I was all squirrelly last week leading up to last night’s show — wrangling machines, sending e-mails (so many e-mails) and in between the cracks, getting my own stories ready.

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:

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In preparation for the upcoming live show, I have decided to post something you won’t see from someone you will see. Because I take the direct route to nothing. Which is probably why my high school career went the way it did.

So at the live show, you will see a very talented magician and burlesque host. He will be performing magic. In this video I am posting, he is not. He is telling a story. His name is Nelson Lugo.

As part of Cyndi’s neverending quest to make burlesque performers tell a story and storytellers strip, we had Nelson over at Standard Issues in October.

He did a great job, because he is a charming man. However he did wear that hat. So this is more radio than video, in certain ways.

Oh, and you should drop by billyjoesboy.com. Because I am a brilliant literary mind who could desperately use the traffic bump.

It had been a looong day of walking around Brooklyn with a bag full of colored tape, looking for something to touch off an idea for another site intervention. That’s how it works for me. I’ve gotta lug the materials around and just sort of wait for the lightning to strike. I can target an area that’s likely to have some interesting detritus to do my wandering in, but that’s about it. The rest is out of my hands.


Late in the afternoon when I was pretty well sick of walking, and the sun was hitting a beautiful angle that I knew wouldn’t last for long, I turned down a dead-end industrial street in western Greenpoint. I can usually count on the side streets and factory lots near the East River waterfront to give me something to work with, and it seemed like this spot would be no exception. Among the mostly empty parking spaces of this factory lot, between cracks in the pavement that were filling in with tall, unruly grass, there was a wood-paneled TV with its screen smashed in; a metal folding chair missing its seat; a scattering of food wrappers and discarded shoes; a stack of plywood and shipping pallets; and the requisite nasty mattress, old tires, and busted auto glass. I stared at all of that bizness for a while, mentally rearranging things and visualizing appropriate sound effects for the possible vignettes… but nothing was switching me on. Not really.


I turned around ready to leave, and saw that I had been joined on the ground by a group of pigeons that had been watching from the factory roof. They were slowly head-bobbing in the direction of a rock-hard partial loaf of bread that someone must have been using to feed them at some point. It hit me like (insert your favorite metaphor for inspiration here): with a combination of crusty old bread to draw them in, and a good stomp on a stack of plywood to make them scatter, I might be able to choreograph these dirty little bastards.


So I laid down my tape, bloodied my fingertips a little bit breaking up the hardest loaf of bread known to man, arranged the bread near the tape-writing, and then repeated the picture-taking cycle: I waited for the pigeons to get up on the bread, stomped like hell on the nearby plywood, and snapped a picture of them scattering. Wait. Stomp. Snap. Wait. Stomp. Snap. Now let me tell you – it is damned hard to properly frame a shot without a tripod or remote shutter release, while repeatedly thwomping your leg down like a jackass. But I managed to get a few decent photos in the end. Here’s my favorite:

Mini-promo time: This shot, along with documentation of other recent interventions “WAAHHH” and “ZZZAP”, and a handful of my recent collages, will be on display (and for sale) from December 11th, 2010 through February 13th, 2011, as part of the group exhibition “PARTY CRASHERS” in Arlington, Virginia. Check it out if you’re down that way!

D.Billy sent this, apropos of not a damn thing. I don’t know who made it, where it came from, or anything other than what you see below. That’s all I need, and it’s more than enough.

I wear the coat that my dad wore on hunting trips with his dad back when a man could kill his dinner with his son for Thanksgiving. Dad never put any dead rabbits in the pocket in the back, and he never took me hunting, either. Consequently, that coat looks just about as good as new and doesn’t have a rabbit-sized scab stretching across the back.

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.”

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I have climbed a mountain of my own bullshit and started yodeling. The avalanche is picking up steam and it’s gonna get real on December the 5th.

Some time ago, I whipped up a bunch of big talk about turning this blog into a live show. I got D.Billy and Brad and Cyndi all excited about it, and then we went and made it happen. For real.

And I’m a little antsy about the whole enterprise.

Here’s a flyer for the show:

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My first job after college was as a rude little gingerbread boy in a touring children’s theater company. We did three or four shows a day across Virginia, DC, and Maryland. I wore a costume with adorable fake raisins trailing down the front, a little hood with faux icing on it and burst out of a plywood oven.

It was my job to escape from a large, sweating woman in a fox costume, and usually I did. Sometimes my costume would be damp in the dryer from washing it the night before, and I would dry it in the microwave, 30 seconds at a time. I got sick, ran out of money, and tried to sell my plasma to make up the gap but nothing worked. I was doomed to become some sort of indie-rock influenced Krusty the Clown.

