Most of that has improved.  If you want to be elegant and exclusive, you still have to head on over to Vimeo or any of the other more esoteric video-sharing services. But video on YouTube looks much, much better.

I originally had the videos hosted by Revver.com, with the hopes that everyone would watch them, that my viewers would view (and even click on) the ads that Revver presented, and I would make a couple of bucks.

But as proud as I was of the videos, I’m no Ze Frank.  I made about $12 in the months after I posted the videos on Revver, and then, in the past couple of years, Revver sort of imploded.  After hoping they would pull themselves out of their funk, I’ve given up.  I’ve given in.  And now I’m uploading everything to YouTube.

I’ve already uploaded Film #1, Leaves. More to come in the next few days.

Enjoy.

Tonight I performed in Jamie King’s O.M.F.G. show at The Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre as part of their Spank series. Jamie is one of the writer-producers in Friends with Deficits, my regular sketch group, and he took a bunch of material of his that we’d already performed and glued it together to make a show.

Working on the show was a good lesson.  Most of the sketches he only tweaked a bit here and there; one got completely re-written.  He introduced the scenes in character, using interstitial material written in blog form for his web site.  Bits got added or dropped because of time or technical constraints.  Nothing ended up exactly as it started out.  And somehow we had thirty-five tight little minutes of funny.

So Jamie didn’t have exactly this show in mind when he wrote his first O.M.F.G. sketch;   things evolved.  The scene that changed the most (called, variously, Double Talk, Fem-Speak, and finally, Crazy Ears) was cute but didn’t really make sense to us or the audience, and Jamie completely re-wrote it, trying to make both the underlying idea and the “funny” clear.  And along the way, we got one of our best lines (something I won’t repeat about honey bees and a woman’s, um, parts).

What was the lesson?  Even genius writers have to cover costume changes.   (Thus the Porter in Macbeth.)  When you set out to write a sketch–or a show–you never really know what it’s going to look like in the end, so don’t strain yourself trying to write comedy gold into every single line of the first draft.  The funniest, most memorable material may come out of your quest to fix a structural problem.

It’s a real relief.  I used to think scripts came to writers in a single burst of inspiration that could somehow be sustained for a hundred pages.  With every thing I write or work on it becomes clearer that it’s much more of a step-by-step slog, with occasional flashes of light. Sometimes you’ve got to cover a costume change, and sometimes your brilliant idea just doesn’t make sense.  So you re-write.  You paste things together.  And eventually (if you keep at it with faith and perseverance)  you end up with a book, a play, a movie.  And if you’re good, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.   Even if some of the parts came in the door with nothing but a flimsy excuse.

Like a lot of “breakthrough” stories people tell, this really only makes sense if you’re going through the struggle yourself. You have to have intimate knowledge of that devil inside you that keeps telling you to be like someone else or to play to other people’s expectations. (Often you imagine these expectations, but that’s another story) And you have to learn technique, just like everyone else, so you have the strength and versatility to support what you want to do in your own idiosyncratic way. And you have to do the work.

In a few weeks, at the George Street Playhouse, Mark will perform in Roger Is Dead, written and directed by Elaine May. Ms. May is a seminal comedy genius who started with the Compass Players, made her first big splash with Mike Nichols (you can see them in this live commercial for GE), and who went on to write screenplays (Primary Colors, Heaven Can Wait) and direct movies (The Heartbreak Kid, Ishtar). And did I mention Marlo Thomas is in the cast?

I’m itching to do my own work. I got a sweet little taste this week performing with improv group Punching Hal, and I want more. But until I get something I can sink my teeth into, I’ll study the work of masters.

You are careful to divulge as little content as possible about your shows. Is this to keep the dream alive?
I am very keen on the element of surprise. You can see this throughout my productions. In an open-air show, if I want to make a strong image appear on the right, I distract the public’s attention to the left. I hypnotise them so that nobody, even when it is in the open, understands how an enormous machine could appear from the left so suddenly. It’s like the big bang: it has appeared, that’s all. I value this effect tremendously: it’s like when you give somebody a present they’re not expecting and they are overcome. I hold the theatre in my arms and wish to offer it to people just at the right moment. I believe that this almost childish desire to please people by surprising them is a deciding factor in my work […]

 
Good Art is Hard.  We all know that.  But I wish that the basics, like truth, causality, and structure; surprise, tempo, and balance… were taught properly in school, just as we’re taught good grammar and a sound vocabulary.   Oh…never mind.
 
