non tsunami post

for all the thought i've had about this stupid wave this week it was nice to slip away a bit and experience a blank mind unoccupied by tragedy.

i just got home from a contact improv jam with the cupholders and some other people. it was really good. we never really talked all that much, just improvised a bunch of stupid dancing and some serious touchy rubby stuff. a lot of the principles of what i hold dear in i guess "regular" improv also hold true for the contact improv. if you take turns leading and following and go with what others are building you get taken to places you never would have expected or thought to go yourself. and when you discovered somethin good togehter with another person, it was nice to exploit the joy in it. until something else more intriguing would come along. and you'd go with that. it was two hours of sweaty, smelly muscle tensing and grunting.
i think i'm going to have a fanily reunion in chicago over the summer and make all my family members do a contact improv jam. i'll make a reality TV show out of it. it would be one of the funniest things i've ever seen without a doubt, watching grandma try to lift up my step dad and carry him around listening to cuban music. ah, yes. the imagination is a beautiful thing.

aviator is a good movie. the more i mull it over. the more i like it. and this leonardo kid has really come into his own, or is it his zone? anyway, he's good now. despite having a ninja turtle name.

tomorrow is new year's eve and i'm reminded of the new years party well hung jury threw a few years ago as a fund raiser that lost a lot of money and was a generally lame time for everyone. improv troupes should be careful when doing something other than improv. which reminds me, we're putting a sketch DVD and a rap album in february. everyone should buy one, unless you're in it or on it, in which case you get one free. which i think is everyone who reads this.......

going to sleep early tonight. tomorrow will be a fun time.

b
today's random guy i used to know link

117,000

"We will prevail over this destruction," Bush said from his Texas ranch Wednesday.

"Now watch me hit this drive."

117,000 people. Happy New Year!

b

a really short story

Nah, Just Kick From the Stain

There once was a balloon that floated up into the sky. It glanced down to see the crowd of kids that jumped and screamed at it's amazing ascent. Just moments before it had been in the hand of a scientist who was there in the soccer field demonstrating basic physics to Mrs. Scott's homeroom.
The scientist squinted his eyes as the balloon continued on a normal path into the stark blue sky. But the balloon had other plans.
He had overheard what the scientist said to the class about gases and gravity
just after the scientist had violated him with a hose and unwanted helium. His dad always told him that was the last thing you hear before it all goes black; the hissing of the helium inflating your perfectly happy existence into a spectacle for humans to gawk and scream at.
"no one ever thinks about where we go once we disappear into the sky," he thought to himself as he continued to rise. He knew that eventually he would just keep rising until he broke the Earth's gravitational pull only to be torn to bits in the blackness of space. And all those screaming, happy, cheering little kids didn't give a shit.
Not one shit.
They didn't care about him. They only cared about what they could do to him; to his people.

The humans were now barely visible to the balloon. He knew he had to act fast. He positioned himself with his ass to the sky and his top to the ground. He began to let out a very small amount of gas shooting him downward. The kids had all but lost interest and gone to their usual outdoors activities of pushing each other and running around the playground naked. The scientist was just about to look away when he noticed something unusual. The balloon let out more helium and shot faster toward the ground as the scientist cocked his head in confusion. "Wh....," was all the scientist could muster. The balloon gained in speed and picked his target.
A high pitched whistle bagan to ring out on the playground.
All the kids stopped slapping themselves and looked up to see what it was.
Mrs. Scott stopped running around the playground naked and looked up shielding her eyes from the sun. The hiss grew louder as the balloon dropped faster and faster. The scientist stood in amazement looking straight up as the balloon closed in on him.
The hiss grew so loud that the children covered their ears.
The scientist began to scream as blood shot from his ears and splashed in Suzie Perkins' eye.
The balloon got closer and closer to the scientist, the hiss unbearable.
And then it all went black.

