“Perhaps, mes amis, you are finally as stupid and infantile as the Americans, oui?”

Have you had one of those weeks where you kept thinking it was a day later than it actually was, only to have your illusions shattered each afternoon by friends and colleagues? Were you knee-deep in celebration last night before suddenly remembering that no, it was not yet the start of the weekend after all? Did your heart express to your stomach with the realization that you had to be wrenched and ground down by the week for one more day? Well, good news. It is definitely, assuredly a confirmed Friday after all. This is it. Make it through these next few hours and you have two whole days of weekend to luxuriate in the freedo — oh, they’re over now, it’s Monday again, you wasted it. Hahaha, j/k. Or am I? The weekends go so fast and the weeks they last so long. But I promise you that, at this moment, you are still on the good side of the weekend. Energize yourself with this Hudson Mohawke track and enjoy, because soon — too soon; always, too soon — it will all be over.

The Conflict of the Faculties, Together with a Treatise On the Power of the Mind to Master Morbid Feelings by Resolution Alone [PHOTOS]

If the canonical philosopher Immanuel Kant were alive today and you showed him the Internet he would probably say (in German), “So you are telling me you can access all of human knowledge through this one machine? Every thought that has ever been expressed and every interpretation of those expressions is available simply by clicking on a series of interconnected links that provide both context and background? An entire history of philosophy and a construction of morals and reason are — hey, you can see sex stuff on this thing? Well, get me to the sex stuff! REALLY, THEY CAN SHOW THAT? FOR FREE? Oh, this is good. This is very, very good. Let me just get comfortable here. Um NO IT’S NOT ‘TOO WEIRD.’ Do you know what we had available to us in 18th century Prussia? HORSE PROSTITUTES. That was as good as it got. Nothing like this. Look, I didn’t say I didn’t want to see horse prostitute videos, I’m saying let’s not settle on one particular thing when there seems to be an infinite variety of subjects here to experience. Wait, what is that? Is that that guy’s asshole? What’s wrong with it? NOOOOOOOO.” But also he would probably be totally okay with ad blocking, at least according to the philosophy seminar that is Digiday.

★★★★ Petals dropped from a helpfully labeled Japanese pagoda tree beside the natural-history museum. More petals lay on a navy Audi A4 wagon up the block. Thin clouds were whitening the east, but the sun through them cast shadows. The cross streets were hot, but still preferable to the runaway office cooling system. Reading a draft on paper out on Fifth Avenue left the eyes so overloaded that, on return to the indoors, not only were the rooms and people green but the windows and scenery magenta. Great drifting afternoon clouds of white and silver-gray were scaled for the multi-framed panorama through the Time Warner Center’s front windows, or for the panorama of the sky itself.

“Allrecipes has been the biggest winner [in audited magazine circulation] so far this year, boosting circulation by 70 percent to 1.1 million, including a 76-percent rise in subscriptions. Even single-copy sales bumped up 9 percent, bucking the industry trend. The good news follows a January rate base increase for the brand. EatingWell and Food Network Magazine also demonstrated that the epicurean market remains one of the strongest in the business, both posting solid circulation gains above 6 percent. Interestingly, Diabetes Self-Management and Diabetes Forecast also had two of the most successful starts to the year. The brands were up 26.6 percent and 15.8 percent, respectively, with each touting a circulation of around 500,000.”

by Brendan O’Connor

In the outer boroughs, the M train runs above ground. Travelling away from Manhattan, M train riders in Williamsburg and Bushwick mostly travel over busy thoroughfares like Broadway and Myrtle Avenue. In Ridgewood, Queens, after the Seneca Avenue station, the M train turns and begins cutting through blocks of residential buildings. Between Seneca and Forest Avenue, the elevated tracks cut diagonally across the northeast corner of the block bordered by Woodward Avenue to the north and Woodbine Street to the west, beneath which, earlier this year, Ridgewood residents took over an empty plot of land and turned it into a community garden. They patched up a hole in a fence around the property and built a gate. They cleared out the garbage, cut back the weeds, and started building planters. Last month, without warning, city officials changed the locks on the fence — which the gardeners had fixed — and put up signs threatening anyone found inside with felony trespassing.

Clark Fitzgerald, one of the Ridgewood Community Garden’s co-founders, told me that he and others began taking steps to bring the garden into being early last year. “We wanted to make sure we were doing it the right way, that we wouldn’t be doing it for nothing. We tried to go through the Transit authority, but for over a year they were unable to tell us who owned it, if at all,” he said. “They just didn’t know. They said, ‘Our property management systems are really complicated, we really can’t ascertain whether it’s within MTA, the New York City Transit Authority, if it’s the city’s, if it’s a local landlord and we’re leasing it from them for the air rights.’ They really couldn’t say.”

