I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

Almost eight years ago (eep!) I was in a show called Feature Feature at the UCB Theatre. I will gladly chew the ear off of anyone who wants to know more about it, but for the purposes of this unnecessarily long buildup to a marginally related art file, I’ll describe it as a show in which a set cast of 9 played multiple character roles every week in an improvised genre movie.

Even though I was an Adobe Illustrator novice, I drew retro Shag-inspired/ripoff cartoon portraits of the entire cast for our very-circa-’98 website and then, playing to the strength of vector drawing, basically used them like Colorforms to do depictions of each show we did. I’d put new hair on them, or attach heads to animal bodies, and so on. I did a dozen of them, I think, and now don’t even know where the files are (it was 4 computers ago) and featurefeature.com is long dead and URL-poached.

So, last year I did a Mad Men Christmas card the same way (though hopefully with seven-years-more sophistication and less rip-off-iness) so I have “colorforms” of all the main characters of the show. In a bout of insomnia and inspired by seeing Remy Auberjonois in The Country Girl, I pasted up a disturbing scene from the pilot of Mad Men...probably the first time a gyno exam has been depicted in cutesy retro cartoon form… that kind of stuff didn’t make it into too many ads in Ladies Home Journal.

(click to see in large and lovely detail)

Mitch and I were at one point talking about making Mister Glasses into a purely educational show that defined architectual terms and told people who Philip Johnson was. Actually, I was talking about this and he was ignoring me, but he liked the idea of 50s clipart style bumpers. So I made some.

I remember maybe 15 years ago every jackass loved putting dumb 50s “retro” clipart on everything “ironically.” (Me too. I loved it. I had a big CD of clipart.)

Last night, Silvija and I went to see “The Country Girl” on Broadway. Who’s in “The Country Girl” on Broadway. Three Extraordinary Stars, that’s who!

(Just kidding. I am not an Extraordinary Star. Peter Gallagher is the third Extraordinary Star and is off camera. He was in The Hudsucker Proxy. He sang a Dean Martin song in the Christmas Party Scene.)

These are Broadway shows I’ve seen with Silvija:

In The Heights
High Fidelity the Musical
Spring Awakening
LoveMusik
There might be more of them. I can’t remember now.

The Country Girl was written by Clifford Odets. He also wrote an Elvis Movie. The play is a scootch on the boring side and a lot of the actors seemed kind of stiff. All of the non-MorganFreeman/PeterGallagher/FrancesMcDormand actors looked vaguely the same… like they all were related to each other and in some cases, seemed to be the same person. The show edited scenes by having the curtain sweep in from the left and then keep going and going and going until it swept off stage and then miraculously the set had changed. The curtain was my favorite part. I wish they could have done it vertically as well, but that would have been an engineering impossibility.

René “Odo, Guy from Benson” Auberjonois’ son was in this… Remy. He also played the gynocologist in the pilot of Mad Men and looks a bit like Josh Perillo. I looked him up online afterward and he went to Wesleyan Univerity. The guy who made In The Heights also went to Wesleyan (possibly at the same time as me, though I didn’t know him). I went to Wesleyan… kinda.

As Silvija and I left the theatre we passed A Chorus Line, now starring Mario Lopez. At that moment, Mario Lopez himself was leaving the stage door and was being mobbed… MOBBED!... by dumpy-looking screaming teenage girls. We walked back by The Country Girl’s door and Peter Gallagher had just come out and was being slightly-mobbed by a more sedate group of well-wishers. In the background, Remy Auberjonois and the guy who played the stage manager walked by unnoticed. Well, except for Silvija noticing them and pointing them out.

To celebrate Will Hines fixing my flickr badge on the sidebar, I present Baroque Obama, part II

The first one wasn’t that hot, so I bend to public pressure to put a wig on him.

