Roped Inc

Screens Ahead: Mad Men and the Music of Failure

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 16:00:58 -0400

Screens Ahead: Mad Men and the Music of Failure:

We have a lot of expectations for the next series of Mad Men. But as the best series on TV (see below) returns, my biggest hope is that we see the nascent roots of the music of failure bloom into full gorgeous orchids of poisoned sadness in the 1970s. With any luck, we’ll be ascot deep in Yacht…

A new place at which I’ll be posting about TV, with some friends. Starting with my thoughts about Mad Men and Yacht Rock as Season 6 begins.

Interview With Marc Maron: All About Clowns

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 10:30:04 -0500

Interview With Marc Maron: All About Clowns:

I talked to Marc Maron this week about his podcast and Comedy and what Comedy Is with capital letters like that. He is scary smart that guy. We did talk a little about clowns.

After the conversation he asked me, “What was your name again man?” I don’t know whether that means he enjoyed it or is sending minions to destroy me. More likely he was being polite. Actually that is the least likely possibility.

Reggie Watts Rap Session

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 14:21:51 -0400

Reggie Watts Rap Session:

Me and Reggie Watts made a list of humorous nouns in this interview. I have never gotten a contact high over the phone before, but it was a grand old time.

Got My Own Private Sun: An Essay of Punk Nobility

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 12:13:25 -0400

This piece was recently published in the excellent Metafiler magazine put out by my favorite members of that site. They made my pretentious ramblings look almost professional! Download the whole thing here, it’s awesome.

Interview with Dave Foley

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 11:07:27 -0400

Interview with Dave Foley:

The Kids in the Hall is still the best sketch comedy that has ever been on TV. Yes, I do want to fight about it.

Oh and Dave Foley is sweet and great. His comments about why empathy is important in comedy should be written on every aspiring snarky stand-ups face in blood.

“A lot of people don’t realize that what we did on Kids in the Hall was never mean-spirited. It could be really dark and maybe uncomfortable, but it was never mean. Never going out and shitting on people and just being cruel. I think there is a lot of empathy in our work, through the characters we play and subject matter we deal with. I know I don’t like dealing with comedy that’s like, “Hey look, aren’t other people stupid?” You know, I’m not a big fan of watching YouTube videos of people getting hit in the balls or falling off buildings. That just doesn’t make me laugh to see somebody to get hurt. When I see somebody get hurt, I think, “Ow, that would be horrible.” And I think that detachment from other people allows for that snideness you’re talking about. I guess is just a lack of empathy. I think that any art form should be imbued with empathy. Whatever it is. To me that’s just the core of humanity that you should not lose for any reason.”

Also, this .gif.

An Interview with Chris Hardwick

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 15:17:46 -0400

An Interview with Chris Hardwick:

I talk to nerd-king @Nerdist and try to defend hipsterism against his Wit-sabers. Let’s call it a draw?

Nostalgia: A Master List

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 12:51:06 -0400

Nostalgia: A Master List:

Some things are not worth building a new wing on the memory mansion.

This video was made by moi (with Erin as monkey-wrangler) to...

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 14:27:23 -0400

This video was made by moi (with Erin as monkey-wrangler) to promote Live From the Lab the Comedy night we are hosting. It hopefully attains a respectable level of really dumb.

Invite Yourself

“Like” “Us”

Watch on youtube here.

Interview with Eric Andre

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 13:59:59 -0400

Interview with Eric Andre:

He’s not the black Patton Oswalt or the nerdcore Eddie Murphy. He’s just a really funny awesome guy.

Charlyne Yi Interview

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 10:35:31 -0400

Charlyne Yi Interview:

She’s like a stand-up comedy Michel Gondry film. Or like Andy Kaufman reading a George Saunders short story while April March plays piano. Or like a really great quirky thing mixed with another really great quirky thing. I edited out lots of awkward pauses and us talking over each-other so you just have to imagine those parts.

David Allen Grier

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 13:55:41 -0400

David Allen Grier:

DAG is a comedy legend who has no fear of speaking his mind. That I got him to crack up wildly with a Jumanji question might be the high point of my life.

An Afternoon Chat With Fred Armisen

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 13:19:32 -0500

An Afternoon Chat With Fred Armisen:

I interviewed Fred Armisen for BYT. It was just a quick chat but he was supercool and invented a new emoticon: [[!]] which means: i already knew that.

