Will Hines Dot Net

• The Del Close Marathon was a blast. In years past, the crowds and beer-soaked hallways detered me, but this year I was fired up. I think being at work too much made me want to simply sit in the theatre and absorb a lot of good shows. I sat still for 4.5 hours at one point — the last time I did that was for Hoop Dreams. Highlights for me: Gemberling playing a stomach solo in No Posers, I Eat Pandas and their standing O, the casual bliss of the Monkeydick reunion and the improvised stand-up comedy of Pass the Mic.
• On Sunday, too exhausted to return to the marathon, Eliza and I strolled around Williamsburg where we stumbled upon a concert being held for at least 5,000 people (or way more, maybe?) in an abandoned public pool. I’m speaking of McCarren Pool. Rather than fill the pool they’re holding a series of outdoor events there including movies, concerts and this past Sunday’s outdoor party. I like that I live in a city where that a huge outdoor party held in an abandoned public pool is something I can stumble upon.
• Tapas last night with Eliza, Ptolemy, Shelly and Terry was pricey but well worth it. One of the snacks was cooked pieces of chicken head.
• Also walking around Williamsburg, I found the 5-EP set Costello & Nieve (from a tour where Elvis Costello performed just with his keyboard player Steve Nieve) at Soundfix. Excellent collection! The five EPs also serve as a list of my favorite cities (I just decided): Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and New York. Yeah, that kinda works. If I could just get Austin in there.

Stand-up at Oh Hello went pretty well. Nick and John hosted as characters I hadn’t seen before: two gay men who work in catering services for It’s So Raven. Their names? Fabreze Fabreze and Sean Fierce. Those names are so hilarious I am going to type them again: Fabreze Fabreze and Sean Fierce. I could have watched just them for an hour. Now that my night performing there has passed, you may take that as an unbiased recommendation and not a plug. It was a packed house, and I was so nervous before my set that I chewed an entire sheet of paper. It was like I was building a hive.

But it’s a friendly room, and I was happy with how I went over. I need to figure out how to tell jokes without pausing for 10 seconds in between. But I have no segues and it feels abrupt to just leap from my criticism of overuse of the word ridiculous right into my opinions of the New York Times without giving the audience a chance to catch its breath.

Lo and behold, there’s pictures of it.

In the front row at Oh Hello was a guy named Chris from the Atlanta improv group Dad’s Garage, one of the other improv groups at the San Fran festival last weekend. He was in town for the Del Close Marathon (more on that later). I took he and his friend with me to karoke afterwards at the Alligator Lounge, where I met up with Eliza, Glennis, Mitch and Todd. That makes 100% of the times I see people from Dad’s Garage that I’m going to a karoke night. Karoke was decently fun, though at the end of the evening Eliza had vomit spilled on her and I threw up in my mouth briefly. Those were separate events.

The Del Close Marathon starts today — a debaucherous, indulgent and very fun spead of improv. 72 hours straight. I recommend coming from midnight until 6am both Friday and Saturday nights, for reals. Crazy silly stuff. If you just want your Will Hines improv, I’ll be performing with

• 1985 (8:45pm Friday – Stage 3)
• Primal Bias (11am Saturday – Stage 1)
• The Compromise (7:15pm Saturday – Stage 3)
• Monkeydick (12:30am Sunday – Stage 2)

Believe it or not, typing that paragraph has sincerely made me feel as good about my life as I’ve felt in months.

I am appearing in the “Oh Hello” show hosted by the charming Nick Kroll and John Mulaney. They will be hosting as their “Oh Hello” characters, who are very funny.

Details:
Rififi (cinema classics)
332 E11th st (btwn 1st and 2nd ave) NYC
Thursday (which at this moment is TODAY), 8pm

I am about to leave to go to the eye doctors. My right eye has always been significantly worse than my left eye, and I believe this is because as a child I would swim in chlorinated pools and open just my right eye.