(Hair borrowed from composer Henry Purcell)

I Saw These at a deli—Hot Kid brand Baby Mum-Mum 100% Selected Superior Rice Rusks

Here is a poem/cheer I wrote in collaboration with the words on the front of the box (all capitalization and repetitions theirs):

Baby Mum-Mums! 100% selected superior rice rusks.
Baby Mum-Mums! A Wholesome Source of Food Energy.
Baby Mum-Mums! Soft and safe for biting.
Baby Mum-Mums! Packed in stay fresh packs.
Baby Mum-Mums! Low in salt.
Baby Mum-Mums! Wholesome source of food energy.
Baby Mum-Mums! Specially prepared for 4 months onwards.
—-

Edited to add: “Baby Mum-Mum is a division of Want-Want Holdings, a manufacturer of healthy snack foods, beverages and related products since 1962.”

Oh, fucking shit. I lost my driver’s license. Of course, I didn’t realize this until I was about to go to a rock show and got carded.

I’m trying to think of the last time I had to show ID… Valentine’s Day, maybe.

I’ve torn this place apart looking for it.

So I got tagged to write out 3 Three Things That I Learned the Hard Way on my blog. I just wrote mine and now I’m “taggin’” you to write yours (if you want to). You definitely don’t have to do it. But it was actually more fun than I thought it’d be. Here are mine:

http://www.roblathan.com/2008/02/22/three-things-ive-learned-the-hard-way/#comments

A lot of stuff I almost wrote here boiled down to “don’t do design work for crazy people,” but I still haven’t learned that and managed to take at least one mentally-unbalanced client every six months.

1. I should never agree to proof-read anything

I’m not a good speller. I’m not a good proofreader for things like bad punctuation and typos.(I never proof anything I’ve ever written in this blog, for example) My mind works faster than my hands, y’see, so I skip words and run them together. I had a poster I did hanging up on the wall and I didn’t even see the typo in the copy until 6 years of looking at it every day.

I did help a successful screenwriter friend do his WGA arbitration. Basically, he was one of many screenwriters who worked on a big Hollywood movie and he had to prove he had written X% of the filmed script (the number is different depending how many total writers there are and how late you came into the process) to get a screen credit. My job was to read every version of the movie… a coulda-been summer blockbuster based on a 70s cop duo show… and record which scenes appeared for the first time in which versions and which scenes made it into the final. No proofreading involved, just patience and note-taking.

Another set of friends were looking for someone to proofread (as in, for errors) their script before they submitted it to some studio that was interested. The successful screenwriter friend nominated me, citing my work on his arbitration, and I reluctantly agreed but added that I wasn’t a professional but I’d do my best. Then they told me I only had 2 days. And they didn’t have a printed out script, I had to proof it on my screen. And I didn’t have FinalDraft so I had to proof PDFs so I couldn’t correct errors on screen, I had to make note of them (page and line) in another document and send it to them. It was a Rube-Goldbergian set up for what should have been a simple task.

Two days later I got a screaming phone call from one of the friends saying I had fucked them, the studio person had complained about typos and I had ruined them and I was an awful person.

2.The NYPD are not like the police on Law and Order.

I was the victim of a violent crime and had to come in and tell the detective in charge what had happened. I had to repeat it about ten times. He contradicted me repeatedly and kept implying that what I was saying couldn’t have happened. He told me he wasn’t going to put any effort into finding the guy. He broached other theories (the perp in question must have been a boyfriend I brought home that I’m taking revenge on), and at the time I was thinking, he’s testing me to see if I’ll change my story under pressure… he’s looking for inconsistancies. But actually, after I got home, I realized they just didn’t want to investigate the crime and were trying to get rid of me. I later found out that precinct in Brooklyn is one of the most notoriously corrupt in the city.

3. Don’t buy computer cables at Best Buy

I bought a $30 one the “GeekSquad” told me to get that didn’t do shit… the actual right cord from the Apple Store was $9.

I don’t know anyone to tag since Rob Lathan got everyone I know with a blog. Um, I’ll tag Stoney.

I’ve been up to my eyeballs in little annoying lingering things that need to be taken care of on the SuperDeluxe show, but it’s as boring to talk about as it is to listen to, so I’ll skip it.

