Less travel this week, just a flight home from Phoenix and six days of working at home. All of it turned out well, particularly important as Margarita and I spend more time planning our wedding. That’s an incredibly boring topic for any diary, so think of your favorite Jennifer Lopez vehicle and fill in your favorite details. Got it? Yes, that’s what it was like when I was putting search terms into Vrbo.
We tried to take advantage of our setting and relative free time. On a whim, Margarita picked a movie, “The Boy From Heaven,” for a date, largely because it was screening just a couple of times at the Laemmle up the street and then vanishing. On another whim, I got us tickets to “Tomorrow,” a monthly midnight variety show at the Elysian Theater, where the professional self-doubting comedy writer Ron Lynch invites comics, magicians, and joke psychics - maybe some other entertainers, but those were the ones we got - to do their stuff for a tiny audience.
I liked the variety. The highlight of Lynch’s birthday show (he just turned 70) was debatable. The lowlight was a stand-up who tried, badly, to offend us, getting more and more frustrated by the total silence he got with material like “I’m pro-choice; I think you should get an abortion if you’re having a trans baby.”
It didn’t seem like the audience was allergic to this material, in theory. Anti-woke comedians, who are good at the craft, have been succeeding for years; Dave Chappelle won a Grammy while I was typing this. The type of person who’ll genuinely be hurt and depressed by a joke about gender identity is not the type of person who’ll take a date to a midnight variety show where Kate Micucci is the celebrity draw. But you need something else. You need wordplay, wit, delivery, the ability to drag the audience down with you, and this guy never sniffed it. I sometimes avoid live performance because watching artists eat it and die onstage is so unpleasant. This version was so lousy that it sort of broke the tension; when he was gone, the succession of desperate comics got much funnier.
The Best Thing I Read: The public service winner was Tom Lee’s “Fake Tags Are A Real Problem,” which brings the appropriate level of anger to the craze of drivers affixing red light camera-duping paper where their license plates should be. Could not be less boring, trust me. The only reading I did for enjoyment was “Frank: The Voice,” the first volume of James Kaplan’s Frank Sinatra biography, and “Sekiro: The Second Life of Souls,” Ludovic Castro’s respectful 33 1/3-ish study of From Software’s shinobi game.
The Best Thing I Watched. “Possession,” not just a source of memes but a powerfully disturbing movie in which half the dialogue is screamed.
Lighter edition this week - better to keep the habit going then to get annoyed that it’s not perfect, and never finish.
Lighter is fine. The entries often have a good amount of content anyway.
FYI the j. Lo vehicle I picked is the only one I've seen which was the j. Lo/statham/Chiklis vehicle Parker. (Some good fights but a rather anti climactic finish.) I had to google that kate was garfunkel and oates which is where I first remember her from, and yeah no matter how bad the individual the cringe watching a dude bomb on stage is almost unbearable. One of the hardest parts of Joker to watch to.
Might check out the book on sekiro. Sounds like Phoenix was fun (I wonder if they have anything going on this week) good luck with the wedding planning.