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On the pandemic front, things are looking up. People are getting vaccinated and consequently, the country and world are starting to open back up. In celebration of that, Ariana Grande joined James Corden on The Late Late Show for a pandemic-themed Hairspray parody. The number, a rework of “Good Morning Baltimore,” was filmed on a high-production, musical-style set and features new lyrics about getting vaccinated, reconnecting with loved ones, and enjoying life in ways we hadn’t been able to recently.

Ahead of the show, Grande shared some photos from the making of the sketch and wrote, “fun with my friend @j_corden ! tune in tonight @latelateshow 12:37 am on CBS for our skit. #LateLateShow p.s. there may even be a very special, heart attack provoking cameo made by a Tony Award winning, friend of mine !

That cameo, by the way, was Marissa Jaret Winokur, who won a Tony for her role of Tracy Turnblad in the original Broadway production of Hairspray. Winokur shared a photo of herself with Grande and Corden and wrote, “It’s not about the shoes but it’s also not NOT about the shoes Tune in tonight @latelateshow 12:37am on CBS for the skit TY @j_corden and my sweet @arianagrande for including me in such a special event .”

Watch the “No Lockdowns Anymore” skit above.

What is it like to have a conversation with Isaac Brock? Actually, it’s a lot like listening to Modest Mouse — he’s somewhat erratic, often explosively funny, and, just when you least expect it, brutally honest and insightful.

Believe it or not, but Brock now qualifies as a true indie-rock elder statesman. Modest Mouse’s seventh album due out June 25, The Golden Casket, arrives 25 years after their 1996 debut, This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About. Back then, Brock was a few months shy of his 20th birthday, and he sounded like it. His early songs were rough-hewn, combustible, and filled with pointed observations about small-town blue-collar life that still seem utterly unique in the largely bourgeois world of indie music. (Brock’s insistence on saying his band was from Issaquah, Washington rather than nearby Seattle had as much to do with his trailer-park allegiances as his aversion to being associated with grunge.)

The next two Modest Mouse albums, 1997’s The Lonesome Crowded West and 2000’s The Moon & Antarctica, are landmarks of modern indie. Then came 2004’s Good News For People Who Love Bad News, which shockingly transformed them into a multi-platinum mainstream rock band. While their output since then has come slower — just three albums in the past 17 years — Brock remains committed as ever to not repeating himself.

For The Golden Casket, “I didn’t go in with any plan except I told them I wasn’t going to play guitar,” he says. Instead, he set out to make “a sound effects record” in which he assembled various exotic sounds (“fucking kalimbas and weird tinkery shit,” as Brock puts it) into a sonic collage with big-time rock producers Dave Sardy (LCD Soundsystem, Band Of Horses) and Jacknife Lee (U2, The Killers). In the end, however, Brock did end up playing some guitar, though the album ultimately hews closer to the layered production of later Modest Mouse records as opposed to the band’s more feral early work.

Thematically, Brock’s concerns have remained remarkably consistent over the course of Modest Mouse’s career. Just as The Lonesome Crowded West ruminated on the early effects of urban sprawl on the Pacific Northwest, The Golden Casket evinces deep skepticism about how modern technology has turned against its human masters. Brock freely admits that his thoughts on this subject veer into “tinfoil hat” territory — he basically believes we’re all in the midst of a secret world war being waged with a combination of disinformation and underhanded hacking of essential forms of personal and political infrastructure. But even at his most conspiratorial, he can still crack a well-timed joke.

“I don’t believe that we are very restrained in our usage of anything,” Brock says. “I mean, if someone were to tell me right this second that, definitively, using cellphones gave me brain cancer, I’d still just be like, ‘But they also give me cellphones.’”

While he’s not overly fond of looking back (or doing interviews in general), Brock did agree to reflect on Modest Mouse’s seven albums, and explain how they all lead up to The Golden Casket.

This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About (1996)

I don’t know that I would have continued making music if I and Eric and Jeremy hadn’t managed to come up with a song like “Dramamine.” I’ve never been able to make another one like that. I’ve never heard another one like that. I love that song.

When I started Modest Mouse I didn’t want it to be confused with the Seattle scene. The Seattle scene was defined by this “Why be normal?” bullshit. Everyone was dour, and fucking had green hair, and would just party their asses off a fucking cliff. So I was more interested in making it harder to pinpoint what the fuck was going on with us. And so I talked about the town we lived in. Which, there are special things about it, but it’s not like it’s a magical alpine village.

I wasn’t reacting against grunge, because I really liked what I considered… these are the sort of things I don’t give two shits about at this point in my life. As a grown-up, what was really grunge and what wasn’t seems pretty fucking pointless. But at that time I didn’t think what was going on, when it hit the radio, barring Nirvana, was really grunge. I was like a Tad/Mudhoney person. I had very strict rules as to what made you grunge.

