He makes beautiful, funny typographic additions to found oil paintings, he designed sets and puppets for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, he art-directed the Smashing Pumpkins’ gorgeous, Georges Méliès-inspired “Tonight, Tonight” video, and he generally embodies the kind of artist that I want to be.
And now Wayne White is the subject of a documentary entitled “Beauty is Embarrassing”, which is premiering at SXSW 2012. Here’s the trailer:
I want to watch this film with all of my heart and soul. (And also my eyeballs.)
We’ve just added bullwhip and lasso artist Chris McDaniel to the show at Union Hall on February 7th. This guy’s an incredible treat – I saw him whip pasta noodles out of his own mouth at Sharkbite Sideshow a few weeks back and I couldn’t get enough.
Here’s a video of Chris doing part of his act:
AS always, the show is the first Tuesday of each month at Union Hall in Brooklyn, 8PM.
We’ve been real sometimes-y about these And I Am Not Lying live shows over the past year – a show here and a show there, spattered around Brooklyn and lower Manhattan and DC and Philadelphia in a series of one-offs that are always exciting, but hardly consistent. Considering that the show’s based on a blog that is updated really infrequently, that kinda made sense.
Thanks to a lot of awesome help from Creaghead and Co., that’s about to change.
Starting February 7th, we’ll be cock-rocking the NPR crowd with the And I Am Not Lying live show at Union Hall on the first Tuesday of every month. Doors are at 8, show’s at 8:30 and tickets ain’t but ten tiny dollars for the finest comedy, storytelling, burlesque sideshow you’re going to get anywhere.
Be honest with yourself: stuff like this is part of the reason you moved here. It’s worth a headache at work on Wednesday.
We pulled together this cool trailer about it, too. It may be NSFW, depending on your job:
I wanted to start this show for a very, very good reason. I’m doing this thing so that I don’t go completely numb, and I’m trying to bring as many people back to life as I can right along with us.
I spend a lot of time hunched over a glowing rectangle starting and mediating petty squabbles about nothing, breathing shallowly through my mouth and reading tweets about television. I’ve been doing it for years. When I’m not getting paid to do it I sit around my apartment in my underpants and do it for free, apparently.
Everyone does.
Sometimes I think we’re all using computers to row this numbing boat towards a black wall of depressing distraction. I want to do my part to get as many people into one room and feeling something great together for a little while. And maybe if we get together often enough and pool our collective energies into something funny and weird, we can live a little outside of our bottomless pockets filled with lotus petals.
The entire purpose of life is to get as excited as possible. I’m so, so excited to have a reason to hose the town down with excitement once a month. So it’s like a Mobius strip of recursive excitement for me.
Sometimes storytelling shows can get a little sweater-vesty, comedy shows can be too bitter and detached, and burlesque too much, all in a go. This way we can cross-pollinate the best of the best and no matter what, if you’re not into what you’re seeing you can see something else really soon.
I want this thing to be a rock show without instruments, to just cram an entire aircraft carrier’s worth of fun into the basement of Union Hall. So far, we’ve been doing pretty okay on that front, I think.
D.Billy and I collaborated on this cool poster (I think it’s cool, anyway) to announce the residency:
I saw these doorways on the subway at the 4th and 9th streets in Brooklyn – with layers and layers of paint chipped away so that workmen could get to the padlocks holding them shut. I thought they were just breathtaking, like a micro-geologic event in slow-motion action. The paint looks like steppes or a canyon slowly eroded by wind and time, doesn’t it? Kinda like another planet where people have to hike down those paint layer steppes into this treacherous valley with a gigantic ceremonial padlock in the center, like some sort of ancient alien ship.
And like, every million years a giant hand yanks the ship away and rips the planet apart, shaking everyone off to drift into their deaths in the cold wilds of the outer atmosphere.
In case you were wondering, I was, in fact, late to my destination. And yes, I do find psychedelic drugs to be redundant. Enjoy the pics:
Creaghead and Company is pretty much Caroline Creaghead. And Caroline Creaghead is pretty much awesome. She helps to book and produce the And I Am Not Lying Live show, in addition to a bunch of others. One of the other shows in Caroline’s stable is “Heart Of Darkness” with Greg Barris. According to Flavorpill, Heart of Darkness (with the live band the Forgiveness) is a
psychedelic stand‐up show … a visceral experience from the downtown comedy underground. Accomplished thinkers, authors, poets, and artists join Barris and his band to become one seamless, improvised comedy freak show.”
I caught the sold-out show at Union Hall last Saturday. What I could see of it was really, really awesome, when I could see around a pillar. Everything sounded great, though.
Reggie Watts dropped in at the last minute and did a hilarious set, improvising all kinds of hilarious music and completely surreal standup that made perfect sense and told right-on truths as long as you didn’t listen too closely. If you did, you’d realize he was riffing on the kind of played-out onstage cliches you hear from most hip-hop and rock ‘n roll stage banter.
Here’s a pretty sweet clip. In it, Reggie Watts covers Maroon 5′s “Moves Like Jagger,” freestyles and improvises, and raps like the lead singer of a Cookie Monster death metal band:
Sandy was my family’s dog. We got her from the pound back when I was in college, and have had her ever since. She’s a mutt, some combination of terrier and lab. I always thought she looked like a Muppet snow monster.
