DSO Records: Trivia & Music

If you’ve been following my twitter stream or have spoken with me in the last day or two, you’ll know that I lost my job this week, which really sucks on one level, but on another seems to have opened up a door or two.

To wit: If anyone has some samples of a good book proposal they could share with me, I would really appreciate it. I have to write one this weekend, and it could be a reasonably lucrative thing (for me and for those around me) if I do it right.

After I walk out of this place tomorrow afternoon, I plan on going out with anyone who’s around and interested for two-three-nineteen drinks, and then sleeping until I wake up, and then getting back to work all weekend on this project.

There’s also a few other things I’ve been sitting on until I had some time, and well, now’s the time:

• I do want to restart the trivia podcast, but in video form. It seems to make more sense than just the audio, even though audio is what I know. I know some people who have way more expertise in this than I do, but if you have any ideas, now’s the time to chime in & let me know what you’d like to see or what you might be able to do. I have some ideas myself, but they’re not quite the kind of thing I can do by myself anymore. Frankly, that’s a jump that scares me.

• I wouldn’t mind expanding the website a little bit. We’ve been doing the (very occasional) corporate trivia gig, and I wouldn’t mind standardizing and organizing that, and there is the next album of music just sitting there, aobut 75% finished, on my multitrack recorder. I wouldn’t mind just getting it off the convyor belt, at least. Because that’s what quality is all about, right? Shoveling crap out the front door just to make room for the next thing.

• During the stretches where I don’t have a regular job, I know my discipline changes into some seriously unmanageable beast. I find I obsess over things that don’t matter while the meaningful and important parts of my life go directly to shit. I’m going to need help from you (yes, you) to keep me going. I can provide more than the same in return; I’m a sweet and thoughtful guy, and despite the fact that I seem to not be able to keep a job, my loyalty and generosity are beyond cavil. I think.

Leave a comment, or email me. Take advantage of my misfortune and current situation as much as I’m trying to. Buy me low. Sell me high.

Happy [mumblemumble] birthday to one of my childhood crushes, Deborah Harry.

It’s possible that there’s a site someplace collecting all the web tributes to George Carlin out there, but I ain’t gonna be the one. It would take years. I haven’t seen a website in the last week, political or philosophical, self-obsessed or link-whorey, preteen or geezer, that didn’t have something to say about his dying “passing away.”

That said, the title of this piece is the same as one of last night’s team names, so here’s Jay Smooth dropping a short eulogy to “one of the biggest influences on [his] understanding of everything,” while simultaneously gently taking the piss out of will.i.am.

Yes, I said piss.

There are a million obituaries and recollections of George Carlin going around today, all of them heartfelt and richly deserved. He was a hell of a thinker, and a gleeful optimist who covered his idealism under a thickly-applied layer of murk. He was incredibly prolific, as cunning a lunguist as you’ll ever see on a stage, smarter than you or me, bold in the ways we all would do well to be bold, and deeply committed to and passionate about his life’s work. He outlived Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, his two contemporaries who were the closest thing he had to true peers (I’d include Lily Tomlin in that list, but she got out of the game a quarter century ago), and a lot of what I think of as acceptable or unacceptable in society I cribbed at an impressionable age directly from listening to his records over and over and over (and over and over) again.

I crib his punchlines when I can’t think of my own every day. There are people who think I’m funny because I’ve said things Carlin said first, and I know I’m not alone on that. In fact, I suspect I’m in the majority.

Carlin’s books always left me cold, but that might only be because by the time he started writing them, he’d started becoming an old crank, and I hadn’t gotten there yet. When I do, I fully expect that those books will signify the same way his stand-up does for the adolescent in me.

Did I love the man? Hell, no. There’s a line between being the smartest jackass in the room and being the only smart person in the room, thus giving you license to be a jackass. George didn’t always know where that line was.

But his influence transcended comedy, and if the archetype of the Standup Philosopher is to persist (and where the fuck is anyone we know getting our philosophy from these days, if not from comedy?), then Carlin was a fuckin’ prophet. His influence runs long and wide, and his echoes can be heard in every working American comic with any chops at all. Will we miss him? Shit, yes. But he left behind a considerable body of work, and he ain’t exactly going to fade into a couple of pages of a book on a shelf someplace.

So, for George: Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker & tits, and I hope to hell Joe Pesci is taking care of you in the next world.

Update: I just love this quote:

“The best afterlife for me would be to be able to sit comfortably and watch the world on a kind of heavenly CNN,” he said. “To be able to have my remote and say, ‘Okay, there’s an uprising in Spain. Let’s watch that. Or to watch China finally take over the fucking world. Because there’s a billion of those motherfuckers and they’re going to eat our lunch. I would love to get the thousand-year view on the decline of the European birthrate or the “Muslimization” of Europe that’s talking place; the explosion of Latin American culture in the western part of the United States.’ Just sit back and watch. India and Pakistan, both, have nuclear weapons and they fuckin’ hate each other. I’m telling you, somebody is going to fuck somebody’s sister and an atom bomb is going to fly. And I say fine. You know? I just like the show. This world is a big theater in the round, as far as I’m concerned, and I’d just love watching it spin itself into oblivion. Tune in and watch the human adventure. It’s a cursed, doomed species but it’s just interesting as hell. That’s what I want heaven to be. And if it’s not like that, then fuck it. I’ll just kill myself.”

