#1,388: 21

WATCHED a lent copy of Foxy Brown this week. Fun and crazy and interesting to see where the different standards used to be. READ a copy of How to Cheat your Friends at Poker, presumably by J.D. Richards. I'm inclined to believe that Penn Jillette really did help someone else get their text into print on his good name, because Penn's never so dull in anything else he works on. Pretty much like reading a bound up handful of old BBS-era textfiles describing how to be a successful cheat with all the usefulness of Steve Martin's advice on how to get a million dollars and never pay taxes. Don't know that I really wanted someone to train me at cheating in a game I don't play, but I wanted more than I got.

WATCHED 21, the Los Vegas advertisement that looked kind of neat in the commercials. I talked with some of the dealers about the movie last time I was there. They said if anything, it was pretty good for the town, since it got more people in thinking they could work the system the movie didn't actually explain to them.

But I was still surprised by how bad the movie was.

While it ran, I had a litany of complaints, but I thought writing them as it played was corny, and now, minutes after the film ended, it almost completely escapes me. The cheesy 80s score, the paper-thin plot twists, the just enough romantic subplot to fill in a spot in the trailer, the reams of voiceover material that tells us how great vegas is. I guess they just didn't sell the fantasy of winning a lot of money, since, like poker chips, it didn't seem like money. They don't use it for anything, and they don't seem to have really worked for or earned it, so there's no reason to care when things go south for the characters, as they inevitably must in order to fulfill the plot formula. There was one fun moment when one character took everything from another character, but that didn't last.

ALSO, this week I saw a bunch of Robot Chicken, which really loses its fun when it isn't fresh; the Rifftrax Live short 'Self Conscious Guy,' which was good; the start of season 3 of the excellent UK series Hustle, and I synced up the last segment of 2001 with Pink Floyd's 'Echoes,' which is like doing Wizard of Oz + Dark Side of the Moon in that it's kind of neat, but doesn't really work any more than how most songs will seem to fit most videos.

OH, and I cranked through most of the Google Reader I'd been ignoring for 3 or 4 weeks. Sweet Christmas I wish people proofread their posts. It's like the /film people are using a speech recognition program, for how often they get simple words and homonyms wrong. Also, even though nobody should have to be told this, if you're a journalist, or even if you're just pretending to be one on your blog, the fact that you're writing the story IS NOT the lead, least of all on your first day on the job. Unless maybe you're 9. Or 93. Yuck.

Therefore, I'm hanging out with Luke today.

Later, a compilation of videos and things I've worked on out on the internets.  But today: 

Rob: Hey, Hombre Ocho
Luke: Hey.
Rob: allons a la lune?
Luke: Pas a la lune!
Rob: aw...c'est magnifique, la lune. Tu vas aimer la lune!
Rob: allons!
Luke: Je ne veux pas aller a la lune.
Luke: Il va faire froid sur la lune.
Luke: Mais, ici, nous avons 60+ degres F.
Rob: je ne crois pas cela
Rob: la lune est super-chouette!
Rob: mais, pas "froid"
Luke: Aussi, la, il n'y a pas d'atmosphere.
Rob: oh! l'atmosphere! Tu et t'atmosphere!
Luke: Quoi?
Rob: "Bonjour! Je m'appelle Luke. J'aime respirer Tous! Les! Temps! Regardez-moi!"
Luke: Ouai ouai.
Luke: Tu l'aimes, aussi, mais tu ne le dis pas.
Luke: Tu as un amour discret avec l'atmosphere.
Luke: Mais tous le monde ecoutent tes respirations!
Rob: alors, je n'est pas une jeune fille
Luke: Ca ne fait rien.
Rob: allons a la lune, s'il vous plaît?
Luke: Tu as les poumons!
Rob: il y a gâteau.
Luke: Si tu as les poumons, to ne peuz pas aller a la lune (sans quelques chers choses a porter).
Rob: (le premier cadeau de la saison)
Luke: Je n'aime pas le gateau de la lune! Je ne suis pas un astronaut!
Luke: Je ne veux pas des enfants du fromage de la lune!
Luke: Je ne veux pas manger l'hamburger avec un paille!
Rob: arrete
Rob: je suis désolé
Luke: Je ne veux pas les astronauts, qui defient la force de gravité devant nos enfants!
Rob: je ne tu appellerais jamais un astronaute
Rob: c'est trop
Luke: Tu m'invites a aller sur la lune!
Rob: je ne pense pas
Luke: Tu es mechant.
Rob: j'ai pensé un vacance a la lune seraient amusement et un delight
Luke: Evidement, le 'matinee' a la Cedar Lee finit a seulement 2:00PM!
Luke: Il n'est pas amusant, un vacance sans oxygen.
Rob: aussi, aux Cinemark a 3h-quelquechose. J'ai un certificate!
Rob: je voudrais payer pour nous tous les deux, parce que j'ai vende un Dialysis cette annee
Rob: (il serait amusant pour un peu de temps, meme sans l'air)
Luke: (Je ne vous croix pas.)
Luke: Ou a 'Regal Crocker Park' a 3:10.
Rob: "Crocker Park?" Es tu certain qu'a assez l'atmosphere pour tu?
Luke: Peut-etre.  

