Will Hines Dot Net

The Cornish Game Hen Maneuver. A shamelessly ridiculous Star Trek-inspired sketch written by and starring John Frusciante. Directed by me. Also starring Devlyn Corrigan, Cody Lindquist and featuring the voices of Mike Still and Greg Tuculescu. Edited by Carmen Angelica. Crew: Brett White, Ben Ragheb, Mike Fallek, Ian Carr.

I’ve been watching episodes of the original Star Trek series on Netflix recently. Great fun! I love that everyone who worked on that Enterprise was 40 and had a gut.

That microphone is very much not plugged into anything.

Performed stand-up on the Union Square L train platform Saturday night as a special guest of Joe Pera, the host. Dan Wilbur also performed. Very fun. It was part performance art, part awesomely challenging stand-up conditions. Joe had done this twice before. I’m only now realizing I never asked him how he came to think of this. I think he liked the idea of 2 hours of stage time, broken into 5-10 minutes sets (the time in between each train departing). Or it just seemed fun? Not sure.

That’s your host, Joe Pera. Tabitha’s phone ran out before we got a photo of Dan.

Here’s how it worked: A train would depart. Joe would wait until one or two people were nearby. If they were girls, he’d offer a compliment. If they were guys, he’d offer to guess their favorite food. Those went over well, sometimes even gathering two or three others. Then he’d do his set — three or four very short jokes. Then he’d introduce either Dan or myself, and we’d take the microphone. You had to project over the echo of the station, over the fan that was blowing directly overhead, and over the frequent announcements. After a few jokes we’d turn it back to Joe to close. After a while, we’d cycle through all three of us in the 5-10 minutes timespan. It usually worked all right. At least twice we had a crowd of twenty or more gathered around. If no one would talk to Joe to begin with, Tabitha would be a plant and ask for a compliment.

It was pretty cool. Besides the very fun silliness of the whole presentation (I enjoyed shaking Joe’s hand as I took the mike and saying “Thanks for coming out, everyone.”) there was the challenge of trying to get a reaction out of the crowd. Most of my “material” is too-subtle stories of being a guy in his late 30s in hipster Williamsburg. Even though it was the L train , there were not many of my peers there. Mostly younger guys and girls, often Latino, heading out for their Saturday night. The fun part was — it seemed they were into hearing jokes. Considering it was one of the most hostile acoustic environments, these people seemed like they were rooting for the material to work. Joe’s crowd work was a hit, and both Dan and I had patches of getting stuff to work.

Dan admirably switched up his strategy with each train. He tried his normal set once, then all crowd work, then a mixture, then addressing the weirdness of the situation — he was adapting and doing better each time! It was like watching Joshua learn tic-tac-toe in War Games. I mostly just talked faster, trying to trim the starts of each of my jokes each time. Good training to edit!

I think we’re doing it again. I am going to wear a tie like Joe next time. And prepare a special subway set.

I was never really into Michael Jackson, but I respected how powerfully pervasive his popularity was.

1) My friend Greg Lancaster could reproduce with impressive accuracy Michael Jackson’s dance from the Motown 25th Anniversary show where he did the moonwalk the first time. We had all been about 12 when that special was on and I for one didn’t give a crap about it. Bloom County made fun of Michael Jackson and so therefore so did I. But I guess Greg had been spellbound. In the fall of 1988, during our freshman year at UConn, at a party with people who would become my best friends in the world though at that time they were mere acquaintances, Greg at one point started to do that dance routine. I think it was as a joke at first but quickly became a non-ironic impressive display of a really hard thing. It was a weird but joyful party and the start of four years in which being happy was more important than being cool. The room was going nuts and everyone cheered when he got to the moonwalk. In my mind I made a mental note “A lot of people really like Michael Jackson.”

2) In 1996 my then-girlfriend, who was not a particular music junkie at all, sang with jarring precision Billie Jean. She knew all the background gasps and ooohs and aahs. She was normally a very cool cat, maybe even shy — but at any rate a mellow California girl not given to outbursts of loudly expressed silliness. But we were driving a rickety car from Santa Monica, California to NYC and the stereo flat-out died. Hours later we tried singing songs out loud. She suggested Billie Jean and rocked it out. I made a second mental note “People really remember Michael Jackson.”

3) Yesterday at the UCBT offices as we were hearing the news, my brother Kevin burst in with an amazed expression — like a guy coming into a horror movie to report that the zombies had toppled the statue of the mayor. He had left to go home about five minutes before. “EVERYONE is talking about Michael Jackson outside. I walked by a guy and I just heard him say into his cell phone ‘LaToya’” Even LaToya is on people’s minds. Then I heard that news of Mr. Jackson’s death would be above the fold on the New York Times — a placement normally reserved for heads of state or the results of tragic murders. I thought again “Yep, people really liked Michael Jackson.”

