Best Of: Making ‘La Bola Negra’ / 'New Yorker' cartoonists lament their kitchens

0:00This message comes from NPR sponsor, the official Gilded Age podcast from HBO. Unpack each episode of the Gilded Age and hear from the people who bring 19th century New York to life. Watch the official Gilded Age podcast on HBO Max or listen wherever you get podcasts. From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley in Los Angeles. Today, Spanish filmmakers Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrose. They've turned an unfinished play by a gay poet murdered during Spain's civil war into a sweeping epic. Their film La Bola Negra tells the stories of men whose love could cost them their freedom, even their lives.

0:40Javier Ambrose says those stories deserve to be told on a grand scale. That's why we wanted to make it big. We wanted to make it epic and we wanted to make it bold. because we don't have that many stories. Also, New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast and Jason Adam Katzenstein talk about their new book, The Two Saddest Kitchens. Usually when we get together, we discuss things like death, anxiety, scary movies. But today, all we can do is kvetch about kitchens. And Justin Chang reviews the new Korean film, Possible Love. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

1:25This message comes from the UPS Store. Open this holiday to help with all your small business needs. Find a store near you at the upsstore.com. Most locations are independently owned. Products, services, pricing, and hours of operation may vary. See Center for details. This message comes from Prolon. Want to look and feel your best this fall? Prolon's five-day fasting mimicking diet is a clinically developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Developed at USC's Longevity Institute, it aims to assist the body in entering a fasting-like state that helps reset metabolism, target visceral fat, and support healthy metabolic markers.

2:04Get 15 % off plus a bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com slash NPR. This message comes from Avalara Aviator, the agent hub for tax and compliance. While you've been listening, Aviator could be helping move tax and compliance work forward with purpose-built AI agents and with you still in control. More at avalera.com slash aviator. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. In the private clubs of 1930 Spain, members used a tidy little system to decide who belonged. They dropped balls into a box. a white ball meant you were in, a single black ball meant you were out. The gay poet Federico Garcia Lorca began a play about that cruelty.

2:50He called it La Bola Negra, the black ball. But before he could finish it, Lorca was arrested and murdered. His body was never found. Only four pages of the play survived. Ninety years later, my guests today, Spanish directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrose, have turned Lorca's pages into an epic about the men spaying shutout, gay men persecuted through the Civil War and the decades of Francisco Franco's dictatorship. The film takes viewers through three timelines, a young man blackballed in 1932, a soldier from 1937 who falls in love with a wounded enemy prisoner, and a contemporary writer who inherits something from a grandfather he never knew, and with it, a past his family kept hidden.

3:38The film, which has become a record-breaking hit in Spain, arrives as the country is still fighting about how to remember those years. Last fall, on the 50th anniversary of Franco's death, a government survey found that more than one in five Spaniards now say Franco's dictatorship was good for the country. Calvo and Ambrose are household names in Spain, known simply as Los Javis. When their film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the audience stood and applauded for 20 minutes. Days later, they shared the festival's Best Director Prize. La Bola Negra stars Spanish singer Guitarrica de la Fuente in his first acting role, as well as Penelope Cruz and Glenn Close.

4:24Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrose, Welcome to Fresh Air. Hello, how are you? Thank you. Hi, how are you? I am great. Excited to talk with you. Thank you so much. And I'm going to be referring, since you're both Javier, to you by your last name. So folks will understand. That's okay, yes. Yeah. So, Calvo, I just said this film began with Lorca's four pages. But for you, I read that it actually began with another play that you read. And when you read it, you burst into tears. Yeah. So La Piedra Oscura, it's a play that Alberto Conajero made in 2013. And we watched it together, actually. And I bought the book that day.

5:10And many years later, we had a project that didn't come out. and we were kind of depressed, sad, and we had a trip to France and I was like, I'll pick a book, like a quick book, a theater play, so I can read in the play and just forget about this sadness. And I read the first page, it's a monologue with Sebastian, the character that Guita Ricadera Fuente plays. And it was about the bombing of his town. He was telling the audience how the Italians bombed the town and he had to abandon his mother. and he played in a little orchestra. And it was beautiful and I started to cry and I didn't know why.

