Monday, September 29, 2003  

Like Lucy and Ricky, Only With More Rock!

Jeniphir and I just had a five minute argument over whether or not Lucinda Williams looks like Tom Petty.

I think the answer is obvious.

Serious Bag Contender

I may have found my bag:

The Dutyman Ballistic War Bag

Anything with a "helmet pouch" has got to make some yuppies cry.

Muddy River Roundup

Great time in Portsmouth last night (note: that's the first time those words have ever been used together). The place was small but filled with people there to see a comedy show. Max Pelke got 'em going, but then Tony Moschetto brought the magic of the Swedish bum and the show was really off and running. I love following Tony...he gets them opened up and ready for anything. I had a strong set, lots of crowdwork. Sold a few CDs.

Stayed until well past closing, and had, no lie, fried pickles, which, as it turns out, were delicious and spicy. Drank some free beer, hung out with some very cool people (Moschetto, new comic Leslie Downs, and a philosopy student/writer/bartender who was a hoot and a half). Just enough debauchery to make me feel young and relevent, but nowhere near enough to make me do anything untoward for a married guy. Listened to the Folk Singer bit on the house system and smoked some Kentucky Cheroots while I talked Steinbeck and the writers journey with the philosopher and Tony spun his web of seduction (note: as of this writing, I have no idea how successfully spun it was). Woke up with a mouth that tastes like I felched the garbage monster in Star Wars.

Also, I don't know if it was the pickles or the cigar, but I had some crazily erotic dreams about my wife alternately making out with a redhead chick and me last night. What kind of weird phallic calculus is that? How do a pickle and a cigar combine into hot girl/girl action? By all rights, I should have dreamed some sort of Jeff Stryker motif.

Gigging

Heading out the door for the Muddy River Smokehouse in Portsmouth, NH. Working with the ever brilliant Tony Moschetto and have the whole house to myself tonight. I'm thinking a little comedy, a little whiskey (AFTER I get home, Ross, it's okay), and some Big Lebowski.

Now if only I could skip the comedy part, it would be a perfect night...

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...That's the Stuff

And Shoutcast provides my Pixies fix.

Hicks v. Leary; Leary v. Rogan

First, a big thank you to the mystery guest who emailed me the MP3 of the Stern show where they compared Leary and Hicks back to back. Information wants to be free! (Note: yes, I see the irony in using a questionably copied and distributed sound clip as a launching pad to decry joke theivery, so you don't need to point it out).

So straight out: Leary's a goddamn thief. Not only is it crystal clear, but it's taken as a given throughout comedy, most enthusiastically here in Boston where he cut his comedy chops. A certain well-known headliner was tremendously ripped off by Leary back during the No Cure For Cancer days (said headliner actually buried the hatchet with Leary about a week before Rogan went public with all this; how's that for bad timing?). The bits aren't word for word, though they're all close enough that I think a comic in a club would get a talking to. More than that, Leary's No Cure stuff is so obviously Hicks-as-interpreted-by-the-Boston-style. It's chemical, man: Hicks + Boston Comedy = Leary. Hicks was wry and ironic, but Leary Bostonized it and made it in your face and high energy and devoid of soul. And that's pretty much Boston comedy, kids. High on craft, short on oomph. The general word is that Leary left doing one act, went to London, where Hicks was huge, and came back doing his No Cure Shtick. The timing is what's most suspect.

So it's axiomatic. Leary's a thief, and I'm glad he helps firefighters and Cam Neely and whatever other causes he supports, but he stole the jokes that made him famous, so frankly, fuck him.

My respect for Rogan, however, has shot through the roof. I've always dug him, but by god, he took the chance to call Leary out and get Hicks a little of the public vindication he always deserved, even Stern's handling of it was pretty anticlimactic.

Leary's an idiot to try to call Rogan out, by the way. Rogan's a world-class kickboxer and he studies Brazilian Ju Jitsu with the Gracies; Leary's two-pack-a-day habit would seem like a real poor choice real fast. It'd be like Faces of Death.

No Joke

I'm serious! If someone doesn't email me an MP3 of Debaser right goddamn now, I cannot be held responsible for my actions.

Where Is My Mind?

Why do I have such a jones for the Pixies right now?

Doom 3

Oof! Penny Arcade's Gabe on Doom III:

Every time I see a new screenshot from Doom 3 I chuckle. I just canâ??t help it. I mean these have to be some of the most uninspired creature designs ever. The idea is that youâ??re fighting monsters from Hell but the best the devil or whatever can come up with is a skeleton with guns on his shoulders. Itâ??s like the devil is a 7th grader who hates his mom and draws pentagrams on his notebooks during intro to physical science.

More Bags, More Bags, More Bags

Amanda and TC have both steered me towards Timbuk2's make-your-own bag thing, which is admittedly pretty cool, though I haven't been able to put anything together that out-rads the Vagrant.

I will tell you this, though, if I owned a decent laptop (and I don't...my current model is a P100 IBM that weighs approximately four hundred pounds and has a screen the size of postage stamp), I'd be all over this.

