Johnny Sagan's Dance Marathon

Heavanston: Evanston Is Our Yale--Interview with Rob and Alex, Authors of Evanston Graffiti: A Rich History of Bombing

2008-12-29T16:38:00.000-08:00

On November 16, I posted a call for submissions of material related to the history of Evanston graffiti--pictures, videos, personal testimonies--on behalf of my friends Alex and Rob, who are working on a book about that illustrious and oh-so-Evanstonian subject. Since then, I've interviewed the guys about their project. Please enjoy the following discussion, and by all means email evanstongraffitibook@hotmail.com if you would like to help Rob and Alex get the full story!
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Johnny: When Rob first introduced me to Alex, at Teddy Ballgame and Grant Munski’s open studio back in July, he told me he was doing a documentary on Evanston’s graffiti history. I guess I assumed it was going to be a film documentary, but now I find out it’s going to be a book. Tell me how you got the idea of making a book documentary about graffiti in Evanston?

Alex: Well, I was always interested in knowing the history behind Evanston graffiti and took the opportunity to learn what I could growing up. I had the idea to make a comprehensive book about it for a long time but didn’t act on it till I realized that it was something that had to be done right away, now or never.

Rob: Inspiration came to me when haphazardly running into Alex on the train. Alex, I soon found out, was wrestling with the idea of creating a book about the history of Evanston graffiti and had me in mind as the designer of the book. I could tell he was serious, passionate, and humble toward his cause so I offered my hand of service and encouragement. Having roots in Evanston similar to Alex’s, having collaborated with Alex on projects in the past, and nearing completion of my bachelor's degree in Graphic Design, it seemed divinely appointed that we met on the train that one day. Now we’re nearing one year of working on the book, recovering the history and photos of writing in Evanston.
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Johnny: Why did you guys choose to do this interview by email, rather than in person? I feel this question is sort of related to my curiosity about why you want to do a book about Evanston graffiti, rather than a movie?

Alex: Questions by e-mail allow us time to respond, were both real busy and it’s more practical that way. Creating a book makes more sense. Remember, back in the day only a few people had snap and shoot cameras let alone video cameras. There are far more photos out there then tapes of video footage. A Book is classic, you can pick it up and flip through it wherever you are.

Rob: The idea of meeting in person we would have enjoyed, but we wanted the luxury of getting our thoughts together before answering. Gathering together video footage to make a “comprehensive” movie about Evanston’s graffiti history would be incredibly difficult because of the lack of video footage there is on the subject from the early 80’s to present date. In our search for photos we have come across close to a thousand photos. With my focus being graphic design, making a book was the obvious choice.
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Johnny: Do you have any favorite coffee table books you might want to model your book after? Are you by any chance thinking of doing a straight-up PROSE book?

Alex: Definitely on the Prose side of things. There is a lot of history to present in the book so it is not going to be your typical big, clunky coffee table book that only contains photos.

Rob: Frankly, I don’t think I own a coffee table book. We have good ideas for modeling our book. I’ve received tremendous design know-how working towards my B.A in graphic design and have a unique perspective growing up in Evanston and riding the purple line.
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Johnny: So, guys, tell me what’s going to be in the book. What’s the story, what can we look forward to reading about?

Alex: The entire history of graffiti in Evanston. We plan to cover generations of graffiti artists, crews, events, twists, and turns that shaped the history and made it what it is today. There are going to be hundreds of photos, compelling stories, proper design, and very special dedications to our fallen brothers. This is a story that has to be told.

Rob: I come in at proper design. As the designer of this book, I am committing myself to finding the most relevant way of displaying Evanston Graffiti in book format. Expect something easy to read, enjoyable to look at, and able to pull you into the history of graffiti visually and textually.
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Johnny: How did you become aware of graffiti in general? In Chicago? In Evanston?

Alex: I first became aware of graffiti as a kid the same way most kids did. Seeing it on the street, on the train, and in school. Graffiti was a part of my surroundings. Back then, a lot of the people my age had a friend or relative who wrote.

Rob: Growing up, meeting people that did it. At that point I really started to see it on the train and all over the city.
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Johnny: What is Chicago’s equivalent of going all city compared to New York?

Alex: Going all city in Chicago means rocking all the train lines and streets on the North, South, and West Sides. For New York, it’s rocking all five boroughs. The lines are included in going all city in New York. but it’s more oriented around street bombing. New York has more transit lines than Chicago, so there’s much more ground to cover, way more competition, way less available space, and overall it’s a much harder task. In terms of the size of the systems, New York is to Chicago what Mexico City is to New York.

Rob: Yep, that sounds about right.
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Johnny: Shout-outs and thanks?

Alex and Rob: We want to give a special thanks to every one who has had faith and believed in what were doing, and taken time out of their busy lives to contribute photos, history, personal stories and help from the get-go. We don’t want to blow you guys up all crazy right now, but you know who you are; y'all are the best. Thank you. To those of you who are in the process of contributing and helping, thank you. To those of you thinking about it, don’t snooze. We are proud to make this book and highly qualified. We view this as a contribution back to the culture. Rest in Peace Wiz, Fun, Kiser. Thank you John for showing an interest in our project and interviewing us. We appreciate it. Peace.

What We Call Fruit: TantraNova Man

2008-12-02T17:08:00.001-08:00

Oh my fucking God. You guys have to watch this video.

http://www.tantranova.com/video/TN03_TantraNova%20Man_Short.wmv

This is a classic example of What We Call Fruit.

Evanston Is Our Yale: Ben Allen Explains The Crisis

2008-09-30T23:41:00.000-07:00

An Evanstonian has the best explanation of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, which started the wave of bank failures we're dealing with now, on his blog:

http://plektix.blogspot.com/2008/05/sub-prime-mortgage-crisis-explained.html

Artists I Know: Hannah Bos (Part 1)

2008-09-02T21:25:00.000-07:00

Where I'm from, where I live now, Evanston, Illinois, is a very special place. We grow up with more than our fair share of creative inspiration, so in disproportionate numbers we turn out to be creative. Documenting the inspiration and results of life in Evanston in order to further inspire the youth of America to pursue creative occupations is the brief of Heavanston (motto: "Evanston is our Yale"), an ongoing series of interviews with Evanston's creative sons, daughters, parents, and queer family friends by me, Johnny Sagan.

The first interview is with my Washington School classmate Hannah Bos, a childhood friend who got over a million hits on YouTube with her R. Kelly parody "Same Dude". We talked about: how to be an internet TV writer, actor, playwright, and filmmaker; and about: how growing up in Evanston set the stage for her creative accomplishments as an adult.

Johnny: I'm here with Hannah Bos. We were just talking about how it's been a little more than 10 years since she graduated. We're watching the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony on the screen behind us, a suitably epic backdrop for the first interview about Evanston, Illinois. Hannah is one of Evanston's creative daughters. Well, why don’t you tell me, when people say, "What do you do?" what do you say?

Hannah: I now say I'm an actor and a writer, I used to say I'm an actor, but now I say I'm an actor and a writer.

Johnny: Cool. And people would know you best at the moment, I would say, for two ongoing projects.

Hannah: Right.

Johnny: Your theater group, and your internet TV series. So what are those called, tell me a little about those?

Hannah: I have a downtown theater company called The Debate Society, which I'm the playwright for, and the actress. There are three people in it; I have a writing partner Paul Thureen, and a director of this tiny theater company, Oliver Butler. And we write our own plays that are all kind of good, avant-garde pieces, they're not hard to kind of access. The next play is at PS122 in November and December, and we're taking The Eaten Heart to Syracuse, New York, to the Red House in September.

Johnny: I think I've heard of the Red House.

Hannah: It's awesome. It's a small, new theater space and gallery, they have a gallery space, they do music as well, but they're trying to bring some downtown theater people to their space. So we're going to be there in September, so I get to live in Syracuse for two weeks.

Johnny: Oh, wonderful.

Hannah: Yeah.

Johnny: How many performances are you going to do?

Hannah: It's two weeks, we're doing two weekends, and then maybe some shows for schools, we're going to try to teach when we're out there.

Johnny: Oh, nice, like workshops?

Hannah: Workshops, yeah, my theater company's been doing a little bit of teaching just for fun, and trying to figure things out.

Johnny: And is it more teaching acting techniques, or like how to mount a show?

Hannah: It's not mounting a show, because we'd be talking too much about producing, which is the most depressing thing to talk about in theater, because there's no money for any arts in the world. But we kind of teach—I have a Masters, so I've taught like improv and acting, but I'm trying not to teach—but we teach this workshop called How To Write A Bad Play, and we make the worst possible play, in conjunction with actually writing something good, because whenever we're developing something, we have a really unique situation. It's one director and two writers, and the writers are the actors, which could be hell, but actually we found this great group of three people that really respect each other and we work well together. So when we're writing something, we often write the worst possible version of something. Say we're working on The Eaten Heart, which is the play we did last year, based on Decameron, which is like Italy's Canterbury Tales.

Johnny: Is it by Juvenal?

Hannah: No, it's Boccaccio.

Johnny: Oh, Boccaccio, okay.

Hannah: But we did it in like a seventies hotel, and we took several stories; there's 100 of them, told over 10 nights. When we were writing it, we were like what is the worst fucking thing this character could say? So we take that, and we're constantly writing like the worst version of what we could be doing, to get to the gems. So with students, we teach them kind of like that the horrible, horrible decisions are often a way to find what really works. Because if you're stuck, it's so great to say, "Well, we know that the worst thing this person or this situation could be is this," so that's something we've been kind of teaching.

Johnny: Yeah, that's really important, because I think that for me as a writer, a lot of times I let thoughts of how awesome the writing I do could be if only I could bring my A-game at every possible second, and live up to my expectations; I let my vision of how great it should be stop be from getting started on the writing.

