laugh all you want but if you call too soon you might scare off a nice baby who’s ready to party

Posted on By Wil

Mike: So how long do I wait to call?
Trent: A day.
Mike: Tomorrow.
Sue: Tomorrow, then a day.
Trent: Yeah.
Mike: So two days?
Trent: Yeah, I guess you could call it that, two days.
Sue: Definitely, two days is like industry standard.
Trent: You know I used to wait two days to call anybody, but now it’s like everyone in town waits two days. So I think three days is kind of money. What do you think?
Sue: Yeah, but two’s enough not to look anxious.

-Swingers

The audtion yesterday was fantastic. I thought I’d be there for thirty minutes or so, but I ended up working with them for almost three hours (and making it home too late for my Tuesday night poker game.) I read with six different women who are all in the running to co-host the show, and I was shocked at how much fun I had. If I book the job, I’d be the geek, she’d be the babe, and everyone in the audience would have something to enjoy.

In fact, when I got home, I told Ryan, "Dude. I had the best afternoon: I got to sit with beautiful women and talk about Sci-Fi! Three of them were former Miss USA contestants, and one of them was Playmate of the Year for 2005."

"Dude." He said. "You are my hero."

I have this post-audition ritual: after I leave, I find the first trashcan and dump my sides in it. It’s how I let go of the whole thing, because I’ve already done everything I can do, you know? I’ve pushed my chips into the pot with the best of it, and now I have to wait for five cards to come out and hope that I win when it’s all over.

This time, I did dump the sides and my note cards (I have the notes on my Powerbook for easy re-printing, should I get called back) and I’ve tried to get on with my life . . . but holy shit is it hard. I had so much fun while I was there, and the prospect of getting a weekly gig where I get to geek out about Sci-Fi stuff — and get paid to do it! — is just too much. I’ve already called my manager twice today to see if we’d gotten any feedback.

"I haven’t heard anything, yet," he said, the second time I called. "Normally, I’ll call the next day, but if they don’t call . . ."

"It’s like you just met a girl in a bar, and you don’t want to screw it up by calling too soon, isn’t it?" I said.

He laughed. "Yeah, it’s exactly like that."

"So . . . are we calling today?"

"I think it’s best to wait until tomorrow, because they have to take your tapes to executives, get approvals, and all sorts of things."

"So, what, two days?" I said.

"Yeah, there’s a lot of things that have to happen before they give us any feedback, so we’ll just have to wait until we hear from them." He said. "Then there’s the whole negotiation thing, too."

"You’ll call me, right?"

"I’ll call you right away." He said.

I hung up the phone and looked at the calendar. I thought about drawing a circle around the 17th. I may have done it.

I’m sure I’m going to feel like a real jerk if this doesn’t happen, but
I love this feeling of excitement and optimism that I have right now. It’s much nicer than the usual alternative.

made of plastic and elastic

Posted on By Wil

Dresdendolls_1
The Dresden Dolls are on a grueling tour right now, and Amanda is writing about it in her blog, which is wonderful and a great example of why we should always trade quantity for quality.

There’s an entry this morning which touched a nerve with me. She’s talking about the new album:

The reviews are 98% amazing, but we will focus on the 2% that think the
music is terrible and the lyrics are trite and overdramatic. How does
one scrape oneself out of the goth pigeon coop? This has been a problem
from day one. I never thought that wearing whiteface on stage would
land us in the predicament of being compared to Marilyn Manson. Are you
shitting me? Have you listened to our music, fool? We have as much in
common with Marilyn Manson as we do with Cher. Did people lump KISS and
david bowie together?

I
had a lot of frustrations with O’Reilly and the release of Just A Geek,
but the worst thing of all was that they classified my autobographical,
narrative non-fiction story as "Science Fiction," because I was once on
a Sci-Fi show. That’s as idiotic as comparing the Dresden Dolls to
Marilyn Manson, and a great way to limit the potential audience.

When someone doesn’t like my work, there’s not a lot I can do about
it; I try to dig something constructive out of it, and move along.
But when someone just doesn’t get it, and uses an entirely
inappropriate comparison or categorizes me with another artist based
on something as stupid as what kind of makeup I wear on stage (ahem), it
makes me want to deliver the cockpunch.

I don’t know what it is about artists, but so many of us can’t ignore
the bad reviews. It’s almost like we think that they know something
real, something secret, something that nobody else is willing to tell
us. I think that, deep down, we all know that this thing we’ve created
really doesn’t suck, so we listen to all the people who want to
convince us that it does. It’s like we have a dysfunctional,
battered-person relationship with some invisible force called The
Critics.

delivery for i.c. weiner

Posted on By Wil

I absolutely love that one particular kind of pepperoni pizza that you get at the mini golf course.