Goddamn, I Hate Colleges

Pain in the ass show last night at Northeastern, which is generally a fun place to play. Club did no advertising (none...not even stupidass homemade flyers) and drew 9 people, who were real sports, but that still doesn't change a real comedy truism: performing for 9 people blow-diddly-ows. Add to that the party of 5 who showed up haflway through the show and plopped down in the back of the room, turned on the Red Sox game, and started yakking about whatever it is 18-year olds who couldn't get into a better school yak about. After a couple polite, "Uh, dudes...could ya...you know...not talk during the show"'s, I finally snapped when the kid in question said, "Look, we want smoothies. And they won't run the blender while you're on stage, so could you hurry up?" And my world went red. I mean, I remember being an 18-year old douchebag myself, but I don't think I'd ever have been that public a cocksucker for the sake of a speedy smoothie.

So I tell the bartender, "You can run the blender all you want, if it'll shut these fuckers up. Hell, pull the fire alarm...actually, yeah, I'm begging you, pull the fire alarm and we can all go home." So I look at the kid and go, "Better?" And he looks at me like I'm a wet food stamp. You know, that look that only a real spoiled white kid can give you? Like you're the butler and your gloves aren't up to snuff? And he goes, "Pfffft. Hardly."

Ordinarily, at this point, I'd unleash hell, but it's a college, and they never really get these sorts of things. Management, that is. In a bar or a club, I could bury the guy while the crowd egged me on like the onlookers in The Accused, and 99 times out of a 100, management would back me up and buy me a beer. But in a college, the crowd will wince like scared puppies and management will disavow you in a heartbeat. Plus, the guy who books the room, and who I like, and who gives me a shitload of work, was there, and I didn't want to queer his relationship with the club. So after a little spluttering while I reigned in The Beast (my temper), I settled for offering a free CD to anyone who would kick the kid in the balls for me and limped to the end of my set, feeling every bit like the hired help. Can I just have one job, day or night, where I'm not shit upon by rich kids? Is that too much to ask?

P.S. The offer for a free CD still stands. His name's Brendon, and he's an adenoidal pale little fucker. One CD for every nut shot. Photographic evidence required.

Happy Phrase: Kazaa SUES (Not "Sued")

Via GrepLaw:

Kazaa proprietor Sharman Networks has filed antitrust charges against record labels and Hollywood studios. In a new lawsuit, Sharman Networks claims 'record labels and movie studios have conspired to drive Sharman Networks out of business in order to monopolize digital distribution'.

Looks like I'm not the only one who thinks corporate media's looking at the long term.

Bag Redux

Thanks to Randbot and Amanda, both of whom sent me good suggestions on finding a new bag. Randy's advice tended towards the hippie and practical, Amanda's was a touch more cyber. And I will take both under due consideration, but I want to stress that I am looking for the Perfect Bag.

When I flash this sumbitch, I want marketing executives to find Jesus and day traders to join the Peace Corps. I want a bag so goddamn cool I'll find several pairs of anonymous panties stuffed into it each and every day. I want a bag so crazily hip Neal Stephenson will make it a character in his next book.

It doesn't have to be a messenger bag. It could be a Russian infantry bag, or a Japanese pizza delivery pack, or a Zapatista laptop pouch. I don't even know if any of those exist. But that's the level of universal badassedness I want this bag to possess.

I shall continue the search.

The Quest for the Perfect Bag

My trusty old messenger bag is about to give up the ghost. I washed it this weekend because there was something in it that bled brown gunk onto my pants whenever it got a little bit wet. Well, it ain't bleeding goo anymore, but the fabric got pretty shredded, and though I've ordered a kicky li'l CKY patch from eBay to cover up the worst hole, I'm afraid I'm going to have to get a new one. I feel like I'm about to break up with a girlfriend just because she's put on some weight (though I guess to keep the metaphor as close to reality as possible, I'm breaking up with "her" because she suffered horrible facial scarring in my washing machine).

Prior to this, I had what I thought was the Bag to End All Bags. It was WWII ammo bag I'd got from a crazy store in Cody, Wyoming, screenprinted with an elaborate mandala of some sort. It had pockets like crazy and survived more than one washing, unlike SOME BAGS I COULD MENTION.

So being a good little cybershopper, I bang open eBay, search for "messenger bags," and am confronted with words I never thought I'd see in such a circumstance: Prada, Versache, Abercrombie, Gap. What??? Just when did this yuppification occur? Serves me right for ignoring other people on the bus; I missed the latest casualty of the eternal Ruination of All Things Cool. (Note: I'm aware that my righteous indignation over the compromising of the cool factor of messenger bags is diminished somewhat by the fact that I've never actually been a bike messenger my own self. But...Prada???)

So I want a bag that's cool enough to counterbalance the discomfort I may feel standing next to some tweedy bastard on the T carrying a messenger bag of his own. So far, the number one contender is this bad boy from Chrome, but I anticipate this being an arduous selection process, because I intend to strike a blow against all yuppiekind with the coolness of my bag. I want it to be so cool that the simple act of opening it up to grab my notebook will cause spontaneous laptop explosions in all Starbucks within a one-mile radius (that's approximately 75 Starbucks).

