that may or may never reach into the mainstream. (Some College Humor comedians broke through, and Lou Wilson has started to get attention as the announcer for Jimmy Kimmel’s show. But this isn’t like the last golden age of stand-up, where someone who hits it big in this circuit shows up in multiple scripted cable shows.)
Tucson was a quick trip for one quick story, with about 90 minutes of downtime. I spent it with a friend I’d met covering a campaign event in 2018 and stayed in touch with on Twitter. This is the good function of Twitter, which I’m trying to use less than ever: You can build intimacy, a sense of whether you really want to be around somebody, by shooting them messages all day.
This trip was proof. I told my friend to meet me at a coffee shop near the conference I’d just covered. He showed up in a grey sweatsuit and dropped a black utility bag on the table.
“What’s that?” I asked, and asked sincerely.
“Hold this,” he said. He gave me the bag. I held it. “Now you’ve conceal-carried in a coffee shop,” he said.
We caught up on his second failed marriage, ate a Sonoran hot dog, and talked more about his gun. One more gag: “They say carrying this thing is like having two c****, and it is - in one respect. If you whip either one out you’re f*****.”
I mean this: It was a nice respite from the trip.
The Best Thing I Read: Nice rebound after a slow week. I read Will Sommer’s “Trust the Plan” and Malcolm Harris’s “Palo Alto” for interviews, and loved both. Harris’s taught me more, but a well-adjusted person who didn’t spend years following the QAnon conspiracy theory would learn from either. “Palo Alto” struck me as the one I’d be recommending for years.
The Best Thing I Watched: Not the new “Ant-Man.” Our expectations had been driven very low by the reviews, and neither of us had a bad time. But you could feel the air slowly coming out of our theater, from people who had gotten used to Marvel’s old hit rate and expected at least a goofy action movie that seemed as put-together as the ones in the trailers before it. I’m not saying the other people in our theater should have chased this with “Enter the Void,” but I did, and recommend it.
I really liked the opening two paragraphs, both were very immersive in setting the scene on the train.
I recall when College humor came out it was a big deal that will Ferrell was associated with it little was it known that the era of comedy opportunities was about to change. Your point on the "last Golden age of stand-up" reminded me of Tom Papa a comedian who was good friends with Jerry Seinfeld, whose decent stand up career netted him two nbc primetime shows that went nowhere. Of course those were the days when nbc went hard on reality TV post friends so maybe not that surprising.
The gun story was pretty good. Solid line by your friend too.
Can't wait to read the Palo alto interview. Hope next week is as eventful.