Laugh Riot
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
Intro
What were you doing on Jan. 6, 2021? I was prepping for a national TV interview about staffing at contract manufacturing organizations that were making COVID vaccines. (Staff at The Today Show read a WSJ article that I helped out with and contacted me to tape a segment about it for an upcoming episode.) That meant I was working on talking points with some of the members of my trade association, finding the best point for a ponytail so that my pandemic hair wouldn’t look crazy on TV, putting on a tie for the first time in 11 months, and reorienting my desk and rearranging the shelves behind it, so that my webcam would have a decent background.
I only had a day’s notice to prep/worry, which was for the best. I knew the subject well, and any more time would have had me second-guessing myself. The session went well. I didn’t make any gaffes or say anything that would cause a public panic (that was a possibility), and I felt good about my bookshelf game; I was sure to make it onto one of those “rate my room” Twitter threads once this piece aired, at which point people would marvel over the dizzying array of classics and great comics on the shelves behind me.
After we finished at 12:30 p.m., I put my office back together, changed into my WFH sweats, had some lunch and made some coffee, then turned on the TV to see the news & chill out for a few minutes . . . only to see rioters storming the Capitol. My exact words were, “Well, I guess that segment’s not gonna air tomorrow.” As the day progressed, it was pretty clear my segment was Never Gonna Happen, and it never did.
So you can imagine my disappointment at yesterday’s unsealing of the indictment against The Former Guy for election fraud (PDF). Sure, there’s no federal civil rights statute for “denial of shot at fleeting internet or minor TV fame,” but there should be.
And now, on with The Virtual Memories Show!
Podcastery
No new episode this week, because the guest I had lined up had to postpone the past two weekends due to ongoing illness. But I’ve got the next 3 weeks recorded, so we oughtta be good as we close out the summer.
Last week I posted Episode 548 of The Virtual Memories Show, in which writer, musician and composer Howard Fishman joined the show to celebrate his amazing new book, TO ANYONE WHO EVER ASKS: The Life, Music and Mystery of Connie Converse (Dutton). We get into how he discovered the music of the enigmatic Connie Converse, what it was like to write a biography around the gaps in her life, the sheer amount of chance, happenstance, and miraculous occurrences that led to this book, and what it means for the idea of artistic legacy changed. We talk about how Connie Converse arose as a singer-songwriter in 1950s NYC (maybe) just a few years ahead of her time, her subsequent role as a public intellectual and progressive activist, her Cassandra-like nature and how she vanished without a trace in the mid-’70s. Give it a listen! And go read TO ANYONE WHO EVER ASKS.
Other recent episodes: Christopher Brown • Rian Hughes • Eddie Campbell • Remembering Michael Denneny • Mitchell Prothero
Links & Such
RIP Sinéad O’Connor . . . RIP Pee-Wee Herman . . . RIP Edward Sexton . . . (Lance Richardson, who wrote about him in his Tommy Nutter biography, had a lovely tweet about the suit Sexton made for him) . . . RIP Stewart H. Greenfield . . .
When I got the news about Sinéad, I put on The Lion and the Cobra and cried for a while. I was just talking about this record with my
girlfriend from college 2 weekends ago, what a piece of dynamite it was. The night we got the news, she texted that the moment she started playing the album, she was back in her dorm room. We were all so young. Here’s a portrait of Sinéad by Deborah Feingold, from her site
My first memory of Paul Reubens was from watching the Pee-Wee Herman special on HBO in 1982 or thereabouts. I watched it at my father’s place, because he was stealing HBO. After that, I saw him in a bunch of Cheech & Chong movies, also with my dad. (I was like 11-12, but my old man did not exactly grok that Cheech & Chong movies were all about drugs. TBF, my parents also dug the Village People back in the ‘70s, without quite putting 2 and 2 together.) I loved Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, didn’t dig the sequel, didn’t watch the Playhouse too often during college, thought he got a raw deal, and am in awe of the joy he brought into this world.
Martin Rowson wrote about antisemitic imagery in his political cartoons.
Michael Dirda (2012, 2014, 2015) writes about Book Habits!
I was fascinated by this article about the afterlife of Fordlandia, the rubber town Henry Ford built in the Amazon.
I enjoyed the living heck out of the Wham! documentary a few weeks ago; this followup Superlatives interview with Andrew Ridgeley is pretty entertaining, too.
I posted this appreciation of Jules Feiffer by Ed Sorel a few months ago, but I got a card from Ed recently and went back to reread it. In one of the podcasts I recorded this weekend, the guest talked about coming in at the tail-end of the golden age of magazine writing. We talked a bit about that era, and I told him how it felt to record with people like Milton Glaser and George Lois — not writers, but people who had created monuments in the magazine world — and how the very notion of that sort of impact on the culture doesn’t seem to exist any longer. Replaced by who can build the biggest pile of money, I guess. Anyway, regular listeners/readers know that I miss greatness.
Speaking of greatness, the announcement of a podcast about Tom Carvel is occasion for me to bust out what may be my greatest drawing ever
My ink-sketch of ice-cream mogul Tom Carvel, on his birthday in 2022
Current reading
Gravity’s Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon (~200 pages left in this re-re-re-read)
Art
I started making some sketches of the drawing I want to use as the cover of the next Haiku for Business Travelers, but nothing I want to show you yet. You should go to the Flickr album of most of the art I’ve made & find something you like.
Sound Body, Fractured Mind
I managed my 4 out of the 5 days of my weights/yoga cycle from Friday-Tuesday, missing Sunday’s weights for a panoply of boring reasons. I made up for it by doing a pyramid workout on Tuesday, starting with heavier weight/lower reps than usual in set 1, and reducing weight/adding reps with each subsequent set. The final set — 5 lbs. lighter dumbbells than usual, but 18 reps instead of 10 — walloped the heck out of me. I also ran ~4.5 miles with The Guys on Saturday, which was good. I’ll be traveling the next 2 weekends, so that’ll screw up all my workout routines.
Until Next Week
Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back next week with a new podcast, some great links, maybe some art, & who knows maybe a little profundity or something.
You should’ve left the light on,
—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
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