The nascent community garden garnered support from the local community board and received a three-thousand-dollar grant from the non-profit Citizens Committee of New York City. “Many times with issues like getting permission, the grant helps move things along,” Saleen Shah, Citizens Committee’s director of communications wrote in an email. In this case, unfortunately, it did not, and the community gardeners decided to move ahead without the MTA’s permission. About a dozen people from the neighborhood were involved on a semi-regular basis, Fitzgerald said. “We see each other here every few days, and then on Sundays we host a big public work days,” he said. “Upwards of thirty people generally. We do workshops, we do resilience think-tank type things. We act as a compost hub for the neighborhood. We take plant donations. Throughout the summer I’d say we’ve seen a circulation of over a hundred people around here.”

Two buildings back up to the garden along its north side, off Woodbine Street: the ground floor of one is currently being used as a collective workshop space, members of which also participated in cultivating the community garden; the landlord of the other recently began conducting renovations. The day before the locks were changed, Fitzgerald said, “an assessment team came by to scope out this huge pile of debris which had accumulated by one of the local landlords during a renovation. They cited him for illegal dumping; they assessed what we had done; they said, ‘Okay, it’s not an impediment to our operations. It looks pretty. It’s far better than what came before — you guys can stay here.’” The next day, however, they were locked out: “New chain, new lock. No heads up.”

According to Fitzgerald, the MTA claimed at first that they had plans to pave the land over and lease it as a parking lot. “It became apparent that that was not the case whatsoever. That was like a neat excuse. The next reason was, It’s not suitable for gardening. But we weren’t consulted about how we were gardening, because we’re doing it with the tenets of permaculture and resilience in mind — we don’t intend to eat any of this stuff, it’s mostly for remediation of the soil and as a gathering place for the neighborhood,” Fitzgerald said. “And then they said, ‘Oh, it’s a security issue.’ Which is, you know, a classic ‘explanation’ that needs no explanation whatsoever.”

Even publicly, the MTA’s messaging on the issue has been contradictory. Spokesman Kevin Ortiz confirmed to the Queens Courier that the MTA had asked the owner of an adjacent property to clean up the lot and remove the dumpster improperly placed there by one of his tenants. “The lot has since been cleaned,” Ortiz said. (Yes, but… by whom?) “The Ridgewood Community Garden group never received permission to enter or use the lot and they are essentially trespassing. We’ve asked them to vacate the lot no later than Aug. 3. We cannot have anyone occupy the lot under our structure as it is deemed a security risk.” But, the next day, MTA spokeswoman Amanda Kwan told Gothamist that the issue wasn’t “security” but access. “A garden is not a suitable use for that space because we need to be able to get in equipment and trucks,” Kwan said. “We may have said something like we need access — it’s a matter of safety in terms for our people to get in… I don’t think we used the word ‘security.’”

On Monday, the MTA opened the gates temporarily to let the Ridgewood Community Garden salvage whatever they could. (“We still haven’t seen any actual proof that they do own it other than that they have a greater capacity to cut and change locks than we do,” Fitzgerald said.) A few plants had survived and are to be moved to friends’ apartment nearby, above Topos, a recently-opened used bookstore where Fitzgerald works and that, along with the garden and the Woodbine collective space, has come to function as a kind of community gathering place, especially for people looking to unite newcomers to the neighborhood and those who have been living there for more time. The garden group took advantage of their last few hours with the space, hosting a small party. Early in the night, the small crowd was diverse: bearded hipsters, but also an older, white-haired man fixing a wheelbarrow and a Hispanic woman with her children. A week before, Fitzgerald had said he had high hopes for the garden, which he understood to be “bridging the gap between people who’d be divided and conquered otherwise.”

Well within the Williamsburg periphery at thirty-five minutes from Manhattan, Ridgewood is very attractive to developers looking to capitalize on the L train corridor as much as possible. “We’d always thought about this as really an experiment in very basic neighborhood resilience, which means: knowing your neighbors, learning skills together, being capable of facing up to the questions that are posed by the time we’re in,” Fitzgerald said. Ridgewood is also, however, situated between two Superfund sites: Newtown Creek to the west and Wolff-Alport chemical company, which the New Yorker dubbed the most radioactive place in New York City, to the east. “For a neighborhood of this size and cultural integrity, we’re still laid siege to by a nuclear waste site on one hand and that hellish moat over there. And according to all reports they’re just going to be creeping in as time goes on.” In this view, the city’s ecological crisis and its housing crisis are both concurrent and concomitant. Fitzgerald, who grew up in Manhattan, said that gentrification is “another disaster we have to face up to, another consideration we have to take into consideration as a group of people that have become interested in the land we inhabit and not as a dispersed group of individuals.”

State Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan and City Councilman Antonio Reynoso have both reportedly promised to help the community group find a new space in the neighborhood to establish a garden. “I look forward to working with the Ridgewood Community Garden group and other interested parties to locate possible green space in the Ridgewood community in the future,” Nolan said in a statement. Reynoso did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement, Peter H. Kostmayer, CEO of the Citizens Committee for New York City, who awarded the community garden the three-thousand-dollar grant, said, “We gave a grant for this new community garden and we hope it can be saved. If the MTA’s only issue is access I am sure the group will provide access. That really should not be an issue. I am asking Council Member Crowley, State Senator Addabbo, Assembly Member Nolan and Congresswoman Meng to sit down with Citizens Committee, the MTA and the local gardeners and resolve this neighborhood improvement issue in a fair and reasonable way.”

