It was the inspiration for this memorable parody by Andy Kauffman called Breakfast With Andre with legendary pro wrestling heel Classy Freddie Blassie:
Most combinations of people, almost all, really, fail to produce interesting conversations yet a lot of people enjoy interesting conversations. If you can't manage to participate in them in real life, watching people do it on the internet and imagining where you would occasionally make a good point if you were there, is a fair substitute.
Human connection? Ick! Of such materials are pandemics made.
It also leads to a kind of psychosis. You watch the same guys talk in YouTube many times, gather their conversational rhythms, come to know the inside jokes, imagine you made good points back, pretty soon your brain registers these strangers on the internet as people you know, maybe even your friends. But if you met them in real life you would find the relationship was entirely one way and that could cause problems.
As much as it is possible to spoil a 35+year-old movie, yes, the Eric Bogosian character gets killed. Bogosian authored the play on which the movie was based as well as co-writing the screenplay with Stone.
I wonder if the cause is the same, i.e. a varied society is a low trust society so people are reluctant to join public facing organizations. The youngsters do a lot of their socializing over the web. A Millenial friend told me aside from us oldsters he hangs with, most of his socializing is either family in person or over video games. Checking in with your imaginary pal Joe Rogan is only a small step from that.
One genre of podcast that is popular is the television rewatch. A group of people will rewatch an old television show episode by episode and will post the ensuing conversation as a podcast. Often times it will be actors or others connected with the show itself; Pam and Angela from The Office, JD and Turk from Scrubs, and Christopher and Bobby from The Sopranos have particularly popular ones but there are others. You can imagine you are all doing the rewatch together as if you have actual friends!
Due to Malle's untimely death and their relatively late marriage, the Malle/Bergen dynasty has only produced Chloe, who is the editor of Vogue.com, not the magazine itself which is still the domain of Anna Wintour
Is there really a direct line between this song and Rap Music as understood by the 1990s?
The word "rap" in the Sugarhill Gang song seems like it meant something different, like "shoot the breeze" or "breezy chat." A guy who likes telling stories and talking amusingly. It seems almost a coincidence that the same word is used for the later-developed genre, Rap Music.
The "Etymoline" etymology-dictionary suggests that the word/verb "rap" in the sense of "to talk informally, chat in an easy way" was introduced to US Blacks through Caribbean Black immigrants in/by the 1920s (attested by 1929, per OED), who in turn got it from archaic British sailor-slang in the 19th century.
The full split of the word RAP, from (1.) the mid-late 20th-century "chat in an easy way" sense, to (2.) the by-1990s "Rap Music"-genre sense. It can't have been total before -- when? -- at earliest, the late 1980s?
Eventually sense (2.) replaced sense (1.) totally, but there was a period of coexistence that even still was recognizable in the 1990s. A Simpsons episode from 1997 has a flashback scene to the 1970s, in which a younger, longhaired Rev Lovejoy tells a young Ned Flanders: "Sit down and rap with me, brother, that's what I'm here for!"
Would anyone in the 2010s or 2020s use the expression, "Rap with me" and expect the person so have a casual chat-discussion? At what point does even the expression lose any even-tenuous connection to the original meaning? How many b.2000s people would see that Simpsons episode and think Rev. Lovejoy was making some bizarre reference to "hip hop music"?
None of this is easily reflected in online material, generally all of which dates to the 2000s and 2010s (and the increasing auto-written AI-"slop" of the 2020s also would miss it). The wiki entry on this is hardly helpful if the goal is to try to reconstruct when exactly the word "rap" took on the new meaning of a specific music genre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapping#Etymology_and_usage
Since around the mid-2010s it's moved towards highly computerized (artificial) sounds and increasing incoherence of the lyrics. See the rise of "mumble rap" in the 2010s. It sounds like a joke, and maybe it was at first, but all rap ended up going that way.
Almost all pop music uses the over driven autotune effect. I hate it and don't understand it. It's like that cookie monster heavy metal voice; it should be one novelty song, not an entire genre. I was never bothered by the effect Peter Frampton used on "Do you Feel like we do?" even though it's similar.
I think there is a lot of great hip-hop/rap. As with most genres, the overwhelming majority is crap. I also think the late 70s early 80s stuff doesn't hold up. The 90s and early 2000s is where it really developed into something worthwhile.
"Is there really a direct line between this song and Rap Music as understood by the 1990s?"
Yes. Rapping was a thing during the disco era. Blondie has a 1980 song called Rapture in which Debbie Harris raps and is the first song with rapping to become a Billboard no.1. After that the 80's had lots of rappers.
Lots of leftist yappers claim rap was a 70's underground black social and political music but there's no evidence for that.
By "rap" are we/you meaning, "Talking in the context of music"? I think there are many possible examples from earlier than the late-1970s/early-1980s period.
"Alice's Restaurant," 1967, was based on the "talking to music" concept. It was more like telling a story outright, and not quasi-poetry that later "Rap Music" is seen to be associated with. But the Sugarhill Gang 1979 song, too, is more like that than like 1990s rap.
Going even further back, Tex Ritter in the 1940s was doing similar things with "talking to music." I am sure that there are many other easy examples. So what is the real dividing-point between these and Rap Music?
This 1980 "Rapture" song seems to imitate the Sugarhill Gang song in tone, telling a story set to music. If the Sugarhill Gang song is part of Rap Music as later understood, then the Rapture song should be so-considered, too; but if the Sugarhill Gang song is considered something pre-Rap Music (despite the name), the Rapture song should likewise be excluded.
The tricky part here is the inclusion of the word "Rap" in the name of the Sugarhill Gang song, even though all the Blacks who produced and performed that song will have grown up knowing well that "to rap" meant "to chat breezily."
Talking to music was practiced in many cultures including in Ancient Greek tragedies.
Norse (vikings) were even dissing each others in verse. In a poem part of Poetic Edda Loki disses the other gods. This was called flyting and remained a practice in England and Scotland throughout history.
"Parlando" is another term of art, here. Goes back to at least the mid 19th century. Again, basically talking to music. You hear it in opera, plenty.
Italian singer Paolo Conte has made a career out of it. I've enjoyed listening to his records every once in a while.
Frank Sinatra did a lot of this, as well. We think of him as a singer, of course, but his range was rather limited. So, really, lots of times he was basically talking in key.
Debbie Harris and Chris Stein of Blondie invited Nile Rodgers of Chic to an early rap concert in which the kids rapped over his "Good Times." Rodgers swore he'd sue the bastard punks for ripping off his song. The white rockers reassured him that rap was the coming thing and he'd make a lot of money off it if he didn't get all persnickety over intellectual property rights.
Kendrick Lamar’s “They Not Like Us” has over a billion streams on Spotify and is sampled from “I Believe to My Soul” by Monk Higgins from 1968. The latter has just 34,000 streams and was written by Ray Charles a decade prior.
It’s fair to say that the heirs to Charles and Higgins have got VERY rich from this one song.