5:53Like it touched something, like a wound I had with my country, with my community, with my ancestors, my elders, and yeah, and my family. And I understood I had to talk about the LGBTQ plus people during the civil war in Spain. And how that inheritance has come to us as a form of silence, pain, and unresolved tension. You know, history tells us a great deal about how gay men were persecuted. It tells us much less about how they actually live, though. What were some surprises that you discovered that surprised you, Ambrose? We were researching for a lot with historians. And I think what I learned the most was the feelings that Federico García Lorca had.

6:52And that was never told. Like Federico is seen as an artist and as a writer and as a playwright. But no one really talked about his relationships. It's more like the literature, only what he wrote. Because no one want to talk about the politics or the loves or the queerness. And what I learned the most during this movie was about the personal life of Federico García Lorca, because since he's a master and everyone loves him and the literature he wrote is so important in the Spanish culture, at some point someone thought it was not necessary to talk about him in the personal way. but he was a free person and the loves he had and the way he approached life it was so beautiful what did you have to let go to fictionalize that world though because you only have four pages to go by and then you have a play and a book but you in your own imaginations have to recreate something that feels real but also knowing you don't have much information about the way they actually lived.

8:04Yeah. I guess we were like detectives, you know? Like we were trying to understand what Federico Garcia Lorca wanted to write. And we read letters. We read a lot of interviews. And here and there, you could find different moments like, oh, he told a friend that after the sister's scene, he was going to write a scene with Carlos and his father. Oh, he wrote that in a letter to a friend. Yeah. And you can read in the conversations with friends, he was like, oh, I will talk about this and this and this and this. So we were following the clues. It was fun to discover that he would like to talk about his projects in parties.

8:48He would say, I'm going to do this play about the sisters and the mother is going to drop them in their house. So I do the same. Oh, you do the same. Yes. In every party I would talk about my projects and the things I want to write. And I like to discover that from him. But that's so good that Federico did that. Now we have the information. We could reimagine La Bola Negra from those four pages because of the clues he left in his friends, in his family. And it was beautiful to understand the mind of someone and what he wanted to write to discover that. How was that for you? I think about how there's not much in the way of legacy in history when we think about, I've been thinking in particular about your decision to make this an epic.

9:41And, you know, historical epics typically are based on something like lineage and family, history, institutions. But when it comes to the history of gay people, there's less of that lineage that you can go by. There's less where you can grow up, and we'll talk about this, but you grow up and you hear stories about gay people like this, historical ones. So to be able to see yourselves in the history through Lorca, through his writing, what was that process like for you in coming into understanding your place, really? We work with a foundation that's called 26th of December. They take care of elders of our community, of LGBTQ plus community.

10:25and uh this was also like how uh this story was born because we get to talk to all gay men uh that would talk about how they fall in love with uh with someone and and the families would turn against them and they would live together and alone like building this relationship and when the other died they would like be alone and not knowing what to do with their lives and go to the cemetery every day and um like understanding that all these people somehow are kind of my grandparents are kind of like the people that lived a life in a way so incomplete in order for me to have a life that is better than his like they risk their lives with trying to love and trying to have to fulfill their passion.

11:25And all those stories are silenced. And talking up with them, understanding Lorca, understanding Cernuda, who is another gay poet in Spain, understanding how we are all connected by, you know, this black ball that we all share, that we pass through each other, to each other every generation, a black ball that is silence, pain, shame, but also it's a spark of life and desire and love and joy that it made me feel proud of my community and of the brave people that fought before me. And it's true that we don't have that many movies or books about the history that connects us as a community, the queer community.

12:21That's why we wanted to make it big. We wanted to make it epic and we wanted to make it bold because we don't have that many stories with that point of view in the queer community. And, yeah, we wanted to make it fun at the same time and mixing genres in order for the young people to be like, oh, I can connect with that. we told them the story with our point of view, but hopefully after the movie, they will try to learn. They will try to study more. They will try to learn about Lorca, about the Spanish Civil War, or their own stories, because there are queer stories under the ground everywhere.

13:06When I was writing, I always asked myself, Do I pay tribute enough to the people that came before us? Oh, that was something you were thinking about as you were writing. All the time. And the answer was no. With my life, I don't pay tribute to the people that came before us. I take my freedom for granted. I do that. And I don't want to do that. I want to be aware. And activate it by your freedom. Yeah. I want to try to enjoy my life because of the people that couldn't do that before me. We should try, at least. We are so privileged, and a lot of countries they cannot. And the LGBTQ plus community is still prosecuted.

