FLOOD 8 — Side B — Roy Choi Version

BRYCE VINE

ORIGINAL TRACKS is a monthly series, brought to you by ORIGINAL PENGUIN and FLOOD Magazine, featuring performances and interviews from some of today's most unique and talented artists. Check regularly at ORIGINALPENGUIN.COM for the latest episodes!

#BeAnOriginal

CHROMEO

FA M I LY O F T H E Y E A R

THE COLORS OF

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

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APROPOS OF NOTHING

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BREAKING: ANDREW HAIGH, MORGAN BLAIR, LOLA KIRKE

22 PARENTS, ASSIMILATION, AND B.E.T.: JIMMY O. YANG WROTE THE BOOK ON IT 26 IN CONVERSATION: WYATT CENAC HAS SOME PROBLEMS TO DISCUSS 30 TODD McFARLANE IS BORED WITH ORIGIN STORIES 46 SOUL FOOD: A MEETING ON THE FRINGE WITH ROY CHOI AND PORTUGAL. THE MAN 62 KATE BERLANT AND JOHN EARLY ARE HUNGRY: A LOVE STORY IN FOUR COURSES

FLOOD MAGAZINE IS PUBLISHED BY FLOOD MAGAZINE LLC, 542 N. LARCHMONT BLVD., LOS ANGELES CA 90004. VOLUME 1, NUMBER 8, 2018. FLOOD MAGAZINE IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING, INCLUDING THE RETURN OR LOSS OF SUBMISSIONS, OR FOR ANY DAMAGE OR OTHER INJURY TO UNSOLICITED MANUSCRIPTS OR ARTWORK. ANY SUBMISSION OF A MANUSCRIPT OR ARTWORK SHOULD INCLUDE A SELF-ADDRESSED ENVELOPE OR PACKAGE OF APPROPRIATE SIZE, BEARING ADEQUATE RETURN POSTAGE. ©2018 FLOOD MAGAZINE LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. FLOOD IS DISTRIBUTED FOR FREE IN SELECT LOCATIONS AND AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE AT FLOODMAGAZINE.COM PRINTED IN CANADA

ROY CHOI COVER PHOTO BY MICHAEL MULLER / KATE BERLANT AND JOHN EARLY COVER PHOTO AND TABLE OF CONTENTS PHOTO BY EMILY SHUR

40 WILL THE REAL GUS VAN SANT PLEASE STAND UP

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THE FASHION ISSUE

STARRING DR. STEVE BRULE

6/15/16 2:42 AM

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Content. The word practically vibrates with innuendo. At one time, it referred only to a peaceful sort of happiness or a generalized quantity of something. Now it brings to mind any number of journalistic sins: clickbait, mindless listicles, and an unending stream of warring seismic opinions intended not to deepen readers’ understanding of news or culture, but rather to award them with a constant glut of information.

In an age of live-tweeting and near-ubiquitous Wi-Fi, the demand for “content” can force outlets and writers into rushed and weary stories. For each issue of FLOOD, we have the luxury (and it is a luxury) of working more slowly; this magazine was not put together haphazardly, under the looming threat of being beaten to the punch.

Neither small, niche publications nor corporate-owned papers are entirely safe in this moment. The Village Voice, NYLON, NME, and Teen Vogue recently shuttered their print editions. Weird and wonderful sites like The Toast and The Awl closed their virtual doors. MTV News—after first hiring writers from the defunct Grantland—pivoted to video. City-news sites DNAinfo, Gothamist, and LAist were terminated by their billionaire owner following a vote to unionize. The Koch brothers bought Time Inc., and when LA Weekly was sold, every editor and all but one writer was laid off. We put this issue to press without taking it for granted.

But even so, what specific value does a culture publication hold these days? That’s a fair question, and one deserving of a somewhat circuitous answer. We’ll assume you’ve heard praise of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread over the past several months and also reveled in the wild ride that is Adam Sandler’s comedic career over the past several decades—but think back to Anderson’s 2002 film Punch-Drunk Love, in which Sandler stars as a sad, angry businessman named Barry Egan (the performance of his lifetime). In one particular scene, someone asks Barry if anything is wrong with him, and he tells them: “I don’t know if there is anything wrong, because I don’t know how other people are.”

That, then, is what we hope to accomplish with FLOOD 8: to show you how other people are. It’s lonely not to know. Within these pages, you’ll become privy to Andrew W.K.’s insecurities and Gus Van Sant’s inscrutability; Courtney Barnett’s easy-going nature and Jack White’s curious one; Kate Berlant’s love for John Early and his reciprocal passion for her. You might disagree with some of their—or our—artistic assessments or cultural biases, and that’s OK. In differing perspectives, the spark of art lives.

— Anya Jaremko-Greenwold, Managing Editor

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The Indie-Rock All-Stars Opening Day Lineup

by Nate Rogers

1. Ira Kaplan (CF) Anyone who’s stuck with the Mets this long deserves some playing time as a consolation prize.

2. Georgia Hubley (LF) Good communicator with Ira in the outfield. Knows how to call for fly balls in multiple languages.

3. Craig Finn (3B) Power hitter. Known for swinging out of his shoes. Lights the place up when he connects; profusely apologizes when he strikes out.

4. Jack White (1B) Promised to supply the team with custom-made old-timey uniforms—and enough Brain & Nerve Tonic to last the whole season.

5. Chance the Rapper (SS) Technically still indie, and “Same Drugs” is basically a Sufjan song, so he’s in. Looks good in a flat brim, too.

6. Carrie Brownstein (C) Made some questionable game-calling decisions in Wild Flag’s “Electric Band” video, but was still trying to brawl with the other team in spite of them, and you really need someone like that on the field, ya know?

7. Jake Ewald (RF) I mean, his band’s name is Modern Baseball. I’m just kind of counting on this being a thing.

8. Kim Shattuck (2B) Was notably DFA’d from Black Francis’s major-label team, but has a high baseball IQ and an even higher-quality baseball last name.

9. Robert Pollard (P) Everyone knows he threw a no-hitter in college. What this lineup presupposes is… What if he could do it again?

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Now at MoMA: A Jack Dawson Retrospective

by Anya Jaremko-Greenwold

NEW YORK — Twenty-seven (very damp) sketches by one Jack Dawson have been retrieved from the wreckage of the RMS Titanic, 350 miles off the coast of Newfoundland. A third-class passenger, Dawson was one of 1,503 who died following the Titanic’s collision with a monstrous iceberg in 1912. The vessel upended and eventually sank into the North Atlantic Ocean, failing to complete its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York (despite boastful branding as the “unsinkable” ship). The Museum of Modern Art will house a retrospective of Dawson’s recovered work later this month, amidst protests from several curators who call the art unexceptional and expressed displeasure that the water damage was not more severe.

Dawson’s charcoal sketches feature women (likely prostitutes) in various states of undress; there is but one clothed figure—an elder draped in lavish jewelry and crudely titled “Madame Bijoux.” A single nude is thought to bear a passing resemblance to Rose DeWitt Bukater, a socialite and first-class passenger aboard the Titanic, who also died in the disaster. The sketch is dated April 14—the very night these travelers would have met their maker.

DeWitt Bukater’s likeness reclines on a pillowed surface in naught but a heart-shaped diamond necklace, arms lifted in surrender, genitals lost to vague and prudish shadow. It is apparent from his technique that Dawson creates with neither formal academic training nor passion; he describes without searching. There is no depth of expression, no psychological tangents—Rose’s is a conventional rendering, both wooden and mechanical. Good art is suggestive more so than descriptive, posing questions that will go unanswered. But Dawson has laid his mediocre soul bare.

A burgeoning art collector in her day, DeWitt Bukater purchased a genuine article Monet and several hallucinatory (though erotic) works by Picasso shortly before her demise. As these paintings joined her in transit, they have since perished in the deep, admired now only by culture-starved mermaids and sea monsters, while the waves of time rinse their bright colors away. We are compensated with Dawson’s paltry attempts.

(MoMA, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019, September 25, 1987–March 25, 1988.)

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& I’d Die for It” · Jonny Greenwood, Phantom Thread Soundtrack · Yodeling Walmart Kid, “Lovesick Blues” · Five-note melody from Annihilation

Music we listened to while making FLOOD 8

The Roches, The Roches · Relatively Clean Rivers, Relatively Clean Rivers · Chook Race, Ar

There Can Only Be One

by Mike LeSuer

1) Bon Jovi | Bon Iver Oh, please. At least with the former we always know what to expect. Moving on.

2) Portugal. The Man | Math the Band Implausible; math is only a genre. Next!

7) Ice Age (2002) | No Age Two franchises with commendable debuts, but whose subsequent outputs further sunders their comparability like a continental drift.

8) Man Ray | Blu-ray Man Ray: the Blu-ray to Hans Arp’s HD DVD.

3) Logan (2017) | Lucky (2017) | Logan Lucky (2017) Obvious choice: Why have one when you can have both?

4) Mister Heavenly | Mister Lonely (2007)

One exception: René does trump MK64.

10) John Frusciante | Ron Don Volante

If Harmony ever gets around to a sequel, I may reconsider.

Approximately equals in regards to musical prodigiousness; Ron Don takes the cake, though, with his foray into the night life industry.

5) Mr. Bean | Commander Keen

11) Speedy Ortiz | Speedy Claxton

Context is what’s most important here, and Bean undoubtedly provides less of it.

Apples and oranges, really, since the latter Speedy was plagued by injuries.

6) Jeff Beck | Brubeck | Trebek

12) Ava Gardner | “Avant Gardener”

Easy: Only one of these men possesses the sheer radiance to attract the attention of a young Julianne Moore during her sister’s husband’s subject-ofadmiration’s hospital-acquaintance’s son’s neighbor’s daughter’s cello concert.

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9) Descartes | Mario Kart

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The Barefoot Contessa vs. Uma Thurman postoverdosing? No question.

asement · Barlow, In a Stranger’s Car · Young Fathers, Cocoa Sugar · Titus Andronicus, “(I’m) Like a Rolling Stone” · American Pleasure Club, “This Is Heaven

So You’ve Been Mutinied: A Six-Step Guide to Personal Recovery and Sea-Justice

by Matthew Morris One of the unfortunate truths of a life at sea is mutiny. Let’s be pithy: it sucks. Midshipmen are, by their nature, a slothful sort—and after years offshore, even the most honest cabin boy can be found prone to the maelstrom of malaise, drink, and scabies abundant in seedy ports. It’s these circumstances that bear insubordination—and if insubordination is met with what’s deemed to be inordinate punishment, even the highestranked captain can find him or herself in the midst of a mutinous rebellion.

