by Edward Champion

Zuleika Dobson (Modern Library #59)

Max Beerbohm’s singular novel remains a lively satirical masterpiece, with its musings on romantic obsession probably just as relevant to our time as it was during its original 1911 publication.

(This is the forty-second entry in The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: The Moviegoer.)

Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson — a wildly enjoyable and erudite sendup of romantic obsession that is astonishingly peerless and more than a little punk rock in its originality — was included on the Modern Library list, but this Beerbohm stumping was not without modest controversy. Judge William Styron — fulminating in the August 17, 1998 issue of The New Yorker — dismissed Zuleika (as well as The Magnificent Ambersons) as a “toothless pretender.” A novel in which nearly all of the characters commit mass suicide at the end is “toothless”? It does have me wondering if Styron ever dismissed Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre, and Martin Amis’s Money or what he would have made of Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels or Alissa Nutting, Angela Carter, Anne Enright, or Mary Gaitskill at their fiercest. Styron was certainly right about Tarkington, who stands now with the sturdiness of a tray of blueberry muffins baked during the Obama Administration, left for decades on a kitchen island to attract generations of flies and rot into dowdy dust. Of Beerbohm, however, one can only conclude by this ridiculous and unwarranted dismissal that Styron was having a drunken or depressive episode.

As Beerbohm biographer N. John Hall has pointed out, this mustached satirist — who was friendly with Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and Edmund Gosse — was brilliant enough to attract the attention of William Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity. Empson singled out this passage:

Zuleika was not strictly beautiful. Her eyes were a trifle large, and their lashes longer than they need have been. An anarchy of small curls was her chevelure, a dark upland of misrule, every hair asserting its rights over a not discreditable brow. For the rest, her features were not at all original. They seemed to have been derived rather from a gallimaufry of familiar models. From Madame la Marquise de Saint-Ouen came the shapely tilt of the nose. The mouth was a mere replica of Cupid’s bow, lacquered scarlet and strung with the littlest pearls. No apple-tree, no wall of peaches, had not been robbed, nor any Tyrian rose-garden, for the glory of Miss Dobson’s cheeks. Her neck was imitation-marble. Her hands and feet were of very mean proportions. She had no waist to speak of.

Of the “trifle,” Empson commended the ambiguity of not knowing whether to be charmed or appalled by the detail. Of the “No apple-tree” and “no wall of peaches” (and even, I append to Empson’s consideration, Beerbohm’s “not discreditable bow”), he praised Beerbohm’s negatives for casting doubt upon the lush imagery. Of “imitation-marble,” he rightfully asked whether Zuleika’s neck was imitating marble or imitating imitation marble. And he likewise called Zuleika’s professed beauty into question, pondering whether it was unique or conventional. Zuleika’s comely qualities are certainly impressionable enough to drive numerous Oxford students mad, leading many to commit suicide. Empson concludes his analysis by writing, “I hope I need not apologize, after this example, for including Mr. Beerbohm among the poets.”

Empson is recused. There are layers within layers here. And Zuleika Dobson is the rare satirical novel of this type that beckons you to read it again, if only to sort the real from the zany. Beeerbohm was a poet of the dandy comic strain — in addition to being a meticulously devilish satirist (“The Mote in the Middle Distance” is unsurpassed as the definitive sendup of Henry James’s hideously bloviated late career style), a formidable caricaturist, and an unexpected radio star in his later years. The language itself, with its recondite words (“chevelure” and “gallimufry”) and its potent phrases guaranteeing rich dopamine hits to anyone with true literary taste (“a dark upland of misrule,” “an anarchy of small curls”), surely reaches the heights of poetry. T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden were just two prominent poets who sang bountiful praises to this “prince of minor writers.”

Even so, Max Beerbohm’s legacy in 2025 is quite possibly in shakier eminence than the underappreciated and veritable genius Henry Green. If Green was a “writer’s writer’s writer,” then surely Beerbohm is a “writer’s writer’s writer’s writer,” enjoyed only by those of us who still schlep dogeared paperbacks of John Barth and Robert Coover and who revere perverse and playful postmodernism even as we feel the hairs bristle on the backs of our necks as some doltish Goodreads sniper targets anyone with bold and subversive taste within their hopelessly unadventurous crosshairs. Even so, Beerbohm is still nestled enough in the canon to have inspired a high schooler to opine last month that she found the narration shift near the novel’s end to be “excitingly strange.” Let us not forget that great literature, even works published more than a century ago, can often be potent enough to stir vital and newfound passion within the young. And in our presently bleak epoch, we need all the good faith exuberance we can get.

That sudden transition to first-person after so many close third-person passages is indeed a thrill. I would likewise contend that the men who get so worked up over Zuleika — to the point of coveting a desire to unalive themselves over her — are still reflected today within the mythical “male loneliness epidemic” served up by wildly obnoxious MAGA incel types as the casus belli for their failure to find any woman who will endure their incessant mansplaining and their monstrous entitlement. Zuleika is rightfully bored by these hopped up doofuses and Beerbohm serves up some dependable zingers over how graphene-thin their souls are (intriguingly, the emphatic allcaps is in the original):

And oh, the tea with them! What have YOU been doing all the afternoon? Oh John, after THEM, I could almost love you again. Why can’t one fall in love with a man’s clothes? To think that all those splendid things you have on are going to be spoilt–all for me. Nominally for me, that is.