But, really, I’m not complaining.  Really.  I lost three hours to these bad shows; but one of them was odd and hilarious and fun.  And the thought of that little girl giant makes me happy beyond words; I mean, my sound vocabulary doesn’t half do it justice.  Not half.
 
Maybe someday I’ll get to see it for myself.  Maybe someday you’ll be there, with me.

Then I walked out on to 42nd street and headed for the McDonalds.  I ordered an apple pie.  The counter man corrected me, asking: “Two apple pies?”  Sure.  It was a buck forty-two.  I thought it was ninety-nine cents, but no matter.  I gobbled the first pie standing inside the entrance, holding my bags.  Then I went out on to the street and looked at the cops on the horses.  I wanted to ask them would they protect me if the Cloverfield monster really came.  I mean, what a stupid question, of course they’d try.  But they’re not idiots.  We all know what happened seven and a half years ago.  Trying isn’t enough.  Still, it occurred to me to ask.  And I found myself throwing a dollar in the cardboard box in front of the homeless guy at the base of the stairs on the NRQW platform.  He was holding a cat, which needed a bath, but it looked healthy, if tired.  I felt pity, or affection.  And I was thankful for the guy upstairs with the drum machine and the synthesiser; and watching a mother and her adult daughter stilt down into the station on their high heels was particularly sweet.

I waited on the NRQW platform for only a minute or two before the train came.  I had time to eat my second pie, and see the sign.  “DANGER Third Rail is Alive.”  Well, obviously.  It was a paper sign, taped to a steel support beam.  Maybe they’d been doing track work and the power had been off.  And when you turn it back on, you hang a sign, so everybody knows.

The movie scared the daylights out of me.  I wish I hadn’t seen it alone.  It’s much nicer to have her to comfort when something awful happens, holding hands tight as if you could squeeze the fear out, crush it into a safe, tingling nothing.  It would have been good, too, with someone else, just a friend, both of us pushed back into the synthetic velour of our seats, each tentatively aware of the other, wondering: is he scared?  More, or less, than me?

The movie didn’t make complete sense.  Liberties were taken.  An awful lot of power stayed on.  And the subway tunnels were unreasonably dim–your eyes adjust, after all.  And what about that Third Rail?  Maybe it’s off, maybe it isn’t, but Every New Yorker would debate the matter before hazarding a stroll on the tracks.

And just how long does a video camera battery last these days, anyway?

But the joy of the movie was that it left so many other more interesting questions unanswered.  Scary stories always do.   Cloverfield is smart enough to have the characters speculate because they’re scared, and their lives are at stake, and something has got to make sense.  But while they speculate fruitlessly–no lucky guesses help explain the
story–we all want to know: where did it come from?  Why is it here?  What Does It Want, for God’s sake, and what’s it going to do next?  We, the audience, only get an answer to the last one, and hardly a complete answer at that.

Seeing a scary movie with someone else is comforting.  It draws you together.  But walking out of the movie by myself I found my world brighter and more precious–bless the cat and the man with the box!–and I had time to stop and watch myself feel that way.  And I felt the freedom to write it down without hurrying off somewhere else.  And so, I hope, I have shared a little bit of the feeling with you.

Or would it have been better if we’d held hands?

I don’t know.

Then my editor, a free, bare-bones version of Avid’s Xpress, stopped working: if I tried to export a movie, the program would disappear.  No error message, no error log.  I got the program for free, and Avid said they wouldn’t support it, and anyway they stopped even offering the download, so now (at least) I can’t re-install it.  I’m sure it broke because of some automatic Windows Update or another, but I wasn’t about to start selectively rolling back O.S. patches; who knows what else would break?

The completed movies sat there on my computer’s hard drive.  I’d made a draft of the DVD, but it didn’t feel right. 

I felt guilty.  I acted in a show; I still felt guilty. 

I started studying with Terry Schreiber, and I felt less guilty. 

I took another show. This time it was a lead, with page after page of quasi-Chekhovian monologue mixed with paranoic evangelical raving.  And in class Terry had me doing multiple scenes, and wild, hairy acting exercises.  I forgot to feel guilty, except in odd moments when I fought with someone I love; and then I gloomily rehearsed my all my failings, right down to my irregular flossing schedule.

Hanukkah passed, and Christmas. 

I reviewed the draft of the DVD.  It wasn’t bad.  The new sound mix on Professor F’s Party was actually pretty good.  The story didn’t make any more sense, but at least you could hear what people were saying.  And the outtakes–not bad.  Not as good as those ones on the Internet with Tim Conway.  Sorry.