For what it’s worth, there’s no combination of human beings gathered in a group who aren’t glad to hear “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough.” Here’s the demo version of “Don’t Stop” that Michael recorded with his brothers. It was released on a special version of Off The Wall. an album so good it makes the whole decade of the 70s seem better. This demo is GOOD (doesn’t get going until about :50).

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Pitchin’ Nightmares: You Say Tomato. This one is my favorite. One and a half minutes of fantastic subject-changing good times.

The New Pornographer’s video for “My Slow Descent Into Alcoholism” is one of the funniest and coolest depiction of defiant dirtbaggery I’ve ever seen! It’s not that there’s a huge VOLUME of dirtbaggery. Just well chosen details that slowly build into an awesome last shot.

Found after watching Letter From An Occupant via achilles’ blog. Both are amazing and fun songs!

Later!

This blog is a self-promotional nightmare! But let’s keep it going!

Father’s Day Acting Class LandlineTV. I fake vomit in this!

The Landline makes hits! Also, before the shoot started, I swore loudly in front of the child actor when I decided it would be hilarious to get extremely fake hostile with Tim Martin because he was reading Harper’s! (“you like that fag s*** you f***?”) How awesomely awkward! Why do I enjoy being such aggro jerks? Because they are warmhearted and care about America, that’s why.

You guys want me to post more videos I’ve been involved with, right? This is American Apparel: Everyday Sexy, written and directed by Todd Bieber, and starring Nate Dern who is one of the two ucbcomedy.com video editors. Gawker has it on its front page right now, which is fun.

Todd wanted a certain kind of script — something with lots going on visually, about a subject that people would WANT to see made fun of, but still filmable in a short easy session. So he wrote one! Todd and Nate did a lot of work to get this video from a 4+ minute version down to its current two. It’s hard to do that, and I think their work paid off. It was weird: I think the video was good at 4 minutes — weirdly got worse at the 3 minute mark but then better at 2. When they showed me the final cut it felt better in a way — well, look, I don’t really know what I’m talking about. But they worked hard and I think it paid off.

I’m also IN this video as a suburban man who is in an American Apparel ad. Todd said “I’d want someone a little older, middle american, shlubby, for the guy — any thoughts? ” and I selflessly nominated myself.

How about some more videos? Good heavens I’m just promoting myself these days.

I said “We need stuff we can film fast and release right away.” Clements and Spellman had this: Pitchin’ Nightmares: Good Luck Chuck. We filmed it two days before Senior Clements moved to L.A. I am in this one, and there are two more coming soon. They’re all on UCBComedy for complete-ists. I am IN THIS performing my time-tested Frustrated Straight Man Role!

The End of the World –and improvised sci-fi show — starts tonight at 11pm. The class and I have spent 8 weeks developing this show. Half the class spends the first half of the show creating events that lead up to an apocalypse, and then the other half of the class shows the world that develops after that apocalypse. It is great fun! It runs for four Tuesdays starting tonight.

The idea for this show was born when I was IM-ing with Katey Healy-Wurzburg in February and said “I wish I could teach a 600 where we just act out the plot of Watchmen every show.” And she said that it sounded possible — just do an Evente that always ends with the world blowing up. I agreed, but didn’t think that was complicated enough so I tacked on a mono scene to the end of that. BOOM. Sci-fi extravaganza.

I gave them a suggested reading/viewing list at the start of class.

When I took my current job as Associate Academic Supervisor pretty much the first thing I did was talk with Joe and get this show approved. Power corrupted me instantly, I’m happy to report.

So if you are going to Harold Night, or if you are a fan of geeky sci-fi and/or improv — come by and check it out.

I got my head more or less shaved last Friday. Why? Well, I had to play Eisenhower in a play that night. I’ve always kind of wanted to try it, as my hair recedes more and more, to see what it’d look like. But most of all is because the LAST time I went to the barber (I go to that pit of barbers beneath Astor Place) a man in a thick Russian accent said to me “You know what you should do next time? Use number two clippers on the top, number one clippers on the side — QUIT MESSING AROUND.” It genuinely affected me — I had been messing around! So I did not mess around, and got my hair cropped extremely close. “Honest” as Brian and I like to say.

Now I look like, as Greg Burke said, a guy trying to start a Bruce Willis tribute band.