I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

I used to read a lot of sewing blogs—sew but they all seem to have been neglected of late. Sew Hip It Hurts and Sew Wrong have both been killed.

My mother has always been a major sew-er (is there a different way to spell that so as not to be confused with the subterranean tunnel where ninja turtles live?) and made a lot of clothes for me and my brother (and continues to, for me anyway—she did the costumes for Girl Crush and Sarah’s dress in My Wife, The Ghost)

Eliza sent me the link for You Knit What??, an archive of hideous knitting being modeled by lumpy semi-pro models pulled from magazines and pattern catelogues and comments full of negative hyperbole and swearing. Knitting takes so much more time than sewing, it makes me sad to think of people putting 10 million hours and 10 billion stitches into these “fashions;” it reminds me of the “designer” garment in Threads Magazine (ethnic-inspired “wearable art” that is so labor-intensive it no longer resembles clothes).

And then, the site also has a lot of “Martha Ponchos;” I don’t get ponchos outside of a Spaghetti Western context.

I made a “favicon” for the site and for GirlCrush2040.com but neither of them seems to be showing up. Will said he could see them, but I can’t.

My brother “re-gifted” a camera he had gotten from our parents two years before to my last Christmas—a Canon Exilim “Wearable Card Camera.” Of course, it was missing all of its software and some of its cables. I tried for months to get the USB “cradle” to download to my computer… downloading software and getting new, somehow subtley different, USB cables. No dice. I assumed it just didn’t work on Macs (which the Canon site somewhat implied)

Anyway, right before tossing it, I plugged it in to my laptop and for reasons known only to Life, Destiny and Jesus Christ himself, it worked.

....Aaaaaand, the picture quality sucks.

See my sporatic usages of this camera in the first half of the year at my flickr: Things I Found On A Camera

Combing several of my favorite things, enjoy some vintage, baffling Japanese commercials for soaps and such:

I made this tiled wallpaper. There’s like 2 pixels off at the border, so it’s not perfect. I might do a cleaned up version later. But feel free to download and use as you please.

Seamless tiled textures vanished for a while from the website makin’ game. I’ve been making a lot of them lately. I really would like to find—or if I have to, make—a good seamless background of entangling vines. Something kind of like this William Morris pattern called Willow (which this sample doesn’t have any repeats visible).

I’m very slow on the uptake, but I’ve come to really enjoy Pandora by the Music Genome Project. You can type in any song or band/singer and get a music stream of “related” artists. Custom streaming radio.

There have been a lot of misfires (They Might Be Giants ->Foghat?), but you can fast forward or skip around. I’ve been using it to look up bands I don’t know anything about, just to see if I might like to buy, say, “I am the World Trade Center.” They seem to only have one album of some people so a search for “Future Bible Heroes,” not THAT obscure, basically plays one album interrupted by weird misfires (Foghat!)

They’ve added to their “genome” qualifiers (such as “major key tonality” “mild synchopation” “mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation”)—”humorous lyrics.” I aimed to make that my main thread of genomical relation but “The Laughing Gnome” by David Bowie was not in their database. Just plenty of Foghat. (There’s a difference between “humorous lyrics” and “joke band,” Pandora.)

No one eats as much Chinese food as me. It’s a major obsession and it may have clouded my judgment in recommending this site— Mei Wah: Eating in Chinese—which I found pretty interesting. If only to find out what Moo Go Gai Pan means (Mushroom Mushroom Chicken Slice, which sounds like a horrible soda).

I live down the block from Dumpling Man, which both food snobs and drunks seem to adore but I am less than enamored with. The mascot is really cute (like a Super Mario power-up), but some of the people who work there are retarded and the dumplings are really aggressively chivey. Too too chivey.

There was a food feud earlier this year over a knock off restaurant opening 4 blocks away, nicking the concept and having a piss-poor cease-and-decist-inuring logo. They changed their logo to an extremely weird chicken fat yellow heart with a face and dropped dumplings in favor of the sort of menu Mee Noodles used to serve before they burned down (terrifying!)—noodle soup, dumplings, Ameri-Chinese slop on rice.

