I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

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.”

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!

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.

This is my current favorite song—

First, watch the 3rd Mister Glasses, I edited the middle part.

Second item, I want to make a new show. I like making shows, but I’ve had a two-ton, cake-frosted albatross around my neck for the last year. I have a bunch of semi-developed ideas (many of these are really old), but I can’t tell if any of them have merit.

The more the trend towards really short one-off sketches continues on the internet, the more I want to make complicated, multi-scene, involved shows. I don’t care what they end up on, though I like seeing them live with an audience. These shows could be for any venue online or off.

Here are the top candidates, to keep a record of them for my sake as well as the handful of peeping peteys who read this blog (both of you).

Sui-slider
Main character is a overly-sensitive Poetry grad student who after a series of disheartening encounters with his advising professor, therapist, and ex-girlfriend; commits suicide. What he soon realizes that rather than find a tidy end to his put-upon life, he has become a sui-slider cursed to jump between alternate realities with each attempt to end it all.

Pro:

Bowling Noir
The one hack move that pisses me off more than anything is badly done Noir parodies… sketches, videos, whatever. It’s always the same stock shit off a detective in his office and the dame comes in, voice over…zzzzz. The detective in his office shit is like less than 5% of the genre, and it’s 99% of the parody. I’d do a show that’s the rest of the genre, poor suckers getting pulled into schemes they don’t know how to get out of, insurance fraud, lots of night driving.

And the main character is the world’s greatest bowler, continually suckered into doing illegal things, played by Matt DeCoster

Pro:

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.

Why am I wasting my time making internet videos, when this guy already completely mastered the form?