You know the one: it’s cardboardy, the pepperonis are usually burnt a
little bit, and the cheese burns the everlovingfuck out of your mouth
when you bite into it, just before it slides off in one whole piece and
sticks to your chin or falls onto your Journey concert shirt.

If I could eat that pizza while I listened to Hall & Oates and
played Space Invaders, I could be in fourth grade for the rest of my
life.

there are many copies

Posted on By Wil

Cylon
I have an audition this afternoon to host a Sci-Fi show, and one of the things they’re asking us to do is conduct a mock interview with Edward James Olmos.

If I book this show, I’ll solicit questions from WWdN readers for the interesting guests whenever I can, so, without revealing any spoilers (I’m only on episode 5 of season 2.0),
if you could ask him anything about Battlestar Galactica, what would it be?

To be clear: I’m not actually going to talk with him. It will probably be a casting assistant, but they will want to see that I understand my subject, know how to move an interview along and react to the subject’s natural ebb and flow, and make with the occasional funny. I’m also pretty sure that I’m in a very unique position, with the ability to connect with WWdN readers and take a consensus question (does that make sense?) back to the interviews.

I think I’ll ask him the most controversial question I can come up with: Is Deckard a Replicant?

He won’t answer, but then again, who does?

Update: Thanks for your questions and discussion. For me, personally, I want to know about the father aspects of Adama and find out if it’s intentional that that thread of nurturing and inspiration runs through all of the great characters he’s played over the years (I suspect it is.) I also want to know how he’s dealing with being the new Picard/Kirk/Sisko/Malcolm character, and if he would speak at conventions, and get involved in all that fandom stuff that we all love so much.

I think I’ll present the WWdN consensus as: "Do you feel vindicated that your BSG is widely seen as the best SF series ever, especially since you advised original series fans (who were highly critical before the miniseries even aired) not to watch? Does it feel as cool to be a part of this as we all think it is?" I’ll mix in some comments about how there are TNG parallels, and then I’ll ask him if he’d like to grab a Flaming Moe after he show.

Well, I’m off now, so wish me broken legs!

odeo, eventful, isolatr

Posted on By Wil

I have added Radio Free Burrito to Odeo.com, so if you’re an Odeo user, you can subscribe to the RFB, and do whatever you do when you’re an Odeo podcast listening guy. Or girl. Or flaming-moe-juggler. While you’re at Odeo, you can also listen to a bumper from All Over The Place (which needs a little more cowbell, but is still cool, and was created by the same guy who created the hawesome "trust him, he’s famous" RFB bumper.) Speaking of RFB, I found a band I like so much, I sent an e-mail to their label asking for permission to share one of their songs on a future podcast. I’ll let you know if they laugh at me.

Eventful is a service similar to Upcoming.org, which allows you to find out when an artist or event you dig is coming to a venue near you. What sets Eventful apart is a spiffy feature that allows people to let artists, authors, flaming-moe-jugglers and actors turned bloggers turned writers that there is a demand for them to appear in your hometown.

This is an extremely cool and useful tool for performers and their fans, because it lets us all know where it makes the most sense to schedule an event. For example, right now there is a demand for me to come speak or read or set up a spectacular display of dominoes that displays the Fijian flag and launches a balloon at the end in San Diego. But what if you’re not in San Diego? What if you’re in Phoenix? What if you’re in Chicago? What if you go to college in West Virginia? The cool thing Eventful lets you do is create your own demand, for your own area, and then share that demand (via e-mail or a blog, or an EAM or a complex series of rebus puzzles) with your friends from the same area, so they can join the demand. When enough people let an artist (or me) know that they’re interested in a performance, or a demon-purging in their town, the artist (or snake handler) knows that it’s worth his or her or its time and effort to come to your town. So what makes the "demand" thingy so cool is that fans can let performers know that there is a demand for them, and where that demand is. So if you want me to come bake bannana bread in Eugene, Oregon, but there’s already a demand for me in Portland, make a demand of your own, and if Eugene ends up with more demands than Portland, guess where I’m taking my ultra-portable oven?

I’ve added an eventful demandy-thingy over there on the right side of my blog, which you can use to let me know if you want me to come to your town for a reading, or a flaming-moe-juggling, or maybe even a sketch comedy or improv performance. I haven’t decided what the critical mass for me to come out is, and I suppose I’ll cry bitter tears of defeat when no more than 15 people want me to come anywhere. Thanks for nothing! And to think I played my harmonica for you while we were on the rocket ship X-M!

Finally, I’ve been skipping around all sorts of social network bookmark groupthink zeitgeist things lately, and I think I finally found the one for me. Created by my friend and occasional partner in crime, it is called isolatr.