Are you asking if this song is why we call it 'rap' or if this was an early example of what we think of as rap today? No to the first and yes to the second. My understanding is that (to use SAT analogy) rap is to hip hop as singing is to rock (and other genres obviously) that is, rap isn't a music genre, it's a vocal technique like Sprechgesang.
according to wikipedia rap was used among activists for more serious talk. It does strike me as date 1960s slang. further: Rap was used to describe talking on records as early as 1970 on Isaac Hayes' album ...To Be Continued with the track name "Monologue: Ike's Rap I".[26] Hayes' "husky-voiced sexy spoken 'raps' became key components in his signature sound"
Rap was not used "to describe talking on records"; it was (a Black term) simply used to describe any talking. Like a variant of the word "chat" (its pre-Internet use, that is).
I think these Internet histories of Rap Music suffer from the perspective problem of being written decades later, and they anachronistically misinterpret an far-earlier use of a word with a far-later connotation.
You are clearly incorrect per the sited reference in the wikipedia quote above. Just because rap was used to mean chat by activists and hippies doesn't mean that it wasn't also used for the obviously related activity of speaking over music on a record.
As other commenters have pointed out, speaking over music is not unique to Hip Hop and speaking poetry to a beat was done by ancient Rhapsodes before the Iliad and Oddysey were committed to writing. As I point out above, I'm pretty sure that the music genre you are thinking of is hip hop. Rap is just a name for the common vocal technique of that genre....maybe like scat? Scat isn't a genre, it's a vocal technique used almost exclusively in Jazz. But when Robert Plant does it, it's called vamping.
The discussion is over the etymology of the word "Rap" as we'd now understand the term. There is no exact right answer. I say only that with any Internet source there will be big recency bias towards the definition understood after the rise of the Internet.
This is also a case where "living knowledge" can have value. You and I may be too young to remember what the word "rap" was understood to mean in the 1970s, but someone over 70 might have better insight from memory (the problem is a lot of people don't trust their own memories and just go with the flow).
Remember too that most everything on Wikipedia is written "at earliest" in the mid-2000s, and much of the material might be traceable to far-later even than that. There is a risk of back-imposing a later definition on the word, and falsely using evidence.
Imagine someone centuries after nuclear war wipes out our civilization later reconstructing English and concluding: "The word 'talk' clearly refers to the act of speaking that is recorded and put into use for a 'motion picture,' as it was called, or 'movie'. We have definite evidence for this, with the many references to 'talkies' in the late 1920s and 1930s. Case closed!"
I'm failing to understand your point. Are you asserting that the use of 'rap' to describe non-singing vocals over hip hop music did not arise from the use of 'rap' to mean talking, conversing etc?
I think we can trust etymology of a word meaning that developed within the living memory of people still alive. Sure you can have arguments about whether person A was the first to use it that way, but it's pretty clear to those people where the new meaning came from and that it isn't just a coincidence that 'rap' and 'rap' both refer in some sense to talking.
Patrolling the Podcast Frontier, one can indeed learn a lot and be entertained, but in most cases seeing the podcast doesn't add much to the experience. Also, most people talk slower than your ability to listen, so skipping the video and accelerating the audio leads to a more engaging and efficient experience.
Podcasts that are edifying and entertaining:
• Joe Rogan, if you skip all the standup 'comedians' [sic] and MMA fighters (i.e., skip 85% of the content). Recent guests Mike Benz and Mark Zuckerberg were good.
• Steve Hsu's Manifold podcast, if you skip the more solipsistic academic stuff (about 20% skippable).
• John Derbyshire's Radio Derb is a pretty good current events summary, leavened with Derb's recollections and reflections. He talks sloooow: use 2× audio acceleration.
• John Dolan and Mark Ames's War Nerd podcast. John and Mark are 1970s and 1980s (respectively) Berkeley Marxists-lefties, but they they are honest enough to describe things accurately even if they draw IMHO mistaken conclusions from their observations. Though War is the nominal subject, they actually spend most of the time discussing background, politics, and media coverage, so it's more like an in-depth analysis of geostrategy, both current and historical.
• Mark Steyn is a sort of upmarket Rush Limbaugh, if Limbaugh were a Britanno-Canadian-Imperialist holdover who loved Broadway showtunes. His older stuff was more upbeat and musically oriented, but he's paid an enormous personal price for going to the legal mat with his various political, rhetorical, and business opponents, and for knuckling under to the vaccine mandates, so nowadays he's a little more angry. Yet he still makes unique observations and draws insightful conclusions that no one else notices.
• Andrew Napolitano's Judging Freedom, if you skip everyone except Max Blumenthal, Jeffrey Sachs, and Doug MacGregor (70% skippable). Also skip the numerous ads.
• RWA: Russians With Attitude is AFAIK the only English language source of information about Russia by independent Russians, without any heavy ideological slant. Of the two pseudonymous podcasters, one is, I think, an expat in Central Europe, who is more intellectual and bourgeois, the other is a more working class regular guy somewhere in the Urals. The latter is IMHO more authentic and informative; informative not necessarily in the data sense, but in terms of what regular Russians actually think and feel.
• Carl Zha's Silk and Steel is similarly an English language source of information about China by an independent Chinese, without any heavy ideological slant. He lives in Indonesia, so he's presumably unconcerned about CCP pressure.
• I hesitate to mention BAP's Caribbean Rhythms because it's hard to explain to someone who is not already initiated, but suffice it to say it's not about the Caribbean or Rhythm.
There are many others with various virtues, but the above are of general interest and relevance, and in current production. There have been other podcasts that have fallen into disuse, but have some worthwhile archived episodes.
Is something like John Derbyshire's "podcast" better listened to than read?
It's not a true podcast, I'd argue, in that he's reading a script from start to finish, and posted the "transcript" (if that's the right word for something pre-written) on VDare before VDare was eliminated from the Internet last summer.
I think Derb’s English language skills are best enjoyed by listening rather than simply reading. I’ve begun my Saturdays that way for many years. Efficiency is overrated.
I wouldn't disqualify Derbyshire just because he is a monologist rather than a conversationalist. They are two different genres of podcast but one isn't necessarily better or purer than the other; however, like yourself I find it easier to just read a monologue than have to listen to it, while a conversation is better heard than read.
Malcolm Gladwell's podcast Revisionist History tends to be more of a monologue although he will occasionally have a guest to discuss a particular topic. I don't listen to it for myriad reasons, mostly for the lack of density that others have stated, but also because Gladwell in particular tends to have a lot of chaff mixed in with the wheat and he isn't entertaining enough to make it work the effort to sift through
It's usually not a good idea to read a powerpoint. If Mr Derb is ever a speaker at the Castle again, he can do it extemporaneously and hope for the best.
If The Derb gets booed off the stage; his friend and ally Steve Sailer can dash in and cover the rest of his time with an emergency talk. I recommend "The wildest and most-salacious stories from the wide world of golf-course architecture, as told by Steve Sailer."
Almost all of the Dailywire "podcast" are the various public figures reading an article off of a teleprompter which means no one knows who actually wrote it or what take they are on.
I see a few trade-off problems with podcasts (and their cousin, the kind of Youtube video that amounts to a spoken essay).
One problem relates to information density and opportunity cost. Joe Rogan does three-hour shows. A listener could, if foregoing a single Joe Rogan episode, instead read a short book, half of a medium-long book, or one-quarter of a very-long book. Or several long-form magazine articles.
