Those clips of Lynda's philanthropy video are INSANE. The Gilliam-esque makeup, the direct look into the camera when she says, "YOU'RE GOING TO DIE," the Fiji water, the Marie Antoinette painting (which I now realize is, of course, owned by them). Utterly beyond satire. With apologies to Matt Christman, they're just dabbing on us 24/7.
I have a little ptsd from watching the trailer. Lynda looks and acts almost exactly like what my first wife has become in the 43 years since I left. Same terrible face work. Same exact wig. Same stilted, proto-fascist demeanor. She was once a hot young Irish/Italian hippie girl, but her dad was a mobster and politico and she morphed back into her gene pool.
The Pistachio Wars at the Roxy thing was great. It was also absolutely surreal for me personally, an effect that was multiplied by the fact that I was listening to your Spinal Tap 2 episode on the two-hour drives down from and back to my home in beautiful, toxic Dutchess County.
1) SoHo always creeped me out and I’ve mostly avoided it for 25 years. Experiencing the neighborhood again brought back multiple memories from when I lived on the lower east side through most of the 1990s. Many gigs at nearby clubs. Wetlands. AKA. New Music Cafe. Knitting Factory. Worked as a messenger out of Breakaway Couriers, which was in a loft above a Chinese sweatshop, on the street I parked on Thursday night. I used to chase my beautiful drunk suicidal girlfriend around on these same cobblestone streets, trying to stop her from jumping in front of cars. She and I nearly got shot by a Son of Sam style serial killer. He missed. After Hours was more like a documentary to me at the time, although I no longer worked in a fucking office in the World Trade Center just down West Broadway a few blocks. That was in the 80s.
2) The scene in and around the Roxy on Thursday also made the hair stand up on the back of my neck … save for your fish-out-of-water crowd of mostly introverted armchair activist nerds. Nice people. The dominant hotel bar crowd of tricked out Euro-oid hipster poseurs looked and acted like they were auditioning for a Great Gatsby miniseries. It was even worse when, after the show, I wandered unadvisedly into the main floor “Oyster Bar” searching in vain for a nonexistent cup of coffee for the ride home. The unctuous, super-slick clientele would have been at home in a Weimar milchbar in 1925, and the browbeaten bar staff looked cowed and terrified. I have to ask: did your experience trying to bumrush the Curtis Yarvin thing cement the Roxy in your minds as a Dimes Square-adjacent Nazi-friendly venue? Because that was the distinct vibe I got. Call me paranoid.
3) Lynda Resnick looks … and acts … exactly like the current 73-year-old iteration of my formerly beautiful crazy narcissist of an ex-wife, whom I left way back in 1982, as she was morphing back into her mobbed-up Italian family mindset after having lived with me on the run from them for a few years. Her dad had a contract out on me, but I outlived him and survived. I showed our 50-year-old son the trailer, and he almost shit himself. I experienced a mild case of PTSD.
4) My third son is currently a senior at … Bard College, which you so lovingly skewer in your Spinal Tap episode. He has a pretty good scholarship, and my schoolmarm wife and I are firmly in the lower middle class and couldn’t afford it otherwise. When I showed HIM the trailer last night, he exclaimed: “Holy shit, that’s a RESNICK! They’re major donors to Botstein!” (Leon, the Jeffrey Epstein-adjacent longtime college president and chief fundraiser.) “Their names are on half the buildings!” … along with George Soros and a few other crooked billionaires. My kid and his many non-Zionist Jewish pals have egalitarian socialist leanings, and are not fans of Leon. They’re also painfully and ironically aware of their school’s fancified reputation, and are doing their best to avoid any sort of quick and easy success.
5) Finally, Yasha’s 10-year obsessive odyssey to make Pistachio Wars reminded me of my own frustrating jihad of 1997-2000, following black market toxic waste mobsters around, scouring public records and investigating industrialists, mobsters and mobbed up public officials, up to and including NY’s Republican and Democratic governors, senators, congresspeople, mayors, town supervisors and state and local department bosses. Nothing I did changed a fucking thing, and I very nearly became a Luigi Mangione figure before listening to my current wife, cooling my jets and writing a thinly disguised “novel.”
… 6) I’ve seen the trailers for “Spinal Tap 2.” I was already not looking forward to having my regard for the young, very funny Christopher Guest ruined by what looked like a probable hack job. I’m not sure it can all be attributed to his out of control arrogance. I’m pretty certain old ossified Rob Reiner might have had a fun-dulling hand in things as well.
7) Gut-busting humor is very hard to come by in a world where everything that has ever happened is available, in your fucking face, right now. You did a great job teasing humor out of those Lynda Resnick and Colbert clips, but the end result of Thursday night was crushingly sad and depressing… lucky for me I’m a misanthrope who already assumed we’re toast.
8) At least I found an open Dunkin’ Donuts on Canal on the way out of town. No leather-pantsed Nazi hipsters in there.
Those clips of Lynda's philanthropy video are INSANE. The Gilliam-esque makeup, the direct look into the camera when she says, "YOU'RE GOING TO DIE," the Fiji water, the Marie Antoinette painting (which I now realize is, of course, owned by them). Utterly beyond satire. With apologies to Matt Christman, they're just dabbing on us 24/7.
