FAVOURITE COMEDIANS: LOUIE CK

Click the image to learn about why Louie CK is great

It was an interview he heard that made him change his stand-up to what it is now. It didn’t one-handedly put him in the place he is right now, but it set him in the course to now be able to say that we could end peanut allergies by letting some millions die. The interviewee was George Carlin.

Curious George had an unusual approach. Like a snake he shredded his material when he was done with it. The unusual side of it was that it happened once a year. Louie had been working for 20 years to get one hour of material that he refused to abandon, because he feared he couldn’t do better than those rotten comedic scales. It wasn’t awful comedy, Louie was the proud number 98 on a list of Comedy Central 100 Greatest Standups of all Time. But they were funny musings at best. What Carlin said that stuck with him was that after you exhaust your ideas on making jokes about dolphins’ flippers or hats, you have to go deeper to find material. If you do it long enough, you get to places most comics can’t or won’t go.

The first bit that did it consisted on him saying Continue reading →

MOVIE CLICHÉS #1

You go to enough different movies, you start to notice things.

Roger Ebert

You can read this excerpt in the introduction of a very small book called ”Ebert’s Bigger Little Movie Glossary: A Greatly Expanded and Much Improved Compendium of Movie Clichés, Stereotypes, Obligatory Scenes, Hackneyed Formulas,  Shopworn Conventions, and Outdated Archetypes”. It contains hundreds of constantly repeated movie features tightly packed in a 116 paged hardcover bundle.

I had this volume for maybe a year or so, but never really got to it. Today I came up with a silly joke about a movie in the dearblankpleaseblanksincerelyblank mould. I decided to apply the concept of silly joke to movies, and movie clichés seemed to be the easiest target. The fact that I had a book about it made it even easier. The gods of procrastination were obviously plotting against me, giving me little excuse not to make this post and some more.

This will hopefully be the first of many posts about movie clichés, unless I get kidnapped by aliens wearing the same clothing, hairstyles, and jewellery.

Fallacy of the Talking Hero

Fallacy of the Talking Hero

BUKOWSKI’S NUMBER ONE RULE

Click to visit the original post: Number one #writing #rule from Charles #Bukoski

His 3 passions: Writing, booze and women )I assume a woman took the picture=

So you want to be a writer
by Charles Bukowski

.

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.

don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.