I have to embarrasingly admit… I like Plump Dumpling. Why? The storefront is kind of a bummer, always empty and covered in piles of menues and 5-year-old Maxims that I’m positive were pulled from the trash. Becase they make their own wontons… and getting any decent wontons in NYC has always been an uphill battle. One place on A doesn’t even fully reheat their mass produced wontons… it’s a wet, doughy snowball with a thimble of stink meet in the middle. Revolting. And yet I’ve ordered them more than once because I was craving “wontons.” Plump Dumpling’s are almost identical to the ones at Wonton Garden in Chinatown… they’re a little expensive for how little food it is, but I’m thinking about them RIGHT NOW.

If I want dumplings, I’ll go to Excellent Dumpling House in Chinatown. No big.

Cromartie High School the Movie (Live Action)

Thank you, Japan.

On Wednesday I was walking around in Chinatown and back up to my apartment and I passed what was probably a restaurant on Bowery that had just opened. There were ropes of triangle rainbow pennants hanging off the awning; that usually means “Grand Opening” (or “used car dealership”).

It seems to be a Chinatown thing that either family members or investors or someone give new retaurants potted palms and “good luck” wreaths (written in Chinese, so I assume they said “good luck”) lining the sidewalk. This particular restaurant must have had more than 100 of them… completely obstructing the sidewalk and entrance to the building. Ironic that so many glad tidings for good business would be an impediment to any potential customers entering. Or maybe that was the intention? 100+ plant-giving “family members?” Triad-controlled front for illicit heroin addict bathhouse, natch.

On that note, please welcome Mr Ghost to the internet.

For Thanksgiving, Will Hines drove Kirk and me down to DC as he and Eliza were continuing on to Richmond. It was a huge bonus double plus good thing since Amtrak sucks an ass in the days leading up to any major holiday (like weekends) and I was looking forward to forced merriment as we kill time in traffic jams. A call home to get directions turned into a harshly worded warning about leaving too late in the day, so I advised Will we had to leave at 8 AM or he wouldn’t make Richmond before midnight.

The night before was Harold Night, which I actually attended, attempting to collect Kirk’s Girl Scout cookie order and ended up staying out at the bar until midnight. Kirk had gone to watch Dr Who at his weekly nerd club meeting in Brooklyn and was supposed to call when he was in so we could meet up. Eliza went to see ‘Rent” and had the latest night of all.

So, as a result, in the morning, we were all very tired and there was no fun road-bits until Baltimore. As Camden Yards came into view, Will denounced giving stadiums corporate names and wished he was rich enough to buy a sports arena and name it something embarrassing like “Suck-Your-Dick Miniwheats Stadium” so people would have to say it all the time.

There was also no traffic for the entire way and we only hit roadwork on the DC Beltway (where I also had no more directions to give them). Roadwork on the busiest travel day of the year? What the fuck? Well, on the news that night they reported that some 6 hours earlier in the day an oil tanker truck had EXPLODED on that spot and melted all the pavement off… we were seeing the last wave of repair work .

When my directions ran out, we went to Three Pigs Barbecue in McLean, which was close to my house in high school but I had no gauge how close it was to my parents current house. Eliza announced an appreciation of Brunswick Stew, which they were out of, and my mother came to pick us up since she didn’t know any of the street names to give us directions.

Kirk and I spent 4 days down there and then took the train back up.

If you’re good at be funny, sign up for my class
http://www.ucbtheatre.com/classes/classdetail.php?ClassID=2081

I did these mini-logos for Erika Kern’s craft “company,” showing n’ shilling her wares at the Holiday Craftacular.

