The most staggeringly impressive of these theaters—and the one furthest away from me—is the Loew’s Kings Theater on Flatbush Ave. It really is mind-boggling. And there are a number of old theaters on that block that are nearly as impressive.

Looking at the interior shots of the Lowes Kings, I’m curious about what lies beyond the doors of this Greek-extravaganza of a theater near me on Easter Parkway:

The picture doesn’t do it justice—this place is enormous. And the weirdo “Greek” ceramic ornament is amazing.

If you walk down Bedford Avenue near Eastern Parkway you see a number of “repurposed” theaters.

Look at this one! The style of a building like this makes me think that it may have been built (unlike the Lowes) before the advent of movies. What played there? Vaudeville? Light Opera? Ibsen? Who knows?

Anyway, here’s a similarly fantastic theater a little bit further down on Bedford Avenue:

Most of these theaters were in operation until the early 70s when white people decided that they were terrified of black people moving in, so they skipped town. If white people hadn’t been such nervous nellys we’d have some amazing theaters in our neighborhood. White people!

Speaking of white people, it feels as though my neighborhood is going through a very rapid gentrification process that will eventually leave me priced out. I wish I had a job that paid more. White people!

“Swingtown,” the period drama from CBS, premiers in 2 days and the reviews are decidedly…mixed. Which is a shame because I have a lot invested in the “swinging couples” genre of TV shows.

“Swingtown” was created by Mike “The O.C.” Kelly and follows the adventures of an attractive couple that leaves their straight-laced friends behind, moving to an affluent suburb and taking up swinging and drugs.

Bloggy readers, you may remember I too had a show about swinging couples living in an affluent suburb. “Sexual Intercourse: American Style” premiered on the prestigious internet in 2006 and was seen and enjoyed by literally thousands of people. So don’t get so smug, CBS, ‘cause I got there first.

Actually, I’m a little nervous, because I just sent off “Sexual Intercourse: American Style” for consideration in the New York Television Festival, and I imagine the judges thinking, “why the hell did someone submit a ‘Swingtown’ parody?”

Oh well. For those who are fans of the show, I recently uploaded some outtakes of Curtis Gwinn and Dyna Moe from episode 5. Enjoy:

I’m looking for a way out of this morass, oh Bloggy reader, and you can help! Come see my delightfully quirky show, “Mister Glasses” this Monday at the Lower East Side club, Pianos at 7:00 or 8:30pm! Perhaps a deep-pocketed producer will be there to swoop me up in his loving embrace!

If you need any more inpiration to get off yer butts, take a look at this amazing illustration Dyna Moe created of the principle “Mister Glasses” characters:

Cute, huh?

Come see my show!

For some reason, I didn’t imagine this happening when I decided to film on the beach in April. It wasn’t particularly warm. The sun did not seem particularly bright. But here I am—my face feeling as though its been stung by a hundred wasps.

Have you seen my show “Mister Glasses”? It’s good, I think.

The next episode will prominently feature this Western Electric model 500 telephone:

It was designed by Henry Dreyfuss and released in 1949. When you think “rotary telephone” you think of this phone. This is the phone of your early childhood, but perhaps it was in beige or green, maybe with touch-tone buttons. AT&T was responsible for the upkeep of these phones. As I understand it, when you signed up for phone service, you were given one of these, but they were owned by the company. Strange. It explains why they’re so mind-bogglingly sturdy. Nothing today is designed like a model 500 telephone; it is a phone designed as if under a Communist regime, a phone where the makers were hoping it would never break down. Today we design phones to be thrown in the garbage.

Or, rather, I used to be an improviser. But because I’m not up on stage that much anymore, what I do now doesn’t really feel like comedy. It feels like filmmaking. It feels slow. I miss improv.

In late 1998, I came to New York and got a job working as an admissions counselor at the School of Visual Arts. Half of the year, I’d drive around to High Schools in New Jersey and give slide presentations to aspiring young artists on the wonders of an SVA education; the other half of the year, I’d sit in an office and do paperwork and give the occasional portfolio review to a prospective student. I’d sit in my office typing out information about Northeast High Schools into fields in FileMaker Pro and I’d think, “so this is what my life will be like…” So I decided to have a mental breakdown.

And then I enrolled in improv classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. And after a while, I was able to force myself onto one of their house improv teams. I liked improv. longform improv, passed down from Del Close to me.

