unwiredben

1) Seeing Demitri Martin at the Paramount Theater. Last night, Mr. Martin was in town shooting a comedy special for Comedy Central that will air in mid-January. kazanya and I had tickets for the 7PM show, and while we got there about 20 minutes early, no one was seated until right at 7PM because they were busy setting up the stage and the cameras. About 7:30, the opening act, Irish comic David O'Doherty came out and did a set featuring some pretty clever songs on his electronic keyboard. He got into a bit of a row with a member of the crowd who reacted strongly to him making fun of Dell Computers, leading to him confessing to liking Macs, then saying the might not be the best move to make at a show sponsored by Windows Vista.

Demetri's set was quite long and punctuated with breaks for inserting advertisements. He had to retake a few things, and there were a lot of technical difficulties, ranging from poorly placed props on stage to squeaking noises from the chairs in the Paramount. Still, his bits with the flip chart were hilarious, and Annelies said her face was hurting from laughing so much when we left. Definitely look for this one on TV -- we were in row five, stage right, so it's possible we'll be visible as part of the audience briefly.

2) High-Def TiVo. I ordered one of the new Series 3 TiVo units about a month ago, and it had been sitting around, waiting to be hooked up. I finally got it connected on Thursday, then called up Time Warner to get an installer out to put in the CableCards that will let it receive digital cable and encrypted channels. The first time I called, the rep wouldn't sent someone to install cards into a non-TV, but I called back later, got the same rep, and managed to convince her that it was OK.

The installation on Saturday took about two hours, and the installer wasn't able to get things exactly right -- the cards were working, but they weren't decoding anything that was encrypted. I tried calling Time Warner's customer service, but they weren't super helpful. However, I got in touch with a member of the TW network operations staff via a TiVo message board, and he was able to send the right packets my way to get everything working. So, now I've got both the original TW DVR and the new TiVo hooked up to cable, and it's working quite nicely. After I get a chance to move all of my "season passes" over to the TiVo and watch the shows I've got left on the TW box, I'll take it in to the local shop and just rely on the new box for my program recordings.

I hadn't realized just how much I'd missed TiVo's features like suggestions, the much-better-than-a-grid program guide, wishlists, and the to-do list. It's such a superior interface to finding and recording programs over what TW provided on their box. Even the new remote feels really great in the hand, with its ridges along the backside and a battery door that doesn't offer any attractive snaps that I'll play with and break while holding it.

Some of my friends are big Demetri Martin fans.  I know I am.  Some of you even became fans due to my insistence that you watching some clip of him off my DVD player that I'd recorded, maybe the one where he has his mom and grandmother do all the punchlines to his jokes on a flip chart.  That was was classic.

So, if you are a fan of his absurd comedic style, why haven't you gotten yourself a ticket to his show at the Paramount Theater on November 18th.  Details and a horribly stretched picture are online at gettix.net, and it's been on sale for almost 40 minutes.  I just got two tickets for the 7PM show, one for me, and one for my lady friend.

Last week, I played hooky for a few hours and journeyed downtown with kazanya to see the National Poetry Slam's "Nerd Slam" showcase at Antone's.  It was a mid-afternoon show and mostly populated by slammers from around the country.  The main seating was all full, but we got seats over to the side with a good view of the stage.  I took videos using my Panasonic camera of a lot of the performances, and I've included the intro poem below.



The event was a little disappointing to me, mainly because of the moderators and the audience.  There were way too many guy poets to have time for all of them to read, so they alternated between guy, girl, and group performances.  However, for each guy they spent lots of time getting two poets on stage to compete against each other in a trivia contest where the quizmasters were giving very, very hard questions.  A very loud group sitting behind us started shouting "Not a nerd!" over and over during this part when the poets on stage would blank on the questions, and it was just unpleasant.  It would have been much better to have just drawn names out of a hat, skipping the trivia portion of the event entirely.

Most of the poems were pretty blah.  I liked one of the girl's doing a poem about a name-dropping English professor, but I thought the poem about love expressions in programming languages was a bit trite.  An ode to the Muppets was quite nice, but we don't need another bad poem about the pleasures of nerd girls when there's Ernie Cline's work out on the net.</lj>

Salvage Vanguard Theater has done an amazing live radio show in three parts called the Intergalactic Nemesis trilogy.  I had a bunch of my friends accompany me to the third part for my 31st birthday last year, and they recently reperformed all three parts (in a show that I kept missing because of being out-of-town).

SVT's got a new site about the trilogy which features blogs from the main characters, and even more importantly, they've got a new weekly comic serialization of their live-theater radio production just starting.  I've created a syndication account for LJ for it at nemesis_comic so you can follow along.