And unlike prolix and condescending nitwits like Arnold Bennett (his reputation rightfully destroyed by Virginia Woolf, with only imperious Tory scumbags like Philip Hensher eager to embrace this ancient sexist fiction better used for lining the bottoms of birdcages), Beerbohm is also surprisingly forward-thinking in 1911 when it comes to Zuleika seeing no difference between older men and youth who “fatuously prostrate to her,” inuring her of any deference she could possibly feel for them. At the end of the day, Zuleika, like so many of us, just wants someone to love. And when she does go gaga over the Duke, Beerbohm describes her soul “as a flower in its opetide.” Yet this is a “love” rooted on the Duke’s physical appearance. She is more transfixed by the “glint cast by the candles upon his shirt-front.” And Beerbohm doesn’t stop there. He compare the two pearl buttons on the Duke’s shirt to “two moons: cold, remote, radiant.”

It’s tempting to rope in Zuleika Dobson with Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity. While the two novels are entirely different in tone and sprang from the two writers observing wildly contrasting social milieus, they are both strangely mesmerizing about that one singular feeling that hasn’t yet been hammered out of the human race, even as our dating app age appears primed to reach a natural close: the mad claptrap rush of superficial attraction followed by an obligation to care for an increasingly wilting flower perceived to have lost its bloom. If anything, the 21st century has revealed that all of the social media layers intended for “connection” only buttress the primal superficiality that lurks beneath us all when it comes to matters of the heart and loins. It is the failure to consider some lover or this week’s main character as a palpable human being. True love — predicated on a physical, emotional, and intellectual connection of substance and depth — cannot hope to push past the solipsistic D.H. Lawrence nonsense that remains in place among many Feeld and Fetlife users today. Zuleika Dobson reminds us of the vital need for coruscating wordsmiths to send up this selfish stupidity from time to time, if only to preserve some hope for those who remain committed to the attenuating possibilities of real and enduring romance and the fulsome belonging that naturally emerges from it.

Next Up: Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence!

by Edward Champion

Is Amazon Censoring 2010’s ROBIN HOOD in the United States?

An eagle-eyed TikTok user noticed that the prologue text from Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood had been removed from the Amazon streaming version. I have confirmed that this is strictly an American Amazon issue and that the text is visible on other steaming platforms.

On Sunday night, TikTok user @theshannonduke0 noticed something strange when she tried to stream Ridley Scott’s 2010 cinematic version of Robin Hood on Amazon Prime. The prologue text was removed for this particular streaming version. The text reads as follows:

In times of tyranny and injustice when law oppresses the people, the outlaw takes his place in history.

On Monday morning, I confirmed on two separate devices that Amazon had indeed removed this text from the American streaming version of Robin Hood. I then rented the movie on Apple TV and noticed that the text had not been elided over there.

I have also learned from a TikTok user in Ireland that the “seditious” text appears there on Amazon without any problem. He sent me this screenshot:

Additionally, this Reddit user reports that the the text is available on Amazon Prime in the UK.

We have thus have established that the only place where this text is not available is on the American streaming version available at Amazon.

I have left phone calls and emails to Universal (the film’s distributor), Amazon, and Scott Free Productions. As of 11:00 AM Eastern time, I have not received a reply. Should I receive any comment from any party, I will update this story.

This support thread likewise contains numerous users reporting that they are not able to see the text on any device, which rules out any “technical issue” on Amazon’s end. The version of Robin Hood that Amazon is streaming in America has quite possibly been censored.

This strange and inexplicable move, for which Amazon has yet to issue a statement, is suspiciously timed, shortly after Trump announced a 100% tariff on non-American movies. (The Hollywood Reporter has noted that this idea was instigated by Jon Voight.)

If Amazon is censoring Robin Hood, are they censoring other movies that contain “anti-tyranny” text? Did Universal or director Ridley Scott authorize this? Others have speculated that this could be a technical glitch from Amazon. Until we have a solid statement from Universal, Scott Free, or Amazon, the question of the missing text remains a mystery.

DEVELOPING.

5/5/25 5:30 PM UPDATE: I was able to get in touch with Ridley Scott’s people at CAA. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said an assistant, who promptly hung up on me. As of this writing, I have not yet heard back from Universal, Scott Free, or Amazon.

by Edward Champion

Comedy Club Thuggery: Fear City, Johan Ankarcrona, and the Assault on Jonathan Randall

Jonathan Randall was a veteran comedian trying to help out a friend with his fledgling comedy club. He had no idea that his show would be canceled — ostensibly for politics, but more out of a troubled man’s instinctive mimicking of recent violence towards comedians– and that he would be physically assaulted by the man he was trying to aid.