Every time I smell apple juice, vinyl nap mats or canned chicken soup I just want to run right into traffic and let an 18-wheeler carry my tortured soul back home. I like little kids when I can get to know them, but seeing hundreds of them in a day just reduces them into this shrieking, messy mass for and I really don’t like the person I start becoming.

If you’re doing something as a joke you’re still doing it, and you might end up kicking a kid in the face. I wish I could say that I learned that from that experience, but really it took about ten years.

I told this story at The Moth at Housing Works bookstore in SoHo back in early September, 2010. It was possibly the most fun I’ve had all year and definitely made the whole experience worthwhile.

Halloween 2010

Originally uploaded by chinese_fashion

I wore my least favorite work suit to my friend’s Halloween party, put in some contacts and painted my head blue and presto: instant Dr. Manhattan costume. Or so I thought.

The party was in the West Village, right at the heart of the annual Halloween parade. Traffic was so tight that the cab dropped me and my girlfriend off a few blocks away. Maggie’s costume was a magnificently form-fitting hot pink with a plunging (or awesome) neckline, but I got all the catcalls. “Blluuueeee MAaaaan GRooouuup” washed over us punctuated, oddly, with a rapid-fire “what’s up, dude-from-Arrested-Development?”

I thought the Watchmen movie was big enough that my lazy costuming wasn’t that much of a stretch. But that’s the mistake that nerds always make: thinking the rest of the world is tuned into their obsessions despite all the contrary evidence once we disconnect from the Internet. Now that I’m grown, it’s not that painful to find out that I’m as self-deluded as I ever was. But it’s still kind of a surprise.

We got separated at the party, Maggie happily practicing her Mandarin with a new Chinese friend. Speaking in Mandarin lights up her soul — and while it makes me really happy to see her happy, it’s not something that I can participate in very easily.

I wandered to the other side of the apartment, where my buddy’s charming alcoholic brother was doing some kind of a stumbling shamble-dance next to a tall Latin woman poured into a snug black dress. She was carrying a dumb little plastic club and had some fur around her neck in a head-fake towards “sexy-cavewoman,” but she could have dropped the charade and been La Elvira, Mistress of the Dominican Republic.

She looked me up and down and whispered with the guy in the corner. Then she looked over at me, her eyes lit up, and walked up to make some conversation. Just because I’m absolutely not available doesn’t mean it’s not a lot of fun to rap with a pretty lady at a party.

Like I said before, being that deluded nerd never completely leaves you.

She sipped her drink and smiled right at my eyes, showing two rows of teeth bright enough to stun a deer. And then she said “I can’t figure out what you are. Are you a faggot?”
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I was trying to get Tracy Rowland for Standard Issues from the moment we started the show, but she always had some conflict, like moving to LA. Then that cleared up and now she is back on the correct coast and here she is from our latest Standard Issues show.

In this story, Tracy like so many American girls abroad, accrues some very strange bedfellows.

In related, but more self-promoting news. I am currently experimenting with travel essay over on my blog so have a look.

photo.jpg

Originally uploaded by chinese_fashion

Adam Wade asked me to be a guest speaker in his storytelling class at the Magnet Theater last night.

It’s a lot harder to tell a story to twelve people under fluorescent lights than a roomful of people in a dark rock club. You can see their eyes and feel the silences a lot more. If you pay attention to how you feel when you’re talking to a small crowd you can find the spots where you need to tighten your own conviction more and commit to your own story. Nervousness and discomfort are unavoidable aspects of the human condition. But if you can careful examine your own unease while it’s happening, you can pretty much make sure you kill it dead for next time.

I was workshopping something new, and the class’s input was really awesome. They’re not my friends, so they don’t have any incentive to spare my feelings, and I got a lot of really great, insightful feedback.

I ran into one of the guys from the class on the subway platform on the way back home. We rode the F home together, just having that sort of easy “getting-to-know-you” conversation: “How long have you been doing storytelling,” “What got you into Improv,” “How do you know Eliza Skinner,” stuff like that when this guy got on the train dragging a bunch of luggage and joyfully singing like he was trying to peel the paint off the platform.

We tried to ignore him, as did the rest of the car, but it was really difficult. Especially when he sat down right next to my new friend and started singing to both of us, directly.

Finally I just asked him if he knew “Stand By Me,” and we all sang together:

I really wish I was a better singer — or more comfortable singing badly. That was a magical, strange and wacky moment for me and my new buddy. For that other dude, it was just another Sunday night.