On Tuesday, MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz confirmed that the Ridgewood Community Garden group had been evicted. “They have cleared out of the space,” he wrote in an email. Asked whether the MTA has any plans to make sure the lot doesn’t fill up with garbage again — and wouldn’t having a group of locals maintaining the space, so long as they didn’t impede access to the tracks, accomplish that better than the MTA could — he wrote, “We will maintain it. And that’s exactly the point, they would impede access to our tracks in the case of an emergency.”

Already trash has begun to accumulate behind the now-locked gates. “You can’t just clean something up and leave it and expect it to stay fine. You gotta reintroduce a new vitality into it,” Fitzgerald said last week. “If they’d nipped it right in the bud, that would have been one thing. But to wait until it’s already started to bloom? Brutal.”

Every artist, every writer goes under the hammer. But under ordinary circumstances, since a writer’s real ambition is to be anonymous and since his work is done in private, one arrives at some way of living with the hammer.

— James Baldwin, interviewed in The Black Scholar, 1973

Last week, I watched The End of the Tour with the author David Lipsky in a Palisades screening room. The movie is based on his 2010 book, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, which describes the five days in 1996 he spent interviewing the late David Foster Wallace.

Lipsky had been on assignment to Rolling Stone when he spoke with Wallace, but the intended profile never ran. “While I was in Illinois, Jann [Wenner] had read a thing about how heroin had become re-popularized in the NW and Seattle,” he said. “I think the lead singer of Blind Melon had died. And so he wanted to do a big package on heroin; I went and lived with these heroin addicts for a month. And then I came home, and it took two or three weeks to write and close the story (“Junkie Town”, Rolling Stone, May 30th 1996.) At that point, Infinite Jest had come out four months earlier, so we couldn’t do the story. So then, to say [to Wallace], ‘Hey, all that work, you were so careful to get your story across, and there isn’t going to be a piece’ — that was just embarrassing.”

After Wallace’s death in 2008, Lipsky wrote a story for Rolling Stone, “The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace,” which won a National Magazine Award. A book based on the taped interviews was the next natural step. But he didn’t want to write an ordinary biography; he was determined to give a sense of what it was like to spend time with Wallace. “I didn’t want to compromise,” he said, “or write a book where I was making assumptions about what Wallace felt like, but could say instead: ‘here is the transcript.’” The book he wound up writing is gentle and self-effacing, a faithful depiction of Wallace as he presented himself to the world: funny, humble, brilliant, tender, challenging. There’s a natural sympathy between the two men, their conversation a Vulcan mind meld of insights, quotations, jokes, references to television and movies and above all, literature and writing.

The heart of Lipsky’s book is in this talk, but The End of the Tour is not a literary movie. At its center, instead, is the portrait of the fine and difficult man we meet in the book. Or rather, two such men; Jason Segel as a highly evocative Wallace, and Jesse Eisenberg as a dramatically smaller version of Lipsky. I love the movie, even so. And feel that both Segel and Eisenberg achieved miracles honestly.

Lipsky and I spent the first hour or two just talking and then watched the movie, with plenty of pauses for questions and the occasional American Spirit cigarette (orange box).

I’ve been trying to analyze the rock star element of Wallace’s mystique. There’s something just wrong with it? I don’t know quite what. But from the instant your book came out there were all these complaints, mixed in with the praise — oh no, what is this book, and now there is a movie, Jason Segel is going to suck! — but I loved Jeff, Who Lives at Home.

I actually loved him in I Love You, Man.

I LOVED him in I Love You, Man.

He looks like Wallace in that movie.

There’s something sweet about the furious complaining, at the same time it just exasperates me.

Two things. One is that I really pushed for Jesse. When we met, we had lunch in a diner, and I showed him how interviewers would use the tape recorder. I was talking about what it was like to drive out there and stuff like that. Then we got up and we were walking the check over to the cash register and he looked at me and said, “You’re much taller than I am, and you are Wallace’s height.” I said, “Yeah but trust me, visually, for the story — the story the movie is telling — it will really work that you aren’t the same height as Jason.”

And in the book it’s the same sort of thing, do you know what I mean?

It’s a deliberate choice, to make yourself smaller, so that you can tell the story better.

The book is about David. So it was just enough about me that you’d understand while we were talking and having a good conversation, but not enough so that it would seem like I was trying to make it seem… like I was trying to make us the same height.

Wow. But you ARE. Actually you are taller.

No, no — I —

You are stealthily being much larger than you choose to appear.

This is the second thing: When you were talking about fanboys, there are so many things that are just format, things that don’t wake us up, right? David said that when something does come along that’s actually good and that does wake us up, we go berserk, and we don’t know how to treasure it. It’s in Of Mice and Men, a book I haven’t read, but I know from film representations: There’s one person who would keep petting bunnies so hard that they die. The culture hugs the things that it loves so hard.

