Will Hines Dot Net

Here is a song I like.

The Comealongs – from the solo album of the not-famous Jimmy Smith, a member of the barely-famous Gourds. In solo projects, he refers to himself as “Clocker Redbury/Dusty Slosinger” to distinguish himself from the much more famous jazz musician (I had “reggae musician” here but that was powerfully inaccurate).

The song is slow and twangy and about handcuffs. Read this paragraph out loud and tell me you don’t love the sound of the words (exclamation points are mine):

“Let me tell you about the comealongs! The more you resist, the tighter they get! Around your wrists, the pain will break you! Then for a moment these humbling toughs turn you into baggage whereas before you were cocksure and adulated — the prevailing doom of the high and mighty!”

Bonus track: Collections Gettin’. Whole album: Clocker Redbury/Dusty Slosinger. I recommend it heartily. It sounds like it’s being sung by a wise drunk man in a top hat while he sits on a collapsed refrigerator in a junkyard.

That is awesome.

Wikipedia: Sunken Cities

If you’d like, please suggest some other intriguing Wikipedian categories.

You heard me.

So some 1985 compatriots helped me make this video recently:

[youtube C3xT38j4TGs News Anchors]

Gavin Speiller plays “Gavin Speiller” and Ben Rodgers plays “Will Hines.” I play “offscreen voice of reason.” I originally had a more ambitious idea and then decided to just have them read and make up a bunch of silly headlines because… er, I don’t know why. Because I’m drunk on the freedom of YouTube to do whatever I want, I guess. It’s nice to have funny friends who will show up and shoot for an hour with zero prep, too.

Gavin and the rest of Rogue Elephant are doing a sketch show tonight. Maybe you go, yes?

Oh, you want MORE trivia on that 2.5 minute video? Sure, sure. Ben is basing his character on this guy. The”boop” noise is from the end of Radiohead’s song “Airbag.” I was gonna greenscreen in a background but a) it was hard and b) it distracted from the performances. More trivia: I need better (or any) microphones. Then, quietly, you ask: hey, is this some sloppy half-assed copy of the outtakes from Anchorman? Hmmm. Yes. Yes, come to think of it, it really is. Screw you and the whole world.

I listened to a handful of This American Life episodes this weekend. I simultaneously enjoyed the subtle naturalism and was annoyed by the wry smugness. My antidote was Kasper Hauser’s hilarious parody. Those guys are amazing! If you’ve heard even 10 seconds of This American Life, I recommend it.

“I was one of those kids who grew up literally less than 400 miles from the beach. Other kids would go home after school? I would go home and think about the beach.”

“You really loved the beach.”

“It was my favorite. My second favorite thing in the world.”

“You favorite was… peeing?”

“What?”

(Guitar intro from ‘These Days’)

I found an old mini-DV of UCBT Cagematch from December 20, 2001. Mitch and I watched it and felt nostalgic and impossibly old. This was back before Curtis and DeCoster and Rocco joined Monkeydick and while Berrebbi was still on it. Curtis was filming it though so you can hear him laughing at his soon-to-be comedy partner Gemberling (and the rest of us). On the Respecto side, Owen had a mohawk and Riggle was overseas. Monkeydick won this, and you can see the surprise on our faces since Respecto was so clearly funnier.

I encoded the files for the other Monkeydick guys to see, but here they are in case anyone else is interested in seeing them.

http://64.90.181.100/will/cage_2001/

Note: You have to download the .mp4 files and watch them on your computer. I didn’t make them viewable online because they would take a few hours to re-do.

I think I can see Erik Tanouye watching on the sideline and hear Gethard laughing in the back somewhere.

This video from Matt Evans cracks me up.

[youtube c-Dv1HLD-es Rick Kant - Commercial Actor]

“Fields of Gold,” the song which plays over the beginning, is the worst song ever written ever, counting the random clanging of pots and pans that happens at restaurants as songs.

Kurt Vonnegut died today. Everyone is sad, which is nice. I’m amazed at his ability to connect with so many people. I feel like when I was in high school, everyone — EVERYONE — loved Catcher in the Rye, 1984 and a Vonnegut book of his/her choice. Is that right? I loved when that “sunscreen” graduation speech got passed around a few years ago, everyone just ASSUMED it was Vonnegut — the Internet collectively decided that it sounded like him and so therefore it was. We liked him.

My favorite book of his was Slapstick, which apparently was a terrible one. It featured twins who were mentally retarded when separate, but brilliant when together. They become president on the platform that they will randomly divide the nation into families. You know what family you are in by a number — like family 4756 — and it’s your job to remember the birthdays of everyone in your family. It made everyone feel connected and happy.

I made another video last night. I do not expect it to become a touchstone of youth culture.

[youtube d_cEwqFNehs nolink]

There’s a very cool bio-comic out called Lucky by Brooklyn cartoonist Gabrielle Bell that’s being well reviewed by smart people. Most fun for me is that page one of this book shows her going to attend a Team Brooklyn show at The Charlie Pineapple Theatre. See the first page about halfway down this page:

http://smithmag.net/memoirville/2007/01/08/excerpt-lucky-by-gabrielle-bell/

No, she doesn’t say it’s Team Brooklyn, but I know it is because the week after she drew it she walked up to me at that pizza place on Bedford Avenue and showed me her sketchbook and said — “Hey, you were in this show I went to.” We talked comics and I used to see her and her boyfriend selling comics on Bedford for months after that. So when I saw her sketchbook sitting in a bookstore, freshly published, I selfishly flipped through looking for that page, and it is page one.

Team Brooklyn, by the way, was a UCBT project which took all of its Williamsburg improvisers on Harold teams to headline a periodic Harold Night in hipsterville. I think most Harold teams dreaded having to truck out there to perform, but TB had a blast. It was myself, Brian Finkelstein, Charlie Sanders, Will Becton, Jeff Campbell and Mark-Sam Rosenthal. I thought for some teams, it was a good antidote for the pressures of Harold Night. I know that Neutrino and Police Chief Rumble used to kick the shit out of their shows there. I guess the Under St. Marks shows have come to serve that purpose. I wonder what the maximum number of people there could be that would be interested in this very paragraph?

Some points:

• My improv team 1985 is in Cagematch tonight. 11pm at the UCB Theatre. Maybe you go, yes?
• Here is the video I showed last night at A Week of Kindness‘ and Bare Handed Wolf Chokers’ “Funny Video Night.” The dialogue is Not Safe For Work. I thought it was hilarious when I made it at 1:30am late Tuesday night, and still pretty okay when I woke up Wednesday morning.
• Looking for a new apartment. $1200 or less. I’m open to roomates but I have two insane cats that will not tolerate other animals and I like to walk around criticizing things out loud so I should probably find a place just for me.
• Great interview with Gilbert Hernandez here. He makes an offhanded comment describing many of the big buzz graphic novels as “tragic biographies” — and he’s right! Can we just have some cool stories become big graphic novels, please?
• A photo of Wonder Woman with kittens. That’s kinda funny. Found via Journalista, which is where I find 95% of my comics links. (Edited to add: It is not a photo because Wonder Woman is not a real person. It is a drawing.)