The comedy world is changing, fast.
joe rogan won't shut up about it. but i won't steal a guy's act..
EXCEPT TO SAY
with the proliferation of really great comedy podcasts, you can get an unpaid internship in comedy if you have a long commute,
or if you have a lot of time to listen to comics talk to each other and an audience simultaneously. isn't that what internship
is about? listening, watching, seeing how this shit is done? the opportunity to let the pros -- guys like Stanhope, Rogan,
Gaffigan, Burnham, Irrera, Shaffir, Diaz, Attell, and on and on... the opportunity to let those guys talk to each other about
life and the job and their friends is so illuminating, it's like the thing you pay $5,000 for in college to get paid nothing and
get coffee for whatever startup is in the old Daily Camera building this month, except free and not humiliating, unless you spent
months believing Adam Carolla was the king of podcast.
There's such a huge disconnect between the people with money and the people with no money. People with money will give any
amount of money to any stupid thing -- some guy who draws an Internet comic -- it's like a newspaper comic, but you can only
see it on the Internet -- some guy who draws an Internet comic made fun of a website that stole his work, they reprinted it
without his permission. The website that reprinted his shit without permission sues him for defaming them. (Which, what the
fuck. God bless America, right?) The website that stole the comics in the first place wants $20,000 to settle out of court with
the guy who drew the FUCKING COMICS. So what does the author slash artist do? He asks the Internet for the money. Within a week,
he has $100,000.
Meanwhile, if you turn on the five o'clock news in any state in America, you'll see a privileged, comfortable white man in a position
of great political power -- your state governor -- explaining to you why every single fucking item in the state budget must be cut,
except of course for the parts where we hand huge subsidies to enormous, land-raping, human-consuming industries without asking them
to pay a penny in taxes in return... well, those people would just up and leave these natural resources alone if we didn't pave the
way toward the MOST VALUABLE GODDAMN THINGS IN THE ENTIRE FUCKING EARTH WITH A DIAMOND STUDDED CARPET RED WITH THE BLOOD OF HUMAN
CHILDREN AND ENTIRE FUCKING SPECIES, WOULDN'T THEY? They'd go John fucking Galt on us and go blast oil out of someone else's ground!
The moral of the story, I guess, is that if you've got money, it's much more important to donate it to a webcomic artist than any of the
100 million people in America - THE RICHEST COUNTRY IN THE FUCKIN' WORLD - who can't afford to see a dentist. SO WHAT IF A THIRD OF
AMERICA's TEETH ARE ALL SMALL AND CORN-LOOKIN' AND SHIT?
At least we can laugh at drawings of fat people and cats. LOL OATMEAL IS A FUNNY WORD
April 29, 2014
a new (trite) hope
Hey there, 30-something! I'm sorry your life hasn't turned out the way you planned. That's what you get for letting dumb parents who don't even use the Internet help a 19-year-old figure out "what he wants to do with his life" during the Clinton Administration.
You'd be forgiven for your optimism. After all, we hadn't been subjected to eight years of Bush/Cheney "defend the homeland with infinite detention and torture, and take your shoes off at the airport" jingoism and the rapid fetishization of rich people along with the increasingly exploitiative ways they've pulled up the ladder behind them. If you'd come up to me in high school and said the next president would be a war criminal who would have to be careful which foreign countries he visited, well, I would have laughed. (Then again, the ends of my hair were also bleached at the time. Just the ends. On purpose.)
So, here you are. 19-year-old you is hilariously disappointed in many ways. You have essentially the same job you had while you were in college, except now you're a barista at a corporate coffee shop instead of a local one because you really need the benefits. Your degree in communications is about as unique and useful as a grocery store receipt. You don't own a home, but you have as much debt as a homeowner. Your last relationship ended because you accidentally saw your significant other's Facebook when they forgot to log out, and discovered you were being cheated on. Plus, your friends all think you're a snoop and a Facebook stalker. Your tiny apartment is surrounded on all sides by unemployed insomniac hip-hop mariachi players, and your rent is going up next month. You can't cook, you can't dance, and the angry questioning from your parents about why you haven't gotten a real job or bought a house yet has softened into the hesitant, soft, slightly sad query that comes from someone who already knows what the answer will be, and that they aren't going to like it.
Put down the shotgun, Taylor. There is hope. A new hope.
You can learn to cook tasty food for yourself. You can learn to play an instrument, to paint, to draw. You can learn to dress well and cheaply. You can become knowledgable and confident enough to interrupt strangers in conversation at a bar, and speak confidently about in-season sports; failing that, you can identify former high-school athletes and ask them about their sports, and offer anecdotes to further their personas of lost glory, thus impressing potential mates. You can hold in your mind simultaneously an appreciation for baseball and Broadway. Most of all, you can become a positive, peaceful influence on yourself and those around you. Think of it: the breadth and depth of the crushing disappointment you've felt in the past empowers you to sit in traffic because a squirrel chewed through a traffic signal's power cable and think, "This is not ideal, but it is not as bad as any given moment during those six months I was a telemarketer." The Greeks had a specific kind of love, reserved for misery and tyrants. You can, too.