A good book or magazine article is almost always going to be more information-dense than any podcaster; more than Joe Rogan (who deliberately cultivates an "aw shucks, average guy" persona, and may indeed have that persona "in real life" in addition to his comedic interjections, all of which slow things down). (This is why Achmed E. Newman, of Peak Stupidity, says he dislikes and resents Joe Rogan: He likes the guy in some ways, but the podcast material feels like too much of a waste of time for the time invested.)
People listening to podcasts for information don't realize it but they're getting far, far lower value for their time than if they'd just read. People will be able to come up with plenty of exceptions or explanations, a big one in the USA being "listening while driving," that's true. The only point is, he who wants to learn something and thinks podcasts or Youtube videos are an efficient way to do so, most of the time are wrong and many may not even realize the half of it.
Those reading this (or listening to it, if that's possible) can test this out. Pick a subject, find a popular podcast or Youtube video on the topic, try an experiment: Give an hour to the podcast, then stop; then an hour to reading a well-produced book on the same subject. See which one gives you better info or which you can follow better.
I know of someone who does book reviews and writes them out but doesn't even post the "written versions" anywhere, only reads them onto video and posts the Youtube video. This I find a little absurd. It's as if this person thinks the value of the written-word has dropped to zero.
> It's as if this person thinks the value of the written-word has dropped to zero
LOL it HAS effectively dropped to zero; it is much easier to monetize a YouTube than it is to monetize a blog post
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Your post is based on a false premise: That the point of a podcast is to convey information. The point of the podcast to entertain the listener and to get them to subscribe and listen to the next episode. Your reference of magazine articles shows how out of touch you are, as magazines are barely a thing in 2025
I don't necessarily mean paper magazines or things labeled magazines. It is a term of convenience. Maybe the term "long-form essay" would work better.
Think of a good investigative piece of the type Matt Taibi became famous for. A piece of that scope, depth, and length that could be read in 45 minutes will almost necessarily be "better" in the sense I mean (and often much, much "better") than 45-minutes' worth of a podcast purporting to cover the same or similar material.
You are right about the purpose of podcasts being entertainment.
> "People listening to podcasts for information don't realize it but they're getting far, far lower value for their time than if they'd just read."
Besides the listening-while-driving factor you already mentioned (which adds value to a lower value activity), there is also the fact the with a podcast you are often getting extemporaneous responses from important or influential people without the filter or the time-lag of an editor, PR flack or other spin-doctor. In other words, the immediacy and unrehearsedness are a value of their own.
And if podcasts are not replacing reading but replacing broadcast news-watching, podcasts are a massive value upgrade for reasons I trust I need not explain.
Joe Rogan is a dumb person's idea of a smart person; I am stunned that he became the leader of the podcast industry, as I distinctly remember him going on Opie & Anthony 15 years ago to hype up his podcast and specifically gave Anthony credit for inspiring him. O&A encouraged him a little-brother type of way but at the time satellite radio was king and no one thought anyone would be able to successfully monetize podcasts. Another one that went on O&A when podcasts were new was Marc Maron, who also was able to make the transition. Meanwhile both Opie and Anthony have been left in the dustbin of the entertainment industry.
Joe Rogan and Andrew Napolitano are alike in that neither one is very interesting in his own right, but for whatever reason is able to get an eclectic variety of guests, some of whom are quite interesting, who then answer questions spontaneously.
Napolitano, whose format is much shorter-form, has the additional trait that he tends to ask each guest the same questions, so their responses are a sort of ongoing single-blind experiment in punditry.
A problem with Napolitano "Judging Freedom" is, it's generally limited to a narrow band of the very same people; and, when new voices are added in, they have similar opinions to the others. These opinions are still worthwhile, in many cases, but it cannot be called any kind of wide overview with differing views.
It's true that Napolitano likes guests who agree with him, but since he and his guests tend towards the inversion of the MSM narrative that predominates everywhere else, that makes their point of view atypical. And he invites ambassadors, military officers, journalists, academics, etc. so he's not just fishing in the MSM's chosen-experts pond.
Whether or not it is laziness on Napolitano's part to ask everyone the same questions, I still find the resulting contrast between answers intriguing. Even guests preselected for agreeing with Napolitano often give polar opposite answers to the same question. And do so with utter confidence. I suppose they're too busy to check what the last guy said. Or maybe Nap pre-records the interviews in the morning, then plays them out in the afternoon, so no one knows what anyone else until after their own interview.
This is why, actually, Joe Rogan is a rather smart person, in a Socratic way.
He understands and accepts his own limitations with frank humility. But he doesn't think less of himself because of it, so he asks questions. And lets his guests just talk about whatever they want to talk about rather than attempting to insert his own point of view.
This makes for variegated and entertaining listening, because it's about the guest. Not Rogan.
Smart people cannot help making it about themselves. Which can be occasionally interesting, but becomes boring over the course of multiple episodes.
I haven't listened to Derb in a long time, but I remember getting a good laugh hearing a slow-talking old British guy say "blackety-blackety-black black black black black black" (referring to the excessive preoccupation with black people by the media).
I've been enjoying https://www.youtube.com/@restishistorypod The Rest is History, Brit historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook filling in the details with humor.
Now I know why I spend so much time listening to the classics, jazz, rock and classical. I read old books and occasionally watch an old movie. I’m old, true but today’s entertainment seems as worthless as watching two guys BSing about something.
Another clueless person write another "get off my lawn" post while failing to realize how pathetic the post always is. Image how strange it is for a 20-year old to watch a movie or TV show where the main plot line is the inability of people to contact each other.
Steve has already forgotten that Raiders of the Lost Ark does not really have a plot since no matter what Indiana Jones does, the conclusion would be the same.
Since Steve apparently does not listen to podcasts, Steve does not understand that people listen while doing other things such as commute, workout, etc. Even Netflix admits that there most successful limited series are designed to be viewed while doing something else.
Come to think of it....I remember watching My Dinner with Andre back in 92 or so (Shawn was/is? the partner of the writer Deborah Eisenberg, with whom I was studying at the time); I remember feeling amazed by how compelling just two guys talking could be -- in a movie! Now that's pretty much all I watch, is people talking -- mostly men. Unfortunately, my constituents aren't always game for these kinds of discussions.
Shawn and Eisenberg have been a couple since 1972 although they don't seem to have children. I've never read any of her stuff; how would you describe it? Did you enjoy it?
I remember her as being very kind. I haven't read any of her work in so long, it's hard to say much about it. I would recommend it anyway. Just located this intriguing interview.
> Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory as Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory
According to the actors* they are playing fictionalized versions of themselves, not themselves per se. There was an actual script; Louis Malle didn't simply film a conversation between the two and condense it into 111 minutes, although Malle was prescient enough to condense the original script, which clocked in at over three hours!
