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I can’t imagine a poster more perfectly designed to make me not want to see something.
The latest Efficient Officiant! Watch it! And if you like it, tell your friends ‘bout it! “Like” it! Things like that. Because we often have no idea if people are even watching these.
Episode #9 - The Testimonial
Written by Katie Schorr and starring the SUPER FANTASTIC Kelly Hudson, Dan Klein, and Lance Rubin.
Shot by the great Ray Munoz. Special thanks to Julie Harnik for her gorgeous apartment! If we were only skilled enough to light it properly…
“In psychology, procrastination refers to the act of replacing high-priority actions with tasks of low-priority, and thus putting off important tasks to a later time. Psychologists often cite such behavior as a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision. Schraw, Pinard, Wadkins, and Olafson have proposed three criteria for a behavior to be classified as procrastination: it must be counterproductive, needless, and delaying.”
Graffiti of the Month, January. The obvious subtext of No Strings Attached.
me: hey jaden! hey willow!
jaden: what’s up?
willow: hi lance!
me: i’m doing all right. january’s been good. slow audition month, but i’m feeling good about 2011.
jaden: auditions? why don’t you just get your parents to remake a famous movie for you to star in?
willow: yeah, stupid! or at least have them get somebody to produce and write a hit single for you.
me: oh, yeah. good idea! thanks, guys! your worldview isn’t skewed at all! and won’t continue to be for the rest of your lives!
The one and, thus far, only time in my life I was a hard-core sports fan was for the New York Knicks, from 1994 through 2000. This video (which also serves as a reminder that 1994 truly was a long time ago) is from the first year I started following them, when I sorta felt like I was such a devoted fan that I had helped them make it to the Finals. Which they subsequently lost to Hakeem and the Houston Rockets. Sad.
But this vid takes me back to such a specific time and place, when I had a Knicks pullover Starter jacket, when I would try to watch every single Knicks game on the MSG channel, when John Starks, Patrick Ewing, and Hubert Davis (my personal favorite, a highly under-rated pure shooter) were completely awesome. Go Knicks.
Re-watched this gem last weekend to start off this Year of the Rabbit right, and it still shines oh-so-bright, almost 23 years (!!) after its release. After this movie blew my mind (“Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny onscreen at the same time?!?”), Roger Rabbit became my absolute favorite cartoon character for many years. And I was shocked when I later learned Bob Hoskins was British.
Why is the whole world not talking about Macgruber? Most highly under-rated movie of 2010. It had me laughing out loud (LOLing) way more than I expected and more than any other comedy this year.
If nothing else, you have to appreciate the first 15 minutes, which are a pitch-perfect take on 80’s action movies. Delightful.
I’m a little late in finishing up Season 2 of Bored to Death, but finish it I did. Because it’s a show I really want to like. Ted Danson is having such a great time and is really fun to watch and the tone is zany in a way that seems to hold such potential and Zach Galifianakis is spinning as much gold as he can out of lines that, on paper, aren’t all that funny or interesting.
But at the end of the day, this is a show with no stakes, a show where characters don’t learn or grow or change, and where our protagonist Jason Schwartzman seems completely removed from and unaffected by the world he is in, having made little to no progress as a character after 16 episodes.
One could argue that, in comedy, a protagonist doesn’t need to change. I mean, does Larry David change in Curb? Not much, but at least he is reacting to the world around him in a way that is hilarious and insanely relatable. And then, the fact that he never changes becomes part of the comedy.
One could also argue in Bored’s favor, “It’s just a comedy show! It’s funny! Look what crazy adventures they get into! They do so much hilarious running-around!" But when none of this is grounded in any reality, with no repercussions for anything that happens, when guns don’t even really matter, it all becomes a non-funny wash.
This lack of stakes was never more clearly on-display than in Ted Danson’s character arc this season. In a really awesome, interesting twist, his character George was diagnosed with prostate cancer. And I thought, "Wow, that was unexpected." The show had been so fluffy-light that to suddenly bring cancer into it seemed smart, suddenly grounding everything in a new way. Lo and behold, after about 4 episodes of dealing with his cancer, the show shit all over any reality it had created when it turned out George didn’t have cancer at all. It had just been a clerical error the whole time; his last name had been confused with some other guy’s. Really, people? Really? Sigh.
So, though a small part of me still wants to like this show, still loves seeing so many fun Brooklyn locations on my TV screen, and still thinks there’s some potential for all these elements to come together in the right way, most of me realizes I already watch too many TV shows anyway, and it’s time to let one go. Farewell, Bored.
As I was getting off the F train just now, I was blind-sided by a casual service change notice on the window with, what essentially amounts to, this information:
From January 10 through May 2011, there aren’t going to be any Manhattan-bound trains at this station (which is the station near your apartment that you use every day). Sucker.