Any pointers, ideas, directions, suggestions on where to find The Bag would be greatly appreciated.

Pattern Recognition

I just finished reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, ostensibly for the first meeting of the Grand High Council book club (as someone pointed out, if you're creating a book club from members of your email list about a nerd-centric comedy show, you are through the looking glass), and I cannot adequately describe how overwhelmed I am with how Goddamned Good it is.

Gibson's always one of my favorites; he's one of those rare gifted writers who can pack such despair and loneliness into a sentence that I'm nearly breathless after every page, and he can do it while weaving one hell of a good yarn, to boot. I've always considered him to be an evolution of Dashiell Hammett, and he continues to write grindingly stark hard-boiled fiction with an added layer of soul and depth.

But this book is on a completely different level, both in terms of craftsmanship and of theme, which, let it be said, is a complex and heartrending exploration of art and soul and money in a techno-literate world.

I'm not going to turn my blog into a book report, but let me just get this out of my head: what I noticed most is that Gibson's still writing pretty much the same kind of story he always did, but somewhere in the last 15 years or so, the world's caught up to his imagination. This story's filled with the same archetypes he's used since Neuromancer, but instead of "console cowboys" and Yakuza types, he's got Google and the Russian mob, filling the same niche in the story, but being, obviously ever more plausible, because, well, they've finally gotten here, thankfully in time for him to write this book.

He's the kind of writer that at once inspires me equally to begin pouring words into my notebook and to throw my hands up in despair because I will never, EVER, be that good.

I'm just saying that the next Neal Stephenson fan who chats me up is going to get an earful about who's REALLY the alpha dog writer.

The Joys of Toddlerhood

Jude is currently furious with me because I wouldn't let him sleep with a jar of salsa in his crib.

Because I'm the Cheapest Motherfucker on the Planet

Does anyone out there have a copy of Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction, a Guide to Narrative Craft they'd be willing to let me borrow for a semester? I'm taking a short fiction writing class at Harvard Extension School, mostly because since I work at Harvard, I get classes for 40 bucks and to not take one would be wasteful and retarded.

I can't quite bring myself to spend more on the textbook than on the class, however, so I'm holding out my digital tin cup in case any of my fellow creative types would like to hook me up. I can trade CD's and stage time, if anyone wants 'em.

Comedy Studio Wrapup

Great show at the Comedy Studio last night. Typical for the Studio -- fantastic lineup, and absolutely no crowd. Can't quite seem to get any traction there these days. Last night's show was as good as we've had, even without the benefit of Walters' wang.¹. I was especially pleased with my opening set. Freestyled 15 minutes of stuff I hadn't planned on ever doing onstage. It was one of those rare nights where I pulled that off without being (a) self-indulgent or (b) unfunny. A little of the stuff was one-shot: it won't ever work if I'm consciously trying to make it a bit. But at least one little chunk should be usable.

The rest of the gang came to play as well. Abe Smith, who I've really come to like, was hilarious, and Dan Sulman caught the stream-of-consciousness bug and riffed a little bit on watching Scarface as a 12-year old kid. Brendon Small was in town, brushing up for Aspen. He's sporting some weird new American Chopper-esque moustache and mutton chops, but is still a bona-fide Funny Motherfucker.


¹The spread of the Reuters story seems to have slowed, but Sam forwarded me this email [cursing at me for getting him into this has been excised]:

Hello Sam,

My name is Marc Fellhauer and I am the producer of the Drew and Mike show on WRIF in Detroit. I just read a story about your stand up routine last Thursday in Cambridge when you exposed yourself. I was wondering if you would be interested in talking on the air about your unique comedy. Actually, we find it very funny. I can be reached via this email or at xxx-xxx-5608.

Thanks and I hope to hear from you,

marc

Is it me, or does anyone else smell a setup here? I'm going to try to talk him into doing it but have a contingency plan in place in case they sandbag him.

Power to the People!

Ha! Had to pass this along:

The Strange Habts of Gas Pumpers

Sometimes, I Don't Hate My Day Job

Sure, being a total lackey at Harvard Law School is a lot like being a medieval serf, and being a 33-year old secretary sometimes makes me want to hang myself in the men's room, but every now and then, there's a perk or two that make it moderately less humiliating.

To wit: Erin Judge, a funny comic who also works here, hooked me up with a name badge so I could get into a debate on campus between John Perry Barlow of the EFF (one of my personal rock star Jesuses...Jesi?) and Cary Sherman of the RIAA. Sherman bowed out at the last second, citing airport closure concerns (which I buy...there's a goddamn hurricane coming), but Barlow was still astounding. He's so passionate and smart, and he's got the moral weight of being a successful musician that's actively encouraged free sharing of his music for years. The highlight of the session was his assertion that music isn't a product to be consumed, that at its best, it's a verb and a direct communication between his heart and his listener's, and that the Internet and digital recording make it possible to make all of human history available to all humanity, and that that goal should trump trying to prop up a broken music industry.

Poetically or ironically, based on your perspective, I used my minidisc recorder to record the whole thing, and will encode it as an MP3 tonight after the show.