13:44A lot of countries. If you're just joining us, my guests are filmmakers Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrose, known together as Los Javis. Their new film is La Bola Negra. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from the UPS Store. Open this holiday to help with all your small business needs. Find a store near you at the upsstore.com. Most locations are independently owned. Products, services, pricing, and hours of operation may vary. See Center for details.

14:22This message comes from Prolon. Want to look and feel your best this fall? Prolon's 5-Day Fasting Mimicking Diet is a clinically developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Developed at USC's Longevity Institute, it aims to assist the body in entering a fasting-like state that helps reset metabolism, target visceral fat, and support healthy metabolic markers. Get 15 % off plus a bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com slash NPR. This message comes from Avalara Aviator. Aviator is the agent hub for tax and compliance. Herpes Build AI agents work around the clock and across business systems to help execute the work.

15:02Visit avalera.com slash aviator. My guests today are Spanish filmmakers Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrose, known together as Los Javes. Their new film, La Bola Negra, draws on an unfinished play by Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet murdered during the Civil War. It stars Penelope Cruz and Glenn Close. Penelope Cruz's character, she plays a cabaret performer who tells one of the main characters, a young soldier, this line that cross-dressing in particular is a world of possibility and war is the opposite. And what she's articulating is that before the war, there was a world of acceptance in a way, that they were living in this very moment of war and this constriction, but there was a kind of freedom that was taken away.

15:57I'm obsessed with this Madrid scene that happened around 1915, 1920, 1925. So there's this figure called Cupletistas. That's what Penelope is. Kind of a cabaret girl. They would go to France, Paris, and look at the Folies Berger, the Moulin Rouge, take those songs, bring them to Spain, and adapt them in kind of a nastier way. Raunchy a little bit? Yes, campy. They talked about sex, drugs. They weren't as elegant as they were in France. They were more, we call it picaras. It was, you know, sexy and a little bit trashy, but they were amazing. So this is 1915. 1915. And they would like, Madrid was neutral during the war, the first war.

16:57And everybody would come to Madrid to party and to, you know, feel free. And this generation, they thought they were going to be free forever. But then two dictatorships came and they were persecuted. They were murdered. They disappeared. And it's shocking to understand that today almost no one remembers them. They were kind of lost in history. And that's by design. Yes, and it was shocking to feel the parallelism with the society we live now, in which we think we're going to be free forever. We conquered the rights. We're here. But history repeats itself. Fascism is raising, and it's a worrying thing.

17:49And, you know, our weapon against intolerance and hate is our writing and making movies. And this is what we're here to do. But yeah, yeah, yeah. It's worrying. I'm just holding on to a lot of the lines from the film because they're so lyrical. They're very poetic. And there's this line in your film, a gay man's heart is an ocean of secrets. But that's not very poetic because it's a tribute to Titanic. So it was more like a funny thing that we, it's a wink to the audience. The people that knows, knows. Those who know, know. Those who know. Besides the Titanic tribute, we wanted to do a poetic movie because I think poetry is the opposite of fascism.

18:44because poetry is full of meanings for everyone, and it's polysemic. And poetry, everyone will understand differently, and it's meant to be understood by everyone in a different way, every single day. When you guys were young, did either of you have an older gay person in your life or a figure in society that showed you what your future might look like? I didn't, but you did, Javi. No, my uncle, Carlos. He's the brother of my mother. And he was so, so, so, so mysterious. Because when I was a kid, no one was talking about him. It was like, hmm, he lives in L.A. And you will meet him at some point.

19:33And I was like, what's going on with this guy? And when we really met, when I was a teenager, I was going through understanding myself. And meeting him was like, hmm, I think. You knew. I knew and he knew. He knew from, how did you know that he knew? Because I was, it was in the Christmas Eve and the dinner and I was about to cry because I was like having a bad moment. And he was like, hmm, come here. You have to go to come to LA at some point. And you have to just travel and extend the world and everything will be okay. Whatever you're going through will be okay. And I think he was one of the first persons that saw me.