Mrs. Scott and the kids minus Suzie Perkins watched as the balloon ripped clean through the scientist cutting him into shreds. His mangled body lay quiet as the kids picked up their jaws from the ground. Mrs. Scott pulled up her dress from her ankles and muttered something. The balloon quietly sighed to himself, knowing he would be thrown away, left to live a life of luxury in some retirement community landfill for several thousand years. The scientist's body left a stain on the penalty box for months afterward, a grizzly reminder of that fateful day when science was not on our side.


And that balloon was ME!

That's what you get for not celebrating Christmas.

Part of the world celebrated the birth of Jesus last weekend. Another part paid the price for not.

the death toll continues to rise. up to 80,000 as this is written. one of the worst and possibly the deadliest natural disaster in the history of man. i can't think of anything more deadly, especially as the number of deaths is expected to rise even further. and when the outbreaks of disease from bad water and rotting corpses start to spread, more will die. it's incredibly sad. i feel helpless, as i am. i have no prayer power. i have no money and no helicopter loaded with food nor helicopter pilot's license. nor proper tap shoes with which to put on a benefit concert. i do have tap sandals that i made myself but they are not fit for a fundraising event.

when you consider that this could have easily happened in the pacific and killed thousands on the west coast, it makes the disaster even more frightening. obviously, i have no less care for humans living on the indian ocean than the pacific. it's just the thought of a disaster of such proportion hitting closer to home that scares me. and allow me to be a bit of prick when i ask, "what would that do to the entertainment industry?" all those actors and set pieces swept into the sea never to be seen again. It would be like a big reset button for all us chodes dwelling out of LA waiting for the right moment to pounce, hoping we can pounce somewhere else like New York or Chicago. Right back to zero. I’d have a gamer’s chance at stardom then.
Even more strange, what if only half of Hollywood was erased, leaving just porn and Steve Martin? Hmmmm. Or how about just porn and The entire cast and crew of Seventh Heaven? Or what about just porn? Porn probably accounts for half the work in Hollywood all by itself, right? Luckily, Bollywood is far inland on the Asian continent.

Getting back to the point of me being here writing, WOW. 80,000 people. That’s a huge fraction of the Earth’s population. I read somewhere too that the earthquake caused the Earth’s rotation to speed up making the day a fraction of a second shorter than it was just last week. That’s all I need; less time to sleep at night. Apparently, as a plate was subducted under another one, the Earth is now more compact and spins faster. amazing.

The final number is going to be so huge. I thought it was pretty high Sunday morning when I saw that it was 13,000 people with a few thousand more missing. And here we are at 80,000. the only thing I can hold it up to (tragic wise) is the world trade center and I think the death toll from that was around 3,000. considering everything that it did to our country, to our culture, it will be interesting to see how these humans react to such an astronomical loss of life. Of course, the circumstances are different as this act was perpetrated by nature or some invisible magical force from the sky as some would have it. And the act of 9-11 was enacted by fellow humans or an invisible magical force from the sky as some would have it. So they are different in that respect. Nonetheless, mega tragic and something everyone on the planet should feel for if not just briefly.

These people should be missed and remembered by all people on Earth, not just their newly homeless loved ones.

