I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

Episode Two of “My Wife, The Ghost” took the Channel 102 crown last night with 106 out of 137 votes!

Kirk captured a lot of stills from “My Wife, The Ghost,” episode one, to use as a kind of highly-detailed pictograph language on everyone’s favorite message board, The IRC.

Feel free to download them and mess with them to create “My Wife, The Ghost” AIM and LJ icons, wallpapers, fanart, and Krazy Kaption contests.

Enjoy:

I’ve been reading some other blogs lately…

Peter Payne’s Journal is by the founder/owner of J-List, which is a terrific horrorshow of Japanese crap culture and it’s all for sale. Aside from Peter’s major advocacy of J-Porn which I’m not all that into, he gives a lot of cross-cultural insights and updates of what’s going on in Japan. Very interesting! I read two years of entries in one sitting.

Eliza pointed out Craftster.org to me last week—specifically the fun-fur taxidemy—the owner of which has a blog as well.

What to give the little girl who dreams of unicorns… behing beheaded

Unicorn Taxidermy

Follow up that nightmare image cocktail with a chaser of Rat Fingers. Smoooooth

I don’t care much for working. You’re required to be at a place, regardless of whether there’s shit to do or not, so I’ve become even MORE dependant on active-timewasting and internet browsing.

Lunch is also problematic. We don’t really have anywhere to eat lunch, so we always go out. It gets very expensive, but I always ate out when I stayed home all day. What bothers me more is that “workplace lunch” is expensive and shitty at the same time.

Cosi is an abortion… $9 for a cold sandwich full of dogfood chunks on salty pizza crust. Chipotle serves, as Julie Klausner just identified, “diapers full of beans.” (That’s the food before you eat it and the end result of eating it.) And then there are “delis,” that NY institution, that my coworkers and I always default to. There’s like 10 million of these identically stocked mega-delis crammed with workers jostling around getting ass-salads and wraps. Give them glowsticks and UFO pants (or diapers full of beans) and you’ve got a rave.

I’ve become oddly enamored of Boston Market, despite the one on 23rd St stinking of homelessness and vomit spray, but mostly because it reminds me of better Rotisserie I’ve had other places. They also don’t offer a half-chicken that’s all white meat. And their potatoes taste like sawdust. Maybe I should seek out a better Argentinian rotissery to feel this need rather than eating this AIDS-food.

I also eat at Rickshaw Dumpling Bar twice a week. It’s like mall-Chinese food.

It turns out our office isn’t moving to Tribeca until mid-July now, so I have more time to explore and be unsatisfied by my local dining options.

Suggestions are welcome. I will enjoy complaining about YOUR favorite restaurant in the future.

Japanese Eyeball Glue Makeup

I think only the very rich can afford to be germaphobes in New York City. Aside from everyone having small apartments filled with crap and a constant flow of dust clumps in the air, things like “diswashers” and “garbage disposals” are a luxury here despite being standard lifestyle accessory everywhere else in the country.

My roommate eats a burrito everyday. I’ve never actually seen him eat this burrito, but I see leavings of it in the sink. It might be the same burrito over and over and he’s trapped in a time loop. I find burritos vile, especially beans. There are always beans in the sink.

I rarely eat at home. When I do it’s usually takeout Thai curry or tuna fish. I leave the dishes for these things in the sink for days at a time. I’ve taken to treating the sink as dish-prison. After an appropriate amount of time “doing their time” in the sink, semi-submerged in water and bean-filth, I declare my dishes rehabilitated and therefore, clean and ready for use again.

No visitor to my home will ever want to eat anything on a dish again. Good riddens! More disease for me!

LaLaLand Gallery’s “Art in The Dark” gallery is almost as good as being there… stoned.

I like the weeping unicorn and all of Vicki Berndt’s Asian corporate mascots achieving enlightenment.

It was a sunny, warm and summery weekend (for the most part), which made it all the more ranklesome that I spent the majority of it taping the second episode of “My Wife, The Ghost” at my parents’ apartment. Another rankle, they were there the whole time.

I think I had much to do on this one since Bill was setting and lighting all the shots. I didn’t do a storyboard for this one since we barely used the one I did for the last episode. Every so often I’d suggest a different line-read for the actors, but other than unlock the door to the apartment, I didn’t do much on this one. I even left to go watch my class show in the middle of the Saturday taping for two hours.

