{"id":35495,"date":"2025-07-30T23:19:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-30T23:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/35495\/"},"modified":"2025-07-30T23:19:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-30T23:19:09","slug":"getting-in-marc-marons-head","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/35495\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting in Marc Maron\u2019s Head"},"content":{"rendered":"

In its nearly sixteen years on the air, \u201cWTF with Marc Maron\u201d has recorded more than fifteen hundred episodes, with guests ranging from RuPaul<\/a> to Robin Williams<\/a> to Barack Obama. In 2015, Maron interviewed the Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels, who had long ago turned Maron down for a job. As Sarah Larson noted<\/a>, what might have seemed a loss was really a gain, allowing Maron to arrive at \u201cthe right thing at the right time\u201d\u2014that is, becoming \u201can unhinged garage-podcast messiah.\u201d This fall, \u201cWTF\u201d will end its run, after which Maron plans to spend more time acting and doing standup. (His new special, \u201cPanicked,\u201d arrives on HBO this week.) Not long ago, he joined us to recommend a few books about particular interests of his that he has recently enjoyed. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t say I\u2019m an avid reader, and when I read, I mean business,\u201d he said. \u201cIf I\u2019m going to read a book, it better do its job.\u201d His remarks have been edited and condensed.<\/p>\n

No One Left to Come Looking for You<\/p>\n

by Sam Lipsyte<\/p>\n

This novel is about young people who are living through a moment of transition, when both the Lower East Side and the music associated with it are becoming gentrified. These are people who think \u201csellout\u201d means something, and that some stuff is really garbage because of its mass appeal.<\/p>\n

The plot is a pulpy detective story that revolves around this kid named Jack Shit, who\u2019s in a noise-rock punk outfit, and who has lost his bass and his drug-addicted lead singer. He needs to find them because they have a gig in a few days. He\u2019s singularly focussed on that, but in the course of his search Jack learns that there are bigger forces at hand\u2014that it\u2019s not all about him, and that not only is music slipping away from what he believes it should be, but that New York City is also about to be turned inside out by real-estate developers.<\/p>\n

I have to be transparent\u2014Sam is one of my best friends. But I have read him forever, and I think he\u2019s one of the great humorists of our time. The book has a beautiful ending that takes place in an ice rink, where Jack has to go up against a hired goon who is also a great skater. I think the requirement of a story of any kind is that your lead character should probably change. At the end of this, everything around Jack has changed, but he remains, and it\u2019s kind of touching.<\/p>\n

Sonny Boy<\/p>\n

by Al Pacino<\/p>\n

Reading Pacino\u2019s whole story was fascinating. It shows you how much he was really invested in acting from the start because of the art. You read about his influences, his beginnings as part of this kind of fringe, radical theater company\u2014where he and Martin Sheen would be in the back sweeping up\u2014and about the fact that what compelled him was the pursuit of truth. I know people talk about \u201ctruth\u201d in acting all the time, but acting can be a lot of things. You can just get away with it. A lot of actors are just hustlers, they\u2019re conmen riding on natural gifts. But he was in it, all in.<\/p>\n

Another thing I came away with is that, with a public person like this, you judge them by their performances. Al Pacino\u2019s always got these roles where he has a lot of swagger, but it turns out that he\u2019s pretty shy. I didn\u2019t know that he is this vulnerable, sensitive, neurotic artist. And he\u2019s very honest about having to do roles for money, because he was such a nutty guy that he just couldn\u2019t manage money at all. It was just kind of amazing to me to know that guy, the real Al Pacino, and to learn a bit about his process.<\/p>\n

The Crisis of Culture<\/p>\n

by Olivier Roy<\/p>\n

Yeah, this one, geez. It\u2019s not an easy read. I\u2019ve always been a guy who wants to take on these books\u2014whatever trend cultural criticism is leaning toward, I try to crack it. I\u2019m not that intellectual, I do not have the foundations to really wrap my brain around some of the language of this stuff, but I like to look toward books like these to feed my own perception of what I see going on.<\/p>\n

The biggest thing I took is Roy\u2019s idea that society is breaking apart and that we are losing a shared cultural understanding\u2014that, especially as we moved into a world ruled more by social media, we lost the ability to have a civic body. He has some really interesting stuff to say about how neoliberalism flows into the structure of digital platforms, and how that has all kinds of questionable effects, like making what people stand for meaningless in a certain way.<\/p>\n

The book really made me think about the effects of creativity being made available, for many people, only through social-media platforms, which are corporate entities designed and built to capture eyeballs and make money and advertise\u2014to dump things into people\u2019s brains. It\u2019s especially interesting to me in terms of the comedy industry. You know, I have this idea that as a comic you have freedom of speech, freedom of voice. But if your career is tethered to a one-minute clip, and to algorithms dictating what should and shouldn\u2019t be put in front of people\u2014an algorithm that is also chipping away at people\u2019s attention spans\u2014what happens then? If you\u2019re operating in that world, which is not the real world, then maybe you don\u2019t have any real freedom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In its nearly sixteen years on the air, \u201cWTF with Marc Maron\u201d has recorded more than fifteen hundred…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1206,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[353,49,48,1783,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-35495","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-disable-inline-signup-unit","12":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35495\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}