I wrote and directed this! It stars soon-(very-soon)-to-be-very-famous TV star Echo Kellum. Watch it, laugh, put it on your Internets.
Alleged humor from me, Tim Neenan. I write and perform stuff in Los Angeles. A lot of it is comedy. You can e-mail me if you like.
My most popular post is this one, which is cool I guess.
My most popular post is this one, which is cool I guess.
Re: this video
Bodhisattva Vow
The first time I ever attended a teaching by the Dalai Lama was in the spring of ‘93, right in the middle of the scheduled recording time for what would become the Check Your Head album. Adam and Mike, knowing how important it was to me, agreed to take that week off. So I signed up for the five-day teaching and then began to study the recommended texts. There were several books that we were asked to read before attending the course, but the most important one, the one that the course was based on, was by Shantideva, an Indian Buddhist scholar who lived in the 8th century. In fact the entire five-day course was to be based on one chapter of that book, the chapter on patience. The book was called the “Bodhicaryavatara,” which translates into English as, “A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life.” I worked hard at studying the texts. Although I had taken a prior interest in spirituality, I had never seriously studied it in Buddhist terms.
To try and make a long story short, about three or four days into the teaching, I showed up late for class. I’d somehow overslept. I was usually very careful to be on time to all of the sessions, but this one time my alarm wasn’t set correctly. I ran all the way to the auditorium, but they had already locked the doors. No one was admitted once a teaching began, but latecomers could watch from a nearby room that had a video monitor with a live feed.
After the session as I left the room I noticed some people gathering in front of one of the doors to the auditorium. They were lining the sides of the doors waiting for His Holiness to exit. I joined them. A second later he came walking through the doors. As he walked he’d stop and shake hands with people. Some of the people burst into tears as he touched them. Others smiled back at him. Then he got to me, clasped both of my hands in his, looked deep into my eyes and burst out laughing. It was such a sweet laugh, nothing mocking about it. It was like a child’s laugh. It warmed me in a way that I could not help but smile back. He greeted a few more people and before a minute had passed, he was gone. I looked around at the teary-eyed faces, and began to walk back to my room. As I walked, an idea came to me. I felt that I should write a song to express the meaning of the Bodhisattva Vow, or that at least I should try to.
-Adam Yauch
My heart broke when I read that MCA lost his battle with cancer today. The Beastie Boys were the first thing I ever discovered outside whatever music my dad had in the house, and any playlist I put together for any reason always has a disproportionate number of their songs on it. I can connect most of my memories and all of the major events in my life to whatever Beastie Boys album I was listening to a lot of that month. With him now gone, this feels like a line - maybe a small one - but a line nonetheless. If I needed to, I can now divide my life into the time my favorite band of all time existed and when it didn’t anymore. It feels weighty.
Yauch was the most eclectic and interesting one in the group. Outside of the albums, his work as Nathaniel Hörnblowér and at Oscilloscope is kind of incredible, and he was a dedicated activist, particularly for Tibet. There was an observable peace in MCA, attributable to his religion, and I certainly like the idea that he’s already reincarnated elsewhere, in some other form. I hope he’s not too far from enlightenment.
This movie’s interpretation of life in Louisiana is loaded with inaccuracies. It’s amazing that this is probably how most of the United States pictures Louisiana.
The “Cajun” band featured a huge piano-key accordion; real Cajun bands use the 10-button diatonic accordion. Zydeco bands sometimes use piano accordions, but never Cajun bands. Also, the triangle was the kind used in orchestras…not the handmade “T-fers” made in south Louisiana. And what was that hopping around? That’s exactly how tourists dance to Cajun music when they hear it for the first time! That was NOT Cajun dancing! I particularly enjoyed the fact that this little dance scene was held around a campfire with people passing a big jug (full of moonshine or something, I’m sure) around. Real modern-day Cajun dances are normally held in air conditioned dance halls with tables, chairs, and usually a bar. Bands use sound systems and amplifiers. Sometimes there are outdoor dances, but, again, they’re more civilized than what this movie portrays.
-An IMDB user review of the 2003 Lou Diamond Phillips shark movie, Red Water.
(via Dan)
Re: this video
You can say nice, reasonable things like “Neat! I’m just not all that into those Marvel comic movies, though.”
But all I can hear is “I’m just not all that into The Hulk jumping through the air and punching spaceships in the face,” which is a ridiculous thing to say, you idiot.