If one notices the YouTube link, the Chicago Sun-Times gave the movie 4 stars. The CST critic at the time was of course Roger Ebert, who considered this one of the greatest movies ever made, as it was "entirely devoid of clichés"
It's funny that Steve brings this up as I was just discussing this movie on Reddit the other day, as it was featured on The Simpsons** in a scene where the children are at an arcade and Martin is playing a video game based on the movie
A co-worker of mine said "My Dinner With Andre" was a piece of ^^^p, lots of blah, blah, blah so I never saw it. But it is well-regarded today and I'm a little slow on popular culture so I guess I missed something wonderful. I never understood the appeal of rap but apparently scores of rappers are multimillionaires and a few are billionaires. When he died a couple of years ago, I was shocked to see that Jimmy Buffett was worth $650 million. I like Buffett alright but how did he amass such a fortune appealing to beach fantasists who want to go through life stoned and drunk? But then there's the answer. Tens of millions of Americans want to go through life stoned and drunk at Margarittaville stepping on pop tarts. You just never know.
It's the effect of scale. If one million people out of the 8.8 billion on the planet like your $5 piece of crap enough to download it or order it from Amazon, then you're a multi-millionaire. So presumably Buffett had cool merchandise and appeal to enough people. At $650M it sounds like he made some really good investments too.
Ring pull pop tops used to exist and could cut your foot if somebody had littered one on the ground and you had to walk barefoot because you blew out your flip-flop.
As someone who spent my boyhood on foot and later, on bicycles, I can attest that American road shoulders of the 1970s were paved with an agglomeration of pull tabs and cigarette butts.
One should remember that the number reported in the show biz media and the number that comes out of execution of the will and settling of the estate usually differ in orders of magnitude. The $650 number is the total value of assets without counting debts, partners, or agreements.
Sure. It's not like Buffet had $650 million in the Bank of Margarittaville three blocks from his beach house. Yoko Ono is worth something like $750 million but with a constant stream of income from all the Beatles royalties. But she doesn't know where one half of where her net worth is most probably.
Like you, I have an affinity with the film and the experience seeing My Dinner With Andre. But for me, the film exists beyond the screen—woven into my own surreal relationship with its co-writer and star. Wallace Shawn, that peculiar gnome of a man, lived in my mother’s tenement on McDougal Street in the Village during the years after the movie’s release. The building was old, the walls thin, the hallways narrow. I passed him often, but he never so much as glanced up, never acknowledged a neighbor’s presence. We were beneath his notice—just figures in his periphery, like extras in a movie.
And yet, for all his obliviousness, he lived there because it was cheap. It was still possible then for artists, writers, and even theater royalty to share an address with lower class New Yorkers like my mother and me. But not for long. Soon enough, he moved out, securing his place in Hollywood lore in The Princess Bride by playing a grotesque caricature of a Sicilian—a turn that did not escape my notice, given my own ancestry and my mother’s and many of those who lived in that building first, second and third generation Sicilians.
There’s something unsettling about it, something I’ve never quite shaken. Seeing his unmistakably goyish face in movies and on TV has always triggered a visceral reaction, an almost reptilian discomfort. It’s not just him—it’s what he represents. A certain kind of American reality where power, privilege, and cultural storytelling are controlled by those who don’t see the people they borrow from. The whole experience—this absurd, intimate yet impersonal proximity—has shaped the way I see my place in America. Not just where I stand, but who’s looking, and who never even bothers to look down. So yeah, I agree, “the dominant form” of entertainment of the 80s is still apparent today.
Shawn has had a peculiar career in that he is a nepobaby* but it took him a long time to cash in on the distinction. You are correct that he is probably best known for The Princess Bride but to me he will always be Alicia Silverstone's social studies teacher in Clueless, a role that is now 30 years ago when he was an old-looking 51. It is interesting that you refer to his face as goyish as Shawn identifies as Jewish, but he is certainly distinctive looking so I'm not surprised that you remember him as your mother's neighbor all those years ago.
*Wallace's father was William, the long-time editor of The New Yorker.
He was Woody Allen's girlfriend's ex-husband in "Manhattan," whom the girlfriend raves about how erotically attractive he was. Woody is finally introduced to Wallace and refers to him thereafter as "this homunculus."
I was confused for a moment as when the movie started Woody's girlfriend was the Mariel Hemingway character, but in the iconic scene at the Queensboro Bridge was indeed with Diane Keaton.
It is worth noting that both Hemingway and her character were both 17 at the time and no one seemed to care 45 years ago, proving yet again that the past is a different country
Personally, I thought it in dubious taste in 1979 that the 40-something Woody Allen character in "Manhattan" was having an affair with a beautiful high school girl, but Woody was obviously at the peak of his artistic talent in 1979, so nobody else back then seemed to care.
While I'm not doubting your lived experience, I have never been able to find any contemporary criticism of Manhattan vis-a-vis the age of Tracy or her actress. Even in 2001 when Roger Ebert re-reviewed the movie, he said "there was no plausible future between a 42-year-old (however immature) and a 17-year-old" but he didn't find the relationship scandalous or inappropriate per se. This was less than ten years after 38-year-old Jerry Seinfeld openly dated a 17-year-old girl at the height of his fame and while Steve Kroft asked him about it on 60 Minutes no one was particularly outraged about their real-world relationship at the time.
Of course when Seinfeld made the rounds to promote his Pop Tarts movie last year the moral scolds on Twitter tried to make hay of this, but much like JK Rowling one of the benefits of having F-U Money is the ability to wash away these concerns
Shawn sounds like an Irish or British name but his father’s last name was originally Chon (which doesn’t sound Jewish either tbh). Wallace definitely looked like he could’ve been a nerdy-looking wasp when he was younger but like David Lee Roth now looks like an old Jewish guy.
"Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel gave high praise to the film on Sneak Previews, support that the producers told Ebert helped keep the film in theaters for a year.[16] Ebert chose it as the best film of 1981, and he and Siskel later ranked it as the fifth-best and fourth-best film, respectively, of the 1980s.[17]"
Siskel & Ebert (1981) - Rollover | Quartet | My Dinner With Andre | Reds
You must be the type who replies all on an email that has been forwarded a dozen times to just add three words and without clean up the email to make it readable.
The past foretelling the future of film. And in the words of Casey Stengel...
"Amazin'!"
It was the inspiration for this memorable parody by Andy Kauffman called Breakfast With Andre with legendary pro wrestling heel Classy Freddie Blassie:
https://youtu.be/NWCJM8wvcg8?si=6RKO9slNmXHg6aH0
*Blassie
I love you for the tip on this one Mike, and I'll never forgive you.
Most combinations of people, almost all, really, fail to produce interesting conversations yet a lot of people enjoy interesting conversations. If you can't manage to participate in them in real life, watching people do it on the internet and imagining where you would occasionally make a good point if you were there, is a fair substitute.
It may be a partial substitute but lacks something important, which is human connection.
Human connection? Ick! Of such materials are pandemics made.
It also leads to a kind of psychosis. You watch the same guys talk in YouTube many times, gather their conversational rhythms, come to know the inside jokes, imagine you made good points back, pretty soon your brain registers these strangers on the internet as people you know, maybe even your friends. But if you met them in real life you would find the relationship was entirely one way and that could cause problems.
'The King of Comedy' covered this downside well.
Talk Radio (Stone, 1988) covered this parasocial phenomenon well as well
Is that the one about the shock jock getting killed?
As much as it is possible to spoil a 35+year-old movie, yes, the Eric Bogosian character gets killed. Bogosian authored the play on which the movie was based as well as co-writing the screenplay with Stone.