Last night, Mitch Magee, his friend Todd and I were sitting in a Williamsburg bar which gives away free pizza when a stand-up show suddenly sprung up right around us. We had gone to the back, in a tiny alcove, trying to find a place in the bar that did not have music blaring so loud that it prevented any conversation. There were only ten people or so, and it turns out that about six of them were stand-ups waiting to go on. The host didn’t seem to have any jokes, although maybe he was rattled since the room was almost empty and those of us sitting there were silent and bewildered. Instead he would wait for anyone in the audience to do anything or move, and then he would label the person according to that action. “Oh, this guy, he’s the designated clapper! Look over here, this guy’s lounging! Are you lounging? That’s great! I love lounging! Uh-oh, this guy’s hooting!” I felt bad for him, but I didn’t want to move and attract attention (although I was already designated clapper).

The tragic thing is moments before this guy lept up and started, I had been talking about how I have been doing stand-up and enjoying it. Mitch was saying that he wanted to do a routine in which he jumped up on stage and just asked people for recommendations of good Thai restaurants.

We ducked out right as the host was introducing the first act. The host pleaded with us from the stage to stay, and it just made us run faster. He lost his designated clapper, lounger and hooter all at once. We went to Barcade where I got a text message from Eliza as she was standing next to John Flansburg at the 10th Anniversary ASSSCAT show. I then got my butt kicked in Centipede and Robotron.

I went to the ASSSCAT after-party and danced to “Scenario” with about 4 people. The party was bigger, but that’s all that was on the dance floor. It was really a series of sparsely-populated events for me last night.

1) Sinbad is supposed to be a hack comedian, yes? One of the horrible ones, who does predictable and stupid material? Listen to Demitri Martin, you say! Well, despite all the tongue-clucking hipsters’ proclamations, Sinbad’s cable specials used to make me LAUGH — HARD! I would change my schedule to see them. And I wasn’t all that young, either. I was probably like 19 or 20. I’d probably still like them. I don’t care if it’s not hip. He makes me laugh! Sue me.

2) When making a web page, putting your formatting directly in the HTML is lame, right? Use a CSS file instead, you say! But you know what? For all the snobby righteous anger of CSS missionaires, there’s still one thing that CSS is TERRIBLE at: CENTERING! How did they revise HTML and forget to goddamn CENTER anything! I love the CENTER tag, and I still use TABLES to VERTICALLY CENTER! I don’t care if it doesn’t validate. It’s cross-browser, uses minimal markup and WORKS! Hit me in the face if you like.

I also like Demitri Martin and CSS files. I just hate “supposed to” directives from society.

Gilbert Hernandez’s new graphic novel Sloth is out. That should be fun. Thanks to Kevin for the heads up.

I do not like the type face Copperplate Gothic Bold or any of it’s variations, but the world has a boner for it. Someday I’ll take pictures of every instance of Copperplate Gothic Bold that I see while walking around — it’s everywhere, still. That’s right, Mitch, I’m talking about fonts!

I am performing stand-up tonight at Mo Pitkins at 10pm as part of the Mintyfresh Comedy show. Check it out, if you’d like!

http://www.mintyfreshcomedy.com/

I returned from my week’s vacation to find that the coffee grounds I had left in my coffee machine had sprouted an impressively large lump of mold. Hey, that means coffee can’t be ALL poison!

Friday, Eliza and I hoofed around The Mission and The Castro. Highlights here included a store called 826 Valencia, which was ostensibly a Pirate Supply store, but it felt more like a headquarters for McSweeney’s. I think McSweeney’s is published out in SF, right? There were very funny lists posted around the place — things like “How Ned Lost His Eye” and “What To Do If You Are Being Mopped.” And everything had an old-timey McSweeny’s-ish typeface, and they sold most of the back issues. I refuse to conduct the very small amount of research necessary to answer this question.

We also saw a sci-fi/horror bookstore that featured a hairless cat. It was creepy and adorable.