DC/HC/JK 4EVER New video for an experimental comedy open mic I...

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 10:01:24 -0500

DC/HC/JK 4EVER

New video for an experimental comedy open mic I just started hosting. Please to like on Facesbooks.

Interview with Tao Lin

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 09:13:51 -0500

Interview with Tao Lin:

I interviewed Tao Lin…he was really nice and sent me some drawings of hamsters. I called him a Troll, but some of my best friends are Trolls, so it was totally a compliment.

Post about Yoga and Punk Rock on TBD

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 09:59:54 -0400

Post about Yoga and Punk Rock on TBD:

This is the first story I’ve written for TBD, an article about Michelle Mae Orr from the Make Up and her transition to becoming a yoga teacher. Also I took my first yoga class while writing this story, which was awesome and painful.

An Interview with Punk Rock Zen Master Brad Warner

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 04:01:44 -0400

This is a post I made on BrightestYoungThings this spring, about author, zen master, filmmaker and hardcore punk guy Brad Warner. Here are some screenshots of it for your viewing pleasure.

This is an interview I conducted and helped edit, with...

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 10:14:00 -0400

This is an interview I conducted and helped edit, with Greenland’s first feature film director, Otto Rosing. Otto was a really really awesome and effusive guy, who clearly has a ton of talent.

You can read more about his movie and his experience at Sundance here.

thedustys: Dustys Fall Tour Video Blog: Week 3 New York to...

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 07:00:00 -0400

thedustys:

Dustys Fall Tour Video Blog: Week 3

New York to Florida

Track Sticky Blood

From The Sticky Blood EP

EP available at:

thedustys.bandcamp.com/album/sticky-blood

Touch:

myspace.com/thedustysmusic

twitter.com/thedustys

Blog:

thedustys.tumblr.com/

Cut by Rasheed of CromagnonJazz.com

We got people in Boston. We got people in Philly. We got people on the beach in Florida. And you know we got people in DC.

On stage at the Boston House of Blues: “Anyone here from Weymouth? *some applause* Anyone here from Needham? *three dudes go insane cheering* Good towns!”

Met friends in the cold drizzle, across from the photograph that is Fenway. “Carl Sagan called it “America’s Lyric Shoebox,” said one in his Needham accent. It sounded good.

After the Bravery played, the floor of the HOB was ankle-deep in beer and cups. One friend offered us some couches close-by. Unfortunately she didn’t mention the raging college party going on right next to the open curtainless windows of our living room. Banging on the glass, slamming into the wall fighting, screaming at each other about how is bein more ridiculous—this must be how fish feel about their idiot air-breathing feeders.

Philly seems forever away but actually is reached pretty quickly, back through New York’s snarls. The rest of the night was a blur of faces. Old friends drove up from DC to taunt our rockstar airs and travel beards, buying us drinks. Philly connects, family members: buying us drinks. Drinks buy themselves for us. Some of us made the punk rock afterparty, others pass out, others drove back to DC through the sudden mid-atlantic winter.

The first time spent apart the whole tour is in our own beds, alone. Then we gather at the 9:30 Club for our homecoming, discovering we’ve been spared an indignity. The other opening band, poor bastards, had their van swiped from a hotel parking lot back in PA. It’s a tragedy, but an opportunity for US Royalty to sweep in from an outdoor show and whirl onstage, as well as for us to be in the second spot for our hometown triumph. Walking through the curtains, playing the best and tightest set we could imagine, the music sounding crisper and more confident than possible, as if we were miming to backing track of a much better uglier group, the faces of friends and distant acquaintances and just “Oh I Know that Chick From Somewhere” nod and dance and come to the afterparty and dance to our friends bands, thee Lexington Arrow, Death By Sexy, out long past bar time but not even drunk just giddy on the love. It felt good.

Back together in the van 29 hours later, we were still riding that high down to Norfolk. The venue’s bigger than expected, and the dressing rooms are insane, ping pong tables and pool and two TVs and a dining room and a hot-tub for the headliners and trained penguins carrying drinks—but the real wonder is the packed house on a Tuesday, practically dragging us down the street to Hells Kitchen, where the tatooskulls bobbed to terrible 00s punque, Say Anything, Today’s The Day.

By the time we get to Charlotte the rain and sickness has caught up with us again. The sound on the tiny stage is like playing in wind tunnel and we’re looking at rock and roll from the outside, like the puppets who play our songs are falling apart at the strings. But everytime someone comes up and hugs us or asks shyly to take a picture with us it’s a shot stronger than your best speedball baby.