Insomnaic Conspiracy Freaks Rejoice!

Thanks to John Curtin for a tip on this wonderful news! No one makes good radio like Art Bell. I fell in love with his show the night a man named Captain Galactic talked about how he'd been sent to save the earth from Rigel 7, and the only way to get to Rigel 7 was through a dimensional portal with an approved guide: The Archangel Michael OR Sasquatch would do.

Why do we lock our schitzophrenics up in jail when we should be giving them air time???

Midnight Club Better Be On There!

Quick pointer for the geeks in the house: Game Spy is running a week-long series on the 25 most overrated games of all time.

Saddam/Baghdad Bob Reprise

Adam Pearlman and Andy Wasif will be reprising their Saddam Hussein/Baghdad Bob sketch at the Comedy Studio tonight! I'm sure the rest of the show will be fantastic, but this alone should inspire you to head out to the club.

Nude Comedy Roundup or How I Got Naked in Some Man's Basement For Free Booze and Hummus

You would think that a road story that begins with "So there I was, in some hippie's basement, naked except for my little white bootie socks and drinking cut rate whiskey from a plastic pint bottle while the MC introduced me" would get pretty juicy pretty fast. You'd think so, but you'd be wrong. I thought so...hell, that's why I agreed to do a free spot on the Naked Comedy Show. I got such good mileage out of the time I got a little naked on stage, I figured that if I got all the way naked, I'd have a bit of Hunter Thompsonian proportions.

I was wrong. Who knew?

So there I was, in some hippie's basement, naked except for my little white bootie socks and drinking cut rate whiskey from a plastic pint bottle while the MC introduced me. There were about 45 people crammed into the basement of a house in Newton, theoretically a staid, white-bread community where things like this simply do not go on. No one in Newton would be crazy enough to let naked people sit on their white carpet, would they? Oh, yes they would, brother. Oh yes they would. A local comic had promised these people a naked comedy show, and they were there to collect. Luckily, they'd let us decline coming to the naked potluck beforehand. Conventional comic wisdom is to never eat with your crowd before a show, and this was definitely not the night to break that rule.

And then BAM, I'm out the door and onto the stage, facing a sea of people ranging from fully nude to fully clothed, and righteously fine to astoundingly lumpy. Two men in Speedos are spooning to the left of me, a good looking woman in a sports bra is sacked out to the right, and three naked comics stand in the back of the room to watch me face down a demon. Let's put it right out there. If I liked how I look naked, I wouldn't even have to DO stand-up comedy. With the exception of ages 1-6 and a pretty sweet senior year in college, I've always had the kind of body that makes a guy develop a good pesonality pretty fucking fast. It's basic psychology that comedians become comedians because of something bad in their past. Mine was how I looked in Levi 501s in the ninth grade.

So I don't want to get all Rudy about it, but suffice it to say that it took some balls for me to do it. I didn't really have a choice. Given the opportunity, I'll yak your ear off for an hour about how standup comedy is the purest form of performance art. How there are no barriers and how only a comic can really connect with a crowd. So when the chance to strip away the last few barriers arose, I realized that I'd pontificated myself into a corner, and so dammit, here I was in a psychologically significant and truly fucking horrible situation.

And I don't know why or how, but it was the most engaged 25 minutes I've ever spent on stage. Period. I was jacked right into that crowd, and the laughs came as easy as breathing. We were in that perfect comedy rhythm, and I think I could have stopped talking entirely and still kept on getting them, because we were just riding that real comedy wave together. I don't know if it was being naked, or facing a fear, or having a room full of freethinkers, or if I just got lucky, but it was a great...GREAT...night of comedy. Hell, we even got to hot tub afterwards and finish the leftovers from the potluck.

I ate some hummus, soaked in the jacuzzi, and I even treated myself to a Kentucky Cheroot for the ride home. I had a happy skinbuzzy kind of feeling on, so I rolled down the window and just cranked up the music. The radio was playing David Bowie, and you don't exactly have to be a shaman to understand that that's one of the universe's fundamental ways of telling you you've just done the right thing.

Hey, Now, You're a Blog Star...

My boss is having lunch with Eugene Volokh today, and he just called to confirm. How geeky is it that I got moderately twitterpated because I was talking to the man whose blog I've been reading the longest? On the other hand, since I'm neck deep in what-the-hell-have-I-done-with-my-life angst, I don't know why talking to a guy who got a math degree at 15 makes me happy at all.

Jude and I ended up on Warren Ellis' blog last night. Poor kiddo has a wicked cold, and I'm snapping pix to get on the web. I'm a total asshole.

Good christ. If I'd known just how many goddamn newspapers would pick up the Walters penis item, I wouldn't have started listing them. Now I'm trapped in a cycle where all I do is follow the media trail of this phallic meme. Sam's wang now has a better press kit than Sam himself. And apparently, I'm its agent. Sigh. That said, more papers in more countries, including China and Croatia:

The Taipei Times
Sampion (Croatia) (2 down from the Arnold piece)
Tiscali News (UK)

Thanks to Rob Reuter for the sightings.

