Recently indie band Pomplamoose posted a financial breakdown of their last tour. That post has been characterized as a sob story and a cynical marketing stunt. Those characterizations miss the point (and probably reflect the attitudes of their authors more than they reflect their subject Pomplamoose, but that’s for another time.)

Pomplamoose started out on Youtube employing a format that Jack Conte called the VideoSong and defined by two rules:

1. What you see is what you hear. (No lip-syncing for instruments or voice)
2. If you hear it, at some point you see it. (No hidden sounds)

This format served two ends. First, it served to prove that this music being made on the other side of the internet was “real”, that it was being made by a real person without the benefit of “studio magic”. Second, it showed how the music made so that other musicians could replicate it. The message was “Here’s how I did it, and you can, too!”

That ethic has been present in all of Conte’s endeavors. Whether it’s writing out all a whole album in sheet music or creating a whole ‘nother Youtube channel to give his fans how-to advice, Conte has always been about helping other people be musicians. Posting Pomplamoose’s tour finances online was no different.

In the post Conte emphasized that Pomplamoose had not “made it” and instead that they were “making it”. But he wasn’t just telling. He was showing. He was showing fans how to tour so that they could try themselves. With Conte it’s as it always has been – “Here’s how I did it, and you can, too!”

Thots on this video of a woman walking thru NYC for 10 hours and getting over 100 catcalls:

– Most guys, at least most strait guys, have no idea girls get approached this much. Most guys can count on their hands the number of times women have made sexual advances on them. Guys are so starved for physical attention that the idea that you can have too much of it is so foreign as to be incomprehensible. Of course, women get far too much physical attention, and it’s overwhelming.

– She’s hot. I kinda want to see a video of an overweit, frumpy, plain-faced woman walking around NYC for 10 hours and see how it compares. Like how that clothing company made a video of (coincidentally hot) strangers kissing, and then the Guardian made a video of average looking strangers kissing each other, and it was exactly as awkward as you’d expect.

– Unless they didn’t show it, no one actually threatened her or touched her. One guy called the logo on her butt “sexy”, but other than that nothing sexually explicit happened. It’s really the fear of the unknown, of what somebody might do, that’s doing the damage.

– Any time I walk into a club I live with the fear that some bigger dude is going to beat me up just to show he can. Obviously not the same, but related.

– Now I know there are white dudes who catcall because I’ve seen it, but all the catcallers in this video are black and latino. Maybe it’s the area. I suspect catcalling has more to do with economic class than race and the poor people in Manhattan just happen to be “people of color”.

– There’s no cost to catcalling. These guys don’t have shame and apparently have time on their hands, so they don’t have anything to lose by catcalling over and over again.

– Just keep walking seems to be a pretty effective deterrent to any kind of danger for this lady. Really the catcalling is just annoying, like buzzing flies that you can’t escape from. It doesn’t seem that different in nature from being approached by panhandlers who want your money or missionaries who want your soul, just much more overwhelming because of how often it happens.
UPDATE: someone made a video of a white man walking thru NYC. There are times while talking to angry women that it seems like this is what they think being a white guy is actually like. Kind of makes me wish someone would do a real video of a white man walking in NYC for 10 hours. I can see it now: over a hundred approaches by panhandlers and Mormon missionaries.
UPDATE: I’ve come to the conclusion that none of what is shown in the original video is sexual harassment, but I can understand why once you’ve seen a wolf in sheep’s clothing you’d jump at every sheep.

From Cracked.com

People keep hailing this 3D printing revolution. Internet sociologist Clay Shirky said in is book Here Comes Everybody: “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.” I don’t think 3D printers will take off until everyone has one in their home and has on-demand access to materials to print things out of.

From Cracked.com

If toilets were sold on a subscription model instead of a one time installation, would businesses be better motivated to provide them?

“Honestly, I believed that I could do more good with money for the poor than the poor could do for themselves. I held two assumptions: One, that poor people are poor in part because they’re uneducated and don’t make good choices; two is that we then need people like me to figure out what they need and get it to them. It turns out, the evidence says otherwise.”

That is a perspective from a culture that is saturated with resources. There are still places in the world where famine, drought, disease, and natural disaster still preempt choice as the determining factor in people’s lives.

As I watch the back and forth about Renee Zellweger on social media, I recall a bit from a Monty Python documentary. It was John Cleese talking about Graham Chapman coming out as gay to his fellow Pythons. Cleese said something to the effect of “He mistook our surprise for disapproval.” There are certainly people talking about plastic surgery and pressures on aging actresses and all that. Then there is just honest surprise.

When You’re the Noob in the Improv Crowd

In response to my friend and fellow improvised theater actor Karen’s post about cliques in improv.

When I started out in improv there were a lot of people I wanted to be like and wanted to like me. I thought “What can I do to make them want to talk to me? What can I do to make them invite me to play with them?” I didn’t realize I was basically saying “How can I change myself to make them like me?”

I was starting with the assumption that I wasn’t good enough. It makes sense that I did because in a lot of ways I sucked. But the secret to not sucking is not to look at other people and desperately try please them.