Yay big

Everything you hear about that's eh, about this large, [gesture], is said to be 'the size of a deck of cards.' Unless it's really small, then it's 'as big as a pack of gum.' But you look back a few years, and you'll see the truth, which is that 'the size of a deck of cards' is a euphemism for 'as big as a pack of cigarettes.' I mean, you've seen cards, you know, but that's not what they're really thinking of when they say it.

Eventually, will things be 'as big as an ipod?' I bet they won't, because you'd have to get into a chat about what kind. The one I got the first time my car got robbed is about as big as one of those flat packs of gum, like stride or 5. This new hard drive I picked up is as big as a moleskine notebook. And my old ipod, the one I bought? That seems huge now. It's, like, the size of a deck of cards.

Sometimes it's the little things

Sometimes it's the little things the internets have to offer that make them all worthwhile. Eighteen years ago, when he was popular, I would have never dared to dream (for any number of reasons) that THIS message would one day arrive:

Hi, Rob Schultz.

Hammer (MCHammer) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Hammer's profile here:

http://twitter.com/MCHammer

Best, Twitter

However, I definitely remember my dad having the mistaken impression that I  was a MC Hammer fan. Maybe he knew something I didn't, all along...that Hammer was actually a fan of ME!

Work was hard, so we quit.

I've been playing a little bit of Type Racer lately.  So far, I'm averaging 95 wpm over 150 races.  Winning a race is a nice way to add a little sense of false accomplishment to your day.  The other reason I like it is that it's an oracle every now and then, giving you a paragraph to type that you need to read right now. I got this one last week: 

"Being able to quit things that don’t work is integral to being a winner. Going into a project or job without defining when worthwhile becomes wasteful is like going into a casino without a cap on what you will gamble: dangerous and foolish." -Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek

The week before I got that, I did some recording of improvisers improvising, based on the Random Article button on wikipedia. The idea was to release a daily improv scene via podcast. The hope was to give a variety of improvisers that I know a chance to play and since by now I know a bunch of 'em, it wouldn't be too much an inconvenience for anyone.

The week before I set out on this quest, I contributed to the hastily thrown together idea of De-Gifting. I like the (jokey) concept, but certainly I didn't or haven't yet committed hard enough to really drive the site around the internets. It'll come back around later, but it's probably less interesting to me right now than Burritos Against Terror was (and it's a shame that bit of performance art / political statementing / out and out hoaxery didn't get more than 24 hours to be perpetrated...) because, future topic for discussion #1: I'm not sure if I have any beliefs at the moment.

So a couple weeks after getting the site online, I'm sitting around spending a lot of time on syncing audio tracks and wondering if I shouldn't just cheat and cut up these scenes to be shorter. Or sharper. Or something. And along with getting the podcast thing going, I notice that the work vs. reward, and especially the opportunity costs, are not stacking up favorably.

What I learned is that this particular project is not as simple or as trivial as I had thought. There are some challenges and techniques specific to audio-only improv, and the more the cast rotates, the more cast members will meet these challenges the hard way. Without a practiced radio team, time is more a requirement than a luxury - we should be able to throw away scenes we've recorded if they're not up to scratch. You look at your Whose Line is it Anyway?, synonymous with improv in the public consciousness, and they record at least five times as much material as they air in order to make sure the stuff that goes out is good enough to make you doubt it's improvised.

Whose Line is short-form: they tell you what game they're about to play, and then they play it. My would-be show had its sights set on long-form, which begs a single suggestion from the audience and then explores and plays with it for an arbitrary length of time. Different games and characters may come and go, the goal isn't a laugh every 5 seconds, but over time the ideas that accumulate are often more satisfying. When played well, longform scenes can (should?) be as good as sketches. And a good sketch, like good standup, should not only explore an idea but do so immediately, not meander around the topic, circling like a dog preparing to nap.

A live audience will accept slower or weaker portions of an improvised show, because they can see it being created from nothing, and to be in the room when it happens gives an audience the not-entirely-inaccurate impression that they are a part of the creation taking place before them.

An audience that has been asked to take a moment to watch or listen to a prepared clip is not so forgiving. There is always the struggle to convince the audience that the clip is unscripted, maybe because the semiotics of TV and film tell us that nothing we're shown is by chance. And from there the question becomes 'if this might be, could be a scripted performance, why isn't it better?' Unless it is better, which only reinforces improv-doubt.

Topic for future discussion #2 is a theory of Trying that I'm stitching together. When I prepared a scene that I was in, and I was editing together the outro (all of the episodes would have the same introduction and ending, with the performers names cut into the closing segment), I found myself wondering if I couldn't just leave the names off because the scene wasn't that good. This is a problem.

There's no point in releasing work done for free that I'm reluctant to put my name on, but it's foolish to divert time and resources to create such a thing when there are other, better projects waiting in the wings. Time spent hitting a daily deadline would have been time not spent editing Amy's Prank, or would continue to be time not spent on the forthcoming podcast (which is very real, and scripted, and scheduled to be at least 10 installments starting next month.)

This post is long and light on jokes, but there's something ingrained in me that balks at quitting a thing just about before it's even gotten started. In this case, it happens to be the right move, and now I can explain why. We recorded about a dozen scenes, and I'll probably post some or all of them in the near future, though with less promotion and fanfare than they would have gotten as a de-gifting promotional tool.

I had planned to suggest that if comedy theory instead of actual comedy was a let-down for you, you check this out, but I'm pretty sure the sync manages to fail every which way, so you might want to try a different video clip.