That goes back to what I think is the not-real story about the movie, which is that it’s about literary ambition? It’s not. It’s about literary love, it’s about loving someone’s work and then finding out that you love the person, too.

This whole idea of being “the best” writer seems kind of questionable to me.

Hemingway once wrote to Fitzgerald: Your problem is you keep trying to write masterpieces. Just write as well as you can every day, and know that it will be good and at the end you’ll have a really good book. But if you try to write masterpieces, nothing will come. That’s what happens to people when they get the acclaim that they want for their work. That’s what David says at the end of the book: If you listen to the outside culture, if you care what they think about you, the weapon pointed at you goes from being a .22 to being a .45…

There’s a moment in the movie where Segel says to Eisenberg on the airplane, “David, this isn’t real.” And in the book he goes on, and says, “What’s real is being in a room with a piece of paper,” right?

What’s real is that the movie has the same sense of who this person was when he was alive that the book has. The other stuff — people writing essays about how they won’t see the movie, or former friends of his saying that they don’t like the way it is? — that’s the part that in the movie, and in the book, David is saying, “It isn’t real.”

I wrote that book primarily as a fan. Here is how this great writer thought about his life, and this is how he lived. This is literally just what he would want strangers to know about him. Remember, he’s working the tape by the end of the book — he’s stopping it, deciding how he wants to phrase his life, and then turning it back on.

Why didn’t you keep in touch with him?

Right when I came home he’d sent me my shoe back. It was charming and funny, with a note — “Yours, I presume?” — It was great. But he was a much more powerful writer than I was. He was someone whose blurb would matter, if he reviewed your book kindly or talked about your book in interviews. If I’d tried to be his friend, that would have been an unavoidable part of the friendship. So I made a note to myself to not try to contact him until I had some work of mine that had been valued by the culture — people had really loved the first two books, but they weren’t part of the culture in a serious way.

Remember, he had said, “It will be interesting to talk to you in a few years, because my experience is that when you get what you want you won’t feel especially better.” I didn’t want to have that conversation with him until I could have it with some knowledge. And so when the West Point book came out and it was on the cover of the Book Review and on the list, I would write letters to David. And then I would look at them and send them to myself and they just seemed so loopy I just couldn’t send them.

Then my producer at NPR said, we want to do a new book series, name a book that’s just come out that you think is great. I said there aren’t any, but the best book of the last year is David’s second collection of essays, which was Consider the Lobster. That was kind of a smoke signal that I assumed that he might hear or see. And then two years later, he was dead.

Watching the Movie

Jesse Eisenberg (as Lipsky) is learning of Wallace’s death. He can’t believe it, but soon he is describing his feelings about Wallace to Robert Siegel on NPR: “To read David Foster Wallace was to feel your eyelids pulled open…”

How’s this feel to you?

Like the thing that I wanted to do… it’s done.

We pause, just accidentally, on a closeup of the tape recorder, in quite sharp focus.

The weird magic of a tape recording. The eighty-six thousand seconds that are in every day: These have been preserved. When I first watched the movie, this is what I thought: This series of five days was there, right, as a sound thing? And then here it was visually, also.

The biggest thing for me, and we’ll see it when we get to the house… I didn’t think I’d ever be in that house again. Because by the time I was ready to write about David, that house had been sold; he was in California. The people who had bought the house had done a remodeling, and stuff like that. Also they didn’t like people going there looking for Wallace.

So when you go inside: seeing his bookcases again, seeing his mantel again, seeing his kitchen again — that was really thrilling. Just being able to be in that house again, that I never thought I would see another time.

The camera enters the kitchen.

Do you know… I asked them for a Whataburger magnet to go on the refrigerator.

***

New York: Infinite Jest has just set the literary world on fire. Eisenberg/Lipsky is incredulous, envious.

“David Foster Wallace… The plaques and citations can now be put into escrow.”

Do you know Walter Kirn? That was something that James [Ponsoldt, who directed the film] was great about. He wanted to recreate that time, so it’s not just some fake review.

Oh yes, that’s one of my favorite parts of the book, when you’re discussing the reviews.

Lipsky’s girlfriend: “Guess you’ll have to read it.”

That’s just so ludicrous. You knew his work intimately.

When I read the State Fair piece, all of a sudden it was not just his intellect. It was also sensuous, you know. It had the whole world and not just the brain, and it was thrilling how he had made that shift. That was June ’94, “Ticket to the Fair.” He had been really smart and his phrasing was great — but then all of a sudden he had populated the world around that great brain too, and that was just totally exciting. We had tried to get him into the [Rolling Stone] Hot List before — that’s when you pick all the cool things that are happening, and we knew that Infinite Jest was coming out, so we made a big push to get him in there, but we couldn’t.

Eisenberg’s Lipsky arrives in Illinois.

And they got the car that I had! A forest-green Pontiac Grand Am.