We are not bound to our misery; we are free to live frugal and interesting lives even though both our paychecks and our bills make us cry. And best of all, I'm here, and I'm gonna help you.
You'd be forgiven for your optimism. After all, we hadn't been subjected to eight years of Bush/Cheney "defend the homeland with infinite detention and torture, and take your shoes off at the airport" jingoism and the rapid fetishization of rich people along with the increasingly exploitiative ways they've pulled up the ladder behind them. If you'd come up to me in high school and said the next president would be a war criminal who would have to be careful which foreign countries he visited, well, I would have laughed. (Then again, the ends of my hair were also bleached at the time. Just the ends. On purpose.)
So, here you are. 19-year-old you is hilariously disappointed in many ways. You have essentially the same job you had while you were in college, except now you're a barista at a corporate coffee shop instead of a local one because you really need the benefits. Your degree in communications is about as unique and useful as a grocery store receipt. You don't own a home, but you have as much debt as a homeowner. Your last relationship ended because you accidentally saw your significant other's Facebook when they forgot to log out, and discovered you were being cheated on. Plus, your friends all think you're a snoop and a Facebook stalker. Your tiny apartment is surrounded on all sides by unemployed insomniac hip-hop mariachi players, and your rent is going up next month. You can't cook, you can't dance, and the angry questioning from your parents about why you haven't gotten a real job or bought a house yet has softened into the hesitant, soft, slightly sad query that comes from someone who already knows what the answer will be, and that they aren't going to like it.
Put down the shotgun, Taylor. There is hope. A new hope.
You can learn to cook tasty food for yourself. You can learn to play an instrument, to paint, to draw. You can learn to dress well and cheaply. You can become knowledgable and confident enough to interrupt strangers in conversation at a bar, and speak confidently about in-season sports; failing that, you can identify former high-school athletes and ask them about their sports, and offer anecdotes to further their personas of lost glory, thus impressing potential mates. You can hold in your mind simultaneously an appreciation for baseball and Broadway. Most of all, you can become a positive, peaceful influence on yourself and those around you. Think of it: the breadth and depth of the crushing disappointment you've felt in the past empowers you to sit in traffic because a squirrel chewed through a traffic signal's power cable and think, "This is not ideal, but it is not as bad as any given moment during those six months I was a telemarketer." The Greeks had a specific kind of love, reserved for misery and tyrants. You can, too.
We are not bound to our misery; we are free to live frugal and interesting lives even though both our paychecks and our bills make us cry. And best of all, I'm here, and I'm gonna help you.
tears in place of fears
All our surfaces are ground down.
How far down must we be ground to be any good? Oreshitachino kensakuwa nandesuka? Oreshitachino seimuibaiwa nandesuka?
Some might say, halfway.
(暴力的な時代では、あなたの魂を販売する必要はありません)
but i wake up under similar stars and still can't sit at the same feast
On Cinephiles and Sports Fans
By and large, people who watch movies and people who watch sports are similar, in the sense that all humans are similar. We all would like to laugh and clap our hands before we fuck. THE LIFE OF KINGS, AND NOTHING LESS.
Since we live in a part of the world where hunger is a political weapon and we all agree to let it happen by calling it "income inequality" instead, we have kind of all agreed that what hungry people and fat white racists (like the kind of person Don Sterling swears he isn't) want is the unexpected. I think it's a shame that so much of our culture is so divided over how we chow down on the aforementioned unexpected (Aformexcepted).
It's a distinction without much of a difference. People who watch movies want someone to create a total package and then serve it to them to be judged complete/good or incomplete/bad as one is capable of judging. People who watch sports want an unscripted performance that they can then use to generate or confirm a narrative or belief as needed.
As a very specific, lazy kind of creator (with particular training in speaking extemporaneously,) I prefer the second form. if watching movies were a sport, it would be figure skating, which makes natural sense to me - in that context, it makes sense to judge performers on the basis of who can make me laugh and clap my hands the most. Film students, with the kind of family wealth that lets you move easily through life, exploring your conception of the universe through the windshield of your BMW X5, would say that there are objective criteria viewers can use to judge the relative quality of a film; at the end of the day, films remain subject to the whims of the audience (or worse, their investors.)
Yet, each viewer's experience is equally genuine and heartfelt; even people who know nothing of film history or Roger Ebert know if they liked the damn movie or not. Only the buttery fingers of the devoted movie-goer can stroke their self-same pimply chins and declaim that they can't understand how Peter Jackson directed both The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.
