Timberlake eyes are no surprise

Also: Fascinating music musings, Bob Dylan, Pride, Clarence Thomas, anti-semitism, rap battles, and more.

Hmm…which emoji is best for Justin Timberlake: 👀 or 🤩?

An eye-popping performance.

If you’re surprised that JT was (allegedly) high on coke at a concert, I got some really bad news for you about The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Sly and the Family Stone, and every other band from the 70’s.

And for the love of god, do NOT watch “The Last Waltz.” Just seeing Van Morrison in it will give ya a contact high.

Here are some other music musings:

🥁 I feel like people sharing that Anderson Cooper/Rick Rubin clip should know that pretty much every other music producer does in fact play music and know stuff. I fear a lotta people's takeaway from Rubin’s social media takeover is you don't need actual skill or hard work because having good taste is enough to make magical art and, um, yeah no.

🥁 We always act like rap battles are won by the better rapper, but it really feels like it helps to be the less evil person too. People are unlikely to think, “Yeah, he’s a serial killer – but his flow is also killer so…”

🥁 Can't believe the guy singing that "I would walk 500 miles" song really has that thick of an accent. Feels like he's really hamming it up. I PROCLAIM him a faker.

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🥁 Separated at birth: Rick Steves and Mike Mills (REM):

🥁 Hugh Hefner asks Jerry Garcia why the Dead has two drummers:

🥁 How are things going at Sphere? Exactly how you'd expect...

Every concert at Sphere looks like a reaction video in which the band, the size of a postage stamp in the corner, is commenting on the light show.

Every concert at Sphere just looks like a reaction video where the band, the size of a postage stamp in the corner, is just commenting on the light show.

🥁 Morrissey captcha:

When Morrissey logs in…

🥁 Neighbor dream team! Gimme all of this ya got…

🥁 I made a playlist of country music for people who think they hate country music.

🥁 Musicians have adopted a fast food mentality: Taylor Swift puts out dozens of songs a year. Kendrick & Drake spit out a new diss track every 3 days. EDM artists spit out new remixes weekly.

Meanwhile, Sade puts out one album every 7 years.

I just want more Sade and less McMusic.

🥁 What’s Bob Dylan’s secret? You pour out what you fill up on.

“I’m glad for my songs to be honored like this,” Dylan said. “But you know, they didn’t get here by themselves…These songs didn’t come out of thin air. I didn’t just make them up out of whole cloth. Contrary to what [people have] said, there was a precedent.” Dylan talked about the songs and the artists that filled him up. Before he poured out songs of his own, he said that for years all he did was sing songs like “John Henry was a Steel Drivin’ Man” by Steve Earle. He said, “If you sang ‘John Henry’ as many times as me—‘John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain’t nothin’ but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I’ll die with that hammer in my hand.’ If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you’d have written ‘How many roads must a man walk down?’ too.” And songs like, “Come along boys and listen to my tale / Tell you of my trouble on the old Chisholm Trail.” “If you sung all these ‘come all you’ songs all the time, you’d write, “Come gather ‘round people wherever you roam, admit that the waters around you have grown / Accept that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone / If your time to you is worth saving / And you better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone / The times they are a-changin.’ You’d have written that too. There’s nothing secret about it.”

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One Jew’s take

🥯 I need to “pick a side,” eh? OK. I am against religious lunatics, whether they be in Gaza, Israel, or America. So I'm anti ALL of these:

- Hamas
- Bezalel Smotrich/Itamar Ben-Gvir
- 10 Commandments dude in Louisiana
- Woke as religion
- Mike Johnson
- Anti-abortion crusaders

Seems so simple yet means I'm politically homeless within our current framework.

🥯 The two thoughts re: anti-semitism I keep coming back to...

🥯 "I can't believe American kids are cheering for Iran." Idea: Maybe they think the supreme leader of Iran is actually, like, the guy in charge of Supreme and they're just hoping for some free box logo tees.

🥯 Niche one for hockey fans: Every time I hear the name Leon Draisaitl I'm amazed at how Jewish it sounds. It’s as if someone mixed a dreidel with a Fiddler on the Roof character.