Interior: Wallace’s house. The recorder is off. Wallace explains that he might want to take some stuff back after he has said it: will Lipsky agree? “Yes” — then he turns the tape recorder back on and says, a little unpleasantly: “You agreed to the interview.”

That didn’t happen.

Yeah, no, so: Jesse asked me, were there times when David seemed like he didn’t want to talk anymore? and I said yeah, there were. But look, he’d agreed to the interview. So — that line isn’t in the script; that’s something that Jesse knew was a nice way of explaining. Because you have to make a story. That makes me look a little bit bad or whatever, but it…

It makes you be a journalist, instead of a fellow reader.

Okay. But they have a hundred and five minutes to make the story; so that version of me is part of the envelope to get what is really valuable.

So, satisfy my curiosity about this: These two guys, in what we’re seeing, in a minute’s conversation, they’re speaking maybe two percent of the actual word count that took place, I’m guessing.

That’s right. That conversation over pizza, we’re talking about Tolstoy, and it was one thing I really wished had been in the movie. The challenge, he says, is: “I have received five hundred thousand discrete bits of information today, and I have to decide on the twenty-five that mean something to me.” And he’s saying that before the Internet. That was one of the things we talked about the first night that I would have loved, but I guess there wasn’t room for it.

Ponsoldt is a great director who is perfect about how people talk to each other. I could tell that he would be great for this in the same way I knew that Margulies would be great writing the script. He is able to make whole plays out of just people talking. He won the Pulitzer for Dinner With Friends, but he did this great play about artists called Sight Unseen, just two artists talking over a weekend.

The part about drinking in front of someone… about being in program, whatever. You knew so many more secrets about this man’s life than you have told.

One of the things that was important to him was not to be on record as having gone through any kind of program. And they were very good about doing the same thing here. It is everything he was willing to talk about when we were together for five days. But you know, other things that you knew — they weren’t things that he wanted to talk about.

So you could feel a margin.

Of course.

***

Segel’s Wallace talks about wanting to profile the reporters who’ve been coming to talk with him: “It’d be a way for me to get some of the control back… Because if you wanted–I mean, you’re gonna be able to shape this essentially how you want. And that to me is extremely disturbing.”

Okay, so here’s what’s great. He wanted to do that, as opposed to someone doing a biography of him. And I was able to do that in the book. And here he is, saying the same things in the movie.

***

Segel and Eisenberg are in a Midwestern restaurant onscreen; the real Lipsky, watching, is thrilled.

What a paradise: They’re smoking at the table!

***

Segel as Wallace: “Why am I watching all this shit? It’s not about the shit… it’s about me. And what’s so American about what I’m doing?”

This is great.

The refrigerator reappears onscreen, complete with magnet.

Whataburger! Ha! ha! ha! Very cool.

Segal/Wallace, on American entertainment: “Sittin’ in really expensive chairs, watching the best most sophisticated electronic equipment money can buy.”

As we are right now.

“Why are we so empty and unhappy?”

Except I’m really happy, though.

Yeah, me too. It’s a really good movie… that’s the difference.

“So look, as the Internet grows in the next ten to fifteen years and virtual reality porn becomes a reality? We’re going to have to develop some real machinery inside our guts to turn off pure unalloyed pleasure… or I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna have to leave the planet…”

I would give up a lot of stuff in the first part of the movie to have this. He made this guess in ’96, right? You could give up anything you wanted to give up, to have this scene in the movie. What he says is so brilliant.

***
Wallace says in the book that you have to be able to perceive how an alien consciousness will respond to what you’re saying, and I connect that with something that Martin Amis said in an essay about Ulysses: It’s the title of his book, The War Against Cliché, which is about keeping people awake. And he said: Joyce didn’t love the reader, as you have to do. Wallace says art finds a way to take care of you, and that’s what I kept feeling in his stuff.

That’s so true. Like the closest Joyce comes is “The Dead.”

Exactly. At the end of the essay, he says that Joyce had all the elements, he could have become the cleverest boy, the most charming, the most popular and instead he became something else: He became the teacher’s pet. In a way, the culture is trying to make David into the teacher’s pet.

Ah. That is so good.

By the way the thing you just did is what… when Eisenberg was asking me what it is to be interviewing somebody? I said, the key thing is that whenever the person you are interviewing says something that you know will be useful —

— something awesome —

— You look and make sure that the tape recorder is on.

***

Are you at all a Mamet fan?

No, not a bit.

You’ve seen Glengarry, right?

Yes. Blech.

Okay, I love that movie. It’s so — oh, no it’s great!

You are so fired.

Okay, I’ll go —

No, fine, I understand. You’re such a guy.

It’s smart! It’s beautifully written —

— you are guilty. Of being a dude.

There’s two acts — I think a lot of women love that play and movie too — some —

— there is one woman —

— there are no women, okay.

