Saturday, September 27, 2003  

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.