A long time ago, I did the Second City Conservatory. A long time being like a year, or thereabouts. Either way, there’s video from our final shows and I just never got around to sharing it. Check out this clip from a sketch I pitched, where I do my impeccable Italian accent. IMPECCABLE. Also featuring Tom Knight and Trey Hanks.
- I made an appearance on the NBC 5 Saturday morning news last weekend to promote the Bite-Size Arts Ensemble. It was way too early in the morning and I think I was still a little dreamy, but check it out nonetheless:
Bite-Size Arts Ensemble on NBC 5
- I wrote a little guide on how to create a badge for your blog, which you can find over at the Entrepreneur the Arts Blog. You don’t need to know how to design or code or anything like that. Real, real simple. Check it out.
I’ve discussed in the past the idea of your worst ideas actually being your best…but I hear a lot of reluctance towards pursuing an idea that isn’t your absolute favorite. After all, you throw yourself into your work with all the passion and fervor of a crazy person, and it eats up weeks or months of your life, depending on what exactly it is that you’re trying to write. So why bother investing yourself in something that you don’t even think is good?
If you don’t like your idea, that’s not an excuse to dismiss it. An idea you don’t like is a challenge. Because here’s the reality of what happened:
An innocent tree died so that you could have the pencil wood to write that stupid thing down! You deserve to honor it! This is where the whole “love” thing comes in. Writing isn’t dating. When you’re dating someone, and you aren’t really enjoying it, it’s probably a good idea to get the hell out of there. You can’t change your lover, and it’ll only hurt to try. Ladies, you’re with me on this one.
You can change your idea. Writing isn’t a “love at first sight” process. You don’t have to start off in love with your shitty idea. In time, you can learn to love it. All you have to do is push past that initial rejection and start to question what it is about it that you don’t like. Is it not grounded enough? Is it about something that doesn’t interest you, or that you don’t know much about? These are fixable problems. You know the old “it’s not you, it’s me” excuse? Take it to heart. It’s not your ideas fault, it’s your own. You came up with it, you can make it work.
Creativity is as much about the experience of creation as it is the experiences that come from the final product. Whatever it is that you don’t like about an idea, use it as a catalyst to learn something new or have a new experience. And if you absolutely can’t get something down on paper, even after giving it the fairest shot in the world, then so be it. But before you push all your “little ideas” aside, remember that you already wrote something and that’s a hell of a lot further than we get on most of our ideas. It would be a shame for it to go to waste.
I think tonight may have been a weird kind of turning point night, despite the fact that it also may not have been and I’m just assigning more import to it than I should. But tonight was a night where I did a show in a space that’s not meant for it, missing half of the cast and without an audience to speak of…and still came out on top. Here’s the story:
We’re in the midst of our Level 5 Conservatory shows at Second City. For those that don’t know, we do an 8 week run of a sketch show as the final piece of our study at Second City. Last week was the first week of the run, and we were told not to get our hopes up because first weeks have about a 70% cancellation rate. Now why would they cancel a class show for a class that we’re paying for? Because they haven’t sold 25 tickets for the night. Kind of a ridiculous system, in my opinion, but I don’t make the rules (I’ll just change them when I open a theatre of my own someday).
But last week we were fine, had a good show with maybe 30-35 people in the crowd. Not huge, but we’re just testing material right now, so who cares. Tonight, though, we got canceled. This wouldn’t have been such a bad thing had my girlfriend Amanda’s parents not been in town to see the show (she’s also in my class, just to clarify). They weren’t here JUST for this show, but still…they were excited to see it, she was excited to show them, we all wanted to do a show, stuff like that. So when pulled the plug on us at about a quarter till the first group was supposed to go up, it was a pretty severe disappointment.
Except that wasn’t the end of it. There were maybe 6 or 7 of us milling about, having just heard the news, and it dawned on us that just because we were canceled didn’t mean we couldn’t still do a show. Except, of course, all of the rooms in the Training Center were booked with classes or rehearsals, and attempts to gain access to the empty theatre for a private showcase were not met with much approval. So we found a reception area, with a stairwell. We sat down Amanda’s parents (and her aunt, who was also in town) on the stairs. We quickly ran over the running order, cutting the few pieces we couldn’t do with our smaller numbers and swapping in people to play parts as needed. And then we did a fucking show.