Everyone wants to matter for forever and shit. That’s just built into being, I think. But I don’t think I had a very clear idea of what 10 years really looked like, much less 20 or 25. I wanted it to make sense right then, and I didn’t really give a shit if it made sense the following year. Although, that’s kind of bullshit. Because I remember when writing the lyrics I’d specifically go through and weed out words that had too much attachment to the time, or so I thought. I didn’t succeed, but I thought I did that.

I didn’t put any photos of us on the record. There were discussions, I was like, “We’re going to look stupid.” And at one point I also tried talking us into not putting our names on it because I said, “It doesn’t matter.” But I lost that one.

The Lonesome Crowded West (1997)

For years, starting probably when I was 14, the house that I was living in and the property — it’s actually still where my mom and stepdad live across the street from — would get flooded. As in, there was a river running through our houses every fucking winter, once or twice. Because the people up the hill had just clear-cut shit, and they were just like, “All right, here’s a little flood for you.” So I didn’t have to be well-researched or well-taught on matters of the ecological impact of putting up fucking strip malls.

A lot of my politics were born in rhetoric taken from Crass records. I was pissed off at people — it wasn’t even their fault — about where they were standing with class and shit. I drew a line in the sand, which I don’t think is necessarily the way to fucking solve shit. But I was very cognizant of the blue-collar angle.

Personally, I struggled with the idea of being a sellout. Like, “Ah, this is very un-Fugazi of me.” I remember my friend Sam Jayne, he was the first person I was in a band with, he passed away this year. But him and I started our first band ever, and that band became Lync, on K Records. I dropped out, went to Arlington, Virginia, and they kept the band going. But I remember when I was in the band with him, he and I were arguing over the premise of, if someone offered us a million dollars to be on a major label would we do it? This is what teenagers fucking do, apparently. And I was like, “Yeah, absolutely.” He’s like, “Nah, where’s your integrity?” And I was like, “I have two dishwashing jobs, where the fuck’s my integrity right now? I’ll take the money and be not poor for a minute.”

The Moon & Antarctica (2000)

I did have a bigger budget, but it resembled the other budgets because that budget, it turns out… this was my first time really experiencing this, it was our first major-label release and I learned that the way that the recording budget thing worked is whoever’s working on it says, “So what you got in your pocket?” And you’re like, “This much.” And they’re like, “That’s how much it costs.” Which is fine when you don’t have anything in your pocket. But then you get to be the bigger dog and they’re like, “You’re paying to support other bands like you, so they can get in here for nickels and dimes.” So it didn’t necessarily feel like I was allowed more time because of a bigger budget.

A couple weeks into it, during basic tracking, I got my face broken by neighborhood kids. To quote them, “Fuck you, cowboy.” That’s after my jaw was broken and I was walking away. They were throwing beer kegs and bottles and saying, “Fuck you, cowboy.” I looked down and I was like, “Oh, I’m wearing a cowboy shirt.”

I was in Cook County Hospital, which is a fucking nightmare. I felt happy to be the one who wasn’t handcuffed to his gurney, bleeding to death. Got out and stayed in the apartment in the neighborhood where my mouth had been broken long enough to realize that the neighborhood kids were pretty psyched and they were coming back to do it again. Sort of like revving their engines all night and shit. I’d hear old neighbor ladies like, “Yeah, Johnny and the boys fucking broke one of those guys in the apartment, something to do with the face. And they said there’s a recording studio down in there. It’s nothing but some piles of garbage and dry wall.” Anyways, they were circling the property all the time, ready to just finish the job and shit.

I went to Del Prado, Indiana, where Benny [Massarella, Modest Mouse’s percussionist] was living. Got my face operated on, got my mouth wired shut, and then went back to the studio. I couldn’t go anywhere, and the rest of the band had left, and it was just me and the intern. And I couldn’t sing. On all these tracks, I was just stuck there and I got to do way too much layering.

I was left alone there to build that fucking record, with another guy who felt pretty happy to just be left alone. I obviously didn’t go forth and get my jaw broken for every record, but that was a better record because of it.

Good News for People Who Love Bad News (2004)

We had done Antarctica, and it had done fine but not major-label fine. It did really good as far as we were concerned, but below expectations, I guess. No one who was at the label really knew who we were, except for someone in the art department. While we were recording they fired our A&R guy, so at that point we didn’t even have a liaison to the label. No one was asking us about the record. We’d send in our budget saying, “Okay, we’re working on this thing. Can we do this or that?” And I thought they were going to just boot us off the label or shelve the record.

When we gave it to them it just happened to be in this particularly dry period for Epic. And the current president of the company, Steve Barnett, was storming around from office to office, throwing paper in the air or whatever you do to get shit done. And he was like, “Oh, this just came in.” And he put it on. He was like, “That! That’s the one!” There’s a kind of fairytale rock story there, just because nothing else was going on, and we happened to be.