This is a guide not on how to quell these rebellions, but on how to manage the resulting strife. At this point, revenge—whether by the scales or by the sword—is all that matters. The following wisdom seeks to define how it is best exacted.

I. Negotiate a vessel, arms, and five days’ food

IV. Find the nearest colonial outpost

If there is a life to be had post-mutiny (and there often isn’t), you must do everything you can to negotiate an exit that includes the essentials: a sizable vessel, twelve loyal crew members (including a carpenter and a surgeon), five days’ food and water, navigational charts, a sextant, a compass, rum, proper change of military attire, gold, tools, arms, and sails.

If you’re near to a colonial outpost, great, but don’t go the extra mile to a British outpost if there’s a Dutch or Spanish one that’s more easily accessible. Though heed this warning: Never weigh anchor at a French Isle. The French do not exhibit goodwill nor justice.

II. Work your way through sea-depression Now, it’s going to be quite difficult to overcome the feeling that you’ve failed yourself, your crew, The Queen. You can’t think this way; these are just the sea-sads. Your remaining crew still depend on you and want to be singing shanties right now—not wallowing.

III. Set sail for safe harbor One may presume that, if this has happened, you are likely on the other end of the world. This is good because there are numerous islands in the South Pacific, many of which contain friendly natives and good harbor. Beware, though, that many of the islands also contain cannibalistic natives suspicious of outsiders. Send the Irish of your crew to scout the situation.

V. Retreat Go home. You’ve been through enough. Take some time off and seek another, more civilized appointment. Perhaps Mediterranean salt or New England ice blocks.

VI. Retrieve and try the traitors Your court testimony shall destroy families and reputations of good sailing stock, and you should enjoy every syllable of your deposition as it leaves your mouth to form a dagger. Throw some invective in there if you have to, but either way, congratulations. The blood that will soon be splattered on your face won’t be blood so much as liquid red dignity finding its way home.

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Time Bomb High School · The Muffs, “Sad Tomorrow” · Saint Etienne, So Tough · Bad Company, “Feel Like Makin’ Love” · Fletcher C. Johnson, Lessons

round the House · Stephen Malkmus, Stephen Malkmus · Silver Jews, Bright Flight · The Impressions, The Young Mods’ Forgotten Story · Reigning Sound,

in Tenderness · JPEGMAFIA, Veteran · Airiel, Winks & Kisses: Melted · Mannequin Pussy, Romantic · Kal Marks, Universal Care · Hymie’s Basement, Hymie’s

BREAKING

ANDREW HAIGH EXPERIENCING A FILM BY ANDREW HAIGH IS LIKE SPENDING TIME WITH A NEW FRIEND, REALLY GETTING TO KNOW THEM THROUGH ALL THEIR FLAWS, FEARS, AND IDIOSYNCRASIES. His work expresses a genuine fascination with people, and it’s refreshing to hear that that’s the very reason he started making films in the first place.

“It helps me understand myself and the world that I live in,” he shares.

“I just have to feel really engaged on a character level. That’s always the thing that gets to me.”

In the hands of someone less subtle, Lean on Pete could have easily dissolved into an overly sentimental story of young Charley (played by breakout star Charlie Plummer) and the sweet racehorse he befriends in a desperate need for companionship.

But Haigh was able to retain the essential elements of Willy Vlautin’s novel, which provides the source material for the film.

“His aloneness is what drew me to the story,” Haigh says. “It wasn’t so much about the horses, or the horse racing, or even that it was set in America, but it was that need Charley had to find a base in which he could grow.” That reality of feeling isolated, combined with the erratic trajectory of love, is a tricky area that Haigh often explores.

racetrack, while Chloë Sevigny is a jockey who continues climbing on the backs of horses to avoid the miserable alternative of waiting tables. Travis Fimmel plays Charley’s dad, a guy who’s fumbling his way through single fatherhood despite the best of intentions. Yet there’s an earnest and realistic sense of hope in the story, too. For Haigh, striking the right tone came down to ensuring that no one was prematurely judged: “I didn’t want to vilify or demonize any of these people, even if they made wrong decisions or didn’t do enough to help Charley,” he explains. “They’re struggling just to get food on their table, and we shouldn’t underestimate how difficult it must be to live that every day.”

BACKSTORY: An auteur who learned how films were made while working as an assistant to producer Ismail Merchant of Merchant Ivory Productions, and then in the editorial departments of several bigbudget Hollywood productions FROM: North Yorkshire, England

To capture the authenticity of each personality, Haigh spent time at match races and local fairs in Oregon, meeting jockeys and trainers. (“It’s a real hand-tomouth existence, very different to highend racing, where people are making lots of money.”) He wrote the script while on the road, traveling through Idaho, Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming. “For me, it helps so much if you can be in the environment you’re setting the film in,” Haigh says.

“It’s a lot easier than sitting in my flat in London trying to imagine what it feels like out there.”

YOU MIGHT KNOW HIM FROM: His award-winning features, Weekend and 45 Years, or his writing and directing work on HBO’s Looking

When Charley has nothing and nobody, “Most of the things we do in our lives the only living creature he can open NOW: Preparing for the worldwide release of A24’s Lean on Pete, and directing BBC Two’s The North Water are to try and not feel alone, and the up to is his horse—who, naturally, can’t majority of people reach out through their understand him. It’s in this challenging relationships to find comfort. I think that’s why I’m always drawn to them in time that Charley reveals the strengths and weaknesses that will inform who different respects. When they fall apart or break down, you get thrown back he becomes as an adult; the best characters continue moving through the into that maelstrom of aloneness again. It’s a terrifying prospect—which sludge of life, even when the movie is over. is often why we stay in relationships we shouldn’t.” Haigh laughs briefly, keenly aware of the sudden heaviness of the conversation.

“I don’t always need to know everything a character is experiencing—I just want to be able to look at their face and feel like something is happening In all their remoteness and togetherness, every character in Lean on Pete and something is changing,” Haigh explains, hinting at his creative is living an extraordinarily hard life. Steve Buscemi appears as a seemingly process. Oh so delicately, Lean on Pete ends as it begins: with movements hard-edged horse owner who only knows the ups and downs of the that trigger curiosity about life’s mysteries.

BY TRILBY BERESFORD 16

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PHOTO BY SCOTT PATRICK GREEN, COURTESY OF A24

BREAKING

MORGAN BLAIR PAINTING AND COMEDY GENERALLY AREN’T TWO FORMS OF EXPRESSION THAT GO HAND-IN-HAND, but Morgan Blair is here to remind us that they’re not mutually exclusive. While the images she creates won’t elicit an immediate laugh-out-loud response, a careful investigation of the globby impressionism of one of her oil paintings will certainly inspire a delayed humorous reaction: Is that...Fusilli Jerry?

For Blair, the decision to channel her talents into hazy reproductions of obscure moments in the godfather of shows about nothing wasn’t a conscious one. “I just kind of set off blindly on a vacation from my usual abstract work, which I needed some time away from,” she recalls. “So I indulged this joke idea I had, which was to make oil paintings of scenes from Seinfeld.”

What began as an exercise in recreating screencaps worthy of portraiture—Kramer posing in nothing but his white socks and Jockeys—evolved into a series focused more on visual themes than classic bits.

“I never wanted to be painting straight-up portraits or recognizable group shots because that felt like it would be very close to fan art,” Blair explains, before admitting that it frequently resorted to that anyway.

Scrolling through her online portfolio, even the most culturally illiterate viewer will recognize Frank Costanza trying on a manzier, Puddy painted up as a devil, or Kramer’s “ASSMAN” New York plate.

“Oh well,” she concludes.

like ‘Socially Conservative Man in Conversation with Gay Cousin’ that suggested the blobs actually contained specific narratives and references to pop culture that people are interested in.”

While she began using the approach to “trick people” into connecting with her work, the titles have become a crucial aspect. “I’ve now spent so much time on these clickbait websites stealing ideas,” she says, “that I’ve become fond of nonsensical juxtapositions, like a link saying, ‘You Won’t Believe These Forty Celebrity Transformations!’ below an accompanying photo of toenail fungus. Here is a crazy, indecipherable statement, and here is a crazy, indecipherable image. They go together because they have been put next to each other.

I’m happy with any forced associations that result.”

BACKSTORY: A painter, muralist, and self-proclaimed Home Alone buff uninterested in separating her art from her fond recollection of the ’90s

Even without a paragraph-length title, Blair’s work recalls a certain memeage aesthetic, from the ska-patterned Photoshop default peeking through certain canvases to the sourceless imagery vaguely recalling stuffed animals inexplicably soaked in tropicalia. “I take in information on the Internet and then I aggregate it into the paintings and titles,” she says of the relationship between her two virtuosities: painting and mining the furthest corners of the surface web.

“With one I’m consuming media and with the other I’m regurgitating it. Yin and yang, man.”

FROM: Berlin, Massachusetts; now working out of a studio in Brooklyn YOU MIGHT KNOW HER FROM: Her jazz-wax aesthetic muralled across Blair has developed other ploys for Regarding the regurgitation of her images the US, including Rudy’s Barbershop in Highland Park, Los Angeles, and injecting the same in-joke humor into her on the Internet by others, Blair doesn’t feel Brooklyn’s ill-fated Silent Barn and Death by Audio venues—or more more recent paintings of the Dali-esque too threatened by credit being stripped virally, her Seinfeld-inspired oil paintings which have been making the rounds on social media since 2013 liquification of Internet-sourced imagery— from her work. She views the web more NOW: Translating the incomprehensible lexicon of clickbait articles into Craigslist free-stuff listings, YouTube howas a useful tool for generating ideas—so paintings of psychedelic webscapes (with an occasional Costanza or to-videos—depicted under the influence long as those ideas aren’t repurposed two sneaking in) of Magic Eye, all labelled with absurdist maliciously, she implies, citing the recent clickbait titles that defy word counts. “In 2013, I made a series of totally misappropriation of a certain cartoon frog to a certain hate group. “I have abstract paintings,” Blair recalls. “I immediately became aware of the a really cool lawyer who will shred you. But I don’t really care. But I will palpable boredom they were causing. My solution was to give them titles destroy you. C’est la vie. Namaste.”