Was it our tightest show? Who gives a shit. Our blackouts were coming in the form of yelling “blackout,” our sound cues were coming out of my tiny iPhone speakers. We played the cards we were dealt. And yet I still came out of that mini-not-a-real-show feeling better than I have about a lot of recent performances because it just felt fun. It was as much just for us as it was for them, and it reminded me of why I’m doing anything creative to begin with…to do what I like to do and hope that others find something fun in it.
I think we all reach a certain point in our development as creators where it kind of stops being fun…you hit a plateau for awhile, where you’ve been drowning in classes and mediocre performances and being in your head and fighting to find an audience for so long that it’s all you can focus on, and you lose sight of enjoying the thing that you set out to do to begin with.
I want the opportunity to do more shows like tonight. I want to be able to do a show without the pressure of needing it to change the world. I want to be able to do a show where I’m not on the line to pay back the theatre for an hour of space, or where I need more than three people to see my work to feel validated about it. I want to remove the limitations of accessibility that I’ve put onto my stuff and just do what feels right, and if other people don’t dig it, maybe I don’t need them to as much as I did before.
My next show’s about a space station. Genre stuff. Not a ton of commercial appeal, I’d imagine. But I’m going to do it however the hell I want to, in a space that’s not meant for theatre, and I’m going to blow the roof off of it. I encourage you to do the same, because as backwards as it sounds, I think I’m more inclined to come see your show if I know you don’t need me there to make it the best thing you’ve ever done. And while I don’t need you to, I do hope you stop by.
We’ll find a comfortable stairwell for you.
I’m not going to lie to you and say that I haven’t reawakened as an obsessive portable gamer since getting my iPhone for Christmas. Because I have. It’s not my fault that there’s a ton of quality software out there for my little wunderphone, or that many of that software happens to be really good and worth playing as more than just an occasional timewaster. It took me awhile to overcome that hurdle, as I still have nightmares of what mobile gaming USED to be…I’m talking Bubble Pop for your Samsung flip phone. I shudder at the thought.
And so, like with anything that I discover I like, I’ve become obsessive about finding new games to play. This is to your benefit, though, as it means I’ve sifted through tons and tons of crap to find some of the gems in the mix to recommend. MAYBE WE CAN EVEN PLAY TOGETHER (if you have an iPhone or an iPod or an iPad (if you can get ahold of one when they come out (good luck))).
First off, a website recommendation. Most all of the games on this list were downloaded for free at the time (even if they aren’t free anymore) using a site called AppShopper.com. Don’t get the wrong idea…they’re not pirated and the site is totally innocuous. It’s just an App Store tracker that shows when games are having price drops or free days. I keep AppShopper.com/Prices bookmarked on my phone so I can check it every couple of days and stock up on a batch of new free games to try. Even if there’s a game you want to actually PAY for, it’s worth it to keep a lookout on this site to see if you can’t save yourself a couple of bucks before you buy.
NOW THE GAMES, IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER:
Words With Friends
This one is probably the most common of these games, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth mentioning. I haven’t spent a ton of time with the official Scrabble app, but it seems to me like they’re doing Scrabble better than Scrabble is. The fact that you can download the full version of the game, albeit with ads that don’t really get in the way of the experience at all, is also a real selling point over the $4.99 that EA is asking for real Scrabble. If you want to upgrade to the full version, it’s only $3 and they deserve your money for building a clean, effective word game knock-off. It’s easy to connect with random opponents and you can have up to 20 games going at a time, so you almost always have a board to play on when you’re bored.
Download Words With Friends now!
