Fine Words from Dylan

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Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:32:00 GMT

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Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:32:00 GMT

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Lindy West is Wonderful. Many humans are not

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Start by taking a look at this page from Jezebel.com entitled "IF COMEDY HAS NO LADY PROBLEMS, WHY AM I GETTING SO MANY RAPE THREATS" from the wonderful Lindy West.

THEN read my comments below.

The reading of these tweets is incredibly powerful and absolute proof of the ugliness of rape culture. This is how those in power maintain power -- through the casual intimidation that comes with off-handed dismissal of complaints against them. Lindy's simple, unaffected reading of the comments is, in itself, a powerful act of defiance. I am in awe of her and ashamed of a culture that has led so many to think their humorless, hate-filled comments are acceptable.

Oddly, I am of the opinion that all topics should be fair game for comedy. I also think that comedians have a responsibility to be cognizant of what they SAY about those topics, because comedy is powerful and by its very nature is a teaching tool. I heard Margaret Cho do a piece on rape that was powerful and poignant and very, very funny. It did not support rape or apologize for the rapist or blame the victim.

Many in our society are incapable of distinguishing between that which is racially charged and that which is racist, that which is gender-observational and that which is sexist. I used to do material about homophobia and people would come up to me, amused by my set, and say, "I got a fag joke you can use." Not everybody learns at the same rate. But everyone can eventually learn.

If more people are as courageous as Lindy West is, perhaps our culture can learn to be as intolerant of rape, as averse to sexism as we are, in general toward Naziism and racism and the other less prevalent, less culturally tolerated power-biases.

Bravo, Lindy. Thanks so much for your courage, your wit and your willingness to confront head on the ugliness of your detractors.

A Piece of my Heart -- this should be a rave instead you get a rant

Sat, 25 May 2013 07:00:00 GMT

My review of A Piece of My Heart, a two act play by Shirley Lauro produced by the Los Angeles New Court Theater should be a rave. The script, a tightly woven series of character-driven vignettes revolving around women who served in Viet Nam, provides a stirring, painful and shocking look at the horror of the wartime experience. The piece condemns war not through didactic language or lecture but through simple revelation of the tragic, brutal wrongness to which it subjects those who face it. This is a good thing for a play to do. This is a good thing for people to see and hear and remember. The play touches on issues of race, of gender, of control, of deceit. The first act takes the women, nurses and USO performers from their pre-enlistment thoughts of service and personal empowerment into the impossible, terrifying grotesquerie of the war zone, the blood soaked medical units, the stages set up before ranks of homesick soldiers, the constant danger and desperate revelry of day-to-day survival. The second act examines the post-war treatment of these female veterans, their return to a nation split over the issue of peace, the casual dismissal by the military of their lingering physical and emotional injuries, their difficulties in returning from the battlefield to a culture that demands they fill expected roles, roles that make no sense to women who have seen what they have seen, done what they have done. This is a good and worthy play about the need to move beyond war, to see war as the glamorless, horrific waste that it is by its very nature.

Director Becca Flinn handles the direction of this complex and deliberately disjointed play beautifully, creating transitional devices and scenic shifts that allow the scenes to flow from one to the next without breaks for scene-setting. The rhythm of the production never lags.

The cast, all young women and one young man who plays every male role – the grunts, the wounded, the brass, the civilian in a bar all become as much a singular blur as the boys who cross the nurse’s tables and the audience members of the touring USO singer must, all the same face like a recurring nightmare – move through character transitions, support one another and find unexpected laughs and painful pathos in a script they all seemed to me to be too young to be capable of grasping. They stretched into difficult and uncomfortable emotional territory with the apparent effortlessness that can only mean they are all really doing their work as artists and they took us with them from the opening moment to the final candle-light imagery.

A woman sitting near me in the audience wept openly.

This is a good play, a fine production and it is performed gorgeously.

Clearly my review should be a rave.

FOR TICKETS AND SHOW RUN DETAILS GO HERE: http://www.lanewcourttheatre.com/Los_Angeles_New_Court_Theatre/Season.html The show is well worth seeing!

I left the theater, though, very angry. Before the play – as is often the case in small theaters – the director stood up to thank everyone for coming and to talk about how proud she is of the work and the cast. The assistant director joined her to make announcements about turning off cell phones and how long the intermission would be. Then she went on, this assistant director, to add some personal comments. She spoke briefly about how important it is that we honor our veterans and meet their needs. Yes. Agreed. A thousand times yes. She wasn’t done. She got choked up as she went on to spout the oft uttered but rarely questioned or challenged or even considered trope about how our veterans sacrifice their lives and limbs for our freedom and our happiness and that for this we owe them a debt of gratitude.

I cannot begin to express how wrong-headed and downright offensive I find this young woman’s mouthing of pro-military cliché before the performance of a play that is so carefully designed with intent to break down the sanitized, romanticized notions of what it means to serve one’s country.

Yes. Of course our veterans should be treated well, their needs met. So should our homeless, our sick, our mentally ill, the victims of bank foreclosure and natural disaster and industrial accidents.

We do not protect freedom by killing people or by allowing our servicemen and women to be killed. We protect freedom by building a society that does not incarcerate more people per capita than any other nation in the world.

We do not protect happiness by killing people or allowing our servicemen and women to be killed. We protect happiness by creating and maintaining a culture in which people feel they are valued more than property, they have greater value than the profit they can help generate.

What those who have served in times of war tell us time and again, when they are not too traumatized to tell us anything, is this: War is bad; it is ugly; it is incomprehensibly horrific. It damages the bodies and the minds of all who are directly exposed to it. It should be avoided at all costs.

I have never heard a veteran speak to a young person and say, “You should go to war. That will be a noble and beautiful way to protect the freedom and happiness of the people who do not go.” The only people who speak in those terms are those who live within the safety of their borders and wish to silence their own guilt by projecting honorable intentions onto those who fight, honorable motives onto those in command.

Those who fight know that there is no honor on the battlefield, no noble intentions, no freedom or happiness being preserved. There is death, dismemberment, blood, fear, urine, stench, mud, rage and the systematic dehumanization of the enemy by the soldiers and the soldiers by the brass. War requires, by its very nature, a break from the most basic tenets of the social contract. “Thou shalt not kill,” is out the window. Once that goes, all is fair game and once the social fabric is shredded the truth becomes apparent. Soldiers realize quickly that they do not fight for what they thought they would be fighting for. They fight not for the freedom of their families but for their nation’s political or economic interests, not for the safety of those back home but for the security of a corporation’s oil holdings or the ideals of a religious fanatic or the revenge fantasy of a second-generation politician.

To preface a beautiful play about the ugly truth with an ugly lie about a beautiful myth offends me to my core. If my freedom and happiness depended on the atrocity of war, the price would be too high. But it doesn’t matter, because that is part of the lie we’ve been told for so long that we forget to question, to challenge, to consider. War cannot continue once we acknowledge that humanity, all of humanity, is of greater value than any property.

The play I saw tonight held the truth. I wish they hadn’t allowed that young woman to come out first and spout the very lies it sought to debunk.

The rich and powerful decide that something is worth killing for and then go about convincing the desperate and frightened that it is worth dying for. Let’s try to remember that on Memorial Day, as we mourn the fallen.

A New Poem

Sat, 11 May 2013 06:45:00 GMT

She contracted,
reshaped, accommodated
every dent, each bent
inclination of my
bruised and swollen ego,
loaned my sprained spirit
a crutch from her expansive collection,
carved romance novels down my spine
to wake me from the eversleep
two decades of extended weekend
made habitual with her tongue.
When she left
her pillowed scent dissolved,
the poet's dissipated lie of lingering
perfume diffused, debunked
by cruel and fluid mathematics
of atmospheric shift and flow.

Security

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 22:11:00 GMT

(I am almost certain this will be on the CD I will record this year for 2014 release. It's the first one I've started working up for the next batch)

The greatest comfort in my life comes from the presence of Sir Corwin the Beautiful Dog-faced Dog, Brindled Beast of Sylmar. He was named on faith. When my wife and I adopted him he was a tiny puppy. We were told he was brindled but he seemed to be black with a single, dark brown streak on his shoulder. He grew in odd fits and spurts that made us worry at times. One day we woke up and he had a giant head stuck on his little puppy body. Another day, his legs were very long and he seemed pinheaded. We really didn't know how he would turn out. He matured into his name splendidly.

He has a noble face and sad, communicative eyes. As he became an adult, his coloring turned out to be a rare, dark, reverse brindle that draws comments from strangers.

Corwin is a rare pit/akita/lab/mastiff/sharpie/king corso purebred. At the dog park, I tell his admirers that he comes from a long line of promiscuous mongrels, just like me. They chuckle and tell me that he has a beautiful coat.

While he is a strong dog, athletic and powerful at almost seventy pounds, he is not particularly aggressive or dominant. At the off leash park where we take him almost every day, he has proven time and again that he's capable of playing well with others. He wrestles hard with dogs that can handle hard wrestling and he wrestles gently with puppies, often lying on his back and allowing them to gnaw on his neck. He's not much of a runner, but he's enough of a strategist to engage runners by intersecting their wide circles and thumping chests with them as they pass.

On July 2nd, 2005, I ran late getting him out of the house and the regular morning crowd was gone when we got to the park. Corwin and I shared the park with one woman walking three golden retrievers. Friendly beast that he is, Corwin ran up to the retrievers and introduced himself. One of the dogs twigged. It snarled and attacked Corwin. I don't expect that from retrievers – from any dog, really, but retrievers especially tend to be good-natured – so it took me a moment to react. By the time I did, the others had joined in. The woman who owned the golden dogs panicked and began shrieking at her dogs, "Ajax, no! No, Ajax!" and then, "Stop it! Just stop it!"

I pulled Corwin back by his haunches to get him clear of danger and wrapped my arms around him, hugging him, scratching his chest and saying, "It's okay, Buddy. Settle down."

But the golden retrievers had become an aggressive pack and the woman didn't know how to control her dogs. She still thought that screaming commands was going to solve the problem. While she yelled, the dogs came in at Corwin, snarling and snapping. I wasn't going to hold him still and let him be mauled so I released him, at least allowing him to defend himself. He didn't want the fight. He ran. But as I said before, he's not a runner. The three angry goldens stayed right behind him as he tore around in a big circle. He tucked his butt under him for speed and raced to the one place he thought he could be safe. He ran back to me and tucked himself between my legs. Again I bent down to hold him and protect him. I pushed away the three dogs with my right hand, shouting, "Lady, get control of your damn dogs! Stop yelling and just put 'em on a leash!" Apparently specific instruction was what she needed. My hand got bitten up badly enough that, had I gone to a hospital there would have been an animal control form to fill out, but after a few moments she got her dogs leashed and I took Corwin to a picnic table where I checked him for injuries before calling it a short day and taking him home.

I put the harness on him that allows me to seat belt him into the back of the car for safety and I drove up the five freeway lost in the dreamy world that comes after adrenaline action. I found myself reviewing an experience from my youth.

I was fourteen or fifteen years old and I was home on vacation from my first year at prep school. My father took me out for pizza. We sat together in a booth. I know it was my freshman year because I was wearing a greek fisherman's cap that my grandfather had bought me and it was during my freshman year that I wore it all the time as a personal fashion statement.

At another table, three young men – all in their early or mid-twenties – talked loudly. They cursed a lot and made demeaning comments to the waitress. My father asked the waitress to send out the manager, another young man in his twenties, and asked him to have the boys keep it down. The manager spoke briefly with them and then went back to the kitchen. After a few minutes, the three young men came to stand threateningly over our table. One of them took up a position of leadership. The others stood near him, looming.

"What'samatter?" He said to my father. "You can't come tell us to be quiet yourself? You gotta go call the manager?"

My father said, "Alright, boys." He did not stand up.

I imagined driving my fork into the guy's leg and then throwing a shoulder into the first one of his friend's to move toward me.

"You got a problem with us but you're too much of a coward to come talk to us? That it? Well now you're talkin' to us. Whattayou gotta say?"

I imagined my father dressed as Captain America and me as Bucky, the young sidekick, striking powerful, comic-book blows side by side. I looked down at my plate and smirked a little bit, so as not to seem frightened.

My father said, "Alright, boys."

The bullying young man turned his attention on me. He said, "What are you laughing about? You think this is funny?" He pushed my hat down over my eyes.

"Alright, boys," my father said.

One of the other young men started getting impatient and the trio snorted a few more derisive words at us and left the restaurant. My father and I didn't talk much as we finished our pizza. When we left, he was nervous walking to the car and I knew he was afraid they were waiting in the parking lot.

The whole event played through several times in my head as I drove Sir Corwin home from the park. Then, with his beautiful beastiness lying on the floor near me, I soaked my retriever-bitten hand in a sink full of stinging, burning hydrogen peroxide until bubbles stopped rising from the small puncture wounds.

The following night I had an opportunity to see my father. He was on his way home to Boston from Singapore and he had a four-hour layover at Los Angeles International Airport. We met at the Daily Grill in the Tom Bradley International Terminal and drank scotch. He told me about his trip. I told him about his grand-dog and explained why my hand was lightly bandaged. Then we discussed the event at the pizzeria. We remembered the event almost identically, which is rare when it comes to shared family memories, though we had slightly different takes on it. I tried to tell him my end of the experience without including how disappointed in him I had felt at the time. I had wanted to feel protected but instead felt as though, like me, he was just waiting to find out how badly we were going to be victimized. Then he said, "You were going into your usual, self-protective smart-ass routine and I just wanted to diffuse things before you made them worse." I flushed at his words. I remembered the smirk, my last grasp at dignity that evening long ago. But I rankled at the thought that somehow he had been thinking of me as a liability as I had been imagining us fighting our oppressors as a team.

I said, "Uh-huh. But... at what point would you have done something? Diffusing things is fine but isn't there a point where you have to do something?"

In the comfort and safety of a bar at LAX, my father said with absolute certainty and confidence, "Oh, if they'd laid a hand on you, I would've been on them in a heartbeat."

I sipped my scotch and remembered the guy pushing the hat down over my eyes. I nodded and hated myself for still being angry about it. I was pretty sure I saw a flicker of awareness in my father's sad, communicative eyes, the moment when he remembered that a hand had been laid on me. In that moment, I suspect he hated himself for his current revision and for his past cowardice just as much as I did. But we didn't discuss that. We discussed other things. And then he flew to Boston.

Corwin hates the fourth of July. It's not a philosophical thing. He just doesn't like fireworks. He doesn't know what they are, but they're very loud and scary.

As our neighbors celebrated with M-80s and Jack Blasters, Sir Corwin the Beautiful Dog-faced Dog curled closer and closer against me on the couch until all sixty-nine pounds of him were huddled in my lap, his sad eyes looking up at me, pleading with me to make it stop. I warded off the snarling, slathering pack of retrievers. Surely I could silence the explosions outside our town-house. I petted him lovingly, hugged him, and sang Sondheim's "Nothin's gonna harm you" over and over again into his velvety ear. I couldn't make the threat go away, but at least I could offer him comfort. I felt very strong and heroic and filled to overflowing with love. In the end I brought him to my fairly well sound-proofed home-office and put on some classical music to drown the outside bleed-through and calm Corwin’s nerves.

I called my father to follow up on our conversation at the airport. I said, "You know, I think it bears mentioning that regardless of how we felt about ourselves and each other that night in 1978, you made a good call. We both wound up safe at home, unharmed."

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah. That's probably the important thing. Huh?"

And I said, "yeah, Dad. You done good."

We all live with our own fears and weaknesses, our regrets and resentments. We look back on our mistakes and our failures and we all seek comfort where we can get it. Now and then, when the opportunity arises, it feels good to offer a bit of comfort to someone else. It’s good to let someone feel forgiven if when you don’t feel entirely forgiving.

That night – or maybe the next -- I noticed, as I was about to plunge my healing hand into the stinging peroxide, an odd expression crossing my face. I pretended to smile, feeling strong and heroic and powerful. But as I studied my reflection, dipped my hand and waited for the wounds to stop stinging and bubbling, I realized it was just a habitual smirk that I adopted so I wouldn’t seem frightened.

Some of my songs!

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 01:11:00 GMT

Get Band email for free at ReverbNation.com

Note From the Sylmar Underground

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 07:17:00 GMT

I must, dear reader of my blog, begin with a confession. There lies, in my character, an inherent flaw, a disingenuous tendency to make myself more than I am, to publicly overvalue my accomplishments while privately dismissing them, to spin my failures into fraudulent gold and more, still. I pretend to great intellect and depth of education, implying my own superiority in these areas through a fussy insistence on grammatical precision and near constant demonstrations of my own master of the language.

Even as I hate myself for these behaviours (and I assure you that each of them brings up in me that self-same loathing which drove the bullies of my childhood to beat me on the playgrounds and sidewalks of Schuylerville, New York) I hate myself more for my awareness of their deceptive nature. In truth, while I do have a facility for language – my own, that is, I have had neither the patience nor the talent to master even the most rudimentary conversational skills in any other – I rely heavily on that natural ability and demonstrate barely the least bit of discipline in my work. I write when I am inspired, haphazardly applying myself now to poetry, now to blogging, now to a spec script and so on. My published works, two novels for the young adult market, a novella and an e-book, have not made the best-known best-seller lists (as my father is quick to point out) and so I speak of their publication as though that alone is a mark of greatness. An award I won for playwriting some few years ago was so small in nature that the prize barely covered the expense necessary to travel to the ceremony at which the award was presented and yet I speak of that award as if it were of value as great as a Tony or an Oscar which, as my father is quick to point out, it is not. The litany of minor accomplishments which I inflate to bolster my public image could carry me well into the night, pen in hand, as I reveal them one by one but let me make short this paragraph by saying this: I speak of my five CDs and do not speak of the minute advance I negotiated for the contract or the meager sums I receive in royalties; I speak of my work on radio and do not mention the miniscule listenership or the stipends I receive for my writings and recordings; I speak, in short, to the aggrandizement of a career that stumbles in its faltering way toward a legacy of obscurity. The best consolation I offer myself, as I huddle in bed beside my beautiful wife who works hard to support us despite the expense of my unprofitable efforts is that after my death, perhaps, some person or persons among those few who have become aware of my efforts might in passing, at a some party or other, make mention of me and say that I was under appreciated in my time.

Now, in an attempt to make good on the promise of the man I claim to be, the man I pretend to be, I have taken it upon myself to read those books that I skimmed or failed entirely to read when I was assigned them in prep school and in college. Admittedly, I do still alternate, reading first a novel from the adventure fantasy rack at the local book store, pure self-indulgence and delight for me and then one of those classics with which I have, for all these years, only pretended to have been acquainted.

As each line passes beneath my eyes, as I become at last educated to the masterful writings that I had dismissed in adolescent arrogance as unworthy of my time and find the treasures I had so long denied myself, the hatred I feel for my own moronic pretense of erudition grows until it burns like a candle’s flame within my very soul. The self-recrimination as I realize the extent to which I have unmanned myself with ignorance while trumpeting my intellect troubles my sleep. I lie in bed at night, asthmatically gasping, suffocated by the pressure of my own detestation, my own failure even to be even a shadow of what I have claimed.