I just downloaded Linotype’s FontExplorer X. An amazinglly generic name for a program. It’s free, which is its main selling point for me. It’s really an iTunes for fonts, with a “shop” tag embedded. I only have a hundred or so songs on my iTunes (I don’t have an iPod, so what’s the point of loading my record collection in), but I’ve only run half my font collection into FontExplorer and it’s topping 800.

I had been using an old version of Suitcase, which didn’t make the trip to OSX Tiger. It exists only as buggy pop-up screens telling me that it isn’t working when I start Photoshop. The most immediately irritating thing of Font Explorer is that it doesn’t interface with Photoshop/Illustrator. In fact, it seems to have totally disabled my ability to type in Photoshop.

I also don’t have a working version of Word. That’s like being retarded in computer.

Kirk and I finally committed “The Cake…” to paper after talking about it for maybe four months. Bill read the draft and gave it a thumbs up, so we’re in business. This one has special effects, so we probably have to plan it better than usual.

Our cast is in place (we actually had them on board back when we first started talking about it)—Brian Huskey and Gavin Speiller. Unfortunately/fortunately ace model maker Erika Kern is committed through the holidays making crafts for the Bust Craftacular and can’t help us out until after she finishes her embroidery pomo neofeminist Xmas ornaments, which pushes main filming until January. We also have to cast some kid, which Kirk is handling through his friend who worked at a performing arts summer camp.

They haven’t announced the next screening anyway, so we don’t know when we have to get it together by.

To kill November and December, I decided to take up the animating gauntlet that I fumbled in the months before graduating film school. Keep your expectations low… I have a rough script and I’m working out my character designs in Illustrator. My plan is to make a semi-animated storyboard (a little more than an animatic) first, record the voices, and then do lip-sync and a polish on the animation last. I’m going to be using Flash, probably, since I know it better than After Effects, which I only used to make “credits” in for a school assignment.

I get asked for Flash samples all the time… both in my twin non-careers of graphics and comedy writing. I don’t know why I haven’t pushed myself to do it more since it seems so obvious… it’s a ton of fucking work. It’s the anti-improv—all prep for precious little actual ha ha. I also have never completed a comic, despite the fact I want to… at some point… I think it’s knowing the hours I have to devote to it, I’m waiting for a really awesome idea that I think is worth it but one of my charming personal eccentricities is that I think anything that comes out of my brain is utter shit. The first step is always the hardest.

We “launched” our video project site, mrghost.net. Right now it’s home only to our failed pilot “The First Steps.” I have to move over all the MWTG files and create some sort of layout and main page. We haven’t even figured out what kind of logo to make, which should be a walk in the park considering how many retarded logos I make for other people.

We have around 3 months until the next 102 to figure out what exactly we want to pursue next. The First Steps near-miss, while not really surprising, was disappointing. We’ve been pretty bummed about it, as the only pilot that didn’t get picked up, but since we’ve never been cancelled or rejected we probably were due for something. I suppose being knee-capped at the start of a race is better than having your throat slit mid-stride.

We still don’t have our contract from Comedy Central. Our agent tells us we’re being piggy-backed on another contract that a big-wheel is negotating over there and whatever he gets, we get. Which, in the end, is better since he has more clout that we do; but it also molasseses up our process even more. It’ll be January before anything ever happens.

I’m bugging out lately with nothing to do during the day but watch my meager bank-balance decline daily. I can’t get a new full time job only to leave it a month later. I don’t have a lot of work to do… and it’s getting cold.

Please come cheer on (and vote) “The First Steps” at Channel 102 this coming Tuesday. We’re psyched to see it on the BIG SCREEN of Anthology Film Archives and hear the confused murmurs it inspires.

We got interviewed on Saturday by a NY Times writer about our experiences as 102 creators. He came over and talked to Bill, Kirk and me for like an hour… we cleaned for like 5 hours beforehand, in case they wanted to take a picture as he mentioned on the phone. He asked questions that were kind of confusing (“What about shows that always have changing casts?” I assume a reference to 101’s “The ‘Bu” since I can’t think of any shows here that replaced their cast members).

