#77. Venue Pierogi and You

It's 11:30 and the club needs dumplings, dumplings.

Hi everyone,

Sometimes in the wake of a seismic pop culture event, I give myself a little break before I absorb the cultural item itself rather than the conversational and critical echoes. Sometimes I’m all in on the zeitgeist and other times it’s a little too…geistly. What I mean to say is that after a week of stalling, I listened to Taylor Swift’s new album The Tortured Poets Department. But, for monoculture-based reasons, I’m having trouble figuring out how to best enjoy it.

The songs sound good, which is not unexpected. Taylor Swift is very good at making songs! Lyrically, though, they feel like a musical recap of the last eighteen months of People Magazine headlines. A friend of mine recently tweeted that she doesn’t love how much art has tipped towards thinly veiled autobiography, even in music. I don’t mind a little navel-gazing (I am in many ways a professional navel gazer myself), but I do get a little dizzy doing the math of connecting TTPD’s lyrics to the corresponding bits of information from Swift’s real life as part of her recent ascent to omnipresence.

The tabloid-stories-to-art pipeline here reminds me of the lead-up to Baby J, John Mulaney’s most recent standup special. Mulaney had (at a scale that was frankly unnerving to me) become the topic of gossip column fascination after a stint in rehab and the end of his marriage. Baby J was his much-anticipated artistic interpretation of that period of his life, just as The Tortured Poets Department is Taylor’s way-more-widely-anticipated artistic statement on her recent and well-chronicled breakup/rebound/romance arc. But while I found Baby J compelling (although I have some critiques), my response to a wide swath of TTPD is: “Oh yeah! I heard about that!” But, to more ardent Swifties, I imagine that fleshing out the skeleton of Taylor’s last couple of years is fascinating and exciting! And, obviously, she is making music for her big fans, not for chumps like me!

I also think despite some of the criticisms of the record, good song lyrics and bad song lyrics are EXTREMELY close to being the same thing, and the titular Tortured Poet came up with some real sticky, interesting ways of expressing big complicated feelings! “I’m so depressed I act like it’s my birthday every day,” is good stuff, imo! I think I just wish I knew a little less about the backstory so the songs could just be songs instead of also being clues to a puzzle the audience has been enlisted to solve.

Is it that I’m just more interested in John Mulaney’s retelling of how drugs threw his life into chaos than I am in Taylor Swift’s chronicling of the interior journey that accompanied her already fairly public love life? Is there some latent misogyny in me that leads me to write off Swift’s (seemingly) autobiographical art? Is this just not her best work? Probably it’s some combination of the three, right? (A fourth factor that plays a role: I’ve never heard a song by The 1975 that has lingered in my brain for longer than it takes to listen to. So the explicit Matty Healy-based lyrics give me a real sense of: “Him? Is he funny or something?” Yes, we are re-watching Arrested Development, why do you ask? I get that he is handsome! But his band sounds like a fake band that would be playing at a student center in a movie that takes place on a college campus.) Maybe I just should have waited longer before listening to TTPD!

Is this something anyone else grapples with? The trouble with separating the art from the artist, not in a “the art is good, but the artist is bad” way but in the sense of having too much context to enjoy art on its own merits?

I’M BACK ON THE ROAD!

THIS WEEKEND (5/3-5/4) I’ll be in the Cincinnati area (technically Dayton, KY) doing four shows at Commonwealth Sanctuary!!!

Then next week I’ll be in San Francisco for one show at Cobb’s Comedy Club on 5/8, three shows at Here-After in Seattle (5/10-5/11) and one show at Helium in Portland (5/12)! I don’t make it out to the west coast that often, and I’m really trying to get this

OTHER PLACES TO FIND ME LATELY

I wrote for The Dirt (one of my favorite publications) about a movie theater from my youth and the importance of figuring out your own taste.

I’m on this week’s episode of Lovett or Leave It which was recorded live at the Lincoln Theater in Washington D.C. Mehdi Hasan is so sharp and uncompromising politically, and he’s a really relentless conversationalist on the show (extremely nice and less intense offstage), and Sam Jay made me laugh SUPER hard during our segments together.

Talking about goofier news, I’m on today’s episode of What A Time To Be Alive with Eli and Kath! I wasn’t asked about the student protests across the country on either podcast, but briefly I think it is good to see a mass protest movement arising against the military industrial complex broadly and ongoing U.S. funding for Israel’s war in Gaza specifically. (It’s additionally moving to me when the protests made space for really heartwarming Jewish-Muslim interfaith events. Also, fwiw, it seems like the students have been doing a pretty diligent job of disavowing and weeding out antisemitism without the “help” of the police who keep getting called in to arrest everyone.)

I also popped up on the two latest episodes of Sound Heap, an extremely fun podcast that is difficult to explain but delightful to listen to!

And, last but not least, I was on last week’s episode of The Big Flop talking about Biosphere 2. My computer kept screwing, up but their producers stitched this extremely funny conversation together beautifully!

PEP TALK FOR VENUE PIEROGI

Dumplings like a truckling, truckling, truckling.

On Saturday night, Maris and I went to see the band Bratmobile play their first New York City show in 20 years. They played a great set. They are cool as hell.