I sit, now perhaps in a park during the day, now at a coffee house in the evening, reading and am aware of the eyes of those about me, their judgment apparent in their sneering, hostile faces as I take in texts I would have been expected to have read long ago and huddle down. I hope to be invisible behind my book but still, I know they stare at me and I know their angry and superior thoughts as they watch me read.

As you may by now have surmised, as I assume you to be better read than I, my current literary endeavor has taken me, at long last, into the works of Dostoyevsky. I was supposed to have read him years ago. Damn, he’s good.

In it Together

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 08:00:00 GMT

My wife and I don’t like to travel. She hates flying. I hate being away from my desk. Also, frequently when we travel it involves seeing our families and that’s no fun for anyone.

A few years ago when we had to go east for the Holidays it dawned on us that almost everybody we encountered was in much the same state of disoriented discomfort . Airports are really just food courts full of the under slept and the disgruntled. We made it our mission to be better natured, more patient, more charming and more generally cheerful than any luggage-dragging, flight-delayed traveler has any right to be. Whenever we travel, we strive to project a sense of joy and ease so that we do not add to the general level of stressed negativity in the world around us. We call this ‘wearing our travel faces,’ and the moment we adopted the habit, travelling became significantly less miserable, our families significantly less intolerable and the moving walkways more like a goofy amusement park ride than a series of conveyor belts for human cattle gliding through the shopping mall of the damned.

Recently, a paycheck I had been eagerly awaiting came with a note suggesting that I wait ten days before depositing it on the same day that new loud renters moved into the condo next door to our home. On my way home from a gig at which the producer had asked me if I could cut my prepared story from twelve minutes down to seven – and then five – I sent my wife a text from the shoulder of the 405. “Triple A is coming to help me with a flat tire,” I typed with my thumbs.

She responded, “Call me when you’re rolling again. The garage door opener burned out so I’ll come open it by hand.”

I thought about how much garage door repair was likely to cost. I thought about the check I couldn’t deposit for a week and a half. I put my hands in my pockets against a chill, freewayside drizzle. My phone made its little “you’ve got a text” noise and I pulled it out to look at it. My wife had typed at me, “Breathe and smile when the tire guy gets there. Travel faces for everyone.” I thought about the guy who had to drive around in the rain all night changing other people’s tires and how amazing my wife is to think of such things when she’d just learned that she would be covering all the dog-walking responsibilities alone in the rain while I waited for the repair truck.

I made friendly conversation when the guy arrived and chatted with him while he worked. The Auto Club covered the cost of the service, so I tipped the guy twenty bucks and he smiled in a way that made me think the he had not felt valued and appreciated in quite a while.

People talk a lot about how life is a journey, not a destination as though that holds the key to happiness. I don’t think that’s really it at all. I don’t think it’s about the journey or the destination. I think it’s all about the travelers. It’s easy to let ourselves turn into angry passengers, helpless in a world of air currents and weather patterns, moving sidewalks and unmoving doors. But with just a little bit of conscious effort, we can smile, chuckle at the delays and make sure that through the vagaries of the voyage we remain, all of us, good traveling companions.

OUT OF RESPECT (A poem)

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 08:00:00 GMT

OUT OF RESPECT

Out of respect for the children
let us not speak of gun control.
Let us grieve in silent outrage
lest one of those small figures
carrying memories of fearful
moments, cupboard cuddled,
waiting with a teacher for an
end to either deadly shootings
or themselves think this horror
might have been averted
had we all been willing, even once
to dream beyond heroic violence
to the far more challenging, more
courageous, more inspiring vision
of heroic peace.

Out of respect for the victims
let us not speak of mental health
but rather, soothe the conscience
of a country with simplistic categories,
good guys, bad guys, innocent and
guilty, lest we lose to shades of gray
our mindfulness that a culture closed
to those who most need help,
who least are able to afford much-
needed meds, who cry and stamp and
tantrum, is not to blame, but only those
who once cast out and told they can’t
be saved return in blazing rage inhabit shadow
and all the rest the pious light.

Out of respect for the soldiers
let us not speak of peace.
For if a world of diplomatic, thoughtful
problem solving is a possibility, why then
how dare we send our loved ones out
to die, to strive in terror and privation,
to sacrifice their bodies and their minds,
their limbs and senses to explosive conflict
far away, outside the rules of civil conduct
where to kill is just as much a job as filing,
cleaning rooms or sliding cans
past bar-code scanners.

Out of respect for our history,
speak not of genocides committed,
of infected blankets given out,
of trails of tears and wounded knees,
of treaties broken, promises abandoned,
reservations cordoned off and redefined
as minerals emerged and unexpected
resources came to light and seemed
more valuable than earth or sky
or human beings.

Out of respect for tradition
let us not speak of change.
Out of respect for the dead
let us all still our tongues.
Out of respect for the past
let us never speak of the future.
Out of respect for the wealthy
let us not speak of the poor.
Out of respect for the poor
let us not speak of the economy.
Out of respect for the worker
let us not speak of unions.
I am out of respect.
Let us now observe
not a single moment of silence.

BIG RXLaughter Fundraiser (and other scheduling notes)

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 07:42:00 GMT

December 1, SONGS ALIVE SONGWRITERS SHOWCASE at Cahuenga General Store. 7:30pm.

December 7, WONKA'S GOLDEN TICKET SHOW at Actors' Comedy Studio. 7:30pm

DECEMBER 23rd! MORE ARTS/LESS MARTIAL (A fundraiser for RXLaughter (a 5013c) at Beyond Baroque 3:30pm (Just click on the image below to make reservations!)

Ann Randolph Made my Night

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 06:13:00 GMT

My calendar said, “7:30. Santa Monica Playhouse. YOU PROMISED.” I had typed that note myself but had failed to make any mention of what I was to see or to whom I had made this promise. I had vague recollection of a Facebook exchange. I try to keep my promises. So I went to Santa Monica to find out what I had promised to see at the Playhouse.

It turns out it was Ann Randolph’s solo show Loveland and it turns out I am very glad to have promised, very glad to have kept my promise, very glad to be aware of a performer of her caliber. The show is funny and dark and moving. Ms. Randolph’s performance shows a kind of courage rarely seen in solo shows. Unlike the self-congratulatory, first person narrative that dominates the solo-show scene in L.A. these days (my own More Arts/Less Martial included in that category, for the record), Ms. Randolph presents in the character of Franny Potts, an adorably flawed oddball with a slight speech impediment, inappropriate body language and enthusiasms that bubble out in childish delight.

As more characters enter the story – her disabled mother, a controlled and controlling stewardess, a meditation instructor, a woman selling urns in a funeral home – she inhabits each of those characters as completely and committedly as she does Franny, leaving us with very little sense of the actress behind them. We do not realize until she begins to transform from one persona to another that what we have witnessed is brilliant character work, not mere shameless self-revelation; she’s that good.

Once we realize that Franny is a developed character and not, in fact, Ann Randolph herself, we have just a moment of suspension in the belief that we are caught up in a character-sketch comedy. We are fooled again. Turning on an emotional dime, Ms. Randolph, who wrote the piece as well as performing it, presents a story that is by turns, vulgar, dark, hilarious, moving and ultimately – and this is what one really doesn’t see coming – tremendously theatrically satisfying.

If you have an opportunity, get to Loveland. And stop in the gift shop for a souvenir. You’ll want to remember it.

To Ohio With Love

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 22:41:00 GMT

Jack Voorhies is funny. Genuinely funny. The kind of funny that can make a man put iced coffee through his nose, including the cubes.

I first stumbled onto him when he was working with The Fresh, a hard-rocking band that did hilariously perverse songs about erections and insecurities and the genre in which they worked. I was hooked.

Then something happened. I’m not quite sure what it was, whether it was family-related or financial or what, but Jack moved to Ohio, to the town of his youth. For more than a year he’s been posting long notes on Facebook under the title From Ohio With Love (Week x) and he tags me on each one so I know when one goes up. I have to admit, I haven’t read all of them. I may have missed some key bits of back story.

Here’s the thing. (There’s a thing? Isn’t there always?) These little blog-like postings of his are beautiful. Each one looks inward to his own experience as it looks outward to the world in which he finds himself. Returning to the place from whence he comes carries natural nostalgia, a bit of the outsider’s experience for perspective. As is the case with most good humorists, he faces the world with significant intellectual self-awareness, an underlying instinct for irony that pervades his thought process even when he is not writing jokes or, in his case, joke songs.

One has the sense – or perhaps projects onto his writings the sense – that he feels apart from his own life much of the time. Jack might well believe that leaving his band, departing Los Angeles, taking regular, non-creative jobs to survive represents some kind of a failure. He might think that this is a delay or an abandonment of his creative endeavors. A deep melancholy resonates through his lovely posts.

And they are beautiful. Each one appears on my screen as an elegantly wrought look into the mind of a man who is trying to learn who he is as an adult, making the best choices he can within the context of life’s requirements.

It’s possible that the posts themselves could someday be compiled, edited and structured into a cohesive piece of literature. It is possible that they will exist only as the transient, connected, beautiful things that they are and will serve only as the public journal work that Mr. Voorhies does on his way to his next exploration of self-expression. I don’t care. The writings themselves are lovely gifts that come to me through the ether and remind me that there are people in the world, working and writing and growing and making the world a richer place.

Jack Voorhies is funny but it also turns out he’s a whole lot more. He’s also smart and dark and depressive and decent and human and an ever-improving, ever-evolving organizer of words and images. See if you can get him to start tagging you when he writes. You won’t be sorry.

A Funny Book That I Did Not Write

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 03:46:00 GMT

I was recently asked to write and read a piece at a promotional event for Jennifer Worick’s very funny, blog-based book Things I Want to Punch in the Face. I struggled with the assignment until I wanted to punch the meme in the face.

As a martial artist and a human being, I strive to maintain a non-violent philosophy and certainly don’t like to leap straight to violence as a solution to every frustration life throws at me. So let me just put myself at ease by saying right up front that I wish to punch in the face only metaphorically and not at all literally, because I am not Tagg Romney.

So, with that in mind, I want to punch Microsoft Tech Support in the face and have wanted to punch Microsoft Tech Support in the face for a week and a half now. I expect to continue wanting to punch Microsoft Tech Suport in the face until a second, WindowsXP re-installation disk arrives – this one, unbroken in transit. Then I will probably want to punch Microsoft Tech Support in the face for at least a day or two more until the installation is complete and I have begun reloading all my other software and wanting to punch other technical support groups in the face.

Let me make this clear. I do not want to punch in the face the technical support personnel with thick Bangladeshi accents and names like Gary and Sarah, even though I know it is culturally acceptable to be xenophobically racist when it is masked behind the comforting economic argument of job insecurity. No. In fact, I want to punch the casual nationalism of anti-outsourcing sentiment in the face until it softens into sympathy for the exploitation of humanity wherever it occurs.

I want to punch Microsoft in the face for its technical support set-up. I don’t want to punch Bill Gates in the face. He’s just a guy doing very well in a culture that rewards corporate success above all else. No, I want to punch his corporation in the face. Which I really should be able to do, given that a corporation is a person according to the Citizens United ruling. And I want to punch the Citizens United ruling in the face.

I want to punch the corporate mentality in its big, stupid, profits-over-people face. I want to punch the premium collecting, pay-out avoiding insurance industry in its face. I want to punch the oil industry in its climate-change denying, pollution justifying, planet breaking face. I want to punch Monsanto in its genetically modified, herbicide resistant face and nobody would fault me for it because we all know that if James Bond were real, Monsanto would have blown up by now in a great, satisfying, orange and black, third-act conflagration.

I want to punch great, satisfying, orange-and-black, third-act conflagrations in the face. I want to punch in the face every movie-studio that has rejected one of my character driven, relationship scripts because flawed people resolving and failing to resolve messy, complex human conflicts through subtextual exchanges of language and silence don’t sell tickets like fiery explosions do and we’re not making art, we’re making entertainment. And I have to remind myself that I do not want to punch the twenty-something executives making those decisions in the face, because they are just human, flawed characters trying to do their jobs in a messy, less-than perfect world. Which I would like to punch in the face.

I want to punch the entertainment industry in the face for combining art and the most powerful tools of communication in the history of humanity into a system for the manufacture and distribution of mind-numbing, repetitious, self-referential, self-reverential, carefully non-inflammatory indulgences.

And tonight, when I go home, pour a glass of scotch, and like every other self-loathing sheep in this City of Nobody’s Better Angels, turn on the television, I will want to punch myself in the face for my own, human weakness.

How Do You Remember All Those Words?

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Line memorization can become an organic part of the process as an actor. It need not be an onerous and separate part of the development of character and exploration of personal action.

Here’s how I do it. Try it and, if it works for you, call it part of the Brody Method. If it doesn’t work for you, please call it part of the Hubbard technique.

Take the script and find out where you are just before you speak. (Often this will be a moment of listening, but now and then yours will be the first words spoken) Given that circumstance, what would you – the actor, not the character – say? Once you’ve figured that out, go to the script. If the character says exactly the same thing you would say in the circumstance, no work needs to be done. Just be in the moment and allow yourself to say the thing you would say anyway. If the character says something different, which is most often the case, take a moment to figure out how the character is different from you, how the character’s experience of the moment is different from yours. Once you know why the character responds in the way he or she does, you can shift your perspective to take in the circumstance or the words that you hear as the character and naturally respond with the character’s words rather than your own.

Often, in dialogue, it helps to remember that in natural conversation we are often a little bit ahead of the person with whom we are speaking. We may be polite enough to let them finish their thoughts but frequently we know halfway through a sentence how we intend to respond. As you read your partner’s line from the page and find your own natural response, assuming it is different from that of your character, figure out at what point in the words spoken to you, the character shifts into responsive rather than receptive mode. This may allow you to pull out the word that sparks the scripted response as opposed to your own instinctive response.

In addition to giving thought-process cues to ride to a natural response from moment to moment, this technique creates a natural rhythm to the performance and generates an active, committed, involved performance as you find yourself listening more intently to those on stage with you as it is only by hearing their performances that you find your own next beats of spoken text. The listening itself becomes part of the active performance.

This same approach works in monologue performance. Rather than worrying about what the next words are – a thing almost nobody does when speaking in day-to-day life – figure out what it is in what you just said that drives you toward the next thing. Where does a whole new thought occur to you that must be expressed as soon as this thought is finished? Where does a sentence lead you to a series of thoughts that must cross your mind in the time allotted by the period or the comma before that next sentence can emerge?

Thus, in memorizing the lines, the process is one of thought-beat exploration rather than rote repetition. The very act of learning the words of the text becomes part of the actor’s process rather than a separate chore.

This really works well for me. Let me know if it works for you, or if you have anything to add post a comment below.

On The Occasion of Ron Shock's Memorial

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 06:07:00 GMT

As we age

and let us hope we do,

we come to know the dying;

we come to grieve the dead.

Solemnities slip by

like sweet and salty

soft serve summer days

when lemonade stand fantasies

of fortunes gripped in tiny hands

dissolve to condensation

right beneath our eyes.

Slow drops distort and magnify,

a clear trail, then sublimate to nothing,

a diagram of transience traced in transparency.

After every hot house comfort

has been peddled out to wilting,

the chairs and tables folded down,

leaned aside, some weep; some smile

a final crowfoot-wrinkled thought to silence

then living on, together

walk back up the waking aisle

to see another fall

in nature’s golden leaving.

A Labor Day Story

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 05:57:00 GMT

{I wrote this piece for performance at Lora Cain's Labor Day installment of Word Salad at The Talking Stick in Los Angeles. The show was terrific all the way through but I can't publish all the stories. Only my own. This is it.}

I have never been good with the quiet dignity of hard work. This concept was not really part of the zeitgeist of my formative years. The cultural focus at that time was heavily weighted toward time-saving devices, labor-saving appliances and the expansion of leisure time. Grown men wore suits designed and marketed specifically for leisure. They were not appealing.

My father worked hard to support the family, in the way that intellectuals work hard. He got up every morning, he wrote for two hours at his desk and then he went to the local college to teach courses in English literature and the subtext of the modern narrative. He spent evenings mapping out lesson plans, reading and grading papers. He worked with focus, commitment and diligence and I never heard him complain about any aspect of his work other than the faculty meetings. None of it ever seemed particularly difficult for him. Whether he was productive at his desk or facing a block, he sat comfortably, pen in hand, tip pressed to the yellow legal pad. Whether the words flowed or he merely doodled in the margins trying to find his next thought, he never seemed strained, rushed, pressured at his work. The few times that I watched him teach, he seemed effortlessly capable of commanding the room’s attention, inspiring critical thought in his students, listening and responding to ideas well beyond my childish grasp.

At Skidmore College my father designed and taught one of the very first college-level courses to deal with film as a legitimate literary form. Each week a new set of big hexagonal boxes would arrive from a distributor in Manhattan. His class would screen the film on Thursday morning and then discuss its content. In order to prepare for those classes, he would show the films on Wednesday Evening in our house, to make notes and get a handle on his own impressions of the week’s film. Every year, the sequence was pretty much the same. He would start with the silents, a melodrama and a comedy. He would move on through the black and white era with a Marx Brothers film and one of the early dance musicals with Fred Astaire, into the films of the forties with Hepburn and Tracy or some similar romantic comedy, then the MGM Technicolor era, with a Gene Kelly musical or a big period piece, then there would be a detour into the auteurs with stuff from Europe of the sixties and seventies with Truffaut films and Renoir and Antonioni. Other kids went to school talking about what Fonzi said last night on Happy Days. I went to school talking about the bizarre images of a Bunuel film that had flickered in my living room and haunted my dreams. Other kids were learning to romanticize family life of the nineteen fifties. I was learning to deconstruct the underlying symbology of a priest dragging a piano full of dead donkeys.

I loved the comedies. I loved the comedies and the musicals and I endured the subtitled weirdness and pretended to enjoy even the films I found completely incomprehensible. After one of the silent comedies, Buster Keaton, I suspect, I told my father that I thought I could do that. He said, “The mark of the great ones is that they make it look easy.”

At the time I was very young and there was nuance and complexity in the statement that I was incapable of processing. I misunderstood. The lesson I internalized as a child was that if something was not easy for me, I could never be great at it.

As I grew into a career as a writer and a comic, I ensured that I never put too much effort into anything by remaining constantly stoned. This also ensured that no matter how badly I wanted to advance my career and find my way into success with my work, I was incapable of assimilating and retaining new information. I did a half-assed job, demonstrating my greatness through lack of effort and wondered why my genius was never recognized.

I visited my parents on a trip to the east coast. They drank scotch and I smoked pot and I told them about celebrities in L.A. with whom I’d done cocaine in hopes that they would be impressed with my social success. I complained about the lack of headway I was making in my career and my belief – my genuine, stoned, paranoid belief – that I was being shut out of show business because “they” some mysterious “they” were threatened by my ideas and my politics. My father was baffled. He said, “Dylan, I don’t understand why you expect to be rewarded for a life of hedonism.”

As you may have figured out, I am not the hero of this story.

From time to time over the years I have stumbled into periods of financial hardship, periods during which I had to step outside of my comfort zone and take the sort of job that most people would think of as honest work. One of those times was 1998.