20:24So having reference is very, very important. And to see yourself in different people around. Because if not, isolation is so dangerous for the queer community. And it's so, so sad. It really breaks your heart. Did you take him up on that offer to come to L.A.? Yeah. How old were you? 18. Okay. And I had, because it was like, oh, I used to live in LA and I want to come back to Madrid. So I left my dog and it was like, do you want to go there and bring back my dog? It was like, okay, I will do it. And he bought me a ticket, like a plane ticket. And I came here and I brought back his dog. And in the meantime, I had fun and I knew myself better.

21:08And I met his friends. And it was like, hmm, it was like such a beautiful moment of discovery. You know, I met different kind of people because I grew up in a very Catholic school, all boys, and in a traditional environment. So to me, it was like, hmm, am I the only one experiencing this? Yes. I felt like I was weird and I felt it was a sin. And I felt it was like, hmm, something is wrong with me. I'm going to hell, that kind of things. Because that's what you were taught in Catholic school. Every day. So suddenly to have an uncle like my uncle Carlos to say, you're okay. I'm like you. You go.

21:52You have fun. You experience this journey. You will understand there's more people like you all over the world. And I think now with social media, that's a little bit better because you can see yourself in others easier. But when I was young, I'm 42. And when I was young, it was like, oh, my God. I think now he's very proud. Oh, yeah. He's still alive and he's proud. Yes. And he's very proud. Has he seen this movie? Yeah. What did he think? He was like, you're doing this. Like, you made it. And you interpreted that as like. Like, you wanted to do this and you did this movie for all of us. Yes.

22:34And he's so proud. But he's very shy. at the same time. So, you know, a gay man's heart. It's an ocean full of secrets. It's an ocean full of secrets. It's got an ocean full of secrets. It is. You understand that there's an unsaid and unspoken understanding in the things that are said. And also I experimented something like that when I saw my best friend's wedding when I was a kid. Oh, the movie. Yeah, the movie. And I saw Rupert Everett on screen. I had that also. I had a moment of revelation. I was like... He is gay. He is like me? I see him. I just knew he wasn't thinking it. There's an identity.

23:14Like, they try to say, like, is who you sleep or you don't sleep. When I was eight years old, they would call me names. And I wasn't sleeping with anyone, obviously. It was about identity. It's not even sexual orientation. It's about who we are and you can read it. And it's mysterious how a little kid in, I don't know, like Iowa, has the same things. They like the same things. We share taste. We share many things. And we haven't met each other. Javier Calvo, your story is that you were into the arts very young. And you were actually on a very popular teen show playing a gay teenager. This was before, though, you had actually come out not only to the world but to yourself.

24:08And so when you're talking about being a young man and even being so young as eight and people are identifying this thing in you, what is that like to have people telling you this thing about yourself before you even told it to yourself? So I had a hard time in school being a gay kid. So when I was a teenager, I tried to build myself in a different way. and when I got casted in this show I was 16 years old and the other day I just because with this movie people are like getting old interviews and you know like researching media like our first interview with Javier Calvo so they posted an interview I made when I was 16 and I was like how is it like to do a gay character and I was like I had to research a lot and ask people who had gone through the same thing.

25:05And it was interesting because he's a character that's so far from me. And I was like, oh. Just looking at your old self like, poor guy. I have to say. What did you have to lie? That is so beautiful that you learned through a gay character on screen who you were. Yes. Like you were discovering yourself at the same time he was playing a gay character. Right. That's amazing. That's the power of fiction in another level. Was there anything about that character, though, that helped you with that coming out, just in the dialogue and the ways that you had to embody it? I had to portray the things I've never done, but I was going to do.

25:45It was like a rehearsal of my life. Like what? Come out to my parents. To have the first kiss. Come out to my parents in a scene. So I did it for national TV. before I did it in my house, having my first kiss. I did it on the screen before doing it in my life. Even like, you know, a loose virginity, my character did it first than me. And, you know, it was like I was doing all these things from 16 to 17, 18, and then I got to do them myself. So it was less scary. I had done it before on the fiction. It is beautiful that to me it was my Uncle Carlos, but to you as Fer, the character you created, that your own self, you created a character that inspired you.

26:34I guess my gay godfather would be the writer of that show who taught me the way. Yes. Javier Ambrosi and Javier Calvo, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrosi's new film is La Bola Negra. The award-winning South Korean drama Possible Love tells the story of two very different couples who meet during the shooting of a documentary. It's the latest work directed by Yi Chang Dong, known for films like Burning and Poetry, and it's South Korea's official Oscar submission for Best International Feature. Possible Love opens in select theaters this week and begins streaming November 6th on Netflix.