Can't wait to watch!
That video is incredible isn’t it? All credit to Rowan for digging it up.
I have a little ptsd from watching the trailer. Lynda looks and acts almost exactly like what my first wife has become in the 43 years since I left. Same terrible face work. Same exact wig. Same stilted, proto-fascist demeanor. She was once a hot young Irish/Italian hippie girl, but her dad was a mobster and politico and she morphed back into her gene pool.
So exciting, congratulations! Sorry to be typo guy, but pretty sure you mean "UNaccountable elite." Really looking forward to the film.
Got a ticket. Very much looking forward to this. Now I can feel safe to start helping publicize it.
I am a somewhat west and near middle elite
A long-assed comment. Sorry:
The Pistachio Wars at the Roxy thing was great. It was also absolutely surreal for me personally, an effect that was multiplied by the fact that I was listening to your Spinal Tap 2 episode on the two-hour drives down from and back to my home in beautiful, toxic Dutchess County.
1) SoHo always creeped me out and I’ve mostly avoided it for 25 years. Experiencing the neighborhood again brought back multiple memories from when I lived on the lower east side through most of the 1990s. Many gigs at nearby clubs. Wetlands. AKA. New Music Cafe. Knitting Factory. Worked as a messenger out of Breakaway Couriers, which was in a loft above a Chinese sweatshop, on the street I parked on Thursday night. I used to chase my beautiful drunk suicidal girlfriend around on these same cobblestone streets, trying to stop her from jumping in front of cars. She and I nearly got shot by a Son of Sam style serial killer. He missed. After Hours was more like a documentary to me at the time, although I no longer worked in a fucking office in the World Trade Center just down West Broadway a few blocks. That was in the 80s.
2) The scene in and around the Roxy on Thursday also made the hair stand up on the back of my neck … save for your fish-out-of-water crowd of mostly introverted armchair activist nerds. Nice people. The dominant hotel bar crowd of tricked out Euro-oid hipster poseurs looked and acted like they were auditioning for a Great Gatsby miniseries. It was even worse when, after the show, I wandered unadvisedly into the main floor “Oyster Bar” searching in vain for a nonexistent cup of coffee for the ride home. The unctuous, super-slick clientele would have been at home in a Weimar milchbar in 1925, and the browbeaten bar staff looked cowed and terrified. I have to ask: did your experience trying to bumrush the Curtis Yarvin thing cement the Roxy in your minds as a Dimes Square-adjacent Nazi-friendly venue? Because that was the distinct vibe I got. Call me paranoid.
3) Lynda Resnick looks … and acts … exactly like the current 73-year-old iteration of my formerly beautiful crazy narcissist of an ex-wife, whom I left way back in 1982, as she was morphing back into her mobbed-up Italian family mindset after having lived with me on the run from them for a few years. Her dad had a contract out on me, but I outlived him and survived. I showed our 50-year-old son the trailer, and he almost shit himself. I experienced a mild case of PTSD.
4) My third son is currently a senior at … Bard College, which you so lovingly skewer in your Spinal Tap episode. He has a pretty good scholarship, and my schoolmarm wife and I are firmly in the lower middle class and couldn’t afford it otherwise. When I showed HIM the trailer last night, he exclaimed: “Holy shit, that’s a RESNICK! They’re major donors to Botstein!” (Leon, the Jeffrey Epstein-adjacent longtime college president and chief fundraiser.) “Their names are on half the buildings!” … along with George Soros and a few other crooked billionaires. My kid and his many non-Zionist Jewish pals have egalitarian socialist leanings, and are not fans of Leon. They’re also painfully and ironically aware of their school’s fancified reputation, and are doing their best to avoid any sort of quick and easy success.
5) Finally, Yasha’s 10-year obsessive odyssey to make Pistachio Wars reminded me of my own frustrating jihad of 1997-2000, following black market toxic waste mobsters around, scouring public records and investigating industrialists, mobsters and mobbed up public officials, up to and including NY’s Republican and Democratic governors, senators, congresspeople, mayors, town supervisors and state and local department bosses. Nothing I did changed a fucking thing, and I very nearly became a Luigi Mangione figure before listening to my current wife, cooling my jets and writing a thinly disguised “novel.”
… 6) I’ve seen the trailers for “Spinal Tap 2.” I was already not looking forward to having my regard for the young, very funny Christopher Guest ruined by what looked like a probable hack job. I’m not sure it can all be attributed to his out of control arrogance. I’m pretty certain old ossified Rob Reiner might have had a fun-dulling hand in things as well.
7) Gut-busting humor is very hard to come by in a world where everything that has ever happened is available, in your fucking face, right now. You did a great job teasing humor out of those Lynda Resnick and Colbert clips, but the end result of Thursday night was crushingly sad and depressing… lucky for me I’m a misanthrope who already assumed we’re toast.
8) At least I found an open Dunkin’ Donuts on Canal on the way out of town. No leather-pantsed Nazi hipsters in there.