Picture:
In response to my boy Tim Neenan’s “script” for Breaking Bad. It is Walter White firing a moon gun.
Posts From Hollywood
Since staking out this modest little corner of the Internet (MORE LIKE HUMBLR, AM I RIGHT?), I’ve received a few e-mails from some truly misguided souls who think I am some sort of actual writer, as opposed to an idiot who writes about poop and Subway. I usually deflect these kids asking for advice with jokes and point them in some sort of helpful direction, but now that I’ve actually had some meetings and stuff, I feel like I might actually be able to offer some semblance of help.
There are plenty of advice columns and “common mistakes” lists for the young writer, as well as a few great books out there, so I thought it would be cool just to post little snippets of things I’ve written that have since become so much ephemera, never actually seeing the light of day. These are all failures - things that didn’t sell, things that were shot down in meetings, etcetera. I don’t know what’s to be learned here, other than to always be writing and learn to not get hurt when it doesn’t work, but I present them here in case you find them helpful.
My first one, below, is an excerpt from my rejected spec for the upcoming season of Breaking Bad, a show I’ve dreamed about writing for since it’s pilot premiered. I got a long way on this spec, eventually sitting down for a serious meeting with Vince Gilligan, but unfortunately there had been some sort of miscommunication somewhere in the numerous e-mails I exchanged with AMC, and Vince was very angry over me booking a meeting with him. I’m still not sure why - I thought it was a pretty good spec.
Re: this video
When I was 11, I wanted to carry myself like Guy any time I had any meaningful interaction with a girl in the future. He was my model for how you do it. It’s that “ungentlemanly” line.
I had two of these moments before I left for LA, which makes me spoiled. I didn’t have time to be sad both times because I was too excited to be having a Guy/Faye moment.
They got together later but whatever, you get it.
Re: this video
I’m having a very humbling month. After a tough year[1], I’ve had a six-week run of rewarded work and inexplicable luck, and some of it’s got me feeling a little emotional. It’s all winding down now, and in a week I’m going to take my first vacation from LA in about a year to go home to my warm house in Alabama and bask in family, content that I’m still doing the right thing.
And then just when I didn’t think there was anything else I could reasonably want for myself this year, someone filmed a singing dog playing the piano. I watched this in baffled awe, the way the grocery store check-out clerk single mother of three stares agape at the lottery ticket in her hand, then back at the TV, then back at the ticket, frantically looking for the mistake she’s made, because this couldn’t possibly actually be happening to her. It is too big, too good.
But no, she won. I won. There is a singing dog playing the piano in front of me.
[1] Relatively! Like, for white people trying to do Los Angeles.
Re: this video
I haven’t posted a video in a long time, because even though I’m hosting this stuff on Tumblr, and the only people that read this are those that follow my Tumblr feed, I still sort of like posting stories and long entries about what I’ve been thinking about even though this makes my updates sporadic, and that’s really not what Tumblr is all about. How do you feel about this? I don’t have one of those “Ask Me” buttons, so you can’t really answer me. But I’m still curious. Hope I’m doing a great job!
Anyway:
HOO BOY, THIS VIDEO.
Here is a thing that happened: Everyone involved here went home, and nobody reflected on what happened today for even a moment. There are many terrible things I went through, though, while watching this totally normal video of a totally normal birthday party for normal people, and after proofreading this entire entry, I’m afraid none of it is satisfactorily conveyed ahead. Oh well! Maybe we’ll just hug next time I see you guys, because we’ve been through something, like how Grandpa talks about The Shit with his friends, because we saw parents trick everyone into singing the Birthday Song and then cut to a blast beat so a fake Batman1 could pretend to clobber an eight-year-old girl’s face with his own nuts and basically just distribute night terrors for everyone tonight.
It’s tough to have kids, probably. Constantly trying not to break them. Like, wholly break them, in a way that is all-encompassing. The way Iron Man presenting his asshole to the children like a labrador will break them. Oy, and the searing, unendurable migraine that these kids must be suffering trying to parse the canonicity of Batman appearing with Iron Man, Spider-Man, and… Spider-Man again? Why are there two Spider-Mans? Why is one wearing a toboggan? These aren’t questions that bother me, because I am a grown man and don’t care about these things anymore(…), but as a kid? Oh, I’d be apoplectic.
1 I don’t know what “fake Batman” means.
Perfect Strangers
I’ve only ever seen one episode of Perfect Strangers.
