art is the new religion

Wainy Days & Horrible People

David Wain's online comedy series "Wainy Days" is now in its third season over at My Damn Channel, proving once again that time moves faster on The Interweb.  The start of the third season maintains the level of absurdity I've come to expect from the show, and the looking-for-love premise remains intact, but I wasn't really bowled over by either episode.  Don't get me wrong though, I still love the show so I'm going to keep watching.

While I was catching up on "Wainy Days", a promo for another My Damn Channel series caught my eye.  "Horrible People" is a soap opera send-up created by and starring A.D. Miles ("Wainy Days", "Reno 911!", Wet Hot American Summer) as well as Kristen Schaal who you may know as Mel from "Flight of the Conchords".  Mather Zickel anchors the show as the character Carter who is ridiculous and sinister in equal parts.  I actually think "Mather Zickel" (his real name, I presume) is one of the most soap opera-sounding names I've heard in a long time.  It's strangely satisfying to say "Mather Zickel" out loud. 

Mather Zickel.

Watch the first episode of "Horrible People":

If you like "Horrible People", you can watch the entire first season on My Damn Channel.

• Related:  Read my original post on "Wainy Days"

We Are Scientists: Git Along, Lil Doggie

My love for We Are Scientists is pretty well-documented, but they've managed to make me love them a little bit more.  I just saw the new video for "Chick Lit" off of Brain Thrust Mastery (thanks to CupCate's post).  Combine the humor we're accustomed to from W.A.S. with lots of fluffy pomeranians, and I'm hooked:



Can't wait to see We Are Scientists at The Independent on Sunday.

• Buy We Are Scientists' Brain Thrust Mastery from Insound.

My Boys

I'm taking a break from art and music for a moment to tell you about a sitcom I really like.  It's not going to change your life or go down in history as giving you one of the best half hours you've ever spent, but it's unpredictable, fairly well-written and has some genuinely interesting characters.  The show I'm talking about is "My Boys" and Season 2 premieres Thursday night on TBS.

I first heard about the show last year when I used to watch "Sex and the City" reruns on TBS.  The network was running a ton of ads for the premiere of "My Boys", and I started to get annoyed at this new show about a tight group of friends (five males and one female who works as a sports writer) who do a lot of drinking and talking about dating.  I kept imagining a group of TV execs sitting around a table saying "let's market this as a 'Sex and the City' that men will actually watch!"

I was annoyed to the point of obsessive curiosity, so I tuned in on premiere night with the masochistic expectation of writhing and eye-rolling my way through the first episode of a series that would no doubt get canceled quickly due to being derivative and uninteresting.

Of course, I ended up really enjoying it and faithfully tuning in to every episode of the first season.

The plot centers around PJ, the cute, female, blond sports reporter with a group of five close male friends and one close female friend.  The dudes are like her brothers, especially since one of them is her brother, except for the one or two with whom she has sexual tension (of course).  They drink a lot and have a weekly poker night and talk about all their dating exploits.  What makes them interesting is that they never spend too much time fitting the stereotypes you'd expect them to, they have a genuine rapport together, and they all do a great job of portraying the humor and familiarity that's written in their scripts.  The actress who plays PJ does an especially good job of being beautiful, nice, funny and likeable.  She's a girl's girl who is also believable as 'just one of the guys'.

This series also has one of the most hilarious peripheral characters I've seen in a long time.  Johnny Galecki, perhaps best known as Darlene's boyfriend from "Roseanne", plays Trouty, a deliciously obnoxious and clueless hanger-on who lights up the small screen during each of his rare appearances.  He plays his part perfectly, keeping you wondering how they could possibly keep him around, yet being just endearing enough to charm you.  Here's a bit of Trouty in action:

Check out some other clips from the show:

go to My Boys page more TBS widgets

Tune in tomorrow night for the season premiere!

Guitar Hero Roadies

Bands make it rock, but roadies make it roll

One of the purchases I made from Antone's Record Store was the double album soundtrack to the movie Roadie.

I love looking at the soundtrack section in a record store because it's inevitably amusing and bewildering.  Most movie soundtracks that were released on vinyl were for movies I've never seen, but that's not because they weren't star-studded and/or bizarrely awesome.  It's fascinating to get a glimpse of what films have stood the test of time (Grease, Saturday Night Fever) and what films faded into obscurity.  I'm going to file Roadie under: faded into obscurity* (please correct me if I'm wrong and this film is well-known).  This is the first time I've heard of this 1980 film starring Meatloaf and featuring cameos from Blondie, Alice Cooper, Hank Williams, Jr. and Roy Orbison.