We had to have her put to sleep today. She was sixteen or seventeen – when you get a dog from the pound, their age is always sort of vague. She had rheumatoid arthritis in her back legs and a dense, growing mass in the bone of her right front leg. Her right front paw has touched the ground about fifteen times since Thanksgiving. She was deaf and starting to lose her eyesight, and my parents have had to give her morphine to keep the pain back for the last week or so. It was time.
That doesn’t mean this doesn’t completely suck, though.
When we got her from the pound, they told us that she had likely been abused in her previous home, but she didn’t have any behavior problems that they could see. She just cringed when she heard people yelling and got a little weird about dinnertime. When we took her into the isolation pen to sort of test her out or whatever, she climbed into my lap and whimpered and licked my hand. How can you ignore something like that?
Her name on her cage at the pound was Sandy, which is also my mom’s first name. We asked my mom if she wanted us to change the dog’s name, and she knelt to pet her and rub her ears for a minute, looking into her huge brown eyes. Then she stood up and said “you know, I really think she’s been through enough. And if you all talk to me in the same tone of voice you’d talk to a dog, and I can’t tell the difference, we have at least two other problems that are much more important.”
Every single time I entered my parents’ house after that, Sandy exploded all over me like a furry avalanche, thumping her tail and emitting this high-pitched whiny squeal. Her tail would bang into the banister and hit the floor hard enough to hurt, but it never seemed to bother her when I came home. I took her running in the field by my folks’ house, and she kept up with me on the sprints for many years, her face split in a massive dog grin. When we got home she’d drink her entire water bowl, maybe knock back an inch or two of toilet water and then pass out in front of the air conditioner.
Then at night, when I’d finally go to bed, I’d find her lying on whatever bed I was supposed to be staying on. She slept next to me every chance she got. Here she is, last Christmas. She slipped away while Maggie and I were hanging out with my parents by the tree, and helped herself to the end of my bed on the floor of my sister’s old room:
I got off at the wrong subway stop last night on the way back from telling a story about Rick James at Luca Lounge. But as it turns out, it was so the right stop. These guys were just blowing out some serious funk underground, after midnight, for the entire world. The whole experience felt exactly like the mental image I had of New York in the decades before I moved here. And naturally, I requested that they play some Rick James.
You know, there’s an awful lot of cancer going around. I’m not sure that it’s not catching.
Or, you know how people used to smoke cigarettes with asbestos filters and X-ray their feet at the shoe store to see if they had a good fit? I think we’re doing something like that right now, something our grandkids are going to find so shocking and appalling when we tell them about it. They’re going to say “well of COURSE you all had cancer.”
Maybe it’s plastics.
A friend of mine got diagnosed with breast cancer last week. And before that, other friends and other friends. The words that follow are for anyone that’s been diagnosed with cancer and is really, really freaking out about it. That should cover pretty much anyone that’s been diagnosed with cancer, period.
I’ve just found myself emailing versions of what follows out to a number of people recently, and I thought maybe I’d put it out here so strangers could read this and share it.
Man, am I beat. In case you hadn’t noticed, we had two shows outside New York City last week. I’ve been consumed with them for months, and we’ve all been super excited. And that excitement pretty much paid off, too.
The bus ride down to Washington from New York was pretty uneventful. The cab ride to Eric and Sarah’s (our hosts for the evening) was another story. That was when I found out that we’d sold out the Black Cat.
It’s really, really difficult to articulate what that felt like. Everything got brighter, sharper. Sounds had more clarity, and all the hairs in my nostrils stuck out straight. I think my metabolism tripled. We all had a belt of bourbon before going down to the club, and I think I can speak for all of us when I say that it burned up before it got all the way through the esophagus.
I’d been getting a cold, and my body did this incredibly strange thing. First, it fast-forwarded through the generative stage of the cold, stuff running out of my head like a child had salted a slug’s nest in my brain.
Then when we got to the club and literally had to walk through a small crowd of total strangers to see this sign on the door, everything just stopped completely:
So it’s the night before our And I Am Not Lying – Live show in Philadelphia, and I’m antsy. We’re bringing this storytelling, comedy and burlesque gig to L’etage tomorrow night and I’m really hoping that folks turn out.
Here’s a little flyer:
Here are the details:
Show’s at L’etage, (6th St and Bainbridge St.)
Doors at 7:30, show starts at 8PM prompt.
It’s $12 at the door.
You’ll see:
Storytelling from me (Jeff Simmermon), Brad Lawrence and Cyndi Freeman – and Philadelphia storytelling wizard ******
Brad, Cyndi, ****** and I all met as regulars at story slams with The Moth in New York. Brad and ****** have won their share of Grand Slams, and Brad, ****** and I have all appeared on the Moth’s podcast. I was on This American Life a while back, and was featured on The Moth’s Radio Hour recently, too. Cyndi’s an accomplished storyteller fresh off her show “Wonder Woman: A How-To Guide for Little Jewish Girls.”
And just last week, we added Philadelphia comedian Doogie Horner to the bill, too.
I’m pretty stoked to meet him – the guy is really funny! In addition to performing on America’s Got Talent (I know), he’s a graphic designer by day — and actually designed the cover to “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.”