I re-read it at least 5 times, thinking, “What? No, this can’t be true. What?"
But it is true. Painfully, mindbogglingly true. Apparently they’re doing work on the Culver Viaduct, so me and Katie’s and hundreds of other people’s stop is fehhhhcked. There’s gotta be a better way to handle this Viaduct work than straight-up closing down Manhattan-bound service at multiple stops. I mean, right??! And there’s gotta be a better way to inform people that this will be happening than with a lame piece of paper a week before.
I have no idea how to process this information. The day after i just spent 15 more dollars on an unlimited metro pass, and I don’t even have a subway stop.
Thanks, MTA. You’re terrible.
Happy 2011! Year of the Rabbit. I intend to ferociously attack and devour this year, though, so I thought Year of the Tiger-Rabbit worked better. (Also I love tigers.)
May 2011 be filled with much creativity, much love, much writing, much performing, and much consistent Tumblr-posting. Hop hop ROAR.
My List of Books to Read in the Near Future is long and overwhelming (that’s what she said), including three decent-sized books that I vowed to read in the year 2010 that I haven’t even cracked open yet. But, when Katie finished reading The Invisible Bridge, her reaction to it was so powerful and so persuasive that I pushed aside said list and dove into this 600-page epic instead.
It took me two months to get through it, as my attention span isn’t always the best, but it was incredibly worth it; I am fairly sure this may be one of the Ten Best Books I’ve Ever Read. I know. These are bold words, and it was one of those books that I was Really Liking the whole time until I finished it, and then I was like, “Wow. I didn’t just Really Like that. I Loved that."
It is a really traditional narrative set during World War II, which has obviously been addressed like, a lot, in books and movies and TV shows already. And yet, somehow, this book feels fresh and human and great in new ways. Julie Orringer writes about her characters with such genuine care and affection, and creates such a grounded, authentic-feeling world around them, that it’s hard not to get sucked in. Her writing often felt to me like this delightful amalgam of Michael Chabon and J.K. Rowling, except supplant the comic-booky-fantasy stuff with straight-up grounded historical-context-and-facts stuff. (That exchange sounds like trading "cool” for “boring,” but it’s really not at all.)
And I think it ultimately works so well because the protagonist, a 20-something Hungarian aspiring architect, is so damn likably relatable. I think it’s the most a piece of World War II art or literature has actually given me a sense of what it would be like to be alive during that era, where you don’t actually know things are definitely headed towards war, towards the Holocaust. It’s brutal and real and shocking and horrible without ever sensationalizing or sentimentalizing, and I think the biggest praise I can say for the novel is that it made me want to know a lot more about my own Jewish ancestry. So, great book? Yeah. Great book.
This ep debuted more than a week ago, but I’m a little slow on the up-take. If you missed it then, watch it now! It’s one of our best Eff-Off eps yet.
And here it is, Part Deux, also known as Episode #7, also known as the episode where the sound stops wildly switching speakers (I hope).
Featuring the great Jeff de Picciotto.
Happy New Year and eff off!
This was supa-fun to shoot. We were the least rebellious rebels, trying to shoot guerilla-style in a public elevator and getting thwarted at every corner by slow-walking elderly people.
This week - a two-part double ep!
Both feature Jeff de Picciotto as Dog, the caterer.
Part of me knows this is a beautiful concept, but it’s overwhelmed by the other parts of me, which think this is incredibly creepy.
katie kindly edited out all the shots where i’m cracking up jimmy fallon-style.
Cal gets advice from wedding officiant guru, Clasper.
Starring Lance Rubin, with Ray Munoz
Written by Katie Schorr
More Eff Off, this time with Lance and Ray! Written and edited by me!
This show’s gonna be great. And also I play guitar in it.
Price: $14
CRAZYSEXYFUNNY
Katie Schorr saves the world
By Angela Ashman
Funnylady Katie Schorr has numerous credits to her name: She has appeared in CollegeHumor videos (see: “Back to the Future Sex”), in Trojan condom commercials as “The Gonorrhea Girl,” and as a regular at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, where she recently killed with an impression of Nico singing an ode to actor-turned-AT&T-pitchman Luke Wilson. Described on her website as an “actor, writer, singer, skeeballer,” she’s bringing her latest solo show Did I Do That? to Joe’s Pub. The comedy, directed by Stephen Brackett, stars Schorr as a girl on a “quest to save the world and lose her virginity, somewhere between the Dominican Republic and Windsor, Canada.”
60-Second Briefly Relevant Songs: Your Plans.
Written and performed by Lance “truth-singer” Rubin
Camera by the lovely and skilled Katie “lovelyskills” Schorr