On the evening of March 28, 2025, at approximately 7:30 PM, comedian Jonathan Randall was standing in shock outside the Fear City Comedy Club, a relatively new venue on Essex Street owned and established by 56-year-old Swedish emigre Johan “Jonezy” Ankarcrona. Jonezy, as he likes to be called, had racked up living time in Durango and San Francisco. He has been in America for twenty-three years. He ran into a bit of inheritance money and set up the comedy club. Randall, who is Jewish but who respectfully declined to divulge his age, had been excited to headline his own show. He had spent somewhere between ten to twenty hours that week promoting the gig — with no help from Jonezy, who had also capped the available tickets on Eventbrite at ten seats. (The venue holds sixty.)

Randall had declined a more lucrative gig that night to honor his friend’s nascent venture. He had been in comedy for twenty years and, after co-hosting a podcast called American Jew, he had discovered a way to criticize Israel through comedy. He always got laughs for these topical barbs. His vibe, as he told me, was “freedom and equality for all and spreading love.” He believed that comedy could be used to spread awareness about the Israel-Palestine situation. And even though an attempt by another New York comedy club to meld mirth with mindfulness had been canceled back in December, the laughs — as they say in the comedy business — are the true metric of success. And Randall felt he had a duty to bring comedic truth to an unsettling genocide.

But Randall wouldn’t be performing that night. This mild-mannered comedian, who was soft-spoken and very polite and a bit rattled with me over the phone and who had no history of being assaulted or being unruly in any way, was stunned when he had received a series of texts from Jonezy just ninety minutes before the show. Ninety minutes before start time.

“Just jokes tonight man,” texted Jonezy. “No political grandstanding or activism talk.”

Political grandstanding is typically reserved for austere rallies, not for a comedy show propelled by laughs. Randall politely informed Jonezy that he would do the same jokes about Palestine that he had done the week before. The jokes had killed, after all. There was no reason to believe that they wouldn’t kill again. And Randall had a fan base. Some audience members had rolled in from the deepest parts of Jersey, many of them paying $25 in parking and tolls on top of the nonrefundable ticket price.

But Jonezy, described by other people in the standup community who spoke to me on background as “not funny,” “fuckhead,” “loser,” and “a bit creepy and I knew it before this went down,” decided to cancel the show.

Randall, who lives in the area, raced to the club to reason with Jonezy. This eleventh hour fifty-ninth minute cancellation made no sense. He had done five shows at Fear City before this one and he had also produced the venue’s first ticketed event.

“All I wanted to do was help this guy,” said Randall. “I wanted to help him grow his club. I wanted to help him make his club a success.”

And these two men had been friends. They had hung out with each other. They had been close enough for Randall to do many favors for Jonezy, both in relation to the club and Jonezy’s personal life. Sure, Jonezy was what they call a “character” in any cultural scene. The kind of guy who rubs some people the wrong way. But what creative world wasn’t without its weirdos and eccentrics?

And now Randall was standing in the very club that had ignobly spurned him, in front of the very man whom he had considered a friend, beseeching Jonezy to go through with the show. Even if it meant ending the friendship and never talking with him again. But Jonezy’s “No political stuff tonight, bro” text had taken a far more minatory turn.

Jonezy then physically removed Randall from the club. And that’s when Randall decided to make a video about what transpired, apologizing to the audience members who weren’t able to see him. Only seventeen seconds into this video, Jonezy — who is the only employee of Fear City — emerged from the club with fury and proceeded to assault him, seething, “Are you still fucking here?”

“The guy was accosting me,” continued Randall, not being physical towards Jonezy in any way.

“Get the fuck out of here,” belted Jonezy, who then proceeded to shove Randall several times and push him along the sidewalk.

What has not been known until now and what is not so evident in the video is the degree to which Randall was manhandled by Jonezy. He was picked up by Jonezy with enough force that a witness, leaning out of a window six buildings away and a few floors up, was able to clearly see the assault. The witness I spoke with bolsters the case against Jonezy. Randall received numerous bruises from Jonezy’s assault and corroborated his injuries by email with a photo. The witness did not know Randall at all and she had no idea what the clamor had been all about until the following happened:

Randall uploaded his video of the incident to TikTok and Instagram. That video went viral on TikTok, accruing more than half a million views.

* * *
People who are not in comedy have very little idea how much work it takes to become a solid professional. Five years if you’re lucky. But seven to ten years of regularly doing it is usually the norm. That’s how long it takes to find your voice. To become fluid. To become someone good enough to land regular gigs. And because becoming a good comedian is so hard, because it amounts to significant creative labor, comedians deserve to be treated with deference. They should be able to perform in any venue without a threat to their personal safety.

Randall has been at this for twenty years. And not only has he kept doing comedy, but it’s clear from the rising passion in his voice, as I listened to him while wearing an Angela Davis T-shirt, that he hasn’t burned out.

“I love comedy,” said Randall. “I love performing. I love making people laugh. I’ve always tried to provoke thought in people and with my acts. I don’t go up on stage when I’m doing comedy and yell, like, ‘Free Palestine!’ Some of my themes are about Palestinian human rights and denouncing anti-Semitism, doing this all as a Jewish person. It’s a fraction of my act, but it’s part of who I am. Being genuine and authentic and true to myself is very important.”

* * *
People who are not in small business have very little idea how much work it takes to become a solid success. 20% of businesses fail within the first year. It’s 45% after five years. More than half don’t make it to the junior high school prom phase. And then there’s the fifteen year mark. 25%. That’s it.

