... Marks the Spot

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Deft Wonk

John Oliver wasn’t the sole member of Comedy Central’s late-night team giving
us process junkies a peek behind the curtain in the past couple of weeks. Stephen Colbert was interviewed by Paul Mercurio, who does warm-up for The Colbert Report, over nearly an hour on a variety of topics — but mostly about the Daft Punk fiasco. You can listen to the podcast free.

Daft Punk, scheduled to be on Colbert’s show earlier this month, bowed out and/or
was yanked over misunderstandings and Viacom internal politics due to the mysterious French faux-robots’ upcoming special appearance at last weekend’s MTV Video Music Awards telecast.

John for Jon

Jon Stewart will return to The Daily Show next week following a sabbatical. He
was in the Middle East this summer directing a film called Rosewater. For the eight weeks out of twelve after Stewart’s departure that the show was not on hiatus, writer/correspondent John Oliver stepped in to host in his stead.

If you don’t already know that, you may not be interested in the video I’m sharing of John Oliver’s appearance on Charlie Rose from Monday, Aug. 8th, just as John-with-an-h was starting his final week as Jon-without’s substitute.

Me, I love this kind of process talk. I’ve been reading behind-the-scenes stuff about
how comics, music, film, and television are crafted (theater and prose, to a lesser extent, too) since I was a kid. It’s not really the gossip, which in on-air conversations like this one is incidental to nonexistent, so much as it is the plain old nuts-and-bolts of how creative work — and in particular collaborative creative work — is made that fascinates.

Brucie Got Bat

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New Dream Titans

One fringe benefit to migraines — which to be clear, I would gladly do without if it meant the migraines would stop too — is even more, and more vibrant, dreams than usual.

Two weekends ago I had a nasty, persistent episode come on that meant by the time I crashed I’d been awake for well over 24 hours and then ended up sleeping for close to 12 hours into the evening the next day when I needed to get stuff done. At least a couple of memorable experiences resulted from the ordeal: First, I had an adventure in outer space during the Blackfire / Gordanians arc in Marv Wolfman & George Pérez’s classic New Teen Titans run (not the only time it’s figured into my dreams). Later, I attended a dance recital where someone was attempting to fix me up to the frustration of my good friend Nick Offerman, in character as Ron Swanson, who had accompanied me and thought I was going to show him around Philadelphia.

After sharing the above on Facebook, I received sympathy, of course, along with suggestions on dietary changes that might alleviate migraines, a Little Nemo in Slumberland reference, and the revelation that a certain friend never dreams when enduring migraines — except for infrequent ones in which she has a splitting headache and wakes up with, naturally, a splitting headache. That’s happened to me too but thankfully quite seldom.


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Stars Are Out

Photo crop of Howard Cosell and Gabe Kaplan at the first BOTNS © 1976 ABC.

I was checking TV listings to see when the Home-Run Derby would begin on ESPN tomorrow night and discovered that at the same time, 8-10 p.m. EDT, ESPN Classic
will be showing an episode — or maybe a greatest-hits package — of Battle of the Network Stars. This made me unreasonably happy. After I punched in the channel number on my remote, however, I got a message saying that I don’t have something called Sports Pass. This made me unreasonably sad. Just not quite sad enough to subscribe to Sports Pass.