Then I will tell you that the live show I am promoting is in New York. I know, we are being a little New York-centric with the past couple of posts. But we can only do live shows in places we are. Perhaps we can fix this in the future.
Anyway, Brian Wecht is the co-producer of Story Collider, in the video he is at our old show in Long Island City. Tonight, Cyndi will be doing his show and I will be there to drink. The show is at Pacific Standard, which is where we are doing our new show, The Standard Issues, which will be on the 24th of this month and the theme will be “Jerks.” So if you like what you saw of Brian, come check out the show tonight and, if you are not in New York but liked what you saw, I am currently plugging through my back log of storytelling videos and will bring you more as soon as I get them cut.
For this month’s Hotsy Totsy Burlesque, Brad, my Co-producer Joe the Shark and I have combined two things we love:
Dr Who and Burlesque.
I love our show. Each month we write a new script in sort of an on-going burlesque soap-opera.
For those of you in NYC, here is the info:
HOTSY TOTSY BURLESQUE
Tuesday, August 17th, 9:30pm
@ The Delancey Lounge 168 Delancey, — just two blocks from the F/J train stop. 9:30, $8.
Cherry Pitz and Joe Shark are unaware – but something weird is going on at the Home for Wayward Girls and Fallen Women. Something that only one person can understand. Dr Who. Whatever you do … don’t blink! You’ll miss the boobies!
Cherry Pitz is your host and the show features RunAround Sue, Clams Casino, Apathy Angel, Misty Lux and Billy the Id & Special Guest Candy Cory!
Check out the latest video mashup “premake” by Ivan Guerrero – a trailer for a 1952 version of The Avengers movie, based on Marvel’s “Secret Invasion” storyline, spliced together from over 50 different sources of footage:
And then, to get a real sense of the buckets of attention to detail, skill, love, and sheer nerdiness that went into this, watch it again with Ivan’s annotations (below). He calls out all of the character and location cameos that you might have missed, and even breaks down the typographical references in the title cards! (Pause the video each time a note box pops up.) Read the rest of this entry »
My wife and I went and saw Winter’s Bone last night. It is a small release film concerning the Meth trade in Southern Missouri.
I was raised in a family that was pretty much evenly split between Evangelical Christians and a meth cartel in the Saint Francois Mountains, on the Missouri side of the Ozarks. In the county where I was born, they discovered 76 Meth labs in 2004. In the county just north they found 259. This does not mean that Saint Francois is any better than Madison, but rather that Madison is on the Ozark Plateau and is mostly wide open space, where as my people are in the mountains where you aren’t going to find anything that means to be hidden. At any rate, in the same statistical year, Missouri had more known labs than any other state by more than a thousand, the runner up being Iowa (2,788 vs. 1,300)
I write on this subject a lot, having lost three siblings to the trade in one way or another, and watched a great portion of my family turn into rabid animals who act as if they always have one leg in a trap. But there is something about seeing it as written by someone else. Something so intimate and invasive. It is like being stolen from and awarded something all at the same time. Like having a stranger on the subway tell you that you have the most beautiful scars. Walking out, I teared up for dead people whose funerals I skipped at the time.
All of this emotional catharsis in the sushi place after the show means, of course, that the film is brilliantly executed. I am ashamed to say that it captures it quite well. There are other sides it does not capture, like the inherent comedy of some of the redneck antics, but it is a movie, not a TV series, and it has two hours to tell a story.
Just to have it said, my solo show Monsters In The Wood and the forthcoming book based on the show does cover those other bases. Just to have it said.
Anyway, see this movie. It is ugly and beautiful and it made an Ozark refugee get a little weepy on the Lower East Side last night.
I was riding the Acela from New York to DC last week on a fairly ordinary commute — then the train came to a stop about a mile past the Hamilton, NJ station. The conductor said that there had been some debris on the tracks that the train ran over, and it would be a short wait before we were back on our way. Then the smell of burning flesh filled the train, telling an altogether different story.
About forty-five minutes later, the conductor announced that we had, in fact, had an accident. We’d struck a passenger back at the train platform in Hamilton. There was a fatality. We didn’t even feel a bump back where I was seated.
Artificially hushed chatter filled the train.
Then the conductor announced that we would probably be there for a few hours while they inspected the train, switched out the crew and dealt with emergency personnel. There would be free snacks and water in the cafe car, he went on to say, to apologize for the inconvenience.
You’ve never seen such an exodus. Everyone jumped up out of their seats and made a beeline for the cafe car, cramming crappy cookies in a plastic sack into all of their available pockets. People were lined up the length of two train cars just to buy food and booze. The train ran out of beer and wine in half an hour.
It was a low-budget, plastic-wrapped business-travel bacchanal.