80,000! F**K

fuck,
b

chodes

shakesweetness

i get really high off of good improv.
there have been a few times when i have been privelaged to be a part of something great on stage. last saturday i did a shakespeare show with the cupholders. we've done shakespeare before and it's always pretty rewarding and fun. but this time, we really wanted to get it right. so we brought in someone to help direct us a bit about the bard. and the show blew me away.
first off, the audience was really warm and a good size. something we're not necessarily used to anywhere but austin. they were digging our opening gags about the language and all the stuff that makes shakespeare fun. but eventually, we had them with the story and by the end of it i found myself amazed at my colleagues. to describe it literally in an attempt to relay the brilliance of the show, particularly the ending, would be pointless. improv is definitely a "you had to be there" type of trip. but i will say that everything seemed to work out really well and be justified in a real satifsfying way. and it was steeped in the genre. virtually everyone died at the end. it was great and like i said, impossible to put into words.
it feels real good to feel that. the feeling that everything is perfect and working out in the end. the deaths are merely fake and there for dramatic effect. everyone laughs and stands up to take a bow. then we all return to our lives. which are what they are. but for short periods of time, we as humans can experience something immediate, spontaneous, and touching. and that is good improv. for me, watching my best friends make amazing and challenging calls on stage puts me in the best possible place. saturday night i stepped outside of myself and watched them soliloquize the most beautiful poetry. i was proud of my boys and also fully aware that i can't take all the credit for their skills. nonetheless i was amazed and it put me in the greatest of moods. most times, you do a show and can't even remember any of the scenes the next day. they just come and go so fast and so often, your brain just doesn't bother to log any of it in the memory banks. but i have a feeling this show, entitled Circle of Flowers by the way, will be in the files for a long time.
another great thing is that we got it on tape in a two camera set up. so it should make out for a real nice demo for shakespeare and renaissance faires. we may just be able to find work for the summer doing prov.
if i have to wait tables this summer, it will be upsetting.
really good stuff.

is this really happening? is dave crossing over? and should he really be credited in front of dabney coleman (9 to 5 and Modern Problems) and Ned Beatty (He Got Game and Deliverance)? i wish the answer to all of these questions was no . . .

b

I have nothing to write about.

i'm slammed

i'm so busy i can barely stop to think abuot how busy i am. i love it though. save the time i've put in cropping photos for real money at my little temp job, all the work i'm doing is sweetness. i feel right at home setting up lights for filming or reviewing tape, memorizing lines, rehearsing improv. it's all good. it's gonna be real nice when i can actually get paid for this. we're pretty close and it all depends on getting more college shows booked. once we're there, we stay there for a while barring any huge incidents like bell's palsy. all we need is some name recognition and talent. well, i guess we've got the talent.
i have to go to sleep. i have nothing else to say really.
hey, i;ve been having some nightmares lately. that's strange considering i never have nightmares. haven't for over a year. but i've had two in the last three nights. one i remember was me and bill went on a killing spree and killed three people, although i don't remember where. i DO remember that it was for the sheer fun of it. and feeling panicked for the rest of the dream regretting hardcore that we had done it. and the feeling of relief i had when i woke up was pretty intense. i was really glad that it all wasn't real. extreme relief.
we workshopped some shakespeare tonight with an old improv buddy who's keen on the bard's ways. it illuminated a lot for us. he's really brilliant with nuance and explained a good amount of things we had questions on or didn't even realize we were doing with respect to shakespeare. the show saturday should be stellar. especially if held up to our dallas shakespeare that we just did last week. we taped that show and tomorrow we'll be taping over it when we film our indian poker scene and our hazardous waste scene.
i have to go to sleeep.

nigthmares. hmmmm. what a strange thing to happen to a person. your brain scares you into believing something terrible is happening to you. maybe it's the superego busting in and saying, "hey, that id is out of control. your taking things for granted. stop going on random killing sprees."

i have to go to sleeeep.

b

break my legs

tonight i audition for humor solutions' corporation, inc.

they do corporate improv shows and training around Chicago. now these gigs pay super well so aligning myself with them would be very good for my fiscal situation. plus, they do kind of random engagements which is just what i do when i have to go out of town for five days to do touring shows. so, it might work out really well. i'll know my conflicts for both jobs in plenty of time to coordinate them.
one problem remains, i have never succeeded at an audition. i must say it is my career weakness. no one ever seems to like me the first time they meet me, not even in real life. i think most people just don't get me right away. for instance, excluding my parents, if you're reading this you probably know me. do you remember when you first met me? you were probably put off or bored by me. but eventually, i worked my way into your warm spots, some of you more than others.
but in the audition setting, there are no second chances. i like to think that it's actually last impressions that count most. have you ever met someone that seemed great and you just think they're going to be your best friend forever and then they murder your pets. sometimes the final impression you have of someone is more important than the first. so, tonight, i'll have an alright audition, but i won't smile enough, i'll play too slow because that's what i'm used to and better at. most importantly, i won't impress them because they don't know me.the challenge is for me to separate my ego from the rejection. failing at auditions should really be seen as part of my job. as an actor, you just have to put in the crappy hours of not impressing people in an empty room. can i just say that an audition does not properly simulate what it's supposed to. there is no audience but two people who have seen similar crap all day long. the room doesn't have adequate lighting and you have no ensemble to bond with. it's like asking someone to ride a bike for a driving test. you might be on the road but you're really just moving on wheels and not driving.
i love their name, too. corporation, inc. presents humor solutions. it works within the corporate world by using their jargon but it's also funny so it's in our world and therefore makes fun of them a little bit. very nice.

