This performance of Latino Comedy Project’s‘s “Gentrif*cked” was especially sweet with a fantastic, sold-out audience and a tight set.
You can hear more about the show here. And learn about the Austin Chronicle award it won here.
Plus we got to show a preview for our upcoming “¡Estar Guars!” Kickstarter. It got a huge reaction.
Thank you, Austin, you have been so good to us for 20 years.
Slightly longer versions of my reviews of the Nike+ FuelBand (beautiful, baffling), the Xbox Live game “Fez” (indie, retro, cool) and the Swivl for camera phones (rotatin’ follow-you action).
Last week was pretty busy at work. I broke the news about the follow up to Wizard101, Pirate101 from the Austin developers at KingsIsle Entertainment. (The version that ran in print is a little different.)
And I did a mostly-photos preview of the new Austin Microsoft Store in the blog.
Things got even busier later in the week with the Moontower Comedy and Oddity Festival, a new thing in Austin that we covered. I ended up writing up The Divorce Show, Aziz Ansari’s fantastic headlining performance, the Theme Park improv show featuring Laraine Newman, Oscar Nuñez from “The Office” and performers I’d seen years and years ago in the sketch troupe “Totally False People.” Saturday night, my coverage ended with Wanda Sykes, which was also great. Aziz Ansari ended up Tweeting a link to the review of his show, which brought us a nice little surge of traffic.
Still doing reviews over at Kirkus every week or two of children’s apps. In fact, apps were part of a discussion I had with Patrick Jordan, who does a weekly blog feature called “What’s On Your iPad.” I told him what’s on mine for a feature he ran last week.
And I saved probably the biggest news for last. Because I work for a large company that owns several large papers and is in the process of consolidating lots of things across them, my Digital Savant column will be appearing in the other ones as well. That means the column will run more regularly in Atlanta, Dayton and Palm Beach.
In Palm Beach, it started two weeks ago with a flourish. They interviewed me for a very nice introduction piece and ran a past column of mine that I suggested would be a good intro to the Digital Savant column. The first column brought me some very nice emails from South Florida from people either needing tech help or offering their own opinions about everything from LINUX to what devices are best for people suffering from disabilities like multiple sclerosis.
All that recent activity made me exhausted enough for a bad crash early this week. I got several pieces of bad or weird news on the same day, including one about a writing project that I was rapidly losing confidence about (one thing about that; when a writer loses confidence in one piece of writing it can often trigger a chain reaction that leads to thinking you can’t write ANYTHING, EVER AGAIN. That can be dangerous.). It took pep talks from several wonderful people in my life including my writing partner, my wife and my two daughters, who each suddenly became angelic and nice to their dad for once and then things were fine again. I got a good night’s sleep and then today, the day of my 8th wedding anniversary, everything seemed fine again.
It’s been a weird combination lately of big changes at work (not for me specifically but for the paper and the company in general), always feeling pressed for time at home and having gone on a jag of writing so much in a short period of time that the words began to ran together and I stopped processing. Add lack of sleep to that and things get worse really quick.
Now my priority is resting up, getting back into the exercise routine and getting recharged because it’s almost summer, I have a few big tasks ahead of me and I’m gonna need every ounce of energy I’ve can generate. (Just not Nike Fuel points because I’m starting to think those are just useless.)
It seems like the subject of comedy has been coming up a lot lately in my life, reminding me of how much I miss writing and performing for the stage (or for live-action video).
On Monday, my Digital Savant column was about how stand-up comics are using social media and other technology to attract fans, sell their own productions or even generate material. I spoke to several local comics who will be performing at the new Moontower Comedy and Oddity Fest as well as Aziz Ansari, who was nice enough to do a short phone interview with me for the piece to talk about his online special, “Dangerously Delicious.”
I’ll be covering some of the Moontower shows this week for the paper. My colleague Dale Roe did a piece in the paper advancing the festival that looked back at the Austin comedy scene, including some previous festivals like the Big Stinkin’ fest, which was the first big gig we ever had in the Latino Comedy Project.
The LCP, incidentally, is about to put on a brand new show in May called “Los Abengers.”
My understanding is that some of my other comedy friends are also doing a different comedy show that’s being put together and it just got me thinking how fun it was to write together and to go through the process of editing and revising sketches. (Sometimes it was frustrating and tough, but the parts I remember best are just laughing and laughing, all around the table.) I’ve offered to write stuff from afar, but of course, it’s not the same as being at writing meetings and rehearsals and doing the work to get stuff on its feet. With the way my life is right now (kids, commute, other writing commitments), it’s just not possible to do that. But I do miss it.
I still have sketches that were written and never produced and a few ideas for new sketches, but the whole point of a sketch troupe is the collaboration, the whole being more than the individual parts, and doing something like that remotely, shooting in scripts by email or Google Docs and not being able to participate beyond that seems weird and maybe wrong. But we’ll see.
Other stuff going on recently: I did an interview with Dennis Tardan for his BlogTalkRadio show. We just talked about writing, inspiration, trying to be creative, all that. It was nice to talk about writing and not have it just be about stuff related to technology. He asked some great questions and the interview took place on a day off when I was able to lie on the couch and relax and really focus on the conversation.
I covered the International Symposium on Online Journalism at UT over the weekend and blogged about it for Digital Savant. It’s always an inspiring conference with lots of great idea.
Soon I’ll be posting the last Trailers Without Pity video of the season (and if I’m being honest, perhaps ever). But more on that in the next post.
Last night, we went to see Conan O’Brien at Austin Music Hall. This involved a convoluted set of babysitting maneuvers — my in laws are out of town this weekend and my mom was due for minor surgery Friday morning (it was cancelled at the last minute), so we took the girls up to Austin with us to go stay with their aunts.
We love Conan. We saw him in New York years ago and he was no less funny, although it was strange to see him in Austin and I could have done with about three fewer indulgent musical numbers. But the videos, the monologue, the bits with my hero Andy Richter, were all fantastic. It almost made up for the fact that Austin Music Hall is a hellhole. Even though it’s been remodeled, it has seats that feel like they cost about 25 cents and jab into your back, the acoustics are still shit and, as O’Brien pointed out, it looks like it could be cleared out for cockfighting. The show also ran so long that we missed seeing visiting friends Tara and Glark afterward (yes, we have turned into those parents who can’t ever stay out past 11 p.m.).
But I’m glad we went — it feels like something we might never get to see again and depending on how things go for Conan on TBS, he might never have the cultural lightning in a bottle he’s got right now to pull off a tour like this again. The mood in the room was certainly electric and the show brought out two of Austin’s most vibrant communities — dorks of Austin (if you wear a porn moustache and straw election hat, you are an Austin dork. Sorry) and comedy nerds. As far as the content of the show, I agree with pretty much everything our TV critic Dale Roe said about the performance. I would have liked more comedy bits and fewer songs, but most of the comedic stuff killed and I was gasping for breath during the sublime Walker, Texas Ranger handle bit (which still works. Brilliantly.).
I did a story in the Statesman earlier in the week about social media and ticket sales related to the show. Still pretty amazing how quickly it sold out given, as O’Brien himself pointed out, this is the first time audiences have paid to see him perform.