It's So Obvious

Dan and other aspiring writer friends and I are getting more wound up about the WGA strike.

How can the moguls and producers get so happy about the certainty of current and future profits from online content (and surely crow to their stockholders to this effect) and yet plead that the impact of internet content is still uncertain?

Disney's honcho says $1.5 billion of its annual revenue comes from digital. Sumner Redstone says "Viacom will double its revenues this year from digital." Rupert Murdoch refers to the digital revolution as an era of "golden opportunities."

But when the writers say "Hey, can we please have our fair share, as well?" They're all "but the impact of new media is uncertain."

Come on.

Things Don't Go As Planned, But Still Are Pretty Awesome

Sam and Morgan (Tony and Nick, that is) canceled their show tonight. I rode my bike from work all the way down Lincoln to the Apollo Theater and ended up drinking a beer, chatting with Sean Flannery, and sneaking upstairs with Tony and Noah and assorted others to see Wonder Woman take the mic and do her cabaret act. (Seriously. Lynda Carter was playing a concert, backed up by a jazz combo.) Well, I watched for a few minutes and then went back downstairs to the studio space where the guys were sitting in the audience, clicking through the Powerpoint presentation of their show and half-assedly running through their dialogue. It was pretty fun, actually. Steve and Nate, AKA Team Submarine, were also there, and Adam Burke showed up as well.

On the plus side, I rode the crap out of my bike today. Yes, those are my actual legs at left. Pasty, and short, but damned strong. I rode for almost three hours, all told. Biking so much lets me get away with an awesome amount of eating. (Why have I not photoblogged my famous McDonald's-cheeseburger-layered-with-Lay's-potato-chips yet? That stuff is like ambrosia. Manna. Heaven on a starchy, nutritionally pointless bun.) Before the almost-show I had a solitary tuna melt and giant steak fries at Clarke's and worked on some new material for my Underground debut, which is in a few weeks. Things are coming together. Things are happening very fast, but things are definitely coming together. Sorry about the lack of blogging, the three of you who still regularly read me. There's so much going on that needs day-to-day attention. But it will be worth the wait.

In the meantime, one of my childhood idols (yeah, I was Wonder Woman for three Halloweens in a row back in the day), who attracted a very unusual and appreciative demographic at her show tonight:

Sloan's Chicago Architecture Tour

Sloan's been getting her creative mojo back in high gear. Today she put this up:

My Interview With Carol Leifer in Chicago Magazine

Hooray! My Chicago Magazine interview with Carol Leifer, who will be playing the Lakeshore Theater in a few weeks.

Also, not quite the same flavor of pop culture fun, my first piece in Builder/Architect (p. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).

Interview with Posh Spice's "PA Spice"

My Chicago comedy friend Renee Gauthier has given me (as the Bastion) an exclusive on "her experience working as Victoria Beckham's personal assistant on the show Victoria Beckham: Coming To America," which aired last night on NBC.

It's a pretty awesome and hilarious interview, if you ask me.

Give it a peek, and get answers to questions like "What, if anything, does Posh eat in a 24-hour period?" "Does she think her tits look good?" "What's the deal with Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes suddenly being BFF with the Beckhams?" and much, much more.

Typos are Everywhere

From Netflix, with errors bolded because I am becoming evermore the grammar bitch:

An email with instructions on how to access Your Account has been sent to you at elizabeth.mcquern@****mail.com

To acccess Your Account

1. Check your email account
2. Click the link in the email

You will then be asked to chagne your password.

If you no longer have access to this email account, please click here.

Bella Simpson

What would you look like as a Simpsons character?

At left, me. Kinda boring looking, actually. I need more tomboy gear to look more like myself. And the eyebrows need to be archier. But what an adorable overbite, no?

Swooning Bloops

Is this technically a fetish? Here's a website archiving very specific scenes in movies - where a man is carrying a woman. A woman who is in peril/incapacitated/all swoony and crap. There are lots of pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. What is this about, exactly? I'm pretty sure it's the website you click on right before you go looking for ones about rape fantasies. That's just the feeling I get.






What the haytch is this thing, the "Bloop," lumbering beneath the sea in a terrifying indeterminate slumber, making noises that naval technology can't make sense of? Is it Cthulhu? Is it a spaceship? Is it a gigantowhale? And listen to this official government recording of this almost immeasurably deep burble in the mysterious depths. Shudder.

Cate the Great

Netflix just added the "drop and drag" feature. Rock on. I've watched over 420 movies from Netflix in the last three years, which reminds me that I need to read more books. The last DVD I watched was "Babel."