27:18Our film critic Justin Chang has this review. The writer-director Yi Chang Dong, known more commonly outside Korea as Lee Changdong, belongs to a rare breed of filmmakers who have never made anything less than a great movie. Not surprisingly, there's sometimes a long wait between those movies. It's been eight years since his previous work, the chilly psychological thriller Burning. It's wonderful to have him back with a new film, Possible Love, which tells a story that's been weighing on him for some time. It was inspired by an incident from 2009, when a car factory in Korea laid off one-third of its workforce.

28:00The metal workers' union organized a strike, which was brutally shut down by police. Many of the workers subsequently took their own lives. The film, which director Yi co-wrote with Oh Jung-mi, follows a married couple two years after a similar tragedy shook their small industrial town. So Kyung-gu plays a welder named Hoseok, one of many who were laid off from a factory due to a major restructuring. He now has another metalworking job elsewhere, but the pain of his termination still lingers, and he's become an alcoholic. His wife, Mi-ok, played by Chan Do-yeon, works at a company that manufactures face masks.

28:46She's the warm-spirited glue holding the family together. They also have a young son. Early on, the couple meet a woman named Yeji, an aspiring filmmaker who's shooting a documentary about the layoffs. Yeji wants them both to appear in the film, but only Miok is game to be interviewed. She reveals a lot about her past on camera. We see flashbacks of her with her mom, who felt ashamed and even angry about their working-class roots. We also see the thrilling day that she and Hoseok first met as teenagers. Yeji shares a bit about herself, too, including how she met her very handsome, very rich, hedge fund investor-type husband.

29:31But even as the two women forge a friendship, the flow of information here is largely a one-way street. The film never lets us forget that their bond is governed by clear differences of class, wealth, and power. Yeji's kindness, genuine as it seems, is conditioned on Miok's ongoing participation in her project. At times, possible love can play like a treatise on documentary ethics. But while Yeji's methods certainly warrant critique, Director Yi sharply implicates himself as well. His gently handheld camera work sometimes blurs into Yeji's footage, making it hard to tell whose perspective we're seeing.

30:15He seems to be acknowledging that fictional and non-fictional storytelling both have their manipulations, and he's determined to do right by the real events and real issues that he draws on, possible of itself as opening the same month that its distributor, Netflix, laid off a staggering 6 % of its global workforce. There is a documentary-like quality to some of the film's most moving moments, which take place at a group counseling session for laid-off workers and their spouses. We hear them speak about the joyous early days of the strike, the sense of solidarity that they experienced before it was shut down.

30:56Yee's earlier films, like Oasis and Peppermint Candy, have often portrayed misfits and outcasts. In Possible Love, he explores a different kind of alienation, the kind that results from the rupture of a once-great community. Since its premiere at festivals earlier this fall, Possible Love has sparked a lot of comparisons to Parasite, another class-conscious Korean drama about two families. Cho Yo-jong, who played the rich wife in Parasite, is equally terrific as Yeji, the rich wife in this film. Yet the two movies are more different than they are similar. Where Parasite was a virtuoso Hitchcockian thriller, Possible Love has an almost novelistic richness and depth of character.

31:45It also has four of the year's best performances. As Yeji's husband, Cho In-sung is such a smooth mix of condescension and charm that you might not recognize him from the recent down-and-dirty monster movie, Hope. And then there are the leads, Sol Kyung-gu and Chan Do-yeon, both of whom have done some of their best work in director Yi's previous films, and who do some of their best work again here. As the depressed and drunken Hoseok, Sol gives a quietly implosive, deeply mysterious performance. He keeps revealing layers of himself through the final moments. As for his wife, Mi-ok, she's simply one of the most memorably complex characters you'll see in a movie this year.

32:32Remarkably, she hasn't given in to despair. She meets every challenge with a playful sense of mischief, and though she often gets exasperated with her husband, even the way she chides him makes clear the depths of their connection. The title of Possible Love asks whether love can survive life's difficulties. For all their deeply human foibles, Hoseok and Miyok, answer that question with a resounding yes. Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed the new South Korean film, Possible Love. Coming up, New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast and Jason Adam Katzenstein discuss their sad kitchens.