We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank (2007)

Around The Moon & Antarctica, we started incorporating a percussionist and a violin player on stage. We had so much of that going on, it was pretty easy to just adopt the idea that Modest Mouse is a revolving door. I think it’s pretty positive. It’s there for folks if they need to come back. If I hadn’t kept a revolving door kind of community thing going on with this band, we wouldn’t be able to accomplish a lot of what we have. I think some people see … well, it’s not all positive, what people seem to feel about that. Because no one likes to be the person who disappears from the picture. Although oftentimes the person who disappears from the picture is themselves why they disappeared. It’s just an optics thing where there’s a lot of assumptions made if you’re not in the picture. Then there’s a lot of explaining, “Oh no, there wasn’t bad blood.” And sometimes there was fucking bad blood, but you know what they say, “There was no bad blood.”

With Johnny Marr, we had discussed very clearly that we were just working on three songs together and that he would do no touring. But it was too much fucking fun, so we did a whole record. And then that was too much fun, so we started touring together. And it wasn’t until we toured for fucking five years or something, four years on the same record, that Johnny had to basically be like, “I want to be making new music. And we’re just fucking playing the same shit, so we got to get out…” I remember we were in Australia, and he’s like, “Dude, what are we doing here? Let’s go make a record.” And I was like, “Ah, it’s just…” I don’t even remember what my answer was, but it wasn’t as good as, “Yeah, let’s go and make a fucking record.” So he went off, did The Cribs and stuff, which was a good move. There were another two years before we even started trying to make a record.

Strangers To Ourselves (2015)

Well, honestly, substance abuse was part of it, initially. One thing turned into another, and your eyes dilate and you work for a week on something that you have to destroy because it was never good in the first place. So there is a bit of that. It’s not the whole story, but that played into that record.

It turned out great, I love it. But that’s despite of, not because of, my bullshit and staying up. This is a very different conversation that I’d be happy to have at some point. But I was getting gang-stalked, if you’re familiar with that? Google it. Gang-stalking turned into Adderall and stuff like that, so I could keep my eyes on regular stalkers, two of which ended up in jail, one for burning my security cameras at my house. I started losing sleep, and I started taking substances to make sure I stayed awake. So other people’s bullshit made my problems on that one.

I’m starting to feel a little bashful about leaning into the negative aspects of my life that fit into an album cycle. The salacious shit, it’s okay, it makes for a good story. But all the days that weren’t shitty in fact went into making these records good, which I think probably were more important than overcoming obstacles and other shit.

The Golden Casket (2021)

I had no vision at the beginning. I went in with an almost completely blank slate. “We Are Between” was pretty much written, “Walking And Running” was sort of written, and the second half of “We Are Between,” which is “We Are Lucky,” it was two songs made in one song. And so basically there was a handful of songs that were already made. And that led back to the middle.

I didn’t want to stand and have the band showdown where we write fucking like Let It Be, where we’re talking out parts and shit. I started off with just me and Dave the producer so that we could rack up a bunch of weird sounds, and then see what we needed from the rest of the band. I just wanted everything to fucking fall together, and it did.

I wanted to make sure I didn’t accidentally make the same record again. It’s better to not put out many records, and make them all feel a bit different. I try to be very aware of whether I’m doing the same thing, or doing something too close to another thing. My canon of information — what songs are out there, not just Modest Mouse songs, but just songs in the world — I know about a lot more songs. I just remembered a song I was super psyched on with Jacknife Lee last week. I was playing the kettle drum. And I get done and I’m listening to it and I’m like, “This is fucking strange. It sounds like The Simpsons theme song.” And so I’m aware that I can’t cover songs by accident. I’m also aware that I don’t want to accidentally cover my songs.

I could talk for 10 hours bout just the subject of that song “Transmitting Receiving.” Anytime I start talking about this, I have to say, “I call this section ‘the tinfoil hat.’” It’s probably the most important shit that I’ve written about, which is the true scope of what’s going on with technology. Everything from gang-stalking, to fucking targeted individuals, to B2K, all the shit that goes on, is going on, and has been used on me. Someone bought all these salvaged IBM computers from the Pentagon, and in one of the banks of it there’s a top-secret thing called “Silent Weapons For Invisible Wars.” It’s basically the Third World War which we’ve been all participating in. But I’ll stop now.

I feel really, really optimistic about the fact that everyone’s casually talking about UFOs, and that they’re on the scene. And pretty pessimistic about our ability to handle our own shit. But UFOs are on the scene. And they haven’t turned us into human fondue yet, so maybe they’re here with good intentions. It’s hard to be a dad and be as pessimistic as I want to be. There’s something good about being a parent and just being aware that, not for your sake, you don’t want this place to fucking suck. For anyone. I don’t want other kids to have to live in shitty situations, because I like my kids.

