Marc Maron's Mainstream Moment
Marc Maron is telling me about his New York City day. He lived here, on and off, for nearly 30 years, before settling in Los Angeles in 2009, where he hosts his podcast, WTF With Marc Maron, out of his garage. Back in the city briefly, to do press for the Netflix series GLOW, he indulged in some local favorites: the Whitney Museum; an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in the West Village—one of the first he attended 20 years ago; a slice of pizza at Joe’s on Carmine Street; and lox and bagels at Russ & Daughters, where he jotted down an idea for a new bit.
“As a Jew, sometimes you just spend the day smelling like fish and onions,” he says, offering one of the grins—almost a grimace—that punctuates his funny observation. “It’s part of our history. It’s part of our culture. Some days, we’re just going to smell like fish and onions.”
Does he feel more Jewy in New York? “Sure, definitely,” he says, and he misses the city, but he doesn’t want to live here anymore. L.A. traffic drives him nuts (“It makes you not want to go anywhere”), but he loves living in a house. “So you build a life where you live.…You have to love your house. That’s a rare possibility in New York. The idea of loving your apartment? Back when I lived here, you wanted to spend as much time as possible away from it.”
We’ve met in the restaurant of the Ludlow Hotel, on the quickly gentrifying Lower East Side. He points through the window, across the road, to another hotel: “That’s where the Luna Lounge used to be.” Between 1995 and 2005, the bar’s legendary back room became a sanctuary for fans of indie rock (the Strokes and Interpol played their first shows there) and alternative comedy. For eight bucks every Monday, you could catch the likes of Maron, Janeane Garofalo, Sarah Silverman, Patton Oswalt, Louis C.K. or Dave Chappelle. “I spent a lot of time on this street,” says