BY MIKE LeSUER 18

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IMAGES COURTESY OF MORGAN BLAIR

BREAKING

LOLA KIRKE TWENTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD LOLA KIRKE IS THE YOUNGEST OF THREE SUCCESSFUL ARTIST SISTERS, AND THE ONLY PERSON IN HER FAMILY WHO SPEAKS WITH A DIFFERENT ACCENT. Following a recent vocal cord injury, she’s been considering how her smoky voice functions, or “how we as humans use our voices to assimilate or distinguish ourselves from other people,” as she puts it. “I can’t help but think there’s something to the fact that I’m the only person in my family with an American accent. Jemima nurtures her British accent, so there must’ve been some kind of destruction of mine for some reason.”

York Symphony. Kirke played an oboist who dates her orchestra conductor (Gael García Bernal) and later becomes a conductor in her own right. “It was challenging,” she says of learning how to fake-conduct for the part, “but it felt guided by something. My coach was this fantastic conductor, Eímear Noone, and she was really excited that there was going to be a woman conductor represented in the media for the first time. She was so passionate about it, and that rubbed off on me.”

Kirke now splits her time between music and acting—unsurprising, as her dad Simon is the drummer for Bad Company and her sister Domino is a singer/ songwriter, too. “I grew up going to my dad’s concerts,” says Kirke. “I was always fascinated by the music.” She recently released “Monster,” the first single off her “grungy country rock” debut album scheduled to come out later this year.

This is in reference to Jemima Kirke, star of HBO’s Girls and big sister to Lola. The two recently played siblings in their first film together, Emma Forrest’s Untogether—the project that Lola received the vocal injury on; she had to scream at Jemima in a scene that later got cut.

Lola has the air and gravitas of a ’70s starlet, more classic than modern, and a sleepy-sultry way of talking. After studying electronic arts and film at Bard College (“I feel very far from an electronic artist,” she quips), she broke onto the acting scene in David Fincher’s Gone Girl as a sleazy opportunist who robs the main character blind at a cheap motel. She went on to star in Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America as an NYU freshman who pals around with her stepsister-to-be (Greta Gerwig) and dreams of becoming a writer—a deeply convincing performance earning Kirke considerable critical praise.

Between these two films, she landed a leading role on Amazon Studios’ Mozart in the Jungle, a drama set behind the scenes of the New

BACKSTORY: A multi-hyphenate actress/musician from an artistic family (her father is Simon Kirke, drummer of Bad Company; her sisters are singer/songwriter Domino Kirke and actress Jemima Kirke) FROM: London, England; raised in New York City from the age of five; currently splits her time between New York and Los Angeles YOU MIGHT KNOW HER FROM: Starring roles in Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America and the Golden Globe–winning Amazon show Mozart in the Jungle NOW: Playing the lead in Aaron Katz’s neo-noir LA murder mystery Gemini, and touring with Middle Kids in support of her upcoming debut album

BY ANYA JAREMKO-GREENWOLD 20

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As a kid, Kirke could’ve done with a musical role model like her character on Mozart. “Playing an instrument was something that felt distinctly male to me,” says Kirke. “I didn’t know many women instrumentalists growing up. I could sing, but didn’t feel much agency over my own voice. Then when I was eighteen, I got my heart broken and picked up a fucking ukelele.” That ukulele eventually gave her the confidence to try the guitar.

“It’s harder for me to believe in myself as a musician than as an actor—but it’s harder to get work as an actor than as a musician,” Kirke explains. “As a musician, I can create my own work. That’s one of the things I love about it.”

PHOTO BY WYNDHAM BOYLAN-GARNETT

Parents, Assimilation, and BET JIMMY O. YANG WROTE THE BOOK ON IT

by Jason P. Woodbury

photo courtesy of Da Capo Press

J

immy O. Yang isn’t all that much like Jian-Yang, the character he plays on HBO’s Silicon Valley, which returned for its fifth season in March.

Unlike Jian-Yang, the real-life Yang isn’t casually cruel. On the show, Jian-Yang ruthlessly mocks his start-up incubator roomies, sparing no elaborate scheme to make them look and feel stupid. But the real Yang is a warm, tender guy, as evidenced by his new book, How to American: An Immigrant’s Guide to Disappointing Your Parents.

Riffing on the comic misadventures he amassed while evolving from young Chinese immigrant to stand-up comedian to strip club DJ to television star, Yang writes with an empathetic tone about his parents, his struggles with the opposite sex, and, of course, the lessons he picked up watching rap videos on BET. We spoke to Yang about what makes Jian-Yang tick, his new book, and his upcoming role in the eagerly anticipated rom-com Crazy Rich Asians.

The subtitle of your new book is An Immigrant’s Guide to Disappointing Your Parents.

Parents. Are your parents any prouder to have an author for a son than they are a comedian?

The show is sort of about a lot of people who can’t communicate with each other. All of the characters struggle with that—Jian-Yang isn’t the only one dealing with it.

I don’t know that they are proud of me for any of it. I’m still not a scientist, so it doesn’t matter, right? I think they just don’t get it about being an artist, but they’ve come around. I’m safe and sound now, so it’s all good.

I think in the beginning, it was a satire on Erlich [Bachman, played by T. J. Miller]—him being short and impatient toward this little immigrant kid. The joke’s really on him. But as it progresses, I think the audience started to like the revenge of Jian-Yang. He’s been bullied so much—now they’re cheering for him. He’s the underdog.

You write about your relationship with your parents a lot. Did writing the book offer you a chance to open up to them without having to necessarily sit them down and walk them from point A to point B? I think subconsciously, writing this book was partly like therapy…

[I was able to] broach subjects I wouldn’t normally talk about. With Asian parents especially, we don’t ever say “I love you” to each other.

We don’t ever talk about our emotions. That’s a very first-world thing that we don’t do. I’m interested in what they have to say about this, and maybe opening up that conversation, but most importantly I hope other immigrants or any type of outsider—anyone going through trying to fit in, assimilating, trying to teeter between two cultures, either ChineseAmerican or whatever—can relate to this book and feel a little better about themselves after reading it.

There is no shortage of funny people on Silicon Valley, Valley, but your role is one of my favorites. What did you think about Jian-Yang when you first read the scripts?

I really loved Jian-Yang’s character. I gravitate toward a lot of immigrant characters. It’s the same thing I did in Patriot’s Day: I played a character based on a real-life Chinese immigrant. I think a lot of Asian-American actors have reservations when it comes to playing fresh-off-the-boat characters—immigrants or somebody that has an accent—for fear of being a stereotype. But for me, this was me ten to fifteen years ago, when I first came to this country. I couldn’t speak English very well. I could totally relate to him and I pull a lot from that to put it into that character.

I don’t think my job is ever to avoid playing immigrant characters; I love playing him. There are people like that out there—like me, back in the day—and it should be our job to make these characters human, funny, and make them sexy or whatever. To make them three-dimensional.

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In the book, you write about your attraction to rap music and BET, specifically. Of all the channels to latch on to, what was it about BET that hooked you?

It was just something I’d never seen before. I had never really heard rap music, never seen those music videos, never seen stand-up, right?

So when I saw that, it wasn’t only educating me about the English language and slang, which I was very foreign to—it was also educating me about the culture of America. I didn’t know the stereotypes. In a comedy routine, when someone would say, “Black people do this, white people do that, Asian people do this...” I didn’t know those things. In Hong Kong, everyone is just Chinese. It was very interesting to me. It was a cultural education. I thought if I could just understand what they’re talking about, and what they’re saying, and how they’re saying it, I could get a pulse on what America’s really about.

You write about performing in San Diego early on in your stand-up career, and the audience is shouting racist taunts. You started your set by saying, “What’s up, racist motherfuckers?” That’s the most direct and incisive thing you could possibly have done, but I don’t think that would have been most people’s first move.

I think sometimes you’ve just got to call the crowd out on what it is.

Same thing with improv. You’ve got to call somebody out for saying something crazy, and that’s where a lot of the comedy comes from.

When it comes to a crowd like that… That’s something where they are racist motherfuckers and idiots and you’ve got to call it out as it is. You can’t be scared of them or else they’ll eat you up. I don’t necessarily think it’s a courage thing—it’s just a developed skill of comedy.

Silicon Valley, photo by Ali Paige Goldstein, courtesy of HBO

Does that sort of thing come naturally to you? Have you always felt like a pretty open person who’s unafraid of talking about who you are or what you’re thinking?

I didn’t have too much stagefright, but I don’t think anyone is funny when they are starting out. You have to go onstage seven nights a week and grind it out. I wasn’t a very open person. Being Asian, like I said, we don’t talk about emotions like that. When I was first doing an acting class, my acting teacher realized there was a wall for me: I was starting to be kind of funny, but I still wasn’t talking about really truthful stuff—I was just making stupid jokes. My acting coach was like, “I can’t help you with this. You need to go see a therapist. That’s beyond my reach.”

I actually went to see a therapist to get more opened up. My stand-up is more truthful now, and I think you need that, especially as an actor.

The exit of your former castmate T. J. Miller is very complicated. A lot of what I’ve read indicated that he wasn’t always the easiest to work with on set. He was your consistent foil on the show. What did it feel like knowing he was leaving?

But I think it became a blessing in disguise. It allowed my character to interact with more of the world and more of the other characters. I don’t know if we’ll ever find that same dynamic, but we’ve found some other really funny stuff that we’re exploring this year. You’ll see me making bigger, more powerful enemies.

You’re starring in Crazy Rich Asians Asians,, which is out later this year.

I called my managers when I heard the news that the movie was being made and said, “Look, this is a full Asian cast, it’s huge, I don’t care what you’ve got to say, let me at least try to read for the lead part.” And my managers, who are amazing, kind of just leveled with me. They got real quiet and said, “Look, Jimmy, I don’t know how to tell you this, but for the lead part they’re looking for a good-looking guy.”

I was like, “OK, I get it.” [Laughs.] I’ll settle for the funny part. I actually auditioned for another part, and ended up with the Bernard Tai part. He’s a massive asshole, a frat boy, insane… So I had a lot of fun playing that.

When are we going to get to see you be really nice and charming?

