I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

I live in filth and garbage. Or clutter, I suppose. Though we have a mouse in the kitchen some time.

I’m like one of the Collyer brothers or something. I can’t throw anything away, because a.) what if I need it again and b.) deep moral conflict over “wasting” things and hurting the environment with the trash I produce. I also imagine myself to be some sort of “artist” in remission and one day I’m going to want to turn all the crap I collect into some art project despite the tiny size of my apartment that is all together inappropriate for doing projects.

Part of my horde is probably common to anyone who’s done a sketch show or video. I did two really prop-heavy stage shows and a dozen videos and I can’t bear to toss any of it in case I need them again for some other stupid comedy video. No one wants to buy maid’s outfit twice.

The second stuff is more insane. I have several thousand bottlecaps in a bag. A huge bundle of felt. Three pocky boxes filled with fortune cookie fortunes (and a separate box of unopened plastic-wrapped cookies) Every CD I’ve ever burned, I kept in case I needed to make a disco-ball-like background for something.

I threw a lot of stuff away today. I found a shoebox with several hundred flyers for my one man show (circa 2001) and the first Girl Crush (2002). My iMac box (took up a ridiculous amount of space).

The crafty stuff I’d like to unload on a crafter or someone who will actually use them (and the bottlecaps count as crafty stuff). Putting a listing on Etsy will cost me money and craftster.org seems to have removed their classifieds.

A stack of thrift store records wasplaced on the curb; they were gone in 15 minutes. A stack of studio Beta tapes (still on the curb 5 hours later). I have another stack to go on the curb (handy vac, futon cover, CD burner), but my building has installed security cameras everywhere so I worry they’ll come down on me. I was shooting a video in the courtyard near the trashcans (not noisy… just climbing stairs) and within 10 minutes our super appeared to stop us, saying the management company saw it in their security cameras.

Hopefully, soon, I will have less filth and garbage.

Iiiiiiit’s FRIDAY!

Time to buy a bunch of glowing shit!

In the last week, I’ve signed up for MySpace, Facebook, Linked In (which I apparently had already), and Vimeo.

So far, I have failed to get a job, a husband, or true happiness through any of these services.

Gyp.

A CD cover for “Circuit Parade’s” Coney Island themed single. Done for trade—got a couple hours of studio time to record Welcome to My Study’s theme song.

(If you need a CD or flyer or anything else, now would be a fantastic time to call on me… trades for studio time don’t pay my bills or feed my baby.)

Sometimes I feel like a failure who’s wasted my life so far. A lot of the time, actually. The rest of the time I download free games from the internet and play them, like this one:

Recently I started buying them, too. So far, I’ve bought Alchemy, Mystery Case Files Ravenhearst, Virtual Villagers: The Lost Children and now, Chocolatier. The problem with a lot of these games is they’re meant for people who are half-asleep at their boring office jobs and are really easy, so I end up beating them within a couple hours of buying them. Then I feel bad I wasted $20 (less with coupon codes) on less than an evenings entertainment.

Chocolatier is a weird game that reminds me a little bit of Pirates! You go to different ports sourcing ingredients to make bon bons, then you sell them for profit in other ports. There’s a mini-game where you shoot those ingredients out of a canon at spinning targets in your factory to make the candy. And there’s some lame “story” about these sisters who ran a chocolate company, but one of them married some jerk and left the company. Oh, and it’s 1888. But a weird community theatre unresearched version of 1888 with a multi-ethnic cast (including the “sisters” who range in skin hue from vanilla fondant to mocha to 80% cacao), women who work as naturalists (but not Charles Darwin “naturalists” wearing wool suits in the tropics; modern hiker types) and people throwing around “awesome” in a very un-gilded age manner (as in “Awesome!” as opposed to “Our God is indeed awesome and terrible who will smite us all.”) You get a zeppelin in the second half of the game.

Casual games always ask your name at the beginning. I always use the name of someone I know.

Study is becoming what I initially predicted – my Fargo, in which a retreat into weirdness somehow strikes a chord with audiences that my more mainstream (relatively) fare totally failed to impress.

Last night at the ROTFL ( “Gong Show for the Internet”), Study was shown and tickled the applause-o-meter enough to allow for Channel 102 to eventually dominate the contest (with other selections Fun Squad and Space Guidos). Weirdly enough, his competition was the previously blogged Comics Curmudgeon (who should have show the Mary Worth film series and flattened Study—I know where my bread is buttered)

Tony Carnevale, representing Channel 102, reports “In round 1, “Welcome to My Study” edged out a Powerpoint presentation on penis-enlargement spam by the Comics Curmudgeon, who had come all the way from Washington, DC. (The applause levels were extremely close, though, and cohost Reggie Watts had to select the winner. And after he did, it seemed like the hardcore Curmudgeon fans wanted to tear me limb from limb.)”

Additionally, Comedy Central’s Insider (staffed by friends-of-102) plugged Study the other day.

This guy made incredibly complicated and labor-intensive deer head mask and costume.The breaking point in the tutorial is where he describes wanting to make sure the head has a long neck and narrow head to make sure it looks properly cervine, so he shifts the mask to have its chin where his nose is, so his human eye is actually lined up with the muzzle. So he puts a camera in the mask’s eye and feeds it to a tiny tv monitor in the nose, but because the distance between his eye and the monitor is too short to focus on normally he gets special contacts made so he can focus on the tv at a short distance… And the ears are on servo motors that he programs into switches in his gloves so he can register different “emotions” in his mask…

This guy is kind of my hero. And also, depresses the shit out of me

Back in April I uploaded a couple of old vector designs I had laying around to the new t-shirt site bountee.com. I’m not entirely sure whether they want to be cafepress or threadless, but you could upload vector art directly, so it took about 30 seconds to make the shirts. But you have to have your designs “approved” to have them go live on the site. I get pennies on the dollar for each shirt sold, so it’s barely worth it financially… just wanted to dust off some old vectors and see if they’d fly.

I thought I had blogged about this, but I accidentally set the entry to “private” so no one actually saw it.

Key Lime Pie for jaded ladies for jaundiced gentlemen Girl Guitarist for ladies for gentlemen All my shirts.

I had considered writing something epic and facinating (probably about the Thai restaurants near my apartment), but instead I’ll show this—

I found it at my parents’ place a long time back and only just got to scanning it. The book is kind of inpenetrable but I got through it on the second try. That cover’s a beaut’!

As this week is my birthday (the entire week is my birthday, yes) and despite my recent and staggeringly dull financial woes (short story, client bounced a check), I bought manga. I only wanted the Kare Kano, but there was a price break if you bought three and I arbitrarily got the other two.

Kare Kano is the only series I “follow” and this was the finale after something like nine years of publication. I always liked it because it wasn’t as retarded about the way the female characters and their relationships are depicted. Yes, there’s a cultural difference about acceptable behavior and attitudes, but 21 volumes without a panty shot is as good as writing “The Feminine Mystique” in manga-land. Anyway, the final issue showed the author’s real plan—save up the skeeze and dump it all on the final chapter. The high school sweethearts the story’s built around get married and have their (unplanned) child. Jumpcut to 16 years later (where all the characters look exactly the same as they did, depicting “age” is not the artist strong suit… they also all have basically the same face) where the main character’s male best friend (approximately 33) is in love with their 15 year old daughter and… she loves him back! Oh, happy day!

Junior High or High School girl dating/marrying her teacher is a pretty regular trope in anime and manga. I’m hoping it’s like teenage wish-fulfillment fantasy and not a regular and accepted part of Japanese culture. It also features heavily in dozens of other stories I’ve read (including the retardo Fruits Basket pictured above… they soften it by making it a Student-Teacher who decides not to become a teacher after all and after fucking his 15-year-old charge).

Open letter to Japan: eww.

Ive been trying to find the “Dudley Ford” comics that inspired the Mary Worth Channel Zero series but no site has archives going back to 1998.

In my search I found this blog—The Comics Curmugeon—that’s pretty hilarious and their obsession with a different Mary Worth storyline involving a stalker who’s a spitting image of Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown (if you merged “old” Rusty Brown” with “young” Rusty Brown).

I’m directing a sketch show for Will Hines and Matt DeCoster and we had a meeting yesterday. It’s a lot of old sketches from their show “Chronicles of Riddick,” the performance of which was attended by less than 10 people at the Red Room. Five of them were their friends, five of them were random drunk people lured up from the bar who spent the entire show talking loudly and making cell phone calls. Brett Gelman (one of the “friends”) nearly got into a fistfight with one loud drunk lady, who later came back after the show to alternately complain about Brett to the performers (“he must have been related to you because he was laughing at stuff that was’t funny”) and damn them with faint praise (“Some of your stuff was OK. You could play at Funny Bones in Staten Island.”)

During our meeting, Matt DeCoster brought up his favorite online video series, declaring every creative decision made by the creators to be perfect in every way and that he’s watched every episode over and over. I was skeptical at first, but it does grow on you—
ZeroTV’s adaption of Mary Worth

Refining this DCM magazine cover… this is far darker than the real file is and the positioning of things still seems awkward, but it’s better.

For further DCM materials I’m going to have to redraw all the new type by hand to keep with the theme I was going for, but this looks OK.

“Hey, how was your weekend?”
“Pretty good. How about you? Do anything special this weekend?”
“Not really, a couple of friends came over and we wrapped my entire body in three rolls of duct tape and then they cut me out of my clothes with scissors, leaving me shivering and naked in my living room.”
“Oh. That’s cool.”

(Dramatization based on the photo essay entitled: Duct Tape Dummy)

I’m in the process of designing the Del Close Marathon, the first item of which is a cover for a pocket-sized tourist mag. Did a digital sketchy mock-up and I’m not liking it too much… too crazy-quilt.

I think I have to deconstruct the logo and use the elements individually. Not sure about the rubber stamped background either…

I think I might even have to go back and redo the title treatment in a different face. I want to keep the “hand drawn” elements (all text would be hand drawn on the final, but this is just a mess.

My little Flickr widget on the left seems to have stopped working. Will said it was my server being a dick. I need to get a new widget now, I guess.

I ended up pulling an unnecessary all-nighter doing this:

Which wasn’t even for a deadline, I just got this “well, get it over with” bug and couldn’t stop until like 5 AM.

I didn’t draw it… just colored it and laid it out.

I decided I want a cool robot costume. I made one more than ten years ago, and I think I could probably do a better job now. I don’t specifically have a show or sketch or anything to use it in, though I’ve discussed it with Silvija.

When I suggested doing a video where we played robots, she said “Isn’t that kind of hack?” I disagreed. I think the hackiness of robots in comedy has gone full cycle (peaking in 2000-1) and now it’s more Zombie that are hack. (Despite my argument, I admit that robots still might be slightly hack so the material has to be extra good… and the costume has to be extra good.) On the pro side, Silvija noted that we both kind of talk like robots naturally, so we won’t have to modify our voices.

I will probably do a head in paper-mache using some kind of helmet as a base… maybe a cheap plastic mask stapled to the front to give it structure. If I could get a very cheap used bike helmet I’d use that. I did a short peruse of Halloween Adventure, but they didn’t have any plain plastic “helmets” to use. The ones they had were kid-sized—too small! I’m probably have to get a bodysuit to wear under it… which is just the slippery slope excuse I need to get into the confusing/claustrophobic “zentai” fetish!

So, I don’t want to do the tinfoil box with dryer vent arms—that really has been done to death—or anything really boxy. I checked the internet to see if there were any robot tutorials, but I haven’t found anything that fits the kind of robot suit I want to make which is on the more art-deco tip. Like somewhere between the “False Maria” from Metropolis and the Will Smith I Robot robots (I didn’t see this movie).

Here’s what I found online:

• The unholy union of “furry” and “robot” which I posted in my blog years ago.

• CloroxBot step-by-step which also uses stilts (people think robots are tall), but the real prize on the site is this insane cardboard Boba Fett helmet.

• A French-Canadian who makes Transformer costumes (in cardboard, no less) that actually tranform….
  ... but of course the Japanese still do it better

Someone start a comedy group under this name:

Make sure you have a really tall guy in the group who dresses like a cop all the time. Maybe he can do all your edits by lurching onto stage in this position.

A lot of comedians are teenie-weenie in real life.

Found while researching sideshow banners and posters for a Coney Island-themed CD cover I’m working on. If’n you’d enjoy that sort of thing, here’s two sites worth visiting:

Johnny Meah, Czar of Bizarre (contemporary artist working in the style)

Vintage banners (40s-50s) from the Hammer Gallery

Alfred Hitchcock mosaics from the tube station nearest his place of birth in London.

I’m not sure what’s more boss… that these exist or that I found it on mosaic-centric website caalled “The Joy of Shards” or the credit in the bottom of the page to “Grout”, the newsletter of the British Association for Modern Mosaics.

At last night’s Channel 102 screening, a show I co-created again failed to place. For the third consecutive time. It’s enough to lose faith in the system.

Yeah, I get your message—Mitch and I have decided to stop being friends since everything we make is a terrible failure! We hate each other now! See what you did, audience! Now I’ll have to start making shows that aren’t weird, inaccessible, full of retarded child molestors or pretentious... where’s the fun in that?

(Or see a nicer looking one on Channel102.net... click on my Chuck Taylor!)

See you in August, Channel 102… with something else you won’t vote for! Hooray!

P.S. – For fans of Study (people of quality and taste)—here’s an outtake: crabs.mov