As part of my preparation for my first black-belt test, I had used a stint as artist in residence at an east-coast prep school to quit smoking pot after sixteen years of continuous stonedness. I returned to Los Angeles sober, but unable to write and perform. In the simplest of terms, I did not know who I was without the haze of smoke between me and my psyche. My on-stage persona and my off stage identity had revolved around marijuana use for so long that I did not know how to present myself beyond that framework. As my savings dwindled I took a job at Stevens Nursery and Hardware carrying big bags of dirt to people’s cars for them. That was my job. With a degree in theater, training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, fifteen years of stand-up comedy, two television appearances and a couple of published books behind me, I carried bags of dirt to the cars of people who bought bags of dirt.

I was incapable of seeing this as dignified so I created a lie that I told freely. I claimed that my Master had insisted that before I test for black belt I spend some time doing work that required only strength and movement, no thought at all. I thought it was a lie I told other people, but it was a lie I told myself and it allowed me to do the work quietly, less resentfully. I hefted the fifty-pound, sealed plastic bags of earth, one on each shoulder and I trudged from the shelf to the parking lot and pretended that this was a sacrifice I made for my martial arts training, not a swap of my precious time on earth for eight dollars and seventy-five cents an hour necessitated by my own misspent youth. I still hadn’t figured out that I had misspent my youth. I blamed my difficulties on the vagaries of capitalism, the end of the comedy boom, the economics of the entertainment industry.

Sobriety provides far more waking hours for thought and study and intellectual pursuits. I began reading again as I hadn’t in years, devouring science fiction and fantasy mostly but occasionally delving into books I had avoided reading in high school and college in favor of class-time osmosis and late night bong hits. I read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States of America and learned about the labor movement in its infancy. I learned how many people had struck and had been struck in the battle for basic workers’ rights. Business owners, mining companies, manufacturers, sought always the greatest possible profit margins and fought back at every step of the way, sometimes brutally, to keep workers from unionizing, finding their own power, raising their voices in protest. Slavery as it was known in the early years of the country was outlawed, but still labor was overworked and underpaid. It was only through difficult struggle and conflict that a five day workweek was established, an eight hour work day, a minimum wage, the most basic safety standards. People had worked very, very hard to make my life easier.

Instead of finding a pride in the basic dignities they had provided me in my work, I found only more shame. Not only was I doing menial labor for minimum wage, I wasn’t even using the opportunity to make things better for the others who shared my fate. I was a professional dirt carrier and I didn’t even have the basic decency to appreciate the job. I had to create a fantasy of bullshit nobility to tolerate it.

As I began writing stories for the radio, even before I started taking them out and performing them live, I wanted them to be good. I wanted them to be sharp. Before I recorded a new piece, I would call four or five friends on the phone and read the stories aloud, making notes about difficult sentences and convoluted structures to tighten. In sobriety, I found I cared more about the quality of the product than I had before and as a result I found myself working harder to polish the rough edges, to make sure that each story could shine. I wanted to make sure that the images were elegantly composed for the mind’s eye and that even if one was unaware of it, the narrative carried a subtext.

When I started performing again, I rehearsed to be sure I could deliver. I began to write and rewrite. I didn’t realize I had given up my efforts to make it look easy until I started carrying a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from my face ‘cause when I perform I perspire like Chris Christie putting on his socks.

I don’t make enough to support myself most of the time but my wife teaches kindergarten and thanks to the teachers’ union that generally gives us enough base pay to get by. A few weeks ago a writing job fell through and I was filled with guilt and self-loathing. I felt like a failure as a husband and as a writer, as though I had wasted too much time when I was younger and as though I spend too much time in leisure now. I asked her how she puts up with me.

She said that she loves me and that I write good stories and that I make her laugh and then she scratched my head for a moment as if I were a sheepdog. She’s a great wife. I can tell. ‘cause being around me is really hard work and she makes it seem easy.

Carlin Hits Home

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 08:54:00 GMT

Tonight Kelly Carlin performed her one-person show (with video appearances by the late but ever-timely George Carlin), A Carlin Home Companion at The Santa Monica Playhouse. The house filled up nicely, the technical aspects of the show ran flawlessly under the masterful hand of Bob McCall. Ms. Carlin took the stage with charming in-the-moment awareness of the room’s vibe and then very quickly adjusted the vibe of the room to match her own rhythms and energy.

I have seen this show at various stages of its development and while it has always been interesting and entertaining and delightful, I could not have imagined that it would turn into such a transcendent piece of theater. Ms. Carlin’s comfort on stage is such now that throughout the show one is free to follow her on a journey of personal discovery without ever worrying for her, without ever feeling she might lose her way. Even when the tales she tells reflect moments of loss and confusion, her focus is laser-like and the dramaturgy behind her self-conceived script provides the kind of arc, the clear, simple beats of story-telling that an audience needs to feel well taken care of, to know that we are in the calm, confident hands of a master.

Under the direction of Paul Provenza (The Aristocrats, The Greenroom with Paul Provenza, Sataristas!, Set List) A Carlin Home Companion transcends the one-person shows to which we have become accustomed and turns into a genuinely moving theatrical experience.

Clips of her father, George, the undisputed master of stand-up comedy, appear as projections throughout the show, but there is never the sense that Ms. Carlin has put together a fast and sloppy best-of reel to draw in a crowd or to lend her a legacy-credential. No, the clips she uses – some of them fairly obscure in the vast body of her father’s work – are chosen to inform the personal stories she tells of her life just as the stories she tells inform our take on the clips that flicker before us. We watch the comic and are aware of the father. We hear the jokes and are aware of the daughter.

For the hard core George Carlin fan there is insight into the life behind his performances, but that really isn’t what this show is about. Kelly uses the outsized image of her father to tell the universal story of every child striving to find her own way out of the shadow of the parent, into her own light. Ms. Carlin speaks of the love she witnessed between her parents, of her own difficult role in the family, of addictions battled, of paths sought and found and ultimately she reminds us that our parents are projections and we are the ones who must eventually stand in the light.

George Carlin once said, “Your children aren’t special.” I know I’m taking him out of context and he had a point to make that was valid and hilarious, but if he were around to hear it, I would feel compelled to say, “yours is George. Did you see what she did?”

Economics 101

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 06:19:00 GMT

I don’t claim to know much about economics, but like most Americans, I never let a lack of comprehension prevent me from having an opinion.

Here’s what I’ve noticed. Most politicians operating at the national level have a lot of money. I do not have a lot of money. For the record, I am not a politician operating at the national level, either. Is there a record? If there is, that was for it. I digress.

These national level politicians tend to tell those of us in the middle class that the reason for our problems lies with the poor and the disenfranchised. Illegal aliens, they tell us, eat up social resources in a time of deprivation using emergency health care and school lunches that cost millions of dollars. Apparently there are a great many accident prone undocumented immigrants with really hungry kids. We are told that having a safety net creates a lazy, government-dependent class that seeks only to live off our tax dollars in rat-infested hovels and that the best way to discourage people from being poor is to take away their money.

These same national level politicians spend millions and millions of dollars on advertising to convince the poorest voters that the reason we cannot afford a safety net is that the unions – those who actively represent the middle-class – demand too much for their workers. According to the very wealthy of this country, the so-called “job creators,” an interest in working together to get the best deal for everyone on the work-force is anti-capitalist. Being willing to sell one’s time on the planet at a rate that undercuts the other guy and allows for maximum corporate profits, that’s just being a good, old-fashioned team player.

So, a group of people with a lot of money who mostly associate with people with a lot of money, spend a lot of money telling those with less money whom to blame for their privation. Let me put this, as best I understand it into the form of a simple school-style word problem.

Lexington Park Madison the Fifth has sixty-five apples in a big bucket. Lawrence Workharder has two apples. Michael Undernostril has none. Lexington Park Madison the Fifth stands up on his bucket and says, “Michael! Lawrence has two apples. You have none! How is that fair?” Lawrence says, “Wait a minute. I worked hard for these apples. Why don’t you give him some of yours?” Lexington says, “Hey, you two fight it out. I have all these apples, obviously I am the provider of apples so those two must have come from me to begin with. If I start giving them away willy-nilly, nobody will have any apples at all!”

Lexington sits and eats some apples while he watches them argue and, at last, Lawrence agrees to give Michael an apple because the poor guy looks hungry, at which point Lexington says, “Oh! Did an apple just change hands? Then you each have to give me half an apple.”

This confuses Michael and Lawrence. They say, “why?”

Lexington then says, “This is very complicated stuff. You couldn’t understand it. But if you apply yourself, there’s a chance that some day you could have enough apples for me to explain it to you. Now get off my Orchard. This is private property.”

Did I mention that I don’t really know much about economics?

August THINKING ALLOWED

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 06:51:00 GMT

Modern Depression Guidebook is Now On Sale

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 07:00:00 GMT

I wrote the Modern Depression Guidebook a long while ago and, truth be told, I'm not as much a depression sufferer now as I was then. Now my depression is mitigated as a side-effect of Paxil use which I take because I'm seeing a strict Orwellian Therapist who medicates me against political outrage. (When my wife first heard me say that, she said, "Shouldn't that be 'Huxlian?'" I knew immediately that she was right, but I felt Orwellian was more accessible and, frankly, the medication prevents me from caring too much about the details)

In any case, I wrote the thing a long time ago and shopped it a few times to publishers. I was told that there wasn't much of a market for it. Then I stumbled onto Autharium. They make e-publishing really easy and pay a decent royalty so, once I'd ascertained that I'd retain the right to legacy-publish if an offer came my way, I uploaded for sale.

The thing's been in the top 100 sellers on the amazon/kindle humor list for more than a week now. Sometimes it's been in the top ten. I have no idea what that means in terms of real sales yet, except this: there's more of a market for this goofy little bit of writing than legacy publishers believed. It's made me pretty damn happy for the last couple of weeks. Who know a literary exploration of depression would do so much to cheer me up?

You can order the book as a .pdf or as an online file to read on any computer at Autharium or you can order it for Kindle at Amazon.com.

Is it Possible to Teach Flipper to Sign?

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 06:31:00 GMT

Every now and then something comes along that proves to me once again that our society has completely lost its way, that the choices we have made are irredeemably wrong-headed, that the well-trodden path of least resistance down which we travel inexorably as though we are completely without options is the path of the panicked lemmings.

When scientists decades ago listed the options for ways we might slow or stop global warming, for instance and instead of taking any of those options we chose to argue over whether we should trust the worried scientists who risked their reputations to warn us or the reassuring scientists who sacrificed their reputations outright for oil company paychecks, that was one of those times. Another was when Rodney King was beaten on the side of the road when, obviously, anyone caught going more than a hundred miles an hour in a '93 Hyundai should be hailed as a saint for performing a miracle.

This week I have received several breathless e-mails urging me, begging me, pleading with me to sign a petition saying that I do not approve of the Navy deafening 15,900 whales and dolphins and killing 1,800 more. This petition is aimed at stopping the Navy from doing that. I do not actually believe for a moment that the Navy is going to change its plans based on the signature of an internet petition. Of course it's not. The armed forces have never taken their marching orders from the civilian population. The armed forces believe, genuinely, that they do something necessary though distasteful and must find ways to do it without so offending the sensibilities of the civilians that it will occur to us to stop funding their activities. That's why they call it "liquidating an enemy unit" rather than "killing people," performing a surgical strike" rather than, "killing people," or "taking the fight to them so that it doesn't come to us," rather than, "killing and maiming people some of whom are innocent civilians in faraway places."

In fairness to the Navy, deafening and killing beautiful marine mammals is not the Navy's main plan. That's a byproduct of something else that they're doing. I don't know what it is exactly, but it involves an underwater sound system and I'm quite sure they are thoroughly convinced that it is an efficient and effective way of securing our nation's borders or deterring an attack or something that sounds noble when it isn't framed in terms of whale and dolphin deafening statistics.

Yet there it is, this petition that I have to sign to tell the Navy that I do not approve of the deafening and killing of dolphins and whales. Surely, it should be the other way around. Surely the disabling of beautiful sea creatures should be on the "opt in" list, not the "opt out" list. Surely, if we lived in anything like a sane society the Navy would have to come to us first. They would send a petition to every household in America that says, "We need a majority of Americans to approve of the deafening of 15,900 whales and dolphins and the killing of 1,800 more if we are to test and run a loud thing that we think is useful. Please sign here to say that you approve of this." Of course, then the Navy wouldn't get to play with its giant undersea iPod and the free world would be far poorer in deep water rock 'n' roll, if somewhat richer in whales and dolphins.

I think these are exactly the kinds of decisions that should be made by a well- informed - and honestly educated - public if we wish to keep calling ourselves a democracy rather than a democratic oligarchy.

Despite my belief in its futility, I signed the petition to say that I do not approve of the deafening or killing of even one whale or dolphin. If there were a petition that I could sign saying that I do not want my country to kill people, I would sign that one.

I'm just that crazy, that I think none of my tax dollars should go to killing sentient beings. And let me be the first one to point this out: if we do deafen and kill tens of thousands of sea mammals and then they figure out a way to defend themselves, we'd better not call it an unprovoked act of aggression that must be avenged.

Commentary for This Week's CCCP on WBAI, Pacifica Radio (NY)

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 05:27:00 GMT

This week the Supreme Court said that Montana cannot limit the power of corporations to act as if they were people. And by "act as if they were people," I mean throw their weight around for their own benefit.

A friend of mine is a republican and when I mentioned that I thought the idea that corporations are people was absurd, he said that corporations are made up of people and should therefore be treated as people. I wouldn't have a problem with that if - you know - it made any sense at all. A lot of things are made up of people. Chess clubs are made up of people. The Ku Klux Klan is made up of people. Soylent green is people. It's people! I don't think anyone is arguing that the Society for Creative Anachronism should have a say in the workings of our national government just because it is made up of people.

If corporations are people, all groups of people should be treated as people, and yet the same Judiciary and Legislative organizations that wish to give personhood to corporations are perfectly willing to disenfranchise groups that are less likely be valuable allies in elections. Forgive me for seeking consistency in our definitions. But wait. If corporations have personhood, does that personhood begin at the moment that a corporation is conceived? Can the abortion of a business plan that seems unprofitable be seen as murder or does it not become murder until the corporation is fully funded? Wouldn't personhood of corporations make Bain Capital a serial murderer and, as such, subject to incarceration? Or are corporate people subject to different laws from corporeal people?

Ultimately, the question of personhood is a clever misdirection when it comes to Citizens United. The real point of the ruling is that money equals speech. The unspoken but dangerous corollary to this idea is this: Poverty is silence. Corporations are very, very wealthy. They have great resources at their command and therefore they can buy a place at the table. Individuals who do not have deep coffers should shut up and mind their own business, which, obviously, they don't do very well or they would have bigger businesses to mind and therefore be prepared to buy a voice. Who would have thought the trick to free speech would be the ability to afford it?

Maybe I don't understand what free means.

Thus Capitalism Doth Make Collaborators of us All

Sun, 17 Jun 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Several years ago, a manager who no longer represents me offended me fairly deeply. Twice.

In Hollywood it is important to have representation. In many ways it separates the wannabe’s from the legitimate participants in the entertainment industry. It is a signature of professionalism, when someone takes an interest in one’s work, to be able to say, “I’ll have my manager send that over,” or “call my agent to set up a meeting.” When I am without a manager I go into a blind panic that I am a failure and will never find anyone willing to take me on and represent me.

This former manager of mine – let’s call him Hank – didn’t mean to offend me. He’s a really good guy, a sweet man. He’s gay, in a committed relationship and seems to genuinely adore his husband. When he first started managing me we went to a meeting together and, he took a light-hearted jab at me for something I’d said. He turned to me and said, “Jew,” which was clearly intended with ironic derisiveness. It confused me and stung, but I’m a performer and a comic and I knew how that particular bit of banter had to play out so I said, “fag,” in exactly the same tone of voice and everyone in the room chuckled at our playful, no-holds-barred relationship.

After the meeting, when we were in private, I told Hank that he had put me in a difficult position that made me very uncomfortable. I did not like calling him a fag. It’s not a word I use. I don’t trust people to understand the irony. For him to call me “Jew” in that context felt like an anti-Semitic attack and I did not want to make him look bad by calling him on it in a meeting, but it bothered the hell out of me.

He told me that he didn’t ever want anything to be off limits. He wanted us to be able to say anything to one another.

A few months later, he pointed out a dime on the ground and said, “How weird is this? You’re a Jew, I’m a Republican and neither of us is picking up the dime.”

I wanted to tell him that I am not comfortable with the casual use of stereotyping. I wanted to tell him that the stereotype of Jews as miserly is offensive, was used as part of the justification for the German atrocities against Jews, grew out of a time when finance was the only option for Jews who were not allowed to own property in Christian-dominated Europe, but also existed outside the anti-usury laws as they were not proper Christian citizens. I wanted to give him a history lesson in the ways in which groups are singled out, marginalized, forced into specialized subcultures and then ostracized for their specialization, their separateness, their cultural adaptations.

I didn’t. I didn’t say anything because I needed to have a manager for my career to advance. I needed a manager on my team to keep working toward greater financial success and he had told me that he wanted us to be able to say anything to one another, which I correctly, though unconsciously, interpreted to mean that he could say anti-Semitic things and I could not call him on them. I kept him on my team for years and, in fairness, he did a great deal of good for my career. He also screwed some things up.

He’s human. He’s flawed. I’m human. I’m flawed. That’s not the point, really. I know it seems as though this is a blog about my ex-manager and what an insensitive prick he was, but it’s not. For a long time, in my head, it was. That was why I didn’t write it. I knew that wasn’t right. I knew that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about.

I like the guy, still. For a long time he was, by far, the best, most supportive manager I ever had. A hit piece on the guy didn’t make any sense, despite my simmering resentment, my anger over those couple of remarks and my inability – no – my unwillingness to express myself fully in the moment of my rage.

___________________

I’ve had way too little work for the past couple of years. After Hank and I parted ways there was a brief time with another wonderful manager who took ill and then a little bit of free fall. Also, in the last months of working with Hank, he had gone into something of a midlife crisis and I found out after the fact he had destroyed some terrific professional relationships that had taken me years to build. Now I’m starting again with a new manager, building that relationship from the ground up, sussing out the kinks in our working dynamic.

I’ve had little gigs here and there, hundred-dollar checks for magazine articles, hundred and fifty for NPR commentaries . . . a weekend in Indiana headlining a great club, but nobody to help me build other gigs around it to make for a profitable Midwest tour. It’s been a rough time financially. I’ve gone through my savings. My wife’s income alone is not enough to support us.

A potential client met with me last week about a ghost writing job. I needed the work. I needed the payday to help restore the coffers, but also to help bolster my self-esteem, which suffers mightily when I do not bring in my portion of the household income.

I sat with this lovely young woman in a restaurant and she told me about her project. I began to position myself to give her a great deal so as to maximize my chances of landing the gig and to let her know that she was likely to be able to get a decent deal out of me. I said, “I’m terrible at negotiating these things on my own.”

Her immediate, unselfconscious response was, “What? Aren’t you Jewish?”