The lovely Ms. A and I went to see the Salvage Vanguard Theater production of "Static" last night, their current play. SVT is known for using odd venues, but this one really stands out. The play is essentially a one-man show and is set in a hotel room. The audience, limited to twelve people, sits in the hotel room and watches the action unfold. This has the potential for being really, really bad, but SVT's effort is actually pretty good. They pull off the 1 hour 15 minute piece with a combination of great acting and technical finesse.

The play starts with a man apparently asleep in bed. He awakens and starts muttering to himself. Then it gets strange.

While I don't want to give away any of the plot elements, I'll say that I found that the pacing was a bit uneven. It sets up lots of disconnected feelings and emotional states, and they only really get connected in the last fifteen minutes. There are some really sublime moments, once where the audience wonders what their own role is in the production; in that kind of intimate space, is there a fourth wall?

I really appreciated that SVT set the evening up so that we'd have a chance to chat with the actor, Brent Werzner, after the show. It was an informal Q&A where we got to explore the themes of the play and how the various mechanisms of the production worked. The work isn't meant to have a clear meaning, and there was some dissent among audience members about some of the interpretations.

Should you see it? If you like the theater and want to see how it can be reshaped and reworked, yes, go see it. However, don't expect the experiment to be neat and easy; there's a lot of potential here, but I'd like to see a stronger story that provided some resolution earlier in the work while still preserving the strong ending.

OK, so it's two months out, but I've already found the first activity for my birthday weekend this year. Matt Besser, one of the founders of the Upright Citizen Brigade, is doing a one-man show on June 2nd at Alamo Lakeline. Details are at http://www.alamodrafthouse.com/online_tix/show_details.asp?show_id=3299.

Earlier this evening, I went to my first Dionysium event, their April 2006 meeting at the Alamo Drafthouse South. The name is pronounced "die-oh-knee-see-um". This is a project of Salvage Vanguard Theater among others to do a monthly salon with presentations, debate, and theater. I went into the program with high hopes and left with some interesting experiences but also a little disappointment.

What went well? The opening piece was a screening of a short film, part of the East Austin Stories project. It was about Honduran teens who took political asylum in the US to escape their violent gang life in their home country, and it highlighted a program here in Austin that provides support for these kids. The RTF program at UT has been doing this project as part of their introductory documentary filmmaking classes for several semesters, and they will soon be turning these pieces into a video podcast.

I also really enjoyed Wayne Alan Brenner's telling of a personal story titled "Coming & Going" that he'd written for the 2000 Austin Chronicle "sex" issue. Wayne's a brave, brave man and a really funny storyteller, even though the content is probably more "Austin weird" than "highbrow salon".

What didn't work? The debate was the centerpiece of the evening, but I didn't think either debater provided an effective argument. The topic was "Resolved: That American military power can be neither effective nor justified in bringing about democracy in other societies." In the affirmative was Pat Youngblood of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center, while taking the contrary view was Alan Blake, CEO of Yorktown Technologies. Pat argued that the US had a poor track record with military intervention, with many of our efforts pushing our own country's interest over the democratization of the rest of the world. However, he gave a lot of ground on the morality of military action to preserve human rights in the abstract, and he failed to show that it would be unjust and ineffective for the US to act if it really had the goal of bringing democracy to a troubled region. However, Alan's argument relied on an appeal to the Declaration of Independence and a recital of Japan and Germany as example of the US being effective in setting up democratic systems. When questioned, he usually dodged the meat of the question by saying we're dealing with abstractions. At the end of the speeches and audience interrogatory, a vote was held, and the resolution passed by a small margin, but I don't think the format adequately explored the deep issues involved in this question.

There also was a performance by the core group of Violet Crown Radio Players, doing the last act of their recent Molly McCoy aviatrix saga. The timing for this was a bit off; they'd done a much better job when I saw their show at the Hideout earlier this month. Better was the closing commercial, a pitch for the MoneyGo Vulcanizer, a rubber coating sprayer that can be used on furniture, pets, and children.

The evening was closed by everyone singing the Philosopher Drinking song from Monty Python. That was fun, and I did appreciate the musical interludes played on the organ by the talented Graham Reynolds. I think I'd attend again in the future, but I'll probably not make a big effort to get tickets unless the topic and speakers looked to be really interesting.

