For a really long time, I had a weird beef with Seth Rogen that was obviously the most one-sided thing on the planet. Namely, my wife has a huge crush on him because, as she and many other people have noted, he and I are both burly Jewish guys with similar sounding voices. That’s really it. That’s my tiny little issue. Besides the fact that Emily would probably leave me for him given the chance, I actually consider myself a big Seth Rogen admirer. Looking beyond the fact that maybe our ancestors came from the same shtetl, I watch or listen to his interviews and think “This is a good guy.”
Take, for instance, his “controversial” remarks on Marc Maron’s podcast. “[As] a Jewish person I was fed a huge amount of lies about Israel my entire life,” he said. This isn’t something I can recall hearing any celebrity say publicly before and I really admire the hell out of him for it.
On the lighter side of Rogen’s interviews, he also let Nardwuar ask him a bunch of questions and Rogen seemed genuinely thrilled to be doing this.
For those of you not familiar with Nardwuar, I’m of the mind there are three perfect North American interviewers on this planet: Ziwe, Eric Andre and Nardwuar. For sake of time and the fact that I hurt my hand recently so I don’t feel like typing a lot, I won’t go into the other two, and I’ll simply say that Nardwuar’s whole schtick is really brilliant and disarming. You look at the guy and think he’s a kook but … nope. He’s one of the truly great asker of questions. He does his homework and uses the most seemingly random questions to throw off and sometimes piss off everybody from Henry Rollins to Tyler, The Creator, getting the most interesting reactions and sometimes answers from them. As far as I can tell, the only people who are familiar with Nardwuar’s body of work tend to be comedians, stoners, older punks and Canadians. Drake is one of those things (Canadian. He’s also pretty funny), and Drake doesn’t do a ton interviews — but he loves talking to Nardwuar.
Rogen’s a stoner, a Canadian and a pretty hilarious guy. His interview basically solidified my theory about who knows Nardwuar’s work, and for that I’ll always be grateful.
But there has been a whole other side to Rogen that I’ve grown to appreciate, and that’s his love of ceramics. It seems to be the thing he has been paying the most attention to over the last year, and in a time when we could all be focusing on learning a craft or, at the very least, picking up a hobby in our spare time, I’ve found it to be really comforting and inspiring. In an interview with The Cut in December he talked to Annie Armstrong about how he got interested in making ashtrays in his home studio:
There’s something about how you’re literally trying to center something. [Laughs.] The metaphors abound. But there’s inherently something meditative about it. I do like tactile things; I like to produce tangible work. With movies, we spend years on them and then they’re very intangible. They don’t have weight, they don’t occupy a physical space. You used to at least get a DVD or a Blu-Ray, and you don’t even really get that anymore. I don’t like to keep my own movie posters around because those are just advertising for the product, not the product itself. I do really like being able to create an artistic expression that is a thing that I can pick up, hold, show to people. It is just so different from what I normally do which has no mass to it.
How can you not appreciate that? I find his whole approach to making ceramics to be incredibly chill and inspiring. Like every third person I know, I’ve taken to trying to bake through my anxiety during the pandemic, and it’s often to meh results. But who cares, really? As long as I’m doing something and it’s edible, then I’m happy.
But Rogen’s pottery — at least to me — is always really good. Like, even if it wasn’t Seth Rogen’s, I’d definitely display any of these in my apartment because they all look like vintage Patagonia fleeces I’ve spent too much money on in the past.
Anyway. Seth Rogen’s pottery. It’s a good thing. I’m glad it’s in the world.
Getting Drunk While the Robots Work
How was I not going to click a Fortune article with the headline “Can A.I. bring back the three-martini lunch?” Unfortunately the article is not about a robot that serves you Martinis while you “create,” but it is about Pencil, a Singapore-based startup “that is actually using A.I. to create the ads themselves.” The idea is that Pencil would free creative humans up to sit around and dream up big picture ideas while the robots do the boring stuff. But there are some, eh, pretty big issues:
One area where OpenAI itself has already acknowledged a problem: The system can exhibit a clear anti-Islamic bias, with a tendency to depict Muslims as violent. A recent paper by two researchers at Stanford found that in more than 60% of cases, GPT-3 associated Muslims with violence—and that the system was more likely to write about Black people in a negative context.
That’s…oof. Machines are racist, man.
Deli Hats
If you know me, you know I love hats. I especially love hats from delicatessens and appetizing places. My holy grail is finding a hat from Langer’s in L.A., which I might or might not consider the greatest old-school Jewish deli in the world. I occasionally Google around trying to see if I can find one, and recently landed on this from Deli Hats.
As somebody who loves Langer’s and has absolutely zero problem wearing a Lakers hat, I 100% want one of these. But I especially love the company (which also makes a Knicks-style Katz’s hat and a Clippers-style Canter’s one) donates its money to Campaign Zero, a non-profit dedicated to ending police violence in America.