I blinked slowly, offended, but still wanting to close the deal.

She went on to say, “That’s not anti-Semitic. My husband’s a Jew and he always gets the best of everyone he does a deal with. I’ve always admired that about him.”

I closed the deal. It wasn’t a huge pile of money but it was as much as I felt she could afford and I managed it so that I would not be overworked for the amount I’d agreed to.

In a second interview before I sat down to write my client made some odd sweeping generalizations about Philippinos. I said, “Yeah. I won’t include that in the writing. I don’t think the race of the guy involved has anything to do with the story.”

With that same lack of self-awareness that I had seen days earlier, she said, “Sure. Probably not. Wait’ll we get to the Persians I’ve had to deal with. Those people are just impossible!”

I did not say, “You should be aware that ethnic generalizations make you seem like an unabashed racist.” I did not say, “Please do not assume you know things about how I do business based on my cultural heritage.” I did not say, “Find someone else to write your book, I don’t work with bigots.”

I said, “I can set pen to paper as soon as the check clears,” and that is what I did. I kept my mouth shut about the rest of it.

I wrote what was needed. I got paid. I made sure that she didn’t come off as a bigot on the page. There may be more pay down the line if the project moves on. It helped fix my month and it’s a start on my battered manly ego and my financial-sadness.

The Supreme Court has said that money is speech. There’s a dangerous and ugly corollary to that. Poverty is silent.

Thus Capitalism doth make collaborators of us all. For a pittance we rent the stillness of our tongues, lease our voices, sell the very songs our souls long to sing. Is this a price we should pay in a country that calls itself free? If it is not, how best can we pool our resources, ungag the poor and set free the great chorus that might, in glorious harmony, sing down the walls of industry and finance, the barriers of racial and cultural and gender division?

I consider myself liberal, a devoted progressive, an artist, a good man. But the forces of our economic system press so hard against me that for a paycheck I will still the claxon of my own conscience to better follow the siren’s sinful call to legal tender.

This is so much a fabric of the experience of my life that when I play the game on which my own survival depends, it is myself I hate for my weakness, and not the pressures that crush me into ugly compliance.

Pitching To A Fetus

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 23:06:00 GMT

I have lived in Los Angeles for too long, now, to thrive anywhere else. I was performing down in Santa Monica and I was asked for money by a one-legged homeless man with a three legged dog. My first response was, “Nah. If you were a three legged guy with a one-legged dog, then you’d have something.” Clearly I’ve become tainted by the city’s culture beyond redemption when I see a disabled, impoverished person and my first thought is to offer a quick punch-up on his circumstance. It burrows its way into you slowly, this callousness, this readiness to rewrite the very fabric of reality for greater impact.

A few years ago, I pitched a very cool show to a fetus at Buena Vista Television. When I say “a very cool show,” I mean a reality television show set in an adventure fantasy world. And when I say that I pitched it to a fetus, I exaggerate, but the truth is, this television development executive was sponging amniotic fluid from his brow as his assistant escorted me into the room, asking if would like water or coffee. I declined.

I won’t go through all the details of the show, but it was called Castle Quest, and the general overview was this: we find the twelve greatest swordsmen in the world – martial artists, fencers, fight directors, reenactors, what-have-you. We move them all into a castle together. Each week they learn to use a different period weapon. They undergo skill challenges. Two of them fight using safety protocols created by the Society for Creative Anachronism. One of the two is eliminated. At the end of the season, the winner gets to keep the castle.

The toddler heard the pitch and said, “Interesting. What’s the hook?”

I said, “They – they’re sword fighting to win a castle.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, man. I don’t see why that’s compelling.” He thought for a moment and then said, “Maybe if they could win a girl, you’d have something.”

I said, “I don’t think that’s legal in modern America.”

He said, “Well, remember, we don’t have to shoot it in the states.”

I was a little confused by that response, not because I didn’t understand his premise but because it was truly not what I had expected to hear just then.

He said, “Look. Maybe this is a little too on the nose but, I mean . . . maybe if someone gets hung in the final episode you’d have something worth watching.”

Thinking he was joking with me, I said, “Well, sure. But then we’d have to take it to Fox.”

He was not joking with me. He said, “No. This is Buena Vista. We’re Disney.”

We sat for a moment and I wished that I had asked for coffee because it would have been a very good time to sip nonchalantly.

He said, “Do you have any other ideas?”

I said, “Yeah. What if, instead of an infant with a desk, you were an extraterrestrial who thrived on creativity, crushing the spirits of artists and devouring their muses.”

He said, “What? I don’t understand.”

I said, “Yeah. Probably a little too on the nose.”

Unheroic

Sun, 10 Jun 2012 22:58:00 GMT

The underlying message of every fairy tale is the same. Nobody gets to live happily ever after until everyone is disenchanted and all the illusions are shattered.

On my way into Hollywood for a gig I stopped at the light at Hollywood and Highland where actors dressed damply as superheroes pose for tips with disappointed tourists. Waiting to cross the street with a cluster of mere mortals, Superman stood on the curb. He was a particularly convincing Superman, well enough built to wear the jersey knit costume without fake padded cartoon muscles built into it. His bootblack hair reflected the streetlights like ink on a high-gloss page and the one comma of curl dipped down over his brow just as it is supposed to.
Standing nearby, a young boy held his mother’s hand and saw Superman standing, waiting with them. He might have drawn his mother’s attention to the man of steel, but he did not. I imagined that he did not want to hear what she thought of the spectacle in red and blue. He wanted to have this moment of overlap between fantasy and reality to himself, unbroken.
The iconic hero looked down at the boy and the boy looked up at him. Superman smiled, half winked and then the light changed. For a breathless moment, it almost seemed that as the crowd moved across the street, Superman might raise a guiding fist to the sky and lift into the night air to vanish into a primary-colored point in the distance. He did not. He walked across the street as did those around him. As the group thinned, stretching across the roadway, his costume boots came into view, scuffed and blackened by the Hollywood boulevard filth.
As I passed the man in the costume, driving on down toward the small theater in which I would tell stories of my childhood, jokes about the nature of memory and the magic of language, I experienced an odd sensation, a nagging sense of loss to which I could not quite put a name but which I knew to be familiar and worthy of further exploration. It seemed that something important had happened, and I needed to figure out just what it was. I needed to remember when I had felt it before, it seemed, and everything would come into focus.

A few weeks earlier I awoke from a Saturday morning sleep-in indulgence with a similar sensation. My wife had taken the dogs for their morning walks on her own and allowed me to sleep in so long that I was able to reach that rare and wonderful state of lucidity in which dream and imagining and memory all melt together. As I lay in bed, I remembered a childhood joy.
As a child, out late with my father, I would doze warmly in the back seat of our lumbering station wagon to the drone of National Public Radio. I was awake enough to know that I was dreaming, that I was on my way home, but asleep enough to be completely relaxed, heavy in the swaying, vibrating momentum of the journey home. I would feel the slowing shift from highway to road, the last, familiar turns and then the rocking stop of arrival.
Knowing the travel was at its end, I would pretend still to be soundly asleep. My father would lift me from the back seat in his arms to let me remain asleep, though I knew I was faking and perhaps he did, too. I was too big to be regularly carried now, though, too heavy, too capable. So I would pretend to sleep and I would smell the nicotine and the antiperspirant and I would feel the rough beard growth of his cheek against mine and would allow him to let me feel safe and protected in a way that I had not in months or years.
I did not know, as a child, that what I was experiencing was my first taste of nostalgia. I did not have that vocabulary, yet. I did not have that much self- awareness. I did not know that I was reveling in the pretense that I could reclaim a simpler time when I was less self-reliant, when felt better protected, safer. I did not know that even that simpler time was a distortion of memory, that in that time when I had been smaller and more often carried, all I had yearned for was to walk on my own, to learn self-reliance, to escape the coddling of toddlerhood. I only knew that I felt warm and comfortable in the arms of my father, groaning as he lifted my growing weight and that I must pretend to sleep to enjoy it. The lie of memory aided by the lie of unconsciousness carried me in my father’s arms up the steps, into the house toward the bed of my childhood.
As I lay in bed, dreaming the memory of lying in my father’s arms, I knew it was a dream, but I did not want to wake up. I longed to hold on for just a moment more to that beautiful fantasy.
It evaporated though, first melting from dream to fantasy and then from fantasy to memory and then vanishing in a vapor of melancholy wakefulness as I knew against all powers of desire that I was not a child in my father’s arms but an adult alone in a double bed. That was the moment. That undeniable sublimation was the moment at which I had most recently felt that sense of loss.

By using both of those moments, the heartbreaking desire to remain asleep in a moment of double-paned nostalgia and the sad-startled vision of filthy red boots on the mortal in the super hero costume, I was able to focus on the elusive, the obscure. Those moments served as the spaced lenses of a telescope, allowing me to see clearly through the distortions of time, across the lying vastness of the mind, to the shameful, human heart of the matter.
Once I had seen it, my experience seemed as obvious, as clunky as utterly without subtlety as the six-panel, four-color tales of the comic books I once loved so much. Like a child, learning new vocabulary, I put words to the sorrow clumsily at first. Then I refined them, edited them until they met the expressive need as simply, as eloquently as I could manage. This was the sadness of a grown man who, just for a moment, had allowed himself to believe.

Wherein I Risk Alienating People Who Might Hire Me

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 07:28:00 GMT

I think we all have to stop watching television. I realize this is a tremendously stupid thing for me to write as I seek work writing for television. Still. I think I’m right about it.

Tonight, saddened by the election results as they came in from Wisconsin, my wife and I turned to the reassuringly empty-headed entertainment of a Criminal Minds episode followed by a Flashpoint* episode. As I watched the programs I had an odd sense of looking through the hypnotically familiar dramatic structure to the underlying messages I was receiving.

Understand that both episodes were the sort that the far right would see as having a left-leaning bias. In both cases the perpetrators, whose misdeeds required the attention of our heroes, were somewhat sympathetic. In the former, a woman who had lost a child in an auto accident was overcome with grief, feeling that her child was forgotten and her sorrow unheard. In the latter, men who had lost their homes, their jobs and their life savings, one of whom had lost his wife to a financially inspired suicide, used a threat of violence in an attempt to get a high-powered, ruthless money manager they held responsible for their woes to apologize on camera. In both shows our heroes stopped these – what? Anti-villains? – from completing a final act of violence and brought them to their senses enough to take them into custody rather than shooting them down. In both cases the series regulars showed empathy and understanding.

Given the power of the televised medium to bring complex ideas to a widespread and disparate audience, both of these story-lines had the potential to change the way people think. How are those who suffer losses treated by those around them? Is society really comfortable with an economic system that constantly rewards those who profit from the labor of others while allowing the hardworking men and women on whose backs the economy is built to lose everything?

The far right would say that just raising these issues is an indication that the entertainment industry is rife with bleeding heart liberals. There are those who would say that the last thing they want to see in their law enforcement officials is empathy, sympathy or a desire to handle violent criminals with dignity and respect.

The underlying message of a story, though, does not lie entirely in the elements that story contains. No, the underlying message is always revealed in the outcome presented. Who prevails? Who is brought low? Who remains when the smoke clears.

Most of you are well enough acquainted with television as it currently functions to know that the broken woman on the killing spree is captured, the men pushed to the point at which they sought to make their point with ~~violence~~ unsanctioned violence are taken away in handcuffs. The law enforcement teams prevail. The unfeeling culture that allowed all this to happen goes on unaffected, save for the brief, thrilling or frightening moments of suspense spent awaiting an outcome which can only be one of two things: the perpetrators are caught or the perpetrators die, shot to death by the ‘heroes’. The callous high-finance administrator goes on with his life.

As long as we watch hour long television dramas, we allow ourselves to be constantly inundated with a dangerous cultural indoctrination. Law enforcement is always on the side of good. No matter how valid one's grievance is, no matter how one is victimized by society, one must find a way to express it within the system or else one becomes instantly a villain. The status quo will be maintained.

As long as we allow ourselves to be fed this message time and again, night after night, we will continue to believe it. We will allow the injustices, the indignities, the inhumanities perpetrated daily upon us and upon our fellow humans because we will believe that to speak out, to speak up, to disturb the implacable calm in any way will make us worthy only of the dark end of a sniper rifle’s barrel or a grey cell and a fenced yard. Taking any action will give us away as crazies, psychos or schizos.

Our nation, our culture, our society is deeply flawed. Income inequality has reached shameful levels. Poverty spreads as a plague. The worship of capital has overgrown and overpowered the love of humanity. I do not believe solutions to our problems ever lie in violence. Solutions to problems, particularly ongoing, systemic problems do require change, though. They require fundamental change, new ideas, shocking, radical approaches that cannot be conceived by people who are trained to self-censor such critical exercises through an unspoken but constantly reinforced belief that just thinking about shaking things up will make them a S.W.A.T. team’s target or an enemy of the state.

Entertainment is designed to capture the imagination. Revolution requires that we set imaginations free.

If we wish to alter the status quo, it starts with us listening to our neighbors, our spouses our hearts, our consciences and yes, even our inner voices. This does not make us crazy. It makes us caring, active humans. None of that can happen until we turn off the television.

*For the record, I LOVE Enrico Colantoni as an actor. I think he would be a huge star if he had a more memorable name. I think the moment he moved to Los Angeles he should have changed his name Rickey T. Colon.

The June installment of THINKING ALLOWED is booked!

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 06:40:00 GMT

What's Up With That Couch Thing?

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 04:35:00 GMT

Alright. Let me explain this as best I can. Darren Staley lives in North Carolina. I live in Los Angeles. My neighbor’s couch, on which he lives, does not exist. The people who join him on the couch are on their way to my home, where they never arrive and have no reason to go. Darren and I became friends before we met in Indianapolis, where neither of us lives. My dog, Lord Buckley Sweetlips, Greatest of All Dane Mutts (The Dinosaur Slaying Dog), whom Darren loves and wears around as a stole when it’s chilly at night, has never met Darren and is far too large to be worn as a stole. The nude photo, Darren in Repose, taken by Cat Gwynn, which hangs over my fireplace is purely fictitious. Darren is allowed to shower any time he likes, in North Carolina, where he lives. I do not feed anyone my leftovers except for Lord Buckley Sweetlips and Sir Corwin the the Beautiful Dog-faced Dog, Brindled Beast of Sylmar. Perhaps I can explain it better by telling a story. I’m good at that. I hope.

When I joined twitter, I quickly found myself falling in with a small circle of comics and writers who spent time playing loosely structured games of top-that-line. One member of that group was @crobama, a very funny man whom I’d never met but who was as capable of writing pithy and funny as the rest of us, although he tended to do two or three genuinely funny jokes and then slip into shock-value vulgarity. Nothing wrong with that, really. Just not always my thing.

He sent me a private message at one point asking if he could send me an e-mail. I gave him the address. He sent me about a page of fairly funny, deeply dirty stand-up material and asked for my opinion. I gave it. I suggested that he was writing some funny stuff but that it would serve him to write clean to start with, learn to structure good jokes first and then begin to play with the potential of shock value. I told him that vulgarity can easily become a comedic crutch and can retard the process of learning how actual jokes work. Understand, readers, that I am not morally or ethically opposed to vulgarity or shock comedy on principle. I just think it’s good to know how jokes and comedic structures function before one begins to explore such devices.

Much to my surprise and delight, the following day Darren sent me another page of material. This batch did not rely on vulgarity. Not only had he taken the note and worked with it, he had come back to me with more material for review. I was sort of impressed. I told him so. I complimented him on the new work. I suggested that he begin getting out and performing.

Next day he sent another page of material. I informed him that I could not review a page of material for him every day. I reiterated the idea that he would need to start getting out in front of an audience to hone the material and find out what worked for him and what did not. The response was a long, personal e-mail, telling me that he had not left the house in ten years, that he is agoraphobic, that there was little chance of him taking the material out and performing it. He asked me to share the e-mail with a couple of others in our twitter circle as he had begun to feel very close to us all. I did so. One of those others is a friend whom I also know to have suffered from agoraphobia. I sent him the manuscript of a humor book I’ve written about my own struggles with depression.

So, what started with the trading of one-liners at one-hundred-forty characters or fewer began to become an oddly intimate long-distance friendship.

He tweeted, “I’m going to California. @dylanbrody invited me to stay on his neighbor’s couch.”

It struck me as funny. I replied, “If he didn’t want me inviting people to stay on his couch he shouldn’t have left it out so enticingly on the curb.”

He sent me a private message: “That’s really funny. I think there’s a podcast in that.”

I responded: “I have no idea what that means.”

He explained what a podcast is to me. I told him I was not an idiot. I knew what a podcast was. I did not know what the idea was that he was imagining.

He sent me a page-long pitch. In the world within the podcast, he had come to L.A. thinking he had a place to stay on my neighbor’s couch only to find out that it is outdoors awaiting trash pickup. He interviews people on their way in to my home. Everybody feels that I’m doing him a favor by letting him stay on the couch. He’s the only one who seems to realize that he’s essentially homeless.

He explained, in the pitch, that he can do all the interviews by phone and then, at the end, I can show up and plug gigs and stuff and tell him to stop harassing my guests.

I asked Darren what this was going to cost me. “Nothing,” he said. “And I can plug your CDs at the end of every show.”

I try to say “yes” to as much as I can and “no” only when I can see a real detriment. So I said, “Sure. Give it a shot.”

He started out with a plan to script all the interviews to be comedic and inept. Then he realized that it’s easier and, frankly, better, to actually interview his guests and let the interaction develop organically. The commitment to the premise became very haphazard. Some guests play it as though they’re on the couch, others acknowledge that it’s on the phone, some vacillate between the two takes on the circumstance. Darren and I try to maintain the conceit – playing it as though I call him from the phone in my house, but he’s out there on the couch . . . most of the time. Even we aren’t all that strict about it. Running jokes have developed. I make him plug the CDs or he won't be allowed to come in and take a shower. He watches me and my wife through the windows and envies our life indoors. He and Lord Buckley have developed a strange and intimate relationship and the dog finds the nude photo of Darren -- which was given to me as a gift after Cat Gwynn's visit -- oddly hypnotic. My wife insists that I give Darren our leftovers. Darren sneaks into our home when we're out, raids the refrigerator, tries on our clothes.

A couple of months into doing the show, Darren e-mailed me that he’d left his house. He’d gone shopping at a grocery store. Then he was going to a comedy show. He wrote some material for himself and went to an open mic night.

I’m not quite sure how it happened, but in pretending to be living on a couch outside my home, Darren gave himself some critical tool that he needed in order to start fighting the agoraphobia that had kept him housebound for ten years.

A few months ago I had a headlining gig at Morty’s Comedy Joint in Indianapolis. Darren, along with his stepson and a close friend, drove ten hours from North Carolina, stayed in a hotel room and came to shows two consecutive nights. We had drinks after the shows. We hung out like close friends who hadn’t seen each other in a long while, which, technically, was sort of the fact. We hadn’t seen each other ever.

