I’m here to tell you that chickens, like monkeys, go from cute to despicable in about half an hour. They’re vile, magnificently brainless creatures that defecate the way that cats shed – casually, constantly, and in occasionally impressive clumps.

It comes as no surprise to me that Werner Herzog feels the same way. Here’s a little clip on Vimeo (shared by my former human bandmate Tim Gordon)

Werner Herzog on Chickens from Tom Streithorst on Vimeo.

I am not saying you shouldn’t hang with wild gorillas –  if you want to. Go ahead, it looks like fun.

It is just that they are both intelligent and they are wild animals, plus they have ideas on how things should go.

*Note to self – do not take your pet baby orphan gorilla into the jungle.

Personally I think I understand gorilla culture and etiquette, as it looks a bit like the culture and etiquette in my family. But as my husband knows, I avoid hanging with my family because they behave like mountain gorillas. They are cute and cuddly until you challenge them. You never quite know what you said that got them all riled up, all you know is that they are suddenly screaming and somehow its your fault …

Also a Safari into the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park in Uganda is like $300 a day, and I’d like to see what $300 a day could get me in Vegas.

I know that someone reading this might be thinking, “but  - but –  but….have you seen Koko the talking Gorilla who speaks sign language? Bill Shatner has!”

And I say to the imaginary Koko loving person in my head, “Oh yeah but what about the story of the Petronella Yvonne de Horde, she loved gorillas! She was convinced that the Gorilla named Bokito, who lived at the local zoo in Rotterdam was her friend…and so she went to visit him almost every day.  She would make kissy faces at him and he would make what she thought was kissy faces back….

But what Bokito was thinking was “Who are you to defy my authority! Lady, I am going to kick your ass…if I ever get out of this damn cage!”

Then he figured out how to break out of his enclosure, went on a rampage, dragged Patronella through the zoo cafeteria, breaking bones and biting her over 100 times.

This coined a new word: Bokitoproof, which was voted “word of the year” for the Dutch in 2007.

Now I do imagine that the best Gorilla porn can only be shot on location.

And I know there are many nice gorillas out there. Like Jambo … but clearly Jambo’s teenage son really sucks.

And okay, this one is just too sweet and too heartbreaking not to share.

* Another note to self, do not visit your pet orphan baby gorilla, years after you have sent him off  into the jungle, and expect him to understand you are only stopping by to say hi. As far as a gorilla is concerned, if  you are family you stay until you die!

And okay after seeing this one below … I think I’d rather go on an adventure in Africa than Vegas.

But I am not hanging with gorillas….nope I’m not… you can’t make me…. god they are so damn cute!

I should call my family.

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:

Reggie Watts – Touching Songs Improv – Heart Of Darkness – 1.7.12 from Karmalize Productions on Vimeo.

In this clip, Reggie, Greg Barris and the Forgiveness improve a long jam about slack friends, vampires, teen smoking and more:

Reggie Watts & The Forgiveness – Improv Jam – Heart Of Darkness – 1.7.12 from Karmalize Productions on Vimeo.

Both clips were shot and edited by Alex Gaylon of Karmalize Productions.

Our good friend and fellow storyteller Tracy Rowland just made us a magnificent trailer for Sunday’s show, and I’d be remiss in my mission to promote awesomeness on the Internet if I didn’t share it here. There is some mild language, almost- nudity. Which is maybe a selling point:

The music is by Richmond, VA sweatrock legends RPG, permission given by Matt Conner. Show info after the jump:

We’re putting on another variety show on Sunday, April 17th at the Kraine Theater – for a measly $8 you get:

Storytelling by

Brad Lawrence
Cyndi Freeman
Jeff Simmermon

Burlesque by Apathy Angel and Cyndi Freeman

Comedy by Matt McCarthy

Puppetry by Z.Briggs

Belly Dancing by Madame X

Here’s a poster/flyer – hope we see you there.

But this video yanked me out of my regular routine and deep into the wild currents of the human experience. I don’t know whether to cheer or weep, to hug somebody or go be alone. My eyes swelled and leaked a little, and I could actually feel my heart expand in my chest.

It’s by a disabled woman who carefully, methodically explains why it’s so upsetting to be called “retarded.”

These are her words:

I made this video after seeing a number of things: Other disabled people rushing to prove that they were not some thing called “retarded,” being referred to here as a “mong” and other such words myself (on and off YouTube) as well as seeing lots of pointless ridicule directed at people with developmental disabilities, and being asked questions about what it’s like to be considered “retarded” in casual contacts with people, or to “look retarded”, whatever that means. I explore these questions, and the prejudice and dehumanization that surrounds cognitive disability of all sorts, in my video.

My grandfather used to say the words “nigger” and “colored” very comfortably. He wasn’t a mean, racist guy. He even fought to integrate public schools in Virginia. He was just a guy a high-school education with an outdated understanding of how the world worked. He was a welder until he retired, and I don’t think he really noticed the world changing around him because he was so busy working. And so he used these incredibly hateful words really casually, and was genuinely taken aback when the rest of the family got upset about it.

The thing is, we’re all doing something right now that is going to disgust and appall our grandkids. In the end of this century someone will be able to make some new kind of Mad Men about our normal workplace behavior and it’s going to show us using some 21st-century version of the N-word in a way that we don’t really get right now.

I think it’s going to be the way we use the word “retarded.” I didn’t really think about it until I saw this video, but now I hear myself using it, and other people using it, and it makes me kind of sick. I’m going to try really hard to never, ever, use that word again.

See if you can’t do the same.

