When I walked by Sidewalk today, I saw an honest-to-God fistfight happening. A short black guy with eyes looking in two different directions was wailing on a long-haired Vincent Schiavellitype junkie who was screaming for someone to call the cops. Literally, right in front of them a traffic cop cruiser was doubleparked and may have even had someone in it, I couldn’t quite see into it since I was Kitty-Genovesing across the street.
I had gone to buy a jar of sauce. My roommate Bill and frequent cinematog/editing collaborator was called suddenly out of town by a funeral. I’ve been trying to pick up slack by doing marathon editing jags, usually without food breaks. I am pretty tired of Cakey and look forward to offloading it, finally, in two weeks… the experience has been more frowns than smiles, but the proper forum to air grievances of that sort is in a loud bar, at top volume while slurring words and sweating vodka.
Being the sole resident of our place has been a mixed bag. AV brought his Wii over and we played Zack & Wiki for a while, but I still prefer making crude caricatures of people I know in the Mii Editor. I watch TV whenever I want and yesterday was so brazen as to not only watch TV and a DVD of Flight of the Conchords (current opinion, 3 episodes in… “Zzzzzzzz”), but I even hooked up the VHS and watched my stone-age copy of True Stories.
The downside is that I have no one to open my jar of sauce that I made a special trip to get, so I can not have dinner.
That flicker widget on the left has been broken forever. I really should fix it.
In the meantime, check out these February calendar flyers for UCBLA that I spent ten billion hours on this week. I think they need more flowers.
Although you’re all distracted by the recent, unexpected death of Heath Ledger, I’d like to point out another fantastic Hollywood star recently taken from us too, too soon at the spry age of 70.
(I am mostly noting this because I have this picture already uploaded. But I just read her bio on Wikipedia... did you know she was married to Tom Poston? Bob, your wife left you for the handyman!)
AV and I saw this movie last Friday at Monkeytown in Williamsburg.
If you’re not local or haven’t heard of it. Monkeytown is a restaurant/performance space/bar/screening room/lounge. It’s a restaurant/bar in the front with a kind of industrial-rustic look (dim light, knitted grapevine hanging from the ceiling, exposed steel and cement floors) and you travel along a super-fluoro, bright-white hallway with a series of primary colored doors (the toilets, I’d later discover) and into a massive (for NY, natch) dark square room with blank white walls. Around the perimeter of the room are neutral colored low futons, two to a wall, and a pair long TV-tray-style table set for four. On each wall the same looped pre-show animation is being projected simultanously. You can, and are expected to order as the movie plays, from the roaming waitress from the menus posted on each station, listing fusion-y, foodie odd combos of small plates and molecular-gastronomic cocktails (includingthe Umami Martini that featured “brine, parmesan, capers, clam broth, and pickle”).
I loved it as a sum of its parts. There’s definitely something appealing about doing something that’s an “experience” that’s totally removed from the everyday. I remember going to see Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind in Chicago years and years ago and it was the same kind of thing. Every stage of getting to the show was a small strange experience… you waited in line, then you got a small plastic chit. Then you put your chits in a bag and they were scrambled, so the order you were in line didn’t matter. Then you were lead through a series of rooms in this brownstone-style house, each of which was filled with disturbing art or piles of furniture or actors doing something. I mostly remember the “Hall of Presidents” with abstract, garishly-colored portraits of all the presidents hung on the walls and a jumble of abused school desks you were ordered to sit in. Decommissioned old schoolbooks were heaped on the floor. There were other hoops you went through to get to the actual show, which I don’t remember nearly as well (a side from one particularly hoary awful monologue we mocked for the rest of the trip) as the process of getting there.
At Monkeytown, movies are free as long as you order $10 of drink and food. Usually their programming is unwatchable, plotless art film nonsense, though last month featured a Mickey Rourke retrospective (irony is alive in Billyburg). AV saw the listing for Funky Forest and immediately connected it to my love of Japanese weird bullshit and gave it a green light. I’ve been burned before, so I was a bit hesitant—the thing was over two and a half hours and of the many things the Japanese do well— plastic knick-knackery, street fashion, misogyny—comedy is not one of them. Intentional comedy anyway.
Funky Forest definitely has its high points and a lot of its successes are more as “art” than as “comedy.” Comedy divorced from context and culture is a really hard sell—most jokes don’t travel outside your group of friends so asking it to work across international borders is asking a lot. In the 2h30, there’s probably a pretty funny or at least satisfying 60 minutes in it. More odd than hilarious, but the Eraserhead fetus-like alien shit scenes (never explained, of course) are pretty mesmerizing. There’s a through-line across segments about various lonely men who can’t seem to meet/are obsessed by women that’s more than one note. And lots of line dancing that is confusing, then irritating, and then, eventually winning you over, totally charming.
I’ve just ruined the movie by posting the most interesting moments in this entry (that I could find on youtube… sans subtitles), but if it comes to DVD check it out (with your finger on FF). “Heightening” to the Japanese comedy mind reads as “stalling” in the American one, which is terrifically frustrating. In the mean time, I actually thing Tampopo is a better package of Japanese sketch… not nearly as self-consciously weird and mercifully shorter. It also has a “main plot” about a mysterious truck-driving “cowboy” who teaches a woman about ramen which pulls you through. As an academic nerd exercise as much as anything, I love watching outdated and international sketch comedy, just to see the mechanics at work and to get a sense of their sense of rules.
