I was pleasantly surprised by the reactions to Jeff’s previous post about my artstuffs — a belated thanks to everyone who reblogged or contacted me for more info — so I thought I’d share a few pics from my most recent outing.
(More after the jump.)
My friend Jim O’Grady is a Moth GrandSLAM contest winner — a great storyteller and a great guy. He’s been a reporter for the New York Times, and works for some mysterious think tank that he says is “physically located on Wall Street, but in no way associated with finance.”
The thing about these story shows is that they let anybody onstage, which gives the show its spirit and beauty. It keeps it from being the province of writers and actors and “who do you know” and lets the voice of the people come through. It also allows people to weep onstage and do some lame standup comedy from time to time. It’s always a crap shoot, and the surprises are the best part.
Jim’s reliably awesome — he has his nights when he kills, sure. But even when he’s not at his best, he’s still really really good, and whenever he gets picked to come to the stage the audience is in for a treat.
Here he is at a Moth StorySLAM this summer, on the theme of “Respect.”
You can see a story by The Moth’s Juliet Wayne here:
Juliet Respects ‘Mannequin Dan’
And two of my stories here:
Royal Quiet Deluxe, Chicken Band
Reverend Al Sharpton Hates Royal Quiet Deluxe, Chicken Band
Today is national fix-the-country day, and it’s gonna be a long one. No matter what side you’re on, you’re probably sick of the campaigning by now. As a little distraction from all the election-related news you’re sure to be drowning in, I thought I’d post a video of me telling the story of Royal Quiet Deluxe, (chicken band) at The Moth.
By way of comparison, you can read a written version of the story here.
The story links to one of our recordings, made with a primitive drum machine, delay/loop pedal, and my tireless prattling.
The following track, though, is a different sort of sound collage. We recorded it on the front porch of Tim’s parent’s place out in Botetourt County, VA, one hot summer evening. You can hear crickets and locusts in the background, something I think is pretty cool. I am playing the typewriter as percussion here, Tim is playing guitar, and the chickens are pecking and vocalizing. Tim mixed in a recording about Exotic Newcastle Disease in Southern California that was recorded over the telephone many years later, and presto — you have:
Exotic Newcastle Disease, by Royal Quiet Deluxe
There’s one more story in this saga. I’ve told it onstage at a Moth event recently, and I’m waiting to get ahold of the video so I can crunch it and post it here — and I’m working on the text version for those of you that want the full-on boxed-set experience. Suffice it to say that while the Internet has helped me find a whole new audience for this band that I never thought existed, I am 100 percent positive that the Reverend Al Sharpton still thinks the whole concept of Royal Quiet Deluxe is the stupidest thing he’s ever heard.
You can see a story by The Moth’s Jim O’Grady here:
And a story by The Moth’s Juliet Wayne here:
I was at the O’Reilly Media-sponsored Web 2.0 Expo here in New York last week. While I wouldn’t exactly call it fun, I learned a lot. Here’s a few observations:
*** The term “Google-juice” sounds really, really gross
*** The word “leverage” is vastly overused. It’s not a verb, people. Every time you say it, an IQ point dies.
*** People love to talk about the “Wild West” mentality on the Internet. Meaning, I think, that there are no rules or ethics online. The real Wild West was about gunfights, cattle theft, drinking whiskey in filthy saloons and dying during childbirth. Making baseless claims anonymously in your underpants is the opposite of tough. There’s a big, big difference.
*** Being articulate, intelligent and well-read and being a Top Digger are not the same thing by a damn sight. I’m not going to name names, but a certain social media expert should be aware that they speak Portuguese in Brazil — not Brazilian.
*** There were a lot of people asking “how can I leverage the power of Web 2.0 community to ‘go viral’ and drive traffic to my market share, incentivizing revenue generation through targeted content promotion?”
Nobody asked “how can I make content that’s actually good?”
I’d like to focus on that a little bit.