He’s my boy. I was sad to see him go. I was the first person he called, and he said, “I’m not coming back on the show.” I was kind of shocked. I tried to talk him into coming back just for a few episodes, but I knew his mind was made up. At first I was worried. I didn’t know where my character would go. It’s so much me and him. My character almost never had a scene without him. We worked so well together, you know? Like Karl Malone and John Stockton.

In real life, baby! I’m such a nice guy in real life, that’s why I play assholes in the movies and TV shows. I don’t know, maybe I am an asshole in real life. Who knows?

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IN CONVERSATION:

Wyatt Cenac Has Some Problems to Discuss

by Brian Josephs photos by Eric Liebowitz, courtesy of HBO

The former correspondents of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show are inescapable when it comes to podcasts and late night television.

What’s equally as impressive as their ubiquity is the breadth of their perspectives. There’s the cartoonish political satire of Stephen Colbert on The Late Show, John Oliver’s unending British aghastness on Last Week Tonight, and Jessica Williams’s sisterly wit on 2 Dope Queens. The next Daily Show alum up is Wyatt Cenac, whose docuseries/talk show hybrid Problem Areas has joined Oliver and Williams in the HBO family.

After first crossing paths with Colbert as a Saturday Night Live intern who got caught in a shoving match with Norm Macdonald during a pickup soccer game, Cenac eventually had viewers latching onto him and his lackadaisical voice during his Daily Show tenure from 2008 to 2012. He arrived with an everyman persona whose surreal tinges always felt like a reaction to nutty realities; his first Daily Show segment was about how the lack of polar bears made the primaries much less interesting than Lost. Cenac personalized that sensibility in his standups: 2014’s Brooklyn found him weirded out and cackling at white people suddenly appearing in Fort Greene (“Even the white people must think, ‘Shit, this is a lot of fucking white people’”).

Overall, Cenac—who’s also made appearances on BoJack Horseman and Bob’s Burgers, in addition to starring in TBS’s sci-fi comedy People of Earth—has a sleepy tone that doesn’t quite register as a slacker’s, but more so as a middle-aged man who’d love to dream big if he could just get over his malaise.

That perspective fits well with Problem Areas’ premise, which takes a pragmatic approach to how we can solve some of the country’s biggest issues. Cenac spoke with us about the goals of his new series, the ever-changing borough of Brooklyn, and whether America is just too weird now.

What would you say is the overall ethos of Problem Areas?

I think the idea with the show was to look at some of the other issues that exist in the country that aren’t just those things that are outside of our control, or that we have to wait until midterms or the 2020 election to deal with. Are there things that are going on in our present that we could actually spend some time on and attack?

What’s your biggest personal problem area?

I have a ton. Living in New York, the subway—which is the start and the end of my day—is a problem that I deal with. But beyond that, there are things that you can look at like gun control or imbalanced power dynamics in society. But if I’m gonna go with the first thing, which is probably the most trite, I’ll go subway.

You’ve spent a lot of time in Crown Heights. Eastern Parkway has sort of become the new gentrification line, with a Golden Krust on one side and a Starbucks on the other. How’s it been for you experiencing that in real time?

Since I’ve been back in New York, the neighborhood I live in [Fort Greene] has seen so much change. It was already a gentrified neighborhood, so it’s weird to see the gentrification hit a point where you have gentrification gentrifying gentrification. On top of that, when you see places like Crown Heights that seem to have resisted gentrification for so long, there are still changeovers happening. With all that stuff, there’s always going to be change— and nothing is permanent in this world. You just hope that when that change happens, it’s inclusive and not pushing people out.

Still, seeing a mainstay like Kings Plaza [a Brooklyn mall that’s been open since 1970] change so much is pretty jarring.

Everything that you see, you think about it and see it from the perspective of, “This exists as a part of my story and as a part of my connection to this place.” When it goes away, you can’t help but take it a little personally, and it feels like, “If that doesn’t matter, do I matter? If I were to disappear from this city tomorrow, would anybody notice?” I think losing some of those markers speaks to that. It’s funny when you think about New York and so many of the street names are named after Dutch settlers... There’s nothing Dutch about Brooklyn anymore.

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“As crazy as it is right now to have a reality TV show actor as president of the United States, 28

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You have a pretty diverse writing staff for Problem Areas. One of The Daily Show’s issues was not having that sort of diversity in the writers’ room. Did you feel that difference?

It’s good to have a lot of different voices and I’m really grateful that when we put together a staff, we tried to put a sense of importance on making sure we had a diverse array of voices in the room and in the building. It’s very easy to find yourself in an echo chamber. I don’t think you ever want a workplace where people aren’t learning or growing or challenging themselves and one another. I think when a workplace gets too homogeneous, a complacency sets in.

Is there a pressure to be like, “Hey, here’s what a diverse staff can do?”

I don’t think there’s a pressure that we’re putting on the staff. [Laughs.]

I don’t think nobody here is saying, “Alright. We’re diverse. We gotta be fucking good.” We hired people that are passionate about trying to make a good show. For me and my head writer, Hallie [Haglund], we see the passion that people have and the work that they put in. I think it’s more of that pressure. I feel like if everything is successful, then that’s when we get to take the victory lap. That’s when you can say, “This all happened thanks to diversity.”

What’s the biggest lesson you took from [executive producer] John Oliver as you made Problem Areas?

The biggest lesson from John, I think, was just making sure to do the show that feels truest to me and my voice, and not feeling a rush to force something out the door. Once the train starts rolling, it’s really easy to just become a passenger—it just starts moving without you. That’s the challenge, because ultimately—win, lose, or draw—you want to make something that feels like, “OK, I made my best version of that show. I made the show I wanted to make.”

You don’t want to find yourself in a place where you’re like, “Right, but this isn’t what I wanted to do.” You’ll be left with nothing but regret in that situation.

Your comedy has a lot of surreal elements to it, but reality has been bending toward surreality with the Trump administration.

Do you find yourself having to adjust your approach these days?

I would imagine that if you went back to the ’80s, they would be like, ‘It’s weird that

Not really. Things have definitely gotten a lot more bizarre, but I think that’s always been the case. As crazy as it is right now to have a reality TV show actor as president of the United States, I would imagine that if you went back to the ’80s, they would be like, “It’s weird that the president of the United States is a guy who acted in movies with a monkey.” There was so much stuff that Reagan did that I think you’ll find a lot of people of that time who’ll be like, “Oh no, it felt really surreal back then.”

the president

Reagan was wylin’.

who acted in

Yeah, so that doesn’t bother me as much. What I think about is, how do we move forward from that? The world is always going to be surreal. It’s always going to be weird and we can get caught up in talking about just how weird it is. But at some point, it’s about, how do we move past that and make sure the weirdness doesn’t overtake what we want the reality to be?

of the United States is a guy

movies with a monkey.’”

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TODD McFARLANE

IS BORED WITH ORIGIN STORIES

The comics legend talks the future of the medium, twenty-five years of Spawn, and creating an upcoming film with the producers of Get Out.

BY JAMES CHARISMA IMAGES COURTESY OF TODD McFARLANE PRODUCTIONS

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Thirty years in the comic industry, and Todd McFarlane’s done it all.

He first pushed his way onto comic editors’ desks while still in college, mailing hundreds of art submissions to try and land a job. A one-off backup story with the Marvel imprint Epic Comics in 1984 led to a two-year run working on DC Comics’ Infinity, Inc. and Batman: Year Two, which led to McFarlane working on The Incredible Hulk and The Amazing Spider-Man. With Spider-Man, McFarlane achieved fame for the dynamic way he drew the web-slinger—enlarged eyes, sophisticated poses, and detailed, multi-strand “spaghetti webbing.” His influence on the style and readership of modern comics can’t be overstated.

In 1992, McFarlane—along with comic creators Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Marc Silvestri, Erik Larsen, Jim Valentino, and Whilce Portacio—broke from Marvel to launch Image Comics, an independent publishing house where artists and writers could create their own characters without giving up copyrights to the studio. Today, Image Comics has gone on to become one of the largest comic companies in North America, whose publications include The Walking Dead, Kabuki, Savage Dragon, Stray Bullets, and the Eisner Award– winning Paper Girls.

Under Image, McFarlane published Spawn, which was the best-selling independent comic book produced at the time, with a record 1.7 million copies sold upon its debut in 1994.

The comic, about a Force Recon–trained CIA agent who was killed, sent to Hell, and reborn as Hellspawn to fight injustice while serving as the reluctant leader to Satan’s army, was one of the most popular series of the 1990s, and gave McFarlane an outlet for story ideas deemed too mature or violent for Marvel or DC Comics. A 1997 film adaptation of Spawn was largely panned (with notable exceptions, like a swooning Roger Ebert, who likened the film’s look and feel to that of Metropolis and Blade Runner), but an animated HBO series from 1997 to 1999 received high praise and won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation.

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To produce the movie and TV show, McFarlane founded Todd McFarlane Entertainment in 1996, a film and animation studio that has also produced music videos for artists such as Pearl Jam. One of the company’s biggest subsidiaries is McFarlane Toys, which creates highly detailed action figures of characters from popular films, music, comic books, video games, and sports.

Today, McFarlane is busier than ever—specifically on a new Spawn film he’s writing, directing, and producing with Blumhouse, the production company best known for horror franchises including The Purge, Paranormal Activity, Insidious, and Sinister, as well as the acclaimed thriller Get Out. We caught up with McFarlane to talk about Spawn, his career, and what comes next.

What can you tell us about the upcoming Spawn film?

People have been asking me about whether this film’s going to be a superhero movie and I tell them no. There’s not gonna be a supervillain, there’s not going to be a headquarters, none of that. It’s going to be more grounded and realistic, except there’s one element in the story that’s not going to be normal—and that’s the thing which you and I know moves in the shadows called Spawn.

How will it compare to the 1997 film adaptation?

This one’s an R-rated supernatural thriller. The 1997 movie was a PG-13 action superhero movie. Back then, the comic book had only been out for five years, so there were only a handful of stories at that point. I’m now twenty-five years into publishing the book.

I’m bored with origin stories. For the new movie, I’m not even going to film a specific issue. I’m going to do a movie based on who I think this character is today. I think Spawn appeals to a lot of adults because he’s been around—so many of his fans are over the age of seventeen. My goal is to deliver a sophisticated story that will scare the crap out of grown adults. We did [Todd McFarlane’s Spawn] on HBO for three years, and to this day I still get a way more positive response to that TV-MA-rated animated story than I do to the PG-13 movie.

