I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

I’m taking off for 10 days on Friday, visiting friends and family in northern California. Plans are vague; lots of driving around. Starting in Davis. Thanksgiving in Oakland. Might want to visit Santa Rosa (my dad’s birthplace and the filming location of my favorite Hitchcock) Dim Sum will be had in San Francisco.

It’s a forced computer break as well (although I’ll end up checking email compulsively on every laptop I get my hands on, just like I did in Seattle in August). Even though I’m semi-unemployed, I end up spending all my waking hours sitting at my computer… usually well into the middle of the night. Being in an unfamiliar place makes me unable to do that and that makes it vacation enough, I suppose.

I’m hoping to use the time to plan my Xmas/New Years card (this was the last one I sent out, back in 2006) and get back to what theoretically is my main career and write some fucking comedy.

Take it away, Mamie VanDoren….
"Cabaret" from "The Girl Who Invented Rock and Roll"

I don’t have a facebook profile. Maybe you do?

Join this group:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=40147231206

This is your new favorite website ever:

Everything is Terrible!

There’s source material here for a million Waverly parodies

This site is to found video what April Winchell is to found audio. As in, the creme de la crap that I will be completely immersed in for weeks and then forget about for two years and then find again and get really into again.

Oh Bob. Still at it.

Bob Newhart in “The Challenge”

Bob, I love you. But I’m scared of your teeth. They look like robot teeth.

I mostly posted this to justify my “Newhart” category.

Swiss (French?) artist draws dead celebrities as unholy reanimated corpses

Franglishly titled “Portraits As Living Deads”

via Drawn

If you’re going to smell-test a lot of Demeter fragrances—smells like Salt Air, Marshmallow, Funeral Home, and Swimming Pool— before going to lunch, remember not to test them on your hand that you’ll be using to hold the sandwich that you’re bringing to your mouth.

The conflict between sandwich and smells makes for a very unappetizing experience.

That’s free road-tested advice from me to you

Twelve crazy months of Mad Men shenanigans illustrated by me, featuring scenes from both seasons.

40% Off Calendars
Enter the coupon code CALENDARSAVE during checkout to receive 40% off calendars through November 27, 2008 .

Buy this now on zazzle.com

Get a paper doll while you’re at it. I can’t believe no one’s bought one.

Doing this calendar probably took a year off my life.

In everyone’s hooplaing and gazooksing about over this Obama fellow, people overlooked the passing of someone very special. A man from another age who was not equipped for our time. A small man with giant glasses and a passion for talking in a weird stiff manner which supposedly was modeled after Jackson Pollock.

Mister Glasses has died.

Mitchell Magee, my friend and sometimes-collaborator (although not on Mister Glasses despite what people think) did not produce a new episode for this month’s Channel 101 screening and, according to the rules, forfeited his slot on the ballot and was immediately canceled.

Mitch didn’t write or shoot anything this month—the stress of the huge production, scheduling, frequent cast changes, expense of making a show for free while living on a limited budget chips away at one’s enthusiasm pretty quickly. He had been talking about ending the show for months, but waiting until he finished the episodes focusing on each member of Mister Glasses’ entourage and after the NY TV Festival in October. By anyone’s standards (except the absurd Defenders of Stan’s), Mister Glasses had a terrifically long run even if you discount the two Welcome to my Study specials that I worked on (but you shouldn’t because Study is awesome and Mitch wrote those, too).

And now… I will present an interview with Mitch about Mister Glasses.

Dyna: What is the origin of Mister Glasses? It’s an unusual idea for a web series, for sure, which tends to be more on the quick and obvious tip.

Mitch: Well, as you know, Dyna, you were pretty intimately involved with the conception of the idea. The two of us were walking around Manhattan and I looked up at a building (it may have been the Urban Glass House) and I said, look at that—that was made by…you, know…Mister Glasses.” I was thinking of the architect, Philip Johnson, but I couldn’t remember his name. You immediately said, “you should do a show called “Mister Glasses.”

Following link to link to link I found this someone out-of-my-depth blog on Japanese culture.
NeoJaponisme

It seems geared towards academic hipsters and expats living in Japan (and being hiply academic over there) who are fluent in the language. The blog is in English, but sprinkled with kanji to clarify points. I was enjoying skimming it… it’s has a more interesting (cynical, grouchy, arty) point of view than the very G-rated and general-interest J-List blog (G-rated blog from the site that introduced the US to the Hello Kitty vibrator).

Then, in their archives I discovered my new favorite thing ever. Japan’s answer to The Electric Company—CURRICULUMACHINE.

A sample Curriculumachine sketch:

• To teach the word “shoeshine” (靴磨き), a shoeshiner is sitting down while a customer comes by, drops his briefcase, opens his fly, and urinates on his face.

The NeoJaponisme article does an amazing job of explaining the show so best to just hop over there and read the whole thing. Curriculumachine sounds amazingly terrible in the same way Pythagoras Switch is amazingly adorable.

Also, I find Electric Company (the real American one) both off-putting and depressing for reasons I have trouble putting into words. I may have watched it as a kid (I was the right age for the tail end of its syndication) but don’t really have any specific memory of it. I rented a couple of the DVDs when I was directing Free to be Friends (which was a comedy-musical stage show based on 1970’s New York kid show The Magic Garden and Free to be You and Me that we did at UCBT and then at the NY Fringe Fest). I dunno… it bummed me out for some reason. Especially the troupe of actors waving to the camera at the end. Maybe it’s the earnestness? And they’re all dead now? (They are not actually all dead now… but that’s what the waving makes me think of.)

All of my tights have holes and the laundry keeps losing my socks (a key fashion element of my “look”). I am down to very few tall socks, so I ordered more from this website. I ordered from them years ago and chose poorly… I ended up with striped socks in odd color-combinations that didn’t really go with any of my clothes.

I, however, did not order these—

Great Whites
Great Whites Outrageously long at 200 inches (that’s over 16 feet/5 meters!). When you pull them on, they will be forced into submissive wrinkles all the way down your legs.

Their $80 price tag seems pretty steep, but Doc pointed out that’s less than $2.50 a foot—a better per-unit price than your average tube sock.

For sale here

I probably should break down and buy a new printer tomorrow.

I am a kleenex-box-shoe-wearing plutocrat who shuns all human company but in those brief moments I left my guard down, I reward those who do me a kindness with riches beyond imagination.

This young shaver—a total stranger to me before these videos arrived—so touched me with his rendition of the Study song, that I sent him the first ever Welcome to my Study t-shirt (left)

Jesus, this kid looks like a Chas. Addams drawing.

Now the young Eve Harrington has struck again! Moved by the t-shirt, he has expanded on his dopplegangerous activities, and done a whole episode!

A world without Yma Sumac.

Peruvian songbird Yma Sumac dead at 86

(I have never seen her referred to as “The Peruvian Songbird” before this obituatry. “Amy Camus” and “Voice of the Xtabay,” sure…)

Yma, Uta, Uta, Yma…

In your faaaaace, Welcome to Our House!

The young master also does Mister Glasses

P.S. – After someone emailed Mitch requesting it, I put a Welcome to my Study T-shirt up for sale. I think wearing t-shirts with logos on them is tacky.

Mitch made his own shirt with a photo on it.

I scanned in my two vintage bowling calendars to make the internet that much closer to encapsulating all human knowledge.

Bowling 1963 & 1965