we shall see if i can overcome my first impression woes.

b

a perfect moment

bill is making cookies in the kitchen just outside my room.
a muzac version of yesterday is blaring on my speakers.
i just sent an email to my fabulous friggin improv troupe.
i feel good physically.

sometimes moments happen when everything comes to a beautiful peak, a pinnacle.

these moments come up on you fast, and they disappear even faster.

the right moment to kiss a girl for the first time is there and you let it slide right by.
the perfect thing to say at the perfect time enters your mind and you say it without hesitation, sending the whole room into stitches.
the moment you realize it is okay to make fun of your friend's face because it has returned to normal. ace was safer when his face was all palsied out. now we know he will only be as ugly as he always was before the palsy, so it's time to get back to business as usual.
that one note in that one song that kills you. it's placed so perfectly. it resonates in your head for the rest of the day.
the moment you realize you are in love with someone.

the heater is still broken. it will be cold in my bed tonight when i finally get in it.

b

i am single

it has come to my attention that the only girl who would put up with my work schedule is a wife. and since i don't even have a girlfriend, i'm certainly very far from that. or am i?
i asked a girl to marry me over email about a month ago. a girl i have never met before. i saw her perform in an improv show several months ago and she's hilarious over the web on the chicago improv board. so i took the plunge and dropped the big question on her even though we've never spoken, not even in email.
so, i didn't hear back for acouple days. i figured i was dead in the water. then i got, "how did you get my email address?" bad news. her stalker alarm has gone off. so i just keep asking her to marry me and eventually she says, "tell me a little bit about yourself." so, i do and she stops emailing me.
it was a classic story of boy emails girl. girl freaks out. boy presses on. girl laughs. boy laughs. girl's interest is peaked. boy spills guts and drops facade of guy who wants to get married in a week. girl is not interested. boy is still cold at night.
a classic story.
i figured if she said yes, even if it was a huge rouse and a joke, i'd be able to treat her like any girl is going to have to be treated in the current scheme of time and travel. i don't want to subject anyone girl to my level of dedication. i'm a workaholic right now and that's the way it has to be for a while. a workaholic who sleeps in till 1pm and then works until about 4am with food and tv breaks in between.
oh, well. at least i can say i asked someone to marry me once. for whatever that's worth.

our heater is broken,
b

DVD

Here is a rough outline of the DVD. I won't give away too much but here's the general idea.

A mysterious man is watching TV and going through and pulling out actors that he likes and imprisoning them. It's SCTV meets UHF meets Stay Tuned. Will they escape?