And then I was kicked off of the team and I thought, “I guess I’ll start doing sketch shows or something.” At the UCBT, you’re not kicked off a team by your fellow teammates, you’re kicked off by the artistic director of the theater.

Here are some reasons why I think I didn’t make it as an improviser:
1. frightened on stage.
2. a dislike of fellow teammates
3. characters always assumed “gay”

Does anyone want to improvise with me again?

This morning, Kaveri held up a torn piece of toast covered in jam and asked if it would make a good painting.

Yes.

Also, on the Helvetica front, our five-dollar bill now has a big purple 5 on it. People don’t seem to like it. For me, I would like a bill with only a big purple five on it.

Here is a leather messenger bag I bought in India:

It was made by Hidesign—a leathergoods company based in Pondicherry.
Here is an article.

India was like this:

It’s pretty bad. It’s beige, mostly. Beige and blue. It’s got a lot of weird charts and tables and pop-up bus routes all over it that no one looks at because it’s ridiculous to think about buses when you’re trying to read a subway map. It looks like this:

Back in the 70’s New Yorkers used a subway map designed by Massimo Vignelli. It was pretty funky looking—unapologetic high modernism with lots of straight lines and 45° angles. Manhattan was so distorted it looked like a big fat geometric blob. Also, every single subway line was represented—instead of just having a single line to represent the 4,5, and 6 lines, you had three separate lines stacked side by side. And each line had its own separate color (magenta, almost magenta, green, slightly darker magenta, blue…) It looked like this:

It was really cool looking and entirely unusable. The idea of representing every line may have been a good one, but because New Yorkers walk around a lot, a subway map has to have some relationship to the physical world above ground and Vignelli’s map had none. The circuit-board-diagram-as-subway-map model may have been OK for fat Londoners, but when you have to squish the long rectangle of Central Park into a square to make your map look nice, something is wrong. Vignelli’s map looks as though it would take days to walk from the east side of Manhattan to the west.

But to this day he is unrepentant. Here’s Vignelli in an outtake from the very fun film, Helvetica, wanting to push his design even further toward absraction.

Helvetica came out a few months ago. It chronicles the competing design philosophies that emerged worldwide in the last half of the 20th Century and tells that story by examining the use of the very ubiquitous typeface, Helvetica (slightly eclipsed these days by the Microsoft copy, Arial.)

Strangely enough, the original Vignelli map wasn’t set in Helvetica but a late 19th Century look-alike called Standard (to confuse matters even more, Standard is a version of the typeface Akzidenz-Grotesk.) Today almost all New York City Subway signs are set in Helvetica. Other big cities like London and Paris do their signs up in their own custom typefaces but New York is having none of that—we’re too cheap, I guess. To cheap for a unique identity…

But back to maps. The best alternative offered up to the current subway map is from Eddie Jabbour’s Kick Design studios. Jabbour’s Kick Map combines the best of the Vignelli map with the best of the current design. Why the MTA decided to pass on the Kick Map (he presented it to them a couple of years ago) is beyond me. Here’s what it looks like.

Here’s the even better looking pocket version.

It’s so cold outside. I’ve lost my love of Winter. A cold snowless Winter…

[EDIT: Arial was actually designed for Monotype (not Microsoft) in 1982. It was first bundled with Windows 3.1 in 1992. Also, the Vingnelli Map looks like it was done in Helvetica although the original signage was in Standard.]

I know—it’s weird. And slightly implausible, but I will try to explain.

A couple of weeks ago, I was notified that I was a finalist for The Andy Kaufman Award. At Dyna’s urging, I had submitted the Kaufman-esque “Welcome to my Study” to the online competition and now I was told that I was going to be flown out to Vegas to perform it at The Comedy Festival along with 7 other finalists.

Hearing the news, I flew into a panic. I was pretty sure that “Study” would bomb big on stage, seeing that it was never intended for the stage and is funny largely because of its weird edits and intentionally flatfooted camera work. Me pulling stuff out of drawers on stage = loser.

So I quickly and nervously cobbled together an act that had a “Study” vibe to it, but was intended for the stage. I came up with a deadpan slide show with musical commentary called “A Catalogue of Fruits.”

So I was carrying a huge, heavy slide projector and carousel filled with generic pictures of fruit as Kaveri and I flew out of JFK on Thursday morning.