Hannah: Exactly.

Johnny: And you’ve got to figure out different ways to convince yourself to just put something on paper, take the risk. I mean is that kind of how that practice started? Just getting over perfectionism?

Hannah: Yeah, I mean actually none of us thought we were perfect in any way, we were all kind of weird, obscure artists trying to figure out what we do well. You know you do something well, but you're not sure what you do well, or you think you do one thing really well and you're scared of that, because you're like is this the one thing I do well? So I think in breaking through all those layers of the things you do well, it's fun to try things that you don’t do well, and in doing that you find all these negative and positive spaces of ways of writing, or acting, or creating, or trying anything.

Johnny: It's kind of interesting, I was working on a screenplay with one of my friends this winter, and at first our method was going to be dividing up the scenes, and writing something alone, and coming back, and then editing them together, and adding to each other's scenes. But my friend and I came back a week or two after the first scenes had been divided up, and I had worked on mine, but not enough, and he hadn’t worked on his, so we decided this week we're going to try to work together. And we just learned that we weren't the best writing partners, because I would throw something out and write something down on the script, and he kept saying, "No, that's not how you do it, you're putting too much information in, that's extraneous; show, don’t tell, show, don’t tell." And I realized after a couple of hours that he wasn’t letting me get any lines just down on the paper, he wanted to debate it all out verbally instead of getting it down.

Hannah: Yeah, I just figured out how to write by myself; I've always known how, but I just got the balls to do it a little bit. But I have this collaboration with my playwriting partner, who I've been writing with for like 10 or 11 years. We did our college thesis together, so we have a very unique kind of collaboration, it is hard to write with someone, and we have tried all different sorts of things. Like we have one computer, and weirdest case scenario is like the two of us on a couch with one computer in between us writing every word together with is crazy, but we've been working so long it's like twin talk. Another thing is us dividing up scenes, or characters, or storylines, and each of us writing the same scene, and then kind of melding the two together. Sometimes we're on both computers writing at the same time, I mean we've tried it all. Luckily we both work, and we respect each other enough to know that fighting is not personal, it's most like getting to what is really important that we're writing about. I also have Mimi & Flo, which is three writers, and it's sometimes writing together, and it's sometimes writing ideas together, and it's another kind of just figuring it out as you go, but it's always a challenge.

Johnny: And then one interesting question is do you have hard and fast rules when you're writing, about like how many hours to do it at a time for, or how many days a week to do it? I mean you said you’ve done most of your writing with other people, right?

Hannah: Yeah, but now I'm in a writing group, in the summer I started a screenplay, and starting a little novel project, but I'm really focusing right now on a screenplay just to do myself, because I have all these great collaborations, and I've been writing more and more on my own, but I've kind of given myself a goal. I'm not a procrastinator, but I'm really good with goals, so I wouldn’t say that I write every day for a certain amount of hours, but if I have a deadline I will kill myself, and that's how I get stuff done, even if it's a self-imposed deadline. I just need to give myself my own anxiety and suffering.

Johnny: Interviews always jump around a lot at the beginning, but your boyfriend is also a creative artist?

Hannah: Yes.

Johnny: Do you guys write and edit film and stuff in the same place, in the same house, in the same room, and just ignore each other and focus on your little project together, or do you go off in separate places to do it?

Hannah: Luckily we don’t live together, which is...

Johnny: Yeah, it is lucky.

Hannah: [LAUGHS] Which is great for now, and he and I do sometimes work in the same space on separate computers, but they're in different rooms. He luckily has a two-bedroom in Carol Gardens, so I have enough room to work on my computer and do my writing if he's editing. But Paul and I, my writing partner, and a third person, live in Brooklyn together in an apartment, so we are constantly in the same apartment, but we shut our doors or meet in our living room. It's super cheese ball, we'll be like, "In a half hour, bring that scene in the living room," which is sometimes terrible, because we're making something together and want to kill each other, but it's also great to wake someone up in the middle of the night with a great idea.

Johnny: Oh, hell yeah. I love those little really short deadlines like go write something down for half an hour, and I don’t care how bad it is. Bring it back and read it, and then...

Hannah: That's often the best stuff, when you're like, "You have 10 minutes to write a paragraph." There's no judgment, there's no editing, it's often really good stuff.

Johnny: One of my tricks I like to use if I'm writing with someone else is something I actually really—one of the places I really got to perfect this method was tutoring in English and history at ETHS; if somebody's stuck with writing, I ask them to just say verbally what they'd like this part of the piece to say, and then I kind of trick them, because they tell me, "Well I kind of want it to say that there's nothing so important as love," and I then I say, "Write down exactly what you just said, 'There's nothing so important as love.'" And I've found that's a good way to just maintain momentum and get stuff done on paper. Because a lot of high school kids in particular get intimidated about propriety and stuff in the written language, and most people without thinking about it are really easy to understand verbally.

Hannah: Right. Great watch.

Johnny: Oh, thanks. It may be a reference to a Jay-Z line. "I'm like Che Guevara with bling on, I'm complex, I never claim to have wings on, I get by any means on whenever there's a drought, get your umbrellas out because that's when I brainstorm."

Hannah: Holy shit, I love that watch.

Johnny: But I felt a little guilty when I got it, because it's from the Museum of Contemporary Art gift shop, which by the way is one of my tips for finding a cool, unique watch.

Hannah: Here?

Johnny: Here in Chicago. Because I love the idea of Swatches.

Hannah: I love Swatches.

Johnny: They're awesome.

Hannah: I have many.

Johnny: Exactly. It can be hit or miss, though, sometimes when you go to the store, because they always have this limited season. Ebay is the shit.

Hannah: You could also join their club. You get a free watch.

Johnny: Oh, really?

Hannah: Through them. It's really dorky.

Johnny: I wanted their little personal proprietary time thing to catch on, they have like Swatch time. It's cool. And there's this guy who works at the Under Bridge Bookstore on Broadway, in Boys Town, where Jesse used to live, and he had the coolest, most colorful Swatches all the time. And he put me onto this online world of like plastic watch excessives. Cool shit, you know? But I felt like it maybe would be a little bit of bad karma to have Che, you know, I was at some Cuban diner, and some old émigré was pouring my coffee, and it would be like seeing Hitler, you know?

Hannah: Yeah.

Johnny: But this is like subtle anti-Che protest.

Hannah: Mimi & Flo was writing a television show, and there was like a whole thing about the fascist—it's like a new Mimi & Flo idea we were pitching, and there was like a whole thing about Che.

Johnny: Oh, really?

Hannah: Yeah. I can't tell you. [LAUGHS]

Johnny: Oh, did you sign that disclosure?

Hannah: Yeah, it's top secret.

Johnny: So tell me about Mimi & Flo, how it started, and where did the characters come from?

Hannah: The characters are loosely based on myself and Frances Chewning, the other actress on the show, she's from Wisconsin.

Johnny: Where in Wisconsin?

Hannah: She's actually from Madison, but the character's from a smaller town, and I'm from the Chicagoland area, obviously.

Johnny: I consider Madison and Evanston to be sister communities.

Hannah: They are very similar, very similar. So she kind of has a very similar background of moving from the Midwest to New York City. We wanted to do something funny together, we had both gone to Harvard together, she was a year ahead of me in the American Repertory Theater, Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University and the Moscow Art Theater. That's the name of our school.

Johnny: What?

Hannah: Yeah. Side note, it was crazy hard and awesome, but it was basically very similar to the stuff I learned when I was like eight years old at the Piven Theater Workshop. I'm a Piven kid.

Johnny: You're a product of Piven?

Hannah: Yeah.

Johnny: This is so interesting because Miss Squires-Collins, a beloved ETHS English teacher, who was doing her first year of teaching in my freshman year, so you may not know her, we had dinner with her the other day, and her daughter just did like her first Piven class, and she asked for a second one. And I feel that's the pivotal test of a Piven kid. Like I did one Piven class and I was like, "Hell no."

Hannah: [LAUGHS] You're like, "This is lame."

Johnny: Yeah, or, "I'm embarrassed." But like if they do it once and they want to go back, something could be going on.

Hannah: Totally, yeah. I mean I did it forever, it was like my favorite thing ever. I still have beautiful, vivid dreams about those classes as an eight-year-old.

Johnny: And you would improvise, and just roll with it?

Hannah: It was like Story Theater, and improv, and the best kind of playing ever.

Johnny: What about the fact that, at least at Washington School, we had drama teachers, and I'm thinking of one drama teacher in particular, Miss Laurel Serleth.

Hannah: I love her and sometimes have coffee with her when I come back into town.

Johnny: You do?

Hannah: Yeah.

Johnny: So she still lives here?

Hannah: Yeah.

Johnny: And does she still teach at elementary level?

Hannah: I think so.

Johnny: At Washington?

Hannah: I think so, a couple years ago she was.

Johnny: Because I don’t know if this is a common experience or not, but the fact that her main method was to collectively tell a story and have cliffhangers each week and return to the story, and add another 45 minutes or hour to it and live through it was so fucking cool.

Hannah: She blew my mind in I don’t even know what grade. She dressed up as the church lady.

Johnny: Oh, from Saturday Night Live?

Hannah: It was so good, it was so accurate, it was so good. She gave me my start, she gave me the lead part in my fourth or fifth grade school play.

Johnny: And what was it?

Hannah: I don’t remember.

Johnny: Because I'm trying to remember what our school play system was at Washington.

Hannah: I think it was Beats Me, Claude, and I can't remember, Mario something was Claude, and I was his wife, and I got to eat a real piece of pie each show. [LAUGHS]

Johnny: I think you're right, because that name sounds so familiar, but what is Beats Me, Claude?