Darren and some of the others who are close to him seem to think that I was instrumental in his healing process, but I think that premise is clearly absurd. He had an idea, implemented it, found his way through a troubled time and effected his own rehabilitation. He put together a project that has allowed him to interview top-notch comics and performers, show-runners to whom I could only hope to gain access in Hollywood, artists, celebrities and a host of other high-profile guests. He’s had Paul Provenza, Kelly Carlin, Suzanne Whang, Greg Fitzimmons, Wendy Liebman, Ken Plume, Mike Royce, Evan Kessler, Johnny Argent, Jackie Kashian, Fred Stoller, Alice Radley, Rick Shapiro and Rain Pryor on the couch. He conducted the very last interview with Joe Bodoloai before he committed suicide and was lost to us all. Darren has made an extraordinary thing happen for himself.

I, on the other hand, did nothing but say, “Sure. You can pretend to live on a couch outside my home on the internet,” and in doing so, I got a fan who will drive ten hours to see me work, a friend who made me feel less than entirely alone in a strange city when I was there to perform and a weekly promotional opportunity that helps me sell some CDs and get my name out there in the world.

I just sort of wish I hadn’t first asked if it was going to cost me anything so that I could come out of the whole thing looking a little less like a self-serving ass. Now if you'll excuse me, my wife says I have to take some of this endive salad outside and offer it to Darren.

Out of the Bottle

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:30:00 GMT

In any sit-com there comes a point at which our lead characters must get out of the bottle. That is to say, the regular cast of characters must move beyond their recognized and recognizable environs, the confines of their series-amortized sets and venture into a larger world.

It is in this larger world that Rob and Laura will encounter a snooty waiter. Paul and Jamie will meet a sad subway token booth attendant. Felix and Oscar will exchange banter with a surly cab driver.

Suddenly, staid rhythms of established characters in established relationships are infused with the fresh energy of visiting talent.

When Paul Sand eyored his way into Mary Richards’ life, the usual dynamic of laugh-a-minute Baxter bashing gave way to an unexpected sense of sweet, romantic pathos.

The first time I ever visited my in-laws in Georgia was, at best, a high concept, fish-out-of-water experience. You can hear some thoughts on that trip on my live CD, TRUE ENOUGH available through Amazon.com or just buy the single track, “The South Will Rise Again, Tryptophan Notwithstanding.”

This last time, though, visiting for my wife’s parents’ 50^th anniversary was far more familial and familiar. It was, for the most part, a comfortable bottle show. Scenes in my parents in-law’s mobile home, my sister in-law’s farm house and the Cracker Barrel restaurant had the soft feel of well worn coveralls. We made easy conversation and took self-deprecating pot-shots at our own cultural idiosyncrasies, suddenly visible in contextual relief.

Then, on Saturday, the big anniversary party took us out of the bottle.

It had not occurred to me until guests started arriving for the party that the friends and family of people celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary tend to be really, really old. Ordinarily, when I am forced to endure the slowly-turning thumb-screw of polite conversation, I dose myself liberally with decent scotch, putting up a light barrier of warm amber liquid between me and those I encounter. This party, though, was held in the meeting room of the Southern Baptist church that my in-laws attend. There would be no alcohol, no music, no dancing, no buffer.

Many old people can’t hear very well and my fancy New England education left me ill-equipped to understand and be understood in Chickamauga, GA, to begin with so I quickly resorted to nodding and smiling as ancient Southerners shouted words distorted beyond my comprehension by both elongation and, simultaneously, abbreviation.

An octogenarian aunt latched on to me for a conversation and worked hard to minimize her accent. She was small and thin but projected not the slightest hint of frailty as she gripped my arm, not for balance but to convey intimacy and keep me engaged. She told me first of how small my wife had been when last they’d met, how her husband had enjoyed playing with the child. She told me that her husband had died eleven years ago.

A 50^th anniversary will get you thinking about things like that. Time. Love. Tenacity.

I said that I was sorry for her loss. I began to think about conversational escape but her grip was birdlike only if one thinks about a hard-taloned eagle lifting heavy prey.

She said, “Oh, that’s all right. After sixty-some years, ah’d hayud enough o’ him.”

I was startled enough to be uncertain as to whether or not I should laugh, though I did hear the distant laughter of my own, ever-present unseen audience filtering through from another dimensional plane.

She went on in a careful whisper, “Ah don’ wanna talk dirty to you in a church but he got the penis cancer. You know what that is?”

I nodded.

“They wanted to cut the thing off but ah sayud, ‘no. If it’s gonna be lahk that, jus’ let ‘im go.' ”

I considered saying, ‘this is my new favorite story,’ but I decided the unseen audience could hear a voice-over thought track. The actual person I was talking to deserved better. I said, “Good for you. That must have been incredibly difficult.”

She said, “Not really. He had that tube thing in his mouth, so I didn’t have to listen to his opinions on the matter.” Then she grinned mischievously at me and I smiled back.

She tousled my hair as if I were a child, though she had to reach up to do it. I knew suddenly that when I wrote the story of this conversation she would be played in my mind not by Selma Diamond but by Ruth Gordon.

My sharp, overly-sober perspective shifted. This wasn’t about my awkwardness as a city boy in the south. It was about this funny, sad woman, this unexpected, encounter. This wasn’t about easy comedy. It was about sweet, unconventional pathos. It was about long lingering romance and hard human choices and the need to unburden oneself through confidential confession and protective humor.

I was abruptly aware that I didn’t resent my wife for needing me to go to Georgia with her, for taking me away from my comfort zone, my condo, my safe home office with the cluttered shelves and the snoring, gassy dogs, for taking me to a party in a church where no dancing was allowed, no drinking, nothing I really think of as partying at all, just oddly intimate conversations with ancient strangers. A trip like this seemed small sacrifice in exchange for a relationship that might last longer than a season or two, for a connection that might take us well into the age of difficult decisions. Besides, every now and then, it’s good just to get out of the bottle.

BuzzCon 2012

Thu, 31 May 2012 06:35:00 GMT

This year’s BuzzCon promises to empower users of buzzwords with a new synergy. The legacy-thinkers with their traditional out of the box approach to fresh ideas will need to up-size their platforms if they hope to innovate with today’s hyper-viral social networkers. What was edgy is now old hat. What was hip and ironic is now given the meta treatment with self-reflexive indifference. The new media have been around too long for WTFs and LMAOs to hold youth-mystique cache. Get ready for V-Time and full-on 4G immersion techno-tripping.

Even the high-end game designers are tasked with the manifestation of an indy feel to better reach a key demo that demands both authenticity and quantifiable challenge markers. Without full integration of these touchstone qualities in all assembled elements, no deliverable will touch the buy button and activate a viable conversion rate much less a CTR percentage worthy of repeat capture virtuosity.

In place of traditional seminars and lectures, this year’s BuzzCon offers group-encounter work shopping opportunities and single-focus presentations built with cross-media scaffoldings to support the grand-scheme ideations of today’s top-think stakeholders.

Anyone who hopes to maintain high-tier placement in the recessionary marketplace needs the vocabulary of the time. BuzzCon 2012 is the epicenter of vocab upgrading for anyone psychomorphing toward a successful, cloud-based professional arc.

SOME GRAPHIC LANGUAGE (a poem)

Wed, 30 May 2012 04:21:00 GMT

Some Graphic Language by Dylan Brody

The time for gentle poetry is done.

Low-hung plums of wit,

their nectar sweetly chuckled down

our tongues, seem overripe, too soft.

Now verse must take to risk,

become as hard as calculus,

word problems set to crystal scansion

metered out for clarity.

Let mathematics rule the day.

The many, more by nature than the few,

in exponential aggregate expand

at last to their first power.

When we are counted, know

we are not sheep. Our numbers will

not lull, and we are coming fast awake.

We are coming fast.

Awake the guards and light the lamps.

Humanity wails at gates

barbarians protect. Stop the soothing

white noise drone and hear.

The wall, however high will crumble

to the rising street. Entropic force

equates by definition. Physics rule

the centrifuge of revolution.

Feudalism had its chance.

Recognizing its rebirth we club it

bloody in its infancy. Too brutal?

Let me say again:

The time for gentle poetry is done.

The Kids Are All Right

Mon, 28 May 2012 05:24:00 GMT

Last night's THINKING ALLOWED show was a smashing success. Robert Dubac, Alex Stein, Laraine Newman and Paul Dooley all turned in tremendous performances of beautifully written work. The show was funny, smart and well enough attended that the take at the door paid for the rental of the space with a little left over for me to offer the performers for their work; all declined, opting instead to have their shares go to the Help Pay Rick Shapiro's Crushing Medical Bills Fund. We also put out a hat to collect for that fund and I gave away CDs to all who contributed anything. We raised $295 which I hand delivered to the lovely Tracy Demarzo who was running a fund-raiser of her own across the street at Vlad the Retailer.

But that's not what I'm writing about today.

My show took place in The Fake Gallery, a wonderfully hip little space on Melrose where almost all the artwork is done by the owner of the gallery. He creates various fictitious personae to whom he gives credit for his work, claiming for each a specific genre and/or medium. He hangs the bios of these imaginary friends on the walls making the gallery itself sort of an entertainment. The gallery is a large, funny conceptual art piece that displays art inside both on the walls and on the stage.

Amongst the paintings on the wall, I found an original Chris Bonno. Chris and I were roommates back in the late eighties and early nineties when we were both struggling road comics. I don't think a month went by that one or the other of us wasn't at least a few days late making our half of the rent. When I was in town, I sat in my bathrobe at my typewriter (that's right. I said typewriter) cranking out my next screenplay or spec script. When Chris was in town he stood at his easel putting oil to canvas. We were both really just finding our voices and visions as artists. We argued. We made each other crazy. We smoked. I stank of depression and marijuana. He muttered and hummed. Once I came home to find he had done all my laundry and put my clothes away, neatly folded not because he was that kind or loving, but because he had realized that telling me that the heaps of smelly clothing was preventing either of us from ever getting laid was not ever going to cause me to do anything about it.

So, I was standing in the FAKE Gallery looking at this painting of his for sale and, had I not been contributing all that I had on me to this medical relief fund, I might have made an offer on it. I bought a Bonno -- one of his abstracts -- at a showing a couple of years ago at The Muse Gallery on Santa Monica. His paintings have started to be collected by the Hollywood Elite. I am a fan of the abstracts, but he also does marvelous, kitschy portraits of pop-culture figures of the past and still-lifes the subject matter of which always seems a bit like visual non sequitur. He has large paintings of ham, of cheese, of dentures and cigarette packs. He has portraits of William Shatner (as Kirk), Nimoy (as Spock) the Vincent Price, Optimus Prime, Silver Surfer, Tom Laughling (Billy Jack) and an hilarious painting of Mickey Mouse sitting for Vincent Van Gogh, looking terrified in a world of swirling brush-strokes and greater complexity than the cartoon rodent has ever before encountered. His work lives at the intersection of German expressionism and Mad Magazine. On the wall of The FAKE, hung a painting of a cooked turkey on a platter. It made me smile and think of this man whose path crosses mine from time to time and with whom I had shared a home long ago when we were both young and scared and feigning certainty about our futures.

After my show, I took the money we had collected for Rick Shapiro across the street to Vlad the Retailer (formerly an artisanal curio shop and performance space -- now in transition to . . . something else) where Rick's official fund-raiser was taking place. There, on the bill to perform, was Chris Bonno himself and we had a minute to talk. In addition to the fund-raising work he was doing for Rick, he has also put his painting SEXY COCO up for auction to help raise funds for Tornado victims in Kentucky.

The painting is autographed by Conan O'Brien and was chosen as the number one piece of Fan Art in an online contest a year or two ago when the competition was run by Team Coco. (Click on the image to bid. Own an O'Brien Autographed Bonno AND support a worthy cause)

These things -- the fund-raisers, the artistic contributions -- These things he absolutely does because he is kind and loving. It makes me strangely proud to see what a good man he's grown up to be, what a decent human. He still wanders about sometimes, muttering and humming. I'm pleased to live in a space that sometimes intersects his universe.

Now, people who know me are likely to know that I am deeply self-involved and self-serving by nature. You might imagine that I'm hoping that if I say enough nice things about Chris, if I post images and help him garner bids on the Sexy Coco painting and sing his praises, the painting of his that I own will skyrocket in value. That is not the case at all.

I'm hoping that if I say enough things about Chris, post images, help him garner bids and sing his praises, he will come to my home and do my laundry. It might be pleasantly nostalgic for him and, quite frankly, my clothes never smelled so fresh.

UNBURDENED - a poem

Sat, 26 May 2012 08:19:00 GMT

For just a moment,

strip off the armor of faith.

Stand naked in your mortal skin,

unprotected by the hand of god,

karmic law, or universal justice,

knowing only the counsel of conscience.

That compass always points you true.

Follow that and you may lead.

Set down the burden of belief.

Stand tall, relieved, and freed

of obligations to the long-dead

ghosts who wailed so loud

a song of sacrifice for what you do.

When all your sins are yours to own,

when all is not forgiven unconditionally,

what choices do you make?

Place destiny aside a while.

When every path lies open

and your way stands undecided,

when you look through childish eyes,

possibility unchained arises, stretches

atrophying muscles toward improbable

horizons. Gaze out at what might be

and choose, for once, what you will do.

Now, if you had faith to strip,

belief to cast away or destiny

imposed upon your life, resume

it if you wish, but know the needle

you have pricked to life still points the way.

The options you have seen remain,

and if there be a god, or ghost

to whom you owe an honor debt

How better can such entities be thanked than through the exercise of all you are?

How Garry Shandling Peed on Me (metaphorically, people. What kind of blog do you think this is?)

Thu, 24 May 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Garry Shandlling complimented me via twitter on some jokes I was writing late one night. This was meaningful to me. Mr. Shandling is a comedy icon and made a difference to me when I was finding my own voice as a performer. George Carlin was one of my childhood heroes, drawing me toward the world of comedy. Garry was one of my heroes in my early years as an adult finding my own way in the world of comedy. So I saw this as an exciting opening, responded to him. He tweeted something to me publicly that I was pretty sure was a subtle reference to something from one of my CDs which I took as an additional good sign and asked him if perhaps we could have lunch sometime. He said yes. Then it didn't happen. For months. He kept saying it would happen and it kept not happening. Then, finally, we scheduled it and I was dorkishly giggly about it.

The morning that we were to meet, I tweeted that I had a good day ahead of me that would include lunch with Garry Shandling and I used the little @symbol that alerted him that I had mentioned him in a tweet. Also, my social networking guru (whom I fired a week later for being a raging alcoholic) tweeted an invitation to him through my account, asking him to come to my show or at least to retweet the info to his many followers. So the morning of my lunch with him there had been two tweets apparently both from me. It must have felt as though I was trading on his name. It certainly felt to him as though I was publicizing his lunch plans. So he got to the restaurant grumpy and annoyed with me. This is the sort of thing that gives me heartburn as I try to sleep at night.

Sometimes it seems that my version of success revolves around alienating people of ever-increasing influence in the entertainment industry.

Now, all of this actually happened a couple of months ago, but I haven't blogged that much and I'm just sort of getting the hang of making it a regular thing so sometimes I may write about things are not the most recent news. Also, the most interesting thing that happened to me today, really, was having a big toothy wolf run at me at top speed.

Wait. The wolf thing is pretty great, and that's something I can tell you about. There's a wolf named Waya who attends the dog park that I go to with my dogs. He's a very good wolf and he's able to mingle nicely with the dogs there, although it is very clear to both me and to Waya that he is not a dog at all. He is very much a wolf. He's tall and thin and grey and I've known him for a couple of years now.

On Wednesdays Waya's mom takes him to agility training -- which is sort of silly 'cause he seems like an awfully damn agile creature to begin with -- and in order to get him to run some and work off some of his excess energy, she brings him to the park first. The first time I ever saw Waya I wanted to meet him, but he was a little bit uncertain until I spent some time standing with his mom and chatting with her about things while he snuck up behind me and smelled my ass and then gradually drew close enough for me to pet him.

The next time I saw him he came directly to me for a greeting and since then he has been very happy to see me when I arrive.

There are a couple of other full-blooded wolves that come to the park sometimes named Brutus and Buffy who were very stand-offish about me. Then mid-winter of this year, they saw me sitting in a plastic lawn chair in the park (Here in L.A., it makes perfectly good sense to sit in a lawn chair in a park in mid-winter. I know this is confusing to Minnesotans) with my dogs, Sir Corwin the Beautiful Dog-faced Dog, Brindled Beast of Sylmar and Lord Buckley Sweetlips, Greatest of All Dane Mutts (The Dinosaur Slaying Dog) sitting in the grass nearby. The two cautious wolves watched Waya come over to me very casually and put his front half in my lap to be scratched and talked to and they decided I was probably cool, so they came over too. Then Buckley got a little bit protective and peed on the chair I was sitting in and a little bit on my leg. That made Waya a bit competitive so he peed all over my leg and then Buffy and Brutus each peed on me to show that they were cool enough to pee on the guy in the chair. Since then they've been very friendly with me because, you know, what doesn't open up the lines of camaraderie like a public golden shower. In any case, for weeks afterward when people said, "How you doin'?" or "How's it going?" I said, "Great! I was peed on by wolves!" And I meant it. The whole thing made me feel deeply loved and accepted. The smell of pee can be washed out of pants, but the feeling of warmth remains.

In any case, Waya has been away from from the park for a while 'cause he got into some sort of an argument with a large dog that wanted to dominate him and didn't seem to understand that, while he will be friendly with dogs, he's still a wolf, and there are limits to what he will put up with. He returned a week or two ago for the first time in what seemed like ages and then this week he sustained a small injury and had been cooped up for a couple of days. When I saw him at the park and happily called out his name, he charged toward me, grinning his happy wolfy grin and leapt at my face, trying to eat my whole skull in an expression of love and it was the best and most wonderful part of my whole day.

I digress.

After Mr. Shandling scolded me about the importance of containment and I apologized for my exuberance -- battling, all the while, the impulse to tell him that I know other celebrities who don't give a shit if I mention online that I'm having lunch with them as long as I don't give out their phone numbers or e-mail addresses -- things settled down and he was as warm and kind as I had hoped he would be. He talked about the nature of a career in comedy and he talked about the ritual of hand-wrapping before he boxes (which led me to write an interesting poem later that week about the boxer's hands and the tefillin). Still, I felt I had offended him in some way that I could not possibly fix.

I saw Mr. Shandling again recently at an event celebrating what would have been George Carlin's 75th birthday. A wonderful photographer named Cat Gwynn (the woman who's done the photography for my last two CDs, incidentally) asked if she could get a photo of the two of us together and as we posed for the shots I feared that Garry hated me and wished he did not have to be photographed with me. I spent the rest of the party in a tailspin of self doubt and self loathing.

Afterward, when I got home, I sent him a note by e-mail. I said that usually such photos get posted at FaceBook and Twitter but that I wanted to be respectful of his containment issues. He responded that when I receive them, I'm welcome to post them (I will). He thanked me for asking. He said he was sorry we hadn't had a chance to talk more at the party. It made me feel warm and accepted and forgiven.

I'm struggling to figure out who I am in the entertainment industry, in the world of comedy and literature, film and television and theater. I'm still learning, still trying not to anger the big dogs but also not to grovel.