We touched down in Las Vegas and it was there I saw that Nick Gibbons—a Texas transplant to New York and creative force behind a lot of funny online videos (including some Channel 102 stuff)— was also a finalist. He was bummed that Dave Thunder wasn’t with us; I was bummed that Rob Lathan wasn’t with us. We were bummed—bummed, but happy to be in Vegas.

Vegas was great! Kaveri and I had an awesome mini-vacation. The room that they put us up in was gorgeous and huge—look at little me in the enormous bed!

Look at Kaveri!

Look at the ridiculously opulent lobby of Caesars Palace!

Las Vegas is like one big architectural joke—as artificial as Disney World, but for adults. Mister Glasses wouldn’t have liked it, but I thought it was great. The hotel New York, New York is particularly fascinating, with its crazy mashup of New York landmarks and vernacular styles.

Is the Whitney Museum really a landmark?

But just like with guilt-ridden sexual encounters, what happens architecturally in Vegas should really stay in Vegas—the architectural mess imposed upon the public spaces of America by the disciples of Robert Venturi and Michael Graves makes me very sad…

Sometimes in Vegas, architectural parody actually transforms magically into the real thing and you feel deeply moved. A case in point is the beautiful swimming pool area at Caesars Palace, with its Roman Villa and Temple to Apollo motif. Swimming in the three enormous pools, surrounded by mosaics, marble statuary and Cyprus trees, you somehow actually start to believe it. It’s great.

I didn’t get a picture of the huge pool area, so this photo from my hotel window (which was intended to show that there was a large construction area right near by) will have to suffice:

It was while swimming in one of these pools (not pictured in the photo), that Kaveri and I bumped into Seth Morris and Owen Burke. Somehow, Seth Morris looks like he was born to relax in a pool.

Here is a picture of the two of them drinking in the private lounge for performers:

Who else was wandering around the halls of Caesars Palace? Um, Nick Kroll was there. He directed a sketch show I was in a while back and now plays a caveman on a sitcom. Unlike a caveman, Nick Kroll seems to pop up everywhere you go. He must spend his time hopping from party to party.

Kurt Braunohler and Kristen Schaal were there. Yikes, they’re funny. I had seen them host the Hot Tub Variety show in New York before, but in Vegas I got to see them do a bunch more bits and they were amazing. Kaveri was crying.

I also bumped into Drew Droege who I know as LaShanda from the Channel 101 show “Classroom.” It turns out that he’s super nice. It also turns out he’s a teacher and performer at the Groundlings which is cool.

Andre Hyland, from “Cool José” and “Movin’ Moms” was there.

Maybe because the HBO folks didn’t want to pay to fly out a bunch of people from New York, the Andy Kaufman Award was a mostly LA affair—lots of people I didn’t know, but everyone basically tied to the same “alt comedy” circle of UCBT NY and LA. So I got to meet the very funny Paul Rust (who was a finalist):

Poor Paul—the tech guys missed one of the sound cues for his act, completely ruining one of his (two) bits. I think I heard him say onstage to the audience, “You know, it’s times like these when God seems to be telling you to quit the business.” Which was funny. He recovered really well.

Who else?…Chad Fogland. Um, there was the girl who was hanging out with Paul whose name I don’t remember right now. Shit. She was really good. She sang and did a puppet show.

Also, there was this woman named Mary Mack, who sang Eagles songs and had a thick Minnesotan accent. It was awesome.

The guy who won the whole thing was Brent Weinbach who was great and insane. Also, he made a point of telling me how much he liked my routine and we talked about how I made the “Why Fruits?” song. So that makes Brent cool.

So how did my routine go over?

It went over really well! I’m not joking—“A Catalogue of Fruits” was a hit. I had put it up at UCBT a week before and it went well, but it went over even bigger at the Andy Kaufman Awards. I played to a packed Ballroom of about 350 people. The lighting and sound system was frighteningly professional. Hopefully, I’ll be able to post a video soon.

Most touchingly, after the show was over, Andy Kaufman’s dad came up to tell me how much he liked my routine and that there was a lot of Andy in my performance. Wow. I was drunk at the time, but I nearly cried.

I saw Carrot Top in the flesh.

Everyone involved in the show—especially the HBO people who organized it—were staggeringly friendly. I don’t know. I have nothing bad to say.

The one thing that didn’t happen was that agents and producers didn’t surround me after the show and say, “Mitch—we really love the semi-autistic character you did up there and we want to put you in a show!” Oh well.