I've become a huge fan of Todd Barry

About every two years I stumble upon a comedian, not necessarily an up and comer, just someone I was not in the know about, who blows me away. About four years ago there was Mitch Hedberg, which led me to Doug Stanhope, which in turn led me to Todd Barry. I just got all three of Barry's live albums and listened to them a couple of times. I think this one on the left is my favorite in the bunch, though they are all fantastic. Barry does an enormous number of relatively short riffs on everyday conventional wisdom, and he delivers them in his characteristic low key delivery. He takes everyday incidents and imprecise language, and he slams you with the truth on these little slices of reality.

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Doug Stanhope in Tempe

Last night I caught Doug Stanhope for some renegade comedy at a rock club in Tempe. He doesn't do comedy clubs because he thinks they're, "Adult Chucky Cheeses for all occasions." This was definitely not a sanitized, corporate comedy club experience, there weren't even chairs, which was mostly good. I enjoyed the 75 minutes of vitriol Stanhope offered, and got to chat with him a few minutes after the show, and he was cool. Stanhope had one of his drunken friends open with fifteen minutes of pointless, humorless rambling, which had a certain unintentional Andy Kaufmann make the audience hate you vibe. I also saw Dave Attell at the Tempe Improv a few weeks ago, which started strong but weakened as the set went on and wasn't aided by $8 per drink in this economy. Liked this line from Attell about watching the presidential debates with the sound down: "It looks like a snowman is yelling at very young pharaoh."

My state of the union speech

"You never hear in the news, 200 killed today when Atheist rebels took heavy shelling from the Agnostic stronghold in the North."
- Doug Stanhope

America for too long has been run by the religious right and corporations. The former makes us judgmental about people, chides most everything fun, touts this precedent for faith as an ethos that leads us to both not question authority and subscribe to a lot of absurd fairy tales (Noah, Jonah and the whale, the Earth's creation took seven days) that are incompatible with critical thinking skills. The latter makes the country's landscape homogenous and dull, the people tired, boring and stressed out from working excessively in lust for all the latest toys that also pushes them to escape into a world of things like televised sports, reality tv or celebrity bullshit that distract them just enough for the corporations to rob the store blind. Iraq is all about corporations on a financial feeding frenzy on the government teet and the debate sponsored by the corporate media is still bogged down into whether you "support the troops." Exxon just posted the highest profits in human history. Read about the military contractors here. Read about the celebration of mass idiocy in our culture here.

I've spent a lot of time, too much time really, studying how the system works and what I've discovered only depresses me. There are people angry about it, but not nearly enough. Writing and reading about reality is a form of catharsis. Useless perhaps, but it helps ease the pain, though at other times it just darkens the mood. Others don't really recognize what is going on, but just focus on themselves intuitively. This is a large group and the group that most needs to change its ways in order to change the world. Another group, the most befuddling one to me, doesn't know, doesn't care, has no interest in knowing or caring and aren't really even taking the steps to "get theirs." The group I most loathe is the one that knows the game is skewed, but it is skewed to their benefit so they make the phoney arguments that take the real debate off the table. The "You hate America" crowd of Sean Hannity and other charlatans. Anyone who throws around the world liberal, which essentially means critical, in derision is especially awful.

America, and the CNMI for that matter, are great places, but they are also so disappointing because they could be so much better if there were a collective pulling of heads from asses.

Steroids in baseball

In perusing ESPN and CNNSI.com, the breathless coverage over steroids in baseball draws out one distinct thought in me: Who gives a flying F***?" As comedian Doug Stanhope says, "You paid to watch balls fly around, who gives a damn what makes them go." Congress still hasn't held any hearings on the Justice Department attorney purge, you might remember the folks who wouldn't indict political enemies (Democrats) on dubious grounds. Congress also hasn't found the time to look into war profiteering in Iraq, yet they are concerned about overpaid jocks who stuck needles in their asses five years ago. Are you kidding me? Above all else, the whole topic is boring. Move on, I think Britney just got sprung from hanging out with McMurphy and Nurse Ratched. There's a story.