Sometimes, before a relationship can start to form, territories and statuses need to be sorted out. People need to be pissed off, they need to be pissed on. They need to figure out where they fit in the pack.

Tonight, I'm feeling pretty good. I've been peed on by some of the biggest wolves in the park. If I had a tail, it would be wagging

David Feldman made me proud tonight

Wed, 23 May 2012 07:00:00 GMT

I write regularly for The David Feldman Show on KPFK, Pacifica Radio here in L.A. The show also podcasts, and the online version involves round-table discussions, songs and all sorts of stuff that doesn't fit into the on-air time allotment. Also, the podcasts can take place even during weeks that KPFK is running a fund-drive, so we go in and do free-form round-table discussions and the like.

Frequently, I have internal difficulties during these discussions. I have similar difficulties during such discussions on Kelly Carlin's show the Ardent Atheists Show put together by Emery Emery and Heather Henderson and a great many of the other shows on which I appear as a guest. The difficulties arise from the friction between my earnest desire to be involved in genuine conversation of complex topics and the fear that the hosts of the shows and the listeners really just want me to be funny and, conversely, from my constant, almost compulsive desire get laughs as it rubs up against my sense that perhaps the hosts and the listeners would really prefer that I open up and offer my most earnest and thoughtful opinions on the topics discussed. The desire to please myself, to be fully engaged, to please my friends, my fans, my parents, my inner voices and so on all take on their own voices in my head and compete for my attention and the immediate use of my tongue. My point is, it's very complicated being me.

On The David Feldman Show I am surrounded by funny writers and performers including Mr. Feldman who, I know, likes to put together a show that is both funny and thoughtful. The company in the room there when we record includes some of the finest comedy-writing minds in Hollywood and I fear constantly that I will be found out as a fraud unless I keep my banter sharp and my conversation pithy. I sometimes engage in earnest and serious discussion in the on-air round tables and fear every time that I am ruining everything, that I am undermining the structure of the show, throwing off the timing and rhythm of the back-and-forth, revealing myself for the pompous, self-important talky-face that I like to pretend is no more than comedic persona but constantly worry is very nature of the underlying man.

Tonight, I plugged a THINKING ALLOWED show that I'm doing this Saturday at the Fake Gallery. (By the way, if you're in L.A., come to my show this Saturday at the Fake Gallery. It's going to be a hell of a good one) I mentioned that I will be passing a hat at the end of the show to raise money to help pay the medical bills for Rick Shapiro, a wonderful comic and a friend who has recently been ill and is in the hospital facing heavy-duty rehabilitation and recovery time as well as crushing expenses.

David took some time to talk not just about how wonderful Rick Shapiro is as a performer but to rant earnestly about the desperate need for universal health care in the United States. He gave a brief, impromptu lecture on the shameful state of health care in our country and did it without hesitation, without the need to find a punchline, without self-consciousness about his willingness to drive into the dark realm of personal conviction for a solid minute and a half -- maybe more -- because he felt strongly about it and did not care if his show was not funny for a little while because there was something that needed to be said and he was the guy with the microphone.

On a personal level, sure. I found it reassuring to know that he is comfortable with earnest, thought-provoking conversation, to know that I will not be fired or shunned if I don't look constantly for the next laugh. On a professional level, though, and on a less narcissistic, human level, I was just damn proud to be part of his show, to be in the studio with him at that moment. I felt like a little brother, watching his sibling-hero rule the basketball court. I felt lucky to be working on a show where things like this get said. I felt as though it might just be possible that real ideas, real progressive conversation might actually be getting out onto the airwaves.

Then I remembered that KPFK is doing a pledge week and this would only go out on the podcast. But still. He said things. Into the microphone. And people will hear them. And I was proud of him.

Jenny Lawson is so awesome it's hard not to write in her voice

Tue, 22 May 2012 07:00:00 GMT

A good friend of mine, Teresa Powers (the same woman who designed my glasses-and-eyebrows logo) gave me a copy of Jenny Lawson's wonderful and funny book Let's Pretend This Never Happened.

At least, so far it's wonderful and funny. I'm about halfway through because I had to get up and blog about it. She has a conversational tone that's completely invading my psyche and making it very difficult for me to maintain the erudite style for which I am known. I envy her lack of pomposity at the same time that I fear it will rub off on me. Or, more accurately, rub my pomposity off. Which sounds sort of dirty.

In any case, I'm recommending the book. Also, I'm admitting that she makes me feel I should blog more often. She has a blog. You should check out her blog. It's called The Bloggess. I've never met the woman, but I have a serious writer-crush on her literary voice.

Andrew Posner made me weep a little bit.

Wed, 16 May 2012 07:18:00 GMT

So, there's this young man, a kid, really. He lives in Baltimore, I think, or near enough that he plans to go to the opening of my play there this fall. (Don't worry. I'll post details about that as the date grows nearer)

He's a smart kid, funny. I know him through twitter. Darren Staley has had him as a guest on Dylan Brody's Neighbor's Couch. He likes my work, which automatically makes him very good people in my mind, 'cause I'm that narcissistic.

But this recent blog post of his really touched me. It made me feel as though my work has value beyond my own self-serving ego needs. So I'm sharing it with you. Read what this kid has to say and then keep an eye on him. I suspect he will be working his way into the zeitgeist in years to come. HERE'S THE BLOG POST HE WROTE.

Dylan Brody's THINKING ALLOWED on May 26th at the FAKE GALLERY

Mon, 14 May 2012 06:09:00 GMT

This one will feature Laraine Newman, Alex Stein -- Me, of course and a couple of other very special guests. Come on out! A good time will be had by most!

Another great review for CHRONOLOGICAL DISORDER

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT

If the world of stand-up comedy were a party, most of the comedy that has been produced since the 90s has generally been a house party of sorts – a hell of a good time, a few regrets, and maybe an arrest or two. Brody’s comedic style is instead that of a sophisticated dinner party – you’re still going to enjoy yourself, but chances are you’ll come out smarter in the process.

. . . READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE

CHRONOLOGICAL DISORDER -- Released today and the reviews are coming in!

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

THE SPITTAKE says "Brody pushes the envelope of what is considered stand-up comedy" Read the whole review HERE COMEYD REVIEWS says " I loved this album. I loved how it made me feel while I was listening and I loved the sense of wonder it left me with when it was over. If Brody has indeed been diagnosed with "Chronological Disorder," I hope they never find a cure." Read the full Review HERE. Of course, you can order the CD and make up your own mind:

Two wee bits of celebrity audio

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 08:00:00 GMT

You can hear Robin Williams in my Shakespeare Sketch from the David Feldman Show HERE And you can hear Fred Stoller and Eddie Pepitone in my Mime Sketch also from the David Feldman Show HERE

Score my Tee Shirt Design! Help get it printed!

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 08:00:00 GMT

A Terrific Review of my Show at Caffe Lena

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 08:00:00 GMT

The lovely and talented Byron Nilsson reviewed my show at Caffe Lena in September. It took a while for the review to hit the web, but I could NOT be happier about it in general! CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL REVIEW

A Poem I Will Read at Occupy L.A. on October 15

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Blog Post - October 145, 2011

GRAPHIC LANGUAGE

The time for gentle poetry is done. Low-hung plums of wit, their nectar sweetly chuckled down our tongues, seem overripe, too soft.

Now verse must take to risk, become as hard as calculus, word problems set to crystal scansion metered out for clarity.

Let mathematics rule the day. The many, more by nature than the few, in exponential aggregate expand at last to their first power.

When we are counted, know we are not sheep. Our numbers will not lull, and we are coming fast awake. We are coming fast.

Awake the guards and light the lamps. Humanity wails at gates barbarians protect. Stop the soothing white noise drone and hear.

The wall, however high will crumble to the rising street. Entropic force equates by definition. Physics rule the centrifuge of revolution.

Feudalism had its chance. Recognizing its rebirth we club it bloody in its infancy. Too brutal? Let me say again:

The time for gentle poetry is done.

Huffington Post piece August 2011

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Check it out! I've written something that's earned me some hate mail! No Offense intended - How to Combat the Neo-Christian Movement

THE LATEST NEWSLETTER

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 07:00:00 GMT

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/142-THROCKMORTON-THEATRE-.html?soid=1103630347534&aid=MbdcmzO-DXU.

Special Audio Preview Post

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 07:00:00 GMT

My newest piece. To air on WBAI a few days from now. THIS JUST IN -- Some people unable to hear audio at this page. (Don't know why) If it doesn't stream for you here, go to http://dylanbrody.com/RepDebate.mp3 to get the direct download. Dig?

A wrote a good sentence today.

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 07:00:00 GMT

In a time of rage, hatred and madness, any gesture of kindness and sanity, no matter how small, serves as a revolutionary act.

The Sage Fool (Mark Traphagen) reviews A TWIST OF THE WIT

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Mark Traphagen has reviewed A TWIST OF THE WIT in his League of Inveterate Poets blog. Here's a taste: Dylan Brodyis to storytelling what John Coltrane is to jazz instrumentals. Just as Coltrane never just “played” a song, but made every note his own and shaped them into something new and unique, so Dylan Brody never just “tells” a story. He treats the very words like musical notes, shaping them, bending them, shifting cadence here, pausing deftly there, aptly applying alliteration, and always with a sense of beat (in both the metrical and poetic movement senses of that word). Dylan Brody stories, while I’m sure they would still be amusing written down, are meant to be heard. Brody’s 2011 live album A Twist of the Wit provides an excellent opportunity to hear the “purveyor of fine words and phrases” sing his word-songs. He is a humorist/storyteller in the Mark Twain/ George Ade tradition, but his delivery is what truly sets him apart. Read the rest of the review HERE

Tickets now onsale for MORE ARTS / LESS MARTIAL

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

To order tickets for MORE ARTS / LESS MARTIAL at THE 142 THROCKMORTON THEATRE in Mill Valley - AUGUST 25 at 8pm, Click HERE

To order tickets for MORE ARTS / LESS MARTIAL at 92Y TRIBECA in New York City - SEPTEMBER 14 at 9pm, Click HERE

In his currently touring, one-person story-telling show, Dylan Brody brings a comic’s wit and a writer’s mind to bear as he explores his studies as a martial artist.

Carrying his experience as a bullied child into his adulthood as an artist, Mr. Brody stumbles into the martial arts as a tool to fight depression and discovers a way of life that allows him to function beyond the fight-or-flight reactions that have ruled his psyche. Ultimately, Brody’s funny and poignant stories bring his audience along on a revealing and human journey to a place where peace becomes possible, where confidence obviates conflict, where the sound of one’s own breath is all one needs in order own any moment. More Arts / Less Martial is a must-see for anyone who loves the story-telling form, laughter, the martial arts, peace, humanity or any combination thereof. Brief Biography Dylan Brody is a TaeKwonDo Master (4th Dan) and an instructor in Hapkido (3rd Dan) and KiGumDo (1st Dan). He has toured widely as a comic and as a teller of humorous stories. His CDs, released by Stand Up! Records are available through Amazon.com and iTunes and his material is heard regularly on Sirius/XM satellite radio, Pandora, Yahoo Streaming Radio and the CBS Interactive Radio Spectrum. He is an award-winning playwright and a thrice published author.

Does fear stop Dylan Brody? It does not. (He SINGS in public)

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Last night I brought my guitar to Story Salon and performed in the theme week show. The theme was "Really?!?!" It seemed the right thing to do. Terrifying. When I was a kid I was in the Schuylerville Central School choir. The choir teacher yelled at me for going off key and told me I should just mouth the words and not sing. It left me very weird about singing in public. Nonetheless, sometimes you have to push your own envelope, you know?

How does a story-teller handle all-improvised stand-up? Just watch this.

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

This was the set I did at Troy Conrad's SET LIST show when it went to Santa Barbara a few weeks ago. The way the show works is this: Performers -- mostly stand-up comics -- are shown a set list as they take the stage. They have a few seconds to read it over as it is projected on a screen upstage, and then they must perform as though that list is the one they brought that evening, the one they'd planned themselves. We each get a different list and we get no chance to see what's on it. Audience members have written suggestions on slips of paper and at certain points within the set we are required to pull one of those slips from a box on stage. I, of course, do not do regular comedy. I do this:

Dylan Brody's STORY CORNER (episode one)

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Ted Wilkinson directed this piece as a submission to Channel 101. It was chosen for inclusion in the NY screening. The written material comes from a piece on my latest CD, A TWIST OF THE WIT

A bit of Lord Buckleyishness

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

This video was shot without permission while I ran this piece for the very first time in front of an audience. I don't generally like for works-in-progress to be recorded but I am not at all certain of where or when I will ever use the piece and I don't want it to just vanish into the ether. So I post it here for your viewing pleasure. In this piece I bring Hamlet's advice to the players into the modern vernacular.

Video Short based on "Uncomprehending"

Sat, 28 May 2011 07:00:00 GMT

If you enjoy this short, share it with everyone you know!

The First Review of A TWIST OF THE WIT is in!

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:00:00 GMT

(jeanmariesimpson.wordpress.com)

A Twist of the Wit

from humorist Dylan Brody

This is going to be a rave. I am an unabashed, full-on, rabid fan of Dylan Brody's work. His newest CD, A Twist of the Wit, is just that, all that the title implies. Brody's humor is entirely unpredictable, only slightly profane, intensely politically incorrect and so colored by self-deprecation, compassion and love, that one hears his unique voice and immediately wants to sit down and with him split a warm challah and a bottle of dark, oaky red wine, because that's what he sounds like. And peanut M&Ms. GOD! Do I ever want a huge, overflowing crystal clear glass bowl of peanut M&Ms in front of me as I write this. But it's snowing out and very icy, and I don't dare brave the 200 yard walk to my neighborhood Safeway. So I turn back to Brody's words, his juicy, Atheist-Jewish, wet dream of a live performance, close my eyes and soon feel as if I'm there, in the living room of wherever it was that he recorded it, and I'm full to the brim. “I love that applause that starts before I've said anything,” he begins. “it's all pure and hopeful...” as someone in the audience mutters something and he quips “No, really, there's nothing I enjoy more on a recording than someone stepping on my very first punchline. It's what I get for appealing to this demographic.” The audience loves him madly, and he launches into his material. Brody has his own style – something between autobiography and fiction. Whenever I experience his stuff, I'm reminded of Starbuck's delicious line in the play, The Rainmaker, “I wasn't lyin', I was dreamin'.” Brody's work is so – truly – twisted, that I find myself in a kind of dream state, a place where I'm not sure where the story leaves off and I begin, and vice-versa. I'm not the kind of critic who likes to do too much quoting from the subject – words are what Dylan Brody gets paid for, after all, and who am I to be giving them away? - but in his piece, Uncomprehending, he takes his dog to the lawn in the neighborhood where they always go, only to find that the house has a new owner, who doesn't want dogs on his lawn. In Brody's discussion with the owner, one in which he, Brody, declares that he “doesn't speak English,” there is a section that I had to listen to over and over again, repeatedly, even, because it is so goddamn funny that it stretches the limits of credulity. You'll have to trust me, because if I quoted it, well, then you wouldn't have bought his CD and I want you to buy lots of copies and give them as gifts to everyone you know, because I want him to get really rich so he can keep making recordings that I get to listen to, because I really do believe that laughter will keep the Cancer at bay. Speaking of Cancer – there's a recent study out that says love can cure Cancer too. Brody's stuff is full of heart, but it's not all squishy and syrupy and lame, it is gritty with a kind of cut-glass finish, a kind of jaggedy-hearted warmth that, along with challah and red wine, makes you want to go to a cigar bar and drink single malt scotch with your very best friend, and get sloppy drunk and fall all over each other as you stagger home laughing and crying because there is nothing funnier than the tragedy of life. Visit Dylan Brody's website and purchase his work here: dylanbrody.com Jeanmarie Simpson is a peace activist, theatre artist and critic of all things art and entertainment. Read more about her at her website, jeanmariesimpson.wordpress.com.

1/14/'11: Pre-order the new CD, A TWIST OF THE WIT today!

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 08:00:00 GMT

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="( photography by Cat Gwynn - catgwynnphotos.com )"]Click The Image To Order![/caption]

02/26/11 - Mind the Gap - The Throckmorton Theater - Mill Valley, CA

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 08:00:00 GMT

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03/04/11 - Word Salad - Paper or Plastic Cafe - Los Angeles, CA

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:00:00 GMT

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03/15/11 - Songs Alive - The Talking Stick - Santa Monica, CA

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:00:00 GMT

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04/12/11 - Dylan Brody Headlines - The Punch Line - San Francisco, CA

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 21:00:00 GMT

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The War on Terror Was Lost at its Inception

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:20:00 GMT

Terror cannot be defeated with military action, no matter how powerful or how well equipped the military that takes the action. Terror, let us not forget, is a feeling. Terror grips us when fear strikes in such a way that neither fight nor flight is an option. Unable to find a solution to an adrenalin spilling situation, the mind gives up on problem-solving and devolves into the screaming, head-hiding, pants-soiling emotion we call terror. Terror causes us to act irrationally. It causes us to lash out, to over-react or to misdirect our impotent feelings of rage in misguided efforts to find security in a world made suddenly unsafe. This is terror. A feeling like this cannot be bombed into silence. It cannot be shot at. I cannot be quieted in the roar of jet engines. No. These only serve to fuel fear. Terror cannot be countered with shock and awe, it can only be propagated. If one truly wishes to quell terror, one sings soothing songs, reassures the afflicted, provides a sense of calm. Nor can a war be won on terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy. If we can say that we are waging war on terrorism, than we must also accept the idea that our enemies are not at war with us, they are at war with insurgency suppression, or with occupation. They are at war with gunfire and drone attacks. They are at war with no-fly zones. Seen from this perspective, it becomes absurd. A war is waged on a nation, a state, a people. It cannot be waged on a tactic. Already, I can hear people muttering an objection that this is merely a semantic argument. Surely it would be easy to write such people off as anti-semantic bastards, but I think this imagined counter to my argument bears a strong response, otherwise I wouldn’t have posed it to myself. Semantics are important. The language we use defines our perceptions, it defines our actions, it defines our culture, it defines us to our very cores. While there is no worldly difference between “collateral damage,” and “the slaughter of innocent men, women and children,” the perception is vastly different from one to the next. People who would be aghast to think that they conspire in the killing and maiming of school children are willing to tolerate acceptable civilian losses in the execution of a military operation. While few of us would sanction targeted assassinations, we have grown comfortable with the idea of surgical strikes. By changing the semantics we protect ourselves from the horror we inflict. Conspiracy theories abound as to the real reasons for our ongoing involvement on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some say it is a war for oil. Some say it is about water. Some say it is about Israel Some say that ongoing war is necessary simply to fuel the incomes of those who make their living in the manufacture and sale of military equipment and supplies. I do not know the truth of the machinations behind the conflicts in which we are currently engaged except that at their heart they are the same machinations behind every great conflict in history. The wealthy and powerful decide that something is worth killing for and then set about convincing the poor and desperate that it is worth dying for. The terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 gave a magnificent focal point for such conviction. We were so angry, so afraid, so impotent in our rage and horror that we would have done anything to feel secure. We were, in short, terrorized. Rather than calming us and offering us the sense of security that had been taken away, our leaders provided us with an impossible mission of vengeance upon an intangible enemy. Trusting our leaders in our own moment of senselessness, we as a society followed them into an ill-advised conflict with ambiguous goals. As time passed we realized the horror of what we had done. In Abu Ghraib, in our air attack that massacred Iraqi journalists, in our treatment of underage prisoners at Guantanamo Bay we saw that we had come to devalue life so completely that not only had we stopped treating our enemies humanely, we had stopped treating them as humans. When attempts are made to right even these most obvious and specific of wrongs, opposition rises up, dismissing the wrongdoings as the work of a few bad apples, justifying the dehumanization of entire cultures by reducing those who disagree with our foreign policy to evildoers. It is always difficult to admit a mistake. It is particularly difficult to admit a mistake when it means accepting responsibility for the repercussions of the wrong-headed actions. Yet here we are, a nation that considers itself the greatest, most noble, most righteous in the history of civilization, at a crossroads. Shall we continue a path that has led us to torture, to mass murder, to blood-letting, to a long-lasting and wasteful conflict against an enemy we dare not even properly name? We continue in a war we claim to be waging on “terror” or “terrorism” because we would be too ashamed to admit that we are at war against the Islamic world because for a moment we were too blinded by xenophobia to realize that the percentage of blood-lusting fundamentalist Mulsims is probably about the same as the percentage of blood-lusting fundamentalist Christians or Jews or Capitalists. Shall we continue killing because to stop would be to admit that it was an error to start killing in the first place? I say it is time to cease firing and live with ourselves. If we are uncomfortable with the truth of who we are it is time to do the hard work of changing who we are by changing our behavior, changing our habits. It is time to recognize that when we went to war we were acting out of irrational fear. The terrorists cannot lose until we stop behaving out of a sense of terror. Let us bring home our young men and women. Let us care for our wounded, our damaged, our loved ones. Let us begin to heal one another with soothing songs and reassurances. Let us prove our righteous nobility, as a national community, by coming calmly to our senses.

