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Shows:
Sunday, November 26th: The Hollywood Comedy
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Thursday, December 14th: Hai Comedy in Denver
Saturday, December 16th: Julian Stern Keeps starting in DENVER
Wednesday, December 20th: Cookin’ something up in NEW YORK
Howdy Sternal Journalists,
Last week, I wrote through some gargantuan neck pain (which I incurred by, of course, stepping out of the shower without even moving my neck at all I mean what the fuck thirties) to tell you my experience of going to see Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour movie with essentially a stalker who has become a good friend, Olivia.
Olivia has appeared in the Sternal Journal at least one other time when I ran her beautiful essay “Tom Cruise” which is about Tom Cruise and also about cults, so really just about Tom Cruise.
This week, I’ve decided to run Olivia’s counterpart to my Eras Tour essay because it is decidedly better than mine, but also she is in her (late) 20s so was not dealing with as much chronic pain as I am.
If you’re a devoted “Julian-stuff-only” Sternal Journalist, then you should still read it because it is quite heavily about me. If you don’t like me or anything to do with me at all, you should still read it because it’s a beautiful meditation on how our friendships—and how our own relationship the concept of friendship—evolve as we get older.
It is also about The Grove. I love it. Please read it (below or directly from Olivia’s Substack). Without further ado:
Ozymandias (Taylor's Version)
Look at the Eras Tour and despair!
Last week, my dear friend and Substack mentor Julian Stern and I went to see the Taylor Swift Eras Tour concert movie. I suggested that we write essays about our experiences in an “Ozymandias” style competition. For those who don’t know, romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and banker/writer Horace Smith spent the 1817 holiday season together and each wrote a sonnet inspired by a statue of Ramesses in friendly contest. Shelley’s became one of the most famous and studied poems in history, while Smith’s was only remembered as a mere footnote in his friend’s biography. Read both to decide whose you think will live forever, and whose will fade away.
I’m not much of a mall person, but one of my favorite places in the world is The Grove. There’s nothing I love more than a bizarre idea executed flawlessly, and this is the pinnacle. I like thinking of the moment Rick Caruso thought what LA needs is a mall, down the street from another mall, with all the same stores. Perhaps he faced objections from investors, until he revealed that this mall would look like both a quaint village and the Bellagio. One day, when our civilization is long demolished, someone will come across remnants of The Grove, and find themselves unable to make sense of what it possibly could have been.
I get the opportunity to contemplate all of this regularly. The Grove is where my friend Julian and I meet to have coffee, discuss writing, and ponder the human experience. Whether or not this seems like a fun friendship depends entirely on how much someone likes both outdoor malls and Richard Linklater movies, a Venn diagram I live happily in the middle of. When our meeting place was overtaken by the premiere of Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour” concert film, we decided to double down on our commitment to the location and carve out three hours to go see it.
The logic behind this plan becomes clearer when one understands that the nonsensical has always been the basis of our friendship. I met Julian in 2019 at the Hollywood Improv, where we were both doing 3 minute sets for the drunken booker1. However, Julian did not know that I was a fellow comedian. To him, I was just a disruptive audience member ruining his set.
The reason for that begins in the fall of 2017. My best friend at the time, Anais, was staying with me in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her boyfriend Paul, a qigong enthusiast musician she’d met on Birthright, was there as well. One night, while sprawled across the floor of my house, we came up with an idea for a movie that kept snowballing into strangeness and depravity as tears of laughter streamed down our faces. The movie would be called “Au Pair O’ Buns”, and it would be a “Mrs. Doubtfire”-era classic family comedy, set on the Upper East Side. It would center around two dads-one fun and one stern; their two daughters- one rebellious and one withdrawn; and the au pair who comes into their lives like Mary Poppins to help them learn the meaning of family. The catch? The au pair will only wear assless chaps. It’s who he is, and it’s part of the powerful message of the movie: to be there for the people you love, you first have to be true to yourself.
Over several months of texts and video chats, we kept elaborating on this idea as though it would one day be a studio-funded feature starring Paul, who didn’t then and still does not act. People were irate every time I brought it up, not understanding my delight. The question “Will this be a porn?” was commonly fielded. I’d always reply that it was a family comedy with a PG rating. When met with outrage over how this could be, I’d share our simple answer. “Artful shadowing”.
Anais and Paul dated for over a year, but eventually broke up. We were devastated by the now uncertain future of our fake movie. Soon after, I joined Anais in her hometown of Los Angeles, and got into the comedy scene. Alone, I traipsed around grungy bars and makeshift stages dressed like a homeless witch. But when we were together, we’d dress to the nines and retreat into the world we’d created, one funnier than anything we’d find on stage.