The first act of that play, that movie, we’re seeing the three different sales techniques: We see the old, sweaty style of selling, then Al Pacino as Ricky Roma selling to Jonathan Pryce, and it’s so smooth you don’t know it’s a sale, so beautifully set up. Then, the next morning, their office has been robbed, and it’s a different set of problems, and Jonathan Pryce’s character comes back wanting his money back from Ricky Roma. And his name in the play — it’s like a smile to us — is James Link. The role that Jesse [Eisenberg] has to keep playing between these great parts of the book — and all that Wallace is saying — is James Link.

***

This isn’t in the book and you didn’t put it this way, but I just felt I’d intuited something, between the three men in the book, each one sort of pulling his own way —

— and there’s a fourth, which is Wallace’s death —

Ah. Yes. But through these various lenses I formed the impression that in truth, Wallace himself thought of you as someone admirable, in whom he could confide. Someone who found things easy that for Wallace, were maybe not so easy.

Maybe.

Here’s a really unusual person who is out on some kind of periphery or margin that is unfathomable, so difficult to understand. But here is another person to identify with and see him through… who likes him.

There’s this warmth… so like, some of the stuff I’ve read about the movie, which is a way to get people to know the movie exists? It doesn’t matter, they may be saying silly things like, why I won’t see the movie, or blah blah. But it’s a way of getting the noise loud enough so that people say, “Oh — is there a movie about David Foster Wallace?” All that is a way to get you to this very sweet thing about two people talking about what it is to read, what it is to write and what it is to decide kind of how you want to live your life.

***

Do you want to hear how close [Segel] is?

Lipsky plays, on his phone, the original 1996 recording of the entire story of Michael Ryan showing up to fetch a towel from Wallace at the health club, and then we watch the filmed version. It would not be so very easy to tell the Jason Segel version from the real thing, I think. As well as sounding markedly more Midwestern — Wallace was then living in Illinois, after all — the voice sounds noticeably younger than the Wallace whose voice I got to know much later.

He nailed it, right? The thing is, he’s so casual about how good he is that you won’t notice it.

***

Segel/Wallace flirts with Eisenberg’s girlfriend over the phone.

I can’t believe that there is any accuracy in this. The dynamic of this.

The dynamic of this isn’t wrong, in that he is a better talker than I am. So like he’s calling my girlfriend —

Charming her?

Yeah, and you know, it’s about a half hour, they have the time right, too. And in a way you feel helpless. It’s like splashing in deep water, to have someone talking to your girlfriend who she’s happier to be talking with than she would be speaking with you; the vibe is absolutely correct.

Wow.

Oh yeah… they were just talking about Harper’s.

***

An even more cringe-making interpersonal disaster involving beer and Wallace’s ex.

Oh, the beer scene! I hate this.

Yeah… it’s true, by the way.

It’s sooo irritating. How much actual sexual tension was there, in this?

When I was looking at my notebook afterwards… I think it was more we’d been hanging around for like two days and I think he’d forgotten it was a story. It was just more like we were just two guys and I was talking to his former girlfriend he still had feelings for. It wasn’t so much sexual tension as like —

A role change?

Yeah.

***

Segel as Wallace: “… a person who has really exhausted a couple other ways to live and taken them to their conclusion, which for me was a pink room with no furniture and a drain in the center floor which is where they put me for an entire day when they thought I was gonna kill myself, where you don’t have anything on and somebody’s observing you through a slot in the wall… and when that happens to you you get tremendously — unprecedentedly — willing to examine other alternatives for how to live.”

That’s a great joke. And so when I watch the movie I’m the only person who laughs, because… that’s a beautiful joke.

I just wrote down “unprecedentedly” for that very purpose, because that’s how he made jokes, he would choose this one word that is so hilarious and so terrible.

Exactly: “unprecedentedly.” Where Segel is —

— sincere?

But here’s a funny thing, like Segel is aware that it’s a gag also, because he listened… I matched the screenplay to the moments from the trip. I sent them like a one-hour, five-minute concordance… he listened to it. If you go back you’ll see, he smiles a little.

***

They’re hungry. Segel as Wallace: “I want to take you somewhere really nice.” And then they’re at a McDonald’s.

So the McDonald’s thing leads up to a great joke that’s not in the film, which is Wallace’s description of McDonald’s — “It’s bad, but in a really good way.” It still is a good joke in the movie (“I want to take you somewhere really nice”) but that great line — “bad, but in a really good way” — that should be the slogan for McDonald’s nationwide.

The thing Wallace was so great at saying: What everyone already knows.

Alexander Pope. “What oft was thought/but ne’er so well expressed.”

I love Pope so much. Do you know Essay on Man?

I do, but I love Rape of the Lock, such a good joke… by the way, that can’t be taught because it says —

Because it says “rape”!? Oh my god, I hate everything.

Elaine Benes: “Everything’s the worst.”

***

Eisenberg’s Lipsky gives a copy of his own novel, The Art Fair, to Segal’s Wallace.

Did he ever read it?

I don’t know. I never spoke to him again.

***

It’s a really good movie.

I don’t think there are other movies that are like it.

