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I started this blog back in 2005. At the time I figured that if I just kept banging on my laptop, eventually someone would recognize my nascent brilliance and offer me a sack of money. That person would also be able to reach through a hole in time and pull out a finished copy of a book, by me, and drop it on the desk next to the money.

Then I’d never have to work pouring concrete driveways or slinging pizzas ever again. While it’s true that I stopped working in both the concrete and pizza industries shortly after starting this blog, the rest turned out a little differently. I haven’t seen a fricking dime of profit from this thing, and nobody’s offered to turn this into a book. Apparently, to write a book you have to do something more than just type whenever you feel like it.

Here’s the thing: while I’ve always wanted to be a writer, I’ve also always wanted to be in a rock band. My early efforts in that regard were similarly misguided. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from storytelling, it’s that making a crowd feel something I’ve written — like a whole, big, crowded rock club — that ’s pretty much the best feeling in the world. If you could chop up the laughter of several hundred strangers and line it up on a mirror, cocaine would go out of business and the would be no more killing in Mexico.

I was reading “Our Band Could Be Your Life” on the subway a few weeks ago and it hit me like Galileo’s apple. I’ve got the Internet platform and the storytelling skills – and now we’ve got Brad and Cyndi on board, two hilarious, exciting and weird burlesque performers AND storytellers, as well as D.Billy’s peerless art, design, and production abilities.

We’re turning this blog into a live show and we’re going on tour. I don’t know how and I don’t know when exactly, but I’d expect to see some of you people outside New York City by spring 2011.

That’s where we need your help.
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So about a month ago, Cyndi and I debuted our new storytelling show The Standard Issues at Pacific Standard. The second edition will be tomorrow night, Tuesday the 24th, at 8 o’clock and it features Ophira Eisenberg, Adam Wade, Andy Christy, Ben Lillie, and our very own Jeff Simmermon and Cyndi Freeman. If you are into the storytelling thing, you know that is a ridiculously brilliant line-up, if you are not into the storytelling thing, this is the show you will want to start with.

In the meantime, here is a video of me from our first show. As I say, first show in the space and I was the first one on, so that is why we had not figured out the lighting situation yet. Which is why I look kind of strangely muscle bound when I am actually 177 pounds soaking wet. Though I did have a pretty bad haircut at that show. Can’t blame the lighting for that.

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First I will show you the video.

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.

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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!

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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.

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This week’s Moth podcast is really exciting for me. It features two people that are not only great storytellers but great friends of mine: Brad Lawrence and Juliet Wayne.

Brad’s way too modest to say so, but he is tearing UP the NYC storytelling scene right now. He won two Moth GrandSlams back to back, which is not unlike Ian MacKaye starting both Minor Threat and Fugazi — except tinier and more fleeting. He and Cyndi Freeman have a new storytelling show out in Brooklyn called The Standard Issues, and he’s blogging here AND his personal blog, too – you’ve heard me mention that ad infinitum.

Juliet Wayne has been a great friend to me since the night we met. She’s a hilarious storyteller and a caring soul who once painted me a picture of a pink cockroach with one testicle while I was recovering from surgery. She lives in Philadelphia and occasionally creeps up here on a Chinese bus, lays waste to a roomful of people and then goes back home and hides in her attic until next time.

Here’s their shared podcast: Juliet Wayne & Brad Lawrence: GrandSLAM Stories

Brad posted a video of himself performing at Story Collider yesterday on this here blog — I’d encourage you to check that out.

And this is a video of Juliet Wayne doing what she does best. She actually performed this story the night that we met for the first time. It was my first Moth event, and it felt like pulling a sword from a stone. I’d been looking for something to do and some cool weird art form to dive right into, and that lightbulb went on during Juliet’s story. I ran up to her after, trying really hard not to be a creepy fan guy. Turns out she was just as stunned as I was. She’s helped me shape a lot of my stuff and is always there to freak out with over the telephone.

Being friends with Juliet reminds me of being in high school, where we talk on the phone late at night and say outrageous stuff to each other and are both way too sensitive and passionate. We got in a fight once like a couple of teenagers and it felt like one of my legs got cut off until we made up.

But anyway: here goes Juliet Wayne in Rehab:

Enjoy, people.

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So this is a video of me doing a show that I am in love with. It is called Story Collider, the producers are Ben Lillie and Brian Wecht, and it is a science themed storytelling show. I don’t know why I am so in love with that concept, but for some reason it has a lot of romance for me.

The show features storytellers with no science background, as well as scientists with no performance background. The theme for the one I did was Friction and, as you will see, mine is very science light because I am somewhat science dim. Or to be generous, I took the metaphorical route. Cyndi will be appearing in their next one, which is Epidemics, on August 12th at Pacific Standard.