The penis du jour just re-hit Yahoo. Only this time the comments are actually about Sam. Come watch the dimwits who would actually take the time to comment on a Yahoo news story race each other to skin flute puns.

People have been asking me to post about the Naked Comedy Show I did this weekend, and I intend to. I just wanna wait for the hubbub around Sammy's schlong to die down so that my entire site isn't about comics' genitalia. I didn't intend to change from a static homepage to an electronic sausage party.

Sam's penis continues to get more press. Sure, the Hindustan Times was impressive, but now he's made it all the way to Jackin World, which I gather is something like the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for cocks.

(Thanks to Ku for the tip via Kvetch)

RIAA Redux

I've gotten a few emails, so I just wanted to restate my point in a much less rambling way: I don't believe that the RIAA is concerned with protecting artists from being screwed; I believe that the RIAA is concerned that new technology will interfere with its own ability to screw artists.

Here's another anti-RIAA site I surfed via Penny Arcade, for whom I am basically becoming a shill, their writing is so damned good.

Yikes! It just hit Yahoo! For some reason, the comments are a weird collection of posts about other penis, flag, or flute stories on Yahoo, so it's a little bizarre.

I know I promised people that I wouldn't post links to the Reuter's UK story about Sam on the Thursday Night Fight, but since it's gotten picked up by the Boston Globe, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Winnipeg Sun, the Hindustan Times, and the New York Post, I figure the cat's kinda outta the bag.

Read the links above for a crash course in journalistic spin. We go from the original story:

Walters' tribute involved decorating his penis with stars and stripes and showing it at the appropriate moment. Audience members laughed, but Walters lost the contest.

"I don't think my penis has ever been more embarrassed or looked so small," the comic told Reuters on Friday. "You would have thought the vertical stripes would have made it seem longer."

But the Post takes it off the wire and changes it thus:

Comedian Sam Walters was battling for laughs at a comedy club in Cambridge, Mass., when he unzipped his pants and exposed his penis - painted red, white and blue like the American flag.

The audience wasn't impressed.

"I don't think my penis has ever been more embarrassed or looked so small," he said.

Tha's the ENTIRE story as run in the New York Post, whose own agenda is pretty obvious.

On the other hand, the picture the Hindustan Times attaches to the story is downright surreal. I assume someone knew what they were doing when they put the "enlarge" button under it.

Oh, man, this is going to get weirder before it gets better. For his part, poor Sammy is shitting proverbial bricks. And not entirely without reason. He lives in Southie, not exactly the home of lovers of genital-oriented satire. He could end up blugeoned to death with a side of corned beef. However, I've seen his apartment, and it really looks like an IRA safehouse, so would-be "critics" may shy away.

The stories above totally leave out the context (and MY NAME, harumph) and make it sound like some sort of defiant, Sinead-ripping-up-a-pic-of-the-Pope moment, and it wasn't that at all. It was a totally self-deprecating-I-can't-believe-I'm-doing-this kind of thing, and in the context of the whole show, came off both hilarious and surprisingly not offensive. It was just funny, man, but you can't explain funny, and I think Sam and I are both worried that at some point, he's going to have to try to do just that.

So for the record: it was funny, it was appropriate, and it was by-god good satire.

I'm not at liberty to explain why I've been conducting panicked web searches for "Sam Walters penis" today, and I've promised the people who are concerned about both the state of the Comedy Studio's liquor license (Rick Jenkins) and the state of Sam Walters' fragile face (Sam Walters) that I won't post a link to any stories about the 9/11 show on Reuters UK that may or may not have appeared in the Globe and the Hindustan Times.

In the meantime, I *did* turn up this story that Sam apparently wrote after his very first road gig. I feel like my little guy's all grown up!

Definition of hell: finding out that William Gibson has a blog on the day he stops writing it.

R.I.P. Johnny Cash

I will truly miss him and his music. His cover of Nick Cave's The Mercy Seat is one of the most haunting things I've ever heard, and what can you say about Folsom Prison Blues, where he killed a man in Reno just to watch him die?

I've been to Reno, and anyone who's killed people there is aces in my book.

I also remember seeing this and laughing my ass off for about five minutes. Johnny Cash: proto-punk.

Rest in peace, Johnny, and I hope when we see you again, you'll be wearing the loudest goddamn jacket we've ever seen:

The Man in Black

Well you wonder why I always dress in black
Why you never see bright colors on my back
And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone
Well there's a reason for the things that I have on

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down
Livin' in the hopeless hungry side of town
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime
But is there because he's a victim of the times

I wear the black for those who've never read
Or listened to the words that Jesus said
About the road to happiness through love and charity
Why you'd think he's talking straight to you and me

Well we're doin' mighty fine I do suppose
In our streak of lightning cars and fancy clothes
But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back
Up front there oughta be a man in black

I wear it for the sick and lonely old
For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold
I wear the black in morning for the lives that could have been
Each week we lose a hundred fine young men

And I wear it for the thousands who have died
Believin' that the Lord was on their side
I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died
Believin' that we all were on their side

Well there's things that never will be right I know
And things need changin' everywhere you go
But till we start to make a move to make a few things right
You'll never see me wear a suit of white