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You first broke into the comic industry through mailing editors your artwork and sheer persistence. Would you recommend this method? Has the industry changed from when you first started?

I’m a big believer that if you put in the time and you have the skill sets, somebody will discover you. It’s hard for me to imagine that if you have talent and ability, someone’s not going to find you.

In terms of the industry changing, I would say that the biggest shift is that when I was trying to break in, editors were mostly geared at looking at people from North America because there were conventions. With the Internet, people can basically submit portfolios from around the world. The last few artists I gave work to were from Russia, South Korea... One was from China and another Germany.

All of a sudden, the number of people showing you their work is way, way more impressive than it was ten years ago. I mean, if the world back then was as accessible as it is today, I might not have gotten my first job. Because there’s a lot of talent out there right now.

It’s usually when people are struggling that they decide to try something new—look at Stan Lee, who developed Fantastic Four because he thought he was going to quit comics and had nothing to lose. In the late 1980s, you found huge success with Spider-Man. What inspired you to suddenly branch out with Image?

Before I broke into comics, I read a lot about the history of comics. In the back of my mind, I was aware of the fact that essentially every artist, all the way up to “The King” Jack Kirby, at some point had been dismissed after drawing for many years.

I remember thinking, “If they can do that to The King, they can do it to anybody.”

So when I was at Marvel, I knew I’d better be prepared and have other options. Historically, other comic artists had left the big companies individually, one at a time, to do other things. But a few of us talked about, “Why don’t we all do our own books but

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in the same place?” Basically, strength in numbers. And if six or seven of us artists left at the exact same time, it sent a message back to the company.

Did it take a lot of convincing for the other artists? Did you have any experience running a business before that point?

I mean, there was a little bit of fear. Leaving your comfort zone and a steady paycheck when everything was going OK. But what was the worst that could happen? We try this new venture, it doesn’t work, Marvel takes us back. Even twenty-five years later, they’d take us back.

Did we know how to run a business? Of course not. We were artists who just wanted to do art. We made a lot of mistakes in the first two or three years. But we learned and improved our business acumen, so now, twenty years later, I’m still doing art but I’ve also learned how to run a business.

You’ve always been somewhat of a pioneer, whether it’s reimagining existing characters like Spider-Man, creating new ones like Spawn, or building your own companies from scratch. Did you meet resistance every step of the way? Or at a certain point did people just start to accept that this is simply how you work?

I think the world is built on protecting the status quo, so any change at any time in history has always been met with resistance. It’s way more comfortable for people to just keep doing what they’re doing. I’ve never heard a story where someone came up with an idea and said, “I want to do something that’s going to be completely different from what everybody else is doing,” and their boss said, “That’s great, we’ll just shift everything.” It doesn’t work that way. You need to be like Steve Jobs and basically go, “I’ll just build my own damn computer.”

Or build your own damn action figures.

McFarlane Toys was based on one question I had: Why can’t action figures just look better? It was a mystery to me.

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I went out and made my own toys, and the answer is that they can look better. The companies just choose not to. It’s not that they weren’t artistically inclined—these were public companies that had to maximize profits. The toy comes at the end of the equation.

I did the opposite. I started with asking, “How do I make this toy as good as I can?” Then, once it was, I turned to my financial people and asked, “At what price do we need to sell this so we don’t go belly-up?” If it means I have to sell my toy for an extra dollar or two, then I’ll do it—as long as I’m giving two extra dollars of value to the consumer.

When it comes to film, comic and superhero movies have dominated the box office for years. Do you think that trend will continue?

I actually think this is a pretty exciting and vibrant time for the comic industry, and I think it’s going to continue. Think about it: DC is owned by Time Warner, which is a big conglomerate, and they’re not gonna share their characters with anybody.

Meanwhile Disney, which spent four billion dollars acquiring Marvel, is also not sharing. They’re both making movies all inhouse to keep the money.

Here’s where the opportunity comes in. Besides Time Warner and Disney, there’s also Paramount, Universal, Sony, Lionsgate, and other major powers in Hollywood—and I’m not even talking about TV yet. They’re all in need of content and they can’t go after the two biggest companies, Marvel and DC. Meanwhile, Image Comics is the third largest comic company in the country.

So anybody who wants to put out an independent comic book, today is the day. Because this is the perfect storm happening for people creating their own characters, titles, and ideas. Image now has something like twenty-one comic books that have been optioned. I’m not saying they’ll all get made into movies or shows, but at least there’s interest and money on the table. This is a big moment for independent creators.

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SA ME BO LD TA ST E, FR ES H N EW LO O K !

RESPECT HIS LEGACY. DRINK SAILOR JERRY RESPONSIBLY. ©2018 Sailor Jerry Rum, 46% Alc./Vol. William Grant & Sons, Inc. New York, NY.

WILL THE REAL

GUS VAN SANT

PLEASE STAND UP On the inscrutable filmmaker’s career, his penchant for troubled, self-medicating men, and his forthcoming biopic on cartoonist John Callahan.

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by Anya Jaremko-Greenwold

On the set of Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot / photo by Scott Patrick Green, courtesy of Amazon Studios

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Van Sant’s artistry has something of a split personality. There are recurring themes, to be sure—homosexuality, listless youth, drug use—yet he is strangely responsible for both ultra-indie 4 24 2 F LF OL OO DO D

darlings (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, Elephant) and conventional crowd-pleasers (Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester, Milk). Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot falls somewhere between these extremes: It’s a true-story biopic with inspirational footnotes about the now-deceased Callahan, an alcoholic who got sober and miraculously found his calling as an artist following a car accident that left him quadriplegic. The movie veers toward sentiment at times, then bounces back with grim humor and terrible sadness. It’s Van Sant’s best work in a decade.

Twenty years ago, Robin Williams approached Van Sant about developing Callahan’s memoir, intent on playing its author himself.

The two had worked together on Good Will Hunting, a film now embedded deep within the American consciousness, for which Van Sant became a household name and Williams won Best Supporting Actor at the 1998 Oscars. Van Sant spoke about that film as “popular art” made “for the ordinary viewer,” intended almost anonymously (you’d never peg it a GVS film if you didn’t know who made it). He borrowed this concept from Native American writer Jamake Highwater, who described Greek art—unlike art made during the Renaissance or contemporarily—as more ubiquitous and easily understood by a public, often not bearing the artist’s name since it was meant to be collective, not personal, work.

On the set of Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot / photo by Scott Patrick Green, courtesy of Amazon Studios

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irector Gus Van Sant sort of resembles a cartoon character—fitting, since his new film Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot is adapted from the memoir of Portland cartoonist John Callahan. Van Sant isn’t odd-looking, but there’s a kooky sensibility to his face; side-swooped bangs, eyes that dart impishly from side to side, a straight-line mouth. With a low voice you might count sheep to, he’s more Charlie Brown than SpongeBob SquarePants. There’s a tight-lipped melancholy to his demeanor.

Depression and death lurk with regularity beneath the surface of his films.

When Williams praised Van Sant in his Oscar speech, he said, “Thank you for being so subtle you’re almost subliminal.” Asked about this compliment, Van Sant explains over the phone: “After they’re finished with a take, actors always look at you right away. They want to know what the director thinks about what they just did. And I usually have a blank expression—though I do have an opinion. The subliminal thing is probably that they can see what I think, even though I’m not expressing it. Especially somebody like Robin—he’s one of those people who could read somebody very quickly.”

Thus the power of that specific Williams performance, it seems— among the most sympathetic and tender of a career already littered with kindly cross-dressing nannies and inspirational teachers and blue genies thirsting for freedom. In Good Will Hunting, Williams plays a therapist who assists genius slacker Will (Matt Damon) in overcoming childhood trauma, meeting a nice girl, and getting his shit together.

There’s a masterful scene on a park bench in which Williams’s character eviscerates Damon’s, never raising his voice above a murmur, hurling barbs of wisdom that lodge deep enough to enact real change.

Fast-forward to 2018, and Joaquin Phoenix stars in Van Sant’s final version of Callahan’s story—Phoenix being an actor far sterner and less accessible than Williams, who took his own life over three years ago and never saw this project to fruition. Williams was interested both in Callahan’s humor and his disability, having himself befriended the Superman star Christopher Reeve, a quadriplegic by way of a horseback riding accident. The director thinks both Williams and Phoenix have traits in common with the cartoonist, whom Van Sant describes as “funny, but shy and soft-spoken.” If Philip Seymour Hoffman had whispered his lines, he would’ve resembled Callahan most, Van Sant adds—but he was also not around. (Hoffman passed from a drug overdose the same year Robin died.) Van Sant is fairly surrounded by these pained, self-medicating men: He included several Elliott Smith songs in Good Will Hunting (Smith wrote “Miss Misery” specifically for the film), garnering the indie rocker international attention; his tremulous, white-suit-clad Oscars performance of “Misery” became the stuff of lore. Smith died of a presumed suicide a few years later.

Sometimes Van Sant animates the flat lines of Callahan’s drawings in Don’t Worry, often depicting a scene conceived at the artist’s own expense and mocking the disabled, or otherwise poking fun at people of all races and creeds (“Let’s wok the dog,” a Chinese man says to his wife

as they relax at home with their pet). Though whimsical, the sketches had a tendency to piss people off; readers would write in to Portland’s Willamette Week and complain.

Callahan’s illustrative technique isn’t particularly impressive, at least not until you remember that he drew everything with numbed fingers, unable to so much as unscrew a bottle. Van Sant’s film is named for one of his best captions, accompanying a cartoon of three sheriffs on horseback who find an upturned wheelchair in the desert: “Don’t worry, he won’t get far on foot,” one sheriff assures the others. It’s both a put-down and a challenge to the artist himself. How much can you accomplish after paralysis?

This is the first collaboration for Phoenix and Van Sant since the two worked on 1995’s To Die For. Here, Phoenix-as-Callahan speeds maniacally down suburban sidewalks on a motorized wheelchair, loathe to slow down, unwilling to accept his new fate. Don’t Worry affords some uncomfortable glimpses into life post-paralysis; how sex works, how Callahan’s assistant lowers him into the bathtub on a pulley system, how his body’s imprisonment interferes with even the drudgery of drinking. He can no longer access liquor by himself— there’s a humiliating moment where he sits, wheelchair-bound, staring up at a bottle of vodka on a high shelf, helpless as a baby but filled with far more longing—so he eventually gets sober. He’s helped along by a Swedish physical therapist (Rooney Mara, blonde and soothing), a patient AA sponsor also deep in recovery (Jonah Hill, blond and delicate and surprising), and an enabling, drunkdriving buddy who’s responsible for paralyzing Callahan in the first place (Jack Black, not blond but wild-eyed and then revelatory in a late scene where he seeks forgiveness).

