This video is from my performance the other night at 50 Mason in San Francisco. It went pretty well, although what you can’t tell from the video is several people went down in flames before I got behind the mike. The audience was waiting for something like a punchline, and they seemed relieved when I started.

Basically, for a thin crowd who hadn’t been laughing much, I felt like a rockstar, because they did laugh.

If you were to watch the whole thing, there’s a flash in the middle. I edited out a new joke that is just too damn mean, especially to some people I left behind Back East. Hey, I’m still learning, but I’m trying not to be an asshole.

Anyone who’s seen me back in Boston, any comments on this video would be appreciated. (Like, can you believe I’m still doing some of the same shit?)

Here’s the short form, because I wasted time being a total douche over here.

Comedy can be fun. Two types of shows I like involve the flow when it just seems to work. In the first and rarest, everyone on the show is part of the same flow and the whole thing just rises with laughs and energy and whatnot. Everyone, audience and performers alike walk out smiling.

In the second, there are crickets and silences until someone on stage bitches about the audience being stiff or not digging it or something. The flow is dammed and in that moment of criticizing an audience (whose fault it rarely is) is where my competitiveness kicks in. I want to be the one who breaks the dam. And, then, in that moment when you get on stage and start, you can feel it when you get it and flow seeps back into the room. Sweet, just knowing that people who weren’t laughing and were etched with the stress of not laughing at comedy (because it is fucking stressful, people want the comedians to succeed) are laughing now.

I turned the mother out tonight. (Or at least I feel that way. Maybe on review of the video, it will be a delusional dream. For right now, the dream is alive. Fucking alive.)

Irony is driving home after work, talking with your buddy about relationship woes and misunderstandings and feelling pretty good about where yours is, then boom, surprise, you come home and find yourself in a fight. One prefaced on just the kind of misunderstanding you were smiling inside about because of their relative rarity in your life. I really had been planning on telling M. about the conversation and maybe sharing that couples version of schadenfreude, where your not them.

Perhaps when I’m done sulking, I will see the cosmic joke in there.

I’m pretty nervous about the old Supreme Court nomination for John G.
Roberts, Jr. But, on the other hand, any one who repeatedly told
Michael (I wasn’t convicted, so your kids should sleep over) Jackson
to fuck off, can’t be all bad.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=3Dstory&u=3D/eo/20050817/en_celeb_eo/17170

So, yeah, I’m working in a not really low-profile place doing some
pretty high-powered things. What that means is we attract a wide
variety of, I’ll say "people," but I’m thinking something with a more
editorial spin.

Today, I got voicemail from a kid who created his own website to save
the world. Seriously. it’s on Geocities, and he’s all up in the
stopping helping the world. (I’m assuming it’s a kid, ’cause when you call his voicemail back there’re
a lot of numbers in the "if you want Tiffany, dial 1" style message.)

Noble, no doubt, because, you know, you gotta start somewhere. Rock
on, global activist dude. Seriously, good on you for helping.

But, I’m a web snob, and I’m having a hard time dealing with the fact that
it’s a Geocities site. Could there be any more craptastically free
web action out there? Wouldn’t a free blog somewhere be better? (At
least it wouldn’t take forever to load at those faraway Internet
connections of the global village you’re hoping to reach.)

The amusing part was calling him back. We’re actually and officially not imperious
assholes, so I’m polite to all comers. (Believe it or
not, I’m actually not bad at that aspect of the job. I think it’s
because I play out dialogue written in my head.)

Anyway, righteous dogooder dude was fucking hostile when I told him
that we weren’t really in the business of sending out websites to the
world. Seriously pissed off, he seemed. The best I could
promise was that I would pass on his link to those above me in the
food chain. He wanted more and came close to berating me for what he
thought the more should be.

One thought that occurred to me while on the phone was, "Dude, if you
are all about peace in the world, maybe you should start with peace
right here on this telephone, and maybe some phone manners."

The other thought was, "Jesus Christ, if I had even 1/16 of his faith
in my own ideas to jump on total strangers for not seeing the strength
of my vision, I would be a goddess, a colossus, a star."

Lucky for the world, I guess, that I’m keeping my complete meglomania in ch=
eck.