I'm planning on going to the Friday night show of the Violet Crown Radio Players, a group that does live-on-stage "radio" productions. I saw them do a really neat version of King Kong back in December, and they're back with Molly McCoy in... THE SKY PIRATES! The way they do sound effects is really inventive, and I loved their sponsor spots for products that I don't think anyone would actually want to get.

The show's at 8PM and will probably be a little under two hours. It's down at the Hideout at 6th and Congress Avenue.

If you don't have anything else to do on Saturday night, please head down to Little City and see the second night of The Best Salvage Vanguard Holiday Ever. My friend sistrmoon and I went to it tonight, and it was a blast. While not all of the five-to-ten minute long plays worked, there were some really funny moments, including one bit involving a man-thong and high pitched ranting that had me completely cracked up.

As we left the coffee house, we drove through a throng of Santa-costume-wearing people roaming aroung Congress & 6th Street, marching behind a big pirate flag. I'm not quite sure what was happening, but I love the surrealism.

Here's a very funny post that ties in the Plame scandal, New York theater, and "The Venture Brothers" all into one grand unified theory. The writer is also one of my favorite Hal Hartley film actors. Enjoy.

I just returned from the Rude Mechanicals' workshop production of "Get Your War On", a play based on the internet comic strip of the same name. The play started about fifteen minutes late, but it was well attended for a Sunday evening. It's basically a dramatization of lots of the comic strips, but there's a lot of variety in how they're acted out. Some have the accompaniment of overhead projector slides, some have audio piped in from off-stage, some are up front near the audience, and some take place in the background around the sparse office set. The common denominator is the use of aggressively foul language and the outrage at the abuse of power and poor priorities of the government of the US since the 9/11 attacks. At times it was really, really funny, and sometimes it made me really angry myself. It is a bit rough in spots, and I don't think I could take more than a hour of its frenetic pace, but I do recommend seeing it. It plays one more weekend, and then it's gone!

Things like this make me so glad I live in Austin.

Last night, I headed down to the Hideout to see their production of "Start Trekkin'", an all-improvised long-form episode of classic Star Trek. This is the current major production of the Heroes of Comedy, the improv troupe from which I took my level 1 class earlier this year, and I had a free ticket to a production to use.

They've done a good job with costumes and their reconfigurable set. Of course, Trek purists will complain that while the show isn't about the starship Enterprise, the crew is wearing shirts with the classic Trek two-legged delta symbol, since in that time era, each ship had its own insignia, but you won't find me complaining loudly online. The main stage was decorated with science panels along the back wall, and they had a captain's chair and chairs for the navigator and helmsman. A clothesline across the stage and a couple of backdrops allowed them to quickly turn the set into "generic planet" or "generic formal location".

The episode from last night, generated from a set of audience contributions, revolved around the Starship Antarctica, heading to the Romulan neutral zone to conduct secret negotiations with the Space Trader Conglomerate. The crew consisted of the captain, William Duncan; science officer Mordock/Bordock (depending on who was talking to him) and his daughter, junior helmsman Becky; chief engineer Reynolds, who has a crush on communications officer Beverly; Tchaikovsky, the navigator who is going to die is six days; and the mysterious Ambassador TuTu, a Frenchman with an agenda.

Well, most of the crew members also did double work as Space Traders, and over the could of the 70 minute presentation, we found out that Mordock was an orphan that lived with the Traders, that the Traders were led by a manic bad guy called Bubb, that they'd made their own transporter out of an ancient Geiger counter, and that they had a plan to take over the Antarctica to get its freon so they could save their planet from global warming. They had a variety of props, wigs, and costumes to let the cast change from their primary roles to their other characters; it was particularly effective when a bridge scene involved the "backup" crew that takes over when all the important people beam to the planet. I did like their transporter effect, which mainly involved some spotlights and a lot of knob twisting.

I laughed a lot during the performance, but there's plenty of room for improvement. The actors didn't always do the best job of remembering character names or keeping consistency with what had been established. There were a couple of crack-up moments. The blackouts to change scenes were often timed poorly. On the other hand, I really enjoyed myself, and I saw a theater production that will never be repeated.

Start Trekkin' plays at the Hideout every Saturday night at 9PM through May 22nd. Tickets are $10 at the door, and if you're a fan of Star Trek, I think you'll probably have a blast. However, I'll spare you from the obligatory "Set Phasers to Fun!" joke that ends lame Trek-related reviews so often.

In talking with orangepaisley yesterday, she told me that she thought I did a good job with the presentational elements during my story from Frey Cafe, although she agreed that I needed to work on polishing the content. I said that I really liked the experience and wanted to find outlets for storytelling activities, and she suggested I perform at No Shame Theater. An excellent idea!