I’m doing a CD package for my friend’s band. It’s a collection of all their vinyl releases going back to 1996, plus unreleased tracks. We started getting this ready as far back as 2005, but it, for whatever reason, never really happened. It’s massive… 13 pages of liner notes, 41 tracks; but nobody had any cover ideas. (The one we wanted to do was stolen… by Smashmouth).

It got a title the second time around, “Christmas for Breakfast,” so going off that I looked around for an idea. I found a kids book (the band self-describes as “kiddie pop”) from the 1960s (the main era they lift style cues from) with “breakfast” in the title, so there you go. I ran it by James, and he was game.

I drew the lettering from a vintage magazine headline which I had downloaded as research for the Madmen xmas card I did last year. Making lettering brings out the obsessive-compulsive tendancies I mostly keep in check. I can do it for hours.

So, as of about the third day working on it, this is the progress. I’m going to put some other stuff on the table. Textures and shading I’ll put in afterwards, using photoshop airbrush. The kid needs eyebrows, too.

Since Tuesday, I’ve been sick as a dog. This is the worst cold/flu I’ve had and it seems to be completely unaffected by any medicine I’ve taken.

Some of the symptom include: sore throat, congestion, sneezing, coughing, chills, shakes, hot flashes, sudden lack of balance, exhaustion, giving false hope that I’m getting better and then suddenly getting a million times worse, fever, insomnia, nausea and telekinesis.

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.

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.

$101.85!

It’s 2008. Snooze. I’m already over it.

I have nothing to recount about New Year’s, nor any promises to make.

Get ready for 365 days of non-committal shoulder shrugs.

P.S.—I did not alter this, which someone accused me of. This is the actual packaging.

Will Hines and I did yoga today We are unlikely yoga people… people least like to do yoga, so we went together to cancel each other out. He had actually done it twice before, I was a total novice.

We went to Om NYC where they had a super basic intro course for $5. I pulled my shoulder almost immediately doing the least strenuous move of the class. Like putting my hands above my head. And anything where I had to support any portion of my weight on my hands, I felt like my wrists were about to snap in two. I have the dainty wrists and fingers of a 90 year old Southern belle.

The 90 minute class passed pretty quickly and the teacher was very normal and non judgmental and not hippie-ish, but there was some kind of questionable music played at some point. I guess they do what they can to offset the almost constant sirens outside. It makes me think—environmentally—people just shouldn’t do yoga in New York City. It doesn’t go. Like ordering Chinese takeout in Maine… don’t do it. They’re going to fuck it up.

I would go back even though I don’t quite know how I feel about it. I know I should be doing something like yoga… something exercisey or physical or calming or whatever, but the cool down meditation where we were supposed to just be calm and breathing I couldn’t shake a weird creeping depression that made me feel much worse than when I walked in. Not an intellectual depression like “I suck at yoga” or “I’m wasting my life” but an emotive non-specific feeling like being dropped into a tank of slightly uncomfortably cold water.

On the plus side, at least no one was jerking off in the class.

So, I wrote a post yesterday twice and both times my internet connection crashed and took the post with it. So I got frusterated and didn’t try a third time. I’ll retro-post it later, but it still counts as being written on Sunday.

Today is my first day of unintentional unemployment (as opposed to taking a day off) since I was laid off at the ad agency on Halloween. Well, they told me to leave on Friday and don’t come back. I was surprised but relieved since after 3 months I was getting really irritated and stir crazy. I also have mounting obligations with the new Cakey series, which will be on SuperDeluxe.com at the beginning of next year. We have one episode entirely shot, one episode 1/3 done, one episode written but not shot, and one episode as an outline.

Come to 102 tonight and I will answer more Cakeyrelated inquiries, but only if you vote for Mitch Magee’s new show Mister Glasses, which I appear in and was present at the first imaginings of this summer. And it was edited on my computer while I was at work, so I will claim producer credit. Also, for more Mitch Mageerealted news, that Andy Kaufman award thing I posted about? He’s a finalist. Nice job, readers.