This is not to say that sports fans are any more enlightened. If there was ever a broad stripe of humanity dedicated to arguing, fighting, and even causing riots in support of a billionaire's plaything whose largest costs are often borne by taxpayers who couldn't care less about the sportball, to say nothing of finding causation in correlation, patterns in noise, conclusions in coincidence, or meaning in nothing than sports fans... I have yet to find them, and I hope I never do.
BUT... if I did... they would probably look like Don Sterling and sound like Master Shake, and say things like "I GIVE THEM FOOD AND CARS AND HOUSES."
By and large, people who watch movies and people who watch sports are similar, in the sense that all humans are similar. We all would like to laugh and clap our hands before we fuck. THE LIFE OF KINGS, AND NOTHING LESS.
Since we live in a part of the world where hunger is a political weapon and we all agree to let it happen by calling it "income inequality" instead, we have kind of all agreed that what hungry people and fat white racists (like the kind of person Don Sterling swears he isn't) want is the unexpected. I think it's a shame that so much of our culture is so divided over how we chow down on the aforementioned unexpected (Aformexcepted).
It's a distinction without much of a difference. People who watch movies want someone to create a total package and then serve it to them to be judged complete/good or incomplete/bad as one is capable of judging. People who watch sports want an unscripted performance that they can then use to generate or confirm a narrative or belief as needed.
As a very specific, lazy kind of creator (with particular training in speaking extemporaneously,) I prefer the second form. if watching movies were a sport, it would be figure skating, which makes natural sense to me - in that context, it makes sense to judge performers on the basis of who can make me laugh and clap my hands the most. Film students, with the kind of family wealth that lets you move easily through life, exploring your conception of the universe through the windshield of your BMW X5, would say that there are objective criteria viewers can use to judge the relative quality of a film; at the end of the day, films remain subject to the whims of the audience (or worse, their investors.)
Yet, each viewer's experience is equally genuine and heartfelt; even people who know nothing of film history or Roger Ebert know if they liked the damn movie or not. Only the buttery fingers of the devoted movie-goer can stroke their self-same pimply chins and declaim that they can't understand how Peter Jackson directed both The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.
This is not to say that sports fans are any more enlightened. If there was ever a broad stripe of humanity dedicated to arguing, fighting, and even causing riots in support of a billionaire's plaything whose largest costs are often borne by taxpayers who couldn't care less about the sportball, to say nothing of finding causation in correlation, patterns in noise, conclusions in coincidence, or meaning in nothing than sports fans... I have yet to find them, and I hope I never do.
BUT... if I did... they would probably look like Don Sterling and sound like Master Shake, and say things like "I GIVE THEM FOOD AND CARS AND HOUSES."
yawn and stretch and my life is a mess
Reposted from, ugh, Facebook.
On Philip Seymour Hoffman, and What's Wrong With Us
I've had enough of this nonsense that addiction claims lives without any sense or whatever.
Yeah, it's obviously a tragedy that Philip Seymour Hoffman died with a needle in his arm. Any idiot his age with that much money should know that OxyContin is much safer than heroin, because at least you know you won't die from a hot dose, like River Phoenix, Mitch Hedberg, Bradley Nowell, Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and that guy from Glee, to name at least a few incredibly rich and famous white performers (well, except for Jimi) who died from a drug that kills thousands of people that you would studiously not even look at if you saw them on the street, did. And yet that didn't stop a single one of them.
They usually smell awful, what with the sweat and gummy bear breath.We would all love to blame PSH's death on drug addiction. It's so easy, and so head-shakingly simple. So sad, what a shame. We can all agree there's no easy solution, and then forget about it without any thought. Drugs, dead, drugs are bad, he's in the ground, done.
I find it curious that we, as a strangely Puritan society, are very careful to never ever talk about the reasons why anyone would want to take drugs in the first place. As if when we gave voice to why one of the greatest character actors of our generation died with a needle in his arm, we might have to graze uncomfortably close along the fresh wounds of the emotionally abusive nature of our culture, and the incomprehensibly weighty burdens of fame.
One doesn't have to be famous to feel that kind of pressure. In fact, we live in a world where more and more people are expected to live with that kind of pressure every day -- and if you can't live with it, well then you're fired, and if you lose your job then you will be homeless in a month or two, to say nothing of what will happen to your family or the people you care about, and that's all before you have to start lying to keep up appearances so nobody knows you're functionally homeless and about a week away from being forever excluded from any kind of life that an American would recognize, much less a rich Hollywood one.
We've built a world where unless your family is going to be wealthy forever, you're constantly dangling over a precipice that will not kill you, but make your life harder and more miserable than anyone in your family would care to admit. All the families that had the money before are circling the wagons, and the wagons are made of money, and you are neither allowed to pick the money off nor ride in the wagon.