(I hate to keep going back to this narcissistic point — “OH WE’RE SO GREAT EVERYONE LOVES US” but the fact is that A. if we weren’t attention whores we’d be playing chamber music or working as accountants, not making crotch-thrusting rock music. And B. even if it’s only a byproduct of being from out of town, everyone we’ve met so far from Ed Hardy sporting black baseball cap dickbag to soccer mom to misguided teenage emo kid has been more than effusive—more like totally familiar, as if we should know their dreams and hobbies based on our presence on a stage in front of them. So it’s only partially narcissism— I also want to point the real heros from this or any tour: the roadies. They get us drugs. I LOVE YOU ROADIES.)

Down in Florida we played in a tiny club in a strip mall next to a bible store, where it’s 100 degrees and some sorority girl at the foot of the stage keeps yelling “I WANT TO FUCK YOU” and then more specifically “I WANT TO FUCK YOUR DRUMMER.” We drove across the everglades, slept in earshot of mating flamingos, lay on a beach where the water was 10x warmer than the air. Day off, we wander around a no-name town alone. Thumbnail-sized green frogs stuck to every surface outside our motel…even they seem to want something. We signed their legs, and drove to Atlanta.

Also posted on Brightest Young Things, who are awesome.

thedustys: 2rd Video+Blog! Shot by us, written by Peter, edited...

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 18:33:00 -0400

thedustys:

2rd Video+Blog! Shot by us, written by Peter, edited and set to the second (and huge international hit) song on our EP Dangerous Little Signs by Rasheed the Willing.

We played the license plate game on the way across the midwest to the east coast.

Ames Iowa has about four Hard Rock radio stations, that play either 80s hair metal or new recordings by washed up classic rock bands. If Stevie Ray Vaughn were alive today he would live in Northern Iowa.

Breakfast in the morning after the Minneapolis show: apples, peanut butter, and regret for partying so hard with intimidatingly friendly Lutheren people.

Chicago finally seemed like a real city, stores crammed so close together around the Vic Theater with signs in a hundred languages. The theater was huge and sounded like a dream, but we had to jet right after we played to go play an afterparty with our sideproject band No Lover and the amazing snotty pop-punk IL band the Safes at a bar called the Darkroom in the Ukrainian Village part of town.

Darkroom was dark.

The Exit we were looking for off Lakeshore was elusive, but we circled the museums til we made it out of the city and on to Detroit.

Faygo was dripping from the walls of St. Andrews Hall because it is the home base of a little old hip hop group called the Insane Clown Posse (who we’ve been accidently mirroring the whole tour, playing before or after them in various stunned towns everywhere….we even saw their caravan at a truck stop: two tractor trailers painted with evil circus shit—presumably full of orange drink?).

Gold For Cash joints and rebuilt art studios lined the route back to our friends place in downtown Detroit. He gave us a drunky historical tour of the demolished stadiums and dirt-cheap artisan spaces springing up.

We poured Hot Sauce the BBQ he spread out for us in his art deco home, right next to the BBQ joint he owns. Mindblowingly spicy and good after wearing ourselves out on stage.

We irrigated the heat with local wine and jelly beans.

Ko from the Dirtbombs and head of the Kokonuts lived right next door and came over at 3am to give us advice about getting into Canada. We tried not to geek out while she informed us about not hiding merch and being polite to the customs agents even if they toss your laptop on the cement.

Last stop before Canada: Duty Free for cigarettes and gas…we stuck to the total truth about what we had in the van and what we were doing and breezed right through.

245 Kilometers to Toronto, whatever that means.

Nine looney dollars for a liter of gas, which works out to: ummm.

Rural Ontario is like a Coen brothers movie about emptiness and isolation. But Toronto was alive, and in a European way just slightly more fashionable and antique than an American city somehow.

Parking behind the club in the pouring rain, moving amps and keyboards with laconic British stagehands, playing in front of a sparser crowd while coughing into the mic—our bodies and souls felt shit heavy from too much booze and smoking and hard travel.

Quality Inn, Buffalo. A day off spent in Dennys looking at video of people dancing as we play, remembering why we’re pushing ourselves around the countryside and why we exist.