P.S. If you’re a Japanese cinema nerd (or just “nerd”), you’ll probably want to see Funky Forest just for the in-jokey cameos by actors from Beat Takeshi films, anime director Hideaki Anno and Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi
Silvija allowed me to accompany her yesterday, courtesy of Playbill press tickets, to see The 39 Steps on Broadway, gratis.
You can see the best and worst qualities of this play in my picture on the left—the fantastic poster and my post-show haze of boredom and underwhelmity. Like many other Broadway shows I’ve seen, I hesistate to criticize as my first through is always “I am not the audience for this.” But, this is a comedy stage adaption of a Hitchcock film classic. On paper, it’s 100% in my wheelhouse; however, in audience, I flipped between being apologetic for not enjoying it more to being angry about the camp winky-ness and telegraphed jokes to just being peeved.
I knew nothing about the show beforehand. I actually thought it was going to be a straight adaption. Silvija said it’s a monster hit in England. The history in a nutshell is: there was a 2-man cast adaption of the film first (like Irma Vep or Gutenburg!, I suppose) and the producer of this version expanded to a central actor in the lead, a woman who does 3 female roles and 2 clownish-looking swing guys who play everything else. I’m fine with that (though it’s a missed opportunity the female actor never played any other swing roles and no male roles; the two buffoons play a variety of arch “bad drag” roles), but the majority of the show there’s no joke beside “look it’s crazy how many roles these guys are playing… oops! he’s gotta find a reason to leave so he can play that other guy again! Oh, the wackiness.”
Silvija, at intermission, still in apologetic mode, said she wished the script was funnier. It seemed like a second draft of a show, in desperate need of punch-up in the long talky scenes where there was no physical comedy. The pacing overall was weird and you could feel real impatience from the crowd when a physical bit was outstaying its welcome and repeating over and over without really growing or changing. That said, there are a handful of moments of vaudeville-y stuff that do deliver—a guy takes a punch to the face and literally falls over backwards, rolls up onto his head and over and another scene has some “comedy sleeping” that I will embarrasingly point to as something that delighted me on my deepest, dumbest level. There is some great object work and miming, but it’s constantly brought down by mugging, winking, breaking the reality with 4th wall call-outs. They shoehorn in the names of 5 Hitchcock films into the dialogue, which is fine… groanworthy… but every time they do there’s a take to the audience, rewarding them for “getting it” and grinding the proceedings to a halt. The “games” of the show that made me the angriest were the endless mugging and pointing out how hard it is to do a whole movie with four actors, which by the second half had become a recurring gag of “You guys stop wasting time… you’re not a river/pile of rocks/10 policeman, you’re just a man waving a sheet around and get on with it.”
I mean, this show didn’t make me want to kill myself (as other Broadway shows have… I’m looking at you, second act of Spring Awakening) and there was enough interesting stagecraft to pull me through. Should YOU get free tickets (or cheap tickets), it’s worth a look. But steel yourself for mugging.
The UCB Theatre called me up and said, “Hey, why not tell people about our new video site” and I was all like “Nah, they can find it on their own.” Then they were like, “Don’t be a dick, Jesus. We’re just trying to get through the fucking day, already.” And I was like, “Well, shit, if you’re going to be all up in my jock about it, I’ll link to your goddamned website.”
Fatal Farm is back! And by that I mean, I finally took notice of something they’ve probably been doing for months and months! So, only my perspective of things makes them exists! Yee haw!
Fatal Farm, as you recall, I last reported on for their bizarre/hilarious re-versions of TV opening credits(and there’s a couple new ones since last I posted). And fucked up interpretations of newspaper comics were twice reported here in the form of the awesome Mary Worth video series (tip of the hat to Matt DeCoster for pointing out originally). Finally, two great internet tastes that taste great together in… Lasagna Cat!
Mad Men, in my humble opinion, was the best show of 2007 and when I got a chance to design a Christmas card for cast member and former NY improviser Rich Sommer, I jumped at it.
click the pic to see it giant sized
I didn’t take any money for it because it was fun and I wanted to do it. I was also working at an ad agency at the time (September) and had a lot of downtime. It gave me cabin fever, totally, to sit at a desk and wait for work to come and I realized the day went a lot faster if I just took a lot of freelance work to stay occupied… and I took a lot of questionable design work that I would have steered clear of in normal life.
The trade off for Rich was he had to endure weekly Q&A emails about behind the scenes Mad Men gossip and insider track backstage plot secrets (he didn’t know any). And when iTunes totally got behind in updating their episodes, he got AMC on the horn and straightened that shit out (or, his boss did, really). Aaaaaaand… he sent me a DVD screener for Xmas and a copy of a shooting script (“The Wheel” aka the season finale) for me to put in my hope chest. And I did this with it:
(I hope this satisfies loyal reader Monique’s need for inanimate objects with sexy legs)
I bought a wall map for my one woman show back in 2001. I’ve used it for set dressing for Cakey and in Sue Galloway’s one woman show last year. It came in a large plastic tube that I’ve been putting my pennies and other change in since then and I finally cashed it in at a Commerce bank.