One night we put on our finest outfits and sat in the front row at the booker-attended Hollywood Improv mic, where the dour host sarcastically referred to us as agents looking for talent. Usually his belittling remarks bestowed upon female comics bothered me1, but that night we howled with laughter and postured ourselves as Hollywood big shots. And when Julian Stern walked onstage, looking a lot like Paul, we locked eyes immediately. “That’s our au pair” we whispered, and spent the next three minutes cackling and destroying his set2.
Months later, I ran into Julian again and effortlessly slipped into whatever version of me is an agent who wants to make him a star3. Anais and I decided to court him with the “Au Pair O’ Buns” screenplay, and plotted for weeks about how we could impress him enough to star in our film. Once we had invited him to Toca Madera in West Hollywood for the meeting, we laid out approximations of executive outfits, practiced how we’d field his doubt, and told everyone who’d listen about our big plan. We did everything but write the movie, which I churned out 20 double-spaced pages of the night before our pitch.
At Toca Madera, we pulled out all stops to impress Julian. We said yes to every up-charge and spent a fortune on sparkling water and guacamole. We gushed over his cocktail order after insisting he ask for the most expensive one. After passing him the script over tortilla chips, we walked him through the climatic point of the movie, the moment when the shy girl who has finally gained confidence makes a stand to keep the au pair from getting fired. “I have a father, and I have a papa,” she says. “But finally I have a daddy.” We let the power of the line rest in the air a moment before asking him if it resonated.
Every time he asked us a question, we’d avoid it. “How do you know each other” he inquired. We looked at each other and laughed, “Oh who even knows,” we cackled. “We go so far back.”
In truth, we had met in college co-operative housing, and had become extremely close in our early twenties, bound partly by the fact that we both felt a void in our lives of long-term friends. Neither of us were close to many people we went to high school with, which at 20 felt like a distinct failure.
“I’m worried when we’re older and people start getting married, I’m not going to be invited to any weddings,” I confided in her one day while we sat in a park and picked at grass. She felt the same, and we promised to stay friends so one day we would have old ones.
During my college years, Taylor Swift released “1989” and began her squad era, constantly releasing photos of the group of friends a man would have called an entourage and a civilian would have referred to as a clique. She was famously excited to have friends after an adolescence of reportedly not fitting in with anyone except her devoted fan base, and advertised her newfound posse as much as her definitive transition into pop. It was a bizarre experience to see the one of the most successful women in the world living out the high school dynamics I’d just escaped. I also couldn’t relate to it as a way of healing the damages of adolescence. I’ve had great friends over the years, but to this day I’ve never really been a part of a group.
This didn’t bother me until recently, when the Eras tour came to town. Anais and I were no longer in contact by that point. That friendship had drifted away, relegated to the memories of women I was once inseparable from but no longer spoke to. I didn’t understand how these intense relationships could end with so little fanfare while romantic relationships somehow deserved sobbing fights and dramatic goodbyes.
Over the summer, my Instagram started filling up with videos of people securing their Eras tickets with friends. I was too casual a fan to justify spending hundreds of dollars to go, and there was no way my rag-tag collection of aughts indie-freaks and conspiracy theorists would shell out to see an illuminati princess perform either. Still, I felt left out. I’d long ago lost the desire to have a large, cohesive group of friends, and I’d never previously considered going to a Taylor Swift concert. But suddenly I felt horribly inadequate for lacking both of these things. I wanted to go to the concert, I wanted to have a squad.
My boyfriend at the time caught wind of potential jobs for us selling merch at the LA leg of the tour. We were told of a huge payday if the work came through, and the Eras SoFi dates became a looming gap in my calendar. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
The job ended up falling through, and the empty space it had once occupied was filled up with Instagram reels and photos of women dressing up in sparkly outfits, heading to the stadium. My sinking relationship felt quiet in comparison. At 28, I’ve been invited to plenty of weddings. That fear I had years ago was never realized. But the week of the Eras tour, I still felt like I’d failed.
My relationship ended soon after, and went out with all the tearful arguments and negotiations that it deserved. But once it was over, it quickly felt far away. All my old romances do, like the lights of a small town just before it disappears from view. But my female friendships still feel vivid. I can close my eyes and be at laughing Anais’s old apartment. And there are others too, friends I ran down the snowy streets to parties with, joined at the hip for hours in thrift stores, making silly songs and endless worlds of jokes. The ones I left, the ones who left me, the ones who never left but got married, had kids, moved on. Those memories feel like the lights of a city I’m still walking through, or at least the disintegrating remains of one that have lasted long enough to prove something that mattered once stood there.