If this is the story of a sick man forced to slow down and reckon with himself, it’s small wonder Van Sant took an interest. The director has always been slow himself; he started out with painterly ambitions and attended the Rhode Island School of Design (later changing his major to film), but didn’t make his first movie until his early thirties, after working in a NYC advertising agency and living with his parents to save money. He also didn’t fully figure out that he was gay until adulthood. He has a languorous way of answering questions, and one of his signature moves is the inclusion of long—sometimes painfully long—takes. As a viewer, you suffer through them, robbed of cuts or excitement, your thoughts forced to take shape, wander, and transmogrify.

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2003’s Elephant, winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, is based on the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School. Van Sant’s camera tracks students (non-actors, all) in a molasses-style relay race, one after the other, as they stroll through hallways and across grassy lawns. Hardly any information is gleaned in accompanying them—jocks and nerds, future victims and soon-to-be-killers. We merely sink inside their lives, unsure of who will live or die and why.

In the wake of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting, the story feels as raw as ever. Van Sant’s neutral depiction of the violence, draining it of “energy, purpose, glamor, reward,” as Roger Ebert put it, is what makes Elephant a timeless masterwork. “We had a screenplay that was much more specific about its views on what the causes were for extreme school violence,” Van Sant says of the project’s origins. “But as we got closer to filming, we left it way more open-ended, so the audience would see the usual suspects drifting by, and they’re kind of encouraged to bring their own ideas into the equation. The film is not exactly dictating what you should feel— just, be a part of it. Be a part of the ideas.”

lethargy). Indies like Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho— both arthouse, lo-fi works about kids living rootless, lonely existences, the latter starring Joaquin’s brother River Phoenix, who also died of an overdose—helped bolster Van Sant’s reputation as a thoughtful auteur at the start of his career in the ’90s. Then there’s the stuff that not many liked, such as his last picture The Sea of Trees (11 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) and the shot-for-shot colored remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which Van Sant made as a sassy response to Hollywood’s reboot and sequel obsession in 1998.

“Hollywood just needs a way to understand the film they’re gonna see before they see it,” Van Sant explains of remakes. “Then the audience will know what they’re gonna get. It’s the idea of making something that the public is already aware of. I just thought, ‘If they’re going to do it, they might as well try to do it one time without changing the thing they’re making.’ If what they wanted is the same movie, rather than taking only the screenplay, why don’t they take all the other input?” Meaning the camera angles and shots themselves, which Van Sant duly replicated. But his Psycho was not kindly received. “It was a concept,” he says, apparently unphased. “I wasn’t sure whether it would work or not.”

He wonders if it was merely the wrong choice of film, and doesn’t see the trend shifting much twenty years later.

“Spielberg is in the process of remaking West Side Story,” he points out. “And they’re not changing any of the lyrics to the songs.”

“ELEPHANT IS NOT EXACTLY DICTATING WHAT YOU SHOULD FEEL — JUST, BE A PART OF IT. BE A PART OF THE IDEAS.”

Frequently, the director’s spoken statements mimic this anodyne ambiguity; for example, while he certainly does not dismiss Good Will Hunting producer Harvey Weinstein’s atrocities, when we discuss how Weinstein’s looming presence might affect that film’s legacy, Van Sant makes an unexpected and somewhat esoteric comparison between the mogul’s fall from grace and Burmese campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi. Suu Kyi was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, then later villainized for overseeing the persecution of Muslims in Myanmar. “It can affect actors, presidents, anybody,” Van Sant says vaguely of these public ruinations.

“A person can become a hero or they can become a non-hero.”

Perhaps Van Sant’s résumé is bipolar, in part, due to his nonpartisan inclinations. It’s split evenly between those mainstream award magnets (Good Will Hunting was nominated for Best Director; both that film and Milk received Best Picture nominations) and the weirder stuff, like Elephant or Last Days (the latter of which is almost maddeningly minimal, loosely based on Kurt Cobain’s descent into heroin-induced

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Van Sant appears resigned to Hollywood’s absurd rules of law, willing to play along if it means he’ll keep making movies. When he speaks of Hollywood’s originality dearth, he does so seemingly without disdain— those trends don’t anger him, they simply inform his own work. Though one might assume it’s harder to get avant-garde projects made than populist ones, Van Sant insists there is little difference for him. “They were inexpensive,” he says of his indies. “Every film is pretty hard. I didn’t notice one being easier than the other... I know it’s a thing where filmmakers say, ‘I did one for the money or the studio, and one for me.’

But I don’t think I’ve been working quite like that.”

John Robinson in Elephant / photo by Scott Green, courtesy of HBO

Michael Pitt in Last Days / courtesy of HBO

Robin Williams and Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting / courtesy of Miramax FLOOD

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On a rainy day in Watts, Los Angeles, John Gourley and Zach Carothers of Portugal. The Man joined their friend Roy Choi at his restaurant LocoL for a bite to eat— and made plans to save the world.

PHOTOS BY MICHAEL MULLER

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ate your food almost every day that we recorded Woodstock,” Portugal. The Man’s bassist Zach Carothers tells chef and restaurateur Roy Choi. “Nearly every one of the four-hundred days that we recorded!”

“Yeah, you were a huge part of that record,” remarks frontman John Gourley.

Recorded over the course of two years in various studios across LA, Woodstock would go on to become the band’s surprising crossover smash, with the single “Feel It Still” topping charts around the world. But who knew Choi’s innovative cuisine had such an unlikely influence on the album?

Initially meeting through Mike D of the Beastie Boys (one of Woodstock’s producers), Portugal. The Man and Choi formed a special friendship and appreciation for each other’s craft, thanks to the band’s near-daily visits to the chef’s LA restaurants, including Commissary and A-Frame.

Not unlike Portugal. The Man’s genre-defying sounds, Choi gained notoriety for colliding styles and flavors into provocative new dishes, most notably creating a bona fide phenomenon with the Korean taco truck Kogi, inspiring a gourmet food truck movement throughout the city.

In 2015, Choi embarked on one of his most ambitious endeavors yet (along with chef Daniel Patterson): bringing quality, healthy, and inspired fast-food to inner-city neighborhoods with LocoL. On a recent visit to Los Angeles amidst their intensive touring schedule, Gourley and Carothers ventured out to LocoL’s Watts location to catch up with Choi and sample burgers, “foldies” (folded, fried tortillas stuffed with carnitas, beef, or beans), and fresh juices. Here’s what transpired…

— Randy Bookasta

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Roy Choi: Here in Watts, this is a restaurant, but it’s also a social project. It’s also an album—a creative poem, I guess—to try to figure out where we can go as humans. We’re in an area right now where there’s a lot of poverty; there’s a lot of history of police brutality; there’s a lot of history of abandonment; there’s a lot of history of resources being stripped. Basically, we’re in the projects. So what we’re trying to do with this is figure out: Why does it have to be that way?

A lot of people thought it was gonna be a lot more elaborate than this. But we’ve always looked at it like a stepping stone in the rebuilding of what this country abandoned. Start with fast-food, ’cause that’s the important gateway to how a lot of communities are eating. The only people that have the courage to open restaurants in the hood, a lot of times, are fast-food places. The question really is: What does that say about us, as chefs and as restaurateurs? We’re the ones hating and blasting all fast-food restaurants, but they’re the only ones coming into communities and feeding them. So really, the hypocrites are us, the chefs.

We’re saying that the food sucks, but why aren’t we in there feeding?

John Gourley: You’ve always been a subject in our circle of friends. We talk about what you do quite a bit ’cause you’re also bringing opportunity to this area, teaching people how to cook, teaching people how to run the place. It’s just really nice to see somebody who is so aware and successful and comes straight back to it. It’s not something everybody catches.

Roy: I guess for me it’s been very natural. These are folks I’d be hanging out with even if I didn’t have a business. So now that I am employed—and now that I actually do employ—why wouldn’t I give those jobs away to them? To me, it just makes complete sense.

And I hate to get so deep on shit, but it’s not just the food, it’s not just the jobs—it’s also the art. In a lot of our communities, not only have we stripped resources in the schools—programs, food, jobs, access, everything—but we’re also putting as minimal an effort into design as possible. So it’s really important for us to put a lot into the design here. See the light patterns? See the screen doors? See the open kitchen? I really believe in the impression of memories. These things will now make new impressions on the young kids growing up here. There was never a place in the neighborhood that was designed by an architect, you know?

John: Just imagine being a kid in this neighborhood, coming in and saying, “God,

JOHN GOURLEY

this is art.” I remember our band leaving Alaska for the first time—it was such an eye-opener because we went to Portland and were like, “Oh, you can go to school for art? You don’t have to be, like, a classical painter? You don’t have to be inside this box?” And that’s what this place is.

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Roy: Kids can walk by and it’s gonna make an impression on their mind. I

Roy: I love the way you guys think. I was never gifted musically—never.

mean, that’s the best that I can do at this point in my life, you know? I’m not a multi-billionaire.

Zach: Neither were we. [Laughs.]

Zach Carothers: But that’s important, too. It’s not just giving back—it’s

John: Yeah. We don’t know what’s going on.

teaching and giving people skills. It’s the whole “give the man a fish or teach the man to fish” thing, and that shows such a different level of thought.

Roy: But I always thought that way. I think I created my playlists like albums, when you mix a song or something with all these layers to them. Like the taco:

Roy: It’s different. You could give away a hundred basses versus...

There are sounds in there that you don’t actually hear, but without them...

Zach: Teaching somebody, or teaching somebody to give something else away.

Zach: You would know.