I’m fighting the urge to do a children’s record. We started one which was just a cappella, about Tom The Hillbilly. And then we animated me climbing on him. We green-screened it so I’m just climbing all over his body. Because he’s always crawling and shit, because there’s always sugar or something on him. Anyways, that’s as far as we got, making a video where I’m climbing all over him as vermin.

The Golden Casket is out on June 25 via Epic Records. Get it here.

There’s a certain type of person who believes Donald Trump will become president again, not in 2024 (although also that) but this summer. Let’s call them “kooks.” Mike Lindell is one (“If Trump is saying August, that is probably because he heard me say it,” he confidently told the Daily Beast), and former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell is another. “A new inauguration date is set, and Biden is told to move out of the White House, and President Trump should be moved back in,” she informed attendees of the “For God & Country Patriot Roundup” conference last month. “I’m sure there’s not going to be credit for time lost, unfortunately, because the Constitution itself sets the date for inauguration, but he should definitely get the remainder of his term and make the best of it.”

Trump being reinstated before Candyman hits theaters is not going to happen, but that hasn’t stopped a “ticket” for his inauguration from making the rounds on social media. “This is just INSANE on a whole other level! These ‘tickets’ are being sold for as high as $1200.00 each on Q sites all over the internet, and the really crazy part is that people are talking about how excited they are because they’ve already purchased them WTAF the deeper one digs the weirder it gets,” reads a Facebook post that has made its way to Twitter. I wish I could say “needless to say,” but I clearly need to say it: the ticket, which has been shared thousands of times across multiple social media platforms, is a fake, via Reuters:

A poorly edited ticket for President Donald Trump’s alleged “second inauguration” has made the rounds on social media, with users critical of Trump and his followers claiming the ticket is being sold online among followers of conspiracy theory QAnon. While the ticket in the photograph is indeed a fabricated image, Reuters found no evidence of such tickets being sold or bought within self-described QAnon groups online.

Here’s the ticket:

Come on everyone. The ticket is an obvious fabrication: there’s no way Beach Boys singer Mike Love wouldn’t join Kid Rick and Ted Nugent.

(Via Reuters)

In a few days, on June 20, Foo Fighters will perform at Madison Square Garden for the storied venue’s first full-capacity show of the year. Ahead of then, though, the band actually performed another show, at Canyon Club, a 600-person-capacity venue in Agoura Hills, California. That was last night, and the show was only for fans who could show proof of vaccination. This ruffled the feathers of some anti-vaxers, who decided to protest the event.

Foo Fighters fans shared photos of the scene, with one writing, “This is what happens when you just want to attend a @foofighters concert at a small local concert hall and the next thing out know you’re a ‘Vaccine Segregationist’.”

CBS Los Angeles quotes one protestor as saying, “What they’re doing is saying only vax people… separating humans is not OK. Those of us who have healthy immune systems should be able to enjoy these freedoms just like everybody else.”

Variety reports that photos from the protest seem to show Ricky Schroder, an actor best known for his childhood role in the ’80s TV sitcom Silver Spoons, in attendance. Ahead of the event, he wrote on Facebook, “Dave Grohl is an ignorant punk who needs slapped for supporting Discrimination. Ignorance comes in all shapes & sizes. Kurt Cobain is laughing at you Dave along with Millions of Patriots….Fool.”

“I think it’s on you. This article will persuade the world that this is the right choice, or not.” These are the words of Late Night with Seth Meyers producer Mike Shoemaker, half-joking, but half not, that the onus is on me to convince you that the current iteration of Late Night – this one that currently does not have a studio audience – is a Late Night finally firing on all cylinders.

Now, it’s true I do believe that. And, yes, I showed up to studio 8G at 30 Rockefeller Center on a hot June New York City Thursday afternoon with an agenda: to convince Seth Meyers and Mike Shoemaker of this (correct) opinion. But both Meyers and Shoemaker have been in television a long time and I know that they also know this, but haven’t fully decided quite what to do about it yet. So I, somewhat jokingly, but mostly seriously, said back to Shoemaker, “I don’t think this article needs to convince America, I think it’s just the two of you.” To which Shoemaker replied, “Now you know Seth’s secrets. That’s the way to do it.”

“Look, one day the audiences are going to come back and I’ll fall back in love with them. I feel very confident about that,” says Meyers. To which I respond there’s no part of me that believes that even a little bit. To which Meyers says, “That’s very fair of you to say. A very fair assessment based on how much I’m talking about enjoying them not being here.”