In the Northernmost part of Greenpoint, just about as far up as you can go in Brooklyn without falling in Newtown Creek and drifting across the sludge-channel to Queens, there is an ever-changing graffiti mural on the corner of Clay and McGuinness, on the walls of the Power Brake Service shop. We’ve seen employees on site while artists are laying it down, and even saw an NYPD cruiser stop by for a short chat with a tagger before rolling along without so much as a finger-wagging, so we reckon the building owner either approves of the paint job, or at least isn’t bothered by it.
Those great big billboard ads you see on the subway are nothing but giant peel-and-stick Coloforms, really. I love the accidental collages you see when people randomly pick and peel those thing like they’re great big scabs, and I just knew it was a matter of time before someone started making art out of them.
Then I saw this ad for Star Wars that had been chopped and remixed with bits from a beer ad and a poster for a Takashi Murakami exhibit and I heard a horde of angels singing a song titled “Shit Yeah!”:
You can see the whole billboard and a gold-bikini Princess Leia mixed with Iron Man after the jump …
Gawker ran a pretty spectacular post today, purportedly cribbed from a Craigslist post that’s since been deleted. It’s by a woman who makes gold-digging look ambitious and blue-collar. She’s not digging for gold so much as trying to find a man who will take the earth-sized diamond at Jupiter’s core and set it in a ring.
Then top himself somehow when he proposes.
Here’s the post itself, a choice excerpt below:
Okay, I’m tired of beating around the bush. I’m a beautiful (spectacularly beautiful) 25 year old girl. I’m articulate and classy. I’m not from New York. I’m looking to get married to a guy who makes at least half a million a year. I know how that sounds, but keep in mind that a million a year is middle class in New York City, so I don’t think I’m overreaching at all.
Are there any guys who make 500K or more on this board? Any wives? Could you send me some tips? I dated a business man who makes average around 200 - 250. But that’s where I seem to hit a roadblock. 250,000 won’t get me to central park west. I know a woman in my yoga class who was married to an investment banker and lives in Tribeca, and she’s not as pretty as I am, nor is she a great genius. So what is she doing right? How do I get to her level?
It gets better. Go on, treat yourselves. The post reads real to me — either by a real life poisonous white dragon who’s looking to line her nest with more gold, or by a real life comedic genius who was hoping his/her inbox would explode with outraged responses.
The best response of all, though, is in the comments section. It takes the out-of-control DeLorean that is this vicious bitch’s ambition and hits it with a lightning bolt just in the nick of time:
It’s a closely guarded secret, but the vast majority of investment bankers have the same sexual fetish: they like to shit on their partner’s face. It has something to do with their ability to understand quanitative analysis. Left brain right brain stuff. Very spreadsheety. So anyway, all the wives of Goldman Sachs managing directors, they’ve had to accept that that’s part of the trade-off for the lifestyle. Ask any dry cleaner on the UES or Tribeca. Shit stained 500 count sheets are the norm. As soon as you start demonstrating a willingness for that kind of play, they’ll be knocking down your door.
This is why I eat the Internet.
Originally uploaded by tozzo
The four of us sat in the dirty aquarium screaming with green-grey light, a small filthy oasis in the Port Authority bus terminal. I was on my way to another freelance interview. Now that I’m on the treadmill, I can’t stop looking for the next gig — I’d rather face down an injured wolverine with an air rifle than go into another long stretch of nothing like I did this summer.
So there’s me in my dark grey interview suit, sweating like Whitney Houston in an airport, sitting there on the little nod-proof bench, just waiting on the bus. An old woman stood across from me, standard issue, straight from Central casting. She wore a sun hat and blue-blockers just like my grandmother and a fanny pack with an L. Ron Hubbard book sat just above her hips.
We were all doing the New York thing where everyone sees each other and says nothing at all for a good ten minutes or so when the old woman crossed the room and stood right next to me at the end of the bench.
“Scum,”
she said, in a low voice that only I could hear.
Scum on the anus of this earth is what you are. Manipulating the legal system to intimidate witnesses in a federal case is a very serious crime in this country. You might be on top for now, but you won’t get away with it for long.
