Del Close was cool as usual. Not the kid-on-Christmas feeling of years past, necessarily. But I worked a bunch and made some money. I didn't see that many shows but what I did see I enjoyed. Most years I'm completely burned out on improv for a week or so afterward but I think not OD'ing on shows prevented that and I'm actually pretty geeked about longform, the community, and life in general right now. Economic downturns are a bummer in just about every way but they've always been kind to New York art scenes. I'm gonna invest in leather jackets and European girlfriends with hard-to-pronounce names.

Also I haven't DJ-ed a UCB dance party in a minute and that was something else I was fairly burned out on that I completely fell in love with again last night. There was wrestling that broke up the nascent dance-floor so I took the opportunity to circulate and drink and when I came back the fights were tailing off and the upshot of everybody being on the stage already meant that people didn't have to make the decision to cross from the dark to the dancefloor, they were already there, so it was way easier to get them to stick around and move their nerd-bodies. Appel and Purnell were in the booth for a while, my UCB DJ godfathers, and that was fun. I played some new stuff and some soul and it all went over really well and it's always cool to have the whole North American longform improv scene in one place shaking they asses.

Also I get why people play house music now: the songs fade real easy into one another. Not to be reductive or anything.

Also also: Ne-Yo's "Closer" is fierce! Who knew he would end up being straight awesome?

Oh inDEED.

The 10th Del Close Marathon begins in a few hours. I will be up in the following shows:

What Would Jesus Freeze?

DERRICK

DeCoster

The Del Close Marathon is two days and change of continuous improv on many stages. In addition to improvising, I will be working the back-room performers-only bar. Upon the advice of fellow bartender Margot, who has worked that bar many times in years past, I will be wearing something sheer and revealing and will bring a big Snickers bar back with me, because "halfway through your shift you'll remember you have it, and it really does satisfy!"

Forward, into debauchery!

Dude, Infinite Jest, you guys.

Infinite Jest is a long fuckin' book.

What you need to know about me is, I like to read a lot of books. This is, on the one hand, because I like reading, and I like stories, and I like going to the library, and I like the comfort of having a book I'm working through in my backpack to crack at odd intervals in the day when I have nothing else going on. I like to read at meals. I like to read on the subway. I like to read.

On the other hand, I like to read a LOT of books. As in, fast. As in, not just for my own enjoyment, but for the sheer conquest of it. Totally divorced from their actual content, I like to get a big stack of books from the library and plow through them. Do not bring me on vacation and expect me to do anything but sit by the nearest body of water and please myself with what great time I'm making, page-count-wise, as I do nothing but read all day. I obviously love what's between the covers, but on the other end of my personality, opposite the literary smarty-pants end, is a caveman who takes pleasure only in conquest and quantity. I like a body-count. (I think this might be a vestige of the BOOK IT! program, an elementary school attempt at literacy-boosting where you got free pizza if you read a lot of books fast. We also had a local Arizona variant called "Hoop Marks," whose prize-system was based on bookmarks with pictures of the Phoenix Suns Gorilla. Maybe I blow through a mean stack of Queens Public Library-issue hardcovers because I am subconsciously expecting the Gorilla to burst through the wall with some Pizza Hut.)

This tendency is way more pronounced in summertime. In winter, you might convince me to settle in for an eight-hundred page biography or many-thousand page historical-science-fiction epic (I see you, Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle!"). But in summer, with its ample opportunities to read-for-the-sake-of-reading in the park, and the ever-present threat of the beach, I want to be clocking through books as though it's my job.

Returning from the movie, when I read maybe a book and a third in two and a half months, I was all ready to make up for lost time, an insane and more or less impossible book a day is what I promised myself.

That is why it was really dumb of me to check out Infinite Jest.

Infinite Jest is a long book, you guys. No one you ever talk to about it will end their first sentence describing it without, somewhere in there, mentioning its length. And while as books, and even novels go, it's not the longest (my copy was 981 pages), it's dense as fuck and there are a whole mess of footnotes you actually need to, then end up wanting to, read.

