It's Everything That Is Connected And Beautiful

I find most art books to be utterly uninteresting and unengaging. I think it's the skill with which the art is photographed and reproduced on the page that puts me off. It's glossy, slick and perfect and it almost always bears no resemblance to what the artist created. There really is no substitute for being in the same physical space as a work of art, for sharing the same air and light as this thing. It becomes more real for me and I feel a real sense of communion that I never find from a reproduced image on a page.

Art in a book is separated from reality and the limits of the physical world. It becomes eternal and perfect, and I hate it. I hate it for the same reason that I am utterly bored by Superman. Because it is so removed, so unassailable and so fundamentally alien. It bores me.

But when I can see a piece of art, see the light reflected off of it with my own eyes, that is something very different. I never feel jaded when I stand face to face with a work of art, even the really shitty ones. Ultimately, I find beauty in the flaws. When I can see the grain of a canvas, or the irregular swirl in a brushstroke, or an errant drop of paint that landed on the picture in defiance of the artist's wishes, I see myself, and my flaws, and I find it very reassuring. We live in a flawed, beautiful world and seeing these works or art, and all of their cracks and blemishes, reminds me of just how beautiful this imperfect world can be.

There's also an impermanence to these objects. And they are, after all, simply objects. Paint, cloth, wood, bronze, clay, etc. These things begin as unremarkable pieces of stuff, and through human industry and invention become transcendent. That's fucking beautiful. But they remain things, existing in our physical world, and all things are impermanent. Things break down, they disappear. Each moment they are on display, each moment they exist, brings them one moment closer to their inevitable end. I work in an archive and the one thing I've picked up is that everything we try to preserve will one day perish from this earth, no matter what we do. Lock it up in a sealed, UV-protected vault at the Louvre all you want, but someday we will have to live in a world without the Mona Lisa. That's fucking beautiful. That's life. It's sad, and terrible and tragic and beautiful. It's perhaps the best metaphor for the human condition that I have ever found, and I'm constantly looking.

I just wanted you all to remember that I do have a soul as you listen to the hate-filled piece of shit I recorded at Othello's this week. And to all my friends who stuck around for the whole show, I apologize for throwing such a weird and embarrassing hissy. And thanks for coming out anyway, I hope you had a good time.

Winston Smith's Five Minute Hate

And go to the Oklahoma City Art Museum, dammit.

You've Made It Pretty Clear What You Like

I have very little to say today. I will point out that I passed the one year mark at my job last week. Didn't see that one coming. And one of my bosses wants to come see me perform sometime. I just hope she respects me in the morning.

Check out last night's funny trainwreck!

And I Swear There's Something Evil In The TV

Anyone who has talked to me in the past six months probably knows just how much I like the show Heroes. It's awesome. Watch it. Watch it and then talk to me about it. Seriously.

I love that show for many reasons, not the least of which is Sylar. He has got to be one of the creepiest, most engrossing villains I've ever seen in literature. That's right, I just called a network television series "literature." Deal with it. It's got me thinking about villains, monsters, and antagonists in general. They're a key part to any story. Without villains and their evil machinations, a story is just a series of occurrences. Boring.

When I was in fourth grade we put on a play based on the story of Pecos Bill. There was something wrong with the script, and even I could tell. It took a while to figure out what it was, but eventually I realized that there was no villain. There was no Shere Khan, no Captain Hook, no big ass shark. We had a tornado for a villain. Boring.

I've tried to inject a little antagonism into my comedy. I really can't believe that it took me this long to see the importance of challenging an audience. I'm not there make friends, after all.

Anyway, blah blah blah. I've got a show on Tuesday and Wednesday next week. Blah blah blah. Oh, also, I've got a video in the Tenth Annual Open Film And Video Screening at the IAO this Friday. Seven o'clock, five dollars, eighth and Broadway in downtown Oklahoma City. Good times.

Until then, feast your eyes on one of my greatest award-not-winning performances ever. Watch it. [Late Edit: Yes, Laura, there was no audio. Thanks for letting me know. I've reposted the performance, with audio, and with a clip of me giving a short, shitty interview at the end. "Enjoy."]

