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Stand-up Comedy

Last night my wife and I went to see one of our favorite comedians, Bill Burr. We both listen to Bill’s weekly podcast, and I’d been monitoring his website so as not to miss a show. He was at the Improv, in Arlington, Texas, this week.

Really fun show. The venue was cool. That makes three stand-up comedy shows for me. Not a lot. Years ago we saw George Lopez in Austin, before he “got big”. Then a few years ago we saw George Carlin in Fort Worth, just months before he died. It was so great.

As I’ve written about lately, I’ve been reading a lot of books by comedians. I guess I have only a certain capacity to take in heavy material. I can’t just read heavy-ass social/political stuff nonstop. I want to be informed about the world, but I also don’t want to be an angry, constantly-outraged, nervous wreck waiting for the economy to collapse, the water supply to fail, and the shit to hit the fan. It’s a balancing act, for sure.

Back to last night’s show.

As we pulled into the side-of-the-highway “outdoor mall” location of the Improv, which is designed to create the failed illusion of a small town square, we both commented on the nature of that failed attempt at authenticity. “People love this shit”, said my wife. The fake town square was filled with lots of national chain stores. Just like everywhere else.

When Bill Burr took the stage, the first thing he mentioned was that nothing in the mall is “real”. It “not Mom and Pop”. Hahahahahaha.

This was the first of two shows Bill would do last night. He did two shows the night before, and will do two more tonight. So three days, 2 shows in a row per night. It is on thing to get up and deliver the material and make people laugh, but to do it in such a way that the whole thing seems like a spontaneous performance is amazing. I realize he has years of experience, and it’s his job, but it’s really quite incredible how the best comedians can do this. I think it goes beyond the skill of bands/artists doing musical performance night after night. When you go see a band, you know they have done that song hundreds of time before, and it doesn’t matter. But to tell the same stories and jokes night after night and make it seem fresh during every show, that is serious skill.

Anyway, it was cool to go to the show and laugh hard enough to make my face hurt.

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Kooks

I just read that Exene, former singer for the band X, is a Truther/Conspiracy Nut/Kook.

No, I’m not just gonna pick on Exene.

I think it was better when we didn’t know what kind of lunatics made the music we like. I liked it back when Ted Nugent was just the Motor City Madman. I preferred not knowing that Billy Zoom is kind of an egotistical religious nut. I preferred not knowing that The Rev, from Reverend Horton Heat, is a Fox News type of guy.

Now, when you have someone like Jello Biafra — well — his politics have always been out there for all to see. So if you, like me, became a Jello fan based on his work with the Dead Kennedys, chances are it will not be a bummer for you to find out he is a liberal. You already knew and probably embraced that fact.

There has always been a tendency in the punk rock world for there to be some pretty extreme right wingers in there. I’ve written about his before, but yeah, it still kind of disappoints me. I mostly let it go, since most of those folks made some pretty shitty music. Also, I’m almost 50 and it would be pretty pathetic if it bothered that much.

Anyway —  the ability of artists to communicate directly with fans via social media — not always a good thing. Talented does not necessarily equal smart.

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X-Men Days of Future Past: Part One

The X-Men movie franchise is a mess, starting mostly with the 3rd X-Men movie, and moving through all the Wolverine movies and X-Men First Class.

There are some great scenes. The great Nightcrawler fighting in the White House at the beginning of #2 is fantastic. But really, they screw things up.

I can’t get into all the details here, but let me just list worst infractions.

1)Killed Cyclops in Episode 3.
2)Killed Jean Grey in Episode 3.
3)Killed Professor X in Episode 3.
4)Killed Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, after totally screwing up the character.
5)Chopped off Wolverine’s claws in The Wolverine, leaving him with his original bone claws.

Now in Days of Future Past, they have to somehow resurrect the 3 dead characters. Apparently they do this with Professor X by simply ignoring that fact that he died. Not sure about the other two, but apparently they come back to life at the end of the movie.

Also, they just bring back Wolverine’s adamantium claws. I guess we are to assume that Magneto is able to repair them. How knows.

A mess. Can’t wait to see how that studio fowls up the Fantastic Four reboot.

All that being said, I’m looking forward to seeing the new film. It looks like visually they got a lot of stuff right. It looks fun. I can’t wait to see the Quicksilver scene. It isn’t Brian Singer’s fault that after he left the series they messed it all up. So I’ll give him some room to fix it — isn’t that big of me?