Charles Murray should add a chapter to “Bowling Alone”: “BSing with your (imaginary) friends alone”.
Robert Putnam
I wonder if the cause is the same, i.e. a varied society is a low trust society so people are reluctant to join public facing organizations. The youngsters do a lot of their socializing over the web. A Millenial friend told me aside from us oldsters he hangs with, most of his socializing is either family in person or over video games. Checking in with your imaginary pal Joe Rogan is only a small step from that.
One genre of podcast that is popular is the television rewatch. A group of people will rewatch an old television show episode by episode and will post the ensuing conversation as a podcast. Often times it will be actors or others connected with the show itself; Pam and Angela from The Office, JD and Turk from Scrubs, and Christopher and Bobby from The Sopranos have particularly popular ones but there are others. You can imagine you are all doing the rewatch together as if you have actual friends!
I had never heard of those. For the stars it might be watching for the first time.
Malle should have stolen from his FIL and made one of the actors out of wood. That would have given it that creepiness that's so French.
Due to Malle's untimely death and their relatively late marriage, the Malle/Bergen dynasty has only produced Chloe, who is the editor of Vogue.com, not the magazine itself which is still the domain of Anna Wintour
Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” (late 1979):
Is there really a direct line between this song and Rap Music as understood by the 1990s?
The word "rap" in the Sugarhill Gang song seems like it meant something different, like "shoot the breeze" or "breezy chat." A guy who likes telling stories and talking amusingly. It seems almost a coincidence that the same word is used for the later-developed genre, Rap Music.
The "Etymoline" etymology-dictionary suggests that the word/verb "rap" in the sense of "to talk informally, chat in an easy way" was introduced to US Blacks through Caribbean Black immigrants in/by the 1920s (attested by 1929, per OED), who in turn got it from archaic British sailor-slang in the 19th century.
The full split of the word RAP, from (1.) the mid-late 20th-century "chat in an easy way" sense, to (2.) the by-1990s "Rap Music"-genre sense. It can't have been total before -- when? -- at earliest, the late 1980s?
Eventually sense (2.) replaced sense (1.) totally, but there was a period of coexistence that even still was recognizable in the 1990s. A Simpsons episode from 1997 has a flashback scene to the 1970s, in which a younger, longhaired Rev Lovejoy tells a young Ned Flanders: "Sit down and rap with me, brother, that's what I'm here for!"
Would anyone in the 2010s or 2020s use the expression, "Rap with me" and expect the person so have a casual chat-discussion? At what point does even the expression lose any even-tenuous connection to the original meaning? How many b.2000s people would see that Simpsons episode and think Rev. Lovejoy was making some bizarre reference to "hip hop music"?
None of this is easily reflected in online material, generally all of which dates to the 2000s and 2010s (and the increasing auto-written AI-"slop" of the 2020s also would miss it). The wiki entry on this is hardly helpful if the goal is to try to reconstruct when exactly the word "rap" took on the new meaning of a specific music genre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapping#Etymology_and_usage
Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” was tuneful and fun. Current "rap" is mostly subliterate grunting.
Since around the mid-2010s it's moved towards highly computerized (artificial) sounds and increasing incoherence of the lyrics. See the rise of "mumble rap" in the 2010s. It sounds like a joke, and maybe it was at first, but all rap ended up going that way.
Almost all pop music uses the over driven autotune effect. I hate it and don't understand it. It's like that cookie monster heavy metal voice; it should be one novelty song, not an entire genre. I was never bothered by the effect Peter Frampton used on "Do you Feel like we do?" even though it's similar.
I think there is a lot of great hip-hop/rap. As with most genres, the overwhelming majority is crap. I also think the late 70s early 80s stuff doesn't hold up. The 90s and early 2000s is where it really developed into something worthwhile.
"Is there really a direct line between this song and Rap Music as understood by the 1990s?"
Yes. Rapping was a thing during the disco era. Blondie has a 1980 song called Rapture in which Debbie Harris raps and is the first song with rapping to become a Billboard no.1. After that the 80's had lots of rappers.
Lots of leftist yappers claim rap was a 70's underground black social and political music but there's no evidence for that.
By "rap" are we/you meaning, "Talking in the context of music"? I think there are many possible examples from earlier than the late-1970s/early-1980s period.
"Alice's Restaurant," 1967, was based on the "talking to music" concept. It was more like telling a story outright, and not quasi-poetry that later "Rap Music" is seen to be associated with. But the Sugarhill Gang 1979 song, too, is more like that than like 1990s rap.
Going even further back, Tex Ritter in the 1940s was doing similar things with "talking to music." I am sure that there are many other easy examples. So what is the real dividing-point between these and Rap Music?
This 1980 "Rapture" song seems to imitate the Sugarhill Gang song in tone, telling a story set to music. If the Sugarhill Gang song is part of Rap Music as later understood, then the Rapture song should be so-considered, too; but if the Sugarhill Gang song is considered something pre-Rap Music (despite the name), the Rapture song should likewise be excluded.
The tricky part here is the inclusion of the word "Rap" in the name of the Sugarhill Gang song, even though all the Blacks who produced and performed that song will have grown up knowing well that "to rap" meant "to chat breezily."
Talking Blues was a thing going back to 1926-1927 Tom Bouchillon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPrnbGm7jas
Talking to music was practiced in many cultures including in Ancient Greek tragedies.
Norse (vikings) were even dissing each others in verse. In a poem part of Poetic Edda Loki disses the other gods. This was called flyting and remained a practice in England and Scotland throughout history.
"Parlando" is another term of art, here. Goes back to at least the mid 19th century. Again, basically talking to music. You hear it in opera, plenty.
Italian singer Paolo Conte has made a career out of it. I've enjoyed listening to his records every once in a while.
Frank Sinatra did a lot of this, as well. We think of him as a singer, of course, but his range was rather limited. So, really, lots of times he was basically talking in key.
Here's Paolo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUP_fex2RaA
Debbie Harris and Chris Stein of Blondie invited Nile Rodgers of Chic to an early rap concert in which the kids rapped over his "Good Times." Rodgers swore he'd sue the bastard punks for ripping off his song. The white rockers reassured him that rap was the coming thing and he'd make a lot of money off it if he didn't get all persnickety over intellectual property rights.
Kendrick Lamar’s “They Not Like Us” has over a billion streams on Spotify and is sampled from “I Believe to My Soul” by Monk Higgins from 1968. The latter has just 34,000 streams and was written by Ray Charles a decade prior.
It’s fair to say that the heirs to Charles and Higgins have got VERY rich from this one song.
Debbie Harry
To put rap in perspective. The Evolution in Hip-Hop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRvZiU4goFA
Are you asking if this song is why we call it 'rap' or if this was an early example of what we think of as rap today? No to the first and yes to the second. My understanding is that (to use SAT analogy) rap is to hip hop as singing is to rock (and other genres obviously) that is, rap isn't a music genre, it's a vocal technique like Sprechgesang.
according to wikipedia rap was used among activists for more serious talk. It does strike me as date 1960s slang. further: Rap was used to describe talking on records as early as 1970 on Isaac Hayes' album ...To Be Continued with the track name "Monologue: Ike's Rap I".[26] Hayes' "husky-voiced sexy spoken 'raps' became key components in his signature sound"
Rap was not used "to describe talking on records"; it was (a Black term) simply used to describe any talking. Like a variant of the word "chat" (its pre-Internet use, that is).