We've built industries that are happy to sing when you're winning, and then disappear you after the first time you lose. Hollywood is a lot like that. Technology is a lot like that. Journalism is a lot like that. Lawyering is a lot like that. In fact, thanks to the families that are going to be wealthy forever, and the billion-dollar media empires they've consolidated, we've all internalized a culture where everything is a lot like that; either you shut up and do your job despite everything in your life pressing down on you like an enormous concrete block, or you're fired, and then how are you gonna pay the mortgage? Oh, your neighbor lost his house and his wife, and his four kids are relying on six months of public assistance that won't come in for at least six weeks? He must not have been working hard enough.
How dare someone self-medicate? How sad it must be to have nothing left but a chemical to save your sanity, say a bunch of people who gladly abuse prescriptions for Xanax, Adderall, Paxil, and Viagra. How shameful that someone would use a street drug that might kill them, say people who take Chantix and Lipitor. Addiciton is such an awful shame.
How many people have to die doing the same thing in response to the same pressure before anyone stops shaking their head and clucking their tongue and being sad to actually stop and think about why it keeps happening? Andy Dick was beaten up by a slightly less effeminate man after it was revealed that he sold Phil Hartman's wife the drugs that sent her on such an unstable episode that she killed one of the greatest character and voice actors of the mid-1990s. But who cares, right? Addiction is a harsh master/mistress, and can take anyone's life.
Bullshit. It's not the drugs that are destroying us; after all, we're sold the same drugs under "safe" labels, along with some really strange drugs that are much less safe, and we have all been trained to leave all that shit alone, as long as it's "medicine." Chantix, a drug that leads to hallucinations, psychotic thoughts and actions, and behavior that will literally lead you into a mental institution (unless you say you've been taking Chantix, in which case, oh yeah, those side effects are tough LOL), is neither criminal nor culturally discriminated against. Heroin, though, is the perfect opportunity for guilty liberals to bow their heads and cynical jerks to point fingers and run their mouths.
It never had anything to do with the drug. It was the culture that poisoned them. Our most feeling people, some of our most talented comics and musicians and actors, are all feeling so much and are so disconnected from what passes for culture that they feel like they have to take a drug that (to be fair) feels better than anything the economy of fame has to offer, and also makes you really really sick when you try to stop. Even if someone were to stop riding the white horse, though, they'd still have to wake up as a famous person (or a not-famous person in a different struggle) in what is a morally and ethically bankrupt culture. As soon as you see the rampant cynicism and hypocrisy we all just take for granted every day, ESPECIALLY if you're a creative type who is sensitive to feeling that sharp glassy edge of life, you can't just stupidly accept it and go get your Starbucks and sit in traffic for 90 minutes because someone took too long to merge and caused an accident in the middle of a six-lane highway. You're just too goddamn sensitive.
That's what's "wrong" with us. By "us," I mean those who would choose self-medication over some kind of weird, anti-Buddhist slow acceptance of the pointless and amoral consumer culture. We wanted a different way, a way where we could feel things on our own terms, and have some kind of power over the inside of our heads. It's easy to blame us for finding it in that space between our thumb and the flat edge of the plunger on a syringe, but it's hard to think about why anyone would do anything that way.
Unless, of course, you were accustomed to feeling things strongly and disagreeing with objects and sensations that were specifically marketed to appeal to your demographic. Then it might make perfect sense, and it might just make you more upset at the economic engine that chews up and swallows our most interesting thinking and feeling humans for the sake of selling more Zoloft and another Transformers movie.By the way, make sure you see the last Hunger Games movie: I hear they'll have to make a REALLY EXCITING casting choice! (Make sure you didn't take a double dose of Lexapro or smoke any cannabis before you do; Jesus might cry, and your parents might call the police.)
September 10, 2011
probably the last update
I've given up on writing a blog because it was too much work.(EDIT 4/29/2014: I'D KILL A MAN IF IT MADE TOO MUCH WORK, AS LONG AS SOMEONE PAID ME)
I have now instead gotten into podcasting, which it turns out is much more work.
Go to Untitled 1 Show for all your Dusty content needs! I'll keep this space around in case I need it, I guess.
Thanks for reading! I had so much fun writing this, and every now and then it's fun to go back and read... it's like a photo album, but with words instead.
July 2, 2010
Facebook Breaks Its Own Privacy Rules
I have public search disabled on my Facebook account. Facebook is for my friends and I to keep in touch, not for strangers, stalkers, and marketers to search for my name and find me.
However, as you can clearly see from the image, my name and facebook page appears in the first page of Google results for my name -- on FACEBOOK JAPAN.
I have never been to Japan, I do not speak Japanese, and I 100% surely have never been on facebook.jp. Also, Boulder, CO is not in Japan. This appears to be a clear violation of Facebook's own privacy policy.
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