Jonezy had been at this comedy club business for around six months, according to local and state public records. He applied for a beer and wine license and was daunted by the relatively facile pro forma requirements. So he gave up.

I could tell you other things, but I pledged “off the record” to my sources. But let’s just say that this guy doesn’t know how to run a business. That should have been obvious from the little EventBrite ten ticket deal I can report on the record.

And now Jonezy has assaulted one of his talents, one of his ostensible allies, and that video has been seen by everybody in the comedy world and now comedians have canceled shows and Yelp — oh, vengeful Yelp! oh, where do you go if you want to squeeze the lifeblood of a small business that wronged you Yelp! — well, Yelp is veritably Yelping right now. Or was. Until Yelp put a stop to the Yelping. Any online junkie who has clocked in at least ten years weeping with laughter in front of screens on lonely weeknights knows Yelp Yelps high whenever people with a sense of social justice howl for a transgressor’s ruin. I mean, Jumping Jesus Jehovah, Yelp Yelps! It is a website long fueled by a spirit of condign retribution that flows like a somewhat deranged and unstoppable magma flow. Jesus Christ, Yelp Yelps. Boom! Up into the air and, gravity being what it is, well, you cannot jump like that and not leave a crater that is so gargantuan that you’ll never know if the gaping hole in your livelihood will ever close or heal. Yelp Yelps and, boy, does it Yelp! It Yelps and belches and burps and flatulates and sometimes even pees. And you cannot help but crane your neck out of a car and say to yourself, “Holy shit! Yelp is Yelping! Well, goddam, I gotta park this beast, grab one of them Millers from the back of the trunk, and get me that there lawn chair and place it out yonder. Yar! Over ther! And why the fuck am I talking like a Southern Belle?”

And, well…

See for yourself.

The owner, Johan Ankarcrona, is a big fan of Mussolini and fancies himself some mobster. He chokes his diminutive chicken to naked photos of Netanyahu three times a day and ensures that all of his staffers raise “Roman salutes” to Ernst Rohm before starting a shift. Fear City is a den of fascism, a completely worthless and unsavory part of the New York sewer system in which its mouthbreathing bouncers punch and push anyone, blaming total strangers for the failed trajectory of their empty lives. Avoid this place at all costs. It is little more than a circlejerk for MAGA CHUDs and bullies.

In other words, the sole and singular player on Team Jonezy doesn’t stand a shot at playing the Super Bowl anytime soon. He is toast. Finito. Out of the game. Fear City — not to be confused with the underrated Abel Ferrara flick or the excellent history book by Kim Phillips-Fein — is as toxic as Kevin Spacey, the Trump Administration, and Jordan Petersen combined!

And the fallout wouldn’t have to be this radioactive if Jonezy here had owned up or issued a public apology. Maybe even confess to the world that he needs help.

But he didn’t do that. Instead, he closed off comments and deleted any remark that was rightly critical of his behavior. And he also dodged my considerable efforts to get him on the record.

* * *
“I was doing some soul-searching and reflection of my life,” said Randall when I asked him about his motivations in booking the Fear City headliner show. “And I was thinking, hey, you know? Maybe I have too high expectations. I’ve known him for a while. And, of course, I am trying to actively pursue comedy and make my comedy dreams come true. And, you know, he was my friend. I thought, hey! You know? This could be a good way to perform.”

Aside from the video evidence, the assault on Randall was witnessed by a woman who contacted me on TikTok and who goes by the name of @crickett (real name redacted, but she was very funny and nice and detailed in her responses: she’s a bona-fide two-phone gal who knows her stuff). She was in an adjacent building on Essex Street when the thrashing went down. She heard the noise of the assault and only discovered the full extent of what had transpired after Randall’s video was widely seen. I was able to corroborate that she was actually there. She was looking the right direction out of the window. The address she was staying at checks out. The geography and her description of where she was at also checks out.1

What I have also been able to determine is that Jonezy does have a history of sketchy deportment.

I made numerous good faith attempts to get Jonezy on the record for this story. He declined to answer my emails. A phone number associated with him, found through a public records search, resulted in hiss and static upon pickup when I called using three different phone numbers. When I swung by the club three times on a night in which a show was scheduled, there was nobody there. During my third attempt, I saw an illuminated spotlight shining on two empty microphones through a locked door. There was nobody around. (Comedian Chanel Ali confirmed with me on Threads that the show in question was canceled. Other comedians have also canceled their shows after Randall’s video hit the rounds.)

Jonezy, in short, refuses to answer anything in relation to his flagrant assault captured indelibly on camera and backed up by a witness. Sources informed me that Jonezy is not a particularly political person. This would certainly align with one of the rules posted on the Fear City website:

There is Nothing to Fear: The show is for you but it is not about you. We all have triggers and we must all learn to emotionally regulate ourselves. It is not the responsibility of others to cater to delicate tender flowers. Words cannot hurt you. Everyone is safe here.

So what motivated Jonezy’s violent behavior? It is difficult to say. Sources who requested anonymity have informed me that Jonezy does have a pattern of toxic behavior, often in relation to much younger women. There has been something of a whisper network about Jonezy in the standup scene. But Jonezy’s behavior has been tolerated in large part because, well, his venue is new. And all comics are understandable champions of any place in New York City that will welcome their comedy.