33:16I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from the UPS Store. Open this holiday to help with all your small business needs. Find a store near you at the upsstore.com. Most locations are independently owned. Products, services, pricing, and hours of operation may vary. See Center for details. This message comes from Prolon. Want to look and feel your best this fall? Prolon's 5-Day Fasting Mimicking Diet is a clinically developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass.

33:52Developed at USC's Longevity Institute, it aims to assist the body in entering a fasting-like state that helps reset metabolism, target visceral fat, and support healthy metabolic markers. Get 15 % off plus a bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com slash NPR. This message comes from Avalara Aviator. Aviator is the agent hub for tax and compliance. Herpes-built AI agents work around the clock and across business systems to help execute the work. Visit avalera.com slash aviator. Terry has our next interview. My guests are two New Yorker cartoonists, Roz Chast and Jason Adam Katzenstein, who have teamed up to reveal a shameful problem they share, their kitchens.

34:37Their new graphic memoir, The Two Saddest Kitchens, reveals it all in words and illustrations, including moldy food hiding in the back of the refrigerator, The shelf with plastic storage containers and lids, but none of the lids fit. Dysfunctional appliances and a couple of cockroach infestations. Chapter titles include The Undersink Cabinet of Doom and Our Kitchens Are Trying to Kill Us. In an era where cooking shows and food travel shows are very popular and fabulous kitchenware is prized, Chast and Katzenstein confess they don't much like to cook. The book is laugh-out-loud funny, and don't tell my kitchen, but I relate to their descriptions.

35:20Roz Chass last joined us after the publication of her graphic memoir, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant, about her changing relationship with her parents in the last years of their lives, when their physical and mental health were deteriorating. Jason Adam Katzenstein is the author of the 2020 memoir, In Words and Pictures, titled Everything is an Emergency. It's about having OCD, which was at its worst when he was growing up. Roz Chast, Jason Adam Katzenstein, welcome to Fresh Air. I want you to start with a dramatic reading from the book, kind of as if it were a play, because the book is based on dialogues between you.

35:58So if you can read the opening part, that would be great. Okay. Okay. What a disaster of a morning I've had. How was yours? A constellation of catastrophes, but I'm here. I am so relieved to be here with you and not alone in my kitchen. Usually when we get together, we discuss things like death, anxiety, scary movies, Thomas Mann, comedy, our animals. But today, all we can do is Kvetch about kitchens! It's not just about the coffee maker or cooking, although yes, I'm a cooking disaster. It's the hums and the beeps in the drawers overflowing with useless junk and chipped mugs. There's Freon tubes and rotting fruit and poisons under the sink and those impossible-to-access cabinets with dust-encrusted liqueur glasses which you will never ever use and dish towels with depressing stains.

36:56And I know the kitchen is supposed to be the heart of the home, but mine fills me with dread. And then I feel bad for feeling bad about this space that brings my friends and family comfort and joy. And then I feel lonely feeling this bad about a silly room. Sometimes when I think about super fancy Martha Stewart iced kitchens with their giant stoves and refrigerators, each costing as much as a house, and zillions of dishes and pots and pans and islands everywhere and a special precious sink just for washing scallions or whatever, and seasonal linens and everything is new, I start to feel upset.

37:34I can hear the voices of my lefty grandfathers. This is capitalism. Run amok. Nobody should have a hundred dish towels, and when some people do not even have one dish towel. On the other hand, admittedly, I'm a 34-year-old man who lives alone, but I do think I could probably splurge on having more than three bowls, zero plates, and one cheap, scary pan. I'm pretty tidy and minimalist. If you saw my kitchen, you'd probably think, cute, unassuming Brooklyn situation. But start opening up cabinets, the fridge, ask a few questions about what I cook and eat. Beyond this lies only madness. Thank you both for reading that.

38:18That's really great. Did you have to overcome shame and embarrassment to write about how pathetic your kitchens are? I think that the kitchen thing for me tipped more over into funny. I mean, there's always, when you're writing about personal stuff, an aspect of embarrassment. But at this point, I feel like revealing anything that's personal probably comes with some degree of embarrassment. So it's just like, how much can you handle? And even without revealing anything, just in general, there's like a low level of embarrassment just any time I leave the house or open my mouth. Great. Yeah, and I've always found that the things that I want to run away from making work about are the things that I most need to make work about, or the things that are actually going to be interesting to explore.

