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.

You can buy tickets here if you’re into that already.

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:

You’ll note that the show on February 7th features:

Comedy from Ophira Eisenberg
Burlesque by The World Famous *BOB*
Nerdcore Rap by Schaffer the Darklord

in addition to burlesque from Cyndi Freeman
and storytelling by Brad Lawrence, Cyndi Freeman and Jeff Simmermon (me.)
**UPDATE**
We have just added bullwhip and lasso artist Chris McDaniel to the show!

Brad and I will co-host as always, and tickets are ten bucks — again, you can get them here.

(I took this picture of gummi fangs. But otherwise, it doesn’t have anything to do with anything in this post.)

At the risk of appearing in Cory Arcangel’s project, I’m kind of sorry that I haven’t posted in a while on here. I’ve been busy, sure, there’s that. So have Brad, Cyndi, and David.

As you may have seen, Brad’s launched The Standard Issues podcast. This is a project that, like anything else in life, sounds easy when you’re necking on about it over a few beers, then gets really, really hard. That’s how the whole life thing works, I think: everything that’s hard now gets easier, and you can relax for a minute. Then you get some new problems. I’m really stoked for Brad, though – this is a great idea, and once he gets the formula down it’s really going to take off.

Cyndi’s just wrapped the first run of her one-woman show Wonder Woman – A How-To Guide For LIttle Jewish Girls and is gearing it up and refining it to hopefully take out into theaters again. I saw it during its first week and loved it my damn self.

David’s been working on a longer form video piece with our friend and fellow artist Nathan Manuel.

And me, I’ve been doing all kinds of stuff. For one, I’ve been doing my actual job a lot. And when I’m not doing that, I’ve been trying to write a book. Ssshh. I don’t want to curse it. But it’s time. I kinda got myself to this Jonah and the Whale moment in the last few months where I’m either going to have to write a book or turn into whatever the creative equivalent of Frustrated Sports Dad is and yell at a future child from the sidelines at spelling bees or something. I don’t have a deal yet or a contract or anything like that. I’ve got a friend at a publishing house here who’s helping me out, though.

For all I know, all these words will eventually go into a greasy paper sack somewhere and then move with me from apartment to apartment along with a few coats I can’t get rid of for the rest of my life. But it’s still important. It’s got to happen. And it feels right.

So this blog, this project I’ve had for coming up on six years now, it’s changed a bit. I’m not doing this because I feel this *urge* anymore. When this started, I had all this *stuff* inside me that just came flying out. Now I’ve learned how to shape that stuff a little, and I’m not trying to blog my way to a book deal anymore.

Nor do I really want to be a professional stay-home blogger that depends on ad revenue for income. It would be nice to build this thing into a powerhouse with a huge following, sure. My ego would like that. But on the other hand, I really don’t like what I turn into when start living and dying by my blog stats. I spent a few months checking and rechecking my stats about 80-100 times a day, my heart soaring when traffic was up and grumbling and frustrated when it kind of flatlined.

That’s not a good way to be on the earth.

Once you start focusing too much on what’s popular, you lose sight of what’s important. First it slips away online, then it slips away in your real life and you’re just this walking collage of other people’s ideas.

I’ve met a couple of Gawker writers here and there over the years, and they were just these tragic husks that wrote really poorly when they had to share their own souls. I worry that I’ll get to this point where I can’t write anything except blog copy for the Internet’s relentless grunting eyeball parade. A lot.

In PR and marketing and your other marginally creative douchey fields that have glommed onto the Web, there’s this constant talk of “the conversation.” “Effectively leveraging social media in the digital space is about joining the conversation,” according to any number of perky consultants with their jacket sleeves pushed up to their elbows, “about listening to the conversation and sharing ideas among your networks!”

First of all: fuck those people. Ugh. There’s nothing more boring than the listening to the constant wind tunnel of “social media best practices strategy for brands” or whatever the buzzword combo is.

Secondly: Sharing links is the mortar that holds the Web together, yes. But at some point you’ve got to lay a few bricks of your own. If you’re not generating your own URLs and pushing ‘em out on the regular, you’re probably just “sharing ideas” to distract people from noticing that you’ve got none of your own.

It’s fun to look at stuff all day. In the years that I’ve been working online I’ve mastered the art of surfing the Web for 8 straight hours and fooling myself into thinking I’ve been productive. But I always hate myself a little bit afterwards. Making something new, that never existed before — even if it’s just a sentence — is the noblest and most fulfilling thing a human can do, short of taking a bullet for a loved one. If you spend too much time with your head dunked in the Internet’s popular plastic river, you’ll forget to think for yourself.