Also, it's really good. Really infuriatingly good if you're a writer. Dude (David Foster Wallace) introduces a whole mess of characters and themes and a whole alternate-future-history-of-America and hops around in time and slips in and out of narrator-voices effortlessly and is basically a big barnstorming show-off about what a great novelist he is. Not even just a great writer, a great NOVELIST, with all the connotations of length and depth and character development and ornamentation the word "Novel" implies. It's funny and balls-smart. It made me wish I'd gone to college for about five different things I didn't go to college for in the course of the book. I get the impression that it's sort of a douche-y or cliche book to be into or to be seen reading, but as a guy who once got practically laughed out of a Creative Writing class for repping "Catcher In The Rye," I will attest that some times books get that reputation for a reason: they actually are quite good and a lot of douches get attracted to the flame of genuine awesomeness, and then a lot of other douches stay away from the resulting douche-cloud because they don't want to look like, y'know, douches.

And it is genuinely awesome. Also, reading it was sort of like being in a month-long relationship. We had our period of feeling each other out, then being absolutely smitten, then getting commitment-phobic about half-way through, like, "I know you're great, but there are a lot of other books out there I could be reading right now," then it being over and already reflecting on the good times like, "I wanted to be free of you so badly but now that you're gone I can't help but think of all the impossibly rich detail and hilarious anecdotes you contained, or the way you nailed dialects and were just generally infuriatingly well-wrought in about every way, and the way you made me feel like a shittier writer but made me want to be a better one. Also you said some pretty beautiful things about irony and how it's a lot like poison sometimes, and you said some pretty beautiful things about a ton of other stuff too."

So now I am book-single, and rebounding with a Phillip K Dick joint. I also have a Neal Stephenson piece (Snow Crash, which I'm re-reading, and if I remember correctly, will also make me feel like a WAY crappier writer by comparison) and a non-fiction deal about "stop snitching" culture lined up. I have promised my caveman side to spend the remains of the summer that aren't spent on work positively annihilating two-and-three-hundred-pagers, sitting in the sun, waiting for my pizza.

I just received a Facebook message from someone I guess I sort of know telling me to vote for Nader in 2008.

Throwing your weight behind Nader in '08 seems kind of like being at the airport when the Beatles are disembarking the plane in the first moments of their first American visit and, instead of joining the screaming, passionate crowd, standing on a smaller runway nearby and clapping as a British men's choir climbs out of a zeppelin.

It's like, hey, I get it, you're different, but motherfuckers are trying to change the world over here.

I'm back in New York after two and a half months in New Hampshire doing the Derrick movie. I am psyched! I came back and there was immediately a new Pixar movie and the Lil Wayne album I hadn't really listened to in earnest, and a whole city of food that isn't catering or D'angelo (Northeast staple sandwich place that is actually pretty awesome, but significantly less awesome when you have it almost every day for two months and change). There are friends and parties and every person on the street looks amazing.

I was warned by everyone who knows that immediately after doing a movie you come home and get epically sick. I haven't gotten sick in any easily identifiable way, I more just have this vague trembly-all-over thing and a general feeling of malaise, like the subject of a Radiohead song. It basically feels like I should be wearing an over-sized sweater and scurrying through the streets of a bleak European city-wasteland, but it's summer in New York, so I feel like a shivering sickly weirdo at a 24-hour all-city block party. It's really going to be very nice once I get back in the swing of things.

The movie went really well. We did it! Well, the shooting part of it, anyway. Now there's the whole post-production process. But we are very proud of it so far and cannot wait to show it to people when it's ready.

People were honking car horns and singing songs two blocks from my apartment continuously for, no joke, two hours straight. I wanted to go see what the deal was, but it was pissing rain. So I just stayed inside and pondered when I would stop feeling like a shaky malnourished shut-in, which is a stupid thing to ponder when you have shut yourself in and not fed yourself all day.

But it isn't raining anymore so I'm going to go get a burrito and see a movie.

Speaking of movies: "Wall-E" is an unfair movie. I never had a chance of not liking it. Post-apocalyptic wasteland? Adorable robot? Old musicals? Pixar? Fuck me. It practically put a gun of quality in my face and said "love me" and I had no choice but to comply.