***

Since the Seth Meyers version of Late Night debuted in 2014, the show has undergone some tweaks here and there. There was the decision to start the show with Meyers seated at his desk instead of starting with the more traditional stand-up monologue. And there was the addition of the show’s now-signature feature, “A Closer Look.” but it would take world-changing-level circumstances to force Late Night (and everyone else in the world, really) to make significant changes to its format. The difference with Late Night, though, is the significant changes to its format have been for the better. It’s, now, less a structured late night talk show, and more a madcap hour featuring Seth Meyers and a carnival full of jokes from Amber Ruffin and Jeff Wright; a fake recap of a television show called Tiny Secret Whispers; weird off-camera characters Meyers just has full conversations with; yelling at his cue card guy, Wally; yelling at his writer Mike Scollins about jokes he doesn’t like; Al Pacino impressions; Werner Herzog impressions; Meyers’s new fake musical, Cicada Cicada; and, well, a lot of Meyers laughing. He’s almost now the late night equivalent of Mister Rogers (this is now a show that features talking inanimate objects, like paintings and craft-works) only with Meyers as sort of a playfully reluctant host to all this whimsy, but, by the end, can’t resist. Right now, it’s not a show easily comparable to any other iteration of Late Night, or any other talk show, really. And in the seven years Meyers has been hosting Late Night, I’ve never seen him happier.

“It got here sort of step-by-step,” says Meyers. “Starting with, of course, a pandemic and the many different iterations the show had taken until it’s reached its way back into an empty studio, post a Trump presidency. I feel like a lot of different things happened to make it what it is now.”

But, however, it got to what it is now, isn’t this the best version?

Meyers: “Well, we certainly are aware it’s the most natural version of the show we’ve ever done. Wouldn’t you agree with that?”

Shoemaker: “Yeah. Definitely, yes. I don’t even know if it’s natural, it’s certainly not labored. We don’t have to work hard to fit it into this box. It doesn’t take much of that. So in that sense, it is very natural.”

So in the past did you feel you were trying to fit Late Night into a box?

Shoemaker: “I think we always took how something would play to an audience into account.”

Meyers: “I mean, when I look back at this show and the sort of different acts it’s had, I think the first 18 months was probably the most we ever tried to fit it into a box, and what we thought a late night show was. And then we found our way via ‘A Closer Look,’ certainly, into doing the show we most wanted to do. But, now … I guess I thought we were doing the show we most wanted to do, but it wasn’t the show, so I was wrong. This is the show we’ve most wanted to do for sure.

So on that aforementioned hot New York City Thursday at studio 8G inside 30 Rockefeller Plaza, I watched a taping of Late Night with Seth Meyers. A thing I had done before, but not like this, not without an audience. As an “audience member,” under these circumstances, it was a fascinating experience in that watching the process is so much more interesting because literally nothing was conducive to me having an enjoyable viewing experience. It was much more like watching all the stuff that happens behind the scenes during the commercial breaks at SNL than it was “an afternoon of comedy for the crowd,” like it used to be. Almost everything that now plays so well and so weird for the actually late at night television crowd at home, I just imagined the silence of a full crowd in the room wondering, “What on Earth am I watching here? Why is Seth Meyers doing an Al Pacino impression? Wait, who is Werner Herzog?”

But there’s the conundrum, it’s the best experience watching Late Night in person, but you can’t have an audience to have this experience. I mention this to Meyers after the show and he jokes, “That’s like saying how much you love flying coach, as long as there’s no one else in coach.”

***

“You know, pre-COVID, we had a test audience,” says Shoemaker. “Which is, basically, during our rehearsal, we would invite people from the building, 25 tourists. And we didn’t always rely on it, but that based a lot of the choices. We tried everything that way, and then that was kind of the barrier to entry. And that’s all gone. It’s really like brain to mouth to television.”

Meyers: “Now, I should note, there are a few stopgaps in place. It’s not like we’re just barfing things onto the page and then doing it.”

Shoemaker: “I mean, some things are!”

But, see, that’s the strange dichotomy of a late night studio audience. The show has to play to both the 200-some people in the room in the late afternoon, as well as to the millions of people watching at home well past midnight. That balance seems way off. Why should the 200 people in the room, who, mostly, were just asked off the street if they want to watch a taping and hadn’t really considered it much before that day, dictate what millions of people are seeing at home? (Also, daytime humor seems a lot different than humor after midnight.)

Meyers recalls, “When I was doing a show in an attic, and I was talking into an iPad with the realization that most of the people who would be watching it would be on the other side of their iPad, it felt really stripped down. And when you take out the performance to an audience? A very small percentage of the people who watch your show, obviously, are in the live studio any given night. And by removing them, I did feel like it brought us a lot closer to the people at home.”

I mention to Meyers that when he was on Conan O’Brien’s podcast a few weeks ago he told Conan that if a studio audience reacts too positively to a joke, he starts to question himself.

Meyers: “I mean, it has been very liberating. We have people, of the 10 to 12 people that are watching any given night, they’re people like Shoemaker who is not an easy laugh. And so there’s still a way to mark, as it’s going, how it’s going.”