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More thoughts on reading

I’m between books right now. That can be a scary place to be, as it requires a decision to be made. What’s next on the reading agenda. That’s right. I have an “agenda”. I just don’t  know what it is.

I was talking to a friend recently about what he is reading. He really likes post-apocalyptic science fiction, and by now he’s probably kind of a scholar in that area. He was wanted to branch out, and he really likes “hard” science fiction. I recommended Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Great book about the colonization and efforts to terraform Mars. Complex, full of really cool stuff.

It’s part of a trilogy, actually. I loved Red Mars. I got about halfway through book two, Green Mars, and just sort of lost interest. They are pretty long books.

I have very little ability to stick with long works of fiction, and I am kind of just done with series of fiction. I’ll still read short works of fiction, but I just can’t sink that much time into reading stuff that isn’t “real” anymore (I’m not counting comics here). In the late 80s I read this very long series of novels called the Wild Cards novels, about superbeings coming into being on Earth due to an alien virus. In the early 90s I read a lot of books based on Dungeon’s and Dragons. I spent a lot of time reading that stuff. It was enjoyable at the time, but I can barely remember anything about them. I turn 50 this year so I don’t have lots of time left. I can’t spend my remaining reading time on shit like that.

Reading takes a lot of time. I think most people don’t really read much because of the time involved. They say that people don’t read so much anymore. I see “studies” on the interwebs that say a huge percentage of Americans never read a book after graduating from high school or college. A couple of observations on this…first, I find this hard to believe, given the insane number of books produced every year. Who is reading these books? Cats? Ghosts? I’m not sure I buy it, even though I hold the collective intellect of our country in very low regard (see Fast & Furious movie series, Glenn Beck, and TMZ). Second, there are just a lot more entertainment choices these days. People can get their escapism with the internet, cable TV, movies, sports, blah blah blah. The book has a lot more competition than it did years ago.

As I think about this, I don’t think I even really buy the notion that Americans read more in the past. I don’t believe it. I think people are pretty much the same as they’ve always been.

Ughhh…I’m losing my focus…

I was thinking the other day about the potential number of books I can read in the rest of my life. Realistically. Not in Bob’s Speed Reading Fantasy World.  I usually read about 15 books a year. I am trying to get 25 in this year. 25 good ones. I’m about to turn 50. Let’s assume a rosy outlook and say I’ll live to 75. I’d like to live longer than that, but who knows. Further, let’s assume that in the last year of life you feel like shit and don’t feel like reading at all. So that gives me 24 years of reading. Further, let’s assume I keep reading at about the same rate — 15 books a year. That is 360 books. That’s it. That’s all. That doesn’t seem like very many books. I’m an educated person. Good grief! What’s really sad is that according to my Goodreads.com account, in which I have counted every book I’ve ever read (that I can remember, and I think I remember most of them), I’ve read as of this very moment 232 books. Damn. That’s just insanely sad. So I’m looking at a lifetime total reading of less than 600 books read.

I gotta do better than that.

My friend Jim, who is roughly the same age as me, reads about 100 books a year. Sometimes less, sometimes more. 100 is about his average. Clearly he reads a lot faster than me, but he also puts a lot of time into it. Assuming he also has 24 years of reading left, that is 2400 books (in addition to the thousands he’s already read). That’s still not really that much.

I will stick with 15-25 per year.

 

 

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A rant about…video games

I don’t really like video games.

I stink at them. I have a Wii. We have enjoyed playing Rock Band on it, but I’m not any good at it.  About 20 years ago, or more, I got a Super Nintendo setup. I played Super Mario Brothers, the game it came with. I really never played any other games very much. Then I got a Sony Playstation. I played a car racing game a bit, and a snowboarding game. Then I was done.

I have friends that work in the video game industry. That’s cool. No hate. I just don’t like video games.

When someone starts talking about a video game, part of my consciousness detaches from my physical form, hovers over the scene, and watches my eyes begin to glaze over, all the while monitoring the part of my consciousness remaining in my body to make sure I don’t rudely drop off to sleep. The extra-corporeal control consciousness makes my body say “cool” sometimes, makes me blink at appropriate intervals, and watches for the right time to get out of the conversation.

I think that classic, on-paper, role-playing games like D&D were my version of video games. Really, when I was growing up, most of the video games weren’t all that great. Pac Man, Asteroids, etc. Let’s be honest. Saying any of those are really “great” or entertaining is a stretch. Once you’ve blasted a few asteroids, maybe gotten through a few minutes of the game, you have crossed the line into incredible tedium.