So this blog has kind of shifted a little. None of us really wants to be popular bloggers. I haven’t asked Brad, Cyndi, or David about this, but I don’t think we’re looking to repurpose and re-present the stuff on Buzzfeed, The Daily What, Reddit, anything like that. We’re using this as a platform for our own ideas, a place to say “check out this new connection I’ve made myself.” Sure, we find stuff and share it. But the point is to find it under a rock WE flipped ourselves.

All of this sits on a bedrock of solid storytelling. Sometimes we’re promoting stories we’ve made, sometimes we’re telling the story right here, sometimes we’re presenting alien artifacts that imply a whole story in another world. But underneath every single pixel, it’s the story that matters the most.

Ultimately, I don’t care about the conversation and I don’t care about social media any more than Vonnegut cared about typesetting. If the whole Internet burned down tomorrow I’d be bummed for a few weeks and then start scratching stories into wet cement with a stick.

This concludes the whining portion of the post. Now, for the good news part: We’re putting on another live show on April the 17th at the Kraine Theater in the East Village. We’ll have a belly dancer, comedian Matt McCarthy, burlesque by Cyndi Freeman and Apathy Angel, puppetry by Z. Briggs and stories by me, Brad, and Cyndi. We may have a live musician in there somewhere, still working out those details.

But the point is, we’re laying a few of our own bricks and making something real. Hope you can join us.

In case you need me to break this down for you: The TOOTH has TEETH.
It has tiny versions of itself in its mouth, and this freaks. me. out.
Let me put this in terms that the Internet can understand:

Here’s Chuck Norris, just chilling, waiting for someone to f*ck with him so he can destroy them any number of different ways. Nice smile, Chuck.


And here’s a little illustration I knocked up to show what it would mean if the “smiling tooth” principle were applied to Mr. Norris:

Horrifying.
And now that I’ve made and looked at this awful thing, if I am ever in a position to choose the form of the destructor, I’m pretty sure that this is what will end up razing Midtown. A giant Chuck Norris with smaller Chuck Norrises for teeth, gnawing skyscrapers end to end like steel & concrete ears of corn. God help us all.

And it tickles me to no end that the show was a success. It was Tauntaun weather out last night, the first seriously cold night we’d had in New York this year. Anyone in their right mind would have been home under a blanket watching TV, but we had a full house. And they weren’t ALL our friends, either!

A bunch of people — total strangers — saw the flyer on BoingBoing and came on out to check it out, too. That’s so exciting to me, and that’s the Internet at its best: connecting people who never would have known about each other otherwise.

Everyone else’s performances were tight (say what you will about mine, I’m hardly objective) and the thing ran perfectly.

Here’s Brad Lawrence, hosting:

And here’s Cyndi, Magdalena Fox and Maggie (my girlfriend and a patient, helpful lady) waiting backstage:

Brad managed to forget his story midway through last night, embodying every shy person’s worst nightmare. He stood there in the lights and flopped around his own brain looking for it for a minute. I tried asking him questions to jog his memory. Then the audience tried yelling questions to jog his memory. He said “listen, people, interviewing me as a group is just not going to work.”

Then he managed to pull a story out of nowhere and COMPLETELY save himself in a way that was even better than if he’d gotten the story right in the first place. It was a verbal tightrope act over a pit of slobbering lions. When he was finished, the whole crowd just screamed and screamed and clapped and laughed. If you could grind up the feeling right then into a powder, Mexico would be out of business permanently.

Or, like D.Billy said: “He set the plane on fire and then landed it.”

I feel so lucky to have such great, talented friends to have helped put this thing together, come and sat in the audience and helped spread it around the Internet. For example, Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing has been a tremendous help to me, posting my videos and promoting this show. Tracy Rowland and her patient boyfriend Mike Goodwin taped the whole thing, and we’re hoping to release the show on Vimeo once Tracy gets some time to work for free and edit it all together. Maggie helped wrangle lavalier mikes and D.Billy did A/V and Kelly Ferraro and Julia Marden did some other video and overall it was just a well-oiled team machine.

I’m looking forward to having it out there in the world for all the folks who couldn’t make it to the show in person. Don’t worry — I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

Prancing Richard Serra



Sad Kiki Smith



Robert Rauschenberg’s “Bed” Intruder

Send us your art-nerdified meme at andiamnotlying@gmail.com!

(See “Rickroll” on Know Your Meme, for those of you who were nowhere near the internet for the past 2 or 3 years.)