Everyone was very patient, despite the hours and illness that we were suffering under. In addition to the late shoot last weekend, we did four hours on Friday and then all day on Saturday. Poor Angeliki was there the whole time on Saturday.

Sunday morning, Kirk was feeling sick but we went to Ping’s for dim sum anyway. We broke a long dim-sum dry spell last week and had a really poor showing… only finding four ok things in an hour. Time worked out this time and we got everything we wanted in the first 20 minutes except for the elusive “triangle pies,” which never made an appearance.

Triangle pies are glazed pie-crusty things with red BBQ pork in the middle and sesame seeds on top. They have an evil twin which seem to be entirely identical but are filled instead with semi-cooked sweetened egg custard. Vomitous! Triangle pies are not triangles at all dim sum restaurants; at HSF they are rectangular to distinguish them from the eggy, custardy, crappy pies.

We walked around a bit, heading north and west from Chinatown aimlessly. He wanted to see the finale of the Film Forum’s Harold Lloyd festival, which was a recovered print of “Welcome Danger.” We were early, so I had a raspberry sorbet at Cones: Ice Cream Artisans, there were a lot of seeds in it. The artist has chosen to include a “momento mori” in this work, the universal theme that the sweetness of life is always offset by small, hard irritants.

“Welcome Danger” wasn’t that great. Some films are lost for a reason. I saw “Safety Last” earlier in the series and that had better stunts and better gags, but more to the point, his character was more sympathetic. His character in “Welcome Danger” was a prick… he beats people up for no reason. The gag of the first part is that he sees this girl and falls for her and then meets her again but she’s disguised as a boy (Kinda. She has a hat on.), so Harold kicks her in the ass and pushes her around. I suppose it’s supposed to be dramatic irony, since this is the girl he loves, but it was more like, even if you think this is some teenaged boy… that’s no reason to just be a prick.

The other films were also pretty surprisingly un-racist, considering that they were made in the 20s. There’d be black people or Jews or whatever in it and they’d be painted in pretty stereotypical strokes (Jews own jewelry shops, Blacks are train porters), but that’s the reality of that age and also, there’s an economy of words (zero in the silents) so they tend to use stereotypes for every person despite their ethnicity. The plot of Welcome Danger was about Chinese opium smugglers in San Francisco and there was one good Chinaman (a westernized Doctor), a ton of thugs who Harold beat the crap out of and then a lot of neutral Chinatown residents who Harold also beat the crap out of. There was also an ambiguous evil guy named Thorne who was posing as a Chinese drug lord but he didn’t look Chinese or white. He looked like he was carved out of soap.

There were like two or three really great bits in it, but for the most part it was more like an Adventure story (like Tin Tin) than a comedy. And there’s a lot of it that didn’t make any sense. Harold is hired to be a detective and crack this case in San Francisco because his father was a great cop therefore he’s also bound to be a great cop. But he’s not a cop. He’s a botantist. But he gets to be a cop anyway. What?

After that I was doing a couple lines in Julie and Jackie’s show, which had no audience. Then I went to Eliza’s kareoke party, which I found a little frusterating. The kareoke system at the bar, not her party particularly. I think I like kareoke better in theory than practice. But I had a slice of cake, skipped out on watching Sakura on Channel 25, chatted a bit and got home in time to be eaten to death my mosquitos.

I wish I could regale you, wonderful reading public at large, with thrill-packed tales of a weekend well spent. But instead I’m going to whine about my mosquito bites.

I got my “first bite” of the summer last week and thought even, maybe I could note that in my journal and spin it as “summer’s almost here,” but forgot about it or maybe it was one of three days last week my work computer was crashed and it slipped my mind. Now I have no fewer than 15 bites (all bitten in the last 24 hours) all over my arms and legs and am no longer enthusiastic about spinning these into a seasonal metaphor. I’m enthusiastic for ripping the skin of my legs, arms and fingers (Finger! What kind of retarded mosquito bites a finger!) as the itching and pain is driving me insane. These aren’t cute little pink dimples, either… when I get bitten, the bite swells and spreads out to the size of a quarter or half-dollar. I look like I have some kind of Pepto-Bismol-colored leprosy.