Oh I'd love to wear a rainbow every day and tell the world that everything's okay
But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back
Till things're brighter I'm the man in black

We had a great show last night. Tony V won handily, but Sam Walters did indeed reveal genitalia painted like the Stars and Stripes. Luckily, the Reuters guy turned out to be from France, so everything is okeley-dokeley do. Poor Sam drank so much liquid courage that he was pretty much out of comission when we got to the "talking part" of the show. Still, an absolute riot. I'll get the questions typed in and posted as soon as I can. It was nice to have a room full of people who didn't want to spend 9/11 moping. Great energy in the room, and Adam Pearlman and Andy Wasif brought down the house with their Saddam/Baghdad Bob Who's On First (I will beg Adam for a video clip today). I know, it doesn't sound like it should work, but it was a certified panic.

In the meantime, Mark Fiore has this great cartoon up on SFGate.com. Nice to see I'm not the only guy bugged by cheesy 9/11 Flash tributes.

Rick Jenkins is notorious for getting stuff like this completely wrong, but according to this post, Reuters is coming to cover tonight's Thursday Night Fight at the Comedy Studio.

I know what Sam Walters has planned. If it gets in Reuters, it ends with the club being firebombed by a veterans group.

Holy shit.

Look, the RIAA’s current all-out legal Blitzkreig has nothing to do whatsoever with protecting artists from copyright infringement. If you read Janis Ian’s excellent essays about the music industry, you see that artists don’t make money from CD sales anyway. They make their money playing tour dates. Even without that factual basis, I think everyone’s gut can tell that a group that would sue a 12-year old girl doesn’t really give two shits about art.

So listen up: I think the RIAA is thinking LONG TERM. And some very smart suit monkey over there has figured out that the Internet in general and peer-to-peer networks specifically represent an alternative distribution system for music that can (and will) completely circumvent the current model that, and this is the important part, makes the RIAA their money.

You can’t want music you don’t know exists. That is to say that by the time you decide you want a copy of a song, you’ve heard it, or at least heard of it, and right now, that happens because an artist gets signed to a label, which produces the album and creates some sort of marketing campaign and makes sure it gets airplay and MTV time and shelf space at the Big Stores and whatnot, and all along that winding road, money is being made and spent. Lots of people are getting rich off the process, and your purchase price goes into that bottomless kitty. You buy what you’re told is available to buy...you’re given a selection, sure, but it’s still a carefully controlled selection. You only get to choose from a pile that makes the RIAA some cash (again: not the artist).

One side effect of this is that some really, really, really good music that would, in fact, be really, really, really popular if only people actually knew it existed gets excluded from that pile, and consequently, you and I never hear it, and by extension, never buy it. The RIAA doesn’t care about those artists, because those artists don’t make any money for the RIAA. And since they’re locked out of the system, the RIAA doesn’t have to pay any attention to them.

But imagine instead the World’s Greatest Rock Band, which is producing the Best Goddamn Rock and Roll Ever Heard but hasn’t gotten signed to a label and is therefore excluded from the road to fame and glory (minus the stiff corporate cut) outlined above. What if that band takes a 4-track recorder and a copy of Sound Forge and produces 6 or 8 of The Best Rock and Roll Songs In History by themselves (no major label studio is getting any dough), burns them to CD (takes 10 minutes), makes some cover art (everyone’s got Photoshop), manufactures a few thousand copies (there are only about a million companies that’ll do this for under a grand), rips some MP3’s (easy peasy), puts them up on their own website (anybody under 30 can make a website in their sleep these days), voluntarily shares them via Kazaa (so no copyright problems, dig?), and emails them to every home-made Internet radio station on Shoutcast they can find, whereupon they become an Overnight Sensation, which drives thousands of people to their aforementioned website, where they sell their own CD directly to the consumer, who has now ACTUALLY done something good for the artist and gotten much better music than they would have by buying the Band du Jour’s CD at their local Virgin Music Superstore.

It hasn’t happened yet; but it’s going to.

Again, the important thing is that this new model represents a method for music production and distribution that doesn’t need the RIAA (or HMV, or Sony Music, or the Creative Artists Agency) for even one second. Maybe CD sales are down due to piracy (the numbers are equivocal), but it won’t be long before CD sales are down because people are buying music that isn’t measured by Arbitron ratings or Tower Records receipts. Not too far in the future, a whole lot of musicians are going to circumvent the entire corporate structure and get the entire benefit of their album sales. Hell, ravers and club kids are doing it already. Some of the best tracks I’ve heard lately (and found via creative Kazaa searches) were produced by some 17-year-old in his basement. If he had a CD, you betcha I’d buy it, and Eminem can go pound sand.

The RIAA isn’t out to protect artists from music piracy, they’re out to prevent a level playing field. They’re afraid of the competition, and they damned well ought to be. They’re trying to shut down swapping now so that we don’t develop a taste for it . They don’t want us to get in the habit of turning to this alternative distribution system, because in a few years, when thousands and thousands of unsigned artists are making for a much more diverse marketplace, if we’re comfortable using it, they know they’re going to lose.