I’m impressed with the graphics on modern video game, but it seems like a waste of technology. It seems like the games are still, all these years later, mostly about shooting people and blowing stuff up, with a little car racing thrown in. I guess it is great training for the military-industrial complex. I think the Shadow Government is really funding all the video game research, developing, and marketing. They trick parents into spending the money to turn their kids into future cyber-murderers.

Veering into conspiracy theory here, right…yeah…

As soon as I had to spend my own money on playing video games at the arcade, the video game fever subsided for me. There was no payoff. I didn’t feel self-actualized and validated by  getting my video game on. It didn’t give me the same sense of accomplishment that playing a Hobbit thief with a magic sword did. No comparison at all.

When I started this post, I thought I might make the “it’s a waste of time” argument. I decided to drop that. It’s a bad argument. Why? Because really, everything is a waste of time. Everything. Really. Regardless what we do in life, most of us will live, die, and in a generation or two we’ll be forgotten. The universe will go on, headless of our activities.

So go ahead and play a video game. Spend all your time reading. Whatever makes you happy. It matters not. Create your own meaning. If video games make you happy, play them.

 

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More Binge Reading

I continued my binge reading over the last week. I finished Marc Maron’s Attempting Normal. Today I was off work for a medical procedure (minor), and cranked through Maron’s first book, The Jerusalem Syndrome: My Life as a Reluctant Messiah. 

Actually, if Maron had another book, I would read it too. I really enjoyed these books.

I thought Attempting Normal was funnier, but the Jerusalem Syndrome was maybe a little more moving.

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The Next Two Weeks

For the next two weeks, I’ve decided to have a news blackout.

Not gonna watch the news. Not gonna read the news.

Barring major disaster or whatever, I am off the news grid as of right now.

Too much bummer shit out there. I know it’s out there. That’s all I need to know.

I’ll check the news on May 30 and decide if I want to “opt back in”.

Until then, retreating into the awesome and the good.

 

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On Binge Reading

I have a confession to make.

I’m a binge reader.

A month or two will go by with few or no books read. My attention is elsewhere. Maybe I simply can’t sit still long enough to read. Maybe it’s internet addiction — you know – checking Facebook, Twitter, and email continuously for two or three hours at at time in case someone responded to that hilarious post I made about Tea Party people or the latest meme.

Then, finally, I read. And I read and I read and I read. Usually I’ll hammer out four books in short order (which for me is a week or two because I’m a slow reader). If the weather is crappy (which we’ll discuss later), I’ll knock out a book per day.

I alternate between depressing real-world stuff about how the financial sector is screwing everyone and the politicians are all bought-off, books of funny and interesting stories by comedians, and real “literature” that I’ve been wanted to read but never really gotten around to reading. Lately I’ll throw in a graphic novel comic too, just to stoke my inner nerd fires.

I might order, in hard copy, one of Henry Rollins’ tour/road journal type books. I’ve got a cool book of skateboarding stories I’m about to start next. Right now I’m reading Attempting Normal, by comedian and podcaster Marc Maron. I read this kind of stuff on my Kindle.

Actually, other than books I really want to collect in hard copy format, most of my reading is done on the Kindle. That means that when the shit hits the fan and our petro-culture collapses, taking the internet, computers, Kindles, and most of modern life with it, I will not not have the physical artifacts of “the books” to prove what a smart person I think I am. However, most of us will be scrambling for operational hand-crank can openers and preserved food, as well as water without fracking fluid in it, so I guess my lack of books won’t matter too much.

This last winter we had some heavy snow/ice/shit weather here in the Dallas area. I work for a local municipality that never shuts down for weather. EVER. Except this last winter. It was actually bad enough that we shut down for a day or two. Combining that shutdown with the normal inclination to stay inside and do sedentary things when it is shitty outside, and I got a lot of reading done. Good ol’ binge reading.

Binge reading is a lot easier to get into if you don’t have cable TV. Of course, we have Netflix and Amazon Instant-Movies, but nothing can suck time away from reading hours more easily than cable TV. There’s always something retardedly compelling on. Shows about modern-day moonshiners. The History Channel’s exploration of Nazi Flying Saucers. Reality shows about the day to day lives of people who are famous for no reason. The problem with Netflix and Amazon, or most any streaming video service, is that you have to put some active thought into what you are going to watch, and eventually you have to make a decision. Kind of like back in the days when you’d have to go to the video store, scan the wall over and over again looking at all the movies you’ve seen there one hundred times before, and finally perhaps go home empty-handed because it was all just too much for you. Oh sure, you might have some Twizzlers to munch on, but no movie.