I think these Internet histories of Rap Music suffer from the perspective problem of being written decades later, and they anachronistically misinterpret an far-earlier use of a word with a far-later connotation.
You are clearly incorrect per the sited reference in the wikipedia quote above. Just because rap was used to mean chat by activists and hippies doesn't mean that it wasn't also used for the obviously related activity of speaking over music on a record.
As other commenters have pointed out, speaking over music is not unique to Hip Hop and speaking poetry to a beat was done by ancient Rhapsodes before the Iliad and Oddysey were committed to writing. As I point out above, I'm pretty sure that the music genre you are thinking of is hip hop. Rap is just a name for the common vocal technique of that genre....maybe like scat? Scat isn't a genre, it's a vocal technique used almost exclusively in Jazz. But when Robert Plant does it, it's called vamping.
The discussion is over the etymology of the word "Rap" as we'd now understand the term. There is no exact right answer. I say only that with any Internet source there will be big recency bias towards the definition understood after the rise of the Internet.
This is also a case where "living knowledge" can have value. You and I may be too young to remember what the word "rap" was understood to mean in the 1970s, but someone over 70 might have better insight from memory (the problem is a lot of people don't trust their own memories and just go with the flow).
Remember too that most everything on Wikipedia is written "at earliest" in the mid-2000s, and much of the material might be traceable to far-later even than that. There is a risk of back-imposing a later definition on the word, and falsely using evidence.
Imagine someone centuries after nuclear war wipes out our civilization later reconstructing English and concluding: "The word 'talk' clearly refers to the act of speaking that is recorded and put into use for a 'motion picture,' as it was called, or 'movie'. We have definite evidence for this, with the many references to 'talkies' in the late 1920s and 1930s. Case closed!"
I'm failing to understand your point. Are you asserting that the use of 'rap' to describe non-singing vocals over hip hop music did not arise from the use of 'rap' to mean talking, conversing etc?
I think we can trust etymology of a word meaning that developed within the living memory of people still alive. Sure you can have arguments about whether person A was the first to use it that way, but it's pretty clear to those people where the new meaning came from and that it isn't just a coincidence that 'rap' and 'rap' both refer in some sense to talking.
Patrolling the Podcast Frontier, one can indeed learn a lot and be entertained, but in most cases seeing the podcast doesn't add much to the experience. Also, most people talk slower than your ability to listen, so skipping the video and accelerating the audio leads to a more engaging and efficient experience.
Podcasts that are edifying and entertaining:
• Joe Rogan, if you skip all the standup 'comedians' [sic] and MMA fighters (i.e., skip 85% of the content). Recent guests Mike Benz and Mark Zuckerberg were good.
• Steve Hsu's Manifold podcast, if you skip the more solipsistic academic stuff (about 20% skippable).
• John Derbyshire's Radio Derb is a pretty good current events summary, leavened with Derb's recollections and reflections. He talks sloooow: use 2× audio acceleration.
• John Dolan and Mark Ames's War Nerd podcast. John and Mark are 1970s and 1980s (respectively) Berkeley Marxists-lefties, but they they are honest enough to describe things accurately even if they draw IMHO mistaken conclusions from their observations. Though War is the nominal subject, they actually spend most of the time discussing background, politics, and media coverage, so it's more like an in-depth analysis of geostrategy, both current and historical.
• Mark Steyn is a sort of upmarket Rush Limbaugh, if Limbaugh were a Britanno-Canadian-Imperialist holdover who loved Broadway showtunes. His older stuff was more upbeat and musically oriented, but he's paid an enormous personal price for going to the legal mat with his various political, rhetorical, and business opponents, and for knuckling under to the vaccine mandates, so nowadays he's a little more angry. Yet he still makes unique observations and draws insightful conclusions that no one else notices.
• Andrew Napolitano's Judging Freedom, if you skip everyone except Max Blumenthal, Jeffrey Sachs, and Doug MacGregor (70% skippable). Also skip the numerous ads.
• RWA: Russians With Attitude is AFAIK the only English language source of information about Russia by independent Russians, without any heavy ideological slant. Of the two pseudonymous podcasters, one is, I think, an expat in Central Europe, who is more intellectual and bourgeois, the other is a more working class regular guy somewhere in the Urals. The latter is IMHO more authentic and informative; informative not necessarily in the data sense, but in terms of what regular Russians actually think and feel.
• Carl Zha's Silk and Steel is similarly an English language source of information about China by an independent Chinese, without any heavy ideological slant. He lives in Indonesia, so he's presumably unconcerned about CCP pressure.
• I hesitate to mention BAP's Caribbean Rhythms because it's hard to explain to someone who is not already initiated, but suffice it to say it's not about the Caribbean or Rhythm.
There are many others with various virtues, but the above are of general interest and relevance, and in current production. There have been other podcasts that have fallen into disuse, but have some worthwhile archived episodes.
Is something like John Derbyshire's "podcast" better listened to than read?
It's not a true podcast, I'd argue, in that he's reading a script from start to finish, and posted the "transcript" (if that's the right word for something pre-written) on VDare before VDare was eliminated from the Internet last summer.
I think Derb’s English language skills are best enjoyed by listening rather than simply reading. I’ve begun my Saturdays that way for many years. Efficiency is overrated.
I wouldn't disqualify Derbyshire just because he is a monologist rather than a conversationalist. They are two different genres of podcast but one isn't necessarily better or purer than the other; however, like yourself I find it easier to just read a monologue than have to listen to it, while a conversation is better heard than read.
Malcolm Gladwell's podcast Revisionist History tends to be more of a monologue although he will occasionally have a guest to discuss a particular topic. I don't listen to it for myriad reasons, mostly for the lack of density that others have stated, but also because Gladwell in particular tends to have a lot of chaff mixed in with the wheat and he isn't entertaining enough to make it work the effort to sift through
Derbyshire did that the one time I went to a V-Dare at the castle. Read his writings with a powerpoint.
It's usually not a good idea to read a powerpoint. If Mr Derb is ever a speaker at the Castle again, he can do it extemporaneously and hope for the best.
If The Derb gets booed off the stage; his friend and ally Steve Sailer can dash in and cover the rest of his time with an emergency talk. I recommend "The wildest and most-salacious stories from the wide world of golf-course architecture, as told by Steve Sailer."
Almost all of the Dailywire "podcast" are the various public figures reading an article off of a teleprompter which means no one knows who actually wrote it or what take they are on.
I see a few trade-off problems with podcasts (and their cousin, the kind of Youtube video that amounts to a spoken essay).
One problem relates to information density and opportunity cost. Joe Rogan does three-hour shows. A listener could, if foregoing a single Joe Rogan episode, instead read a short book, half of a medium-long book, or one-quarter of a very-long book. Or several long-form magazine articles.
A good book or magazine article is almost always going to be more information-dense than any podcaster; more than Joe Rogan (who deliberately cultivates an "aw shucks, average guy" persona, and may indeed have that persona "in real life" in addition to his comedic interjections, all of which slow things down). (This is why Achmed E. Newman, of Peak Stupidity, says he dislikes and resents Joe Rogan: He likes the guy in some ways, but the podcast material feels like too much of a waste of time for the time invested.)