I’ve been writing and editing and re-writing my story for this Monday’s Moth GrandSLAM, just scribbling it over and over on a legal pad to make sure I’ve got it. The theme is “Into the Wild,” which poses a challenge. I’ve pretty much told and re-told what I like to think is a pretty solid story on that theme. I’ve told that thing right into the red dirt, to be honest. I’m sure my friends, family, and the odd person I am totally trying to impress is sick to their guts of it. I think I’ve worn a track in my brain from repeating it so damn much.

I got one of the best passive-aggressive guilt trips about this that I’ve ever had from anyone that wasn’t my own mother recently. She’s a great friend I met through the Moth, and when I suggested I wanted to visit that old incarnation of that story for the theme, she said “Yeah, I mean, you could do that. But if you won with it, I think you’d feel pretty cheap.”

She’s right. So I’m working on it, but brother, you never know you’ve got something until it’s over and done with. The challenge here is to find other material in that experience, stuff that didn’t make the first cut and massaging it into something brand-new.

And beyond that, I’ve got this pretty awesome guilt complex going where I think that if I’m not worrying enough about something, I’ll have earned every microsecond of perceived failure if it doesn’t go off perfectly. Healthy, I know.

I was sitting there making myself nuts last night trying to tighten this thing, and I finally just had to pack it in. Instead, I started fooling with my camera and ended up making this little photo, below. It’s half a tribute to Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion skeletons and half my own inner monster threatening that same old kangaroo, saying “you better deliver again, buddy.”

I shot this with a Nikon D90 and started fiddling with an HDR tutorial. That kinda went pear-shaped, so I manipulated the thing to look like a still from an old movie that you might have seen late at night when you were supposed to be sleeping.

Psychotronic cinema is pretty much the best kind,if you ask me. It’s the purest expression of beauty in art — something that blossoms when everyone involved with the film was trying to do something else. That’s actual magic right there.

I didn’t try too hard with this photo, just kind of relaxed and had fun with it. Any beauty in there comes from that spontaneity, from just playing with well-loved stuff and seeing what comes out.

I’m sure there’s some kind of parallel from that to my storytelling experience, but damned if I can see it.

We did plenty of dude stuff together when I was growing up — shot guns, chopped wood, built stuff, threw a baseball and salted slugs on hot afternoons when the A/C was busted and nothing was on TV.

Now I’m all grown and I live in Brooklyn and have a landlord who’s supposed to fix stuff at my house. Note that I said “supposed to.” I ended up getting into art and computers, stuff Dad wasn’t necessarily all that into before his eyes started giving out.

But the one thing we do together every chance we get: we watch some serious dude movies. I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. “No Country for Old Men,” the first two “Godfather” flicks, any of the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns are all religious canon in the Simmermon household. “A-Team” reruns will do, too.

I shot this on my iPhone the day after Thanksgiving while we were watching “The Outlaw Josey Wales.”

That was a perfect one for us: vintage Eastwood badassery and neither of us had seen it before, either. Something old, something new all at once.

The photo is tingling with purple sparks, and Clint and his doomed young companion are pulsing with a psychedelic rainbow glow. It’s tempting to think that I hit the in-camera iPhone apps pretty hard on this one, and I can’t lie to you about that. I did. But I’m a lot less interested in what something looks like than what it feels like.

My Dad’s eyesight has been fading for years. He can’t drive anymore, and reading the paper is hard on him. He doesn’t recognize old friends across a crowded restaurant anymore. Last year his mother died and I had cancer. Our family got a walloping triple-shot of what it is to be fragile, to appreciate what it means to be alive but also to move closer to a total system failure one waning system at a time.

The holidays were pretty rough. So were most of the other days.

Now it’s a year later, and we’ve made it. We’ve made some peace and done some grieving and adjusted to a world that’s never going to be the same. Dad’s listening to the news on his iPod and I’ve got my hormones straightened out.

But every time I go home, I still go to the best video store in the US and pick out a couple discs to watch with Dad. He moves his chair a little closer to the TV now, sure. We slip into a world where there’s good and there’s evil and all the bad stuff dies when you shoot it. We can still go there together, and he can see it clearly enough.

So all those purple fireflies, all that oozing rainbow pulsing out of Clint’s face up there — that’s not just photomanipulation talking. That’s all the magic in the room. That’s visible evidence that even though a lot of stuff changes, the traditions we have can hold us together. And man, I just like seeing it right there in my face, swirling around my dad.

Remember Kimba the White Lion? It was on at 1pm, and every day when I got home from kindergarten my friends and I would watch it. The episodes were full of hard lessons for Kimba and his animal pals.

Hard lessons that often dented my poor little 5 year old brain.

In one episode that I simply was never able to forget, a herd of antelope have gone crazy with some kind of brain fever. They are running wild and if they did not stop they would plunge into the sea and die. Kimba and his friends try to stop them every way they can, but in the end they fail and most of the antelope jump to their deaths in the sea. Kimba and friends do manage to save a few, and that in the end is the moral: Even if you can only save a few wild crazed suicidal antelope , it’s better then not trying at all.

As an adult I do not quite know what to do with that information. But if I ever meet a methed out antelope at least I’ll have food for thought. If you want to see the episode, some kind soul has uploaded it to YouTube!

Kimba the White Lion: Episode 39 – Running Wild.

Another fun tidbit — the show was created by the Godfather of anime Osamu Tezuka. And I found an awesome fan site with English translation covering his massive body of work!

By way of explanation, their creator offers:
“Vintage pinups are the pinnacle of art. Robert Downey Jr is the pinnacle of sexy. It’s not rocket science.”

Previously in WTF imagery:
Chihuahua on Cheeseburgers
Doctored Science Fair Photos
Sci-Fi Fans at Home
Captain America Brushes His Teeth With Whiskey