• In Newburgh, New York, a man broke into a woman’s house, cut a hole in her couch, and hid there until she came home and sat on the couch, discovering him. Charges are pending.

• After her husband died of prostate cancer, Rosie Swale-Pope, 61, decided she wanted to run around the world. She’s almost done, having run 20,000 miles and dealing with a breast cancer scare, an axe attack, being hit by a bus, double pneumonia, and twenty-nine marriage proposals:
  

  Her many marriage proposals were probably from men who fancied the cart, not me, she joked. “I think most of them were simply because I looked strong and handy for hauling logs and things. I had nine in Poland alone.”

I never promised I wouldn’t overdo it with Match Game news, and two releases in one week is a good start. Besides, the full cast seems to be set, at least for the moment. Sarah Silverman & Norm Macdonald are anchoring the panel, which has apparently been set to include Niecy Nash, Scott Thompson, Rashida Jones and Super Dave Osborne.

Nash and Thompson are great; in fact, to my thinking, they fit better within this framework than even Silverman and Macdonald do. Rashida Jones I don’t know as well, as I don’t watch The Office, but fine, benefit of the doubt, clearly she must have some chops, etc.

Super Dave, though? Super Dave Osborne? In character? Does anybody remember his show? Do you remember how awful it was? The nonexistent pacing, the complete lack of punchlines, the monotony, and that was 20 years ago. I understand he comes from comedy royalty, but — color me skeptical. Besides, I think they really should leave a slot or two open for rotating guests, especially non-comedians who can roll with these things. A Matt Lauer, a Richard Hatch, a Liz Hasselbeck, an Anderson Cooper, people like that. (You just know Joel McHale wanted in on this.)

And comic-without-portfolio Andrew Daly gets to try out the long microphone. He’d be fine. That’s a safe choice.

Buzzerblog is pleased with the lineup, but I think they’re merely closer to having it together.

Updates as I find them. You’re welcome.

I’ve taken the last few years to celebrating Bloomsday, though this year I’ve been wake-to-drop crazy this week, and it flew past me like an arrow aimed elsewhere. Tonight I’ll celebrate it at Dempsey’s, but right now, I present this excellently funny video of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett at the Pitch’n'Putt (beware, there’s a bit of cussing in it):

And in a semi-related story, big ups to Tiger Woods, who won the U.S. Open on one leg and has now shut it down for the rest of the year. Who said golf was a sport for wusses.

Goodbye Brett Somers and Charles Nelson Reilly, hello… Sarah Silverman and Norm Macdonald.

Still no host or anyone else on the panel, but still, they needed to have those two chairs filled early on, so I’m glad they’ve at least made a decision.

What this says about the tone of the show bothers me a little bit. Not that either of them is unfunny, or are two left feet in the improv department (though I admit I have my concerns about Silverman; her standup act doesn’t change much from year to year these days), but they do have a history of not fully connecting with a full mainstream audience. I just have this vision in my mind of Macdonald going off the deep end one show and answering “PENIS” to every blank and derailing the show. He does stuff like that everywhere he goes, and I can’t shake it.

I’m sure my concerns are completely unfounded, and the rest of the panel will provide genial and accessible counterpoint to these two, letting them run wild over the set the way Brett and Charles did back in the glory days of this show, and the writers, whose setup questions were the real backbone of the show, will deliver fantastic questions that lend themselves to multiple interpretations and are still softballs for the panel. And I’m sure a large part of my suspicion is just me being possessive of the legacy of the single greatest crap game show in the history of crap. And I know, above all else, that the essence of comedy is danger, and Silverman and Macdonald were both hired because of their ”they-said-what?” factor.

But the first time Sarah Silverman writes “niggers” on a card and slips it into the slot, I may die a little inside.

Just when I thought that we as a nation had finally pulled ourselves from the fetid, brainless ditch of “reality”-based game shows, and proud-of-our-idiocy PSAT-fests like Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader, shame orgies like Moment Of Truth and no-skill flip-a-coin outfits like Deal Or No Deal had hit their collective zeniths and plateaued or (Insahallah!) begun their decline, and we had begun to enter a better age, where competition programs had a whiff of intelligence, or barring that, originality, or barring that, at least a recognizable style, just when I thought we were out of a dark age and the light of quality was nigh, a show like Million Dollar Cat goes into production.

I think I understand the Unabomber now.

Idlewild Books is a new travel bookstore at West 19th Street and 5th Avenue, and their gimmick (if it’s a gimmick - yeah, I guess it is) is that they group their entire inventory by geography, instead of by reference, maps, local guides, cooking, literature or some other completely arbitrary setup.

“I was in a chain bookstore and realized I would have to go to five different sections to get what I needed—a travel guide, a map, a language book, a novel,” [store manager Daniel del Vecchio] noted. “At Idlewild, everything will be shelved by country, and in the case of the United States, by state—that way people will be able to browse according to the place of their interest.”

For example: You want stuff about Cuba? The Cuba section has guides, cookbooks, dictionaries, diplomacy handbooks, sheet music from Buena Vista Social Club, and novels by Alejo Carpentier, Pedro Juan Gutiérrez and my hero Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

I think this is a capital idea, and I hope it flies.