Congratulations! You have successfully built a time machine and are back in 1890′s.

You’re conversing at the local pub, when the guy next to you says:

“So I there was with my bags of mystery, feeding my potato trap, when a blatherskite asks me to change a wild cat. I said, “bad scran to you!”

How do you understand what he had just told you?

Luckily, you have downloaded this free American Slang Dictionary written in 1891 from Archive.org.

The American Slang Dictionary

Blatherskite: (Irish), a wild and foolish talker and boaster, a cheap orator.

Wild-cat (Am.), Country bank-notes of more than doubtful reputation. Also known as Red Dog and Stumptail.

Potato Trap (Eng.), The Mouth.

Bags of Mystery, Sausages.

Bad Scran To You: (Irish), May you have bad food.

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

As a kid I was intrigued by the fact that a monster COULD exist, and so I went to my Jr High School library and took out a book called The Search for Bigfoot. Written by Peter Byrne – whose bragged in his introduction that he was “…the only man alive who has made a profession out of this extraodinary search and through the support  of many dedicated associates and sponsors, continues that profession on a full time basis twelve months of the year.”

I found that just as fascinating as the monster. What kind of person decides “I am going to hunt Bigfoot for a living!” And my family thought I was plotting a life of silly risks wanting to be an actress!

Since age 12, I have watched hundreds of hours of cryptozoology programming in which Bigfoot is never ever found. If I am stressed, the thing that will distract me more than anything is Bigfoot stuff. This mild obsession has been my solace during many a dark sleepless nights. But again, it is not just the monster that makes me smile…it is the folks who claim to have seen him.

I think my heart connects mostly with the people who spend there lives hunting for the creature. I think this is because it is a quest even harder than being an artist and that strikes as madly heroic. I have spent a lifetime defending my “lifestyle,” as my mother calls it. I want to know what do these guys say when asked by a hottie sitting on the next bar stool, “So what do you do when your not here drinking.” Or when a well meaning relative asks “So when are you going to get a real job?”

Granted, I am not the only performer whose parents tried to discourage.

I have read countless books and articles on the subject dating back to 1871. My latest fun read was: Anatomy of a Beast: Obsession and Myth on the Trail of Bigfoot by Micheal McLeod, who points out facts like: in an ancient Tebetan dialect, Yeti actually means Snow Bear….not Snow Man. His book goes into gorgeous detail about the lives of Bigfoot searchers. Men like like Roger Patterson.

I am sure you have seen the famous Roger Patterson film of the illusive creature

Paterson was always a charismatic thrill seeker and long before he captured the worlds imagination with his infamous film, he was pursuing the lime light. As a teenager he and his brothers created a tumbling act and made extra money staging exhibitions, he spent a short time touring europe as an acrobat, before making a name himself on the rodeo circuit, riding bulls and saddle broncs. A man “who disdained full time work,” he would spend hours inventing gadgets in his shed and was always trying to dream up the “next big thing.” When he read about Bigfoot in a True Magizine (1959) he came up with a plan to capture and display the beast, but alas just couldn’t find the hairy guy, so instead he wrote a book. Meanwhile he started a battle with cancer and also started to film a documentary about the monster. In and out of remission, his physical health diminished, he spent the last years of his life on the lecture circuit.

He claimed, even on his death bed, that what he had filmed was real. However there is also the guy who claims that wearing the gorilla suit.

Most of the sighting have been proven to be hoaxes, this I think is hysterical. Just how much free time do you have? Mathew Whitton of Georgia has a lot of free time now that he got fired from his job as a police officer after the Bigfoot hoax, that he staged with pal Rick Dyer, ended up being covered by CNN.

Rick Dyer now leads expeditions searching for Bigfoot in Russia, (and i am not lying – really) for more info and instructions on how to donate to his defense fund, regarding fraud charges go to  Bigfootracker. Both Whitton and Dyer say the 2008 hoax was all in fun, but the Bigfoot community was not entertained; these are people who believe they have seen the creature and are out to prove that what they have witnessed is real.

They were seriously pissed off – well maybe not seriously – but they were pissed off.

Autumn Williams from OregonBigfoot.com had this to say on her blog after Whitton accidentally shot himself on the job…that is while he still had one…

“I have a song running through my head suddenly…

Shot through the arm
And you’re to blame
You give Bigfoot
A bad name…

I have nothing but respect for our boys in blue, who risk their lives every day sniffing out the bad guys. I just don’t have much respect for a guy who tries to ruin the credibility of something I’ve worked 18 years to educate the public about.”