When I was very young, while the show was still on the air, I once watched an episode with my mother, lying in her bed. It was the episode where Bronson Pinchot’s character, Balky, gets a book of checks from the bank. He doesn’t know how checks work, and buys a lot of things he can’t afford. The other guy, the straight man, gets really mad at him, but they make up by the end of the show. I remember Balky getting really excited that there are “Puppies!” on his checks. I remember not laughing at all during the episode, but nonetheless getting really caught up in it. I was so young that the episode was playing out like a drama to me. I felt terrible when the other guy, the roommate, is furiously yelling at Balky for his mistake, saying “Don’t you understand anything!?” Balky, almost through tears, yells “No, I don’t!”
Anyway, a little over ten years later, having not thought of Perfect Strangers at all since then (there weren’t any VH1 irony shows yet), I was sitting in a hospital waiting room with my dad in Birmingham while my mom was receiving her monthly radiation treatment. We were watching TV, and a Perfect Strangers rerun came on - the one about Balky getting the checkbook. I remembered all the beats of the episode, and it was this really huge thing to me. It had to be on my face, because my dad looked at me and asked, “What?” I tried to explain what was happening, but he wasn’t as impressed as I felt he should be by this cosmic coincidence. I yelled “No, I don’t!” along with Balky when the other guy, the one nobody remembers, yelled at him for messing up his new bank account.
People have these, probably - extraordinary coincidences that mean nothing to anyone but you. I had a very minimal awareness of Perfect Strangers, but I know one episode of it by heart, having seen it twice. There are EIGHT SEASONS of that show! I have tried to tell this story before, always hoping it will blow someone’s mind. But it never blows anyone’s mind because it is stupid, I think.
Coolio
A few days ago taylororci said this:
Coolio used to crash the college parties when I went to UCLA. Never meet your heroes.
Yep! Look, I don’t know whether or not people should meet their heroes. That’s scary stuff, and if I ever met Bruce Springsteen I’d probably barf on him. I am circling around (but have not settled on) the opinion that if you are disappointed when meeting your hero Coolio, then the fault lies with you because Coolio is your hero. That’s a mean joke, probably. I can absolutely agree with her that you should never meet Coolio, specifically. Here is a story about him!
When I was in college, every year we would have a Welcome Back concert, which always featured someone from our youth; someone cheap whose ticket sales would be fueled exclusively by nostalgia so UA could drop their real cash on the Homecoming concert and book The Roots. As an aside, I really want to type up a piece about that Roots concert. Guys, it was so great. But this is about the Welcome Back concerts, which featured Vanilla Ice my freshman year. He didn’t do the Ninja Rap, fuck him, etc.
For the Welcome Back concert my Junior year, UA booked Lil Wayne (full disclosure: I put an apostrophe in “Lil” at first, thought to maybe Google it), which was not a big deal to anyone because it was 2005. It was such a small deal that they actually set the location in the tiny courtyard outside our school’s administration building and food court, feeling that there wouldn’t be a sufficient enough crowd to warrant setting it up on the quad.
But then Lil Wayne cancelled a few days before the concert. I only decided to add him to this story because (A)It’s always fun have a story, however boring, about a superstar before they were hot shit and (B)It’s something (funny? sad? great? terrible?) that Coolio can be booked for a concert in Alabama in three days.
So all of a sudden everyone’s interested in this welcome back concert because lol Coolio. I was actually having trouble deciding whether I was going to be attending primarily in earnest or irony (I was very into thinking long and hard about earnestness and irony already because I have always been a very exhausting person), because one on hand, lol Coolio indeed, but on the other hand, the guy did write the best rap line in history.[1]
The concert was very fun, and Coolio kept making what were either jokes about or expressions of deep existential horror over his audience being a sea of white assholes. He was a consummate professional for the most part, as I’m sure one must be if you’re booking shows at colleges on such short notice.
But we ran out of hits (there are three) early on, and Coolio started pulling out some of those Coolio deep cuts, mostly about fuckin’. During the intro for one of these, Coolio requested that we send women to him. That is what he said! He said “Send me some women” like an alien from space!
