Will Hines Dot Net

Channel 102 was last night. The audience rightfully did not renew mine and Matt DeCoster’s show The Block. It’s a pity, except that the show was cursed, so we were lucky it even screened. Because we forgot it was winter, we had to cancel our outdoor shoot and move it indoors where we had only 4 hours to finish. While searching for sound effects, my iMac’s 11-month-old hard drive crashed. I bought a new one from a mohawk-sporting know-it-all ectomorph on Bedford Avenue and then raced to the home of Superhero Terry Jinn, who installed it for me. My editor underestimated how tough our post-production demands were, and asked if he could drop off the movie in the dead of night Sunday. Moments after I agreed, I discovered amongst my stack of unpaid bills a summons to report, seven hours from that moment, to Jury Duty.

After staying up all night prepping DVDs for the screening, I stumbled to Livingston Street where I helped dispense justice by both reading Jonathan Lethem’s Girl In Landscape and falling asleep.

Day job workload exploded, threatening to keep me from going to the screening at all. But I made it over at the last minute to discover it had sold out. I begged my way in, to see our editor exhausted. The DVD of The Block hadn’t played, and they were going to project it right from his camera, which he had just raced home to get (7 minutes each way, he now knows).

The screening was a blast, though. And it sold out, which is great.

The National Kidney Foundation came to my house and towed away my car yesterday. It’s a donation, theoretically, though that implies I have passed on to them a thing of value. My car is old enough that I had to pay them $30 to take it. A fair deal to someone who doesn’t want to deal with junkyards. I suppose if they scrap it, it’s valuable. I scrambled but could not find my camera in time to snap a photo.

I felt more sad that I expected to see the car towed off. AND I think it was resisting being taken. It allowed its alternator to break, meaning it couldn’t be driven. It got buried under 2 feet of snow. It allowed its license plates to be rusted to its bolts.

The guy who drove the tow truck was very impatient with me when he learned the car couldn’t be driven, and was buried under snow. It’s true, I had not prepared much. I think I had grown so weary of tending to the car, that I couldn’t bear to put more work into actually getting it in towable-shape. The guy hooked a chain under it’s front left tire and yanked the heap from underneath the snow and out into the always-busy Lorimer St. When a line of cars formed behind, furiously beeping, the guy directed me into my driver’s seat: “Steer it — just follow the truck.”

I hopped in and he started dragging my chained car to a less busy street. Unfortunately, I forgot that you have to put keys in the ignition and turn them to unlock the steering wheel. So my car, with its drive train rigidly held in place, swayed leeeeeffft and riiiiight behind the tow truck, narrowly missing oncoming cars at one end of its swing, and almost scraping a line of parked cars on the other — John Hughes comedy style.

The guy stopped the truck and stormed over to my car, just as I had fumbled the keys out of my front pants pocket.
“FOLLOW THE TRUCK” he yelled.
“Yeah, I, the key, you didn’t, I…” I stammered, but he was already stomping back to his tow truck. If the guy had bothered to exchange one sentence with me, I might have had time to think through what I was doing. Then again, I’m a moron about cars.

On the less busy street, we ripped the license plates off. He looked at the maps and jumper cables in the back seat and asked me in a bewildered tone “You’re not keeping your cables?”
“No, I don’t need them.”
“Keep them! SOMEone will take them!”
“Do YOU want them?”

He just shook his head, giving up on me. He mumbled something about “save money – you’ll live to be 90 and feel like you’re 70,” but I didn’t try to expand that into a conversation. He gave me a receipt, and I watched him drag my car north into Greenpoint and away. Yeah, I felt sad.

But I’m glad to not have to get a jump start on Friday morning to move it across the street.

Edited to add: after he questioned me for leaving my jumper cables, I decided to open the trunk to take a last look at what was in there. I pulled out a set of scuba flippers which Matt DeCoster had brought by for a Fun Squad taping the year before. So that was all the tow truck guy saw me salvage from my car.

This is decent list of things to try in NYC:
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/traveler/features/insidersny0505/insidersny.html

As of next week, I will have lived in NYC for ten years. I moved here during President’s Day (and Hines Bro Kevin’s birthday) weekend in 1996, just after a big snowstorm which bothered no one because there had been a REALLY enormous one in January. Anyway, after ten years I’ve settled into eating at the same 3 restaurants (Dumont’s on Union Ave. in my neighborhood, Enid’s in Greenpoint for brunch), going to the same handful places (UCBT, St. Mark’s Comics, Tenth Street Baths, Yankee Stadium) — so I like “secret things to do in NYC” to remind me to get off my sedentary butt and visit my own city.

Those of you asking for cat pictures: trust me, I LOVE posting updates on the cats. Unfortunately, with my relatively new full-time-working lifestyle, I’m not home nearly as much as I used to be, so I don’t have as many chances to capture their antics on film.