Afterwards Kirk said I came across as negative in the interview, which bothered me for the rest of the weekend. I didn’t think I was, but since the huge uproar here in the comedy community over a NY Post article in which mostly anonymous comedy writers bashed SNL I guess I should have been more guarded in my comments about anything. From my previous experiences with press I can’t imagine we’ll have more quoted from our interview than “’We made My Wife the Ghost,’ commented Dyna Moe, 27; Kirk Damato, 26; and Bill Buckendorf, 35; from their East Village railroad apartment that doubles as their production studio.” Only one of our names will be spelled wrong. (The reporter seemed most adamant about clearly determining whether we lived in the Lower East Side or the East Village. )

It’s still exciting to be interviewed about anything. I got interviewed along with a group of other cast members from Matt Walsh’s “WallyVision” back in 1999 for the Times. And did a phone interview for Backstage (along with a gabillion other comedy people) for some feature on improv in like 2000-ish… I never even saw that one in print. Feature Feature got interviewed twice by school papers and both times the interviewer decided to only talk to part of the cast since 9 of us was too many at once.

We’re wrapping up editing on our new pilot, ‘The First Steps,’ tonight, hopefully. It’s our first pilot with “extras,” which I borrowed from Harold Night and we shot in the UCB office. I felt like a pied piper of Extras… everyone merrily following me from the theatre with absolutely no idea what we were filming. Dave Thunder even came and didn’t know where we were going or what we were doing; he just followed. We don’t really know if this one will be screened, much less voted for, since a lot of new people seem to be submitting this month.

I appeared as an extra in Will Hines’ last minute submission “The Block,” which he and DeCoster decided to make in one day. I dug out my Girl Crush sais and pink hair dye for it; Kirk wore my Riff Randal baseball jacket and aviator helmet. We both probably looked like complete douches, but it was close enough to Halloween that no one gave us shit on the street.

As of this morning, Kirk is very excited about filming a parody of “Pet Keeping with Marc Marrone,” and I contend that show is already beyond all parody. We have “Cakey” still on deck, pending a location. I want to also get Instant Cinema together to make a pilot as a group but that may be logistical nightmare. Kirk’s next big one might be a D&D-themed pilot (largely inspired by the photos in Museum Replicas Limited... which amazingly does NOT have a web catalog) ; I still plan on doing “NTGC2040 the TV.”

Lots of TV stuff in the future… enough so that I will make a “102” tab for my blog. How about that!

Will Hines put a kickass spam filter on the site, perhaps cutting into the endless “comments” from Online Poker, A+ Replica Watches and Instant Viagra cluttering up my back end.

I have Jury Duty today. I’m here in the waiting room right now, which has thoughtfully included ethernet cables and powerstrips for NY workaholics. However, the numbers are not particularly well thought our… 100 seats, 4 workstations.

The “invitation” said 8 AM, which I arrived fashionable early for, but then the street baliff guarding the door told me I couldn’t go in for about ten minutes, honey. So 8 AM was the door time. I looked in the windows of the Odeon (closed) across the street and the Bouly Bakery (just opening). When I was allowed in at 8 AM, the lights were off and the place was empty. About five past the room manager noticed me sitting there and graciously turned on the lights and added they usually didn’t get started until 8:45. So, begins the waiting.

I could do “work” here but my latest flyer commission involves drawing a sambo head on a photo; which I believe would earn me some non-judicious looks from my fellow jurors walking by. I also can’t have a camera (or camera-equipped cellphone; should I do a daring 200×300 pixel expose on the squishy-seated room full of tired civic duty doers) in here and the other thing on my to do list is take 24 pictures of pointing hands. So, stalemate.

Am I going to have to give up my computer station at some point? Would it be rude not to? Without my cellphone I don’t have a clock and I want the time always in view… so I can watch every agonizing minute tick by.