I get bit at night, because I leave the window open—hot out, y’know. After the first night of being bitten, I closed the window. There was definitely already one or several bugs in my room, so I covered my face and body with the blanket (Mosquitos are powerless against Crate and Barrel bedsheets), but kept waking up because I thought I was going to boil to death in my sleep. I turned the AC on (First time this year! Summer’s almost here), spraying collected dust (or as I call it, “9-11 confetti”) and spore-based disease all over the room and blowing the fuse at 4 AM. I lost my shit and just resigned to being bitten and resolved to get 10 yards of mosquito netting to make into some sort of mummy-bag to sleep in and some citronella-infused press-on nails before I go home tonight.

I’m annointing myself with generic brand topical analgesics on the quarter hour.

Why are fucking sneakers so hard to find?

I went to at least five stores this weekend in search of a damn shit-ass pair of sneakers and the experience was a wall of bullshit. I’m not even that into sneakers, but I need them for walking around and such. I tried to be a cool and formal and wear nice shoes, but that hurts my feet.

Chuck Taylors, despite their nerd-pride, punk rock legacy, are shit for walking around in, even with fancy gel insoles that cost more than the shoes themselves. Also, as mentioned earlier, they’re made (in Vietnam!) by Nike (booo!) now, so I want no part of them. But they seem to have come back with a vengence—a huge bump of print and style variations not seen since the Kurt Cobain wave of All-Star coolness (where I myself owned a PLAID FLANNEL pair). They even have the knee-high, leather Chuck Taylor formerly only available in Holland (which Stardumb band The Apers seems to be the spokesband/official free-shoe recipient of). Still, not for me.

I looked at a ton of Saucony ones, since they seemed to be low-tech enough and occasionally available for $30. But every goddamn store on Broadway I went to they were “out” of every one I wanted (down to 2nd and 3rd choice) in my size. The stores are the mouth of Hell in terms of unpleasant shopping experiences—blaringly loud hip-hop music, way too crowded and staff who are alternately bored, angry at you about something, and slower than moleasses in January on the “can I see this in an 8 1/2” tip. BOO to David Z, Rubber Sole et al! You ruined my Saturday.

I went to Trash & Vaudeville as well, after 3 visits, started trying on stuff, but everything was not in my size, the half-size up or the size above. Though not sneakers, I was intrigued by some Fruits-style J-boots with ninja toes called “Shibuya,” (just like SuperGALS!) that came in blood red, lime and black patent. They were out of all the colors but black (boring), and they looked too much like rain boots once I had them on. All of my boots have broken zippers right now. Three pairs of boots, dead.

Meanwhile, Kirk effortlessly got a pair of army-green sneakies and a red velvet tuxedo jacket on 75% discount these shopping trips, to make my shopping failers more epic by contrast.

I did find that the basement of Canal Jeans has a big rack of men’s kimono for some reason, for $20-$40. I almost bought a few to stockpile for Girl Crush 3/Nyu Yokku 102 Pilot. I’d still need the hakama though, which will definitely be expensive. I started “Battles without Honor or Humanity” yesterday but got really confused as to who was shooting who and got fixated on the sweatery tube-tops all the yakuza were wearing around their waists (in kimono and over Western clothes)... they have cold middles.

I ended up ordering some Dutch soccer shoes online at Zappos in two sizes. Since my order from Sock-Dreams was appropriately dreamy (and got there the next day), I hope these will be equally zappy.

I thought it was funny they had a category in Athletic Shoes, amidst “Running” and “Basketball,” for “Coaching.” Coaches have different needs, you see. All that pacing they do. And they need arch support for tantrums and pep-talks.

The penultimate 502 class I taught was Wednesday. I feel like my mind isn’t there a lot of the time on this class, compared to the previous one. I completely forgot that we only had one more class (though early on, I was constantly thinking I was well into the class… like it was half over… when only, like, one or two classes in).