If Metallica’s worried about what happens when people use the Internet to share their songs for free, they ought to be petrified about what’s going to happen when people use the Internet to discover some bands that still rock.

I always thought I got screwed by having a birthday five days before Christmas, but I have two friends who trump that by having birthdays TODAY. So let me take a break from maudlin thoughts to wish HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Baratunde Thurston (a great comic on tonght's show) and Chris Walsh (a great comic on the competition's show). Hope both of you have great days that aren't spoiled too much by sadness and cheesy flash presentations.

Just a few odds and ends right now. I can't believe I decided to do a Fight tonight; in addition to discovering in the middle of a moment of silence at 8:45 that Maybe I'm Not Over September 11 As Much As I Thought I Was, I still have to write the whole fucking show. Not one joke done yet. So any and all creativity my rapidly addling brain might have left in it will have to towards making the show so good that I don't feel like an evil cocksucker for having decided to do it.

In lieu of my own interesting stuff, a couple of pointers. First Tycho over at Penny Arcade has a great post today, and even though I fell in love with that site for the hysterically funny cartoons, I am constantly amazed at how good the writing is. To wit:

This is history, and listen up, because it's Goddamn important. If people can recollect and deify people for wearing jerseys and hitting balls, or jumping very high let's say, then you and I can catalogue the moments particular to our own fascination and invest them with gravity and power.

Also, a real shit-storm brewing over on the Kvetch Board about whether acting is harder/more artistic than standup. My own view (and I have a BFA in theatre -- the most useless degree in the universe - the entire universe; there are people on other planets and other dimensions more employable than me) is that if acting is artistic coffee, then standup is artistic crack. It's more intense, more difficult, and more rewarding on every level.

Just found out I'll be doing a spot at Tommy Doyle's tonight (1 Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA 617-225-0888). Showtime's 9:00, and it's a great room run by Greg Johnson and Kenny Z. I'm not even drinking very much lately, so this will be a rare opportunity to be able to understand OVER 90% OF THE WORDS I SAY!

I should not be allowed to listen to the radio unsupervised. I'm sitting here, listening to Radio Paradise via Shoutcast, while doing an excruciatingly mindless task at my day job, bopping along to a catchy little tune, and when I check to see who it is, it's the goddamn Grateful Dead!!! Shit! Now I have to cut off my ears to punish them. One of the fundamental precepts of the universe is that the Grateful Dead blow. Christ, next thing you know I'm going to start dancing like a monkey and smelling like peat moss.

I can clearly not be trusted to make musical decisions without strict oversight. My wife won't let me forget The Avril Lavigne Incident, when I found Sk8r Boi while looking for cuts from the Jackass Soundtrack¹ (yes, I'm 33; yes, this is all quite pathetic), thought it was awesome (and dammit, still do), and since I'm so dense when it comes to pop culture, I raced home to my incredibly hip spouse and announced my new musical find, whereupon she laughed in my face and called both my intelligence and my sexuality into question. I believe the quote was, "You did NOT just say you like Avril Levigne! Get out of my house, you goddamn woman!"




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¹Most of the music in Jackass: The Movie is performed by CKY, who do, in fact, rock, no matter what my wife says.

How about for the upcoming year, we all pledge to remember 9/11 by learning how to ORGANIZE OUR FUCKING THOUGHTS A LITTLE BETTER? Remember, the firefighters who gave their lives want you to go out and get one.

I have to stop wearing the Red Sox hat I found in the back seat of a cab, because now people see me wearing it and want to talk to me about sports. And not cool sports, either...they want to talk about football. And there is very little on this earth I give less of a shit about than football. Problem is, I'm too much of a pusscake to actually just say that when people start having a sports conversation with me. Instead, I try to remember stuff I've heard other guys say and just spout it back, which is what I'm convinced most of you jock types do, anyway. Except sometimes I remember wrong, so you get a situation like today on the bus when The Boys started talking about the Patriots, and I babble, "I heard they're going to start Bledsoe next week." Blank stares and long pause. As it turns out, they traded Bledsoe to Buffalo like 40 years ago, which is why everyone stared at me like I'd said, "I fucked my neighbor's puppy last night."

So as a general guide to my friends and family, here are the sports I am willing to talk about:

Ultimate Fighting
Skateboarding
Judo
Boxing
Baseball (and only because I promised Sam Walters that I would try to pay more attention to the Red Sox and because it's really the only thing anybody in Boston talks about...but please don't go any deeper than the last night's score and the name of the pitcher, because I will start to cry like a little girl)

Any attempt to initiate conversation about any other sports, including, but not limited to basketball, football, golf, NASCAR, hockey, soccer or any other activity that may be featured on Sports Center will be met with passive resistance and uncomfortable silence.

Have the rough cut of DJ's CD in hand. I think it's pretty great, but there are probably 3 or 4 tracks I should remix, just to make the thing a complete work of beauty. I would guess it'll be available (here, from DJ, or from area stores) in about a month or so. I'll check with his royal Hazardness to see if he'd be amenable to posting one or two preview tracks. Stay tuned!

