My show HOTSY TOTSY BURLESQUE is finally back and I could not be happier. I have been running around doing all sorts of things this year, like my solo show and loads of story telling. But what I missed most was dancing naked on stage (or at least semi-nude, there are laws about such things). I also missed the world that Hotsy Totsy is part of. If you could imagine the Muppet show, but instead of puppets you have funny hot naked girls, you are almost there…Hotsy Totsy takes place at “The Home For Wayward Girls and Fallen Women”

It’s an all-girls hotel that has gone through many owners. It was originally incorporated by a religious order called “The Righteous Order Of Frustrated Spinsters With Too Many Cats” and envisioned as a reformatory residence for girls gone bad.

See, the spinsters believed that if you took a girl away from her nefarious environment and surrounded her with cats, she would no longer crave illicit temptation as there would be so many warm friendly pussies to snuggle up with.

I will hosting this week’s show & the cast is:  Jenny C’est Quoi, Gal Friday, Calamity Chang, Go Go Harder and more!

Hotsy Totsy is is part of the Burlesque Blitz: A week of burlesque at the Horse Trade Theater Company in NYC. We will be performing at The Kraine Theater, 85 East 4th Ave (Between 2nd & 3rd Ave) NYC – Dec. 28th – 8pm – for tickets and info go to - http://horsetrade.info

And we have a new sponsor: Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum, who will be supplying awesome swag and drink specials!

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.

Brother, did they ever deliver:

Read the rest of this entry »

My friend Brandon Bloch is a videographer here in Brooklyn. We kinda know each other two different ways. In one way, we know each other because he made a really awesome video promoting D.Billy’s artwork a while back. And we also know each other because as it turns out, his wife is a good friend of mine and a consultant that I work with very closely at my day job. Small world.

Brandon and his wife and me and my girlfriend hang out together and do couple stuff together. One of these days, we’re going to get D.Billy and his lady involved and have the biggest, brunchiest, triple-couple bouge-a-thon that Brooklyn has ever seen.

I was having lunch with Brandon and his wife the other day, and he told me what he’d been working on. “It’s pretty fun, man,” he said. “It’s a video piece that we’re going to call ‘Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street.’”

I was a little surprised. He didn’t really strike me as that kind of a dude, to be honest. “Just watch it,” he said. I did, and now I totally get it.

Now, I present to you: “Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street,” by Steven Greenstreet and Brandon Bloch:

Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street from Steven Greenstreet on Vimeo.

Not exactly what it sounded like when you read the title, was it? That’s kind of the point. As Brandon told me, “We noticed that all the coverage coming out of the Occupy Wall Street movement was either of freaks or young, unusually good-looking people. So we decided to both be honest about our motivations and make fun of media’s tendency to seek out pretty people, and we ended up with an inspiring, moving story. We just kept the title because we knew it would get some attention and hey, look — the kind of person that searches for and watches a video called ‘Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street’ is probably the kind of person that actually needs to hear this message pretty badly.”

He’s right. If they’d called it “A Sober and Respectful Look at the Underrepresented Womyn’s Voices at Occupy Wall Street”, would anyone have watched it?

Unsurprisingly, the Internet had decided to lose its collective mind over this. The response is both shocking, and not surprising at all. There is a particular type of person that is happiest when they are riled up and offended about something. This sort of person is found both on the right and the left of the political spectrum, and they just LOVE to write a blog post about their manufactured outrage.
Read the rest of this entry »

My grammar isn’t always perfect, but I do okay. When something’s misspelled or written incorrectly, it feels like a string out of tune. Or like hearing bagpipes – in tune or not.

It seems like copy-editors are getting laid off left, right, and center – as though nobody cares anymore. Sure, typos happen when you’re writing and posting fast. And everyone knows what you meant to say. But it’s like giving a big presentation with your fly all the way down. Sure, people know that you meant to put pants on. And your wang is probably still covered. But it still makes a distinct impression.

It looks like a rogue copyeditor took the red Sharpie to this Uniqlo ad on the C train. They just couldn’t take it anymore.

Good for them. It works better now, doesn’t it?

I just got some video footage from a Moth show that I did back in September that I’m extraordinarily excited to share with you. I’ve mentioned my stint in Royal Quiet Deluxe, chicken band, on here before, but as a refresher: I used to live in Richmond, Virginia and play the typewriter as a percussion instrument while a few chickens improvised keyboard pieces in toy pianos. For real. It was extraordinarily difficult to build a fan base, and I can say with great certainty that the Reverend Al Sharpton was not a fan AT ALL.

It’ll make more sense in the video, I swear.

I have told this story in various incarnations over the years, but I happen to feel that this performance at the Moth at Southpaw in Brooklyn on Labor Day this year really nailed it. Hope you enjoy it:

If you’re interested, you can actually hear two tracks that we recorded at practice here:

Royal Quiet Deluxe, April 1998

Exotic Newcastle Disease, by Royal Quiet Deluxe

If you happen to see this today, and want to see more like it live in person, I’m putting on a show with my awesome and talented friends tonight at Union Hall in Brooklyn. There will be stories like this, burlesque striptease and a sword-swallower. For real.

Click here for show info and a cool poster: And I Am Not Lying Live at Union Hall

You can get advance tickets here.