Hannah: I think it's like a kid's book that they did a full-length all-school play, everybody got a part.

Johnny: And she like adapted it herself you think?

Hannah: Yes. She also I think recommended me for Piven, I think, 8,000 years ago.

Johnny: Were you in the studio art program at Washington, by any chance?

Hannah: No.

Johnny: That was just another cool thing where you could go and work on your own, like visual art projects.

Hannah: At Washington?

Johnny: At Washington, yeah.

Hannah: I don’t remember that.

Johnny: In Mrs. Galloway's art room.

Hannah: I remember Miss Galloway. Maybe I was. Could you do whatever you wanted?

Johnny: Yeah, you could do whatever you wanted, and you would have like an open studio time once a week.

Hannah: I think I did that.

Johnny: Yeah. I was in that, and it was really deep.

Hannah: A special place? [LAUGHS]

Johnny: Yeah, a special place for me. And it was where I started my long tradition of starting ambitious projects, and never feeling like they were finished. That's an interesting question.

Hannah: So it's all her fault.

Johnny: It's all her fault. But it's also, I mean...

Hannah: It's 11 o'clock at night, let's call her right now.

Johnny: Exactly. It's also, though, I think just a way of being as an artist, and something that all artists have to deal with, the fact that completion is in the eye of the beholder sometimes. Like do you have completion issues, or are you the kind of artist who likes to read or watch your finished work, and is happy about it? Or when you see your finished work, are you like, "Do I sound like that?" Or, "I remember we couldn’t get that sound recording right, I hate this, it's not done?"

Hannah: Well I hate watching live theater recordings, because it's like hell on Earth, it's the worst possible thing.

Johnny: Like the most embarrassing possible thing in the world?

Hannah: [LAUGHS] It's the worst thing ever, ever.

Johnny: It'd probably be like listening to unwittingly recorded phone conversations or something.

Hannah: Yeah, yeah. It's horrific, but you learn a lot. I do like reading things, but if I know that I have the option of it not being finished, of course, to me I will feel unsatisfied. That's why I think deadlines are really important, whether it's like the theater is opening the play that night, or we need a draft by this or when. It's weird when you're acting, I feel, when I'm in a role, and I'm in a play, I get to feel the ending, because it's sometimes someone else's words, or it's my own, but it's only my job to do a good job as an actor, so I'm in it fully, and I have to make an ending, or I have to do my job. So that's a good way of feeling endings of things. But often, you know, maybe the play's not perfect, or something's off, so you're like I can only do my job as well as I can do it. But you get to experience an ending of an arc of a character at least.

Johnny: Because Mimi & Flo is sort of like designed to be endless.

Hannah: True. That actually is a really good point. Yes, we can finish an episode, or like a beat, or a joke, but we're always ongoing, because it's choose your own adventure.

Johnny: And are you influenced by the venerable classic Choose Your Own Adventure books?

Hannah: Yes, when Frances and I were like, "Let's do a project together," she wanted to do something for theater, and I was like, "I'd really like to do something more permanent, like film, or the web," and she was like, "Great, me too," and I was like, "Secretly, I've always wanted to do a Choose Your Own Adventure web series," and she was like, "Yes." And her boyfriend got involved, we started writing together, he's a filmmaker. I grew up reading those books; I love Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Johnny: Did you used to like stick your finger in the Choose Your Own Adventure book, and like go and look and both potential endings, and then choose which one you would go with?

Hannah: Yeah, totally, or like go backwards through stuff.

Johnny: Yeah.

Hannah: Cheat, completely.

Johnny: Oh, absolutely. Because when I was first watching Mimi & Flo, I didn’t know how all that would work, and I didn’t know that once you get to the very end of a storyline you can go back and look at the other options. But the first time I used the option to go back was when you guys were thinking of starting the trend of wearing oven mitts. I initially chose entertainment, because I thought that you were going to do fashion based on the entertainment magazine. And I was like, "Word," because that's another one of my things I like to do, like make collages from fashion magazines, you know?

Hannah: Right, right. [LAUGHS]

Johnny: And I was like, "Oh, my god, she is strumming my pain with her fingers."

Hannah: Right, but we totally disappointed you.

Johnny: Yeah. So as soon as I saw it was going to be some stripper shit, I was like, I bet this is going to be a quick dead end, I want to keep the love. Then it was interesting, because I kept choosing the more positive ones, like accept that girl ripping off your style, like rather than kill her. It was the same feeling that I would get reading the Choose Your Own Adventure books; they were subtly moralistic.

Hannah: Or morbidly depressing. You'd be like, "You fell down the cauldron, and you're burning now."

Johnny: But usually that would be the consequence of choosing some more impulsive or materialistic path or something, you know?

Hannah: That's true.

Johnny: I think they were also teaching storytelling in some ways, like it's harder to keep a story going with more violent and decisive action sometimes, you know?

Hannah: Totally, totally.

Johnny: So yeah, I was trying to surf on the love.

Hannah: We try to keep it positive.

Johnny: Yeah, I mean I even had the dude fall for you and not her, out of like a weird real-world in narrative prejudice where I was like—see, the thing is, when you perpetuate the stereotype of men being more attracted to blonde women, is that you can never really trust that stereotypical infatuation with a blonde. I can just tell that there's going to be less narrative juice in that. I think, or are those the last two episodes you filmed, so that neither one goes on longer?

Hannah: We have three more coming out like this week.

Johnny: Yeah, but as it is.

Hannah: As it is, I think...

Johnny: There's a date with each girl?

Hannah: Yeah, I think that there's more blonde right now. I mean existing, I think you have more of a story right now with the blonde, with Mimi, than Flo's character. But that's also the nature of Flo's character, is just a little bit more...

Johnny: Frustrating?

Hannah: Frustrating, yeah.

Johnny: Yeah, totally. Here's a question about Mimi & Flo, and just about both of your ongoing creative projects. Is it something that needs money to even be created, or is it something that as long as you guys are willing to devote your energy to writing it and filming it, and rehearsing it and stuff, you have enough time and money to put it on?

Hannah: Good question. Does it need money? It costs money to make it, it doesn’t cost a lot of money in dollars and cents, because luckily, we put a lot of our own time into it, which ultimately costs a lot on stamina, on relationships, on favors, on this and that.

Johnny: And that's why you're like talking to people about TV and stuff, because it might be reaching like a critical mass point?

Hannah: Yeah, I mean, it's something that we made for fun, but also that we're really serious about, because we wanted to make a television-y show for the web, and we also wanted to try and interactive website, which luckily we were all really proud of it, and we got good attention, and...

Johnny: It really works pacing-wise and stuff.

Hannah: Yeah, also personally, it was a chance for me to do the opposite of theater, and to get something a little more permanent out there, and also to learn how to write not for the stage, and learn how to write for more commercial things. And Frances and Jeff have a similar feeling of things that we got out of it. We also got good connections, and we had a Youtube hit based on the characters with the Same Dude, and we got like a million and a half viewers from that.

Johnny: Yeah, you should definitely mention that almost in a class by itself, because it's like a spinoff into the world of Youtube music, and Youtube hits.

Hannah: Right.

Johnny: And it's so Evanston, by the way, of you to have love for R. Kelly and music videos, you know?

Hannah: I love R. Kelly, yeah, totally.

Johnny: Enough to be like, "It's important that I first memorize Same Girl." Well did you have love for Same Girl before you knew you wanted to do a parody of it, or was it like it came out, you immediately knew you wanted to do a parody of it, so then you learned it?

Hannah: We wanted to do a music video for fun, and also to get more viewers, because we had our own existing website that was separate from Youtube, and it was necessary to get viewers through Youtube, because it's like changed the world. And we just wanted more people to our site for fun. So we wanted to do a music video, I saw the R. Kelly Same Girl video, and Frances and Jeff called me and they were like, "Have you seen this video?" We were all like, "Yes," they were like, "We want to make a video," we were like, "This is it." And we were all kind of surprised secretly that we were all really excited about making an R. Kelly video. So we spent like a month on it, doing it shot for shot, Jeff did a beautiful job, we all wrote the song together, Jeff did the music, re-recorded it so we wouldn’t get in trouble. It's a satire, so we're okay in that department. And then we had all these funny costuming ideas, and just retarded Brooklyn things that we could put in there, and tried to do the best worst job we could do with it. And then we put it on Youtube, on our Mimi & Flo account, and then we got featured, like maybe a week after, two weeks after. And then we went from like 27,000 hits to a million.

Johnny: And how did you get featured?

Hannah: I think they just liked the video. It's very hard to get featured now; at the time I think it was really hard as well.

Johnny: But did you submit it to be considered for featured? Or you just put it up and they themselves just found it?

Hannah: We put it up, and we contacted all our contacts, like we'd been featured for other things, and just watched by other things, like Yahoo really likes us, and Revver really likes us, and Pop Candy, and... who am I forgetting?

Johnny: And did you find out about Revver and Pop Candy from a fan's perspective, because you yourself were searching for sketch comedy and stuff to watch on the internet? Or did someone say like if you're making internet videos, don’t sleep on Revver and Pop Candy and you found out who they were?

Hannah: We uploaded to anybody who would take us.

Johnny: So you researched that a little bit?

Hannah: Yeah, some people gave us good responses. We're not doing any ad sales, we were just like, "Let's just put our stuff out there," that's what important, having people see your work. So we kind of just put ourselves on anybody who would take us. And then we established some good relationships with certain websites, and really nice editors, and then I think with Youtube we started putting some stuff up, and we wrote to them, and didn’t hear anything back, and eventually were on the front page.

Johnny: Sweet.

Hannah: Yeah, it was great, and we got a little bit of good press from certain people. It's all on our blog, I can't really remember right now.