There aren’t. It’s not the book, it couldn’t have been the book. It has beautiful things in it that are not in the book that I appreciate and love. But there are a few howlers, though. There were complaints that the ending was sentimental, like on the Wallace listserv, because he is dancing, but I’m like no, y’all, remember, this is made from the book, and what you’re seeing is what David Lipsky is imagining to have happened. There’s nothing sentimental about it.

It says that in the script: this is David’s imagination.

by Simon Parkin

Steve Lookner was already feeling out of place as he sipped a cocktail in Hugh Hefner’s ludicrously draped Playboy mansion when a girl in a bikini beckoned him to come over. “I want you to meet Hugh,” she said, before turning on a stratospheric high heel. It was March 2002, and Hef had invited Lookner and other alumni of the The Harvard Lampoon to a party at his lascivious mansion in California’s Holmby Hills. That night, Hefner was due to join Robin Williams, Kurt Vonnegut, and John Wayne as honorary members of the periodical, America’s oldest continuously published humor magazine (Hefner would be bestowed the woundingly sarcastic honor of ‘The Harvard Lampoon’s Best Life-Form in the History of the Universe’).

The woman was Tiffany Holiday, a member of Hefner’s harem of centerfold girlfriends with whom Lookner, a gaunt comedy writer, had improbably become acquainted while working on a television show about video games. (Holiday, who had ambitions toward the stage, would cameo on the show wearing a rictus grin, peroxide hair, and a string bikini to offer advice on pressing questions of the day such as whether a girl would be more likely to date a guy who owns an Xbox or a Gamecube.) Lookner, who assumed that he had little in common with the lingeringly handsome seventy-five year old soft-porn tycoon, followed Holiday’s waggle dance, while “freaking out” in search of opening gambit. As he extended his hand in greeting, Hefner, ever the gentleman, saved him the bother. “Hey Steve,” he said. “Your show is really funny.”

Lookner had grown used to people celebrating his work as a writer on Saturday Night Live. But it had been a while since he’d worked on that show, and his current project existed on an entirely different end of the comedic spectrum — at least in terms of scale. While, like SNL, Dave & Steve’s Video Game Explosion had also been commissioned by America’s enduring comedy tsar, Lorne Michaels, it was filmed on a shoestring budget (initially with just a single camera) and broadcast on a limited access college TV network. Despite Hef’s TV addiction (a journalist once described the playboy mansion’s vast satellite dish as being “curved like a giantess’s brassiere”) the idea that he had even seen the show, let alone become a fan, was preposterous.

“I can’t emphasize enough how much nothing to do with this show made any sense,” Lookner told me recently. Initially, he and co-writer/ co-presenter David Mandel (Hardy to Lookner’s Laurel), received a call from the Family Guy writer Ted Jessup. “He told us that Lorne Michaels wanted us to do a video game show for Burly Bear Network, a college TV network that Michaels had just acquired. It didn’t make sense. Dave and I had both left Saturday Night Live a few years earlier and Lorne hated us for that. Why did he want us to be on a show? And why a video game show?”

In fact, Michaels’ logic was sound. Burly TV created programs to be aired on college TV networks around America (an audience that no doubt included a large contingent of weed-smoking twilight gamers). He would then buy show time on national TV networks such as TBS, and broadcast the shows as if they were original programming. But budgets were implausibly tight and, rather than hire writers and actors, Michaels approached Mandel and Lookner to both write and star in their show. “His thought process went something like this,” Mandel, who left Saturday Night Live to work on Seinfeld and, more recently, films such as The Dictator, told me. “‘I know nerdy writers that used to work for me. If we hire them to be on screen as talent they will have no choice but to write and ad-lib the show, whereas we couldn’t necessarily afford them as writers.’ We had just enough ego and desire to be on TV that we did it.” Lookner agrees that it was a smart move. “We were terrible on camera, but we do know how to block out a thirty-minute sketch show, write some jokes and have a sense of how long things should last,” he says.

Free from the strictures and sign-offs of big budget television writing, Mandel and Lookner skirted the edges of acceptability. The pilot, filmed in the basement of The Simpson’s writer Billy Kimball’s house, opened with an image of the American flag, and a sombre-toned Mandel and Lookner talking direct to camera.

“After what happened on September 11, 2001 we did a lot of soul-searching,” Mandel said. “Is it OK to even play video games?”

Lookner picks up the thought: “And if it is OK to play them, is it OK to talk about playing games?”

Back to Mandel: “And if it’s OK to talk about them, is it OK to film it for a limited access college TV network?”

It was a scathing send up of the exaggerated sense of self-importance of talk show hosts following the September 11th attacks; Even though the segment was cut from the show that aired, Mandel says he is “as proud of that as I am of anything I’ve ever written.”

The low-budget production and seemingly low stakes allowed the pair to do things like ridicule their sponsor, the soft drink-maker Sobe, and even the network on which they appeared. In one later episode, the pair review a World War II-themed first person shooter game, set on the D-Day landings; Mandel exclaims that because the game is so easy to finish, he simply doesn’t understand what war veterans keep “bitching” about. Not infrequently, they would have video conference calls with Japanese video game designers as if they were thousands of miles apart, but when the interview concluded, the designer would step out from behind the set to shake hands with the Mandel and Lookner. “It wrecked working in TV for me,” Lookner says. “That freedom is never going to happen again. There was literally no supervision and no co-workers to compete with for jokes.”

