Edinburgh Fringe Q+A
Gentle spiral into nostalgia madness
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SHOWS:
If you’re in LA, come out to Julian Stern Keeps Trying my Fringe preview THIS THURSDAY July 27 @ 9PM, The Yard Theatre. It will be my birthday at midnight. We will get drinks after.
If you’re in Europe, come see the same show but for Europeans: Julian Stern Keeps Trying @ Edinburgh Fringe! August 4-13!
Howdy, Sternal Journalists!
This is what I call “what Drake calls ‘Album Mode’” time. My Edinburgh Fringe show starts in 11 days. My preview, or “dress rehearsal” as someone else recently referred to it, is in 3 days on Thursday. I mentioned that above. Come if you’re in LA.
My birthday is also on Friday. I will turn 35. Or, as a book I started reading—Four Thousand Weeks—has me thinking, I will have spent 1,825 weeks being alive.
The book is a “fun” book about productivity and mortality and the author quite (in my opinion) correctly absolutely nailed the idea that the best way for a person to mentally grasp—and really actually grasp in a pretty real and non-abstract way—the length of a lifetime is by looking at in weeks. Four thousand weeks, if you haven’t deduced by now, is about eighty years, or roughly a life span.
The context and point of thinking in this way is to realize and accept and grasp that it would be silly to try to do everything you want to do, because when you’re able to look at how much time there actually is to actually do everything, there’s just not enough. And that that’s kind of cool. It makes the things you choose to do more precious.
So for me, someone who has stitched together a decent amount of my past 5-10 years into quite a number of those weeks just plain worrying about whether the thing I did or am about to do or didn’t do or thought about doing but didn’t is the right or wrong thing to do, it’s really, really nice to be in this “Album Mode,” by which I mean time when I feel completely non-guilty and sort of needing to work on a project.
And because my creative fine-tuning skills don’t really show up until I need to immediately get to work because I’m five minutes behind schedule (this is a dynamic I’ve grown to embrace), I don’t want to spend too, too, too much time on this Sternal Journal and have decided to do a little Q and A with myself regarding returning to Fringe and perhaps turning 35.
Q: That’s so cool that you got into Fringe again. Isn’t it so cool?
A: It is so cool, but Edinburgh Fringe is not really like traditional comedy or arts festivals. You do not apply to a centralized organization which then accepts or denies you. You apply to one of many different venue producers to get a venue. If you get a venue, you are a part of Fringe.
There is technically an official program, but you don’t even have to be a part of that to be a part of Fringe. It’s not like Coachella of comedy. It’s more like the 3rd Street Promenade of comedy if famous people were also there and it took over a whole city. This is not a dig. I’ve seen some of the best performance art of may life on the 3rd Street Promenade. If you disagree, you are wrong.
Q: What’s your show about?
A: Ugh, oh god, I don’t know. I mean I know well enough to know that it’s great. I have a constant internal tension between whether I’m better at performing comedy when it’s tightly scripted or when I know the run of show well but am super open to some spontaneity.
But I also do know what it’s about. It’s about the fact that I think there are a lot of things in my life that I just keep trying at, and how that’s supposed to be a good thing but you get to a certain point in life or in your personal journey where you wonder if your determination might be holding you back from other things. SPOOKY.
That’s the sort of scaffolding, but most of the jokes are just the best jokes that I’ve written over the past ten years. They play with sadness and OCD, but also the ways in which many times I am the happiest guy in the room.
Q: Do you have any advice for other people going to Fringe for the first time?
Yes. Everyone I know who’s going for the first time seems so stressed. The four weeks of Fringe last year were in at least the top 10 weeks of my 678 adult (post-college) weeks.
I don’t know anyone who got famous from Fringe last year. Nobody had their Fleabag moment. But a lot of people got better. And a lot of people had fun.
Q: Do you think you’re being too chill about Fringe this year?
A: It’s possible, but I have some surprises up my sleeve and I think time being too chill is a great counterbalance to the rest of the time I’ve spent so far. It’s much more the way I was in high school when I would like show up to a social event without any way of getting home and then friends would realize “Oh no, somebody has to drive Julian home.” But I would always find a way, and even though I was creating mild inconveniences, I most of the time had some great conversations on those drives home and believe that I’ve repaid the favors via either one-to-one actions or general being-there-ness.
It was called “helicoptering in.” One of my friends taught me the phrase and I did it way more once I knew there was a label for it.
Q: It’s late, you’re writing the Sternal Journal, you clearly don’t have a plan. Are you distracted by other childhood memories?
A: You know me so well. I was just remembering when some friends and I planned to go to McDonalds breakfast before high school one day. We didn’t think we’d wake up in time, but we did. Then when we got there, it was closed. One of us, maybe me, claimed to know that the one further down Rockville Pike was definitely 24 hours. We got there and it was also closed. I don’t know why I’ve kept this memory. I’m sure there were hormone-geopolitical factors at play, but I don’t remember what they were.
I just remember three 16-year-olds standing in a parking lot slightly annoyed with each other. The sun was rising and the plan hadn’t worked.
Q: Anything else you want to say about turning 35?
A: I have spent 834 weeks in the 18-34 demographic and I am curious to see if the shift to 35-44 will be sudden or gradual. But for now…
Recommendations!
Barbenheiner. Films. If you don’t know, “Barbenheimer” is the name for the meme/phenomenon that has arisen due to the movie about Barbie, Barbie, and the movie about the father of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer, came out on the same day. Everyone laughed about how they were both going to be great movies (directed by greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan respectively) but also so different. I watched both, enjoyed both, and especially enjoyed the event of it all. That being said, I really enjoyed this article about how they basically tell the same story because we know the atomic bomb is world-shattering, but so is the plastic waste produced by sales of Barbies.
Theater Camp. Film. If you don’t want to see Barbie or Oppenheimer (or already have), SEE THIS MOVIE. IT IS SO FUNNY. I ALSO CRIED. I LOVED IT. I WOULD WATCH IT AGAIN IMMEDIATELY. It even warmed me up to Jimmy Tatro.
The Worst Person In the World. Film. Lotta movies this week. I loved this one. It also made me cry, but in a much more sad way. It’s about most of the people I know, and the people are not actually the worst at all.
Drake and Central Cee’s “On the Radar” Freestyle. YouTube Video. Drake is at his best when he’s unabashedly jacking someone else’s style, and he’s best at that when he’s standing right in front of the person he’s swaggerjacking. And Cench is great as always. “We know some demon guys, with jealous and evil eyes/ You know that’s how Jesus died, you know that’s how Julius Caesar died/ I bet they were decent guys, I swear they remind me of me sometimes” is Drake’s funniest line yet.
Okay, that’s all! Here’s hoping week 1,825 is even better than the other 1,824! And here’s a beautiful sunset I saw tonight:
Much love!
Julian
P.S. I spend anywhere between two and twelve hours a week on the Sternal Journal. If you enjoy receiving it (and are RICH) consider becoming a paying subscriber. For just a few bucks a month, you can provide me with a bit more time to come up with fun topics, poems, and interviews; and you with probably fewer typos.
Love this -- one of my fave Stern Journs of the year! My favorite part about Fringe (ya know, having not been) is how happy it makes YOU.