I saw a documentary on Groucho Marx yesterday, and it must have been an old one since they interviewed Bill Cosby on the set of the Cosby show. Groucho was 40 years old when Coconuts was filmed (and he was the youngest of the “funny” Marx bros.) and it reminded me of a different American Experience show I saw on Lucille Ball that mentioned SHE was 40 when I Love Lucy premiered. Based on this pool of two examples, all from more than 50 years ago, I will unscientifically state that comedians get their breaks late in life. Bad science!

I got this on ebay, this very deck.

For the last couple months I’ve been re-obsessed with the card game Mille Bornes, which I was last most interested when I first moved in NY almost 10 years ago. It’s was game nerds call a “take that! game” (not to be confused with the British boy band that unleashed Robbie Williams on the world) since most of what you do while playing it is fuck your opponent over and stop them from advancing. This game is also French (or Belgian, according to the “made in” tag) and the cards are labeled in French and English, so not only are you a dick while playing it, you can be a dick who speaks French. Coup Fourré, shithead!

If you’re not able to be schooled by me in person*, I suggest downloading MacBornes, which is a nice piece of openware. It lacks the charm of the 1964 deck (pictured above), which features unusually chosen animals to represent the mile cards (50 km = goose?) and great 3 color graphics, but isn’t nearly as hideous as my 1988 deck which I won’t befoul my scanner with its shitty “roadside icon” illustrations. I own two Mille Bornes decks, shithead!

—-

*The random distribution of cards almost entirely determines the winner in most cases—80% chance, 20% skill, from my experience.

Nikolaschka Pillkallen

Halloween was my favorite holiday as a kid, not so much for the scary monster gore blood associations (which are downplayed for kids anyway) but for the costume and candy aspect. Also being able to walk around at night… usually a school night too. It really threw a monkey wrench into the usual pattern of come home from school and then don’t leave the house again until the next morning.

Similarly “off-feeling” was going to school at night, which usually happened on the night of the Christmas pageant. You had to go to your classroom and watch Xmas specials with your whole class until it was your grade’s turn. Then the whole class would walk in a line to the auditorium. Just the night sky outside the windows and the shitty weak fluroscents overhead made the whole experience feel like the twilight zone to me.

My mom sewed my costume every year and we usually started about a month before, going to the fabric store to pick out what I wanted. My best (and weirdest) was in 2nd grade I was Sherlock Holmes. The best costume I made on my own was in high school, where I was one of the line drawings from my Russian textbook. We used no-frills Eastern Bloc text books that featured minimalist line drawings of the Ivanovich/Petrovna families (I actually don’t remember their last name in the book but the mom and the dad were Anna Petrovna and Ivan Ivanovich, to use their patronymic). I wore all white and painted my face white. I cut out “outlined” flowers from felt and pinned them on the white dress and outlined my nose, mouth and eyes with black eyeliner. I made my hair (in the weird semi-flip style of the drawing) out of posterboard with the details drawn in sharpie. It was pretty sweet.

I read an article online somewhere about how Ricky’s (a NY local beauty supply/sexual novelties chain, for out of towners) got into the halloween costume business and now totally turns over all of their floor space to pre-made, bagged costumes for the entire month of Oct. It’s actually kind of a drag since I needed to get some hairgel and I couldn’t find it for all the “sexy pirate” and “silver surfing man” costumes draped over the shelves. Anyway, the guy interviewed said that they’re such a huge market they can tell the costume companies what to make and they’ve revolutionized Halloween by starting the “sexy [blank]” trend.

Fuck you, Ricky’s.