Johnny: Oh, you have a blog that detailed the story of this?

Hannah: We have a blog, it connects all the nice stuff people have said about the site, it's somewhere on our website.

Johnny: And who programs that blog?

Hannah: That blog is programmed by us.

Johnny: So you know how to do that and everything?

Hannah: Yeah, little bits, I'm pretty bad, Frances is really good at it.

Johnny: Okay.

Hannah: But our website, like our huge crazy one is done by someone in Spain.

Johnny: And is that somebody who's a friend, or someone you hired/

Hannah: It's friend of Jeff's, his name's Nathan, he's really good. And so we send episodes to him, and he puts them up. And for the first launch, we had editors in New York and LA sending stuff to Spain to put up for our New York launch.

Johnny: Wow, so are you communicating with these people on the phone, e-mail, instant message, or all of them?

Hannah: A lot of e-mail, not much phone, a little bit of phone.

Johnny: Instant message?

Hannah: Not so much, we did a little Skype. We've done everything, especially for conference calls, as we've gotten a little more exciting things happening, we're starting to pitch new shows, web shows, or a television show, web mostly, we've done conference calls and IMing and all that stuff. That's what people do now, I didn’t know that, but that's what people do.

Johnny: Have you done video chatting?

Hannah: Yeah.

Johnny: And what do you like to use video chatting for? I just started video chatting, and I find one thing about it is it's emotionally satisfying, so for like friendships, it can be so much more emotionally satisfying than writing or talking on the phone. I haven't used it for any kind of formal collaboration. I have noticed that sometimes when it's time to get off of a Skype call, it's really time to get off, because you're like, "Uh, this is so boring..."

Hannah: Yeah, it's good for not interrupting, like it'll stop you from interrupting, because it's like da—eh—er—... [LAUGHS]

Johnny: Yeah.

Hannah: When I talk on the phone, like I like to do 50 things at once, and you can't really escape your computer, and if you're painting your nails, and making a sandwich, or totally not paying attention they know, so that's kind of bad.

Johnny: But for comedy writers, is it like...

Hannah: Frances, Jeff, and I have had meetings, but we've done just throwing ideas around, we haven't actually done writing on Skype.

Johnny: Oh, like on their little writing part, on their little chat window?

Hannah: Yeah, we haven't done that.

[END PART 1]

DJs I Know: TRAV at MaxBar

2008-08-30T11:32:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, August 28, 2008, my friend TRAV played a DJ set at MaxBar, 2247 North Lincoln Avenue in Chicago. The place looks like a futuristic ski chalet, and TRAV's selection was perfectly in tune with the ski trip vibe of the crowd--it was like the last night to party before the last night to party on earth.

Click here to download a live recording of TRAV in the mix.

TRAV's set list, MaxBar, Thursday, August 28, 2008:

One More Time To Pretend (Immuzikation Remix)- MGMT vs. Daft Punk
Pro Nails/ Cool Feeling (Them Jeans Blend)- Kid Sister vs. The Outrunners
Dangerous (Night Facilities Remix)- Busta Rhymes
Drop The Pressure- Mylo
Street Justice- MSTRKRFT
Paris Is Burning (Cut Copy Mix)- Ladyhawke
Put Your Hands Up For Detroit- Fedde Le Grant
2 Hearts (The Twelves Mix)- Kylie Minogue
Day And Night (Crookers Mix)- Kid Cudi
Bossy ft. Too Short (Alan Braxe & Fred Falke Remix)- Kelis
Bossy (Alan Braxe &Fred Falke Erth Out Remix)- Kelis
As Above, So Below (Justice Remix)- The Klaxons
Holiday (The Lazers 2008 Remix)- Madonna
P.Y.T. (Marquis Remix)- Michael Jackson
Flash Gordon (JamieFanatic Bootleg)- Queen
Beeper (A-Trak Fixed)- Count & Sinden
Baile On Me- Flosstradamus
Blond Skinny Robot (Shokkaboy Remix)- Turntablehoshies
American Boy (LAZRtag Remix)- Estelle ft. Kanye West
Lights And Music (Boys Noize Mix)- Cut Copy
Paramount (Rogerseventytwo Remix)- DJ DLG
Shadows- Midnight Juggernauts
Poison (Million $ Mano Remix)- Bell Biv Devoe
Your Bmore (DJ Rocktakon)- Outfield
Mr. Postman- DJ Techniques
Hold On (DJ Nature Remix)- Sam & Dave

Five days later, me and TRAV and TGIK of Best Day Ever!!! were chilling on Washington Island, at the very tip of Wisconsin's Door County, on a real ski trip of sorts. That's me on the ferryboat up there, with a bitchin' picture of TRAV to follow as soon as I get in touch with Teej.

Artists I Know: Hannah Bos (Part 2)

2008-08-27T13:21:00.000-07:00

Johnny: When you're an artist, I was just telling Hannah that I would rather have the $800 I spent on my iPhone free to pay for more transcribing of interviews, or like be there to pay for if I need a computer program or something. Or just to live on. I find as an artist nothing feels better than not spending my money, but just having money sitting there available for a rainy day.

Hannah: Right, I actually don’t think you need a lot of money to be an artist, or you don’t need a lot of things. Unfortunately I love stuff. But coming from Evanston, I like funky stuff.

Johnny: Exactly, exactly.

Hannah: [LAUGHS] I like cool stuff.

Johnny: Hell yeah.

Hannah: But not expensive stuff, just funky stuff. I like my thrift stores.

Johnny: Yeah, I mean this is a question. Hannah's mom is an antique dealer, and how much of her way of life of taking her passion for funky stuff and finding a way to make it work as a way to make a living, how much of that fed into your decision to proactively go after your dreams and stuff?

Hannah: A hundred and fifty percent. My mom's store was like she would deliver things that people purchased to Steppenwolf, or like John Hughes movie sets, and she'd be like, "We'll deliver it for free if we can get a ticket," and we'd get to go backstage and deliver props, or go on the set of some movie, and I used to get to go with her. That was totally a part of what I'm doing now. I also used to play house and store, and setup her window displays when I was way too little to be doing that, like body parts on Halloween, with vintage doll heads and stuff.

Johnny: What was the name of her store?

Hannah: Recollections, on Custer Avenue, and it was there forever.

Johnny: I want to do a feature on her store, and whatever pictures you guys have.

Hannah: We do.

Johnny: I almost started a store last summer, and that is another part of the Evanston dream.

Hannah: You have to talk to my mom. She will tell you how things have changed. Especially with what's going on downtown Evanston now. I mean Evanston's a different place. Main Street is still kind of cute, there's kind of a rebirth.

Johnny: But Good's just stopped selling art supplies, dude.

Hannah: It's all just frames. It's all gone totally backwards. My mom and I walked down Main Street yesterday, and she's like, "When I started my store back in the day, Good's was just a paint store, just hardware paint. And then it became an art store, which was so cool." Now just frames, next to a really expensive Italian restaurant.

Johnny: I already have the hookup to get the inside story on RIP Good's.

Hannah: RIP downtown Evanston.

Johnny: I know...

Hannah: Time out on that, that's too depressing.

Johnny: Chandler's...

Hannah: Yeah.

Johnny: So here's a question, do you and Frances still have day jobs?

Hannah: Frances quit her full-time secretary job, which was just her day job, no-brainer, New York, you have to do that, I don’t know if you have to do that in Chicago still.

Johnny: No, you do. Everyone does except Johnny Sagan, and Johnny Sagan's going to have to start doing it soon.

Hannah: [LAUGHS] Uh-huh. I had like seven jobs or something when I moved to New York at first. I was like dog walking, babysitting, I had a day job working for a middleman of a print shop, that I didn’t know that I was working for the middleman of a print shop, and then I finally quit because it became like a personal assistant job where I had to go with him to get his colonoscopy.

Johnny: Yeah, this is a very important subject, actually, for those in the creative arts, because personal assisting is like an ever-beckoning black hole of your self-respect and time.

Hannah: I was hired to answer some phone calls because I didn’t want to work in a restaurant, and then I started working in a restaurant in addition to working in an office. But I started working in a print shop that I didn’t know was not a real print shop. He like took down Getty Images' pictures, and showed me the factory that he owned, but he didn’t own it, and then he hired to be his personal assistant, which just meant going to his house and talking to his wife, who is ironically from the south side of Chicago, who was like eating bunions and had to sort her closet, and I was like, this is the end of that job.

Johnny: Because it corrupts the people who hire personal assistants, they become helpless and peevish.

Hannah: Yeah, horrible. Off and on I do theater gigs, I'll do some little commercially thing, or my theater company, now we're starting to get grants, and doing bigger projects, so I'm making money from that. I have been waitressing since I got to New York off and on, except I'm quitting next week.

Johnny: Awesome.

Hannah: Yeah. Literally quitting next week, I'm done.

Johnny: It's going to be a means of making money that you're no longer going to resort to if at all possible.

Hannah: Yes, yes.

Johnny: And tell me what you don’t like about waitressing, this is very important. I'll tell you what I don’t like about waitering. I am totally fine with dealing with the people, I'm totally fine with dealing with the mean chefs and all that. The one thing I don’t like is prep work and cleaning up later. I don’t like having to fold napkins or polish glass or something. You don’t always have to do that, that's the deal breaker for me.

Hannah: I am a bad waitress, I have a bad attitude, and I don’t like working. [LAUGHS] I don’t like serving people, that's the problem for me. I've gotten to a point where I don’t like serving mean people. And I work at a place where you can throw peanut shells on the floor, and there's live music, and it's open on Christmas. So that means I have to work maybe Christmas, or New Year's Eve, or Thanksgiving every year.

Johnny: Annoying.