And it is this fact, this phenomenon, this inability to decide upon a movie to watch, in the absence of the mindless information-push of cable TV, that opens the Gates of Knowledge offered by binge reading. Oh sure, you have to decide on a book to read, but once you’ve done that (assuming it’s a good one!), you can read for hours without making any kind of decision beyond when to eat, sleep, or use the restroom.

The Kindle, I must admit, has increased my propensity for binge reading. I might have 15 unread books on my shelf, but if I’m on a binge of books by comedians, it is waaaaaay easy to just download that new book by Patton Oswalt. And I will. From the comfort of my couch, without even sitting up, enabled by the magic of WiFi and the interwebs and Amazon.com, I will download that new book with scarcely a second thought.

Eventually I’ll come down. Not sure why. Maybe my eyes get tired? Usually I think I get the feeling of “What am I doing? Has my life lost all balance? I can’t just lay here reading all week! What kind of person am I? ”  There’s a fine line for someone like me between what I would call productive, appropriate reading and doing nothing with my life.

It’s all about the ability to moderate, and apparently with regard to reading I lack that ability. And thus, I binge read.

 

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Last Night’s Cosmos

I find myself writing a lot about the new Cosmos series. I had to miss it a week ago, but last night it was once again great.

I think it is mostly written by Carl Sagan’s widow, Ann Druyan, and delivered masterfully by Neil deGrasse Tyson. Last night’s episode explored the interrelationship between the earth science and life sciences — how have and do geological processes of the planet (as well as things like the gravitational tug from other planets) effect the development of life on earth, and then how does life effect the planet.

Once again, Cosmos took the opportunity to clearly explain how we are fucking up the climate through our burning of fossil fuels, drawing parallels to the great extinction events of the past. I hope people are watching this show, and I hope at least a few people are actually paying attention and maybe deciding that Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are not the people from whom to seek scientific information.

Beautiful, powerful, moving television. So unusual!

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Dread Lord of Darkness

In celebration of today’s National Day of Prayer (technically tomorrrow’s, since I’m writing this a day early) I submit my favorite prayer ever! Yul Brynner, as Pharaoh, prays to his false idols to restore life to his son after the God of Moses unleashes plagues upon Egypt (killing the boy plus thousands of other children). 

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The Divide

I’m currently reading this book by Matt Taibbi, “the Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap“.

Taibbi is a great writer. He can make something like this topic entertaining rather than simply maddening, which is pretty incredible. If you thought we were/are getting screwed by the financial sector, this book adds an entire new layer to it the issue, as it compares the lax treatment of corporate super-criminals to the harsh, draconian bullshit enforcement and punishment of petty criminals — and in many case people who aren’t even committing

book!

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My favorite Podcasts

In no particular order…my favorite podcasts.

I listen to a lot of podcast during my workdays. I like funny ones and also informative ones.

Unless otherwise noted, all of these podcasts will at least occasionally use profanity. Use headphones at work. Actually, there is probably only ONE on the list that is work-safe.

Edit 8/13/2015: Adding the Henry & Heidi podcast, from Henry Rollins. It is mostly just Henry telling stories to his longtime assistant Heidi, but Henry has some good stories. Lots of them.

The Monday Morning Podcast – comedian Bill Burr. Usually Bill and a mic and a recorder. Good.

Pep Talks with the Bitter Buddha – comedian/actor Eddie Pepitone. Love Eddie’s show.

the Nerdist – good podcast – various comedy and nerd topics and guests – by Chris Hardwick.

the Dana Gould Hour – comedian Dana Gould and various guests. Well-produced and thought-out podcast. Dana likes to talk about monster movies.

Point of Inquiry – podcast from the Center for Inquiry, publisher of the Skeptical Inquirer.

Hour of Slack – radio show/podcast from the Church of the Subgenius. Praise “BOB”.

the KunstlerCast – podcast from James Howard Kunstler, who writes about city design, new urbanism, peak oil, and various policy issues.

A Small American City – by Duncan Crary, former producer/interviewer on the Kunstlercast. Duncan’s podcast is about the small city he lives in. He is an expert podcast producer – his show sounds really good. This one is about 99% safe for work. I can’t remember any cursing on it, but I guess it is possible.

The C-Realm Podcast – by KMO. Lots of topics on this podcast. KMO has been podcasting a LOOONG time. Prolific.