People listening to podcasts for information don't realize it but they're getting far, far lower value for their time than if they'd just read. People will be able to come up with plenty of exceptions or explanations, a big one in the USA being "listening while driving," that's true. The only point is, he who wants to learn something and thinks podcasts or Youtube videos are an efficient way to do so, most of the time are wrong and many may not even realize the half of it.
Those reading this (or listening to it, if that's possible) can test this out. Pick a subject, find a popular podcast or Youtube video on the topic, try an experiment: Give an hour to the podcast, then stop; then an hour to reading a well-produced book on the same subject. See which one gives you better info or which you can follow better.
I know of someone who does book reviews and writes them out but doesn't even post the "written versions" anywhere, only reads them onto video and posts the Youtube video. This I find a little absurd. It's as if this person thinks the value of the written-word has dropped to zero.
> It's as if this person thinks the value of the written-word has dropped to zero
LOL it HAS effectively dropped to zero; it is much easier to monetize a YouTube than it is to monetize a blog post
---
Your post is based on a false premise: That the point of a podcast is to convey information. The point of the podcast to entertain the listener and to get them to subscribe and listen to the next episode. Your reference of magazine articles shows how out of touch you are, as magazines are barely a thing in 2025
I don't necessarily mean paper magazines or things labeled magazines. It is a term of convenience. Maybe the term "long-form essay" would work better.
Think of a good investigative piece of the type Matt Taibi became famous for. A piece of that scope, depth, and length that could be read in 45 minutes will almost necessarily be "better" in the sense I mean (and often much, much "better") than 45-minutes' worth of a podcast purporting to cover the same or similar material.
You are right about the purpose of podcasts being entertainment.
> "People listening to podcasts for information don't realize it but they're getting far, far lower value for their time than if they'd just read."
Besides the listening-while-driving factor you already mentioned (which adds value to a lower value activity), there is also the fact the with a podcast you are often getting extemporaneous responses from important or influential people without the filter or the time-lag of an editor, PR flack or other spin-doctor. In other words, the immediacy and unrehearsedness are a value of their own.
And if podcasts are not replacing reading but replacing broadcast news-watching, podcasts are a massive value upgrade for reasons I trust I need not explain.
Joe Rogan is a dumb person's idea of a smart person; I am stunned that he became the leader of the podcast industry, as I distinctly remember him going on Opie & Anthony 15 years ago to hype up his podcast and specifically gave Anthony credit for inspiring him. O&A encouraged him a little-brother type of way but at the time satellite radio was king and no one thought anyone would be able to successfully monetize podcasts. Another one that went on O&A when podcasts were new was Marc Maron, who also was able to make the transition. Meanwhile both Opie and Anthony have been left in the dustbin of the entertainment industry.
Joe Rogan and Andrew Napolitano are alike in that neither one is very interesting in his own right, but for whatever reason is able to get an eclectic variety of guests, some of whom are quite interesting, who then answer questions spontaneously.
Napolitano, whose format is much shorter-form, has the additional trait that he tends to ask each guest the same questions, so their responses are a sort of ongoing single-blind experiment in punditry.
A problem with Napolitano "Judging Freedom" is, it's generally limited to a narrow band of the very same people; and, when new voices are added in, they have similar opinions to the others. These opinions are still worthwhile, in many cases, but it cannot be called any kind of wide overview with differing views.
It's true that Napolitano likes guests who agree with him, but since he and his guests tend towards the inversion of the MSM narrative that predominates everywhere else, that makes their point of view atypical. And he invites ambassadors, military officers, journalists, academics, etc. so he's not just fishing in the MSM's chosen-experts pond.
Whether or not it is laziness on Napolitano's part to ask everyone the same questions, I still find the resulting contrast between answers intriguing. Even guests preselected for agreeing with Napolitano often give polar opposite answers to the same question. And do so with utter confidence. I suppose they're too busy to check what the last guy said. Or maybe Nap pre-records the interviews in the morning, then plays them out in the afternoon, so no one knows what anyone else until after their own interview.
This is why, actually, Joe Rogan is a rather smart person, in a Socratic way.
He understands and accepts his own limitations with frank humility. But he doesn't think less of himself because of it, so he asks questions. And lets his guests just talk about whatever they want to talk about rather than attempting to insert his own point of view.
This makes for variegated and entertaining listening, because it's about the guest. Not Rogan.
Smart people cannot help making it about themselves. Which can be occasionally interesting, but becomes boring over the course of multiple episodes.
Give Joe credit for knowing his limitations and for putting out a popular product, but that doesn't make him a smart person per se. Words mean things
I'm sure his IQ is above average.
Were those goalposts heavy?
Great list and appreciate the BAP mention.. I’d add red scare!
I haven't listened to Derb in a long time, but I remember getting a good laugh hearing a slow-talking old British guy say "blackety-blackety-black black black black black black" (referring to the excessive preoccupation with black people by the media).
I've been enjoying https://www.youtube.com/@restishistorypod The Rest is History, Brit historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook filling in the details with humor.
Dom and Tom are knowledgeable, relatively sane ideologically, and have extremely good chemistry. The Rest Is History is a delight.
Now I know why I spend so much time listening to the classics, jazz, rock and classical. I read old books and occasionally watch an old movie. I’m old, true but today’s entertainment seems as worthless as watching two guys BSing about something.
Another clueless person write another "get off my lawn" post while failing to realize how pathetic the post always is. Image how strange it is for a 20-year old to watch a movie or TV show where the main plot line is the inability of people to contact each other.
I own the only set of "My Dinner with Andre" action figures. Prototypes really, never went to manufacturing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WwZkbAvBtk
are they anything like that?
Corky St. Clair!
Steve has already forgotten that Raiders of the Lost Ark does not really have a plot since no matter what Indiana Jones does, the conclusion would be the same.
Since Steve apparently does not listen to podcasts, Steve does not understand that people listen while doing other things such as commute, workout, etc. Even Netflix admits that there most successful limited series are designed to be viewed while doing something else.
Come to think of it....I remember watching My Dinner with Andre back in 92 or so (Shawn was/is? the partner of the writer Deborah Eisenberg, with whom I was studying at the time); I remember feeling amazed by how compelling just two guys talking could be -- in a movie! Now that's pretty much all I watch, is people talking -- mostly men. Unfortunately, my constituents aren't always game for these kinds of discussions.
Shawn and Eisenberg have been a couple since 1972 although they don't seem to have children. I've never read any of her stuff; how would you describe it? Did you enjoy it?
I remember her as being very kind. I haven't read any of her work in so long, it's hard to say much about it. I would recommend it anyway. Just located this intriguing interview.
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6203/the-art-of-fiction-no-218-deborah-eisenberg
That's what I get for not reading more closely; I thought you said you were studying her, not studying WITH her
> Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory as Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory
According to the actors* they are playing fictionalized versions of themselves, not themselves per se. There was an actual script; Louis Malle didn't simply film a conversation between the two and condense it into 111 minutes, although Malle was prescient enough to condense the original script, which clocked in at over three hours!