Hannah: Yeah. And it's been good to me. Like off and on, I've not worked there for three months and come back, they’ve been totally supportive.

Johnny: That is cool.

Hannah: That is cool, and flexible; it's all about that.

Johnny: And this is something that you need to understand too, like here we are being very candid, you're saying like on the whole it sucks so much you hope to never have to do it again, but somehow you got them to like you enough to be flexible with you, and let you come in and out.

Hannah: Everybody there's an artist of some sort, so they understand that flexibility is key, that we are really highly responsible people but we'll drop any job in a heartbeat if you are going to get a chance of having what you're really there on Earth to do. It's hard to find a job that has that kind of understanding. There's also the flipside of that, it's like in the last month, two people have thrown up on my feet. And to me, that's like... [LAUGHS] Don’t put that in there.

Johnny: And that's like coworkers or customers?

Hannah: That's like, you know, a sign from god, or the higher whatever that it's time to go. I'm a good person, but karmically, I have to take responsibility of what I'm doing to these people, it's too destructive.

Johnny: No, I understand. That was one thing that was hard for me about being a waiter, was at our restaurant there was this expectation that you would all go out drinking after every shift, you know?

Hannah: Hell no, anymore, I'm not 10.

Johnny: Yeah, exactly, that’s what I'm saying. Although one cool thing is I may do a cookbook with the chef now.

Hannah: Oh, that's cool.

Johnny: Yeah, at Oceanique on Main Street.

Hannah: Oh, yummy.

Johnny: Yeah, he's a cool dude. I felt misunderstood there, but then I found out later that he was feeling my vibe, and now we're cool, and we see each other.

Hannah: That's a good restaurant.

Johnny: Yeah, it's all fish.

Hannah: Yeah.

Johnny: So yeah, this is something. So I don’t know, since you do work as well as write and act and stuff, I guess the question is just are you working on art through extreme fatigue a lot of the time?

Hannah: Yes, I am constantly tired and constantly working. I have like three full-time jobs. I have Mimi & Flo, I have a theater company which his now non-profit, which I'm a board member for, which it costs $50,000 to do a play that you'll make no money on and you're in the red, and you have to kill yourself for a year and a half to do. And I wait tables, which I'm trying to eliminate now, because I just don’t want to do it anymore. And I also kind of want to jump in and take the risk of once I don’t have that crutch, maybe other options, I'll have the real time, even if it's 10 percent of my time, 30 percent of my time, whatever that percentage is, that is time that I could use to be poor, but also totally focused on what I really want to be doing.

Johnny: Hell yeah, hell yeah, I definitely understand.

Hannah: But it is necessary to have either a trust fund, or a really good work ethic, where you can do a job that you don’t care about for money, to support your real career, which sometimes takes years of not making a lot of money and pursuit, to really go forward to get what you want, and then you could quit your day job.

Johnny: Absolutely. And then let's also talk about the role of schooling in the arts, and in your art, because I guess I haven't gone to school yet for writing, I actually am getting ready to apply for an MFA, and I'm excited about it. But I've known some people who sort of were saying that they wish they didn’t have to work so that they could work on their art or something.

Hannah: Who doesn’t?

Johnny: Yeah, who doesn’t? But sometimes those people haven't gone to school. So in terms of the development of you as an artist, what happened at school versus the real world, or just tell me about what you do in art school, what do you do in theater school, how did it get you where you are now? Because I've always heard some people be like, "Fuck school, I don’t need to go to school for what I'm doing."

Hannah: School's important for me, it's not that I like being a student; I genuinely like learning. I'm not the best student, and that's not because I'm not a hard worker, I'm a really hard worker, but I'm a really slow reader, which slows everything down for me. I didn’t learn how to read at Washington until fifth grade, and nobody knew, and they only knew because I was like 99th percentile for math, and then slipping, and they were like, "What's your problem?" And I was like, "I don’t know what the story problems are, because I don’t understand what the words are." So then I went to... what's the school attached to Baker, the teaching school there?

Johnny: Yeah, Baker Demonstration School?

Hannah: But next to it they have the teacher's school, I can't remember the name.

Johnny: Oh yeah, National-Louis.

Hannah: National-Louis had this really great woman Barbara Platt, who is still in contact, and is supportive of my theater company. This really cool woman taught me how to read really quickly in one year. Long story short, I went from being a really bad student, good kid, shy-ish, not really, to sixth grade, straight A's throughout high school. Because I was so behind on everything, I figured out how to read, and then it wasn’t because I was super smart, I was really a little hard worker, because I felt like I was catching up for not knowing how to read, and being really lost for all those year at Washington. So I kind of got into school late in the game. I was kind of slacking through the beginning, and kind of just not being the best student I could’ve been. And in high school I was in some AP classes, this and that, but I just was not a great reader ever. So I've always been kind of really interested in different ways of learning, and it's kind of ironic now that I'm doing a lot of writing, because I'm like, "I'm a writer?"

Johnny: Do you spell well?

Hannah: I spell so horribly. Like if you see me before spell check, it's crazy town.

Johnny: But guess what, there's this really great short story writer named Thom Jones, who has this book called Cold Snap, and in the acknowledgments to his book, he says, "Special thanks to Alice K. Turner, the fiction editor at Playboy magazine, who takes my horribly misspelled, chicken scratch manuscripts, and turns them into the fluent works of language you see before you." And I was always like, "He's being disingenuous, he's like a PhD in spelling, and his shit is probably perfect." And then Jessica, my girlfriend, got the job of Playboy's archivist, and I was hanging out with her at work one day, and she let me see all his original manuscripts.

Hannah: Are they crazy?

Johnny: Yeah, he just like shits out on the page, like he's channeling his inner child, and he just scrawled it out and FedEx'd it, like a sheaf of papers to her. And yeah, she carefully was like, "Thom, you're a genius," and spell checked it, and corrected it, and brought it to fruition with him.

Hannah: Oh, I love it.

Johnny: Yeah, so just spell check exists, and a what a lot of beginning writers don’t understand, because all they read is the finished product of the writing process, is the importance of editing, and good editors in collaboration and revision. And you're aiming for that perfect publishable polish, but be like Hannah, just write it, get it down, and spell check it.

Hannah: Yeah, totally, which is good, because I'm starting from playwriting. Playwriting there are no rules, it's more like poetry, and now that I'm doing a little bit of fiction, and a lot of screen, there's a big format that you have to do for screenplays, but it's nice to come from a place where I'm like, "Oh, there are no rules." That's my world. What was I talking about? School. Okay, so then I went to Vassar, and then I went to Harvard.

Johnny: And at Vassar...

Hannah: Vassar as a drama major.

Johnny: Yeah, and did you know that you were going to be a drama major from the beginning, like you were intending to do it?

Hannah: Yes, yes, I was like, "Meryl Streep went there, I'm going there," and I got really good financial aid.

Johnny: And so tell the kids a little bit about that. When you first get to drama school, how does it start? How does a four-year drama program work, like how do they teach you?

Hannah: Well luckily Vassar is a liberal arts school, so you weren't suffocating in your one major, you got to try a lot of different things. Vassar was awesome, I liked ETHS a lot, but I think that I was kind of nerdy and weird, and a little bit lost in school. I was definitely not cool, and being cool was really important at Evanston.

Johnny: Were you doing plays at ETHS?

Hannah: I was doing Piven, so I was really focused outside of school on something that I really, really loved. I wasn’t part of YAMO, like YAMO and Piven had kind of a thing, and I was a big Piven kid. So I was always kind of artsy and into my own thing.

Johnny: And who were some other Piven kids in your year?

Hannah: Teddy (Heich?), Rachel (Giddleson?), Alexis McNabb. She is in New York now, and she comes and sees my plays. She's acting, she does a lot of clowning.

Johnny: Do you know Ethan (Plout?)?

Hannah: No.

Johnny: He is a guy in Jessie's year, class of '99, who did a lot of Piven, up to a point, but I don’t know how much he kept doing it in high school though. He's my friend.

Hannah: I don’t remember who else... A lot of people from other schools, because it was like all different suburb schools in Chicago.

Johnny: But did you burst with pride when PCU came out?

Hannah: A little bit.

Johnny: I was at the premier, in the Evanston One Theater.

Hannah: Oh, yeah. I mean, I liked Jeremy Piven, I think he's great.

Johnny: He's awesome.

Hannah: I like Entourage.

Johnny: I haven't seen it.

Hannah: It's kind of good.

Johnny: I want to see it.

Hannah: It's kind of great.

Johnny: I mean he did I think kind of like a parody of himself on it, in the beginning of this Katt Williams DVD, that me and Jess were obsessed with this summer. On that show, when he's walking his clients through what their strategy is going to say in a pitch meeting, does he say this catch phrase of, "Stick a pin in it?"

Hannah: I don’t know, I don’t watch it religiously. Probably, he has a lot of catch phrases. He says, "Hug it out," a lot.

Johnny: Like, "Kiss and make up?"

Hannah: Yeah, like men hugging. Drama school...

Johnny: I mean let's say someone reading this is someone who loves acting, whether from an improv Piven tradition, or full-scale school play, learning my lines tradition. Is it like dying and going to heaven?

Hannah: Well grad school was like major drama school. College was like learn art history, learn all these things that you thought you might like in high school and got a week of, and then you get to dive in in college. So I highly recommend if you are from Evanston and you like drama or you like any kind of art, go to a liberal arts school, because you need to learn about everything to really understand art. You need philosophy, you need everything. And I think you're too young to go to a conservatory, like I wouldn’t have wanted to go to NYU Conservatory, or Carnegie Mellon, at least personally from where I was, because I was not ready to be torn apart like I was four years later in grad school. In grad school they personally tear you apart. They find out what you're very good at, kind of like what I was talking about with writing before. Like in acting, they find out what you're very strong at, and then they kind of pick that out of you and say that you can't really do that for four years, because you're good at that, and you know that that's your crutch, that's your cliché, you can't do any of those things. You have to try all the other things that you're good at, in the process you're like, "Wait, what was I good at?"