I then mentioned that, in the press, Meyers has a tendency to tell us that he will love audiences again, as he said to me, but then he will tell guests and other late night hosts the complete opposite and that, yes, we can see him when he does this because this is on television. Meyers jokes, “I’m not going to lie to Gayle King.”

Shoemaker: “It took you time for you to even realize that it was a possibility for them not to be here.”

Meyers: “Well, I think the reality and the thing I keep coming back to is, I didn’t dislike the audience when they were here. I liked them a great deal.”

Shoemaker: “It wasn’t an option. I mean, it’s possible that you could say you’d have to do it from your house. I mean, I could see that in a catastrophe, but we never thought we’d get to do it in the studio with lights and audio that works … and nobody here. This is the most unpredictable outcome. And yet, it’s the thing we found the most fun, because it wasn’t as much fun when you were at your house, for you. I think that there’s a lot of lifting that being actually done in the studio, when you didn’t have to worry about everything.”

Meyers: “My entire day is taken up focused on writing and performance, which was not the case when I was home. And so that also is liberating.”

Look, I know, and if you’re reading this, you know, that Meyers and Jimmy Fallon have very different comedic tastes and styles. But to the layperson who is just flipping through channels around 12:30 a.m. (11:30 a.m. central), there’s now a sharp contrast between the two shows. Back in 2014, Fallon, a host in a suit, would be delivering jokes to a crowd of people and then here comes Meyers, a host in a suit, located one floor above Fallon, delivering jokes to an audience. But now, Fallon ends, and viewers instead get a casual Meyers, with no audience in sight, delivering Al Pacino impressions to the delight of only his crew. It’s filmed at 4 p.m., but it feels like something that was filmed at 12:30 a.m. It feels like something made specifically for someone still up in the wee hours on a weekday.

Meyers: “It makes total sense that the contrast would be bigger now.”

Shoemaker: “Last week, Seth even said, I wonder what it’s like watching the end of Jimmy that has a full audience and applause, and go into us. And I said yeah, I wonder. I still haven’t checked. Like, I don’t know. I wonder if that’s jarring.”

I can answer that. The answer is it feels like something that’s actually filmed late at night.

Meyers: “I think one of the things we’re going to be most interested by, and obviously are going to try to stay tuned into is, whether or not people will find it jarring. And whether once more shows come back with audiences, will people watching at home opt for those shows over ones like ours that don’t have a studio audience there.”

Well, I don’t think people care as much about there being an audience at a show than maybe someone who works on a TV show thinks.

Shoemaker: “I think that you’re right and I made this argument in the past. I know there’s a thinking, like in regular primetime television, that if you have a multi-cam, you don’t put it in the same block as the single cam. And I think it doesn’t matter. I think that people go to what they like. I don’t think that you’re shaken when all of a sudden you go from The Office to Will and Grace. I don’t think that it matters. And I think this is probably the latest example that maybe it doesn’t.”

Meyers: “I think you’ve been here when there were audiences before?”

I have.

Meyers: “You come out, you talk to the audience ahead of time, there’s a warm-up comedian. Before the band comes on I would go into the audience and do a Q&A, and those were all things I liked doing. But, obviously, now, I would be mentally, clinically insane if I did that now. So it is true as well I think doing this show now, you realize, oh, 12:30 at night on a Tuesday is not a time where you’re usually with a large group of people. Like, when I was in high school, I would watch SNL with a bunch of friends, but I never had people over to watch Letterman.”

***

Okay, it’s time to try and convince “the world.” (In other words, it’s time to try and convince Seth Meyers and Mike Shoemaker.) Both Meyers and Shoemaker know right now the show is the best its ever been. They both say it’s the most fun. And they both agree this is the version of Late Night they’ve wanted to do. Also, it’s the most efficient version: All that time spent warming up an audience is time used on the show for the home viewer instead. So if the show is the best it’s been, if the show is the show they both want to be doing the most, if the show is the most fun it’s been … why is bringing audiences back even a question right now?

Well, first, it sounds like some filibustering is going on before any real decisions are made. Meyers says they could have audiences now (like Fallon and Colbert have done), but the earliest audiences even would possibly come back to Late Night is September. Which, to be fair, gives them three full months to kick the tires a few more times to see how it’s going before any real decisions are made. But, also, they make it clear that they believe the decision is theirs to make and they know they only get one shot at this because once audiences come back, they can’t just decide, oh, we made a mistake, and make them go away again.

How much power do you actually have just to tell the suits you would rather keep the show the way it is with no audience?

Meyers: “We feel like we have the power to say that.”