But it was Jonezy who needed Randall more than Randall needed Jonezy.

“I was trying to help him with ideas for the club,” said Randall, “to get people there since he has no audience whatsoever. Different things like that. Then I came up with the idea of the showcases. Prop people up at some of the showcases. But he doesn’t have respect for an audience. He doesn’t have respect for comedians.”

Jonezy had made Randall’s sincere efforts to create a thriving showcase “extremely difficult.” Randall was a friend providing the succor that good friends tender. He wanted to build the club. Arguably with more effective strategies than anything Jonezy had brainstormed. And, for this, Jonezy assaulted him. Putting asses in seats. “Get the fuck out of here.” Building the rep of a fledgling club so that it could raise ticket prices and maybe break even and then some? “Are you still fucking here?”

Randall told me that he will never speak to Jonezy again.

* * *
If Jonezy’s violent behavior was not expressly political, it nevertheless reflects a disturbing trend of green card holders and tourists — Mahmoud Khaleil, Dr. Rasha Alawieh, and Rebeca Burke — being detained without evidence for their constitutionally protected political beliefs or for simply not being American citizens.

It also reflects a terrible trend of violent assaults against comedians. Will Smith slapping Chris Rock across the face during the 2022 Oscars. Dave Chappelle tackled by a stranger months later when performing at the Hollywood Bowl. The Spanish comedian Jaime Caravaca hit in the head mid-show last year. Pranit Moore was assaulted and threatened in Solapur a little less than two months ago.

What is the common quality among the comedians who are attacked? Well, they are either not white or, in Randall’s case, making jokes from a place of empathy and commiseration for those who do not possess his privilege.

Troubled men like Jonezy, who run and book shows and thus hold all the power, have mimicked these violent cues instinctively. That’s just as alarming as an ICE agent “disappearing” someone who has every right to live a peaceful life. The pattern is learned, even when the political implications of casual thuggery are not fully comprehended by the transgressor. And goodhearted comics like Jonathan Randall, operating with integrity and wanting to give venues a chance, become unwanted recipients of men who are willing to torch their reputations simply because they didn’t have the grace or the humility to respect the talent.

[4/3/25 4:00 PM UPDATE: In response to this story, Jonezy released a three part series of videos on Instagram, falsely claiming that the assault and the were was staged:

I should give some context. Some history. So it’s my friend Jonathan Randall and me and, uh, here’s the thing. We’ve known each other fourteen years. He’s been doing comedy for about twenty years. Living in New York for about twenty years. And we, uh, and we made this — well, we had a plan. What should we do? We, uh — Jonathan’s been doing comedy for twenty years. He’s, uh, he’s not getting the numbers and the followers that we think he deserves to get, right? So he’s — I’m not saying he’s transitioned, but he’s kind of made the move more into the sort of, uh, TikTok activist lane. And so we decided — about a week ago, we, we put on a show here for Jonathan called ‘Because’ and, uh, we didn’t do too much marketing for it. So we didn’t sell that many tickets. Which made it okay to cancel the show. Because, you know, it was only a handful of tickets. So, uh, but then we thought, well, how do we get — how do we get attention drawn to this? So we’re both crisis actors. Method actors, right? So I thought, well, let’s — let’s use our skills. My, my lines were pretty easy. All I had to say was get the fuck out of here. In different intonations. And he, he had a little bit more. Like “What the fuck is wrong with you? What are you doing? Why are you trying to shut me down? Why are you canceling me?” You know, those kind of things. He could get more creative. You know, he’s getting paid more. So I just, uh, had to act really angry and, uh, just, you know, be a psycho. Be an old, uh, curmudgeon. And, uh, I think — he used to have, before this video got 81,000 likes? Or 81,000 followers, say. Now I think he’s up to close to 83? Or something? So mission accomplished.

I spoke with Randall this morning and he reiterated that the assault was real and not staged. Jonezy has adamantly refused to speak with me for this story.

Jonezy’s response makes no sense. If the show was canceled, then why would you need to draw more attention to it after it was going to happen? If Randall has adamantly refused to have anything to do with Jonezy, then a calculated prank to draw more attention also makes no sense — seeing as how Randall has already declared that he has no intention of performing at Fear City ever again.

I have also received messages from local comedians concerning Jonezy’s toxic behavior. It is worth noting that in his three-part video, Jonezy proudly announced that he does not take antidepressants and made a homophobic “joke.”]

[4/15/25 12:30 AM UPDATE: On April 14, 2025, I received an unhinged and deeply angry message from Jonezy. Days before this, he had dictated to me a demand to meet in person at a specific time and place. But I had already closed the story. I politely responded that I would accept a written response that I would append to this piece. And I shall do my best to summarize the wildly incoherent email he sent me.

Jonezy claimed that it was Randall who suggested that the show be canceled. He also claimed that Randall refused to leave the premises of the Fear City Comedy Club. “Inside the club I had asked him a dozen times to leave. He refused. He asked if I was going to physically eject him from the club? I did. I was furious with Jonathan and I wanted him out”

Jonezy claimed that the comics that I had spoken with on background were “open mic’ers who have not performed at the club on shows,” but, on this point, he is mistaken. These comics spoke to me on condition of anonymity and I will honor their request. But let’s just say that they weren’t part of the open mic scene. Jonezy also claimed that I spoke with Taylor Drew. And Drew was a comic that I neither reached out to or spoke with.