Johnny: "Am I still good?

Hannah: Yeah, you're like, "What do I do? Why do I do? Who am I? What am I?" So you figure that out, and that I couldn’t have done at 17 or 18. You know, I had two weeks in between Vassar and grad school, which was not smart. I applied, I was like, "I'll never get in," and then I couldn’t defer, and I was like, "I guess I'm going... more school..."

Johnny: That's actually a sort of controversial issue, because I've just heard people expressing views on this subject again and again. Do you or do you not wait between undergrad and grad school?

Hannah: I think it really depends on the person. I think it's good to go earlier than later, because I know a lot of people in my class had gone to New York, experienced it. The longer you're out, I think you maybe see more of the world, and it's nice to go in a little bit young, and not really knowing what the world is like, because the world is a dark, dark place... [LAUGHS]

Johnny: Ooh, I'm writing on that one, girl.

Hannah: Well just I think it's really hard to be an artist. I think progressively there's less and less money, and it's less socially accepted, and just as the world gets harder and harder economically, the way things are, like from 2000, when I graduated Vassar, a year later everything changed. I don’t want to be this dark, but it is hard in any profession you do, and it's always been hard to be an artist. But I think it's really difficult.

Johnny: Well just as someone who always watched New York from afar, I used to read about how New York was a place where your neighbors didn’t care if you played loud music and did heroin or something, and then in the Giuliani years, hearing that he was actually shutting down on shit and stuff, to now hearing about how New York is so money driven that it's not as easy anymore to go there to be with the people who are there working on stuff, because you might have to make such a huge nut for rent and stuff.

Hannah: Yeah, like everyone's like there are no poets in New York anymore, the poets are in...

Johnny: Kansas City.

Hannah: Kansas City, or New Jersey. New Jersey now, there are neighborhoods that are more diverse with 50 different ethnicities in two blocks, versus New York, which is like 50 different Dunkin' Donuts. Literally, there's so many...

Johnny: Yeah, my sister's beloved Astoria Queens, which even that is now becoming a luxury.

Hannah: Totally.

Johnny: Two questions about this darkness of the world financial issue. One, in your non-profit side of your career at the theater company, who writes the grants and researches the grant granting organizations? Because my mom, she did financial aid at a college, and she always says something that you hear a lot out on the road, people say, "There's so much money people are trying to give away," you just have to apply for things. Like who writes your grants?

Hannah: The three of us do. I basically do a little of the editing, the boys are really good at it. And it's really hard to write a grant. Luckily we're getting better at it and we're getting better grants. There is money out there; I mean the world is wonderful. I should really tell the truth. I should also say that I'm completely satisfied and happy with what I'm doing; I'm so happy to be doing what I want to do since I was very little.

Johnny: And it shows in the work, I must say.

Hannah: Thank you, thank you. Yeah, I'm completely happy with what I do, and I'm glad that I'm crazy enough to keep doing it. I guess what I was saying about the world is just like it's a different place than it was 10 years ago, what I thought the world would be like. I always knew it would be hard, but I really think it's a really big struggle if you're going to commit to being artist, or to commit to doing what you love, you have to truly commit to doing the work to do it, because it's harder than ever to break through and make it in whatever kind of capacity it is. So you have to be a really genuine artist, and a really hard worker.

Johnny: Absolutely.

Hannah: But you know what? It's the best time to be an artist, because everybody's losing their jobs, there are no jobs out there for you if you're graduating from college, you should be doing exactly what you want to do, because the world is so weird now, you shouldn’t be wasting your time doing anything but what you love.

Johnny: Right, you’ve got to be like Luke Skywalker at the end of Return of the Jedi, like flying full speed into the heart of the Death Star, you know?

Hannah: Totally, totally, follow exactly your intuition and just do that, because everything else is just baloney.

Johnny: Oh, yeah, we've been talking in our house about surviving the new depression. But it's cool because what I'm doing with doing people's autobiographies, it's just neat to know that there are going to be people with weird situations who have a little pile of money, and you somehow approach them and figure out a way to go into partnership with them and live off that for a while. That was the second part of the question. When you're talking about like pitching a TV show, what are the people like, who are the people who you are talking to? And I mean, when you go into a meeting with them or something about your idea, are they sitting there spitting back critiques at you, or are they just being mysterious and just sort of saying like, "Hmm, we will take this into consideration?"

Hannah: I've only done it a couple times, I've done it with Mimi & Flo, and I've also done it with Paul. The kind of television stuff that we've gotten for Mimi & Flo so far has just been audition with networks for the acting part of us, which is me and Frances. With pitching web series, which is actually where it's more hot, networks are doing less and less pilots, so you don’t get to pitch pilots as much. Web stuff people are making like crazy. So we’ve had some really good situations so far, nothing's come to fruition, but we've gotten close in pitching ideas for new web series, and right now we’re in the middle of a new process of doing that. It varies; it's producers and it's people that are coming from the west coast, which I never have had before. They’ll give you either notes, or they’ll steer you into a direction of ideas, and you try to take that as either a suggestion, or you take that as something that you need to do to put into your writing. Does that make sense?

Johnny: Yeah, it does, there's one thing. I was having a conversation with this girl I know who is a photographer, breaking into photography in LA, and we were speaking grand generalizations about LA and stuff, and she was saying like, "The more I photograph celebrities out in LA, I feel like some people just have 'it,' and other people don’t have 'it'." And that ties into stereotypes you hear about like producers meeting with people and deciding within three seconds do you or do you not have 'it'. And I could see like young people who want to become actors thinking I guess it all comes down to whether or not I have 'it,' and if I don’t have some 'it' factor that says I should be onscreen, I should just give up. But I have all these stories from my experience of people I know, who might have been able to be convinced at one point that they didn’t have 'it,' but they kept working on whatever 'it' was that they did, and now no one can say they don’t have 'it'.

Hannah: I mean if this is for like young Evanstonians, I don’t even think if you're a young Evanstonian you even know who you are yet. I don’t think you can judge who you are.

Johnny: Right, so your desire to do this is its own ticket, its own warrant that you should be doing it.

Hannah: I think I think this. I think you are what you do. So if you're figuring out what you do, you don’t really know if you have 'it' yet. I mean I'm a self-starter, I really believe in making my own work. I went to New York to be an actress, I've been writing my own plays, and my own TV show of some sort, at first not because I wanted to, just because I wanted to give myself work, because it's so hard to get work, especially if you don’t have all the connections in the world, you have to make them. So I feel like you are your work. I can understand if someone's saying 'it' is talent, but if you work really hard, you could make 'it,' you could make what that is, you make that entity.

Johnny: Exactly, and this is a related thing. Do you find it embarrassing or hard to talk about your work, or sell yourself?

Hannah: Yeah, totally, it's the worst. Like right now, I grew up with you, and it's a little difficult and weird to talk positively about where you are in your life. I'm like, "Oh, where am I, oh my god?"

Johnny: Well, and I'm sitting here thinking, as I talk to you, talking to people like this is a big part of my job as a writer, but at the same time, I wouldn’t want anybody to think that it’s your job as a writer to talk confidently and in generalizations, and in the way that sounds somehow definitive about things. But just to let everybody know, with my work as a writer, I find it hard to talk about it rather than just do it too, you know? Do it and show it, do it and show it.

Hannah: Totally, well it’s like when someone's like, "How do you tell a good joke?" And you start mathematically taking it apart, and you're like, "Oh, my god, there's nothing funny about this, and it's taking all the fun out of it." Sometimes it's scary to dissect what you do.

Johnny: Well here's an interesting question, have you ever had this feeling; I've had this a bunch of times in my life, sometimes related to art or not. But have you ever not laughed a truly deep belly laugh in a while and wondered if you lost the ability to laugh, and then you laugh, and you're really happy that it came back?

Hannah: Yeah, I have. Or your stomach hurts, and you're like, "Oh god, I haven't laughed so hard in six months." Yeah, it's growing up a little bit. [LAUGHS] Or you're just not around anything funny.

Johnny: Because I think if we're going to talk about concepts as mystical as 'it' or whatever, let's talk about more positive mystical concepts like your gut and stuff like that. It is important to notice if you haven't laughed in a while, and be grateful when you get around the right people, or you get into a new mood and you do laugh, you know what I mean?

Hannah: Yeah, I laugh a lot with Mimi & Flo and with my theater company though.

Johnny: Yeah, it was really fun, when I first started watching the first moment of the first episode of Mimi & Flo I ever watched, I was ticking off the references that were funny, and they were making my inner funny bone go, but sort of anticipating my first laugh. And then when my first laugh came, it was really fun.

Hannah: Good. [LAUGHS]

Johnny: It was really, really fun. So yeah, I guess here's another question, this is something that it's good to be able to think strategically about, it's part of thinking about what you want out of art. When you're meeting with somebody to like give you money to develop a web series, or sign you up for TV show or something—I want to find a way to say this very plainly, because it just relates to what a lot of my friends who are doing all these arts are doing. Like I've got painter friends, and they're wondering what price should I put on my paintings? Or I've got musician friends, and they're wondering how much should I charge for a show? Like at this point, if you could get exactly what you realistically wanted from the TV people or whatever, what's your price? Would you be like, "I want to set aside a certain amount of money to be my personal salary, a certain amount of money for producing my stuff, and then beyond that I just am grateful for the bigger audience and we'll see what happens?"

Hannah: Completely.

Johnny: Like what's your breakdown?