Shoemaker: “We haven’t had a lot of conversations about it. I mean, it wasn’t an option until very recently. And if anything, they felt bad that it wasn’t. Because there are many COVID protocols. Whereas other shows, I think, were unhappy to not have an audience. Like SNL and Fallon, we were not. So now that the people are coming back no one is saying to us, “When are you?” They just want to know, ‘Hey, when are you (bringing back audiences) so that we have notice because we have to get the elevators working and things like that.’ Literally no one from the network has asked to speed it up, or even for a timetable. Which is not to say that they haven’t discussed it without us, but it isn’t an issue yet.”

Meyers: “I will say this. We will not even… the earliest would be September for us. And so we’ve given ourselves the freedom to enjoy a summer without putting any pressure on it.”

Shoemaker: “But we feel it’s coming. Mostly, guests, which are now maybe half Zoom and half here, I think guests enjoy the audience a little more.”

Do they? I’ve been watching a lot of clips of Later with Bob Costas. Everyone on that show seems to have a great time and there’s no audience.

Shoemaker: “And they’re perfectly fine?”

You know why, because I think they like the crew laughter better than audience laughter, too.

Shoemaker: “Yeah, that could be. We haven’t done a poll. We have not asked them. We have all this time to figure it out. It’s only been a handful of guests since we started letting them in. So we don’t really have a good sampling.”

Meyers: “I think it’s very fair for you to make the observation that I’m not telling the truth when I say I want an audience to come back. I think what it really is, Mike, and again, I’m not disabusing you of your previous notions: I’m very aware that once we have audiences back, it’s only a one-way street, right? Unless there’s another pandemic, you don’t go back to no audiences.”

Which nobody wants.

Meyers: “You don’t, right. So you knock on wood that once the audience has come back, it’ll be like that forever. And so it will be hard not to mourn the ending of a thing that we have managed to find joy in. I guess I do know that when audiences come back, I’m going to have to go out for the warmup and be like, no, look, I know you guys have read some stuff I’ve said. But I love you. It wasn’t you, it was me! That was stuff I was working through!”

Could you imagine being in that first audience back? Knowing you are the most unwelcome guests of a late night show ever? You are going to be hissed.

Meyers: “The best will be when a joke bombs in front of an audience and my save is that would have worked if none of you were here. If the studio was empty, that would have killed. I’m going to have a side camera for the people watching at home that I’m just going to look at and be like, sorry about my guests.”

Shoemaker: “Well, Mike, now I think it’s on you. This article will persuade the world that this is the right choice, or not.”

Who am I trying to convince? You both just said you have the power to do this. Am I trying to convince the two of you?

Shoemaker: “We’re not saying that out loud so much.”

Okay, then I’m just telling you, just don’t do it. Don’t do it.

Shoemaker: “Let’s see how you convince America. I think you could do it, Mike. I believe in you.”

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

The Los Angeles Clippers are apparently going to have to beat the Utah Jazz on Wednesday night without the services of their best player. According to Ramona Shelburne and Brian Windhorst of ESPN, the right knee injury that Kawhi Leonard suffered in the waning moments of Game 4 is so bad that he’ll have to sit out Game 5.

Even worse, the report indicates that Leonard could be out for the remainder of the series.

Stating the obvious here, but the already difficult task of beating the best team in the league becomes exponentially harder if Leonard is not on the floor. Leonard stepped awkwardly while trying to drive to the rim late in the game, which saw him sit on the bench down the final stretch, but said he believed that he’d “be good” in the immediate aftermath.

It is unclear if this knee injury is related to the lingering quadriceps issues that have plagued Leonard throughout his career. As is oftentimes the case, Leonard has elevated his game to a new level this postseason, leading the Clippers with 30.4 points, 7.7 rebounds, 4.4 assists, and 2.1 steals in 39.3 minutes per game while connecting on 57.3 percent of his field goal attempts. On Tuesday, Leonard earned first-team All-NBA honors for the third time in his career.

Liz Cheney has got nothing to lose, which is good news for Americans who want to take a peek behind the curtain of the Washington, D.C. political machine. Her latest target is GOP Rep. Paul Gosar, who seemed to want to rewrite the history of the Capitol riots of January 6th while questioning FBI director Christopher Wray during a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on Tuesday.

While discussing rioter Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed during the mayhem of January 6th as she attempted to enter a defended/restricted area inside the building, Gosar decided that the Capitol Police were the bad guys in this scenario and spoke of them in the same way that one might describe a serial killer who has chosen a victim. After asking Wray if he knew “who executed Ashli Babbitt?” to which Wray replied that he did not “know the name of the person who was involved in the Ashli Babbitt shooting,” Gosar—speaking over Wray at every turn—went on to paint his own picture of how the events of that day went down:

“It’s disturbing. The Capitol police officer that did this shooting appeared to be hiding, lying in wait, and they gave no warning before killing her. Question again: Why hasn’t that officer who executed Ashli Babbitt been named when police officers around the country are routinely identified after a shooting.”

