I made a little phone stand out of cardboard and duct tape for my desk. I know I have succeeded because I’m actually using it.

I wish I could take a picture of my phone with my phone...

When I saw a collection of 50′s and 60′s photography books at a rummage sale for 50 cents each, I had to buy them. They’re full of whimsical glimpses into a world that no longer exists (and probably didn’t exist then either). The women are all beautiful, the ads are all sexist, and the overall quality of the pictures and printing is top notch.

They were nice to have around as coffee table books, but the old hardcovers smelled like mildew and I really don’t like clutter. It felt wrong to throw them out, so I decided to chop them up and make my room more interesting.

I started work without planning, and while it worked, here are some tips to avoid my mistakes:

1. I assembled the pieces face down. This means I had no way of seeing what the hell I was doing…not ideal but interesting if you like surprises.

This is going to take longer than I expected

2. I didn’t want to mess up the wall so I created a duct tape frame and hung the piece like a painting. A large backing sheet or frame probably would have made more sense, but I liked the idea of this crazy duct tape lattice, so I went for it. It also required me to buy nothing and start immediately without actually considering the depth of the project I was about to start. Tip: Stay in a uniform grid rather than getting creative with your tape placement. It would have been more structurally sound and easier to predict spots that needed reinforcement if I had.

I don't color inside the lines either

3. Flipping this huge, poorly structured thing over was next to impossible. Especially without a second set of hands helping. I almost completely destroyed it about 4 times, but managed. This is the first time I actually saw my creation.

So this is what I've been making? Eh.

4. Hanging this by yourself is also practically impossible. I used thumbtacks and almost completely destroyed the whole thing about 10 times trying to hang it. Ask a friend to help you if you are dumb enough to attempt this project.

WAIT I HAVE A WINDOW

5. Cut a hole for the window, stupid.

That's better. But you're still a basement dweller.

6. Since it is held together from the back by duct tape, everything was flapping around and was generally loose and unpolished. I spent some time going through with a blade fixing things up, adding some touch ups and new pictures. Once it was finalized I locked everything down with enough spray glue to completely coat the inside of my lungs and according to webMD I now have emphysema.

Finishing touches:

2 Queen beds? That's way more interesting!

From 2003 to 2006 I was in a sketch group with all of my friends at the time called shortbox.tv.

We made a lot of sketches, learned about comedy and video making, and had a great time in general. We knew we liked the Upright Citizens Brigade and Mr. Show, and were determined to create our own.

A lot of the classics were made before youtube so I’ve decided to remaster them all and re-upload them one video per day.

First up is “Mr. Alison Tate Plays in the Snow,” the first sketch any of us had ever made, as is evident by the completely nonsensical plot.

We were winging it, and the planning mostly consisted of “Let’s go shoot in the snow, I’ll draw a face on this bucket.” During the shooting, I thought it would be a genius plan to run in the snow with a bucket on my head. Of course, this lead to injury, and thus our sketch had a great ending and it ended up going pretty viral for its pre-Youtube day.

This was the final video created for the series Pretzel Talk. It features what might be the finest dramatic musical score composed so far this millennium.

Starring myself and Denis Cardineau, the series chronicles two men and their love for pretzels. Presented as a talk show format, we really dug deep and explored the human psyche and its relation to salty toasted dough.

We made an appearance at the local mall with our question mark bag and handed out pretzels and fliers for the show. I spoke to a lot of strangers about pretzels that day and had a fantastic time. Many people are weary of eating food given to them by unshaven young men in trucker hats, but some brave souls took the plunge and broke bread with us that day. There might be hope for this fickle race of persons after all.

You might notice that the song states “Pretzel talk is coming back…”

That all depends on whether or not society demands our return.

See the other episodes below the cut:

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howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com

Two years ago my comedy partners (friends) Mookie and Zed, and I  (Maxamillionaire) were trying to figure out how we could make the world laugh. Not just chuckle, but really laugh. Like Guffaw, or even chortle.

How I imagined people might react to my work.

I don’t know if you know this, but making people laugh like that is quite difficult. The nature of the art form is to analyze the world from varying perspectives and to recognize the absurd. Failure happens often, and with every mis-step there is the possibility of soul crushing self analysis. When you turn this comedic lense on yourself and question the validity of yourself as a comedian and the absurdity of your goals, you can really throw yourself off the deep end. Well, I can at least. You might be immune to yourself (or have no soul to crush).

We did a photoshoot so everyone would know that we were the coolest.

We all had jobs that covered our expenses and allowed us a lot of free time. I lived in a house in Queens, Mookie and Zed in Brooklyn. They practiced their craft at the UCB Theatre, I practiced in my own mind like a delusional crazy person because I blow at improv. We worked as a sketch group called Torture Rack almost every day. Our sketches did OK and we had fun making them, but we wanted to do something bigger.  We had a burning desire to create the LOL heard ’round the world. We had a lot of side projects, wanted to make movies, etc.

Note: I was trim, fit, and tanned.

Somewhere in this mess arose an idea that really latched on to us:  a web sitcom.

This was very attractive to me, as I was beginning to feel fatigued by sketch. I started to realize that hardly anyone even actually likes watching sketches online (a bit of an exaggeration). The best videos are real, surprising, or cute. Our poorly acted fake scenes didn’t offer these things. I started to hate watching sketches, and declared the art form dogshit unfit to occupy my precious time. So I broke up the group, and after numerous lengthy late night existential conversations that would probably be more hilarious to the outside world than anything we had ever created, it was done.

Some months later we decided to dig up our dead corpse of a sitcom idea. It was still fresh. Clark & Michael was sort of successful, web shows could be the next big thing. We had a vision of a web show in which reality and fiction blurred. It was to be created by an insane person, and be in a style that was still new to television. This all sounded great to me, and I was relieved to work within this construct after doing sketches for so long. The nice thing about a sitcom is that you don’t have to re-invent the entire universe every time you want to make a video – you work within an already established world with established characters. It’s easy to write, and in theory, easier to produce. That theory has been dis-proven by yours truly.

Zed rehearsing.

Stay tuned for part II – Production

“Never memorize what you can look up in books.” – Albert Einstein