John: I was looking at a playlist you made that goes from Dilated Peoples to

Roy: I guess that’s how I approached the Korean tacos—all these different

the Beastie Boys, Miles Davis to Coltrane… All the music that you’re into—all

layers until finally it’s something.

these fringe movements. What drew me to that music growing up was that it was something different. You’re still kind of a part of that outsider group, and I

John: That’s what I like: There are no rules to what you do. And there’s this

think that’s really amazing.

subtlety in it. It’s almost funny. Like the way you approach food, you have a sense of humor about what you’re doing. And that’s really important for the

I remember being at Mike [D]’s birthday. Sting was there, and you were like,

people around you to see, too. I don’t know anybody that works as hard as you

“Oh man, this is crazy—Sting’s right over there,” and I was like, “Yeah, this is

do, and you don’t make it look like work. It’s just kinda who you are.

wild.” There was something about that that was so cool—just the feeling that all of us had about music and who this person is, that we’re still in awe of these

Roy: There is a strategy to that: I’ve cut out all of the stuff that’s normally

things. You can build a place like this because you can look at it the way a kid

considered work. I don’t have a computer. I don’t do any spreadsheets. I don’t

would look at it. That’s such an important thing—and that’s what those genres

have any sandbags that hold me down. And I have great people that let me be

do to all of us.

that person.

Roy: Man, thank you for those words. That’s the first time I’ve heard anything

Zach: It seems like you just take care of everybody. Were you always that guy?

about my playlist being on the fringe, but it makes sense ’cause I was never a

Or, once you had your first restaurant, did you decide, “OK, now I can take care

music nerd who knew every single song of one genre. I didn’t know what I was

of everybody?”

attracted to, but you crystallized it for me: just all things from the fringe.

Roy: I don’t know if I’m always that guy. I think my creativity is giving, right?

John: This is the conversation we have every now and then: “Why did we get

It’s being the homie. I was always the homie growing up when I was younger.

into hip-hop? Why do we like soul? Why do we like all these things?” We were

You guys are lucky ’cause you found an artform that was able to channel your

talking about Great Balls of Fire!—I remember the scene where they’re talking

creativity, and you found it early. I never had that. I always had everyone’s back,

about the devil’s music, like, “Jazz is the devil’s music! Blues is the devil’s music!”

and that was what I thought life was. I always loved just hanging out on the

Those are the artists that come in and they bring change. It’s not easy being an

block—just being with my friends and stuff. And a lot of those friends were able

outsider, but those are the things that make you feel a part of something.

to express their creativity in skating, graffiti, DJing, emceeing, all that stuff. It’s always been with me, but I never knew it was an artform or a creative outlet.

Zach: Totally. Do you see the obvious connection with food? Maybe one of the

It was just who I was. I thought that was one thing, and then I had to go do

reasons you do so many things is because of how eclectic your music taste is.

another thing for work. That’s why I’m smiling all the time: I found it later in

Like, Korean tacos: I never heard those two things together before and instantly

life, I found it in my mid-thirties. Once it came together, it was just like...

was like, “That sounds amazing.”

Zach: “Oh, this is easy now. I’m just gonna be me.”

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“It’s just: Give me a guitar and I’ll write you a song. Give me a kitchen, I’ll make you some food.

And that’s what life should be.”

—

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John: It’s just cool to see something I think you’re really good at. I’d seen you all over town, but I’d never seen you actually directly manage a group of people. And there’s something that I think is very clear when we go to A-Frame and here at LocoL: Your managing reminds me of being back home with my dad managing subcontractors, like, “Here’s my group of electricians. You do electrical work.

You’re good at that. I trust you to do it.” Everywhere we go, it’s always the same feeling of “Roy trusts these people.”

Roy: You don’t have to directly see me work because my work is shown through their actions. They’ve adopted my ideas in theirs, and they’ve felt a freedom to express themselves. We’ve made something together.

Zach: Your table’s pretty big.

Roy: I feel like this is something I was put on this planet for. I can bring people together and all of a sudden it doesn’t matter anymore who you are—you connect in that moment. I wish I could harness it more, ’cause that would be a cool power: to bring world peace.

John: The best you could do is make the people around you happy.

Zach: I’ve seen you literally give John the shirt off your back. Let’s not forget that.

Actually, literally...

John: I wish I had been more in need [laughs]. But the thing about you is you would totally do that for anybody. We were all really excited just within our group: “You see what Roy’s doin’? He’s building a restaurant out in Watts.” It’s really amazing. I mean, if that could happen everywhere...

Roy: That’s the goal. Even if we become just the beta to something else down the road, we’re willing to fall on that sword. If it opens up something for the future, like— Zach: —you won’t be mad if other people rip off this idea. It’s like, “Go for it.”

Roy: To me, that would be the best thing in the world because we’re just showing that it can be done. You can build things with heart and humanity. Use grains and vegetables and seaweed and tofu and make everything from scratch. Make it affordable. And we’re going into our third year. We’re just trying to show that it can be done so that other cities can do it. That’s really what LocoL’s about.

Zach: It’s making things accessible.

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Roy: Yeah, and along the way if LocoL becomes successful, we want that to happen, too. When you say it sounds to some so idealistic, we’re showing you it’s not idealistic. It’s real. And this should happen in every city. There should be chefs opening up delicious natural food outlets that are staffed by the community, providing more jobs, providing more opportunities, getting more people to come into shops—or providing access and ways for people to make their own shops.

Zach: It’s a true win-win situation.

Roy: It’s different than gentrification, too. Watts ain’t never gonna gentrify.

This is one of the deepest communities that America has. It’s the opposite of gentrification. It’s not gonna push residents of Watts out.

Zach: You wanna make the community that exists here better.

John: I love the EBT thing—that you can use food stamps here. It took two years to do that? That’s some dedication.

Roy: Well, it’s a bureaucracy; there’s a process.

John: Not everybody would go through it.

Zach: Yeah, that’s badass.

Roy: Well, thank you.

John: That’s really respectful, giving people something good to eat. And that’s a lot of what was happening in Portland twelve years ago or whenever, right before everything started going really crazy with expensive food. There was a lot of punk rock people doing what you do on a much smaller scale. And I think there was something really great about that period, and I want Portland to hold onto that because it is a tight community. I’m dead serious when I say it—our band would not exist if it weren’t for people like you. Because that was a period where I was really growing a lot as an artist. That’s when we were putting out our first records.

Roy: You mean because of the restaurants you were going to?

John: Yeah, coming from Alaska, I didn’t have restaurants.

Zach: People that cared.

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Roy: Oh, I see. And that influenced you as young artists at that time.

Zach: The details like this. Making it a full experience.

Roy: There was a lot of that going on in Portland in the mid-2000s.

John: Yeah, there was. Around that time, I remember walking into Oscilloscope [Laboratories] for the first time and seeing the Beasties’ gear and their studio setup. It was probably the most inspiring thing I’d ever seen in my life because you walk in there and you expect state of the art— these guys have, like, worldwide smash hits. Beastie Boys had money.

They could get what they need. And if they couldn’t buy it, it’d be given to them. We walked in there and it was like five off-brand guitars and basses with old strings, a mismatched drum kit in the corner, a vocoder with some dust on it, a plastic mic.

Roy: I mean, we do that, too—this [table] was made in the high school woodshop.

Zach: Oh, no way, that’s awesome.

John: It’s just: Give me a guitar and I’ll write you a song. Give me a kitchen, I’ll make you some food. And that’s what life should be.

Roy: But I think there’s a distinction, too. There are some people who go vintage with cameras and then they’re using ’em for art, but they’re also using ’em for a little bit of style as well. And then there’s the Beasties, where it wasn’t intended for anyone to see that style. It was just, literally, that’s the guitar they’re using. Literally the bowl I brought from my house: that’s what we’re mixing the thing in. Sometimes it’s about not putting value on anything—it’s just expressing yourself.

John: Yeah, you’re as true an artist as any out there.

Roy: Thank you. It’s hard to hear that word because our form doesn’t get the same glory as yours. I don’t know what it is. It’s never like, “Oh, chefs are artists,” you know.

Zach: But it’s ridiculous, because food is what makes a culture. When you think about what makes a specific country, it’s like, “OK—people, the food, and the music.” Those are biggest things there are.

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KATE BERLANT AND

JOHN EARLY ARE GRY HUN A LOVE STORY IN FOUR COURSES With their cunning comedic personas and unique kinship, this one-of-a-kind twosome provides a breath of fresh air…even at their most breathless.

by Eric Stolze photos by Emily Shur style by Tyler Cunningham makeup/grooming by Elle Favorule hair by Lana Hunter FLOOD

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tes i t e p p i. A When it rains in LA—not unheard of, but rare enough to remark upon—you either soak up the gloom or supply your own sunshine.

Kate Berlant and John Early are already laughing when they arrive at the Los Feliz restaurant Kismet. They’ve been side-by-side all day, but at a glance, onlookers might think they’ve just been reunited after years apart. While beleaguered Angelenos carry umbrellas to deal with this alien concept called “weather,” Kate and John simply carry an ongoing conversation in media res, which they’ve done for many years and counting, fixing their attentions so completely that the outside world is rendered inconsequential. They might as well still be in New York.

It might as well be raining frogs.

Alt-comedy geeks, stand-up fans, or chronic binge-watchers should recognize both halves of this duo on sight. Combined, their lists of guest spots read like a roll call of cult hits across cable and streaming: Transparent, Comedy Bang! Bang!, and the Tim and Eric universe for Kate; Broad City, Difficult People, and the Wet Hot American Summer universe for John.

As separate stage presences, they’re both forces to be reckoned with: Getting tickets to Kate’s regular show at LA’s UCB Theatre, Communikate, is getting harder every month, and John received acclaim for his work onstage at the New York theater Ars Nova, especially his one-man show John Early: Literally Me. (Look no further than the video he and Kate did for the show—ostensibly a promotion for him, but in practice an obsessive, shot-for-shot recreation of the audition scene from Showgirls—to get a sense of their unapologetic, unfiltered expressions of love.)

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externalize the internal monologue every neurotic tries to veil. They speak with brazen openness about anxieties, ego-driven fantasies, and petty jealousies, all in the tones of people who are striving to appear “fine” with everything. They straight-facedly articulate the hyperbole of the Internet and the exaggeration of nervousness to highlight these modern absurdities. Their creations are the consummate performers, taken to such extremes that the world is the stage and the stage itself is an afterthought.

Developing comic personas that are this heightened and intimate around playing “themselves” requires trust, vulnerability, and assurance—and that’s where the real performances come in. “Kate and John” is the tightrope; Kate and John are each others’ safety net.