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Comedy

🃏 The ability to take a joke is one of my fave things about standup comedians. Bill Maher just got roasted mercilessly (and hilariously) by Bill Burr and Jiminy Glick and took it on the chin/laughed through it all. That's more than you can say for his critics who seem to live in a constant state of being offended and angry.

🃏 Get my jokes, info, and clips of my standup via social media: Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and YouTube.

🃏 My other newsletter is Funny How: Letters to a Young Comedian. It’s about doing standup.

🃏 Listen to my podcast: Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby.

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Quickies

🎯 In Clarence Thomas' defense, TurboTax never actually comes right out and asks, "Did you receive paid-for vacations from Republican megadonors?"

🎯 When it comes to dining at a fancy restaurant, Instagram always eats first.

🎯 Anyone who uses the word "penultimate" just sounds kinda douchey. That's why I always say "second-to-denouement" instead.

🎯 If there’s a pride parade, there should also be a shame parade. Just a bunch of people who are uncomfortable with their kinks walking around chanting, “I’d rather not talk about it!”

🎯 A 🍄 tip: Taking an Uber while on shrooms can be very dangerous. The app shows your car arriving in 7 minutes and then 2 minutes and then 5 minutes and you're left thinking, “OMG, the space-time continuum is collapsing!”

🎯 Andrew McCarthy memoir: “Brat”…His doc: “Brats”…And yet he says he hates the term “Brat Pack.” Gotta appreciate the combo of cash grab and kvetch about the source of said grab. 😜 Feels like that entire doc is really just about his embarrassment at starring in "Weekend at Bernie's."

🎯 Angels, conspiracy theories, religion, astrology, crypto...so much of our society right now is basically "Do you believe in magic?"

🎯 I bake pot cookies. “How many mg in each?” No idea. I cook a 1/2 ounce of weed and make a batch of 60ish cookies and the normal dose is about a quarter of a cookie. If you wanna do the math on that, feel free. I’m obviously too high to answer SAT questions.

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5-spotted

🗯️ Memories vs. photos. Excerpts from “The Material,” a book by Camille Bordas:

When and how, one character muses, did Apple decide to hijack the psyche (“You have a new memory”) and pelt us with old selfies? “More of that imprecision, he thought, more of that turning words into more or less than they actually were —­ manicures into ‘self-­care,’ meat into ‘protein.’ A photo wasn’t a memory. A photo was a photo.”

🗯️ "We have been teaching our youth the mental habits of anxious and depressed people," write

Greg Lukianoff

and

Andrea Lan

.

In practice, intersectionality is a combination of two cognitive distortions: overgeneralizing and blaming. It also arose from a perspective in which the world is utterly dominated by impersonal forces, against which human beings are simply objects that are acted upon rather than people with agency. Within this framework, individuals understandably don't really feel like they have an internalized locus of control — or an ability to guide the course of their own lives.

My .02: Astrology, intersectionality, and conspiracy theories are all a manifestation of the same thing: a desire to believe in an external locus of control instead of one's ability to guide their own life. It's way easier to blame the illuminati/stars/systemic –isms than look in the mirror.

🗯️ Patti Smith on grief:

Don’t be afraid to feel joy in the face of sorrow.

One thing comedy teaches you is how much tension and laughter are related. And since dying/death is filled with tension…

🗯️

Nick Gillespie

: “To me, the idea that liberalism has been tried and found wanting is ridiculous.”

We live in a world that is far from perfect but so much better even than the one I was born into 60 years ago. We are richer and freer than we were—and we are way too quick to take such progress for granted. Indeed, to the extent that we have mainstreamed existential angst, we should recognize that as a virtue not a failing of the system. Yet many people on the right and the left are declaring in favor of something like post-liberalism, where they get to limit yours and my choices in the name of a world they prefer.

🗯️ Rufus Wainwright: “Bette Midler insists on doing the dishes.”

One of the most fabulous things that my husband and I have experienced is, we were at dinner with Bette Midler, and she insists on doing the dishes, wherever she is, at her house, or at somebody else’s house. “I’m doing the dishes!” She needs to do the dishes. That’s probably one of the reasons she’s so successful — she knows she could do dishes, if she had to.

Thanks for reading. If ya dig it, share it. Appreciate ya.

-Matt