Gigging tonight at Johnny D's in Somerville. Showtime's 8:00 pm, and I don't know what cover is. Should be a hoot...the rest of the show looks to be great, too. Come on down...who doesn't like drinking on a Monday?

I'm discovering the downside of running this site as a blog. Obviously, President Bush's speech from last night deserves some comment, if for no other reason than to point out that all the tap dancing was a beautiful and moving tribute to the late Gregory Hines. Problem is, I've got a Fight on Thursday, and I can't afford to shoot my comedy load this early in the week, since I figure it's a safe assumption that the people who would come to a Fight are the same people who would read this. So I figure this site'll be a little light on actual funny until Thursday (and probably well past that, for completely unrelated reasons), but I promise that if the Fight goes well, I'll post the material on Friday morning.

So far, a very lazy Sunday. Took Jude to get his hair cut at SnipIts in Burlington. It's this great hair place for kids...the decor is straight out of an old Warner Brothers cartoon (stylistically...no actual Warner Brothers(tm) characters in sight). He was very brave. I note it only because there was this poor kid there who must have been around 12 or 14, and his mom was making him get his hair cut there while his toddler sis got one. I'm trying (and failing) to imagine a worse thing to happen to a junior high kid than to be seen coming out of a goddamn SNIPITS. If you ask me, that's grounds for DSS to get involved.

Am planning on spending the afternoon finishing up a couple of tracks for DJ Hazard's forthcoming CD, which KFJ is producing. We're using a lot of old source material from Back in the Day(tm), and I had to jerry-rig a system to get these last few pieces into my computer. I think I've got it now and should have a rough cut for Deej to listen to by tomorrow. Listening to piles and piles of material has only served to reinforce that he is truly a gifted and funny sumbitch.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the show at the Acton Jazz Cafe last night. Oh, wait. None of you fuckers did. Well, you didn't miss much. I had a great time, but boy oh boy, did the crowd* give poor Greg and Chris a hard go of it. It was like the first 10 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. Just when did jazz patrons stop being hipsters and start being suburbanites? There was very little of the Lenny Bruce-itude I was hoping for, but there was some free Wild Turkey, so all in all, a pretty happy night.

No gigs tonight, as my September calendar is spotty enough to really, really make me wonder what the fuck I've done with my life. Heard about another club closing (the Aku in Worcester), so the Boston comedy scene's long march towards becoming one huge open mike ghetto continues apace. Replacing high-paying professional gigs, even shitty ones, with more coffeehouses and bringer shows, even good ones, is bad for all of us. The point of open mikes is to get good enough to get paid work...not to get good enough to start your own open mike, dig? (Caveat - that's exactly what Peter Dutton did, and he's landed some pretty goddamned good management because of it, so feel free to dump my ravings in the "bitter old comic" file). Note: the preceding link doesn't go to the Peter Dutton of whom I speak, but I just giggled for a solid 10 seconds at the guy who unabashedly calls himself a "Federal member for Dickson," and I figure anyone that impervious to penis puns deserves the link.

Less than a week until the Naked Comedy Show (henceforth NCS). It's a private gig, so I won't post many details, but some other local comics and I will be performing for nudists next Friday, and in the spirit of the event, we shall all be doing comedy sans clothing. Actually, I think the group is a little freakier than nudists, but definitely shy of swingers, but either way, I couldn't turn down the chance for a once in a lifetime hell gig. I haven't decided if I'll be attending the potluck before the show. Naked comedy = carpe diem. Naked potluck = creepy, somehow. "Hey, Bill...nice cock! And GREAT GOULASH!"



*For purposes of this story, "crowd" shall be defined as 6 50-year old women, assorted bar staff, 3 tables of yuppies, and a MILF and her two 17-year old kids.

Followed a link to a site run by Tim Mitchell, who I only know by reputation (which is mighty) and USENET (which is skeezy), and his wife, who I only know about because the site says she exists, and was duly impressed (with both the site and the wife). I'm adding Graphic Acts to the blogroll, and would like to point out the inherent genius of a guy who can combine a Jorge Juis Borges reference and a blowjob joke in the same paragraph.

Christ, is there anything more boring than a guy blogging about blogging? I might as well jerk off to thoughts of myself jerking o..mmmmm...yeah...that's it....oh, yeah, right there...now touch it under the...mmmmmmmmmm

Okay, Blogger continues to be a prickly pain in the ass, and I'm still slapping style sheets together like a monkey flinging feces, but it's almost de-suckified enough to leave alone.

Found out that I'm working with Greg Boggis and Chris Oake tonight, which will be a lot like working with Seymour Butts and Mort Sahl. And I mean both of those in the most flattering way.

I still need to finish fixing it up a skosh, but welcome to the new, improved version of my homepage. I finally saw enough great stuff on the web (like here, or here, or here) to shame me into trying to create an actual WEBSITE with actual STUFF ON IT that might even MAKE PEOPLE LAUGH or WANT TO SEE A SHOW.

With luck, I'll be slinging pithy bon mots in no time. While we're all waiting for my lazy whore of a muse to wake up, why don't you come check me out at the Acton