Check me out, I is in the big old San Francisco newspaper:

http://www.sfexaminer.com/articles/2005/08/17//entertainment//20050817_en02=
_le.txt

(Yeah, I’m writing this by email so if you are inclined to peek it
would have to be a cut and paste from here, until I get home and fix
this post into proper linkage action.)

Being comedy and press and all sorts of begging for attention, the
above all reminds me to say something about the movie "Grizzly Man."=20
Great fucking flick. Tim Treadwell was most likely a complete and
total wackjob, but his videotape is pretty incredible. And, Werner
Herzog just caresses the footage into something else again.

For anyone not familiar, Tim Treadwell was a self-appointed guardian
to the grizzlies in the Alaskan wilderness, who spent 13 summers just
hanging out and keeping an eye on them. His watch was controversial
with some supporters among environmentalists and some who clearly
thought he did more harm than good.

What I didn’t realize was that before he embraced his bear cause, he
tried to make it in LA as an actor (but ended up struggling, doing
drugs and waiting tables). In some ways, the interviews about that
time in his life reminded me of 12,003 different comedians/actors I’ve
met and their delusions of grandeur.

Unfortunately, none of those comics ended up eaten by bears, like
Treadwell, no matter how many of us wished it to be so.

I decided to rebuild my laptop. Easy enough, but fucking hell, getting all the little pieces back together blows a mighty big chunk.

Meanwhile, on the work front, yeah, M. has it right when he mocks my slacker failure. As in, I consistently fail to be the slacker of my dreams. The version of me with some suckass, screw the man, fuck you I’m getting high and then stocking the shelves, you don’t own me type job.

Nope, I can’t hold one of them low stress jobs with low skills and maximum time to think. Instead, I end up in all sorts of “important” work, fucking bullshit.

Right now, though I guess I suppose that I can’t complain, I might actually be drawing on a little gray matter and digging back into the 20-year-old cobwebbed archives to the glory days of earning my Bachelor’s. Back 20 years ago, when I studied print journalism, VDT’s were emerging technology, and most of my professors believed that media assuredly did not agenda set, it followed the public. Preposterous to think a business reliant on advertising could do anything but lag behind, lest it offend the public it needed.

Back then, Karl Rove, Roger Ailes and Fox “News” hadn’t been invented yet. OK, I suppose Ailes and Rove breathed and roamed the planet, but “news analysis,” a new idea back in the 80s that seemed to give agita to many of the old guard reporters, lovers of short ledes and “just the facts, ma’am,” hadn’t yet morphed into so-called pundits and self-appointed “fair and balanced” talk show hosts shouting editorials as news.

So, here we are, with Peter Jennings dead, thus losing a champion of world-wide reporting, and Sean Hannity still alive. (I typed and deleted a few of the people involved with “news” who I would prefer in the great beyond rather than Jennings. But, O’Riley and Coulter and Tucker Carlson are so aggravatingly idiosyncratic in their bullshit, I’m hoping they will self-destruct. Hannity stays (mostly) infuriatingly plausible in his lies.)

Seems like these days the media is the goddamn agenda. While else would otherwise sane people consider boycotting Aruba for one suspected murder, whilst living in a country with quite a few more actuals.

Back to the point of this little old trip down old-school, newsroom memory lane. I work for a place that thinks maybe juicing the playing field with cash encouraging mainstream media connections to the fucked up world and what’s going on in out there beyond our myopic domestic view could help. What the hell, maybe if the news actually showed, I don’t know, some semblance of reality with a little foreign correspondence, more folks would get how the world’s fucked-up-edness interconnects with their own fucked-up-edness.

You never know, and sometimes education does make a difference.

So, where, might I, a shitty-ass would be writer and comic (note to West Coast denizens who may not catch sarcasm and bullshit, I actually think I’m pretty fair at both writing and comedy), where do I fit in with this noble plan? Apparently, they might be giving me a shot at re-writing a tough-time getting birthed media strategy statement.

Go figure. I’m back to reading and writing about the kind of junk I used to study for credit and argue about in dorm rooms.

Here’s my very own, personal, album cover. It’s like sleeping around 70s/80s style without the messy STDs.

My digital cowboy on his mechanical bull: