This is what we call a "shout-out" in my neighborhood.
My pal
Carly Milne's book has been published.
That's what I call awesome. You go girl. Etc.
You are the fantastic writer/editor of the world, and you look extra-double-alluring with your shirt unbuttoned.
Go to
Amazon and buy it, blog reader.
Go to her
blog and read, while you're at it, lazy.
So I wrote this long review/description on UPN's new adult soap opera
Sex, Love and Secrets last night, but blogger ate it and now it's gone.
You didn't miss much, but I'm a angry at blogger for being a bastard.
The show uses actual locations in Silver Lake for both establishing shots and some interior scenes. It's disconcerting to see restaraunts, bars and street corners I've urinated on filled with TV people and their straight, white teeth.
Overall, it seems like it was written by people who drove through the neighborhood once on their way to Santa Monica and West Hollywood or other places where assholes live.
Take some Melrose Place, mix it with Reality Bites(!) and throw in a carbon-copy of Desperate Housewives narration, and you get the gist. Robyn and I called every single plot point for the entire hour, as well as how the rest of the season would unfold were the show to be on for more than a month. It won't be. Trust me. By the end, I'm convinced Robyn and I were the only two people in the country still watching.
The transitions between scenes were all those clanging, whirring, super-saturated, time-lapse things you do on a computer, because I guess we used up the nation's supply of star-wipes and spin cuts in the 1970s.
You can tell a show is bad when they try and inject life in it by screwing with the transitions. It's like your TV is screaming at you: "LOOOOK!!!! THE SCENE IS CHANGING!!!!!! HERE IS SOMETHING DIFFERENT FOR YOU!!!!!" I'm not fooled.
Also, this one guy had a really funny looking head. That's why he's wearing a hat:
Back on the Air!After a five day Cyber-battle with heartless South Korean Hackers and teh FCC, Suspension of Disbelief is back... and this time, it's personal.
Really I just forgot to pay the yearly 45 clams to keep my site running.
Anyway, I was deluged with more than two emails that were like, "Where's your site?"
And I thought, "eh. Who cares anyway?" but then I thought of these things and was like, "I should post that on my website." So I decided to renew.
1) If I were a homeless guy, I'd make up little songs about the denominations of change I wanted people to give me.
I'd be like, "If you got the TIIIIMMMEEE.... why don'tcha gimme a DIIIIIIIME?!"
or
"If you don't want me to HOLLLLLLAAAARRRRR... Just gimme half a DOLLLLAAAAR!"
I bet a lot of people would give me money.
Or I'd hold up a sign that said, "Will proofread for food." and things would be mispelled, but corrected with red ink and proof marks. Like I'd add "I" to the begining of the sentence.
2) Here are some pictures from
Not a Cornfield.
I'm not sure why they planted a cornfield in the middle of an abandoned railroad switch yard in Los Angeles. I'm not sure why they call call it "not a cornfield," either; It is clearly a field of corn.
But I like it anyway because what's not to like?
We went there last night and heard some poets read in the central firepit while Golden Retrievers sniffed each other and the sun set.
There's nothing wrong with that.
I thought it would be funny to sneak down in the middle of the night and install a crop circle or two. But would the cornfield artist be like, "Ha! The community has responded to my art!" or would they be like, "Someone ruined it!"?
Who knows?
A New Direction
After a meeting with our board of directors and new Publisher and International playboy Baron Von Ascot, it has been determined that suspension of disbelief dot net will broaden its focus.
Cataloging beatnik jokes and providing up-to-the-second information about what Stephen Johnson did this weekend are still of importance, but the main editorial focus of the site will be information, gossip, fan art, "slash" fiction and boosterism of UPN's new television program:
Sex, Love and Secrets.
Finally, a telelvision program about
my life.
Sex, Love and Secrets (or SLS to insiders) is "Set in the L.A. hipster haven of Silver Lake" and explores "the often complex relationships of a tight-knit group of friends finding out who they are and what they want in life."
I love hipster havens, so I lived in Silver Lake for over 2 years, residing in the home of Jet-Set socialite Theresa Ramirez and dashing avante-garde journalist Jeremy Rosenberg. Like everyone in our neighborhood, we spent most of our time finding out who we were and what we want out of life, exploring our often complex relationship and doing laundry and stuff.
Now that I am an old married guy, I live in Echo Park, but I am so close to Silver Lake, I can see the street sign that demarks the border between EP and SL from my kitchen window.
There's no physical wall there, but I tell you, the barrier between the two communities is as solid as the Berlin Wall in the early 60s.
On my side: Working class Hispanic familes, new-to-the-neighborhood yuppies and under-employed artistic types; on the other side: Working class Hispanic Families, less-new-to-the-neighborhood yuppies and under-employed artistic types WHO HAVE A TV SHOW SET IN THEIR NEIGHBORHOOD.
Anyway, SLS, which may or may not have ties to Patty Hearst's reolutionary fun-squad the SLA, is bound to be the most successful television program in the history of the planet, and I'm not just saying that because I think it's true. I'm saying it because I think it's a lie.
SLS features soon-to-be megastars like Denise Richards and Eric Balfour. It premiers September 27th at 9 P.M. on UPN.
Austin Out of Bounds Improv Festival and Miniature Golf TournamentI just flew in from the Austin Improv Festival, and boy are my arms tired. (See? I'm doing improv RIGHT NOW.)
Here is a picture of some percentage of New Orlean's improv crizzew Coldstone Heroes. (At least, I think that's what they're called. I was pretty drunk when I was talking to them.)
Here's their story:
Last Week, Mayor Nagin was like, "You better get out of the way of this storm coming through."
The Improvers go: "I think he's right; we'd better split like a promising stock."
They fled the city for couches in Chicago, Ireland and elsewhere. Like four of them ended up in Austin.
You know what happened next in New Orleans:
*Cheap-ass 55-seat theaters and no-cover bars where the troupe might have plyed their craft are closed forever.
*The alternative weekly that called them "brilliant" and named them "comedy pick of the week" is gone but for millions of soggy hooker-ads floating down the street.
*The college kids who are starting to catch on to the improv thing have gone home to their parents.
*The one agency in town of any importance, the one they've been trying to entice for months to attend a performance, is gone too.
*That cool music store where they browse for Arcade Fire CDs has been destroyed.
*The thrift store where they purchased ironic T-shirts and non-ironic vacuum cleaners is gone.
*The Ramen Noodles they would have eaten have been looted, found, or left for rats.
Anyway, the troupe, homeless, heard about the festival in their adopted city--a city happily full of record stores, ironic T-shirt outlets, and like-minded funny people. Festival organizers screwed around with the festival's schedule to give them a chance to perform.
By all accounts, their set went very well; they were funny even though their hometown had been washed away.
Here's what I remember of my drunken conversation with them:
THE GIRL WITH THE SHORT HAIR: We're having a really good time tonight, but that's just cause we've drinking. This whole thing really sucks. Nagin is a great hero.
THE GUY WITH RED HAIR: I miss my records.
NOT PICTURED GUY offered many creative ideas of what should be done with former FEMA director Mike Brown.
THE GIRL WITH THE SHORT HAIR: Get ready for an influx of New Orlean's most desperate poor people, Texas, gold teeth and all.
ME: If you were in the Superdome, would you have lightened the mood with your improvisational hi-jinks?
THE GIRL WITH THE SHORT HAIR: Yes, definitely. 100%.
I regret not giving this story the journalistic respect it deserves. I didn't have a tape recorder or notepad, and,like I said, I was drunk.
Maybe it's not as big a story as people starving to death in their attics while our president pretends to play a guitar, but still, to members of the now-none-existant New Orleans comedy scene, it was pretty major.
It's also a story about how miniature golf, fellowship and booze can make people happy even though their records are in condemned apartments in New Orleans.
RAT GIRLThis is Ratgirl and Jobber Ratgirl:
Ratgirl stands on street corners of Austin holding up poorly spelled signs. She hosted a show Thursday night. I thought that Ratgirl was a crazy street person with an interesting way of expressing herself, but it turns out she has a white collar job in a legal firm during the week, and being Ratgirl is just a hobby.
She didn't tell me this, as Ratgirl never breaks character.
Ratgirl is my hero.
OTHER CRAPSketch and Improv troupes were in from all over the country, and the vibe created by organizers Mike D'Alonzo and Shannon LastNameIForget was, in a word rad. DIY without being disorganized and obviously centered on everyone having a nice time doing what they love instead of scrambling for some agent to pay attention to them so they can get an audtion for Laugh In or whatever. Very different than an L.A. festival I imagined.