Of his politics, Jonezy claimed, “I do not identify as a fascist nor do I have any affiliation with the nordic resistance movement. I have never heard of this organization. You know nothing about my political ideology, my character or personality. I am not in any way a supporter of Israel, nor am I a nazi, or an islamaphobe, or an antisemite. I am neither a genocide supporter nor anti Palestine.”

Concerning the Eventbrite issue, Jonezy claimed, “For every show at the club I sell tickets on the website and put up 10 discounted tickets at a time on Eventbrite (to give the illusion of scarcity). When those tickets sell out I add another 10 and so on…”

Jonezy offered a great deal of vitriol and character assassination of Randall that isn’t especially germane to the underlying facts. So I will elide this.

Of the assault, Jonezy says, “I can assure you that I did not pick Jonathan up at all, He’s two inches taller than I am. I dragged him out of the club by the lapels of his coat and shoved him down the street. I did not hit him in any way. There’s no way he sustained any bruising.”

Of the liquor license, Jonezy claims, “It costs thousands of dollars in fees for the liquor license attorney, state liquor license authority and additional fees. Tens of thousands of dollars to build a bar with three sinks, install plumbing from the back water mainline to the front of house, drilling down and installing a drain line to connect to the sewer line. Then building a food preparation area to serve five food menu items. The space is too small for all of this and it wasn’t in the budget. That’s why I sell non-alcoholic drinks from a refrigerator.”

Of the comedians who canceled their shows, “No comedians have cancelled their shows here. After meeting with me face-to-face they decided to postpone their shows until this controversy dies down.”

Jonezy also offered additional texts in the exchange between him and Randall. But these texts, in fact, buttress Randall’s narrative. At one point, Jonezy berates Randall for “not respecting his wishes.” And he then guilts Randall by saying, “I get so stressed out by you. I had to go to a doctor today for headaches.” At one point, however, Randall does text, “If you want to cancel the show and refund everyone go for it.”]

by Edward Champion

David Lynch: A Personal Tribute

David Lynch meant more to me than any other artist in American culture. His art inspired me to embrace my inner weirdo. But when I met him, he planted a creative seed in me that I will be forever grateful for.

David Lynch has passed away. He was 78 years old. And he was a genius in every sense of the word.

If I had to name the artist who influenced me the most, then the name I would serve up – without a moment of hesitation — is David Lynch.

There was nobody else like David Lynch. Nobody. And there never will be again. He was an ambassador to the weird. A chronicler of the real America, particularly its dark and dreamy underside. He was a champion of outliers, misfits, and outcasts. A brilliant on-set improviser who would see someone interesting — such as stagehand Frank Silva, who played Bob in Twin Peaks and became part of the labyrinthine storyline simply because Lynch liked the way he was looking upwards while crouched — and work him into what he was making at the time. An indefatigable practitioner of the strange who spoke in a reedy high-pitched voice that not even the many cigarettes he smoked could seem to dull. (He employed his thespic talents as the hard-of-hearing and constantly shouting FBI Agent Gordon Cole and, to gut-bustingly comedic effect, for his final short film in 2017 — “What Would Jack Do?” — which featured Lynch with a talking monkey. You can also see him as John Ford in Spielberg’s incredibly underrated film, The Fabelmans. Of course, Lynch steals the movie.)

It is difficult to articulate just how important David Lynch was – not just to film, but to American culture. Because make no mistake: his loss leaves a continent-sized hole that will take hundreds of wild and unapologetically expressive artists to fill. Lynch had so many talents (he painted, he put out music, he wrote an incredibly entertaining memoir Room to Dream, and he even taught himself Macromedia Flash to create DumbLand – a willfully crude set of eight hilariously warped animated shorts), but perhaps his greatest gift was to introduce avant-garde to mainstream audiences and thus inspire shy kids like me to push the expressive envelope as far as we could and seek out many of the same bizarre influences.

In 1990 — an age long before viral videos, smartphones, and broadband Internet — David Lynch grabbed our collective lapels with Twin Peaks, perhaps the most revolutionary television series in American history. He served up sound, images, and characters that had never been seen before on the boob tube. The Log Lady. The Man from Another Place. Sound willingly reversed. The Black Lodge, with its red curtains and its zigzag carpet. All set to a seductive Angelo Badalamenti score that, for a brief time in the early nineties, seemed to be playing in every other cafe.

I think Twin Peaks became the cultural phenomenon that it did because we all had the underlying sense that something audacious and alive had been missing from television. Sure, the normies were scared away near the start of the second season, when it was perfectly clear that the question “Who killed Laura Palmer?” was not the actual reason behind the show. My parents initially loved it and then hated it. Me? I stuck with it the entire time and, as a teenager, I had to go to friends’ houses to see the new episodes, where I recall other kids making out on couches and one of us somehow procuring beer. We would talk about each episode for a long time after it aired, dissecting every strange image and symbol that had improbably been transmitted to a mass audience. I remember vivacious conversations with fellow all-black wearing theatre kids in high school about this brilliant, life-changing show.