39:16So have you each been in each other's homes, and can you vouch for each other's honesty about your kitchens? I have not been in Jason's kitchen yet. I was in your kitchen yesterday. Yes. And I think that had we not made this book and were I a stranger entering your kitchen, I would think, what a lovely kitchen. I think that one thing that we discovered in making this book is that a lot of the sadness and the scariness lurks inside the drawers, in the back of the fridge, underneath. Yes. The facades are often not that scary, and your kitchen looks very cheerful to me. Yes, I would say it's worn.

40:03It's not depressing when you walk in, but behind the scenes, it's really pretty chaotic. We did not look at the cabinet above the refrigerator where, you know, that's definitely one of the hearts of darkness up there. What is the part of your kitchen that you don't want people to see, that you most don't want people to see, that you would be most embarrassed by? I think inside the refrigerator is pretty bad. You know what's terrible? I just realized I'm a little bit replicating my parents' refrigerator. I don't think Freud wrote too much about this, but my parents in their refrigerator had this plastic bin that they called a cheese-tainer.

40:51My mother made up this word. And all of the—if she bought, like, cheese and stuff—my father liked cheese, so there's always, like, different kinds of cheeses. And all the cheeses would sort of go into this plastic bin. And the worst part about this bin is that they had it for about at least 30 years. So over the years, it was plastic and it would crack. And my mother, instead of buying a new one, she would fix it with masking tape. And there were places that were like patched and overpatched and overpatched, like decades worth of masking tape patches. And why she didn't think like maybe it's time to buy a new cheese tainer bin.

41:38This is a mystery to me. But I see that I have now in our fridge, we have a plastic bin that is this sort of repository now of things that I'm afraid if I put on a shelf are going to like either fall behind the shelf. And that is the stuff that falls behind shelves and then like slips down the back of the refrigerator and then sometimes like gets half buried beneath the like fruit and vegetable drawers. That's just some sort of sadness that you don't really want to think too much about. And I don't want to deal with it. I don't want to clean it. I have so many other things I want to do. Yeah, time is the enemy of a clean refrigerator for sure.

42:24Yeah. Jason, what would you like to confess to about the most embarrassing part of your kitchen? Well, I think it's the cabinets that I use for non-kitchen related storage. The junk drawer? The junk drawer, but also underneath the sink, I have all of my loose comic books. That's the only place that they fit. So it's that and it's inside the oven where I've stored all of the pots and pans that I don't use. But it's the fact that I use so much of it for storage. And when I say storage, I mean put things that I'm not ever going to look at and I just can't look at. And so I just, you know, you put them in the drawers that are too high up or too low down or just the ones that you don't want to open anymore.

43:15So when you have food that has expired, including milk, and I'm sure that this has happened to you a lot, judging from your book, do you taste it, smell it, and do you pour it down the sink or the toilet? I don't taste it, but sometimes I make my husband smell things. And sometimes I do make him taste things. The same way that if I think a plug is maybe bad or a burner on the stove and I'm afraid of turning it on, this is really bad. I'll make him sort of try it. He'll say, if you think the stove is going to explode, why are you making me turn it on? And I can't really answer that. If you're in a position where you're choosing between do I taste this or pour it down the toilet, you should probably pour it down the toilet.

44:18I deal with a third thing, which is I just leave it. I say I'll get to this later and later never comes. I do have a completely empty thing of oat milk in my fridge, but it expires on my birthday and I feel kind of sentimental about it.

44:37Do you know what I hate when I'm trying to figure out if something that's like canned or in one of those like carton kind of things, you know, like a broth? I'm trying to see if it's expired. and the expiration date is sometimes totally invisible. You have to hunt and hunt to find it. Does that get on your nerves? Oh, yeah. It's like leftover roulette.

45:03That's kind of profound to me. Don't we all just have expiration dates that we can't quite see? Yes, or that we don't want to see. Yeah, when we did our chapter on expiration dates, we went so quickly to death. Yes, yes. I think they're really kind of a kiss and cousins, you might say. In the book, it's mentioned mugs that are stained inside. And I have that problem with my white mugs, and I always try to figure out, is it from my teapot? Is my teapot getting, like, rusty? Is it from grains from my filter? What is it? Whatever it is, it's probably fatal. Yeah. I would throw those away. We have that too.