Love Is Watching Someone Die

I felt a lot of love tonight. My friends came out and listened to jokes I had told less than 24 hours before. And they still laughed. The audience wasn't quite as into it, and I don't blame them. I need to write stuff that's more accessible. Really, I don't know what I was thinking. I came up with a minute on a Catholic strip club and I actually thought "this is it! This is universal! This will win them over!"

I just don't understand people.

Listen and/or download it - April 18 2007

You Think You're Dialed In? Someone Has To Win. And You Know What That Means? That Means Someone's Got To Lose. It's Probably You.

Last night I gave a shitty performance. I blame no one but myself. I fucked it up. Pure and simple. I can shake that off pretty easily. I might just have to put down Dog Phone, though. God help me, I love that bit so much, but no one else does. C'est la guerre. I actually got heckled, which was a first for me. I don't see it as a failure, though. I learned some important lessons about taking the performance seriously, and about not expecting too much from the audience. Especially when they've had a few good hours to get drinks in themselves. Like I said, it's pretty easy to shake off.

Tonight at the Loony Bin I gave a great performance. It just wasn't good enough, though. Now that's a shitty feeling. It's times like these that I wish I had never gotten good grades or done well on standardized tests. I'm used to exceeding expectations, and I'm so conditioned to judge myself based on the external validation that comes from other people judging me and deeming my actions awesome. That's what the laughter is all about, right? But let me tell you, comedy is not a standardized test. It isn't a research paper on international media systems. There are no guarantees that your hard work will pay off. It is totally subjective. At the same time, I don't want to downplay the achievements of the (at least) 8 people who were found funnier than me tonight. I got beat. It happens. I'm proud of all my friends that made it to the finals at the Loony Bin, and I'll be there on Sunday to cheer them on. But the overachieving Phi Beta Kappa super-nerd within me is having a nice little identity crisis. And one of the nice things about comedy is that until recently, that square-tied little fucker didn't even know what I was up to. Each time I went up I got laughs or I didn't, and that was it. But in the past couple of weeks it's become about competition. And yeah, I know my perspective would be different if I were one of the 8 finalists competing on Sunday. Well, I'm not sure, actually. I always look forward to performing, even at a sketchy south town strip club. But I was fucking dreading my 5 minutes at the Loony Bin tonight.

Oh well, it's over now. And by the way, I am not fishing for compliments here, nor do I want anyone to try and make me feel better about any of this. I am quite confident in my ability to make people laugh, and I do not want to feel better about losing. I want to cling onto my disappointment and frustration like the last blanket in the Siege of Leningrad.

After all, I've earned it.

Twenty-Twenty-Twenty Four Hours To Go. I Wanna Be Sedated.

It's times like these that I'm ashamed to have strident, unwavering and extremist political views. Because it is people like me that, from time to time, do their damnedest to ruin something fun for everyone else. This time, the target is television's "24."

The charges include collusion in PNAC's wet dreams and unfairly depicting Muslims as terrorists. I wonder if these people have ever watched the show.

TwentyFour is a hyperbole. Yes, threats to America are more dramatic on television than they are in the real world, and yes, jihadi salafist martyrs make pretty good boogyemen for American television viewers. That doesn't make make the show a neo-con Chick Tract. It is easy, though, to focus on a couple of hot-button ideas like evil brown men and dirty bombs, but that simplistic view ignores a great deal about the whole. For one, the show takes a dim view of preemptive military adventures. It takes an even dimmer view of large oil companies and Presidents who lie to the American people and claim extra-Constitutional powers. And just so we're clear, racism and religious intolerance are cast in a poor light as well. But to get to all that, you've got to actually watch the episodes, perhaps even an entire season, before making a judgment.

And let me be clear, I'm not saying that people shouldn't take entertainment seriously. After all, I'm writing my thesis on biker films, so it would be a bit hypocritical of me to say "meh, it doesn't matter." Television does matter. It reaches almost as many Americans as water, and what it says says a lot about the culture that makes and consumes it. Of course, what we read into our entertainment, and how we read it, says a lot about us as well. If we're going to examine ourselves, let's do it right, otherwise it's just trainspotting. Oh, and I wrote a couple of papers about TwentyFour a while back. Feel free to take a look:
British Culture and spooks
Family, Fear, Paranoia and Revenge in 21st Century America: A Cultural Analysis of 24