I know it’s a poor substitute, but here instead of photos are brief observations on my cats:

• They are both crazy.
• Well, that was vague. What I mean is they are socially skittish. They are scared of everyone and usually won’t come out if anyone new is over. Even when they like people, they do not like to be touched. They DO like to be NEAR people, just not in contact.
• Maggie is dumber, more slim but ultimately more affectionate than Hopey. She is the first to come out of hiding, and the first to run away. She likes being pet, but does not like to sit in laps.
• Hopey is all or nothing with petting. She either bites your hand, or curls up in your lap and demands, via yelping meows, to be pet.
• They are both very site-specific animals. Hopey likes people who are sitting in front of the computer, or standing at the bathroom sink. She hates all other people. Maggie likes people who are lying on the bed or setting the alarm clock, but does not trust people walking through the living room.
• Maggie loves wet food. Hopey loves all food. Hopey is fat. In Love and Rocket’s comics, it was Maggie who got fat. I have misnamed the animals.
• I feed them once a day, at 7am. The cats know this and are waiting by my bed. Recently, Hopey has been becoming more aggressive about waking me up. She used to just stare. Now she walks on my head and occasionally bats at my face. When I wake up and look at her, she runs away.

I would write more about my cats, but my testicles just shrunk and fell off. More some other time.

Good review of Jaime Hernandez new comics collection “Ghost of Hoppers.”. Thank you Kevin, for pointing it out to me. Someday I’ll lay down my full pitch of why the Hernandez Brothers make the best comics. They are as cool as the ocean, let’s leave it at that.

Did stand-up for the I Eat Pandas musical improv show last night. America, I know I’m biased because Eliza is in this show, but no foolin: you should go see it. It’s a phenomenon. The tiny Under St. Marks Theatre was packed and everyone in there was laughing and clapping with terrific joy. That show is magic. That it’s just three people in this sparse underground theatre makes it all the cooler. They have six shows left, and I predict there will be standing room only.

And how was my stand-up? Well, for my second gig since coming back from hibernation, it was okay. Still smoothing out the kinks. Confidence remains high.

DeCoster and I met afterwards and outlined episode #3 of The Block. DeCoster was on fire — I barely had to say a word as he wrote the whole script. Who knows if we’ll be able to preserve this into the final product, but I was cracking up. My contributions were more like requests: “We need to address X” and DeCoster would fill in the blanks. Still, the questions I asked were important. I wonder if that’s what it was like for Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, as they created The Fantastic Four. Stan picked the characters’ names and initial setup, and then Kirby would lay the whole thing out. Stan would pipe with minimal but crucial concerns about the over-arching continuity, and Jack would fill in the blanks. The difference here is I’m only taking HALF credit, not WHOLE.

Had too much coffee yesterday, stayed up late programming and then had a restless, fitful sleep. I dreamt of uncomfortable conversations with people who wanted to get away from me. Then I woke up on my back, with my cat perched on the pillow, staring blankly down at my face. Disconcerting.

It’s hard to start posting once you’ve stopped. The inertia, it grabs a hold of you. And you have to will yourself back into this self-absorbed world of public navel picking, and here I go:

• I’m doing stand-up this Monday night. Eliza convinced her musical improv group I Eat Pandas (which is Eliza, Glennis and Travis) to let me open for them. Maybe you, YOU, should come check this out. My stand-up is downright fascinating. And I Eat Pandas are a guaranteed good time. I’m convinced they could sell out a theatre once a week on a regular basis. Like it could be a decent living for these folks. That is what I think. Come see. 8pm, Monday night at Under St. Marks Theatre on 94 St. Marks. between 1st and A, closer to 1st.
• Mailed in the title to my car to the National Kidney Foundation. Presuming they clear my paperwork, they will call me to arrange picking up my car and dragging it out of my life and into a scrapheap somewhere. I am spending my last days with it hailing down taxis and town cars to convince them to give it a jump start so I can move it for alternate side of the street parking. The best part of deciding to get rid of the car is that whenever someone suggests that I’m throwing away a good deal I offer the car to them for free. No takers.
• There’s a Jack Russell terrier in my office. I am ignoring him but he is yelping at me to play tug of war RIGHT NOW. He is insistent, but small. I am not afraid.
• Channel 102, the monthly screening of five-minute television episodes, happened Monday night. 177 people, a 70 person jump from the previous screening. Since I help run it, I hear many people offer their ideas of what would make a funny five minute television episode. The number one suggestion? A direct parody of an existing popular television series. There’s no hard and fast rules, of course, but your hilarious twist on The Biggest Loser is fighting uphill with me. I think I might hate show-specific parodies because America loves them so much, and I feel left out because I believe America, should its collective unconscious ever become aware of me, would dislike me.
• I’m reading Jonathan Lethem’s books. I’m through The Wall of The Sky, The Wall of the Eye; Motherless Brooklyn and Gun, with Occasional Music. They are good. Geeky and warm.
• Went to Karoke last night with Eliza, Mitch, Glennis, Jen, Neil and Ryan. Neil closed out the night with a rousing rendition of “Rosalita.” I would not have expected the room of Williamsburg hipsters to respond so positively to an unironic 70s anthem, but the crowd was overjoyed.