Afterward I went to John’s Pizza. Surprisingly, there were a lot of people there and Anthony was distracted, talking to his chorky. Bobby and Charlie were there, polishing off a “carafe” of Jamesons and the first of several pitchers. Cecilia from Conan was there too and was lit to the point of giving Anthony shit about forgetting her name (he aparently called her “Shazam” to cover up his social faux pas). I had a pie and sat around with them. Sue came later. I left about midnight and was very tired the next day.

I went to D. W. Martin’s book reading of OfficeSpeak at the Barnes and Noodles near my apartment. It was very crowded, all with people who knew him or his wife. There are a lot of “bits” as well… or “a lot” for a book reading and signing. I won a box of rubber finger tips (really, thimbles) because I had a boss with the most obnoxious name. I probably should have let “a civilian” win, but a.) there weren’t any and b.) my boss has a ridiculous name. The rubber finger tips smell and make your own finger tips smell like rubber if you wear them.

Afterward, Anthony, DeCoster, Sue and I—all having to be at UCB by9:00—had dinner together at klong. It was pretty good, but I think I prefer S.E.A. There was a massive traffic jam as we tried to take a taxi back to the west side. Anthony was unraveling theories that there was an incident related to the flower-planter-bombing outside the British Consulate and a mass evacuation was underway that we missed out on, but it turned out to be plain ol’ shitty city planning. They were repaving 7th Avenue during rush out.

IC was fine… Huskey sat in for D.W., who was tippling with his well-wishers (and ill-wishers; his co-workers wore shirts that said “David Martin Isn’t Funny.”) I’m going to ask Seth to sit in next week and we’re going to Delaware next Friday to do improv for the elite of Wilmington AIDS-Charity Patrons (and then rushing back that day to film the rest of “My Wife, The Ghost” episode two.)

Tonight is also very busy, with Terry Jinn’s Enormous Television and my one-night return to the improv stage with Monkeydick at 11. I forgot that I had a writer’s meeting, too, which I can’t make it to now.

I had two and a half hours between work ending and when I had to be at UCB to give notes. I was feeling totally shitty… dead on my feet, totally tired. I got an email from Hallie saying there was an Unlovables show that night at the Continental, which is three blocks from my house. I figure I could get in, see their set, and then go back to the west side for notes.

Walked there from Chelsea and still managed to be 45 minutes early… turns out the show wasn’t at 7, but doors were at 7. I killed time at Trash & Vaudeville.

I need new shoes… my sneaks look like they just got back from church—totally hole-y (thanks PeeWee Herman). I can’t find my Chucks… they were my summer shoes last year. I don’t want to buy more since I found out Nike owns Converse now; Nike’s the one company I have am ambiguous, life-long boycott against. Other shoe companies, I’m sure, are equally stomach-churning, so I have a hard time buying new shoes. I’m just be stuck with my one pair of 5 year old metallic purple Puma’s (evil company) from Urban Outfitters (another evil company) forever.

So, Unlovables don’t even go on until 7:40 or so and it was $12 at the door. The Ergs! and Dirt Bike Annie are also playing (and MC Chris who was the headliner and who most of the sweaty, cartoon-character t-shirt and baseball cap crowd was there to see). I found out after I got there that Jeannie Lee was retiring from DBA after that show, which was a major deal since she had been with them since 1997, I think, unlike their fickle and replacable drummers.

I saw The Unlovables with their third guitarist and they were great, as usual. Hallie has such a fun on-stage (and off-stage) persona I got to thinking “she should have her own TV show.” And then I was thinking about my Kung Fu Monkeys cartoon pitch. And then I decided I should probably redo that and pitch it again.

That idea kept coming back to me when I was seeing a lot of the rock scene people again for the first time. There’s so many interesting people who are in that scene and the core of their scene isn’t built over bits-upsmanship or selling your personality as much as actors and comics, so they’re just interesting people as a side-effect. This all may be bullshit, but that’s where my mind was going during the second act, which was some grungy band nobody knew that the club or the promoter or someone put on. Every show I’ve been to there’s always one band no one knows how they got there and they’re always terrible and musically incompatible with the bands that came before and after. And I grouse and complain like everyone else, but I also felt sad imagining what it’s like to be that band and not have any friends on the bill or in the crowd. I will write a “very special episode” about that.