The show’s irreverence paid off with the sundown college audience. “We said and did whatever we wanted,” Mandel says. “Now that’s somewhat commonplace in the world of YouTube, [but] the fact that we were on TBS at one in the morning doing whatever we wanted was kind of exciting, and people responded to that.” They received fan mail and irate letters, which were promptly ridiculed — Mandel would routinely criticize the popular Tony Hawk skating game series, which drew the most ire from viewers — and, in 2002, Mandel and Lookner were listed on Entertainment Weekly’s It List. “I think our ratings to expenditure ratio was probably higher than any TV show ever,” Lookner says. “We were spending a couple of thousand dollars on each half hour of national television.”

Midway through the season Mandel received a call from Michaels, congratulating him on how the show was going. “It was odd to get a call but it seemed heartfelt and I appreciated it,” Mandel recalls. “I also appreciated the fact that Steve didn’t get a call.” But just as ‘Dave & Steve’s Video Game Explosion’ was gathering praise and profile, the network was sold. “We had an offer to do another twelve episodes,” Lookner says. “We even signed a contract to do them, but when Burly Bear got sold that went away.”

There was, however, some desire to keep the show going, even after the sale. For around a year or so after the first season they would receive calls about recording a follow-up. But the potential new proprietors didn’t understand the presenters’ appeal. “These idiots who didn’t understand why we were on started thinking about putting some good-looking people on camera,” he says. “The show that they wanted to do drifted away into something else. Every now and again people tell us that we should do it on YouTube. But we were barely playing video games back then and I’m an old man now.” Mandel and Lookner, who were essentially filming the episodes in their free time, moved on and the show was lost to the ether until, a few years ago, all twelve episodes, including two that never aired, were uploaded to YouTube.

Today, the low-budget, basement aesthetic of Dave & Steve’s Video Game Explosion defines a generation of YouTube shows. “We were ahead of the curve,” Mandel says, “but we didn’t have the internet as a potential delivery mechanism. Had we come along a couple of years later — perhaps we’d be living in whatever special homeless shelter those stars get to live in now.” Lookner adds, “It was this weird place where the internet wasn’t good enough yet to support this kind of programming; it was the one nine-month period in the history of the world when a show like that could wind up on real TV.”

The pair remain immensely proud of what they achieved, from fondly remembered moments (“the time we went to a Star Wars convention and I pretended to choke on Boba Fett’s missile and a guy thought I was having a real heart attack,” Mandel recalls) to validation from Hugh Hefner (Lookner got along with Hef so well that he was invited back to the mansion the following week to celebrate the septuagenarian’s birthday). “Look, none of it made any sense but you can’t argue with the fact that Lorne Michaels discovered the original Saturday Night Live cast,” Mandel says. “He put Conan on TV. He put Fallon on TV. And he put Steve and me on TV.”

“I do think, in thirty years, when he’s older and has maybe a few weeks to live, and he’s sitting in bed thinking about what he’s really accomplished in life, Lorne will look back at Dave and Steve’s Video Game Explosion and say, ‘That might be the best thing I did,’” Lookner says.

While both men drifted away from video games following the show, Mandel admits that he is “on the cusp” of getting back into it, as his children grow up. “We’re playing a lot of arcade-like games on the iPad and they’re just getting ready for some of the Lego games,” he says. “I’m stunned the steps things have taken forward… But I’m also still shocked at how the same mistakes are being made. Basically, endless cutscenes. Maybe that will be the resurgence of the show? Me reviewing games from the perspective of a father. And Steve reviewing them from the perspective of someone who watches child pornography.”

by Haley Mlotek

Victoria Hearst, of the Hearst Corporation Hearsts, has found God (always in the last place you look, I hear) and it turns out God hates Ladies Who Know Where And How To Locate Their Clit. Hearst is working with the National Center on Sexual Exploitation not to shut down the magazine — that’s a step too far, presumably! — but instead to hide their salacious headlines from the prying, innocent eyes scanning past the glossy covers at your local Duane Reade or Wal-Mart.

Hearst offered to meet with Cosmopolitan editor Joanna Coles to debate the issue, and that’s how we, the people of The Internet, were blessed with Coles’ response:

I have no time for a debate. I am too busy putting out a magazine and encouraging American women to have more and better orgasms.

I am impressed and inspired by her ability to so succinctly shut down censorship masquerading as religion. But this story has problems.

Read the rest at The Hairpin.

Depending on the day I could find lyrics that rhyme “safari,” “Campari” and “Ferrari” to be disgusting, laughable or delightful. Today I choose to be delighted. This song makes me wonder what would have happened to Black Kids if Pitchfork hadn’t killed them to prove how much juice they had. Enjoy.