Josie Long - All of the Planet’s Wonders (Shown in Detail) - I saw the preview, I hope I’m still in time to persuade someone to go see this wonder-full show. It was the favorite of my relatively few so far this year; and in retrospect she gets the same award
last year too. She’s smart and inventive and so infectiously besotted with all of life. I am crushed and puzzled that sometimes her non-plussed audiences seem unable to open their eyes, minds and hearts as wide as she does.
As usual for this time of year, I’ve been to a few stand-up shows at the Fringe. Here are brief reviews, and some personal nonsense.
Stewart Lee: Scrambled Egg - his format this year is to do a twenty minute routine on three of six prepared topics. I really enjoy Lee’s somewhat contradictory style where he will find a relatively sophistated angle or phrasing and then bludgeon you with it repeatedly, daring you to stop finding it funny. Unfortunately he is quite the recycler, and tonight I was hearing enough material for the second time that I was ready to call his bluff at times.
Richard Herring: The Headmaster’s Son - another autobiographical comedy, though not as mid-life crisis as in recent years. Herring gets annoyed at, makes fun of, but ultimately loves and celebrates his father, his teenage self, and the diary written by his unusually tiny, girl-like hands. Included some genius moments where he made everyone very uncomfortable using those hands.
Dan Antopolski’s Penetrating Gaze - I like the effort he puts into constructing his puns (his wife was finding breastfeeding painful, but she had after all made a bod for her own rack) despite then delivering them so fast not everyone catches them (it’s impressive when you don’t have time to see the rhyming jokes coming within a comedy rap… actually doing a comedy rap at all without causing actual pain is pretty impressive.)
All three acts above were actually pretty strong, and had me laughing out loud throughout. But I seem to be pedantically fascinated by imperfect wording this year. Antopolski sympathized with Pluto’s having been “expelled from the solar system”, but as he was amusingly describing the devasting effects on its wife and child, all I could think was “it just lost planet status, plutoids/planetoids are still part of the solar system (and why didn’t you name the wife S/Charon and the child little Eris?)”
And Lee had a routine whose punchline was relief that Isaac Newton had not been so amused by gravity as the British public, since he would not have gotten around to making “a comprehensive study of its causes.” The punchline is repeated over and over, because he pretends frustration and puzzlement that it has not yet become a Fast Show style schoolyard catchphrase. I spent the routine composing the letter I wanted to write to him to explain my equal frustration and puzzlement that he chose “causes” when Newton had nothing to say on this matter: “effects” might have softened the contrast in the joke, but “mechanics” would have been just right.
I am the pedant in the comedy kitchen.
Let’s assume you know what Dr Horrible is. The approach taken to releasing this bit of one-off TV for the Net was as a stream available for a very limited period time; then later pay for download and eventual extras-laden DVD. The intended contract would appear to be: watch it once now for free, and if you like it enough, pay for a copy you can keep. This is a contract I’m happy enough to enter.
But enforcing that contract through time limits and by only streaming places annoying unintended DRM-like restrictions on how I watch. My broadband deal means that I have a very limited bandwidth allowance in the day (2GB total per month) but all I can eat between midnight and eight. This turns watching Internet TV as streaming video back into appointment viewing: I can’t time shift. I wanted to watch this show with Julie, when we were both awake. I wanted a download, please.
The solution to my DRM-like problem will not be surprising: I torrented a simple rip that lets me do whatever I want. This was presumably not the intended outcome.
Horrible was a worthy experiment. But I’m wondering which name or break-out producer or collective is going to go the whole way and be the Cory Doctorow of TV: release something into the public domain, and see whether money flies back at the creators from less direct sources. Sure it’s a risk, because TV is definitely not books, and the economics may work out differently - but risks can earn rewards, and the extra lift you get from being the first is a factor in itself.
Even offering paid-for downloads without DRM would be a worthwhile experiment. (TV isn’t music either, but see all the same arguments as above.)
My partner Julie switched PCs a month ago. I handled transferring her data. Today we discovered that a valuable subset (various branding images for her business) did not get transferred, and are lost.
I feel bad and stupid. There are seventeen excuses, and parallel worlds where because other parties (code included) acted more sanely, it didn’t happen. But it’s mostly my fault, and my responsibility.
I’m really sorry, Julie.