Stackus
There are quite a few physics-based games for the iPhone, and some of them are quite good (Finger Physics comes to mind), but this one takes the cake in terms of stacking games. The concept is simple: you take all the blocks on one side of the screen and restack them in whatever configuration you can on the other side to make a stable structure. It actually sounds impossibly easy, until you realize that if any piece falls off of the increasingly small platforms you have to work with as bases, you’ll have to start all over. I keep using the word “clean,” but it’s another example of a game with a very simple art and sound design that really make for a rewarding experience. The sing-songy countdown clock when you complete your structure and the marimba celebration song upon your success will be stuck in your head for weeks. And it’s free, though you can download a “Season Two” of 50+ new stages for $1.99 once you work your way through the first 50.
Amateur Surgeon
This is an older title, but worth the mention. Amateur Surgeon is from Adult Swim Games, and I believe there’s a full free version of it as a Flash game on their website, but it’s perfect for a touch-based game. Imagine the game Operation, except with better graphics and instead of working in a hospital, you’re doing back alley surgery with chainsaws and staplers. There’s a simple little story mode that goes along with it, but the game is long for what it is, and the surgeries gradually ramp up difficulty as you’re faced with case after case of bizarre medical emergency. You’ll detoxify a body of poison, you’ll remove pieces of glass from someones liver, you’ll replace a rapper’s ribs with gold-plated bones and electroshock weird bugs crawling around inside a guy’s heart…and while the game gets a little bloody, it’s all done in an extremely cartoony style that makes even the grossest stuff look cool.
Bonus! The Amateur Surgeon Christmas Edition is a free download that also acts as a semi-sequel to the original game. If story means nothing to you, try out the gameplay with this short, holiday-themed version!
Alphabetic
Talk about another deceptively simple game…here’s the one-line description: you have to touch the alphabet in alphabetical order. Except that the alphabet is bouncing and moving and changing color and filling your screen with random letters that you have to scavenge through to find the next item on your list. The basic game doesn’t have a ton of replay (unless you get into a high score challenge with your girlfriend, which I may or may not have), but there is a Challenge mode as well that offers you specific goals, such as endurance or hitting a certain score or finding double letters. The game is equipped with OpenFeint achievements as well, for those working on their iPhone gamerscore.
Angry Birds
Another game with a great graphic style, Angry Birds is a tower-destroying catapult game packaged as a war between the titular angry birds and a group of evil pigs who have stolen their eggs. Because that’s a thing. This is another game that relies heavily on a realistic physics engine for much of its gameplay, but the feeling of knocking down these fortresses by launching specially-powered birds with a slingshot is immensely satisfying. Best of all, it’s long…which is more rare than I would like for many puzzle games on the iPhone. There are 105 levels of bird-shooting action for $.99, which is pretty damned good. There’s a Lite version you can test, but it’s hard to find a better game deal for a dollar.
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So there’s a few of my recommendations. Do you know an awesome game that I should try? Leave me a comment and I’ll give it a shot! It’s like they say in the Bible: “You can always find time for more games.” No? Maybe not the Bible? Oh well.
There’s a fascinating article up over at the Atlantic today on how the Grateful Dead were utilizing many more contemporary business tactics before they even existed. Things like allowing their fans to tape and share live shows, social networking and more. As a freelancer and an independent producer, I’m always looking for stuff like this that really builds connectivity…it’s one of my big missions in the new year, to try and find a way to make that “give the audience your work for free so that they support you financially/backwards logic” thing work.
Check out this quote:
According to Barnes, the decision [to let fans tape shows] was not entirely selfless: it reflected a shrewd assessment that tape sharing would widen their audience, a ban would be unenforceable, and anyone inclined to tape a show would probably spend money elsewhere, such as on merchandise or tickets. The Dead became one of the most profitable bands of all time.
It’s inspiring stuff, and shows that a little bit of innovation (and goodwill toward your audience) can go a long way. I’m not even a Grateful Dead fan, but I think I might be now. Full article is in the link below.
Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead [The Atlantic via LifeHacker]
I write and perform and do fun projects in Chicago, IL. I could write a bunch more sentences, but you're best off just clicking around the place to find out more about me!
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