I talked about all of this with another college friend, Mahima, who I met in the same dirty co-operative house as Anais. Mahima’s an even-keeled lesbian who mostly socializes with men, and we had spoken before about the ways we don’t fit into the traditional structures of female friendship. I expressed at length my feeling in inadequacy for not attending the Eras tour, and she listened quietly as we ate breakfast. Before leaving the café, we got in line to get a pastry for her girlfriend, Andrea. She looked down, avoiding my gaze.
“I have to tell you something,” she said. “Andrea and her friends were all going to the Taylor Swift concert, and they tried to get an extra ticket for me but it was sold out.” I nodded. It seemed the concert had struck a nerve with her as well. “But then one of them ended up getting sick,” she looked down. “So I went. I went to the Eras tour with a group of women.”
“Are you fucking serious,” I yelled. “I just spent 30 minutes telling you about how weird I feel that I didn’t go!”
“If it makes you feel better,” she told me. “I didn’t know the words to a lot of the songs.” She paused. “I did sing a long to all the hits from when we were in high school.”
“I’ll write about this and I will not change your name,” I told her, shaking my finger as we held up the pastry line. “I hope the Eras tour was worth it.”
After my friendship with Anais started to fade, I stopped pretending to be an agent when I saw Julian. He let me know that my “Au Pair o’ Buns” screenplay bore no resemblance to any real screenplay ever written. I let him know that after he’d left Toca Madera that day, one of the waiters had shown Anais and I his headshots, thinking that we were, in fact, real agents.
When we decided to go to the “Eras Tour” concert movie, I was excited for the anthropological inquiry, but also that I would get to see it. And not standing alone in the wings between rounds of shilling T-shirts. I would see it how it was meant to be seen, with a friend. And for only $19.89, because she thinks of everything.
I met Julian at The Grove, where we were quickly surrounded by families accompanying their young daughters who would soon race to the front of the theater to dance, and teenage girls who’d scream obscenities at the break-up tracks. We were the only childless late-twenties to mid-thirties duo to enter the theater, but as frequent Swift collaborator Jack Antonoff said, “I resent having the most important friendships and working relationships in my life reduced to dumb heteronormative gossip. Those relationships are deeply important and sacred.” It wasn’t normal, but it’s what my friendships look like. It’s what seeing the Eras Tour looked like, a bizarre concept executed flawlessly.
The theatre darkened and we cheered with the rest of the room and the sold out stadium on screen before us. Taylor Swift emerged and gazed around SoFi, to everyone attending and into the cameras, straight to us. I wondered if what she’d built from that long ago feeling not belonging felt worth it to her. It must have. She started to sing and the room went wild, as though we were really there.
I believe I had my ass Ozyma-handed to me so if you’re into Substacks, you should absolutely subscribe to Olivia’s Psychic Therapist or at least read her recent comparative cultural piece regarding EmRata and Derek Zoolander (there’s a quiz!).
And a few other…
Recommendations!
The ‘Georgists’ Are Out There, and They Want to Tax Your Land. Article. Look, I never thought I would be the guy recommending New York Times articles about esoteric tax concepts that might create more housing, but here we are. It’s a fairly snappy read for what it is.
Above the Law. Song. Meek Mill and Rick Ross released a collab album somewhat inaccurately titled “Too Good To Be True” as it is not too good to be true. It is instead very good and very true. To paraphrase frequent Stern Industries collaborator Joe Cabello, they are both so in the pocket, you’ll be sure these songs are old. I have yet to make it through the whole album (though I’m exited to), but this one where Rozay and Meek rap over the beat from Snoop Dogg’s “Tha Shiznit” features Teyana Taylor and DJ Khaled so you have to love it even though you want to hate it.
No Hard Feelings. Movie. This Jennifer Lawrence movie about a 30-something Hamptons local who sets out to fuck a 19-year-old so she can have his parents’ car has a LOT more heart than that setup might imply. It’s down-the-middle and feel-good, and Andrew Barth Feldman is very funny and endearing as the 19-year-old.
Anatomy of a Fall. Movie. This French movie which is getting a lot of best picture buzz had me humming the instrumental to P.I.M.P. and lamenting that my Duolingo French is not nearly as advanced as I thought it was all week. It’s actually only half in French and has had me thinking about other things too, but people are saying this is one you should go into blind. I don’t know if I agree, but I won’t ruin it for you!
Alrighty, that’s all for the week. Go forth and flawlessly execute some bizarre ideas!
Julian note: I am still trying to get booked at this club and this is the first time I’m hearing the the booker might ever be drunk, let alone anything but a grade-A, straight-shooter, class-act woman.
Julian note: This is not an exaggeration. They somehow ruined my set by laughing at it a lot. I have the audio if anyone wants to hear it.
Last Julian note: I would not describe it as effortless.