The best introduction to their act may be their vastly underrated Tonight Show stand-up set. Appearing in “iconic outfits,” as per John, they step onto the historic stage and experience an emotional rollercoaster they verbalize for each other and the audience: first selfcongratulatory praise for one another, stretched out to surreal length, then recognition that they don’t actually have any jokes, followed by constant reference to the remaining time, nervous apologies to their “communities,” and finally running out the clock with wacky dancing.

In its bold deconstruction of the “six minutes on The Tonight Show” sacred cow, it’s some of the most daring comedy on an NBC set since Andy Kaufman on SNL. “Talk about being grateful to have a friend there,” Kate shakes her head.

“It was so fun, but it was cinematically scary. You’re behind that thick curtain, your heart is pounding. If I was alone…” She trails off. With John as her comedy partner, that’s rarely a concern.

But it’s the connection they share on-screen and onstage—where Kate and John become “Kate and John”—that’s built a devoted cult fanbase over the years, starting with their online videos and remaining as their careers have gained momentum.

“The beauty of our collaboration is that we’re also best friends,” John begins. Menus are handed out and the topic is paused; they’re coming from a meeting about their ongoing project, at once their passion and their heartbreaking white whale, but there’s an even more pressing matter on the table.

Together, they’ve created a combination that feels especially insightful, entertaining, and electric in the social media age: “Kate and John”

“I am starvation,” Kate announces. John echoes her; they’ve been going nonstop. But they’ve been going together.

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Other h c a E ing ii. Feed In celebration of Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, the Mediterranean/ Middle Eastern restaurant created a spring-inspired meal starting with an appetizer platter of herbs and radishes served with Barbari bread and squash with walnuts and rose.

Kate and John are foodies who have charted a map of beloved eateries across town, marking their time breaking into the industry with meals alternating between celebration and consolation. They’ve come here so often that they have easy banter with the servers and chef—but still, they agonize over whether or not to send back the wine they ordered, laughing self-consciously as they scrutinize the “social contract” for loopholes.

To see them retell and revel in the micro-dramas of the day is to get a secondhand high on their energy; every conversation a collaboration, every encounter an inspiration. “What John and I don’t have is judgment for the other person,” Kate says. “So there’s no fear. I think it’s normal for someone who isn’t a performer to be a little put off or uncomfortable with compulsive performance. But it’s inextricable from who we are and what we love to do.”

As our server brings out the next course—turmeric soup with spring greens—Kate and John summon the courage. The moment of truth, a stage as intimidating as the Tonight Show set. “This is devastating,” Kate cringes, “but I think this wine lost its bubbles.”

“Kismet,” translated from Turkish, means “destiny” or “fate.” It’s a fitting locale for two people you’d believe grew up together, but instead reached the exact same point from two vastly different walks of life, as if their paths were written with inevitability.

Kate grew up in Los Angeles, her mother a first-generation American from Spanish and Cuban immigrant parents in the Bay Area, her father an artist from Queens. In her episode of The Characters on Netflix, the real-life “Tony Berlant, Artist” makes an early appearance as an interview subject heralding the impact of self-obsessed art-world phenomenon “Denise St. Roy,” played by Kate. When asked why she developed an interest in comedy, she says, “For my dad to pay attention to me,” in the cadence of a joke but with the blunt speed of honesty.

“I grew up around a lot of loud personalities,” she continues. “So I think just the fact that there were no other kids around made me feel like I wanted to be a competitor, too. My dad was always conscious of the art scene. I went to a lot of art openings growing up, and he’d always point out people attending in crazy outfits. He’d be like, ‘Those people are never the artists.’” And thus, Kate’s fascination with pretense and presentation was born.

John’s fixation on society’s false faces, meanwhile, developed two-thousand miles away. “I grew up in Tennessee with minister parents who were extremely liberal and kind,” he explains. “They’re the best.” (Kate agrees.)

“And Nashville was fine, but I grew up in a culture of gentility. The primary value, especially in churches, was a surface niceness and politeness.

I ultimately found it to be very lukewarm and boring. So comedy was always a way for me to misbehave. And express my anger! Weird, primal anger from a gay person who didn’t understand he was gay, growing up in a heteronormative world. Comedy gave me an outlet for that rage.”

John embarked for New York to study theater at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and even though Kate attended NYU at the same time, they never once crossed paths. Their fateful meet-cute occurred, appropriately, at a performance. “I had always been told by mutual friends that we’d get along beautifully,” John recalls. “And then I saw her perform at a show and I was in absolute shock.” “At the beginning of our friendship, I watched John do stand-up—I filmed it on my phone, do you remember?” Kate asks him. “I was dying. The funniest, most perfect thing.”

She goes on: “We really did have a shared language prior to ever knowing each other. It was a feeling of recognizing John as my friend instead of, ‘Oh, we forged a friendship.’ There was zero work or labor.” “It was literally day one—we were just looking at each other in awe,” John says, smiling. “We met, and John spent every night at my house, practically, for two years,” she adds.

“I truly would watch him leave my apartment out the window, like falling in love. It sounds cheesy—it is cheesy. But our friendship was romantic.”

“There was no translation,” John marvels. “There was no performer and audience. We would watch each other, appreciate each other. We change around each other—that’s the beauty of it. When I’m making stuff on my own, or when I’m on someone’s set, it’s very ego-driven. That’s all you have in that moment. But with a friend, I’m constantly getting new information. It’s so much easier.”

“We feed each other,” Kate concludes, as the main course arrives.

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For a moment, a platter of rock cod with tamarind, crispy rice with favas and dill, and Mandarin yogurt becomes the center of the universe. The comfort food activates nostalgia in John and Kate as they recall the projects that kicked off their partnership—stream-of-consciousness video silliness like “Paris” and deadpan nonsense like “Banana Phone”—succeeding in amusing each other but also gaining thousands of fans along the way who found their tongue-in-cheek neuroses all too familiar.

Their reputation for poking fun at larger-than-life social dynamics gained them Netflix’s attention, leading to John and Kate each getting their own episodes of the one-off showcase miniseries The Characters (and making appearances in each other’s, naturally). “Thank god people found it. Netflix is so oversaturated now—that show wouldn’t exist today,” Kate says.

Their work’s focus on uncomfortable artifice made for a logical overlap with another modern comedy duo: Tim and Eric, whose Abso Lutely Productions handled their Vimeo miniseries, 555, which is set in the bizarre margins of the entertainment ecosystem. In 555, Kate and John’s carousel of hangers-on, Type-A weirdos, and desperate wannabes populate director Andy DeYoung’s ominous compositions and Lynchian flourishes, and earned the five-part show a Gotham Independent Film Award nomination for Short Form Breakthrough Series.

Despite the “breakthrough” designation—and despite successfully balancing their rising profiles as actors with their own projects—Kate and John have been on a “rocky road” weaving around these projects in the years since they left New York for the sometimes-sunny LA landscape: the road toward their passion project, meant to embody their unique sensibilities and pay tribute to their bond simultaneously. They repeatedly refer to this project as “The Pilot”—a shorthand of significance between them, a way of saying “You-Know-What.”

The working title for “The Pilot” is This Is Heaven. John and Kate play inseparable friends who support each other emotionally as they navigate the neuroses and expectations that go into planning a dinner party. It’s visually striking, written with surgical precision, and performed with effortless charm, as fans might expect. It’s also utterly unique in its defiant personality as a comedy. In short, the most exciting thing about This Is Heaven is that you’ve never seen anything quite like it…and the most frustrating thing for its two creators is that you still haven’t seen it.

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“It’s been three years, and it has not seen the light of day,” John sighs.

“You invest a major amount of time with a company… It always takes at least a year. That’s just the pace of these things. And then it’s a ‘no.’”

“Then you don’t trust the ‘no,’” Kate adds. “It’d be one thing if it was someone artistically close to you. But when it’s a fifty-five-year-old white man who you could never even have a conversation with…” Even on sobering topics, she can still make John laugh.

John and Kate’s social media presences, so integral to their rise, have also kept them navigating a rising tide of rage and negativity that erodes so much of the solid ground our real world depends on. “Because Kate and I are a male/female duo,” John explains, “it’s such an easy testing ground for misogyny. I do not get a tenth of what she gets online. We’ll tweet literally the same video, or we’ll have tweets that have the same political spirit, and the responses to Kate are so ugly.”

If living well is the best revenge, then loving visibly is the best resistance.

“Our show is our response,” Kate says. “Our show, and the people we put in it.” “We’re definitely trying to strike this balance of inclusiveness and increasing visibility for people you don’t see on TV, without it ever tipping into something didactic,” John explains. “We just want to create a party where there’s space for everyone.”

On the topic of their friendship—as central to “The Pilot” as to their real lives—they have thoughts as deep as their feelings. “On-screen, the gay male/straight woman dynamic is often kind of flat and caustic, and for us this has been such a healthy and productive friendship in our lives,” John says. “Culturally, we’re obsessed with the idea that romantic love is seen as exclusive to heterosexual couples, or that that’s the form of intimacy you should aspire to in your life.”

“Like your friendships can’t possibly give you the same fulfillment or encouragement or depth that a romantic partnership could,” Kate continues. “But we’ve proven that wrong with our own friendship in our own lives. I literally described John as my soul mate in therapy three days ago.”

“But that is the definition of queerness: finding intimacy and warmth and love…” John trails off with purpose, leaving his soul mate to complete his sentence. “...where you’re not supposed to,” Kate grins.

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ess n t e e w iv. S Dessert is served: cucumber ice cream with rhubarb and candied fennel. Their hunger subsided, John and Kate take the time to savor each spoonful. Even as they relive the development hell behind This Is Heaven, discussing the heart behind it keeps spirits light and sweet.

“There’s an evolution that’s happening with us,” John states. “When you’re young, part of making yourself heard is through anger. But then you also realize you have this platform and you want to show love on-screen. We’re ready now to show open-hearted stuff on-screen the way we do in real life.”

As they work toward Heaven finding its home, they continue to pepper their schedule with things to look forward to: another short film with 555’s DeYoung, plans for more stage shows together, and, of course, dinner reservations.

But for now, they say their farewells to the staff they’ve befriended.

The self-made, self-declared vaudevillians have begun a new year and regained the strength to reenter the act of performance. Kate does a dance to make John laugh—he does, as gleefully as he would have the first time he saw her on a Brooklyn stage—and they walk off into the rain together to win over Hollywood.

One restaurant down, the rest of the town to go.

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