An Honor. A Privilege. One of the great joys of my career.

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:12:00 GMT

In March I got to perform at a splendid event in NY, put together by Kelly Carlin and Tony Hendra to honor the memory of George Carlin. It was a huge thing for me, a moment of odd, personal closure. It was a beautiful and touching evening. I was thrilled to have been a part of it. And here, attached, is the part of it that I was.

If You Disagree With Me, the Terrorists Have Won

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 21:42:00 GMT

Yesterday I heard a person-on-the-street interview on CNN in which the interviewee said that a mosque should not be built near ground zero because she considers that land to be sacred. That's right. She feels that sacred land is no place to put holy ground. Well, not that kind of holy. Only the holier-than-thou kind. Or, as I like to call it, the ass-holy kind. Let me take a moment to point out that what is being described in the mainstream media as "a mosque at Ground Zero," is actually an Islamic Cultural Center a few blocks away from the place where the World Trade Center once stood. I would be interested to know just how large a perimeter around the site my freedom-protecting fellow Americans would like to cordon off against the free expression of beliefs other than their own. Maybe we should only allow Christians to live South of 14th Street. And I'm not talking about Catholics, 'cause that Saint-worshiping stuff smacks of paganism and Mother Mary comes awfully close to being worshiped as Goddess. How wrong would that be, to have people praying to a woman within miles of the sacred site where once stood a huge structure dedicated to global commerce? Just a couple of weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, I came out of a Trader Joe grocery story to find a man putting little paper flags on the antennae of the cars in the parking lot. He was just moving to put one on my car as I approached. I asked him not to. He said, "What's the matter? You don't love your country?" I said, "I do love my country and I'm fond of the flag. But right now the flag is being flown in rage and as a call to violence and vengeance and I'm not comfortable supporting that." He turned bright red and raised an angry finger at me, saying, "Hey! This flag is a symbol of peace and the freedoms we hold dear and I should kick your ass just for talking about it that way." They say the first victim of war is the truth. I think the first victim might be a cultural sense of irony. The goal of terrorists is to destabilize a perceived enemy by creating fear and anger that will overwhelm reason. The stability of our society is built upon a constitutional foundation. We started with a document that lays out a governmental structure and ten amendments thereto, collectively called the Bill of Rights. Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Assembly are all included in the very first of these amendments. I would tend to say that if we begin restricting First Amendment rights based on a sentimental attachment to a particular plot of land, the terrorists will have won. I'm sure some people will call me a crazy liberal for seeking to protect parts of the constitution that don't involve the right to carry a gun in a Wal-Mart, but that's okay. Everything I say is pretty easy to dismiss. I'm obviously not a patriot. If I loved my country I would prove it by letting strangers decorate my car to their liking.

The Jung One

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 11:52:00 GMT

(originally written and recorded for broadcast on KYCY Radio and kyouradio.com) It came as a great relief to me when I learned that my wife and friends receive the same spam in their e-mail inboxes that I do. For a while there I put myself to sleep at night concocting complex schemes whereby I might learn who had put me on the small penis list. Somewhere, I thought, there must be a spreadsheet on which I am identified as a person interested in lowering his mortgage, meeting lusty, half-naked young women and sustaining better erections. Recently, amongst the mortgage offers and Viagra promotions, I found an e-mail from a friend of mine who had just heard a piece I’d recorded for the radio. The recording made extensive reference to Proust and she told me that Salon.com had just run a piece about Proust that dealt with his work in much the same way I had in my essay. She also said that both my piece and the piece on Salon.com were reminiscent of some things she’d been writing in her personal blog. When I read both her work and the article she’d referred me to, I was shocked at the similarity in thinking that underlay those writings and mine. Amazed at the Jungian synchronicity, I suddenly remembered a fleeting thought that I’d had years earlier.

_______________________

I lived briefly with an insane woman just after I moved out to Los Angeles from New York. To give you a sense of what kind of person she was, she once told me that she could guess, within five thousand dollars, a man’s annual income just by hearing the sound of his shoes on a tile floor. Not only did she believe that this claim was true, she believed that it was the sort of ability about which it makes sense to boast. She joined a Buddhist group not because she loved Buddhism or sought enlightenment but because someone had told her they didn’t get upset if you chanted for a BMW. She burned candles and did made-up spells in an attempt to draw money to her and misfortune to those who cut her off in traffic or experienced greater success than she did. We attended a new-age festival when we were romantically involved. It was the year I got my first 14.4 modem with the screeching log-on noises and the ten-minute download for a grainy photograph of a sheep dog that could then be rendered to the page entirely in shades created by the characters available on a standard keyboard. I received an e-mailed flyer for the Los Angeles Festival of Spirituality and – something – Airy-Fairiness. I don’t remember. This was before I knew there was any such thing as spam, possibly before the word had been coined. I assumed that the flyer had been sent by someone I knew and because it wasn’t the sort of thing I’d be into, but was the sort of thing Sarah would be interested in, I assumed that it had been sent as a suggestion that I take her to the festival. Which I did. Which she took as an indication that I really loved her and we were tuned in to the same wavelength. For me, mostly, it was just a pleasant day among the chubby wiccans and the scowling, tattooed, self-styled Satanists. I walked from booth to booth and looked at occult talismans and erotic lithographs and hand-carved walking sticks. In the early afternoon, though, we heard a speaker whose ideas stuck with me. A young woman stood on a small stage and spoke into a tinny microphone. She spoke of the Gaia Principal. Mostly she was promoting her book on the topic but her love of the subject and her commitment to her ideas made her riveting. She talked about the Earth as a large, single, living entity. She spoke of humans and animals as cellular parts of the larger creature. She started out by drawing parallels between human activities and the activities of the blood stream. She spoke of the millions of people who go about their daily lives and do not realize that as a group we are collecting sugar, processing it, and then distributing it. She spoke of us converting oxygen into carbon dioxide. She built up a picture of humanity as a functional subsystem serving the great beast’s body. She talked about our addiction long before “addicted to oil” has become a political catch-all, used to promote anger against Arab nations and a sense of environmental awareness. She said the addiction was a sickness, causing the planet to run a fever and I leaned over to Sarah and said, “Or at east making the planet gassy.” Sarah did not find that funny at all. The woman said she believed humanity was on the verge of a psychic breakthrough that would allow us all to connect consciously with the Jungian Collective Unconscious, that when we reached this new level of awareness the planet itself would come into its own as a thinking, evolved being. I thought, as I listened to her, maybe not. What if this internet thing keeps growing? What if that network becomes the synaptic system the planet needs, a physical container for the great, shared awareness Jung wrote about? I wondered, in my own spiritual, airy-fairy way, if it was that burgeoning global consciousness that had sent me the e-mail to bring me here to experience this realization.

___________________

As I read the Salon.com article and my friend’s blog entries, I realized that we’d all tapped into the same idea almost simultaneously and had all immediately moved to share the idea online. I took in a sharp breath as I remembered that thought from fourteen years ago. My half-musing prediction seems to be coming true. The collective unconscious is manifesting in the vast webwork of the internet. The planet is beginning to have thoughts – recurring thoughts – flickering across the international matrix of electronic synapses. Sadly, though, it has only fleeting dalliances with intellectual ponderings like those of Proust and Jung. If we’re lucky, it might turn out to be a phase, some sort of global adolescence, but for now the great Gaia Earth Organism seems to be wallowing in an unhealthy obsession with penis enlargement, barely legal girls and cheap prescription drugs.

My Wife And I Lead a Charmed Life (previously unseen story)

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 19:59:00 GMT

CHARMED LIFE

In 1994, when Nancy and I were about to get married, we took a trip to the East coast so that she could meet my family. She gets very nervous on planes. I assured her that we live a charmed life, but that didn’t help. To distract her from the fact that we were hurtling through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, I used the flight time to teach her the basics of poker and to tell her about my grandfather. I was seventeen when he died and he was the one member of the family she would not get to meet. I told her how he taught me gin rummy first and then poker. I remembered – I remember still how serious he became over the card table. He admonished me to remember that poker is not a game of luck, it is a game of psychology, not the cards but the finances. It’s not about who gets dealt the best cards, it’s about who takes the chips.

In many ways, the timing of the trip was perfect. My Grandmother was in the very early stages of Alzheimers. At this point, the disease had only affected her enough to turn every conversation into a surreal nineteen seventies game show. “I went into that place with the buildings and the smell.”

“Manhattan?”

“Yes! And I was on forty-third street with that annoying woman.”

“Aunt Sarah?”

“No! Bad breath! Long boring stories!”

“Your best friend Katie!”

“Yes! And we saw that man! He used to horrible in New York and then he was horrible all over the country and now he’s going to be horrible from Space.”

“Howard Stern?”

“Yes!”

Congratulations, Grandma, you’re moving on to the dementia pyramid.

Her decline had made my mother hyper-aware of the genetic crap shoot she was facing. She pulled me aside and said, “Dylan, you have to promise me that if I ever start to show symptoms you’ll tell me so that I know when it’s time to take my own life.”

I said, “Mom, we just had this conversation twenty minutes ago.”

In order to defray the cost of the trip, I had arranged to have a stand-up gig in Atlantic City, a gig that was supposed to take place Friday and Saturday, pay about half of what I’d spent on airline tickets and that would provide me and Nancy two nights in a fancy hotel for romance.

When I called to do my final confirmations, though, I was told that the job did not, in fact, include a hotel room. Saddened by the turn of events, but still wishing to do the shows and collect the check, I made reservations at a cheap motel and my wife changed her flight plans so that she could fly home from Laguardia airport that evening.

She went to the airport for a seven thirty flight. I drove to Atlantic City for the gig.

My feature act was also disappointed to find out that he was not getting a hotel room. We were both disappointed to find out that this was due to a dispute between the show-runner and the hotel and that we would not be performing in the swanky hotel bar. We would be performing in front of a big vinyl banner hung on a wall of the parking lot in front of an audience that would be sitting in plastic folding chairs. Irritable waitresses took elevators to and from the bar to provide very slow drink service.

The show did not go well. The emcee, the feature act and I all found it difficult to maintain our rhythms what with the exhaust fumes and the occasional passage of cars searching for parking and slowing to stare in confused wonder at what appeared to be a performance art installation involving grumpy people seated in a parking garage and staring sullenly at morose, disillusioned, poorly lit public speakers.

After the unpleasant Friday evening shows, the man who had booked the show, the man who was in a dispute with the hotel, the man who had claimed never to have said he would provide a room for me or the other acts, screamed at me for ruining his show. He blamed me for not being funny enough to fully overcome the circumstance. I told him that I would not be performing a second night in his lovely Atlantic City garage. He told me that he would not be paying me for my services.

I considered sticking around for the night, seeing if I could make up for the lost income at a poker table but instead I went to the Motel Six, checked out, and drove back Laguardia airport to see if I could switch out my ticket for something sooner.

I was able to get a ticket for a flight that would take me home the following morning. I turned away from the ticket counter, planning to find my departure gate and sleep on the floor. As I turned, in the midst of this vast, bustling airport, I saw Nancy. She stood, a little confused, looking down at a piece of paper. Her flight had been cancelled. She’d been pushed back to a morning flight, the very one I was booked to take. She had been given a voucher for a room. In a very nice hotel.

It was a romantic night. There was a sense of destiny, of serendipity, of having a run of bad luck and still living a charmed life.

As we were leaving in the morning for our flight, my wife grabbed the two cans of Pringles from the honor bar. I asked her what she was doing. I told her there would probably be food on the plane. She said she didn’t care. She said it was in honor of my grandfather. After a week that had felt like a bad deal, she thought he would like it if we left with all the chips.

Hats Off to Tradition

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:19:00 GMT

(Originally published in The Intermountain Jewish News) In 1969 my family moved into a small town in upstate New York. We drove all night long in a big pink Plymouth, an enormous vehicle from which, in time of national emergency, smaller cars might efficiently be launched. At the age of five my reading skills were already strong enough that I was able to read by dawn's diffuse illumination the sign that said, "Welcome to Schuylerville," and then, below that, "population 984." According to my father, that afternoon, in a Norman Rockwell moment, the old white-haired mayor himself drove out to the sign with a bucket o' paint and added on, "and some Jews." I know my mother believed in some sort of traditional, Caucasian bearded deity but she rarely mentioned this around the house for fear of sparking a lengthy diatribe from my father whose only deity was Broadway director Harold Clurman to whom he attributed any thought he considered wise or insightful enough to play better as a quotation. Troubled by school bullies I would turn to my father for advice and he would say, "As Harold Clurman says, 'The hell of it is, they have their reasons.'" While we were Jews by blood and by culture we were not Jews in practice. My mother made wonderful breaded pork chops which we sometimes washed down directly with milk. Nonetheless my parents felt it was important that my sister and I have some sense of cultural history and tradition so they did what they could to provide it despite their lack of spiritual enthusiasm. Every year, for instance, they would try to celebrate Channukkah with us but they never really knew what day it started. We frequently wound up burning extra candles to make up for lost time. Lacking the proper Hebrew, they would invent the prayers as they went along. Dad would solemnly touch the lighted end of the master-candle to the others as he carefully intoned, "Abracadabra alacazam. We light the candles; we don't eat ham.” By the eighth night, it would just get ridiculous. “We will not eat it in a boat... we will not eat it with a goat. We will not eat the gentiles’ ham. We will not eat it . . . l'–chi-am." When pressed for an explanation of the holiday's meaning my father stammered briefly and allowed himself to go the traditional route of self-loathing deprecation. "Well," he said slowly, "at Channukkah we celebrate the fact that, many centuries ago, some of our ancestors got a really good deal on some lamp oil." Then he chuckled at this little stereotype-based witticism, paused for a moment -- I suspect he was deciding whether or not to attribute the line to Harold Clurman -- then he shrugged as if he was forgiving himself for some small faux pas committed years ago against a college friend whose name is only half-remembered. In 1979 I was a sophomore at a well respected Massachusetts prep school. It was a single, co-educational institution spread out over two campuses (I used to delight in making teachers wince by calling them "campi") which had once been separate schools, one all male, one all female. By the time I attended, though, the campuses, separated by about three miles of deep-country road, were fully integrated gender-wise. Over Thanksgiving break that year I visited my grandfather in Lakewood, New Jersey. He asked me, with a genuine tone of concern, if I wouldn't consider wearing a yarmulke. At this moment I flashed on a recurring nightmare in which I was chased through the woods outside Schuylerville by angry Christians intent on doing me harm. (I have always attributed this dream to a particular incident in 1975 when a group of angry Christians chased me through the woods outside Schuylerville intent on doing me harm.) I told him that, no, I would not feel comfortable wearing a yarmulke around the campae and was pleased that he smiled, getting the word-joke, rather than wincing or correcting me. It seemed to me, I said, that at this mostly gentile school, a yarmulke would seem very much the same as a star of David pinned to my shirt. Patiently, and without taking offense, Grandpa explained to me that the purpose was not to identify me as a Jew but rather to hide my identity from above so as to make me equal to all others in the eyes of God. Would I be willing, he asked, to wear a nice hat of some sort if he bought me one I liked? I loved my grandfather and this was clearly important to him so I agreed. From amongst a store-full of expensive hats, most of which I could not imagine anybody wearing un-selfconsciously, I picked a fairly simple Greek fisherman's cap that was on sale near the cash register. I watched my grandfather banter wittily for a moment with the cashier whose left pinky bent inward at an odd angle. On an impulse he grabbed a small, clip-on koala bear and added it to the purchase. Accepting the receipt and offering a quick, "No bag. No box," he put the hat on my head, clipped the koala onto the brim and gave me a wink that remains for me the wink of Santa in "The Night Before Christmas." Some months later I missed a bus back to my home campus and wound up trapped on the school's other campus for dinner. I had never been questioned in any way about the hat so, without thinking twice -- without thinking once, really -- I passed through the line, piling goulash and tater tots onto an industrial-weight ceramic plate. I sat down opposite a close friend and popped a tot into my mouth. As I chewed, a man appeared just behind me and to my left. In memory he was eight feet tall, though I suspect this is one of those inaccuracies that comes with time like the distortion of the sixties so prevalent these days that would have us believe the Summer of Love was the product of nine pot-heads in their teens singing about peace while everyone we know was far more sensibly laying the foundations for a current career. It is a revisionist fantasy designed to make the dreamer more comfortable with his own past. The man's voice was deep, that of a talking walrus in a cartoon. "Who do you think you are and where do you think you are?" Already developing my sharp and ready wit, I replied, "What?" "You don't say, 'what,'" the giant walrus growled. "You say, 'I beg your pardon,' or 'excuse me, sir.'" Try as I might, I can not recall whether it was true bafflement or simple smart alecism that led me to reply, "What?!?" The grip of the grown-up squeezed my upper arm like a blood-pressure gauge and I felt myself jerk away from the table. "Someone get that," the man said, gesturing at my upturned chair. He hustled me to the door scolding continuously. "You have got to be the most impolite person I have ever met. I don't know where you were raised but here, in polite society, we do not wear hats in the dining hall." With his free hand he pushed the door open and snatched the hat from my head. He hurled me outside and threw the offending headwear after me. I picked it up, kissed it and returned it to my head. Rather than waiting for a scheduled bus I walked back along the country road, over the bridge in the chill, dark night, with tears streaming warm on my cheeks and then cold along my jaw line, to my own campus. My roommate wore boot-cut jeans over sneakers. He wore a plaid shirt open at the neck to allow a bluish-white tee shirt to peek out. He asked me what was the matter. I told him that I had been thrown out of the dining hall. I told him why the man had thrown me out. I told him the man had torn off my hat and thrown it to the ground. "So?" he said. I did not want to tell him why the hat was important. I did not want to tell him about my grandfather. I wanted the hat to remain a personal trademark, not a religious icon. I lied, saying, "Do you know how expensive this hat is?" He shook his head in an affectation of disbelief. "Is that all you people think about?" I'm certain he was startled as I jerked my head around to stare at him, silent. My ears burned with shame and rage. I had, in truth, chosen this hat because it was the least expensive in the store and it had been on sale; I feared suddenly that I'd made this choice because I was a Jew. For weeks that hat was all I could think about. I thought about how I'd been wronged. I thought about how -- in my adolescent mind -- I'd been persecuted. I told nobody more about the incident. I believed I'd been thinking like a people and I didn't want anybody to see that. I did not know that I was not at fault. I had no way of understanding the complex conflicts of tradition, prep school manners against my grandfather's religious paraphernalia against my own silent self-loathing. I had no way of seeing the ways in which we were all hostage to our own frames of reference, our own systems of belief. None of this came clear to me until quite recently when I had occasion to visit my old prep school. I stepped into that dining hall. The event, in all its subtlety, flashed across my mind in a contained explosion of emotion and intellect, experience and analysis. Shackles seemed to fall away. I viewed the moment of my persecution through the cold lens of time, the warm tones of nostalgia. I felt a tension in my jaw line release. Layer upon layer of darkness gave way like the veils of an Eastern dancer until beauty flashed naked before me. Traditional shame peeled away in perfect grace, in proper time. And somewhere in the back of my mind I heard Harold Clurman say, "And there was light." END