Hannah: I mean, in all my projects I wish that everyone could just be comfortable, there's nothing that I really want to be making a lot of money. Like slowly things with theater has gotten increasingly better, just by working harder, and bigger theaters and stuff. But with Mimi & Flo, or with any kind of web project or anything, it would just be something that was just enough that I would be more comfortable than really, really doing it all low, low budg'.

Johnny: And like when you're talking to money people, do they...

Hannah: They ask us for budgets, they ask us to break down an entire budget, and we have to guess.

Johnny: And can you put your salary in the budget?

Hannah: Oh, yeah.

Johnny: But they don’t pressure you in a weird way to omit your own salary from the budget and act like you would do it for free or something?

Hannah: No. I mean I am a big fan of not underselling yourself, because you kind of set your price. If you undersell yourself, other people will too. Also, a $50 couch is not treated as well as a $2,000 couch. And that's not saying inflate yourself, but it's saying you are worth a lot, and if you think you're worth a lot, it's a really good thing. You're also your own PR person. But that's more of a painter's kind of thing. For this kind of stuff, with Mimi & Flo, they're asking us to do budgets, we're trying to do breakdowns. Everybody wants to hear you say, "We make it for nothing," and they're like, "Could you make it for X?" And us be like, "Sure." But it's really not X, it's like all these friends who give us time pro bono, for a year of here and there doing things for us. So when we make a budget, we put in what our friends who are actually costume designers, or set designers, who do us a favor here and there. I mean a lot of times Frances, Jeff, and I do the whole thing ourselves. You know, I'm doing catering, Frances is doing assistant directing, or time charting everything, and I'm doing costumes, and Jeff's holding the camera and being the director. We're all writing it.

Johnny: And do you guys sketch your storyboards or anything?

Hannah: Not storyboards, but we write all of the scenes, everything's written.

Johnny: I was just wondering if drawing is a part of web video.

Hannah: It is for some people, Casimir does it all the time for music videos and stuff that he does. It depends on the director I think.

Johnny: But it's not unheard of?

Hannah: No, it's totally...

Johnny: It's totally heard of?

Hannah: Yeah. I mean web is the new film. There is not much film being done, it's all digital, so people are treating it with that kind of respect, especially now with HD, it looks so nice. So people are really storyboarding it, everybody's really, really going all out on it, especially given the time and the budget.

Johnny: And what about your relationship with people like me, like journalists basically, who might interview you, write criticism, and that can be just blogging about your stuff, or write like feature stories about you or whatever?

Hannah: Are you going to criticize me?

Johnny: Oh, no.

[LAUGHS]

Johnny: I do want to find a way to graphically describe and present on the page what the Mimi & Flo page looks like and stuff.

Hannah: Oh, yeah.

Johnny: There's this British film magazine called Sight and Sound that precedes all its film reviews with this really cool synopsis of the entire plot of the film or something.

Hannah: Have you seen on the website that there's like a web? There's a special link that you could see all of us...

Johnny: Yeah, I was amazed to see that.

Hannah: Is that something that you'd want to put in?

Johnny: Yeah, I'd want to put that on the page. Because for me, as a big information overloaded fan of entertainment, I'm so over the idea of spoiler alert, like if shit is really good...

Hannah: Yeah, put it in there.

Johnny: Yeah, instead of being vague for the sake of not spoiling it, put it in there, and the true fan will appreciate it more.

Hannah: Yeah, any of that stuff, we can just find a way to get you a JPEG or something.

Johnny: Yeah, absolutely.

Hannah: I think I'd like to go home soon.

Johnny: Cool, yeah.

Hannah: I have to get my mom's car back. [LAUGHS]

Johnny: Yeah, and you're an only child, she's probably afraid if you're out late. Well cool.

Hannah: More questions?

Johnny: Well I was just trying to remember what I was saying. Something about...

Hannah: Getting your visual picture... journalists.

Johnny: Oh yeah, that's just the one other thing that I'm encountering a lot. People are actually going a good job of promoting themselves on the web, like you guys are doing a great job of promoting yourself on the web, because you have a really nice, frequently updated website, and you're putting yourselves out there. But I've had people say, "I wish I could promote myself on the web better," and there used to be more of a formal network of critics and stuff. So my question is just do you ask people to write about you, or pursue attention from writers?

Hannah: We have a press release that we never sent out. We wrote something and we never actually sent it out. We've written some emails to like friends and stuff, just being like, "Hey, we updated stuff, we have a blog." I wish we were better about doing PR in general, but I think we luckily have just had the work or the viral video be the PR. Which even major PR companies are hiring people to do shitty looking viral stuff, because that's what PR is now, it's all backwards and weird, and they're at the brink of weird, new ways of making commercials and stuff. So luckily our medium is kind of feeding in on what people are kind of looking for. So we haven't done the formal PR, or seeking that kind of stuff out. I wish we were better at that. A lot of stuff has been word of mouth, like Facebook and stuff like that. All those kind of weird social networks are the new self-promotion.

Johnny: Yeah, and it's truly self-promotion. And how many times have you been interviewed in this way, where someone is asking you questions?

Hannah: Mimi & Flo, like for a radio station, or people have done little articles on stuff, on the Choose Your Own Adventure.

Johnny: And all that would be on the blog?

Hannah: Some the links are on the blog. Paul and I and Oliver have been on a few blogs and things like that, or reviews. Most of our pressy kind of things have been reviews on stuff.

Johnny: Oh, that's cool. And when you read reviews, because I have not had any of my work reviewed ever, to my knowledge, so I don’t know what that's like. Do you read your reviews, and do your reviews help you, or are they just like they are what they are, they're just reviews?

Hannah: If I'm in a play that someone else wrote, I don’t like reading reviews, because there's really not much I can do about it. But if I'm the producer of my theater company, or the play that I wrote, I'm conscious of it, just because it's my baby, and I know it's out there, and also like a month later, we're looking for pull quotes for a tour press packet that we're making, so I'm aware that it exists. But it's gross. I mean it's part of putting your stuff out there, people are going to judge it, people are going to talk about it, that's what you're doing, you're putting your own work out there.

Johnny: The final question, basically, related to that is, do you have any desire to comment on other people's blogs about shit, or write reviews yourself?

Hannah: No. You know, for a while with Mimi & Flo, at the beginning we were getting a lot of negative Same Dude stuff, just like, "Girl, your face is nasty," or stuff like that, and we were like, "How could you?" But then we realized that that's what the Youtube chatrooms, that's what those kind of things are, it's like open conversation. In some weird capacity it's like freedom of speech, so raw, gross, unedited. And it's amazing, because then you get all these other comments of people just following those threads, and for Youtube that's great, because you're getting all these clicks, but also it’s just interesting to see the constant chain of thoughts of crazy people around the world. We don’t edit that stuff. And also I don’t like backlashing on those, if someone's going to review you, you put yourself out there, you have to respect—unless it's personal. But I've never had anything like that.

Johnny: Cool, anything else you want to say?

Hannah: No, but if you have any other questions call me.

Johnny: I will.

[END INTERVIEW]

Websites I Like: poetryvisualized.com

2008-08-26T12:09:00.001-07:00

Digging the heck out of www.poetryvisualized.com!

Artists I Know: Theodore Boggs and Garrett Munski

2008-08-14T14:09:00.000-07:00

Theodore Boggs with An Ode To Don Cornelius, Summer 2008

Last Saturday night, August 9, 2008, I attended the second of two interesting art openings that weekend. It was Open Studio at 212 N Sangamon, 2 blocks west of the intersection of Lake and Halsted in Chicago. Garrett Munski and Theodore Boggs--I call him Teddy Ballgame--have had this regal loft space for their studio this summer, so they set aside eight hours that night to show first the patrons and then the party people what they are working on.

Teddy is sitting in front of the piece with my favorite detail of the night, An Ode To Don Cornelius. Those trucks are Mexican Junk Trucks, as I call them, the pickups with built-up sides that are used by independent men and women who zoom up and down the alleys of Chicago as far north as Evanston, picking up any valuable trash that doesn't belong in the garbage.

Garrett Munski made this framed photograph, which I would call a collage for greater specificity. If I were a collector, I would be very excited to plan and paint a room in my house around it. My walls are Sweden Grey, and even as I type this I can see how great it would look above my flat TV and Robert The Rubber Tree in his silver reliquary. I see the cornrows playing off the stripes and the joinery and I think about everything African American culture has to teach the American aesthete about decoration, embellishment, general graphical neatening of one's person and surroundings.

Casta Indomitable by Theodore Boggs, Summer 2008

Undoubtedly from later in the night, this is a picture of another cartoon by Theodore Boggs, Casta Indomitable. Ted, I'm calling it a cartoon because that's where I think it fits in the tradition of drawing, painting, printing and collage. It is a cartoon in the sense of Michaelangelo's cartoons--a rather large-scale work on paper that uses drawing and coloring techniques in various media to rehearse ideas for even larger works.

Casta Indomitable is the second of Ted's recent works to picture the entire globe. I just paid a visit to Ted's amazing blog, SYNTHESIZER, to look for a photograph of the other one to show you, but I think I will wait and use it lead off my upcoming in-depth interview with the man called Theodore Boggs. On second thought, here it is; I can't deprive you of at least a taste of my favorite memory of Summer 2008, which was seeing Okonkwo Poiccard by Theodore Boggs at Art Partly 3 in July:

Okonkwo Poiccard by Theodore Boggs, Summer 2008

P.S. Big up Panthrow Nobody, pictured at the lower left of Casta Indomitable, one half of the talented production duo Best Day Ever!, www.myspace.com/yourbestdayever.