Other people have complained in person and in blogs about this, particularly female comedians. I’ve known a couple who’ve done their own heightened versions (Sexy Burn Victim. Sexy Abraham Lincoln). My complaint, aside from it being lazy and uncreative (dress like a hooker, add signifier = ears, hat, prop), is it’s rarely sexy. It’s “sexy.” A lot of the store-packaged Sexy [Blanks] mysteriously feature some form of pouffy mini tutu. Are dudes getting off on tutus these days? No, because actually putting something sexy like a g-string or hot pants might offend someone or make the lazy costume buyer BE a sexual object and all it’s uncomfortable (physical, moral) associations rather than lamely nod at a toothless abstraction of it. For the record though, 1950s commercial conceits of an inanimate product with lady legs in high heels is the only sexualized costume I approve of. Pack of Lucky Strikes with fishnet gams? Hot-cha-cha.

I think any inanimate object with sexy legs is a winner, in particual if the object in question is actually innately UN-sexy. Like a package of porkroll. Or an issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Or DVD of Studio 60. (Suggest a good one and I’ll draw it and post it online)

Here also is another good idea. If you dress in a sexy bee or ladybug costume (lazy!) you can be redeemed if you wear a very realistic anatomically correct insect head. I mean like moving, drooling pincers and all.

I have nothing to wear tonight.

I fell asleep in the afternoon and just woke up. I suspect I may have an alternate personality that took over (and this is not the first time I’ve considered this) because I woke up with painful scrapes on my hand and foot and a headache. Stuff on my shelf had been knocked over on to the floor—a tea pot, some necklaces and a Cakey baby, but I was entirely unaware of it. Didn’t hear the noise.

While still in half-sleep, I checked my cellphone clock and it said “9:00.” I assumed 9 AM, but it was still dark and I could hear people talking and laughing outside. My first thought was “it’s the apocalypse and the sun has burnt out.” I couldn’t figure out whether it was Monday or Tuesday morning and debated whether to go to work in light of having an alternate personality and it being the apocalypse.

I figured out what was going on just recently.

Will Hines just asked me, “For fun, take this moment and imagine if the world, right now, were exactly as you’d like. Your life, that is—if your life were going exactly according to your wildest dreams.”

It made me think of a Dan Clowes strip in Eightball (which might have been “My Suicide” but I’m not sure), which is typically pessimistic. I think the take on it was “our pathetic imaginations seem so limited trying to imagine ‘the best”—it’s all cartoonish and shallow group sex and Richie Rich piles of money. Lame.

Despite being made of forboding and unhappiness, I made an honest brainstorming attempt and here’s my cartoonish and shallow take on it:

I think I’d like to be making films or working on a TV show or something with people I like, doing a comedy show that we are proud of and is popular enough (not too popular, though… that leads to crash-and-burn Hollywood endings and Chevy Chasism)

I’d have a nice apartment by myself in Manhattan (where I live now) or a nice part of Brooklyn close to a decent subway line (no fucking JMZ). Bigger. Own not rent. On a lower floor… less walking up.

My neighbors are interesting and friendly…like, eccentric old museum curators or scientists or salt-of-the-earth NY Jewish stereotypes who are concerned about my well being, but aren’t all up in my business. Maybe one is a doctor incase someone tries to commit suicide (not me, since my life is aces) in my apartment as in the movie The Apartment. None of these neighbors rehearses their drag cabaret act at 4 AM as my current downstairs neighbor does.

I don’t want to say “I want to be a trillionaire and take a bath in gold coins” because I think that would be a.) boring and b.) too guilt-making because, if I was a trillionaire, I’d feel obliged to like, do a lot of charity events and give my money away, which would be a lot of work. Or else I’d have to trust someone else to run my foundation and then I’d worry that they were being dishonest, with the temptation of my millions (it’s my ideal life, but people are still human).

Plus, I don’t like shopping or anything, so I’d never really buy anything with it. Money also makes people go insane. In this fantasy word, I’d travel a lot, but I’d somehow have my own plane because flying commercially is bullshit. Now more than ever. Fucking delays and missed connections and fucking awful cramped seats. That would be my most luxuriant, impossible indulgence. I would have a relatively normal life and go to work everyday, but also my own private Concorde to fly on whenever I wanted to.

And also a time machine.