9/11 Lightbeams

Originally uploaded by Tim Sklyarov

Everyone who can remember September 11th, 2001 has a story. That includes me. I wasn’t in New York or DC or rural Pennsylvania, so mine’s not that dramatic. But if I went around trying to win suffering contests, I’d imagine that my life would look a lot different than it does now.

Both the phone and the electric company caught up to me on the morning of September 11th, 2001. I had a story due to Richmond.com at the time, a freelance project that had been filling a hole in my tattered writing income. I didn’t really need the electricity that morning anyway — I didn’t own a computer in the first place. I’d sneak into campus computer labs or squat at friend’s places when I had to, typing down handwritten notes in order to get the thing written as quickly and efficiently as possible.

So I did what I always did when the deadline was tight. I climbed out my bedroom window onto the row house roof and jimmied open my neighbor’ Kate’s office window with a credit card I didn’t deserve. Then I climbed in, turned on the dialup modem and made my final edits while the connection hissed and fused.

I sent the piece in and then cleaned her cat’s litter box to show both gratitude and penance. Then I called the office. Kate answered – she was a writer there. “Who is this?” she asked, recognizing her own number on her caller ID. “Uh, sorry” I said. “Listen, we’ll talk about this later. Turn the TV on, now,” she said, and hung up the phone.

I turned it on and watched a few minutes, trying to make sense out of it. Then the second plane hit and everyone in the world realized what really happened. A few seconds later, the station feed jumped to a scene from a Frank Zappa film. Cotton smoke boiled through a cheaply made model town, cars crashed into styrofoam gravestones and Zappa’s face hovered over top of it, grinning. Then whoever it was at the TV station fixed the problem and the news came back on.

I’m not sure if any other Richmonders saw that too, or not. I’ve never discussed it with anyone, actually. That was far from the strangest thing that happened that day and pointing it out never seemed that important.
Read the rest of this entry »

I used to live in Richmond, Virginia, in a row house that was exactly the color of a bunch of dirty old Band-Aids. My rent was $175 per month, and a schizophrenic street mystic named Willie used to come over several times a week and demand to hear Rick James’ “Ghetto Life.” He and his lady would dance to it, over and over, all day long until we had to kick them out.

I told a story about the experience at The Moth at Housing Works Bookstore in SoHo, NYC back on June 23rd — you can see video of it here:

Willie is one of those rare people who is both a classic archetype and a completely unique individual. I can see how someone might see my story and think I’m reaching for this cartoonish stereotype of an older cracked-out street character, not unlike Chappelle’s Tyrone Biggums or Richard Pryor’s Mudbone. Except I’m white, too, and I worry sometimes that I could be perceived as indulging in a reductive racist stereotype on top of whatever else is going on in that story.

Then I think “fuck that, just because I’m white doesn’t mean I don’t get to have a real, complicated friendship with a black man who is literally too funky to function within mainstream society.” It really happened, you know. You change things around a little to make your memories fit a story arc, but Willie is real as hell.

Possibly too real.
Read the rest of this entry »

I would have mentioned this earlier, but I’ve been crippled with a bog monster infestation – a whole bunch of them set up shop in my sinus cavities and have been using my lungs as a fricking waterslide. I coughed so hard the other night that I think I gave myself a small hernia.

That’s got nothing to do with what I’m talking about here, though.

What I’m here to talk about is that we had us a show a few weeks back, and it went really well! I had a ton of fun, despite some really frustrating technical difficulties in the beginning.

The Kraine Theater is this dank, crumbling space in the East Village, the sort of place that feels like it’s haunted by a bunch of old men in long raincoats. It made a certain kind of sonic sense to hear someone kick over a beer bottle during the show, and when an old lady showed up in a sun hat with a Mike-Tyson face tattoo drawn on with eye liner, I wasn’t even surprised. OF COURSE we had one of those. It was that kind of show.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I still wanted to kick the wrinkles out of that old bat when she started heckling the comedian. I like weirdos in the audience and all, but I really prefer when they stay quiet.

Still, I had a ton of fun, and I’m pretty sure the crowd did, too.

I talked to the theater director about the show today, and I think we are going to start doing this quarterly.

One thing I know, though: we’re bringing this show up to Albany, NY in mid-August. We’ll be performing in Saint Joe’s Church, what appears to be this amazing crumbling cathedral in downtown Albany. I’d love to make a little tour out of it, maybe play in Boston, Providence, BUffalo, what have you. If any of you book shows in bars, clubs or theaters in that area and want some storytellers and burlesque people to come up, do please let me know.

And if you happened to be in the audience on Sunday, thank you so, so much for coming. It was a jam, for real.

Look, I know I’m flogging this live show on Sunday pretty hard. But I’m really, really excited about it, and I think you guys should be, too.

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:
Read the rest of this entry »

The always-excellent ScoutingNY blog has an excellent post tracking down all of the exterior locations in Ghostbusters. I was pretty amazed to see that the firehouse that was the Ghostbusters’ home base is still functional, and just a few blocks from my gym — right there on the corner of North Moore and Varick Street.

Naturally, I went over there and took a few pics:

It’s still fully functional. I wonder how long it takes for the magic to wear off for the firefighters that get assigned there.