Cate Blanchett is one of my favorite actresses. I loved her in "Elizabeth." I loved her in "Bandits." She is just fantastic and nervy and smart and flawed in everything. I love her even more after that big profile in last February's "New Yorker" (only part of which is available online) in which she revealed herself to be just as silly and chaotic as the rest of us grubby human beings. In that article, she spoke about the early loss of her father, and how the grief that children experience can be a sort of painful portal to creativity: "bereavement is a 'strange gift.' The shadow that informed her brightness. 'It's chiaroscuro,' she said."

The article went on: "In work and in life, Blanchett, whose favorite word is 'fluidity,' has a kind of inconclusiveness that lets her remain receptive." This observation struck me at a time when I was struggling with a vague disappointment at not being able to feel surer about things. It seemed to me that at a certain point in intellectual and personal development, I should be able to enjoy a certain security in a conclusiveness based on knowledge and experience. Thinking and reading more helped me realize that, especially as a creative person, I would need to be somewhat inconclusive to remain flexible enough to interpret new ideas, no matter how unsettling a feeling that might be.

Blogs of Hollywood Writers

I've been trolling around the internet, looking for blogs by writers working in show biz. Turns out there are a lot, and some of them offer a really fascinating peek into the day to day work of creating popular entertainment. Have you ever wondered how all of that stuff is really done? What are pitch meetings like? How do you convince a producer that your idea is worth putting millions of dollars into? How does a whole roomful of people mesh together to effectively write anything?

First, the blog of Ken Levine, an Emmy-winning tv comedy writer, producer and director. He worked on "Cheers," and talks about how the now famous "Norm!" moments didn't make sense to the audience at first:

"We filmed the first eight episodes of CHEERS before the series aired. So studio audiences were unfamiliar with the characters. As a result, when we did 'Normisms' they just died horrible silent deaths. Week after week. No one understood it was a running bit. We kept writing them though, staunchly believing when the series finally aired it would catch on."

Then, the blog of John Rogers, another tv and film writer. Here he talks about tv and film writing jargon:

"'the Gilligan cut': When you cut directly from a character declaring there's no way he's going to do something, to him doing it, for comedic effect...'a Bono': a place in the script that, no matter what joke you put there, it fails...'a Squiggy' or 'the 'hello' gag: From Laverne & Shirley. Can only be defined by example..."

And finally, from "If this is LA, I must be a screenwriter,"an example of how the "backwards read" I've been using for catching mistakes in proofreading is good for getting perspective on other types of writing, too:

"I've just discovered the most fabulous excellent rewriting tool ever...The Backwards Read...What you do is go through your script scene-by-scene, starting with the last scene and moving towards the first. This allows you to really view the scene as a separate entity, and make sure it contains all the drama, action, suspense, conflict, and character it needs, without any reliance on the other scenes. Later, when you re-enter the forward world, you can check for flow and all those lovely forward-looking things."

Also worth checking out: Complications Ensue, the blog of writer Alex Epstein.

Comedic Navel Gazing, Boring Installment #3247563427956

Second City alum David Steinberg is on Charlie Rose right now, making some very interesting observations about how sometimes, more "personal" comedy, like Dave Chappelle on Comedy Central can find a wider audience than "generalized" comedy on the big networks.

He's also talking about finding one's authentic self, and how timing is so important in comedy in so many ways - the literal timing of joke delivery, the timing in a comedian's life and creative development, the synchronous timing with the Zeitgeist, and so on.

A huge issue I've been thinking about since last week's open mic - letting the audience know you enough to know they can trust you, so they can be comfortable with you delivering riskier jokes. I did three bits last week, and spent the entire hour before my five minutes obsessively reordering them. It was ridiculous. I kept writing "Sunburned," "Inappropriate," and "Uncool Job" in a different order again and again. (Yeah, you should have been there for my proofreading joke...it left the room in tatters.)

My first instinct was to put a safer and more self-deprecating bit first, before going to something a bit sharper, but at the last minute I switched the order, and led off with the edgier joke, which got a fairly flat reaction. Honestly, as soon as the words started coming out of my mouth, I had this creeping feeling up the back of my neck, and I thought "Oh, crap, I haven't let these people know me enough to let me get away with saying something this barbed without thinking negatively of me." I knew it, but I had to keep plugging along. I know better for next time.

This has been your semi-regular installment of comedic navel-gazing. You are now free to explore other internet amusement options that are actually interesting.