By the way, I was out there because Eliza, along with Glennis and Travis, were performing their musical improv act (I Eat Pandas) as part of the San Francisco Improv Festival. I love watching Pandas shows — they are always great, and the audience eats it up. Saturday night they almost got a standing ovation. A sample of the songs that were made up over the course of the three nights: “Being a Ballerina Is Fucking Hard”, “Temple of Ha, Retold” and “Everyone I Work With Has Mustaches.” Pictures, from the festival, here.

Saturday, Eliza was teaching a workshop so I went to see a Giants baseball game. Beautiful day, and I just walked up to the box office an hour before the first pitch and bought a $39 ticket which was 6 rows from the field. Much easier than getting tickets to Fenway, or even Yankee Stadium. I treated the game like an expensive picnic. I bought a hamburger and spent much of the afternoon reading my book, Son of Groucho. At one point Barry Bonds stole a base — a rarity now that he is old and presumedly off of steroids. I missed it since I was reading, but shot my head up when the crowd roared. “What happened?” I asked to no one in particular. “Bonds stole second,” said a guy in the row behind me. “Shouldn’t be reading when Bonds is on base.” I guess he was right! But I kept reading anyway. Good book!

Saturday night, the SF Improv Festival headed out for a night of karoke-ing. Shaun Landry and her husband Hans (who had nicely taken Eliza and I out to dinner Wednesday night) led the charge to some place deep in the mostly gay Castro neighborhood. This place had a small, but very hip list of songs to sing. I belted out Elvis Costello’s “The Angels Want To Wear My Red Shoes” mostly because I couldn’t believe it was available for singing. I believe this is me in the midst of singing it, actually.

Today on the flight home we watched 16 Blocks, directed by Richard Donner, who directed the original Superman movie, which is far better than the Superman movie that is out now. 16 Blocks was pretty damn good, I thought!

And now I am home. The cats are excitedly running back and forth and meowing.

The hoofing around on Monday injured my aged, tender calves so we did our road trip to Santa Cruz on Tuesday. That way much of the day was spent driving. We went to the boardwalk at Santa Cruz. It was cleaner and friendlier then my trips to Coney Island had led to me expect. It’s a pretty extensive boardwalk! Two big roller coasters, a haunted mansion, huge beach, enormous arcade. At 5pm it became “1907 night” which meant they rolled back the prices on everything: hot dogs, sodas and all rides cost just 65 cents. Eliza declared that if she lived in that town, she’d go every Monday night. I do not believe her, but it was a fun trip.

Then we walked around the cartoonishly-populated Santa Cruz main street. Lots of young, dirty, dread-locked hippies. I bought CDs at a bookstore when one came to the counter asking for change. The cashier said “if this guy (me) is paying cash”. I wasn’t GOING to pay cash, but the hippie bullied me by saying “You WERE gonna pay in cash, right, brother?” I said “Yeah.” and he said “Right on!”

For the drive back, I blissfully listened to my new Woody Allen CD (an out of print stand-up CD, which had some stuff not on the in-print Rhino Records one) and a Bill Cosby CD Eliza bought. Old Cosby is amazing — sometimes brilliant, sometimes kinda goofy, but you really do laugh at almost everything! Impressive.

Wednesday we biked around Golden Gate park. There’s BUFFALO in that park! So random. I was trying to pick a more random animal to stumble upon: cobras? alpacas? That night we found a saloon in North Beach that had a band of 40ish plus blues muscians. They were as great as you’d want. They were all dressed way down except the bass player who had a tux shirt and velvet jacket. Perfect!

The weather picked up on Wednesday. Sunday and Monday were like chilly autumn days. But SF has remembered that it is summer since then.

Thursday we went to Berkeley and drank amazing coffee. I got disproportionately offended when the white teenage punks begged for change, but I didn’t say anything. It’s not cute; it’s kinda gross. I know REAL homeless people, kid! Where’s your mental illness! Get a job! Get off my lawn!

Today is Friday.