Well, nothing promotes work like a deadline. Unfortunately, I can't find out when the next No Shame show is, but as soon as I do, I'm making that my deadline for having three polished stories that I can effectively tell in less than five minutes. I'm going to be sorting through my memories, looking through old LJ entires and emails, and finding things that are both personal and funny. I think I've got a good story about the time The Show With No Name almost caused a riot in East Austin, and I know I can polish the one I did at Frey -- the start was interesting, but I need more tension and there was little payoff.

BTW, I was reminded when checking the Hideout's website about the "Start Trekkin'" show that the Heroes of Comedy will be doing soon. This will be a weekly long-form improv creating a new episode of "Star Trek" each week, from April 2nd through May 21st with a show each Saturday night. It looks like a blast.

Earlier on LJ, I mentioned the storytelling event called Frey Cafe that has taken place at the last few SXSWs, and pointed you to Frey Cafe #5, which happened earlier tonight. I met up with lizardprincess at the Convention Center about 6:10, and we walked over to P.F. Chang's where we had a delicious meal of veggie lettuce wraps and Ma Po tofu. We kept cracking up about our waitress who kept adjusting things at our table, including pointlessly replacing the napkins under our drinks and stealing an appetizer plate while it was in use.

We get over to the Red Eyed Fly about 7:30, and no one is there, but things got started around 8:15, delayed a little because of the Webbie Awards ceremony. Now, we'd never been in the back room of this place before, so we didn't know that it was open to the outdoors and susceptible to a strong breeze. This resulted in lizardprincess borrowing my jacket to keep herself warm and some significant use of her as a huddle heater, not that I minded :)

A total of about 20 storytellers made their way on the stage over the next three and a half hours, and most of the stories were well worth hearing. I really liked the story of how Cinnamon got her name from her parents; how a guy witnessed a car crash and tried to help the drunk driver; how a skateboarder got to be an extra in the film "Gleaming the Cube", taking the role from a young Spike Jonez; and how playing a little Mexican boy who missed the pinata got a guy excused from going to church as a kid.

Inspired by the first couple of stories, I put my name on the open mike list, becoming Frey Cafe speaker #14 for the evening. This was my first public performance in a non-professional role since I did open-mike poetry at Flipnotics back in 1995, but I handled myself well. I wish I'd made more eye contact with the audience and went for a few more laughs, but it was pretty well received. Some of the other speakers had taken phonecam pictures of the audience from on stage, so I decided to top them by having lizardprincess capture my performance using my Treo 650.

Ben at Frey Cafe 5 (4MB, 5:39): This cuts off the first minute where I introduce myself, I talk a little about my hometown of Dalton, Georgia, and I talk about how I would go to both Catholic mass and Southern Baptist services when I was growing up until my parents both converted to Methodism as a compromise. Then I talk abut Governor's Honors, Valdosta, Core Wars, Georgia Tech, Tower Dorm, the Bareass 500, Hanson Dorm, my Campus Crusade for Christ roommate, the Wesley Foundation, Dr. Bill Landiss, getting a room at the WF, inviting friends over for RPGs, and getting reprimanded because someone left a beer bottle under one of the couches in the sanctuary.

It was a good effort, but I think it needs a lot of polish before I do it again. Trim some stuff, punch up some details, and a better flow. Still, I didn't have any problems addressing the crowd and I made them laugh a few times. I'm definitely going to be back next year; the storytelling bug has bitten me hard.

I'm trying out the LJ PhonePost system to present a public reading of the poem I just posted. You'll need WinAmp or some other Ogg Vorbis-compatible program to play back the audio stream.

VoicePost 124K 0:33

(no transcription available)

Last night, I was at the Austin Poetry Slam's 10th anniversary party. I'd not been to a slam event for a few years; the last one I remember was one of their shows at Electric Lounge, probably in 1998 during one of the times when my sister came into town for a few days. I saw a lot of faces I recognized, some that I'd just heard about, and many that were new. The event went well; they integrated a video projector, showing photos and web pages into the festivity, and they had both current slammers and past team members up to present pieces. On multiple occasions, the audience got to shout into Mike Henry's cell phone as we attempted to get in touch with missing poets.

During one of the breaks, I started to improvise my own slam poem, much to the life-threatening laughter of my evening companion. I didn't get to finish it then, so I decided to polish it off this afternoon. Here goes something.

( Two Minutes, a poem by unwiredben )

By the way, I do have another line saved up for use in some other work, an allusion to a famous American musical work: "I am tired, hear me snore; my rumble's too big to ignore." See previous post for my inspiration.