WCS 34: Every Coyote is in LA

Netflix—the tech company that acts like a movie studio—next leans into going live

Before I try to distill my experiences with Los Angele’s Netflix is a Joke festival, I want to present you with another opportunity to consume my video conversation with Roger Guenveur Smith. From a few blocks apart, the Berkeley-born actor and I had a Zoom call that taught me many things. Retrospectively, a bunch of them are revelations that Google might have cleared up. So that sucks.

But the Zoom is very engaging. We talk baseball, interestingly, for longer than I’d planned. Fret not. Eve’s Bayou and the talent on School Daze are also highlights.

I only attended one show from the Netflix is a Joke Fest, which played out in 35 venues across Los Angeles. From the Hollywood Bowl, where Seth smoked a major Hollywood bowl, to Echo Park’s Elysian Theater, where I watched Anna Seregina be just a little bit entertaining. Never before has Netflix felt so much a part of my life. This might be because the Sunset Boulevard gym I use is literally next door to a great, big Netflix building.

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That Netflix is situated by my go-to 24-Hour Fitness is not actually the reason.

I’m feeling so in sync with Netflix because the company is pivoting toward live content and the change is palpable. The time shift could be felt in Katt Williams’ hit-and-miss Saturday night live special from the start of May and in Tom Brady’s roast, a sometimes-hilarious affair whose Gronk jokes reminded viewers of America’s inexplicable love affair with drunken tight ends.

What really cinched the platform’s primacy was Everybody’s in LA, the festival-long, naturalistic screen hang hosted John Mulaney.

Nightly last week at approximately 7:01, the Chicago-born/SNL-bred comic, along with Richard Kind and a panel, dissected one weird thing about this town. There were bands and field pieces and other talk show flourishes, but what made Everybody’s in LA a fresh talk-show take was having a smart host from the East to whom the quirks of ’round here are still novel and puzzling. The first show is titled “Coyotes,” after an odd animal that lives amongst us, walking these streets and hillsides. Here’s one from the back yard, who is unexpectedly in my life.

For all of the content shot in this town, not a lot gets at the singular oddness of the long-term Los Angeles experience. John Mulaney’s show nailed it, neighborhood by neighborhood.

All of this is my way of saying that when you’re trying to watch the NBA playoffs and you don’t get to do it without hearing the Ta Dum sound, that owning of the live moment became palpable right here, in May of 2024.

Now, did someone say arbitrary, time-bound news list? I happen to have one of those right here.

10 Gimme the Macklemore pro-Palestine banger

Protest movements, even peaceful ones, are never popular at first, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar reminded in a recent Substack post. It’s fitting that American music’s first salvo in the culture war around Gaza’s decimation comes from one of our most unpopular artists. Look, “Thrift Shop” hit when I was new to the Pacific Northwest, so I haven’t been the one to talk shit about Macklemore. That white nigga saved me hella money.

Straight up though? When I heard that the 40-year-old MC dropped a track about the Columbia student takeover it occurred to me that this previously intractable issue could be above Macklemore’s pay grade.
The Nation

• “‘Hind’s Hall’—named after Columbia’s renamed building that students occupied—is a beautiful, incendiary new track about Palestine and the student movement,” writes The Nation’s Dave Zirin.

• Indeed, it’s Macklemore’s most resonant song in a decade. Kendrick and Drake look decadent in contrast. Guitarist Tom Morello called it “the most Rage Against the Machine song since Rage Against the Machine.”

Lil Hits

• Cannabis rescheduling would have inestimable impact status on the world of medical research.
  Mother Jones

• I read a thing about bodies and feats that’s fairly mesmerizing:

Feats

9 Jalen Brunson is the anti-Bronny

About 15 years ago I got close enough to the Dodgers to convince Andre Ethier to try his hand at food writing, for the magazine I was editing and beyond. But the team I got closest to was the 1998-1999 Knicks, the last New York team to reach the NBA Finals.

West Coasters hate to hear it, but pro hoops really is better when the Knicks are credibly in the championship mix. Unless you’ve lived there, you cannot approximate the degree to which things don’t happen across America until they’ve happened in New York.

(It’s not for nothing that Donald J. Trump hails from the Manhattan business world crucible. The shenanigans that made him one the world’s most powerful figures might only have gotten him arrested in Spokane.)
Newsday