This just in: my WET THE HIPPO pals and I will be headlining at the 2013 L.A. Comedy Festival this Saturday 11/16 at 9PM! Nominated for BEST COMEDY at this year’s Hollywood Fringe Festival, we’ve developed a ton of new & insane material, so you will not want to miss this! Tickets only $10 online, $12 at the door. Full show & ticket info here. See you there!

The TWO PERFORMANCE ARTISTS book trailer is here! You can play it below, or watch it on YouTube.

To learn more about how it was made, check out the novel’s FAQ page. And to the tireless cast, crew, and volunteers who made it all happen: THANK YOU!

11:34 PM. I just finished printing the PDF—it’s the designer’s first try at the novel’s interior layout. And . . . relief: she made it look lovely.

But that thought is short-lived. Because this all suddenly feels surreal—maybe even like some kind of prank—my holding it now, here, in my hands, after having spent so many years thinking about it. I wrote this? I’m in disbelief. Reading through it again now, the text feels new, alien, so removed from me. Maybe it wrote itself? And I’ll admit it: starting now, I am officially nervous as hell. The web site and trailer are about to go up, the PR’s about to hit the wires, and in a month or two, reviews will begin popping up as people actually begin reading this thing! All of my generalized self-doubt—and terrors about what I did or didn’t write right—and the realization of my boyhood dream, of one day writing the kind of novel that I would want to read—these have all coalesced under tectonic-like pressure into the diamond now held in my hands. “Any press is good press” is fine for playboys, but what about for first-time novelists? I’m scared, but also exhilarated, to find out.

I was interviewed on TVRadio’s ARTFUL UNDRESS show in Hollywood, where I talked about performance art, my novel, nudity, nakedness, and much more with lovely hosts Kira Pandukht and Polina Hryn. You can watch the whole interview online here. Thanks, Kira & Polina!

“For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with howls of execration.”
    —Meursault, just before the guillotine . . .
        . . . and every performance artist’s dream.
 
From The Stranger, Albert Camus, 1942

It’s been crazy since July when we began shooting the novel’s trailer, but the footage is DONE and editing is well underway. The HD & 35mm footage are stunning, thanks to the cast & crew & lab.

But more importantly, the novel’s interior layout has begun, and the cover art is complete—I can’t wait to hold the first copy in my hands! Early reader quotes have also been pouring in. The latest, from Marc Wilmore, Writer & Producer of The Simpsons: “A well-written, hilarious adventure I’d recommend to anyone.” Holy shit, I’ll take it!

I just finished watching Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, an incredible documentary from 2006 by Mary Jordan on performance art forefather, Jack Smith. I’m an idiot for not having watched this sooner. If you’re a fan of Jack Smith—or of Warhol, Fellini, John Waters, Jonas Mekas, or if you’re an artist or an art patron or a wacky postmodernist—trust me, it’ll blow your mind, witnessing Smith’s influence on pretty much all things art. No doubt, he was a god. I dont know if this is official, or how long it’ll stay up, but Destruction of Atlantis is presently on YouTube here.

Our small-but-mighty crew has begun shooting the Two Performance Artists video trailer! The first shots were in San Francisco—we spent the day dodging Tenderloin freaks at the corner of Turk and Taylor, and trying not to fall from a rooftop where the sun’s heat was intense in spite of freezing wind and swirling white clouds that were so low we could almost touch them.

Days 2 & 3 were in Hollywood, where we shot bits of the novel’s skating scene, and later, a narrow alley exterior that turned out to be right beside the studios of surrealist photographer & artist David LaChapelle.

For my fellow cinephiles, shooting was on a Nikon D7000 with its standard 18-105mm telephoto lens, a Nikor 35mm 1.8 prime, a Tokina 11-16mm 2.8 wide angle, and a Sony HDR-XR200 for backup. For an upcoming apartment interior, I’ll be using a wind-up 35mm Bell & Howell Eyemo. Loading it is a bitch (requires doing it blindly with safety scissors in a change bag), but the look is gonna be sick!

I don’t want to give too much away, so for now, here are just a couple of footage samples. Release is scheduled for October—about 6 months before the book’s publication date.  Can. Not. Wait.

The 2013 Hollywood Fringe Festival nominated our show Wet The Hippo for Best Comedy, and we ended up taking home the award for Best Stunt! Not bad, considering there were 150 shows this year. The Fringe also extended our run through the entire month of July, so come see us any Friday or Saturday @ 9PM! Hilarious insanity like nothing you’ve seen before, I promise, and tickets are only $10.

A new wacky video with me & pal Natalie Palamides from our Wet the Hippo show at this year’s Hollywood Fringe Festival:

NSA got you feeling paranoid?  Not to worry: I made you a little tool that’ll let you encrypt (scramble) any message between you and a friend using a browser or smartphone.

But this scrambler has a surprise. After encrypting your message with industrial-grade AES encryption, the tool further scrambles the output into a mess of random NSA terror watchwords. If the NSA is so hellbent on illegal eavesdropping, why not give them something fun to read? And if enough of us use this, in theory it should make it harder for them to single out any one person for monitoring.

Scrambling the phrase NSA is watching with the password eavesdrop produces a ciphertext of:

exposure bomber spy worm cain black chemicals port marijuana hazmat botnets eavesdrop codes standoff trafficking cain black underground eavesdrop trafficking pipe scam narcotics undercover tnt riot black national biological trafficking listen port cops initiative force cartels looting underground nitrate national bombing nitrate outbreak mitigate

…and then you can use the eavesdrop password again to decrypt the whole mess back to normal.

Haha, OK, granted, maybe it’s not the most efficient means of communication, but it’s fun. And the AES makes it strong as hell. And it’s one more way to protest the erosion of our constitutional rights. Ssshh! They’re listening.

Get scrambled at Ønsa.net