[started writing this 3 weeks ago, finally finished]

Most of the time I come to by blog, it’s to delete the 4 million spam comments I get… most of which are about online poker ( and online poke-her… yikes!). I blame Matt DeCoster, as a major poker enthusiast, for this. I also blame him for BLOWING MY FUCKING MIND by doing insane trapeze stunts in the back of a Williamsburg bar last night.

Matt DeCoster, four years ago or maybe more at this point, signed up for improv classes and trapeze lessons on the same day. He is a master of both now. I was invited to his last annual recital while on the improv team MONKEYDICK with him. He made it clear that he was severely disappointed that none of us came out. So, I made up for it and came this year despite having no inter-team-ial obligations to come. Kirk came with me, for he does have team-ial loyalty to think of and also, I won’t go to Brooklyn alone at night anymore.

It’s at a bar in outer Williamsburg—Union Pool—which used to be either a swimming pool supply store or a storage facility for billiards tables or an actual swimmingpool that magically now looks like a shitty Williamsburg bar. Who knows. I went to this place like two years ago when I was out looking to get drunk and hooked up but Union Pool did neither of those things for me then. I never went back.

We got there bright and early since it was first-come-first-trapezed and Will Hines, a trapezey veteran, said it gets mad crowded. The earlier DeCoster-less show was still going on when we got there so we positioned ourselves out of the way of the exitting crowd but in a prime “we were here first” area. One couple in the courtyard seemed to be practicing a Vaudeville routine; I highly anticipated seeing it 1000 feet up in the air.

Will forgot to mention the shows regularly start VERY LATE. Like Jonathan Richman concert late. We waited over an hour before the house was open and even then there were no chairs… one row was set aside for the elderly parents of some of the performers and the injured (trapeze casualties!?) and a crazy woman who was yammering to herself. No one wanted to take the seats so we crammed in close to the back room… a garage-like space connected to the main bar with maybe 25’ ceilings and a hard cement floor with a 2” gymnastics mat in the center of the room above which hung 3 jerry-rigged trapezes. The show was undecorated… no “theme” this year unlike previous “Under the Sea” and “Card Sharks (the TV Game Show)” themed events I had seen photos and costume scraps of.

The show was hosted by what Kirk said was a bearded lady and I thought was a preternaturally high-voiced hippie man who was involved in some other fringe circus/burlesque waste of time. Time management was a little off at the event, as if the endless wait to get in hadn’t tipped their hand, as between each act trapezes were raised, lowered, adjusted, secured, etc. for 10 minutes.

Most of the acts were impressive enough… an ironic 80s hit played and various tattooed woment dangled and twisted on the ropes and bars of the slightly swaying trapeze. One girl did a little bit of flair and took a shot hanging upside down and then lit a cigarette while perch on the bar. One had a slightly Belly-dance themed bit. There were two girls who had feathery tops and did a bit of a chickeny head-bob and some flappy wing motions to a techno mix with “turkey in the straw” as played by Mr. Softee as a predominant sample.

Then came DeCoster… no frills, black unitard, Bowie’s “Under Pressure” comes on and he procedes to demonstrate without a doubt he’s the strongest man in the room by supporting his entire weight by his arm, foot, back of ankle, nape of neck, wrist as he dangles and sometimes FREE FALLS from the top of the ropes to within an inch of the rubber mat (the pompadour touching it). He had a death-stare of intensity and sometimes the labored look of a man having his arms ripped out of the sockets… no winking to the audience… this shit is HARD. You can hear a pin drop during the stunts, except for Crazy Woman in the seats who says “It’s HIM It’s HIM It’s HIM” over and over again like she’s just seen Christ’s face manifest in a three-bean salad . “Under Pressure” is crescendoing, Matt makes his final insane dismount onto the mat and the crowd EXPLODES. Non-stop chearing. The Man-Woman hosting breathlessly emotes, “Usually I’m pretty happy with who I am but right now I want to be MATT DECOSTER.”