Knife Collector - Get your knives
Law Offices - Commercial from the Law Offices of Flash, Unitas, Badass, Magnum, and God
Rap Video - A rap video of one of the song's from our forthcoming debut hip hop album
Opposite Ninjas - Yin and Yang do battle
The Candidate outtake - Presidential hopeful and fraud Joe Kennedy campaigns for the Democratic nomination
Nobel Prize - Michael Jackson wins the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine
Bathtub Director - An improvised scene showing the rigors of filmmaking
Super Swap - Batman and Joker agree to give each other home makeovers
Las Polkas - A showdown. Mariachis, Polkamen, and smoke
Um - A filmmakers toil turns disparate
The Shining - Bill freaks himself out
Tek Us Us outtake - A partial showing of my Chinese Documentary about China. Made in China
Hazardous Waste - A salesman struggles to move his best selling product
BOX SKETCH
Indian Poker - A scene with Indian Poker, an indian, and some ex-Presidents
Damien's Deck - A storyteller's mystical tall tale comes alive
Knife Collector II - You still need knives?
Ninja Movie - A girl is kidnapped and only one ninja can save her
Law and Order RBSVSVU (Ridiculous But Still Very Serious Victim's Unit)
Public Transit - Anti-commercial for our beloved Chicago Transit System
Flashlight Heads outtake - A bit of the old school improv video sketch
Waldo - Film trailer for Where's Waldo, a Jerry Bruckheimer Production
Knife Collector III - Still trying to move some product
Gay Gary - A son's trials and tribulations with his two gay dads.
FINAL BOX SKETCH

It's looking pretty sharp. And pretty damn funny. I'm sure it will only get funnier as we film it and improvise on camera. It's also going to eat up our Christmas Break, but who needs time off when you're working for yourself.

not me,
b

Ahhh, the weather looks amazing in Austin for when I'm getting there. Sure, it's a ten day forecast which is one of the most BS things in science since evolution but it'll be nice to get out of this COLD.
Here's a sketch that we're probably going to film and put on the DVD.
___________
Filmed in a lawyery office type setting with books and leather furniture. Dickhole enters. He's terrible at reading cue cards.

DH: Hi, I'm Wilfred Dickhole. Is my name funny to you?
Cut to either a blurry background of a law office type setting or a woman's face who answers yes to all of the questions with different styles of nodding. words from the questions appear on the screen and float by.

Are you looking for something new?
Do you have a boring name?
Do you ever wonder how stars change their names?
Are you looking to add a little spice to your life?
Aren't some names more funny than others?
Doesn't an intersting name make you want to meet that person?
Do you wish your name had a little more zing?
Are you tired of people mispronouncing your name?
Isn't it annoying when someone's name reveals their heritage?
Haven't you always wanted to have a celebrity's name?
Do some names make you moist?
Are you willing to do anything to become a different person?
Is this the first commercial you've seen about name changing?
Would changing your name piss off your family, which would make you feel really good?
Have you ever wanted to steal someone else's name and then try to slowly take over their life as them?
Did you ever see that movie Somersby?
That was kind of fucked up, huh?
Man, Jodie Foster is hot. Am I right?
Wasn't Nell one of the wierdest movies you've ever seen?
And wasn't Contact kind of stupid? I mean, you can't show the alien at the end, even if it is her Dad, right? It looks too phony. That's just me, I guess.

cut to Dickhole

DH: Just listen to what God has to say.

God: Hi. I'm God. No, not THE God, but I play him on TV. You see, I changed my name from Edmond Fitzmorris because I was tired of everyone knowing I was Irish. Then I started a law firm.

DH: Here at Flash, Kwekway, Badass, Dickhole, and God we do our very best to give you the image you desire with a name makeover. Give us a call (1-888-NAME CHA appears on the screen) and we'll make Georgina Faltzgraff into Kitty Kat or Tasty Desires, or just simply Cher.
We're the law firm you trust, to get YOU where YOU want to be. (The last shot is Flash, Kwekway, Badass, Dickhole, and God in the law office waving.)

fin

b

Boy, they aren't kidding.

b

Print it

Here's something I've been working on for the DVD:

a music video for Eric Lebofsky's song Starfox FEAT. Madeline Malka

IDEA III
shot one frame at a time on a Super 8 camera with lots of camera movement. Peoplemation!

opening bit is an animation of the moon and the earth dancing ballroom style. At the end, the earth tosses the moon into the nothingness of space. fade to black.

footage for the male lyrical portion of the song is of couples interacting shot in animation style (one frame at a time) doing happy tasks together.
- walking together
- feeding each other
- washing each other
- running full speed through a field
- dancing
- sleeping closely
- etc.
roughly 10 different couples

footage for the female portion of the lyrics is of the same couples doing un fun things
- screaming at each other
- choking each other
- one drowning the other
- one chasing the other with a knife throught the same field
- dancing and crying
- one about to smother the other with a pillow
- whatever opposite action to their positive one

the end is the moon flying through the blackness of space and eventually landing in the sun's arms. they both smile. they have found love in each other.