Here's the trailer:

Of course, I didn't need to know anything about the movie to want to own the soundtrack.  It's a staggering roster of cool artists with a few complete unknowns thrown in to keep us guessing.  Check out the track list:

Side 1

• Cheap Trick "Everything Works If You Let It"
• Pat Benatar "You Better Run"
• Joe Ely Band "Brainlock"
• Alice Cooper "Road Rats"

Side 2

• Teddy Pendergrass "Can't We Try" (I've always felt a strange kinship to Teddy Pendergrass, as his name is similar to mine in sounds & syllables)
• Eddie Rabbitt "Drivin' My Life Away" (this song's second mention on AITNR)
• Stephen Bishop and Yvonne Elliman "Your Precious Love"
• Jay Ferguson "A Man Needs A Woman"

Side 3

• Styx "Crystal Ball"
• Sue Saad and the Next "Double Yellow Line"
• Blondie "Ring of Fire" (I've never heard this cover!)
• Alice Cooper "Pain"

Side 4

• Roy Orbison and Emmylou Harris "That Lovin' You Feelin' Again" (so much for my Emmylou moratorium)
• Jerry Lee Lewis "(Hot Damn) I'm A One Woman Man"
• Hank Williams, Jr. "The American Way"
• Asleep At The Wheel "Texas, Me and You"

The Texas connection is a special bonus for me.  The synopsis:   

A young Texas good ol' boy has a knack with electronic equipment, and that talent gets him a job as a roadie with a raucous traveling rock-and-roll show.

Songs from Joe Ely and Asleep At The Wheel are also a tipoff that it's Texas-centric, but the Shiner on the front cover is the biggest giveaway.

The art inside is pretty great too.

All in all, I consider this a pretty good score.

• Buy Roadie(released on DVD in 2003) from Amazon.

                        *Not to be confused with Roadhouse, which is still going strong.

Are you SOBP?

Case is.

Dschinghis Khan & Diamond Dave

On a lighter note from yesterday, here are two things that have amused me over the past 24 hours.

Will the Real Diamond Dave Please Stand Up?
Every once in a while after I write something here I'll be contacted by someone who's related to what I wrote about.  I wrote about Wainy Days and someone from My Damn Channel commented, I wrote about the CBC and someone affiliated with the station commented, Ottmar Liebert commented, and so forth.  I find this really fun and gratifying, and I'm always curious who I might hear from next.

You might recall I wrote about Diamond Dave, aka David Lee Roth, last week.  I also happened to update my Twitter page with the following:

"Discussing the differences of DLR-era Van Halen vs. the Hagar years via IM with my friend Chris in Ann Arbor."

For those of you not familiar with Twitter, it's a super simple application that lets you send very short updates to your friends telling them what you're doing.  The updates can be as mundane as "I just got back from dance class - yay!" and therefore usually not very interesting to people who don't know you.

Which is why I was delighted and amused to get this email notification in my inbox yesterday:

Clearly this is one of my friends or acquaintances having some fun with a fake account, but the Twitter notification still made me smile. 

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha - Hey!
The other thing that made me laugh was something I ran across while working this morning.  Did you know there's such a genre as historical-themed disco?

Dschinghis Khan's Wikipedia entry says the German pop group disbanded in the 80's but "has enjoyed a recent resurgence in popularity on the Internet due to the discovery of a video of them performing their hit song 'Moskau.'"  Thanks, Wikipedia, for pointing out that pretty much everyone with an internet connection has already seen this video besides me.  Well, I saw the video for the first time this morning, and it totally brightened my day and inspired an impromptu dance party here.

Ha ha ha ha ha - hey!

Tonight's Showalter

Tonight's show is of the comedy variety, as I will be seeing Michaels Showalter and Ian Black at Mohawk.  It's going to be on the outdoor stage which would be a lot of fun if it weren't 36 degrees and raining in Austin right now.

Michael Showalter has his own show, The Michael Showalter Showalter, on College Humor.  Here's the episode with Zach Galifianakis (I would have linked to the episode with David Wain but half of it was really gross):

Bonus:  Michael Ian Black has a TypePad blog.

Wainy Days

Wet Hot American Summer is one of my favorite movies of all time, and it's one of the rare ones I could watch over and over.  So when I discovered that David Wain, the film's writer and alumnus of The State, had a new online comedy series, I had to check it out.

I ended up watching every single episode of "Wainy Days" in one sitting. 

Do I need to get out more?  Perhaps.  Or maybe the show is just. that. good.

The premise is that David Wain's looking for love and we join him on his dating misadventures with a series of women.  The comedy is absurd, ridiculous and sometimes horrifying and/or unbelievable, and the shows feature cameos and writing turns from other members of The State.  Of course I also love that the theme song was written by my friend Craig Wedren.  Many of the episodes have different writers, so even though there is a narrative that links them all together, the tone can vary from episode to episode (and some of them get a little risque so beware if you're watching at work).  Here's the first one, to get you started.

I don't know the story behind why Wain chose to release this series online, but I love that he's doing it this way.  Releasing it online means the show will have more artistic freedom, a quicker turnaround time, and as long as they can get the word out about it, anyone who is interested can watch it.  So here I am, doing my part to spread the good word and support creative comedy.

David Wain's blog just told me that a new episode is out, so I'm off to watch it.  Enjoy!

• Buy Wet Hot American Summer from Amazon because it's genius and you love to laugh.