The Ergs! were really great. I hadn’t seen them in a really long time but Joey said they’ve been booking a lot of shows since being on the cover of Razorcake last fall, but all of those shows were in Jersey. Neither Mikey nor Joey’s girlfriends were there, but I think both of them live in Pennsylvania or go to college there or something. Joe graduated and he’s back working at the fire alarm factory. He gave me an Ergs shirt, finally… it’s red.

Hallie gave me an Unlovables shirt, too. It’s black. I put the Ergs shirt and the Unlovables shirt on over the two shirts I was already wearing, which was slightly amusing. I also bought the Dirt Bike Annie singles compilation, which I think I never got a copy of before. Pat Roto did the art on that one.

The DBA set was nostalgic. They played all the old songs from when I used to see every show they did. They are sooper pros and I’m sad they never broke through and got big. Jonnie Whoa-Oh even said (and MC Chris repeated on stage) that five years ago when they were all playing together in the basement of Dirt Bike Annie’s house in Jersey City, of all the bands that played MC was second-to-least likely to gain major success. His only song/rap I remember is “Four fried chickens and a coke,” which was more like that phrase repeated over and over than an actual song. MC was very gracious on stage to all his friend-bands and the Family-Guy-shirt crowd went ballistic when he went on stage at 11.

I saw, like, half of the set. My legs were killing me since I had been standing for five hours, so I took off and went to bed.

Today I finally ate a Shake Shack in the park. The hamburgers were nothing special. The caramel shake was only slightly less delicious than last time, so it still gets very high marks.

Oh, I wish this was true, creepy library sign.

Grown Ups who enjoy looking at the greatest thing on the internet, also, must look at all the great stuff at the New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery. They have fucking everything in here. I’m always finding terrific things to look at and disturbing things to set as my desktop wallpaper.

It’s a treasure trove for designers into that “found art” aesthetic and yet, are lazy, also.

Two milestones of entertainment occured this past weekend—the Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation of “My Sister Rides the Bus” or “Rosie O’Donell Rides the Bus” or “Riding with Retarded People” or something and the opening of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

If this movie had come out when I was 13 I would have been more upset by what a snooze-and-a-half this picture was but since my worldview is more widely defined (by not just one sci-fi comedy series but by several), I shrugged my shoulders and largely forgot about it. The opening bit with the dolphins was fun and a fun way to open it but the rest of the movie was so visually predictable and oddly free from laughs (the audience sat in silence for the majority of the film). Information was presented in a confusing way, for someone who hadn’t seen the film I wonder if they had any idea what was going on.

The shortcoming of the book has been oft-noted in reviews is the wandering narrative with no real structure, but the bigger thing is that Douglas Adams, for all his great writing, has presented us with 4 characters with practically no personalities. Arthur kind of has one… “put-upon”, but Ford and Zaphod are basically the same and Trillian plays “the girl.” After Ford gets him off the planet and gives some exposition, he basically has no purpose and becomes Zaphod’s echo. Compare it to another British, sci-fi comedy of a couple years later with another set of four characters aboard a space ship—Red Dwarf—and you see the contrast. Is Red Dwarf better than Hitchhiker’s Guide? In book form, of course not. As a filmed entertainment? Score one, Grant/Naylor.

Still, I hope it makes a million billon dollars and make the rest of the books into movies anyway.

“My Sister, the Retardo” was nothing special in terms of cloying badness—that honor goes to the illogical and manipulative Hallmark Card adver-dramas that interrupted (one which featured an actual Down’s Syndrome actor… which made the actual movie of the week seem all the more uncomfortable). One shot, where Rosie’s caricature had a date with her bike-riding, kung-fu, African-American, mentally-challeged beau in Peter McManus Cafe. So said the exterior shot. The interior set and the supposed Seattle location disagreed with that. But it still was a fun pop-up.

I purchased some new work clothes at H&M. I keep only buying skirts and pants. I’m work-appropriate from the waist down. Every day I wear the same Slayer ‘84 concert tee. I have a whole-person mullet. Business on the bottom, party on the top.

I really wanted to get socks though. My knee socks all have holes, so I mean to replace them, but no one carries them anymore. That trend-ship has sailed. So, I turn to the internet. Thank you, Sock Dreams, thank you.