What other crazy shit was out there? And why weren’t we allowed to see it? It is a question still germane to this very day as the American government has decided to ban TikTok — a sui generis platform for the wild and the weird — on Sunday. David Lynch somehow had the finesse to skate past the unspoken artistic prohibitions — whether corporate or governmental — and was nimble and charming enough to persuade big studios to finance his films. (The Straight Story, a deeply moving masterpiece of a dying and disabled man traveling by way of a John Deere lawnmower across America, has never failed to reduce me to tears and was, believe it or not, financed by Disney. You can still watch it on Disney’s streaming services. When the MPAA gave the film a G rating, David Lynch replied, “I’m sorry. You’re going to have to say that again. This is probably the only time I’ll ever hear this.”)

David Lynch inspired me not just on the film front, but on the sound front. (To this very day, as I’ve been working very hard on the new scripts for the third season of my audio drama — close to two thousand pages of creative labor so far — “Lynchian” has often been used as shorthand for sound cues.) During the third season of Twin Peaks, Lynch credited himself as sound designer as well as director. His extremely underrated television show, On the Air, was a love letter to old time radio. And so, for that matter, is Part 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return, which is arguably the most deranged work of genius that anyone has ever produced for television. (All black and white. Footage of nuclear explosions. And who can forget the Fireman rasping, “Got a light?” I certainly didn’t when I lost my voice for a few weeks two years ago and impersonated the Fireman on the phone to amuse friends.) And if you were fortunate enough to see Wild at Heart on the big screen, you know very well that it was as much an accomplishment of sound design as well as cinematic achievement. I’ve frankly never seen another movie in which the strike of a match sounded so crisp and alive. (I also strongly recommend this podcast interview with Lynch sound collaborator Dean Hurley.)

But I have to thank Lynch in another sense. I didn’t truly understand I was a weirdo and I really didn’t start to embrace this side of myself until I was in my mid-twenties. I grew up in an abusive household in which one was expected to conform to the Great American Lie when it came to culture.

Read The New Yorker every week. Be serious. Vote Democrat. Pay your rent and your taxes on time. Only involve yourself in the legal drugs. Get involved in relationships that led to marriage and 2.2 children.

God, I wince remembering how much I tried to be a hopeless square back then when this obviously wasn’t who I was. But I would make up considerably for my diffident youth in later years.

It was extremely clear that what I was doing creatively and what I believed in stood in sharp contrast to what I thought being an American should be — or, more accurately, what was drilled into me. I was nearly arrested in film school for demanding to be enrolled in a cinematography class that would give me access to 16mm film equipment that would permit me to shoot and cut celluloid. (I will always remember the vile and heartless authoritarian Larry Clark at San Francisco State, who did not even permit me to stick around and watch and help out after I asked to. Word of my punkish exploits circulated across campus, with many other students commending me on the cojones I had displayed, and I was thankfully allowed into the cinematography class the next semester with Catilin Manning, who was a kinder and far better teacher. Although when our group decided to spend our spring break spending every waking moment shooting film, returning to class with far more reels than any of the other groups, our film footage was so warped and unapologetically original that Manning just sat in her seat confused while all of us laughed. Her only feedback: “too grainy.”)

Years later, I became a cultural journalist entirely by accident. And I somehow had enough sway at the time to land an in-person interview with The Man Himself. (You can listen to the show here.) I met David Lynch at the Prescott Hotel (now the Hotel Zeppelin) on his birthday — January 20, 2007. I told the publicists that, out of a sense of great deference to Lynch, I would need to hold onto our conversation for the 100th episode. And they were gracious enough to not have any problem with that. Because Lynch was that important. He needed that round number.

I showed up to the hotel with a birthday gift — Tyler Knox’s Kockroach, Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” told in reverse, which was the weirdest new release I could find at City Lights. And I cannot even begin to convey how kind and generous David Lynch was to me. You know the old mantra “Don’t meet your heroes”? Well, it did not apply at all to David Lynch. It turned out that he was a gentleman as well as a genius. He liked me a lot, laughing at my jokes and taking particular interest in my microphones. (Of course.) He even offered me some technical suggestions. Because he completely understood what I was doing with The Bat Segundo Show. He also spoke with me well beyond our allotted time. (As much as David Lynch’s voice was spellbindingly warm and quirky in clips, it was evermore so in person.)

As a personal rule, it had never been my practice to take photos after the interviews. I did my best to operate by a code of conduct that honored conflict of interest . But this was David Fucking Lynch. So I asked Lynch if he could take a photo with me.

And do you know what David Lynch did? He spent five minutes pacing around the hotel. He wanted this photo to be shot absolutely right. We finally found a spacious room that Lynch insisted had the best colors.

Then Lynch spoke.

“Say, Ed, I want you to put your arm like so. And since you’re a little taller than me, I’ll put my hand on your left shoulder. And it will be a good picture!”

Holy shit. I was being directed by David Lynch. But the man saw artistic opportunities in everything.

The kind publicist shot the photo that you see above.

