ham fisted theatrics

The questions that matter: Who gave Hot Hot Heat permission to become Eve 6? Their first album was kicky and jaunty and fun. The two songs I've heard off their second album bear not a passing resemblance to...well, Eve 6. And I don't have to tell you why that sucks, Consumer.


I think it's funny that on Friday night Rina turns to me at Chipoltle and goes, "Are you dating a rockstar's daughter?" referring to this entry No, I said, that was a short story. Apparently she even went so far as to google the fake New York Times quote. Before I had to, Dominic explained to her one of the somewhat unspoken cardinal rules around here: Everything in italics is made-up. A story or a poem, or, for a brief and shameful period, an acrostic where a word like COURAGE or ENDURANCE would be broken down into a bunch of other words that started with the letters from the initial word.

Oh, shit, what if I write Everything in italics is made-up. Now y'all don't know what to think. I am on some serious Escher painting blog meta-mindfucks right now.

Anyway, I should've deadpanned it and said yes, I am fucking something that came out of Mick Jagger or Bowie. A dude probably could have gotten himself linked on Gothamist.

I like the idea that even if I was, as I so elegantly put it, "fucking something that came out of Mick Jagger or Bowie," I'd write about it on here. I actually just contemplated writing about something as innocuous as flirting this weekend, and then I though nah, real bad boys move in silence and violence. (All my guiding maxims are taken from hip hop songs, despite the fact that most of the advice doesn't scale to situations that come up with my life. I have needlessly shot so many sarcastic librarians and girls in front of me in line in the dining hall who take too long ordering sandwiches with nothing in them.) (Seriously, though. There ARE rules to this shit. Industry people ARE shady. You SHOULD love it way more than you hate it. And most importantly, if you actin' mannish, I CAN find another ho.)

Speaking of Rina, her and Gregor could've taken me to a party tonight that started on a boat and ended up on a private island, but Gregor and I are too big of comedy nerds and saw Mike Myers at the UCBT's Inside Joke instead. Actually, I had to be there for a meeting anyway. I encouraged Gregor to go to the boat party. I mean, seriously. A private island. That is an opportunity for some serious Gatsby moments. A dude could really ponder the emptiness of the glamor and everything around him while staring into Long Island Sound, and simultaneously get twisty on top-shelf liquor someone else paid for.

Anyway, Mike Myers was ridiculous and inspiring. Inside Joke is an interview show about the art of comedy, and he talked at length about improvisation, studying under Del Close, SNL, being superfamous, and living in New York ("It's really kind of great, isn't it?" he said, which got rousing applause even though today was probably the least pleasant day to be a New Yorker all year by way of gawdawful hellmouth humidity. And I'm not saying the applause was unearned; rather, he nailed it. We are determined to enjoy ourselves.) He made making people laugh seem like a noble avocation, which it is, though it's easy to forget that sometimes. And one of the ceiling pipes dripped on him, which I guess is the UCB equivalent of saying "Lincoln slept here." Now instead of being grossed out by getting facialed by air conditioner fluid like I was last week, I can just think of it as communing with the comedy titans. Yea.

This segues poorly into something I wrote about last night only to have it accidentally deleted. Now it's apropros of nothing except the weirdness of this life we've picked out and how this portrait typifies it:


Me and Steve are backstage at the Dirtiest Sketch in NYC Competition at midnight on Saturday. Actually by now it's like 1:15 and we (Hammerkatz) have already done both our sketches: one involved me and Matt as very actor-y actors overdubbing the voices for a horrific anime rape scene, the other, Liam and Noel Gallagher of Oasis fucking beneath an afghan, then Richard Nixon fisting a headless baby's neckhole, then Richard Nixon fisting Liam and Noel Gallagher of Oasis beneath an Afghan while a headless baby looks on in horror, and me at a desk, in a blazer that wasn't mine, smoking, acting hardboiled, and narrating the whole sordid business. Yea, it's called the Dirtiest Sketch Competition. UCBT is renowned for its smart comedy. Dirtiest is the theater's Id. Gross but entirely neccessary.

So now Steve and I are doing tech for Gil's sketch, and by "doing tech" I mean pouring various fluids into a beer-bong like contraption rigged, out of sight of the audience, to Gil's pants, to pour out of the fairly convincing fake penis he's made out of the end of the tube and some masking tape. We have our shirts off, not wanting to get apple juice (urine) or Hawaiian punch (blood) or milk or anything else on them. Right before the sketch starts, Steve says: "Three hours ago, I was doing Shakespeare." And he was.

When I wrote this yesterday, it ended rather dourly, with a quote I'm always reminded of when some moment in the comedy scene is particularly surreal, like I'm in the drugstore pondering which handsoap would make the best fake loads (serioulsy, if you have a suggestion, leave it in the comments, I have to do the sketch again tommorrow.) It's something Paul Newman rumbles in The Road To Perdition:

This is the life we chose, the life we lead. And there is only one guarantee: none of us will see heaven.

And to some extent I think that's true, in a tongue-in-cheek way. The die is cast. We have caught a magnificent disease. But, in part due to the rousing Myers interview, I feel like an evening spent doing disgusting, weird bits in a leaky basement underneath a supermarket all in the name of making people laugh is more valuable, and more viable, than a thousand straight-faced productions of "Hey What If Uncle Vanya Took Place In The Belly of A Whale And Was Read Backwards" by the Please Take Us As Seriously As We Take Oursleves Players. Thousands of people every night in New York City, and millions around the world, go to see bad Legitimate Theater and pretend to like it because they think it makes them Right-Thinking People. But you can't pretend to like a comedy. If you don't laugh, you just don't laugh. There's no bullshit, just instant, honest feedback. So no, we don't get written about at length in the Times and we're not capital-I Important. But at our best, and I mean the community at large, we are fucking funny.

And I can potentially be happy forever if I can stay convinced it's a noble thing to be.