As you will see in the video, a show about science; educational perhaps, but not for kids.

After you enjoy this, go check out my GrandSLAM winning story on The Moth Podcast. It won a GrandSLAM.

And then there is this story.

Trust-fund Soviet – Brad Lawrence from The Story Collider on Vimeo.

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This little tableau was one of the first photographs that I ever took — maybe around age 12 — with my very first camera, a cheap plastic Vivitar 110:

It shows three Masters of the Universe figures that belonged to my brother and I — Jitsu, Tung Lashor (in the Land Shark) and Battle-Damage Skeletor — lined up against the wood panel & linoleum backdrop of the trailer-with-added-rooms that we grew up in, and I f*cking LOVE IT.

I remember the spot where this photo was taken, and I remember that just down the hall under our bunk beds, and under the desk in my father’s “office” there were plastic tubs and wooden boxes of other action figures and vehicles… Transformers, G.I. Joe, Hot Wheels, Marvel Secret Wars, DC Super Powers, M.A.S.K., M.U.S.C.L.E., Battle Beasts, Centurions, and probably others that I’m forgetting. We also had a giant-sized bin of LEGO blocks, all jumbled in together like an 8-bit plastic gumbo. I can remember the feel of the blocks’ corners and the shooshing, tinkling sound as I rummaged through them looking for just one more clear red dot to cap off the wing of my spaceship.

We still have a few of these things in a closet at my mother’s house. (Or we will until I steal them this summer. Heads up, Mom.) But the bulk of them were given away to our nephews or other kids-of-friends-of-the-family, and from what I hear, many were promptly broken. (*single tear*)

So in pining for my lost clumps of cast plastic and rubber, I decided to fire up the group nostalgia engines. I asked my fellow contributors Jeff, Brad and Cyndi if they had any thoughts along these lines to share, and indeed they did…

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So, going to the Madagascar Institute’s shop in Gowanus, Brooklyn is like visiting an embassy of Bartertown from “Beyond Thunderdome.” It is all raw steel and piles of scrap metal stacked on old cable spindles, in a space that looks like the garage where one might keep a souped up dunebuggy that had spikes and a harpoon gun welded to it. I was three feet in the door and already waiting for Tina Turner to walk up and explain that “The real power here is shit. Pig shit.” For a certain generation, even with current situations being what they are, that possibility still gives a little thrill.

Instead, I was greeted by a pretty woman who was dressed like a hard drinking, but sexy, car mechanic. She handed me a release form that absolved her and her employer of any liability should I burn my face completely off before the day was out. After I had signed away my right to recoup my precious flesh, I was introduced to Leif and Hackett, who looked like they were the stars of a post apocalyptic, Chuck Norris – Predator, buddy flick. These were the guys who were going to teach me how to make a flame thrower.

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I have, over the last year, stepped away from my street artist, punk rock, DIY background and actually done something in the way that things are done. I put together a book proposal and started writing a book. And I was an over night success. The End.

No.

This process can make you feel like an ant trying to work its way to the top of a Jello Mold from the inside. You have meeting after meeting and the agent might come and go with nary a nickel on the bedside table. (I am pretty sure mine has gone, if anyone sees him tell him, y’know, call me?) There are going to be parts of the business that glimmer like the city on the hill and others that smell like a dog run on a hot summer day. And, in the end, it just becomes easy to sit and stare at a phone.

But that is the restricted lane, toll road to a nervous breakdown. I have had to make myself remember at times that the work is mine and mine to do and mine to keep doing. You can’t wait around for people, unless you decided to be a writer because being suspended in misery is just what you’re into. In the end, I like what I do and I hope that always co exists with the business of editors and agents and publishers. If it doesn’t, I have taken a wrong turn.

All of this is to say – Having worked on the book for the better part of the last year, I am now sitting on a heap of material that I can use for the various weird projects I am involved in all over the city.

One of my favorites is The BTK Band, a fully improvised live music, storytelling, burlesque extravaganza. This project started out as a rough ride on an overgrown trail with a flat tire and is quickly becoming one of the tightest and most innovative live shows happening in New York. I can toot that horn, because most of the credit goes to the rest of the outfit and its leader, Peter Aguero.

But we are here to talk about me. This video is something I put together from an audio recording of one of the performances and it represents a piece of the book transformed for a new use. So enjoy that, and then check out my blog because there are a bunch of shows I am doing this coming week that I am really happy to be a part of and they are all listed over there, and there are sample chapters from the book, too. – Enjoy.

One more thing, If you are enjoying Cyndi and I on the blog, we will be appearing together as our burlesque alter egos, Cherry Pitz and Johnny Angel, at Seth Lind’s Told on Monday the 19th, 7 o’clock, at Under Saint Marks Theater. We will be there as wigged, lycra clad relationship counselors. You need our help.

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