However, before the show, I’d had a show of my own (thanks to everyone who came out to Union Hall to see me run through my set before I tape my special) and didn’t have a chance to eat dinner (because I squandered that time watching the Boston Celtics beat the Miami Heat at basketball). The night could have gotten grisly, hunger-wise. Fortunately, Warsaw (a concert venue in the very Polish Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint), has a little concession window that sells kielbasa sandwiches and pierogi. This is a pep talk for those pierogi.

Venue pierogi…thank you for all you do. For the mere cost of $6, you provided a late night snack that bordered on medicinal in its necessity. You, a humble three-piece of dumplings, save so many lives (metaphorically if not literally), even if you occasionally get puked up into a nearby trash can (not the case with my pierogi, but I can imagine). So few concert halls take into account the fact that whether I am drinking or not, people might want a little snack at the show. And what’s a better on the go snack than a little cardboard canoe of dumplings. If you were venue calzones or venue samosas or venue empanadas, I would love you just as much. But on Saturday night you were venue pierogi, and you were perfect.

PEP TALK FOR A READER

I’ve toggled some words in this request around for the sake of brevity and punctuation.

I’m dealing with first time heartbreak, feeling like I lost the love of my life. But I think I got played in front of all my friends because we work together. I could really use a pep talk.
- Insult II Injury

The big problem with caring about someone or something, is that if it doesn’t work out, you feel so stupid. The more you care, the dumber it feels when things dissolve. It’s practically Newtonian, in terms of how feeling a strong emotion creates the conditions for an equal, opposite emotion to crash full-steam into you in the future. A first heartbreak is so destabilizing too. There’s a real sense (as there is with any new-to-you type of pain) of “people just walk around like this all day???” You are not, however, uniquely wounded or irreversibly messed up. Almost everyone who feels romantic love has felt his kind of romantic anguish. Possible exceptions: People who stay with their first love forever. And honestly, congratulations on being one-and-done with dating. I can’t even guess my own email password right the first time.

Here’s the good part: That capacity for distress means you can feel, which is, in the big picture, a positive sign. You want to continue to have feelings, because it means you’re open to good feelings. Love doesn’t feel like numbness, despite The Weeknd singing “I can’t feel my face when I’m with you/And I love it.” He’s not talking about love love, he’s talking about his very special relationship with nose drugs (allegedly). Feeling like you lost the love of your life is a sign that you will eventually be open to a new love of your life (is a theory I have, and the operating theory of this newsletter).

Importantly, you don’t have to feel bad to know you can feel. And there’s no special value in misery, but this heartbreak is a sign that your heart is open to experiencing intense feelings, which is a risk with taking, given what rewards come along with it. Think of love like a big hat. The bigger the hat you wear, the bigger the chance that it will go weird at some point. Maybe some people who don’t get your whole ting will make fun of you. But, the deeper the connection you feel to your big-ass hat, the more worth it it’ll be to wear anyway. Does that make sense? Almost? Good enough!

Unlike committing to a big silly hat, falling in love and feeling romantic loss is something that most of your friends and coworkers have experienced too. They are probably judging you less than you fear. Maybe you got played or maybe something good came to its natural end. They don’t know! Either way, it’s like that old saying goes: Don’t pity the player, lament the unfortunate realities of the game, while understanding that internalizing a sense of loss signifies a willingness to care in meaningful ways. (The original version is catchier, but I think there’s a nuance to my paraphrasing that is worthwhile to include.)

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK:
Sabrina Carpenter - “Espresso”

This is a fun song by Sabrina Carpenter who opened for several dates on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and listening to it makes me feel very *Dr. Evil voice* “I’m with it. I’m hip.” And yes, I know that’s a dated reference in itself at this point!!! I get what’s going on here, even though I don’t fully understand the lyrics. I feel like this song has huge potential to be played at every party and poolside bar and Walgreens in a Song of the Summer way that harkens back to “Get Lucky” (11 years ago!!!!). What was our last truly omnipresent song of the summer????

UPCOMING SHOWS

I’ve got some really fun shows coming up! Come see one! More NYC spots are listed on my website, and more road dates are coming soon! OH ALSO: In May I’ll be BACK guest cohosting Butterboy at Littlefield with my friend my good buddy Alison Leiby every Monday! :)

4/29: Butterboy at Littlefield in Brooklyn

5/2: Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me Live Recording (Chicago)

5/3-5/4: Commonwealth Sanctuary (Dayton, KY) (Four shows!)

5/8: Cobb’s Comedy Club (San Francisco)

5/10-5/11: Here-After (Seattle) (THIRD SHOW ADDED!)

5/12: Helium Comedy Club (Portland)

5/16-5/18: Vermont Comedy Club (Burlington) (Five shows!)

6/8: Helium Comedy Club (Philadelphia) (4:30pm show!!!!)

6/13: New York Comedy Club - Stamford, CT (Tickets coming soon!!!)

6/15: Kismet Improv Theater (Pawtucket, RI) (EARLY SHOW SOLD OUT! LATE SHOW ADDED!!!)

6/21: NEW SPECIAL TAPING AT THE BELL HOUSE IN BROOKLYN (Late show tickets on sale now!)