Craig Mod is literally on another level. As in “he is writing from some kind of astral plane” level…
I saw people yelling into cellphones, crying into cellphones, taxi drivers whispering in Hindi into cellphones like they were running an OnlyFans ASMR account for fans in Delhi. Make note: It’s illegal to walk your dog without taking a phone call here. I’ve seen a thousand people kissing, a million people hugging. Someone did human diarrhea in front of us as we walked near Washington Square Park. Here be Robert Frank’s old home and studio around the corner from CBGB, which is now a shop selling expensive suits.
…and “got to see a taping of SNL and go to the after party” level.
The “celebrity infrastructure” is especially impressive. Time to go? Your handler escorts you through a series of security locks and down into the bowels of 30 Rock to a sea of Escalades in waiting, doors and trunks ajar. Everyone knows your name and issue forth lots of hellos and good jobs and all that, and then you’re whisked to the after-party, which doesn’t get going until after 2 a.m. Lorne Michaels just sits in his booth and when you leave at 4:30, he’s still just sitting there, flanked by John Hamm, people coming up and bowing like they’re visiting a popcorn-addicted pope. He clearly enjoys it. That this guy has done this for ~fifty years is a bit TV bananas. The scale of it, the slapping together of the show in (basically) two days, the dress rehearsal just hours before going live, the cutting of jokes in real time, the manic set production, the (mostly) nailing it all and then the mega gathering afterwards — there must have been three hundred people in the post-show restaurant — is, well, it’s something else. What a thing to have kept going. And you feel like this is the last of an era, the final scraps of what used to be (the norm?) for network TV. Goodbye whatever this was. Glad I got to see you once.