Cheney spoke out on Twitter about Gosar’s apparent reimagining of that day, and shared a story about her personal interaction with him on January 6th and her general opinion on his Capitol Police Are the Enemies rhetoric, explaining:

“On January 6, as the violent mob advanced on the House chamber, I was standing near @RepGosar and helped him open his gas mask. The Capitol Police led us to safety. It is disgusting and despicable to see Gosar lie about that day and smear the men and women who defended us.”

This isn’t the first time that the Arizona GOPer has described Babbitt’s death as an “execution” or painted a picture of the Capitol Police as a bunch of homicidal maniacs. Back in May, during an earlier House Oversight Committee, Gosar went the “execution” route again when describing Babbitt’s death and described the mob of people who stormed the Capitol as both “peaceful protestors” and “peaceful patriots.” Which doesn’t seem to line up with Cheney’s (and reality’s) recollection of that day. And also stands in stark contrast to how Capitol Police officers who were there that day described the situation.

You can watch Gosar and Wray’s full exchange below.

(Via Mediaite)

Today (June 16) would have been Tupac Shakur’s 50th birthday. Many are remembering the late rapper on this milestone day, but Jada Pinkett Smith got started early yesterday by sharing a previously unreleased poem that Tupac wrote for her.

Filming the poem, which was titled “Lost Soulz” and written by Tupac on a sheet of lined notebook paper, Pinkett Smith says in a video, “Over the years, ‘Pac wrote me many letters and many poems, and I don’t think this one has ever been published, honestly. He had a song called ‘Lost Souls,’ on the Gang Related soundtrack, but I believe this was the original concept because he wrote this, I believe, when he was at Rikers [Island]. And I was like, I don’t think he would have minded that I share this with you guys.”

She then recited the poem, which reads:

“Some say nothing gold can last forever
And 2 believe this [I] need no proof
I have witnessed all that was pure in me
And be changed by the evil men can do
The innocence possessed by children
Once lived inside my soul
But surviving years with criminal peers
Has turned my warm heart to cold
I used 2 dream and fantasize
But now I’m scared 2 sleep
Petrified, not to live or die
But to awaken and still be me
It is true that nothing gold can last
We will all one day see death
When the purest hearts are torn apart
LOST SOULS are all that’s left
Down on my knees I beg of God
To save me from this fate
Let me live to see what was gold in me
Before it is all too late.”

Also yesterday, fellow Tupac associate Jim Belushi shared a story about trying to get the rapper to cover Frank Sinatra.

Watch Pinkett Smith read the poem above.

The Phoenix Suns may be without the services of star point guard Chris Paul for the start of the Western Conference Finals, and it’s not because of the pesky shoulder injury that has lingered throughout this offseason. According to Shams Charania of The Athletic, Paul has been placed in the NBA’s health and safety protocols and he’ll be out for an indefinite period of time, although Charania noted that if Paul is vaccinated, his isolation period would not be as long.

Paul has been magnificent for the Suns this postseason, serving as the leader of a generally pretty young bunch that took down the Lakers in the first round and blitzed the Nuggets in the conference semifinals. He’s averaging 15.7 points, 8.7 assists, and 4.1 rebounds per game while putting up remarkably efficient shooting splits — 50.9 percent from the field, 44.4 percent from three, and 91.2 percent from the free throw line. While he was an All-Star and finished in fifth place in MVP voting due to his regular season performance, the veteran guard has taken his game up a notch during the playoffs.

Now, all eyes turn to the Western Conference Semifinals series between the Utah Jazz and the Los Angeles Clippers. Currently tied at two games each, a potential Game 7 would take place this upcoming Sunday, giving Paul a little extra time to get out of isolation and back onto the floor.

Having a clown at a birthday party is an old-school—albeit slightly terrifying—rite of passage that kids have been forced to endure for decades now. But having a birthday party full of mostly clowns is goddamn nightmare fuel. Yet that’s the best way to describe the guest list at the little soirée that someone decided to throw together for Donald Trump on Monday night in celebration of his 75th birthday—except Melania Trump, the former president’s wife of 16 years, was not among them. And Jimmy Kimmel noticed!

On Tuesday night, Kimmel shared a quick clip of a video that Donald Trump Jr. (a.k.a. DJ TJ, a.k.a. Fredo) posted to his Instagram of a group of well-wishers singing a poorly orchestrated version of “Happy Birthday” to his dad at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. And to borrow a phrase from the former president himself, it all looked rather sad. But Kimmel was quick to point out that Melania seemed to be MIA.

“What a party! All the best people were there. Although I couldn’t help but notice his wife wasn’t. It’s his 75th birthday. This is a big birthday. Where’s Melania? Wouldn’t it be great if she ran off with Hunter Biden? ‘Where’s Melania? Wait, where’s Hunter?’”

The political fan fiction is practically writing itself.

You can watch the full clip above, starting around the 5:27 mark.