I made some copies.  I put on labels.  And on December 28th, 2007, using a months-old list of addresses, I sent them out.

At long last.

I’m sure there are people I’ve neglected.  If you’re one of them, and see this blog post before I contact you, just write or call and I’ll pop one in the mail.  And sooner or later I’ll get the bug to make another movie or ten, and I’ll start the whole thing over again.

And, by the way: Happy New Year.

I think I know who made it. I’ve seen them hanging out on the street with their crazy choppers. Sometimes they even ride them.

Making a bicycle like this takes guts, persistence, and love, because: how could you make a bicycle like this, and not expect to ride it?

I don’t spend any time at all with the Black Label bicycle club. I don’t talk to them on the street, even when they admire my girlfriend’s pit bulls. But I like what they make.

Selected mad bicycles: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Wikipedia article on tall bikes.

Documentary on Black Label

On the way home from today’s round of auditions, I ducked into Union Market and bought artichokes (six babies and one full-sized) and a half a pound of wild arctic char, which is a distant cousin of salmon, but with lighter flesh.  When I got home, I turned and simmered the artichokes according to James Peterson’s Vegetables, and then dressed them with olive oil, lemon juice, and salt.  The fish I baked in a 400F oven, putting it on a square of parchment paper with a bit of butter, salt, and pepper; I pulled it out right when it began to flake, which couldn’t have been more than ten minutes, squeezed some lemon on it, and sprinkled it with more salt.

The fish was perhaps the best I’ve had; the flesh was tender, fatty, and remarkably sweet. 

And artichokes are always lovely, but these tasted even better because of the novelty of their presentation.  I’ve eaten those vinegary artichoke hearts from a jar, and Miriam, a restaurant in my neighborhood, serves grilled haloumi cheese on a bed of vegetables that include chopped artichokes (very good), but until following Peterson’s directions I’d never had an artichoke that was so easy to eat.  (You remove the choke from the full-sized thistle before it gets to the table, and baby artichokes are so tender that you can eat them whole–although dainty folks might want to quarter them with a knife and fork first.)

I had never thought to serve artichokes with fish.  It’s what ended up in my shopping basket, and then I discovered that Peterson recommended putting the two together.  I think he’s right.  At any rate, this particular combination turned out a stunner.  The clean, earthy, slightly astringent, green taste of the artichokes emphasized the natural sweetness of the char.

It was also, I think, an outstanding piece of fish.  The more I cook, the more I appreciate good ingredients, especially when I’m preparing something simply.  No amount of marinating or careful cooking fix a mediocre piece of lamb or steak when you’re grilling.  The same is true of fish when you’re baking it.

Sadly, I never expect to have anything this good in a restaurant.  Certainly not in an American restaurant.  In my experience, no kitchen technically capable of putting out plate after plate of properly cooked fish will be allowed to present anything so simple.  Oh, maybe it could happen in a Japanese restaurant.  Maybe if I came up with the $300 to eat at Masa, I’d change my mind.

But then, I wouldn’t have made it myself.

Globe artichoke - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Union Market

Amazon.com: Vegetables: Books: James Peterson

Miriam Restaurant & Wine Bar

MASA

I’m struggling to finish the Ample Catnap 10 Films DVD.  It’s the outtakes, which should be long enough to be amusing, but not overstay their welcome.  Without the hard deadline of releasing a film each week, I’ve allowed myself to linger over the edit, imagining that by taking longer, I’ll make a more perfect cut.

Actually, it’s kind of boring.

When bored, we have three options, right?  We can

1. accept the boredom, and try to live with it,
2. abandon what bores us, and try something else, or
3. raise the stakes.

I think most of us choose some combination of the three.  And the third one is the hardest to faithfully execute.

My answer has been to set tiny artificial deadlines.  I’ll make a list of edits, and complete them in a half an hour.  Then I’ll walk away for a day or two, watch it again, and make another list of edits.

Today is St. Patrick’s Day.  Over sized green hats abound.  I wish I’d had my camera with me, but I had left it sitting on top of the computer, having uploaded yesterday’s pictures of the storm.

DAILY MONSTER : OPEN SOURCE BLOT 01

Is a tribute to Stefan G. Bucher’s monster-drawing performance art project, which may be found here, and which I first blogged about some time ago.

Amongst the tributes I was particularly taken with was Jonas Forslund’s monster bug.  It’s the fourth one down.