If one notices the YouTube link, the Chicago Sun-Times gave the movie 4 stars. The CST critic at the time was of course Roger Ebert, who considered this one of the greatest movies ever made, as it was "entirely devoid of clichés"
It's funny that Steve brings this up as I was just discussing this movie on Reddit the other day, as it was featured on The Simpsons** in a scene where the children are at an arcade and Martin is playing a video game based on the movie
*Who are still alive at 81 and 90
**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AUaXI4jU88
A co-worker of mine said "My Dinner With Andre" was a piece of ^^^p, lots of blah, blah, blah so I never saw it. But it is well-regarded today and I'm a little slow on popular culture so I guess I missed something wonderful. I never understood the appeal of rap but apparently scores of rappers are multimillionaires and a few are billionaires. When he died a couple of years ago, I was shocked to see that Jimmy Buffett was worth $650 million. I like Buffett alright but how did he amass such a fortune appealing to beach fantasists who want to go through life stoned and drunk? But then there's the answer. Tens of millions of Americans want to go through life stoned and drunk at Margarittaville stepping on pop tarts. You just never know.
It's the effect of scale. If one million people out of the 8.8 billion on the planet like your $5 piece of crap enough to download it or order it from Amazon, then you're a multi-millionaire. So presumably Buffett had cool merchandise and appeal to enough people. At $650M it sounds like he made some really good investments too.
All power to Buffett. Apparently he had a string of restaurants as well.
Stepping on pop tops. Regretting pop tarts.
I have never seen the word "crap" censored before, but then again I have never seen anyone think that Jimmy Buffett sang about stepping on Pop Tarts
I know, I know. But it sounds like Pop Tarts. And who ever heard of stepping on pop tops? Did he miss the trash can?
Ring pull pop tops used to exist and could cut your foot if somebody had littered one on the ground and you had to walk barefoot because you blew out your flip-flop.
It's a memorable verse.
Yes, I dimly remember the old pull-offs on beer cans. Just yank it off, toss aside, and drink.
As someone who spent my boyhood on foot and later, on bicycles, I can attest that American road shoulders of the 1970s were paved with an agglomeration of pull tabs and cigarette butts.
One should remember that the number reported in the show biz media and the number that comes out of execution of the will and settling of the estate usually differ in orders of magnitude. The $650 number is the total value of assets without counting debts, partners, or agreements.
Sure. It's not like Buffet had $650 million in the Bank of Margarittaville three blocks from his beach house. Yoko Ono is worth something like $750 million but with a constant stream of income from all the Beatles royalties. But she doesn't know where one half of where her net worth is most probably.
Like you, I have an affinity with the film and the experience seeing My Dinner With Andre. But for me, the film exists beyond the screen—woven into my own surreal relationship with its co-writer and star. Wallace Shawn, that peculiar gnome of a man, lived in my mother’s tenement on McDougal Street in the Village during the years after the movie’s release. The building was old, the walls thin, the hallways narrow. I passed him often, but he never so much as glanced up, never acknowledged a neighbor’s presence. We were beneath his notice—just figures in his periphery, like extras in a movie.
And yet, for all his obliviousness, he lived there because it was cheap. It was still possible then for artists, writers, and even theater royalty to share an address with lower class New Yorkers like my mother and me. But not for long. Soon enough, he moved out, securing his place in Hollywood lore in The Princess Bride by playing a grotesque caricature of a Sicilian—a turn that did not escape my notice, given my own ancestry and my mother’s and many of those who lived in that building first, second and third generation Sicilians.
There’s something unsettling about it, something I’ve never quite shaken. Seeing his unmistakably goyish face in movies and on TV has always triggered a visceral reaction, an almost reptilian discomfort. It’s not just him—it’s what he represents. A certain kind of American reality where power, privilege, and cultural storytelling are controlled by those who don’t see the people they borrow from. The whole experience—this absurd, intimate yet impersonal proximity—has shaped the way I see my place in America. Not just where I stand, but who’s looking, and who never even bothers to look down. So yeah, I agree, “the dominant form” of entertainment of the 80s is still apparent today.
Shawn has had a peculiar career in that he is a nepobaby* but it took him a long time to cash in on the distinction. You are correct that he is probably best known for The Princess Bride but to me he will always be Alicia Silverstone's social studies teacher in Clueless, a role that is now 30 years ago when he was an old-looking 51. It is interesting that you refer to his face as goyish as Shawn identifies as Jewish, but he is certainly distinctive looking so I'm not surprised that you remember him as your mother's neighbor all those years ago.
*Wallace's father was William, the long-time editor of The New Yorker.
He was Woody Allen's girlfriend's ex-husband in "Manhattan," whom the girlfriend raves about how erotically attractive he was. Woody is finally introduced to Wallace and refers to him thereafter as "this homunculus."
I was confused for a moment as when the movie started Woody's girlfriend was the Mariel Hemingway character, but in the iconic scene at the Queensboro Bridge was indeed with Diane Keaton.
It is worth noting that both Hemingway and her character were both 17 at the time and no one seemed to care 45 years ago, proving yet again that the past is a different country
Personally, I thought it in dubious taste in 1979 that the 40-something Woody Allen character in "Manhattan" was having an affair with a beautiful high school girl, but Woody was obviously at the peak of his artistic talent in 1979, so nobody else back then seemed to care.
While I'm not doubting your lived experience, I have never been able to find any contemporary criticism of Manhattan vis-a-vis the age of Tracy or her actress. Even in 2001 when Roger Ebert re-reviewed the movie, he said "there was no plausible future between a 42-year-old (however immature) and a 17-year-old" but he didn't find the relationship scandalous or inappropriate per se. This was less than ten years after 38-year-old Jerry Seinfeld openly dated a 17-year-old girl at the height of his fame and while Steve Kroft asked him about it on 60 Minutes no one was particularly outraged about their real-world relationship at the time.
Of course when Seinfeld made the rounds to promote his Pop Tarts movie last year the moral scolds on Twitter tried to make hay of this, but much like JK Rowling one of the benefits of having F-U Money is the ability to wash away these concerns
Shawn sounds like an Irish or British name but his father’s last name was originally Chon (which doesn’t sound Jewish either tbh). Wallace definitely looked like he could’ve been a nerdy-looking wasp when he was younger but like David Lee Roth now looks like an old Jewish guy.
Wally Shawn and Andre Gregory are both Jewish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Dinner_with_Andre#Reception
"Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel gave high praise to the film on Sneak Previews, support that the producers told Ebert helped keep the film in theaters for a year.[16] Ebert chose it as the best film of 1981, and he and Siskel later ranked it as the fifth-best and fourth-best film, respectively, of the 1980s.[17]"
Siskel & Ebert (1981) - Rollover | Quartet | My Dinner With Andre | Reds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKlM1nIbd8Q&t=871s
("My Dinner With Andre" review starts at 14:31 minutes in)
If you are going to crib from Wikipedia, don't be so lazy as to not take out the footnotes
I like leaving the footnotes in, to show the Wiki source quote as it is.
You must be the type who replies all on an email that has been forwarded a dozen times to just add three words and without clean up the email to make it readable.
Nope.
Also that you're lazy