Artists I Know: Rebecca Zemans and Elena Rakochy

2008-08-13T14:24:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I went to two interesting art openings. On Friday night, my friend Rebecca Zemans had the opening of her new group show, Natural Progressions, at the Lillstreet Art Center in Chicago. Rebecca and my sister's friend's sister, Elena Rakochy, are artists in residence there, working and teaching in the Lillstreet studios, and Natural Progressions is a show of their latest work and that of three other residents, Camille Canales, Lisa Miceli, and Rachel Davis.

Rebecca specializes in jewelry and sculpture involving metal, so she was showing both jewelry and metal sculptures. Elena had these wonderful glazed ceramic monoliths, each pretty tall and beautifully colored. I cannot figure out why I am having trouble uploading pictures of their work, but Elena has already agreed to be interviewed, and I suspect Rebecca will, too, so let's look forward to really sprawling out and learning more about them in upcoming posts.

After the reception, we walked over to Becca and writer Ryan Blitstein's apartment for a housewarming party.

To see fascinating examples of Rebecca Zemans' work in sculpture and jewelry, visit www.rebeccazemans.com. I have gorgeous pictures of Elena Rakochy's sculptures in hand to illustrate her interview, and you can see Natural Progressions until Thursday, August 28th, at the Lillstreet Art Center, 4401 N Ravenswood, Chicago, Illinois. I will remind you of this closer to the date, but they have an artist talk and lecture about the show scheduled for Tuesday, August 26th at 7 PM.

Bloggers I Know: Jono Tosch

2008-08-11T23:46:00.000-07:00

Jono Tosch has a wonderful blog called Oil Changes. He is a very experienced poet, but Oil Changes is a cooking blog, the best cooking blog I have ever read, although to be exact its finest quality is the fact that Jono makes (hilarious and quietly comforting) videos of himself cooking the foods he writes about. Go watch some Jono, he'll make you feel better.

Good Blog: Fingers and Tubes

2008-08-10T22:57:00.000-07:00

Jessica found an inactive blog that deserves a book deal: fingersandtubesineveryorifice.blogspot.com. It's the life and times of an acerbic ER doctor.

WebApps I Like: Ping.fm

2008-08-09T20:40:00.001-07:00

The following is a status update I inadvertently posted to this blog in the process of learning how to use Ping.fm, a web application that allows you to post to your all or any of your blogs, microblogs, and social networks at one and the same time:

learning more about pageonce.com

(Bonus signup code: "pingitlikeitshot")

The New Yorker Cover

2008-08-03T00:36:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, July 15, 2008, one of our most promising younger bloggers, Brandon Soderberg, posted about the Obama New Yorker cover. His point was twofold: controversy about the cover being too easy for already bigoted Americans to misinterpret as an endorsement of their worst fears revealed the condescension of the American left toward the American people, but the cover was bad satire because it was too obvious, one-dimensional, and insiderish.

Well, I thought about the cover AND read the Obama profile inside the magazine, and I think the cartoon actually WAS a suitably self-deprecating, subtle, and therefore strong work of satire on the New Yorker's part, one that worked on several levels.

On one level, the only level accessible to those who were only ever going to look at the cover of the magazine, this cartoon was sort of saying, "Yes, conservative, Republican, racist America, here at the New Yorker we are (more or less) visionary liberals. So of course we are happy that Obama got the nomination. Just as happy as the visionary liberals at Rolling Stone with their soberly reverent Obama cover. But wouldn't it be funny if being a visionary liberal really did mean being an America-hating revolutionary, as Obama's opponents imply it does? Wouldn't it be funny if we were overjoyed to have just nominated Obama because his nomination gets us that much closer to the End Of Days? Wouldn't it be funny if by running this cover we were coming out of the closet as terrorist sympathizers?" In short, I think the New Yorker was mocking the idea that liberals want the downfall of America.

In our Google Chat, my friend Ethan thought I was reading way too much into it. He thought the New Yorker was only satirizing the scandalous rumors about Obama, but I still think the satire went deeper, that presenting all the scandalous rumors in one place was merely the setup of the joke, because the article inside, "Making It: How Chicago Shaped Obama" by Ryan Lizza, utterly dispels all of the rumors' insinuations.

In Lizza's article, the "money quote" is this: "Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accomodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them." For those who read the article associated with the cover, then, the New Yorker's decision to run the Obama cartoon is revealed as a satire of the phantasmagory of many leftist AND rightist hopes and fears about Barack Obama, as well as a guarded endorsement of him as a serious and skillful candidate.

2008-08-01T22:43:00.000-07:00

I have been gathering some mind-blowing news about our solar system from the Net this summer.

On May 25, 2008, the day NASA's unmanned spacecraft Phoenix landed on Mars, I think I read about it on the applicable Metafilter post, which is where I think I probably found my first link to this picture here on the right, though I have been unable to retrace my steps exactly in the annals of my extensive bookmark systems.

At any rate, this is the sunset across the Gusev Crater on May 19, 2005.

Imagine my surprise to learn that such unremarkable snapshots of the arid diorama of another planet have been available to at least some human eyes for three years already.

On July 17, 2008, some blog post--my records fail me again--pointed me to another NASA web offering, an animated video of the moon orbiting around the spinning earth that incorporates real photographs from a deep space probe. Watch and feel the cold clear distance shrink in comparison to the vast solid orbs.

On July 24th, Matt Drudge linked to a Daily Mail story about Apollo 14 astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell having claimed that he has always been privy to the truth of the matter about aliens: we are in contact with them and may be in possession of fragments of their technology. Consider the source (heavy metal magazine Kerrang!'s online radio show), and do note the imminence of the X-Files movie at the time, but then wonder...what if it was true?

What if it was true, what if it was true? This Thursday, July 31, 2008, NASA announced that they have used the Phoenix to perform tests proving that there is ice...water...in the Martian soil.

Here on the web, as I read stories about space, there are always commenters to give voice to the everpresent thought that none of what we are told is true. That it's all fake. Even if THAT were true (and I wouldn't be surprised) I think we would still be lucky to live in a time where the deceitful overlords of our lives were making elaborate, fact-flourishing displays that directed our minds to the backdrop and boundary of the world like they do. When you know how to harness electricity to power your machines, and you know how to use corporeal machines to capture ideas as information as electricity, I think you can be hopeful that you will be able to learn all the phase changes of reality one day.

Oh, but it would be a great day if an extraterrestrial intelligence revealed itself to human beings, or if human beings some day set foot on another perfectly arable planet! Our free human habit of investigating and adjusting to as much reality as we can access and handle would lead us to a new comprehension.

What is Johnny Sagan's Dance Marathon?

2008-07-31T19:09:00.000-07:00

I'm opening with this picture because Johnny Sagan's Dance Marathon is going to be a blog about freedom.

Taken by Livejournal blogger The Rev. Livejournal Oracle, aka Jameth, this is a digital photograph of a man who attended the Dore Alley Fair on Sunday, July 27, 2008.

The Dore Alley Fair (officially promoted as the Up Your Alley Fair) is a leathersex block party in San Francisco, a locally focused, gay man-centric premonition of the gigantic yearly Folsom Street Fair, a yearly celebration of pansexual kink in street fair form, also held in San Francisco by the same non-profit organization: Folsom Street Events.

Me, I found this picture by clicking links on Fleshbot, a sex blog in the mighty portfolio of blogging empire Gawker Media, and SFist, another blue chip blog in a big network.

I knew immediately that I wanted to save this guy and discuss him and his surroundings with others.

In this picture, I am first and foremost struck by the man's penis. It looks fake at first glance, doesn't it? It is so big and thick and blandly "flesh-colored", with the level of surface detail of a toy cast in rubber. His cock ring covers up the point of seamless connection that would convince us he is not wearing some sort of prosthesis.

One commenter on Jameth's original post, a very interesting guy named Delko, said he recognized the guy.

"ha...he's from Chicago and has (obviously) been around forever. He used to show up at the monthly underwear parties in the bar I worked at back in the mid-eighties...in animal print thongs."

The Dore Alley Fair! Livejournal! Monthly underwear parties! Blogs! The fact that Delko is an adjunct professor at the John Marshall Law School! These are just some of the 21st Century freedoms I want to celebrate on this blog.

What was I doing on the day of the Dore Alley Fair? Well, on Sunday, July 27, 2008, I too attended a sex-related event, The Sunday Night Sex Show at The Burlington, a bar on Fullerton Avenue here in Chicago.

Hosted by Miss Robyn and Allen Makere, The Show alternated between stage readings, raunchy answers to saucy questions from the audience, and rounds of sex trivia. I knew the answer to every single trivium except the one about sexually fetishizing trees.

What was the first movie to earn an NC-17 rating from the M.P.A.A.? Henry and June. I won a penis-shaped lollipop for that.

Who wrote Sex For One? Betty Dodson. What is the name of the elusive experience pursued by Isadora Wing in Fear Of Flying? The Zipless Fuck.

What is the name of the reactionary U.S. Senator whose reactionary views on sex provoked readers of the advice column "Savage Love" (www.thestranger.com/seattle/Author?oid=259) to make his name the new word for "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that sometimes slides out after anal sex"? Rick Santorum, now-deposed Republican then of New Jersey.

What was the first erotic novel to be published in the English language? Well, to be honest, I would have guessed My Life And Loves by Frank Harris, but when nobody else ventured a guess and Robyn gave the first part of the correct answer, "Fanny Hill: Memoirs Of A Woman Of Pleasure, by...", I raised my hand and said, "Can I give the second part of the answer, just so I can get my props? John Clelland Holmes!"

The final trivia question of the night was which sexual device had long been dubbed "the Cadillac of vibrators", and though I held my tongue for the split second it took for my new friend Becky to shout out "The Rabbit!", I was the very first to say "Hitachi Magic Wand!" for the win.

Somebody remarked, "You must be the world's greatest womanizer!"