It's PEOPLEMATION. it should come out looking pretty cool. i want to shoot it on high contrast kodachrome film that looks really sweet in bright situations. and we're hopefully getting taningembler to do the animation at the beginning and the end of the moon's journey from love to lost to love. if he can't do it, i'll have to and it won't look nearly as good. but i'm really looking forward to finding my ten couples in austin. if it all comes out well, it should look really sweet and it will be completely strange and different from the rest of the DVD which is shaping up to be dialogue based scenes.

i wish i could put the song on here somewhere so every can hear it. i'm sure anyone whho's reading this will see it eventually any way.

b
lebofsky's web

What? What's funny? What are you laughing at?

Anybody Remember When Ace Had a Face?

So, one of the wierdest things I've ever seen has happened. My friend's face is half frozen.
Ace "The Face" as he is known around certain wrestling and improv circles has had a random paralyzing of half his face. It all happened the morning after Thanksgiving. He had stayed here in Chicago and was invited over to a friend's house to celebrate the holiday. Had some food, passed out on a concrete floor watching a movie as Ace is prone to doing (as we're all prone to doing after T-giving dinner.) Woke up the next morning to find the left side of his face paralyzed.


In classic Ace fashion, he was unfazed, unpanicked, and confident it would just work itself out over time. Well, it's been several days and as the condition slowly improves, it is still one of the strangest and scariest things I've ever seen. The first thing I thought of was stroke. He's a young whipper snapper, smokes a pack a day I believe, but isn't overweight or stressed out. Doesn't really make sense that it would be a stroke. This is where watching TV comes in handy. We just went to WebMD and put in all the symptoms. It turns out that it's probably Bell's Palsy, which means its not a serious condition. Nonetheless, when I first saw it and didn't know what it was, I must say I was very worried for his health. After a thorough barrage of questions (as if I was going to diagnose something) I said, "Wow, man, don't take anything for granted."
Yesterday, it was possible that his face would just stay like that forever. Today, after doing our credible internet research, things seem more optimistic. He did say last night that he was going to go to a doctor on Wednesday. How to pay for it, is another issue. I'm afraid he won't go because it's very slowly getting better. But it could get better to a point and then just stay the same, or get better and then get worse.
It's really scary. To think that you can go to sleep and wake up with half of your head paralyzed. He says it's like when the dentist gives you novocaine except it doesn't wear off. He was having trouble swallowing and his smile was the freakiest batman character shit i've seen without the aid of makeup. he would laugh and it looked like he was in pain because half of his face was animated and all scrunched up while the other half was just totally relaxed like nothing was happening.
We were having a writer's meeting for the Cupholder DVD and when he would turn his head to talk to someone and I could only see the half of his face that wasn't moving, it was freaky. then he would turn and talk to me, blinking with only one eye and smiling with the right half. AHG, strange.
He said the first couple nights going to sleep was hard because only one eye would close. like the invisible man who closes his invisible eyelids and can still see the ceiling of his bedroom and everything happening around him. Man, that sucks.
The silver lining is that we've all learned a little something about palsies and what not to do; which would be fall asleep on a cold concrete floor on your face in the winter. Everything should return to normal. I'm sure in a few years we'll all be able to look back on this and laugh.
"Hey, Ace, remember when your face was half paralyzed for two weeks and you couldn't swallow liquid without it shooting out of you mouth? Ahhhh, those were the good times. Gas only cost $2.25 a gallon and Jon was still male. Ahhhh, the good ole days."

May we all dream of Ace's beautiful, functioning face and wish that it returns to him soon.

b
webMD