45:50You have it too? Yeah. I don't want to throw them away though. I like them. But I do worry about poisoning myself. Very slow. Slow poisoning. Yeah. That's good, right? Oh, yeah. It'll catch up with everything else. It'll be listed like number 47 on cause of death. It's so true. Yeah. There are so many things that you have to worry about even more. Yeah. So just kind of file it away. Did your parents or grandparents cook, and did they cook well? Was the food good? My mother is an amazing cook. Really? Yes. She loves it. She doesn't follow recipes, and she cooked dinner every night when we were growing up, and it is her happy place.

46:35It is calming for her. and all of my siblings are great cooks and I don't know what happened to me. I became a cartoonist instead. And Raz, what about you? My mother did not cook. I don't think she enjoyed it. I think she saw it as yet one more boring thing that she had to do to keep my father and me from dying of starvation. And, yeah, she didn't take any real delight in it, and she wasn't particularly good at it. And I never saw my father cook anything, so I never even saw him make toast. He boiled water. Even though he was afraid of hot liquids? No, he was afraid of cold liquids. Oh, yes. Sorry, sorry.

47:28Yeah, anything that was like, you know, directly out of it. He would boil a little bit of water so he could kill the chill of something like juice that came from the refrigerator. Because in his universe, if you drank something straight from the refrigerator, you might as well, you know, be jumping off, you know, the top of Mount Everest. Jason, you live alone. And Roz, you lived alone for a few years. Yes. In an apartment where you could only cook on a hot plate. That sounds bad. Oh, yeah. When you live alone or when you lived alone, did you feel like it's not worth it to cook? It's just me. Yes.

48:06Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have an apartment, a little studio apartment in the city now, and I'm there a lot. And I've never used my stove. Yeah, I have a kitchenette. My kitchen is in my living room, and I live alone, but I love, you know, yogurts and fruits, and I like to do scrounging. I scrounge more than I cook. Have you cleaned out your kitchens since publishing the book? Nope. No. Is that because you want to be true to the nature of your book or because you can't be bothered? There's just so many more interesting things to do. Yeah. I think we made the book because we're really like this. So you're both friends and you're both New Yorker cartoonists.

49:08Are you competitors too? The New Yorker has a lot of cartoons, but it's limited space. There's a lot of cartoonists who do things for The New Yorker. So can you talk about being friends and maybe also competitors? I think Linda Barry said that cartooning was a very rickety profession. and I think in many ways it feels like we're all in the same boat that we're the cartoonists at The New Yorker, the young ones, the old ones. We're doing this because we love to do it because or at the very least it feels worse to not do it than it does to do it because it's not always like the most fun thing when you're having a day where you don't feel inspired, when you don't feel funny, then it's just awful.

50:06But to not work feels worse than working. And I feel like everybody I know who's a cartoonist, we're all in the same boat in a way that there are so few markets for cartoons. I don't know. It's almost past the point of being competitive because it's like we're competing in a profession where nobody is going to be like super successful or some kind of thing. We're doing this because we want to do it. So Jason, you read in your memoir, I want to be with friends who want to make things with me. And the book that you, Jason, and you, Roz, have collaborated on together about your kitchens, that's exactly what you were asking for, Jason.

51:01I know. I feel so lucky to get to work on this with you, to get to have made this book. It really is, to me, when I read it, it's the story of a friendship. Yeah, I think that's for me too. I mean, it's a collaboration, which is what a friendship is. It is a kind of collaboration. And I also, you know, I wanted to rise to your level. Like when you would make a drawing that was hilarious or exciting to me, then, you know, it was like, well, let me make something that'll make Roz laugh. And it's such a solitary profession. And so to be able to do it collaboratively and to have somebody else that you're showing the work to makes something that is often lonely turn into something that is really joyful.

51:51And it's the most that art making has ever felt to me like a conversation. Well, thank you for the book. It brightened my day. And thank you for coming on Fresh Air. I really enjoyed talking with you both. Thank you. Thank you, Terry. Thanks for having us on your show. It's really great to talk to you again. Yeah, this was wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Roz Chast and Jason Adam Katzenstein are New Yorker cartoonists and author of the new graphic memoir, The Two Saddest Kitchens. They spoke with Terry Gross. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger.

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