Huffington Post runs my Defensity of Sarah Palin

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:01:00 GMT

IN DEFENSITY OF SARAH PALIN Former Vice Presidentiary candidate Sarah Palin recently twat about her desire to see Muslims "refudiate" the actions of their violentistic brothren. When challengers predeigned to question her verbial usage, she proclared herself an inventress of words, colining herself with no less auspecial a wordsmith than Shakespeare. Read the full article HERE

A new piece picked up for a Public Radio blog

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 17:39:00 GMT

I wrote a piece called IN DEFENSITY OF SARAH PALIN in hopes of recording it for NPR. I still don't seem to have broken through to get NPR airplay, but John Rabe, the wonderful host of OFF RAMP published the text of the piece at his blog! You can read it here. Or, you can hear the audio file right here at http://www.dylanbrody.com/palin2.mp3

An Ancient Zen Parable That I Wrote a Few Years Ago

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 23:27:00 GMT

_____________

I spent several hours one afternoon listening to Dar Williams' OUT THERE LIVE album over and over again and weeping. It had not been my best week ever. It was 2004 and my literary manager called to tell me that one of the other people who worked at her company didn't like anything I'd ever written and she had to drop me from the roster. So, once again, I found myself an underemployed Hollywood writer without representation. In the midst of this, I had done only a rough draft of a piece to record for broadcast that week. Succumbing to the hollow despair of the middle-aged man in a career crisis, I began to feel that rewriting and recording for no pay was a sort of punishment for my own lack of success. Instead of working on the piece I had intended to record, I listened to Dar Williams and wept and wrote an ancient zen parable which I will present now.

As Jin Sun Ki emerged into the chill morning air, the low hung sun reflected off the dewy grass and the stone steps. His morning’s meditations left his senses keen, his mind alert. He noticed the scuffmarks on the stones at once. Although he would cultivate a frown over the discovery later, his first reaction was to smile lightly at the evidence of misbehavior.

He adjusted his course to take him around to the wide training lawns. The younger novices stood in neatly ordered rows. Having finished their jumping jacks and their sit ups, they now engaged in toe-touches, their arms spread wide and their movements unsynchronized. Jin Sun Ki adopted a look of serious concern as he stepped up in front of the assembly. He raised his voice effortlessly to spread over the field reaching every student all the way to the back. “Apparently,” he began without preamble, “despite my specific words to the contrary, somebody here has decided to use the steps and pathways at the rear of the temple for skateboarding practice.” He paused for a moment letting the words soak in as though the matter was incredibly weighty. Then he went on. “Would anybody here like to tell me anything about this?”

Sheepishly, one boy raised his hand. It took only a glance for Master Ki to acknowledge him and give him the floor. “It was probably Mark,” the boy said.

“Shut up,” Mark sniped. “It was not.”

The first boy shrugged, his ears reddening.

Jin Sun Ki put up a calming hand, palm forward. “Let me rephrase. I am not interested in finger-pointing or accusations. Does anybody want to take responsibility for having done this?” He left a respectable pause in which the boys remained silent except for a bit of shuffling and weight shifting. “All right then. Following your morning training, you will all gather at the back steps. Continue.” He walked away and left the students to finish their exercises.

At ten a.m. the kids showed up at the back steps, sweat soaked and wobbly from the early workout. Half a dozen buckets awaited them and in each bucket, several hand-brushes soaked in watery cleansing solution. Jin Sun Ki stood at the topmost step and gestured silently toward the buckets. His meaning came through clearly. With a bit of a shared groan, the students took up the brushes and knelt on the cold, stone floor. They began the laborious process of scrubbing the stones clean, eliminating the dirt and the scuffmarks from the wide space a bit at a time with their rough brushes.

Shortly after noon a twelve-year-old boy named Thomas unbent his back. Raging against the injustice of the world he strode up the steps to the place where Master Ki now sat on the stones reading a mystery novel. He waited for the master to notice him. Jin Sun remained focused on his reading. Thomas breathed loudly, hoping the master’s attention would be drawn to the sound. He cleared his throat. The master did not look at him. At last he said, in a voice that trembled just a little bit despite his efforts to keep it steady, “Master Ki?”

Master Ki set aside his book and looked at the boy.

“Master Ki,” the boy repeated, “I don’t think this is fair.”

“No?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?” The master asked him.

“Well…” the boy slowed, having believed his thought would be obvious. “The thing is, I didn’t skateboard on the stones. I don’t even have a skateboard.”

“Uh-huh…?” Master Ki said, encouraging him to go on.

“Well, I don’t see why I should be punished when I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“You haven’t done anything wrong?”

“Nothing. I didn’t mess up the floor. I didn’t even try to tell you who did mess up the floor. So, I didn’t do anything wrong and still I'm being punished. That doesn’t seem fair, does it?”

Jin Sun looked out at all the boys, bent over the stones with their brushes. He turned back to Thomas. “If you’ve done nothing wrong,” he said softly, “then you are not being punished. You’re just cleaning a floor.” He grinned at Thomas for a moment.

Then Jin Sun Ki returned to his reading.

Thomas returned to his task.

I wrote this with the Dar enhanced tears streaming down my face. When my wife got home from work she could hear the music coming from my office. She knows I've been having a rough time lately. She called up to me, "Hey, Baby! You doin' okay?" There was a young master who taught Tae Kwon Do for a while at the studio where I study. One night, a long time ago, before I was a master, before I was even a black belt, but not long before – brown belt, red belt, in there somewhere – advanced enough that he expected a great deal of me, Master Seo asked me how I was and I said, "Eh... I'm tired, sir." This twenty-six year old became very stern and ordered me into the office. He had me sit down. He stood behind the desk and lectured me. He said, "Dylan, never share your weakness. Everybody is tired. Everybody is scared. Everybody has enough weakness of their own. You are a martial artist. You share your strength. Tired? I don't care. Scared? I don't care. You, all the time, say 'yeah! I feel great! I feel good! I feel strong!' You share your strength, your good feeling. Makes everybody feel better, stronger. Soon to be black belt. This is your job. Your responsibility." So, I was sitting in my office weeping and my wife shouted, "You doin' okay?" and I thought of Young Master Seo. I shouted back, "Yeah! I'm fine. I'm just. . . cleaning the floor." Since my office is carpeted, she shouted up the stairs at me, "Do I know what that means?" "Nah," I yelled. "Just . . . I'm writing a new piece, I think." "Oh, good!" My wife said. "How's it coming?" "It feels good," I said. "It feels strong." "Excellent!" She said, appearing in the doorway of my office. "I like to hear that." When my wife smiles, it is very difficult to hang on to much sadness. It occurred to me that for perhaps the five-thousandth time, the martial arts had saved me from sliding into depression. She took a book that she'd left open to mark her page and went downstairs to continue reading. I returned to my task. [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="149" caption="Click for the JK Taekwondo Website"][/caption] {INTERESTED IN STUDYING martial arts? I would urge you to check out JK Taekwondo with locations in Burbank, Reseda, Glendale and Lamont}

A previously unreleased piece -- TRUE ROMANCE

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 21:30:00 GMT

A few months ago I performed TRUE ROMANCE at Alan Olifson's Word Play at the FAKE GALLERY in Hollywood. I suspect this piece, in a new incarnation, will wind up being the final track on my next CD, recording this fall for winter release.

New York Public Library VIDEO from George Carlin Tribute is up and running!

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 01:08:00 GMT

A few months ago, I had the tremendous honor of being asked to perform at the New York Public Library's tribute to George Carlin. The evening was extraordinary and now the video is up on line. I urge you to watch the whole thing. Click to see the NYPL Live Tribute to George Carlin hosted by Whoopi Goldberg, the video is available HERE In case you want to skip ahead to particular segments or performers, here's a quick rundown (I've done recommendations in orange of a few of my favorite segments from the show if you're looking to hit the high points): Paul Holdengraber opens the show 5:10 or so Whoopi takes the stage 8:00 Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara take the stage and they bring Ben and Amy up a bit later at about 17:30 23:34 Lewis Lapham takes the stage and reads an extraordinary essay about George (WATCH THIS SEGMENT) 30:11 Whoopi brings up the very funny Kevin Smith 41:15 Kevin brings me up (If you jump right to my segment, stick with it until Whoopi comes back to the stage, 'cause she does a really sweet callback to my story) 51:00 Whoopi Brings Kelly Carlin and Tony Hendra to the stage. Kelly talks about her father's love of words and then they read from BRAIN DROPPINGS 57:50 Kelly leaves Tony to speak about George and to plug his book and talk about the process of writing it 1:00:33 Patrick Carlin takes the stage and talks about the sense of his brother's presence, their relationship and the like and to read from the book 1:07:40 Kelly takes the stage to read a wonderful story of life as George's Daughter (WATCH THIS SEGMENT) 1:16:50 Floyd Abrams takes the stage to speak about the first amendment, George Carlin's effect on the law and the dangers of censorship 1:34:30 Kelly introduces Louis CK who does an incredible set that is less funny than he has been asked to make it and much better than it would have been had he complied. (WATCH THIS SEGMENT)

A CALL TO ARTS (1842 words)

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:45:00 GMT

A CALL TO ARTS

Dylan Brody

When I was a child, my father taught a film course at Skidmore College. Every Wednesday he would bring home a movie to screen in our living room so that he could make notes and plan his lesson before taking the boxed reels to the campus for Thursday’s screening and Friday’s class. He ran each term chronologically so the course would start with a silent comedy and silent drama, move on through the Marx Brothers, a nineteen thirties romance, usually a Fred Astaire musical, a Hitchcock picture, a fifties musical. A representative of the European auteur tradition always closed out the course. While kids at school discussed last night’s episode of Happy Days, I reviewed Breathless in my mind’s eye. With subtitles. Those were heady nights for me. Before the advent of On Demand downloads, before TiVo, before DVD stores, before laser disk came and went, before that first consumer VHS machine with the switch-lever that clunked clockwise to the “play” position, in those long ago days when a plastic knob on the television snapped past snow-filled bandwidth toward the next of three available channels, my father set up the projector in the living room and the history of cinema flickered by on the bare white wall. I watched them, laughing, weeping, fully engaged. After each film, my mom and dad drank coffee and I listened to their conversation. They would start out by discussing aspects of the film-maker’s craft. The editing, the pace, the shooting style. Then they would move on to the part of the conversation that they clearly found more important. They would piece together the underlying message of the film. I was very young. This part of the conversation almost always came as a surprise to me. Although it came to this every week, I was like the audience in a comedy club, fooled each time into believing that this time the comic really means it when he says, “but seriously, folks.” How could my favorites, the laugh-aloud comedies possibly be examined for an underlying message, as if they were the same as classic literature? Sure, with some of the politically charged material I could see it, Battleship Potempkin, even Stalag Seventeen with its wartime self righteousness wrapped in suspense and mystery, but the surreal antics of the Marx Brothers? How could Buster Keaton’s pratfalls or Charlie Chaplain’s adorable tramp possibly have been constructed to convey something of real importance? Inevitably, as they discussed and examined the story and structure, a through line came to light. Once it was pried loose of the trappings, the message was obvious and I felt a childish shame at how easily I had been taken in by it. I had been fed an idea and I had internalized it without even realizing that it was imbedded in the material, woven into the fabric of an emotional experience. Chaplain, Keaton, the Marx Brothers all taught about the plight of the underclass, the struggle of the immigrant, the power of humor to undermine fatuous authority, the absurdity of social convention, the dangers of blind obedience, the potential for greatness that lies in the least of us. Viewed through the academic lens, films that had seemed to me to be pure entertainment slipped into a new focus and revealed a complex artistry, a multi-textured fabric woven as tightly and as meaningfully as those medieval tapestries whose images hold carefully plotted morality tales. At first I feared that such examination of the work would ruin it for me, but seeing the joy of my father as he laughed through the comedies, the enchantment as he watched the musicals, it became apparent that the analysis did not undermine the aesthetic experience at all. It enhanced it, deepening the impact and further drawing the viewer into an active engagement with the material rather than a passive reception. Exposed to this process from an early age, I developed habits of critical thinking in my role as an audient. I developed an ethical, almost moralistic approach to writing and performing my own work. Often, this put me in an uncomfortable position, voicing my thoughts, my ideas, my view of the world to people with whom I disagreed, people with whom I stood at odds. I felt that my only hope of survival and success was to be so funny in performance, so skilled in wordsmithery that the work would be enjoyed for its aesthetic value and that the underlying messages could come through as subtly as the anti-war message buried brilliantly in the hilarity of Duck Soup. I knew that whatever I presented, a message would be in there somewhere. If I did my job right, it would carry on the frequency of laughter to an unknowing audience. If I let the seams show, though, if the message overpowered the aesthetic, my work would become didactic and uninteresting. I strove to ride the delicate balance despite the fear, the vulnerability, the natural anxiety of the creative process. Like so many artists, I traveled to Los Angeles to set up shop. I believed that as a skilled artist with talent and a growing body of work I would surely find support for my endeavors in this city at the center of cinema and broadcast media production. It never occurred to me that my experience at the cinematheque living room was unique, that my approach to the crafts of writing and performing was entirely my own. I have often said that “entertainment” is a word people use when they don’t want to take responsibility for what they say through their art. I have come to believe that, while pithy, this is a bit unkind. I suspect that people who strive to create “mere entertainment” actually do not realize that they are saying things through their work. Comics who say, “it’s just a joke,” to excuse racism or cruelty or outright lies do not realize that jokes have power and resonance and consequence. They do not act with any malicious intent, they simply act out of ignorance. The Entertainment Industry into which I plunged expecting to be recognized and rewarded for my artistic excellence is not in the business of soothing the egos or funding the dreams of visionaries. Quite the opposite. The Entertainment Industry -- as its name should have told me had I been paying attention -- is an industry trading in entertainment. It is a profit-seeking construct selling the product of craftsmen. Writers, actors, comics, dancers and so on, all serve to provide materials for widespread release and high-margin sales. Men and women in offices choose multi-million dollar projects that will generate more in sales than they cost to produce. They are not equipped to judge an aesthetic or to unravel stories to find the underlying messages. They certainly are not geared to handle the anxiety of the creative process. Gambling with magnificent budgets creates a whole different sort of anxiety. They cannot help but seek out a level of confidence and reassurance somewhere in the mix. These executives pick up that slack by seeking formulae that they know will sell, by making and remaking scripts and updates of scripts and sequels to updates of scripts that have sold well in the past. They do not hate art or fear new ideas. They do not know that they trade in art. They do not know that movies and TV series contain ideas. Artists, seek approval to ease the anxiety that comes with creation and self-expression. Believing that the money of the studios represents approval and success, we allow ourselves to be turned into entertainers. We set aside our visions, our ideas, our commitment to craft and aesthetic in hopes of getting a green light from men and women who say things like, “It’s not show art. It’s show business.” We rewrite scripts to make them more “edgy,” or more “whimsical,” or more of whatever the buzzword of the year is. We forget that this is the buzzword of the year because it is the way a critic described the unexpected independent hit of last year. We hear the irritating aphorism, “If you want to send a message call Western Union,” and we think we should write more vapidly, not more cunningly. Don’t be fooled. Improve the aesthetic and the message will sing in the undertones. Feign pointlessness and you make points you do not intend, you find targets at which you do not aim. As the tramp swings at the cop, laugh. But also remember that Charlie Chaplain faced fierce opposition from wealthy fascists and Nazi sympathizers in the American west. Remember that the Marx Brothers worked the road, the stages of New York, honing and refining every sketch-scene to hair-trigger comedic precision so that they could say, “we know this will slay ‘em,” in order to get their subversive brilliance on the silver screen. Develop your craft diligently. Refine your vision scrupulously. Dissect and edit and examine your work ruthlessly. Share the best of yourself and stand naked in the light protected only by the knowledge that if you are judged harshly, at least you are judged on your own, unfiltered essence. Do not seek out representatives of the Entertainment Industry in hopes that they will validate you with a green light and a paycheck. Rather, seek them out with a plan to use their money well. Seek them out with an offer of happy collaboration. Seek them out with the work you know to be of great value and the intent to see it paired with the investment they can make in its distribution. Seek them out and give them the validation they need. Instill in them the confidence that can only come when you deem them worthy of a position on the team that brings your work to light. Then do the work that shines. Let us usher in a new Golden Age of the lively arts in this Golden Age of new media. Some day, all of the celluloid, all of the video, all the old-timey DVDs and hard drive data will be transferred to nano-memory micro-crystals. College students will down-draw us from the archives. We will perform in awkward two-dimensionality on their retinas through optical in-feed implants. Our EQ balanced voices will play oddly rich and pure through their aural-cortical stimu-brackets. Let their professors say that we were brave. Let them expose young minds to the back story in terms of our courage, the courage to speak truth to power, to mock bigots in a time of xenophobia, to promote acceptance in a time of exclusion, to encourage peace at a time when peace is derided as cowardice, as surrender, as treason. Let the professors praise us in retrospect for revealing our intellects even as intellectualism came to be vilified by an increasingly Palinized nation. If we do our job right, the students will rankle a bit. They will stiffen. They will resist such critical examination, saying, “Sure. But at the end of the day, they were just so good. They were just so funny.” END