The Department of Tangents Podcast

DoT Christmas Special - The Nutcracker for Novices

I know I haven't dropped a new episode in a long time, but it's the holidays, and I love the holidays, so I wanted to present an audio version of my reaction to seeing The Nutcracker for the first time. This is my assessment of the story, using only the visual cues from the ballet as it was presented.  Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

S2EP6 - Comedian and Late Night Writer Jon Rineman

Jon Rineman started his career with as tumultuous and triumphant a 15-year run as a comic could envision for themselves. He started in 2003, then freelanced jokes for Jay Leno, wrote jokes for Seth Meyers including one infamous zinger at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner that earned the ire of a future president, and wrote for Jimmy Fallon at Late Night and the Tonight Show until 2018. He survived the vicious battles around late night, got to write for the WWE, got married, had his first kid, and then saw things deteriorate quickly, both personally and professionally. A lot of this is detailed in his new podcast, Here’s What People Are Talking About. I would refer you to that for some of the more intricate workings of his writing role and departure from Fallon we reference here. We address that, but we also talk about his new comedy card game, Anti-Social Skills, his post-Tonight Show gig teaching at Emerson College in Boston, and what he learned about the future of late night from his students.  This one was a tough edit because we had so much to cover, so I’m hoping this gives you a taste of an extraordinary period in the life of a stand-up comedian and writer. You can find the podcast, Here’s What People Are Talking About, on Apple, Spotify, and all the usual podcast locations. Jon’s website is www.rinemania.com [http://www.rinemania.com], and that’s where you can find at least a partial accounting of his late night monologue jokes. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @rinemania. Anti-Social Skills is at asskills.com, which should be easy to remember, and on Twitter at @antiskills and Instagram at @antisocialskillsgame.

S2EP5 - Stay Scary Podcast Hosts Lisa and Yinh

The Stay Scary Podcast is a silly podcast about serious horror, as described by host Lisa McGolgan. Every episode, Lisa and co-host Yinh Kiefer take a theme in horror films or horror lore, everything from insects to puberty, serial killers to doll parts, and have a ripsnorting good time going wherever that topic takes them. The show is as much fun to listen to as it is to be on, and taping this episode was the most fun I had in an interview this season. It devolves almost immediately, and it was a pile o’ fun. That’s right. Not a pile “of” fun, but a pile o’ fun, which is orders of magnitude higher. We discussed that age old favorite question amongst us ghoul-lovers, “why horror,” the origins of our own fandom, horror as a cultural touchpoint, and what actual scares us (hint- very little, but for Lisa and Yinh, the movie Terrifier certainly fits the bill). But you can see from this interview that you don’t have to be a fan of horror to enjoy the Stay Scary Podcast. Here’s Lisa and Yinh! You can find Stay Scary on Apple and Podbean and iHeart Radio and various other podcast aggregators. The show is also on social media, on Instagram at @stayscarypodcast and on Twitter at @stayscarypod. You can find Yinh’s podcast, Ten With Yinh at all of those same podcast locations.

S2EP4 - Musician Rob Kovacs

At first glance, Rob Kovacs seems to have wildly divergent interests in music. His latest album, Let Go, is lush and rhythmic piano pop. It’s organic and melancholy, and tells a very human story about snakebit would-be lovers who can’t come together and yet can’t quite find their way out of each other’s orbit. It’s built for sepia-tinged sunlight and dry scattered leaves. Look again, and you see his alter-ego, 88Bit, who orchestrates the mechanical soundtracks of throwback video games for piano. The music from Let Go seems as far as you can get from the three-channel ditties on your average NES system. But keep listening, and you’ll hear how they blend together, how they merge in Kovac’s particular style. We discussed both sides of Kovac in this conversation on a particularly nice day in his hometown of Cleveland – you can even hear the birds chirping in the background through his open window.  You can find his work at the places he just mentioned, but in case you missed them, his website is www.obkovcsmusic.com [http://www.obkovcsmusic.com], and you can find him on Twitter and Instagram at @robkovacsmusic. You can find 88Bit at www.88bitmusic.com [http://www.88bitmusic.com] and on Twitter and Instagram at @88bitmusic. Follow him there for tour and new release info.

S2EP3 - Author Paul Tremblay

Last spring, I read a Tweet from author Paul Tremblay apologizing for his upcoming horror novel, Survivor Song. When he had turned in his final edits for the book months before, he could not have known how prescient it would seem, especially to his friends in the New England horror writing community. Survivor Song is set in Boston in the opening stages of an epidemic. A virus is spreading, hospitals are overwhelmed, the government is providing an inadequate response. I won’t go into too much detail here since I read the Tweet into the record later, but he even mentioned a lack of PPE. That is where we begin the conversation, which also covers the reissues of his early comic noir novels about a narcoleptic private investigator, The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland.   His new novel Survivor Song is out in paperback in July, and The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland are out now wherever you get good books. His website is www.paultremblay.net [http://www.paultremblay.net], and you can follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @paulgtramblay