Speaking of: L.A.was holding shit down for the Westsii-ide, with my wife's group,
Tiny Bandeleros, delivering a solid, sexy longform set,
Marty Barrett performing a lifechanging one-man improv thinger and Keilly and Roeters turning in a hysterical set.
The troupes from Austin and Dallas I caught (The Sicks, The Plurals, The Knuckleball Now) were, generally speaking, on some whole other shit from L.A.'s groups. Lots of energetic, rough-around-the-edges schtick, with a heavy helping of "shock" material, while the Los Angeles troupes displayed a dedication to craft that was sometimes lacking in the smaller market playas.
I guess making an audience go: "I can't believe they
went there!" is different in smaller cities than in Los Angeles, where we enjoy dinner theater featuring old ladies peeing on each other and everyone knows there is no God.
Each troupe made me laugh in a different way, though, and how often can you say that about comedy?
LOVE IN TEH AIRAlso, Love was in the air at the Improv festival. If George Bernard Shaw were alive, he'd have taken the intriques, mistaken identities and romantic dalliances of the comedians at the fest, and created any number of delightful light comedies... But he would have set them at a manor house.
Robyn and I are old married people now. We do not participate in shenanigans, so we treated the improv people as our personal jesters, spending the evening mightily entertained by their petty hopes and heartbreaks. It was nice to see people from all over the country checking one another out in a professional and personal sense.
I'd tell you all about it, but I like my friends and I probably don't even know you.
I blame
Kitty Kitty Bang Bang for the extra helping of shenanigans. The Austin burlesque troupe provided entertainment for the closing night party, and their reckless brand of retro-striptease set the tone for an anything goes night of dirty dancing and fluid exchange.
Or something. Anyway, I'm going back next year, but I will not be participating in the miniature golf tournament because playing miniature golf is like being tortured.
I imagine playing maximum golf must be worse--it's an argument of scale--but I'll never find out because I don't have a pair of those ridiculous pants they wear.
Beatnik Jokes
The fantastic beatnik joke on
Marty Barrett's blog inspired me to devote my entire life to cataloging and writing beatnik jokes. Here are four I stole from other sources:
1) A beatnik walks into a restaurant and asks, "Dig it: you got any pie?"
Waitress says, "The pie is gone, man!"
Hipster says, "Groovy - I'll have two slices!
2) Q: Why is Santa Claus like a beatnik, man?
A: He never shaves and only works one day a year.
3) This beatnik at a barbeque sees a guy cooking a rotisserie chicken. He says, "Hey, man, I don't want to bug you, but your music stopped playing and your monkey is on fire."
4) A beatnik is walking down the street wearing one shoe. A man stops him and says, "Hey, you lost a shoe." The beatnik replies, "no, man, I
found one."
Here's a beatnik joke I wrote myself:
Q: Why do beatniks hate the number four?
A: Because it's too square.
Look for thousands more soon.
Dear The New YorkerAs you know, the editorial staff of The New Yorker are great fans of my blog. (Hi, David Remnick, you old salty dog, you) The letter below is directed at them, not at the rest of you:Dear Guys,
You gotta drop the Cartoon Caption Contest on the back page of your magazine.
Every week it goes like this: You print an urbane, pen and ink illustration of a businessman talking to a clown riding a unicycle or something, then your readers send in captions like "...what, and leave showbiz?" or "but the benefits are really top notch," and it's never funny at all.
It's the kind of idea that you'd see on a webpage in 1997.
Also,
The New Yorker, please get Art Spiegleman back as your cartoon editor. Since he left, the cartoons have been crappy.
Your TV commercials promise I'll enjoy a coffee table book of your world-famous cartoons if I subscribe to your magazine, but I
won't enjoy that book at all unless it doesn't contain cartoons from, say, the last 2 years.
The cartoons have been bad lately; that's the point. Maybe not
Garfield bad or
Family Circuc bad or anything, but still pretty awful.
Also, why did you center your latest issue on food? Did you really think I'd enjoy a 6,000 word essay on Spanish soups by Calvin Trillin, or an article subtitled "Growing a museum of fruit in Umbria?"
Eat shit, you fucking assholes.
In the future, please only send me the parts of your magazine I will enjoy reading. Leave out articles about modern dance, reviews of books I will never read because they're for pointy-heads and any "experimental" short stories that will make me want to shoot myself because they are gimmicky nonsense.
Also, the poetry. Stop encouraging those people.
Love,
Steve