I then shook David Lynch’s hand, thanked him, and told him that his work meant so much to me.

“Ed, I don’t think you’re meant to just be an interviewer.”

“What?”

He smiled and said, “You’ll figure it out.”

And then Lynch, in his impeccable suit, walked off. And that was it.

Of course, David Lynch was absolutely right. I did figure it out. The audio drama I have produced has changed my life, my writing, and my art for the better. It has made me a better person. I’ve discovered ideas and feelings inside me that I didn’t even know I possessed and that the brilliant actors involved with my independent project have instinctively picked up on.

And that unfathomable kindness — that casual manner in which Lynch saw something in me — meant everything to me and still does to this very day.

And that is why I took David Lynch’s passing so hard yesterday and why I am misting up even now as I write this.

Never meet your heroes? Well, in most cases. Certainly there are authors I’ve met who I’ve admired but who proved to be unkind. But not David Lynch.

Rest in power, sir. And thank you. I will never forget you and your great work.

by Edward Champion

President Jimmy Carter Passes Away at 100

My friend described President Jimmy Carter as “the last selfless President.” And there’s certainly a lot of wisdom in that. Carter’s Presidential legacy was deeply underappreciated, but he was often decades ahead of his time.

Jimmy Carter, who served as our 39th President and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 for his selfless work in stumping for human rights, passed away at his home this afternoon at the age of 100. He lived long enough to vote in the last election, but, perhaps mercifully, he didn’t subsist to see the potential destruction of democracy under the First American Fuhrer.

Carter was, for all of his flaws, a fundamentally decent man and, as one friend told me in tears on the phone, “the last selfless President.” And I think that’s a very good assessment. Carter certainly had an ego and was definitely well over his head when attempting to tame stagflation in tandem with the Fed. He also substantially underestimated the learning curve when shifting from Georgia politics to the more complicated brokering required in the Beltway. But better to have a pragmatic optimist like Carter in the White House — a man willing to try things, a man who actually cared about the American people, a man who did not require vast wealth and who even installed solar panels on the White House roof — to set an example for the nation. Better Carter than a megalomaniac like Trump or a duplicitous neoliberal huckster like Clinton.

While many have rightly pointed to Carter’s stunning feats as a diplomat and an indefatigable home builder long after he left Washington, his accomplishments as President, large and small, were considerable. He brokered a deal between Sadat and Rabin at Camp David to begin the first stages of peace in the Middle East. And every President who followed Carter failed to build from this significant negotiation, opting to cave to Israel rather than collect olive branches for international harmony.

Even after he lost the 1980 election, Carter still negotiated the Iran hostage crisis to the bitter end. He was so committed to humanism that he appointed more women, Blacks, and Hispanics to governmental positions than any previous President. And he also established the Department of Education, which liberated the vital need to educate our children from the overstuffed yoke of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. This made education — and education alone — a Cabinet-level priority. By doing so, Carter made it possible for untold millions of teens to go to colleges by way of financial aid and he fought discrimination against minority children. (Naturally, the Orange Monster — with great calumny to Carter’s legacy — plans to eliminate this department altogether.)

The plentiful craft beers that you now enjoy at a bar would not have happened, had not Carter signed a bill that removed a fifty year prohibition against homebrewing. If Carter had not done this, there’s a good chance that all of us would still be enduring the hideous swill of Bud and Miller Lite as the only drafts on tap, as opposed to the limitless stouts, IPAs, and flavorful lagers that you can now find across the country. (I gleaned that last fact from Kai Bird’s The Outlier, an excellent book on Carter that I strongly recommend. The book truly helped to advance my thinking on the soft-spoken peanut farmer.)

President Carter was ridiculed for his July 15, 1979 “malaise” speech during an energy crisis, in which Carter urged our nation to curb its selfishness:

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.

These were not words that Americans wanted to hear, but these were certainly words that they needed to hear. For here we are, forty-five years later, living in a nation in which many feel that their lives lack real direction. Fifty-four days ago, 77 million Americans voted to blow up the bridge for everyone, laying waste to great possibilities and selling this nation out to the plutocrats simply because they couldn’t be bothered to bust out their phones and Google “tariffs” to understand the cold and clinical financial impact of stone-cold sleazebags on their own lives. Carter saw the writing on the wall decades before anybody else did and tried to warn us. But America was too stubborn to change and evolve. So here we are now in a deeply uncertain and very despotic place.

Like John F. Kennedy, Carter was an idealist (as well as a hardcore reader) who believed in possibility, even when he didn’t always comprehend the abstruse scaffolding holding up the three branches of American government. He would often work late hours, valiantly rolling up his sleeves, so eager to know everything that he once read each and every volume of the tax code. Since Carter had been an engineer, he approached his job with a fierce systematic mind. And there was no President following Carter who was this hell-bent on knowing everything. Or trying to know everything. I’d like to think that Carter’s insatiable curiosity was one of the reasons he tried so damned hard to be the best humanist imaginable.

With Carter’s passing, so too passes a long moment in America. It remains uncertain if we can course-correct after the next four volatile and nightmarish years. But perhaps if we study Carter with humble and scrupulous eyes, we might reclaim the hope and the honesty that marked his four years in office.