Guys it got so bad then. So a few girls climbed on stage to be serenaded by Coolio, and he expressed his disappointment over there being no black girls. So we told our friend Jazzmine to go up! It’s just Coolio, and we were definitely being ironic now (I had settled on this), so it’s ok to get up there and have him sort of dance around you. And then she went up there and Coolio got really excited and grabbed her and pushed her backward over a stage monitor and pretended(?) to rape her(???). I say pretended to rape because he definitely was not feigning consensual sex. She was yelling a lot and reaching for the cops and security guards who sort of stared at her and cocked their heads like beagles while Coolio waved his hands like everything was ok. I think bending a screaming woman over and waving the cops off is definitely an acknowledgment that we’re all just puttin’ on a fake rape show.
So that was weird. She came off the stage both laughing and in tears and immediately began making jokes with us and building up a good sense of humor about it, which is probably not what we should have done, but sexual assault from a famous cartoon hairdo from your childhood school dance soundtrack is probably a lot to deal with for young people.
[1] If ya got beef then nigga eat a pork chop. -“Sumpin’ New,” 1994
“The Importance of Being Earnest”
My unnoticed little corner of the mostly gross apeirogon that is our Internet is called The Importance of Being Earnest, and I never really gave any thought to directly addressing why this is the case. The primary reason for this is of course that my tens (tens!) of readers are already my friends in real life, and these people probably know why I would use that title. The other, smaller reason was that I’m in comedy, and so I’m an idealist about organically establishing a voice that you will all subconsciously grow to identify as Tim without me ever beating you over the head with it. That’s dumb, because that big cursive title The Importance of Being Earnest sort of beats you over the head with it. This post is going to be about 9/11 kind of. Heads up.
I should start off by acknowledging that I understand that earnestness is not actually being rejected by my generation. I’m in Los Angeles, and Los Angeles is not America. It shouldn’t qualify as being full of people, because monsters are not people, if we’re just talking science. But I do think that cultural centers like this city full of gross monsters do tend to be the places that get to be the public face of what “our generation” is all about. And we really need to stop projecting this idea that we think you’re stupid for being thoughtful.
I’ve seen some truly beautiful ways of memorializing what happened ten years ago today, but as predicted, I’ve seen a lot of kind of shitty sentiments that I think convey a sense of annoyance. People who took time to write jokes about what happened (the bad jokes1), those who joked about the outpouring of thought given to 9/11, the genuinely and harmfully stupid Truthers, the ones that took time to point out how much worse the resulting wars were - these are all people who, at the core of their reactions, were annoyed by the idea that people were setting aside a special time to acknowledge and reflect upon one of the worst things that has ever happened. One of the worst things that has ever happened. Of all the things that have ever happened there are relatively few that can be universally acknowledged as one of the worst. If you had a top one hundred, 9/11 would be on it, and that’s a very big thing we need to acknowledge considering how much recorded history we’ve got. But yes, for God’s sake, it is one of the worst. Lots of terrible things happen all the time, and I am very aware that we as young people may not reflect on all of the bad things that happen across the world. This is partly because we are young people, and are therefore horrible. Ask anyone who is not young. Another part of this is that we are human, and so we pour a lot more emotion into things that we’ve been personally connected to, directly or indirectly. Those who say this shouldn’t be the case are right, I guess. I don’t think it’s right that dogs can’t talk, but that’s how nature made them. I do think that people who wrote something snide and mentioned genocide in Africa today (and guys: really?) are 100% definitely not thinking about genocide in Africa when they’re not being annoyed that people remember 9/11.
It really hurts me that we use such an incredible public forum (a magic one, as far as I’m concerned. Not in an overwrought metaphorical way - as far as I understand, the technology behind the Internet runs on magic) to be so tactless and cruel. “Disaffected” should be a word applied with regret to a small group of people, and every day I see my people striving to be disaffected. Again, I’m in a subset of a subset - privileged would-be entertainers in Los Angeles - and I do concede that disaffected people tend to make the best art, but these disaffected people aren’t being disaffected on purpose, and oh for God’s sake do you see what I’m saying yet?
It is not a bad thing to mourn the deaths of innocent people at the hands of misguided, warped but nonetheless fellow human beings. Things that you, based on definitively subjective criteria, quantify as “worse” are happening all over the world, yes, but there is still a very fundamental and important goodness inherent in acknowledging how very sad September 11th was, and how good it is to Never Forget both the people that died and the resulting outpouring of human goodwill and solidarity, as momentary as it may have been.
You’re alive every day. Don’t spend a moment of this time trying to talk people out of compassion.
1Terrible idea for a parenthetical. Let’s discuss what makes a “good 9/11 joke” waaaaay later never.
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