Over the nearly 16 years of airing, “WTF with Marc Maron” recorded 1,500 episodes, with guests ranging from Rupaul to Robin Williams to Barack Obama. In 2015, Malone interviewed Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels, who had long ago turned down Maron's job. As Sarah Larson points out, it seems that the loss is indeed a gain, which allows Malone to “get the right thing at the right time”, that is, to be “a bridgeless garage podcast Messiah.” This fall, the “WTF” will end its run, after which Maron plans to spend more time performing and standing up. (His new special “Panied” arrived at HBO this week.) Not long ago, he joined us and recommended some books about his recent favorites about his special interests. “I wouldn't say I'm an avid reader, and when I read, I mean business.” “If I were to read a book, it would be better to get the job done.” His remarks have been edited and condensed.
No one comes to you
By Sam Lipsyte
The novel is about young people at the transitional moments of young people, when the Lower East Side and the music associated with it were getting high-end. These people think that “sell” means something, and that something is indeed garbage because it is very attractive.
The plot is a muddy detective story that revolves around the exploration of the kid named Jack Shit, who wears a noise rock punk outfit and loses his bass and his drug-taking lead singer. He needs to find them because they have gigs in a few days. He was very concerned about this, but in his search, Jack learned that there was a greater power on hand—it wasn't all about him, and that the music was not only out of what he thought it should be, but New York City was about to be abandoned by the reality's best developers.
I have to be transparent – Sam is one of my best friends. But I have read him forever and I think he is one of the great humorists of our time. The book has a beautiful ending, taking place on an ice rink where Jack must fight a hired fool who is also a great skater. I think the requirement of any kind of story is that your protagonist should probably change. Finally, everything around Jack changed, but he still existed, which was a little touching.
Sonny Boy
By Al Pacino
It's fascinating to read the entire story of Pacino. It shows you how much he really invested from the beginning because of the art. You read about his influence, and his beginnings are part of this edge, radical drama company – he and Martin Sheen will sweep behind the sweep – and the fact that forces him to pursue truth. I know people are talking about the “truth” all the time, but acting can be a lot of things. You can get rid of it. Many actors are just liars, they are liars riding natural gifts. But he is inside.
Another thing I encountered is that with public officials like this you can judge them by their performance. Al Pacino always plays these roles where he has a lot of swagger, but he turns out to be shy. I didn't know he was this fragile, sensitive, neurotic artist. And he honestly has to be a role for money because he is such a lunatic and he can't manage the money at all. It's amazing to know that guy, the real Al Pacino, and to understand his process.
Cultural Crisis
Author: Olivier Roy
Yes, this, geez. This is not an easy task. I've always been a person who wants to read these books – regardless of trend culture criticism tends to be inclined, I'm trying to crack it. I'm not that intellectual, I don't really have the foundation of linguistic linguistic tangles of these things, but I love reading books like this to feed my own opinions about what I'm seeing.
The biggest thing I accept is Roy’s idea is that society is splitting and we are losing a shared cultural understanding – especially when we move into a world dominated by social media, we lose the ability to have a citizen body. There is no point in how neoliberalism flows into the structure of digital platforms and how it can produce all sorts of dubious effects, such as making people express it in some way or another.
This book really makes me think about the impact of the creativity available to many people, only through social media platforms, which are corporate entities designed to capture eyeballs, make money and promote to dump things into people’s brains. As far as the comedy industry is concerned, this is especially interesting to me. You know, I have the idea that as a comic, you have freedom of speech, freedom of voice. But if your career is tied to a minute of editing and the algorithm determines what should and should not be done in front of people, that is an algorithm, that is the algorithm that people's attention spans – what happens then? If you operate in that world that is not the real world, then maybe you don’t have any real freedom.