Rochester to New York City in the morning. We split up into various corners for the night, Park Slope, Williamsburg, Staten Island. Corner Creek whiskey is delicious, only available in Brooklyn, and medicinal.

Terminal 5 is a converted dance club with neon 80s railings on the Upper Balcony reserved for Very Important Persons with VIP Passes like actor Justin Long who had to wait forever to get in because the guy at the ticket counter didn’t recognize him. We played to what seemed like a massive sea of blank faces. Did they hate us? Did they even recognize us as musicians or did they think we were a still life painting called Four White Dudes Gyrating with Electricity? But as soon we were done 15 teenager gaping at us like the Stones just touched down from planet 1964 mobbed the merch booth by the door. We ran out of M, L, and XL.

Did the woman who got naked during the Bravery’s encore and humped a random stranger on the dancefloor until she got kicked out have a Y chromosome? It was hard to tell under the plastic surgery. Then after the show late late late on the way across the river, right at the height of the Brooklyn bridge, Peter remembered we never got paid so we had to tear ass back through Manhattan to Hell’s Kitchen past saturday night madness everywhere on either side before they turned out the lights.

From zenith to nadir is moment by moment on the road so far…we have no idea what is coming next.

Dustys Fall Tour Video Blog: Week 2

Minneapolis to NYC
Track: Dangerous Little Signs
From The Sticky Blood EP

Touch:
myspace.com/thedustysmusic
twitter.com/thedustys

We Love
No Lover
myspace.com/nolovermusic
Cut by Rasheed of CromagnonJazz.com

Also Posted on: Brightest Young Things.com

thedustys: 1st Video+Blog! Shot by us, written by Peter, edited...

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 13:35:00 -0400

thedustys:

1st Video+Blog! Shot by us, written by Peter, edited and set to the first song on our EP by Rasheed the W-illist.

Driving all night from east to west has one massive advantage: you get to see the sunrise behind you. It helps if your van keeps shutting off while you’re driving, pulling you off to the side of the road, then starting back up again as if nothing was ever wrong. You’re trying to make it to Denver where you have no idea what is waiting for you there.

When it comes up you may pull off the highway in Topeka Kansas. You take the car to a body shop where it looks like they haven’t had a customer in 6 months. There’s a wacky wailing arms flailing inflatable man on the thrift store roof next door, where you go and buy a silk hat that claims someone named the “Bama Band” “Kicks Ass.” Then across the street in a classic mid-west bar made of wood and stuffed animal skulls you can smoke and drink at 11am and the only other patrons are tough farm grandmas who eavesdrop and ask you the name of your band and cheers you and grin and you eat cheeseburgers.

According to the mechanic, nothing is wrong with the van. It just shuts off every few hours. You tape post-it notes all around to remind it and you not to break down: Don’t Break Down they say. So you drive to Denver where the mountains are incidental–nobody mentions them because they are slightly embarrassed about them, like beautiful goiters. You play a show in front of 500+ curious teenagers and lit soccer moms, then abscond with the headliners to a bar appropriately called Benders where insanely blind drunk bikers mumble the lyrics to Comfortably Numb on a karaoke stage and excited emo chicks with giant poofy greasy dos ask you to feel their haircuts and you run and hide in the back of the van.

You sleep in the only hotel you plan to get for six weeks, stealing towels, mouthwash, even the needle and thread. And then you drive to Minneapolis, pausing every few hours to break down and pray and study the sticky notes. Somewhere near the outskirts of Lincoln it hits you–what happened last night? You played a show? On a giant stage filled with other bands equipment? You looked into faces filling with joy or boredom or biting lips with sudden metal fury during the rock bits and danced a little and bought CDs and made noise when you asked them HOWUDOINGTONIGHT and it was rock and roll. It was rock and roll for real, and the sun goes down behind a massive sign, a prairie museum, a fully modern rest stop with plastic dinosaurs and you have 700 miles to drive tonight through America, and 6 more weeks of wandering, which is 42 sunsets and 42 sunrises on fields or mountains or streets jabbed with trash. Get some sleep, you have work to do tomorrow.

DC to Denver and Minneapolis
September 28th - October 3rd
Cut by Rasheed of CromagnonJazz.com

Track Whisper Beach
From The Sticky Blood EP

EP available at:
thedustys.bandcamp.com/album/sticky-blood

Touch:
myspace.com/thedustysmusic

twitter.com/thedustys

Also Posted on: Brightest Young Things.com