You have to give yourself permission to feel apprehensive and then try anyway. Give yourself permission to make mistakes and feel ashamed knowing that you’re not defeated. Give yourself permission to accept the encouragement others offer even when it’s not as much or exactly what you were looking for. Trust that when you care about other people and care about the art and care about yourself that all those puzzle pieces will swirl around in your unconscious mind until they fall into place to form a better you.

That only happened for me a few months ago, three years into doing improv. Some of the people who I wanted to like me still don’t invite me to be in their shows, but I’ve made other connections that have been invaluable.

So my advice to noobs is to trust that you have good things to offer, and trust that the universe will send fitting opportunities your way. I can’t say it’s a recipe for success, but I know that doubting yourself and doubting all the opportunities is a recipe for failure.

Also, in more practical advice, remember one cool thing from a person’s set and when you say hey to them tell them you liked it. Sometimes it’s just a compliment and you go on your way. Other times it starts a whole conversation. As a seasoned improviser I can say firsthand that even when you don’t know how to react to an enthusiastic noob complimenting you, you’re still glad it happened.

So I had seen the First Moon Party ad, but it hadn’t occurred to me until reading thru this article that the First Moon Party probably is the first mainstream tampon ad with any truth to it.

Well, maybe that’s going too far. The level of truth in tampon ads up to this point was that tampons are for women and that they absorb liquid. Then there has been a lot of fantasy/lying including blue liquid, white spandex, skydiving, roller-blading, mountain, climbing, and oh, don’t forget horse-riding.

Then I thought about all the fantasy in the First New Moon Party ad, and I wondered what truth it really was based on. Here’s what I came up with:

1. Girls get periods.

2. When periods come is hard to predict.

3. Periods involve the color red. (First I wrote “Periods involve the color red on a tampon,” but then it occurred to me that if you didn’t already know what a tampon was, the ad doesn’t actually tell you.)

4. The mother-daughter relationship can be fraught with tension.

5. Celebrating a girl’s first period is socially awkward.

6. Vagina, uterus and ovaries are words.

Those are good steps. But the central truth of the matter – that as part of natural reproductive function most women mestruate, which means a bloody discharge flows out of the vagina, monthly and those women could use a product to make that process more sanitary and discreet – remains too real to be presented to the pubic in a corporate ad.

Tiger Lily Doesn’t Equal Human Torch

Actress and geek icon Felicia Day tweeted about a white actress being cast as Tiger Lily  in the upcoming Peter Pan reboot, and a furore ensued. Here are my thoughts on the matter.

There’s nothing wrong with an actor portraying a character of another ethnicity. The heart of the matter as Felicia points out is that there are more than enough Native American actresses who could have played Tiger Lily, just like there were more than enough Native American actors who could have played Tonto instead of Johnny Depp, just like there were more than enough gay actors who could have played Rayon in Dallas Buyers Club instead of Jared Leto, just like there are more than enough Asians for all the marginalized Asian roles that you can hear more about here.

Where I disagree with Felicia is Heimdaal in the Thor movie being played by a black actor. A Norwegian deity should be white. An actor doesn’t have to be white to portray a white character, but I doubt it would happen in a live action movie since using makeup to pass as another race is too close for comfort to blackface. On the other hand, in the voice-over world actors cross the race gap all the time. Just think of how many white characters African American actor Kevin Michael Richardson voices. Even if there’s nothing essentially white about the character of the Joker, the character design is still clearly Caucasian when Richardson voices him.

And that’s really what it comes down to. Even tho the Human Torch has traditionally been white, there’s nothing about his character that requires he be white. Sometimes there are even traditionally white characters that make more sense if they’re another race. After fans started a Twitter campaign for Donald Glover to be the new Spider-man he wrote a stand-up bit about it. An orphan raised by his aunt in Queens and his uncle was shot in the street – is it really that hard to believe this guy could be black?

People seem to think racism is just too pervasive here in the USA, but I think really the problem is that people think that. Here people expect others to be racist and so they feel pressured to make racist decisions as well. It’s a catch 22 because if you always make racist decisions then you never give the others a chance to prove they’re not racist. You perpetuate your own fear.

But look what happens when you break the cycle: British director Steve McQueen gave the US audience a chance to embrace a black, African actress in 12 Years a Slave, and now the whole world is in love with Lupita Nyong’o. US Americans need to stop going with the herd. All it takes is a few mavericks to get everyone moving in a better direction.

The Role of Children

Recently in a discussion of woman’s right to choice, a self-described radical feminist wrote that pregnancy is harm and therefore all vaginal penetration by penis is rape.

In contrast, I thought of Judaism where intercourse is the woman’s right. It only made sense to me. The Law of Moses was written in a time before Social Security or even financial insurance. So a woman would have children in the hopes they’d look after her when she was old. Having a child was one of the few ways a woman could exert some control in an uncertain world; it was empowering.

But I don’t even have to go back to ancient Israel to find benefits in having children. I can look in my own family. When my grandfather passed away, my grandmother needed to sell the old house and move into an eldercare community. My aunt was there to help her thru the process. My childless great aunt on the other hand is gradually developing dementia as she lives in squalor in her one bedroom apartment. She doesn’t have the soundness of mind to find eldercare herself and doesn’t have anyone who is there to help her, leaving us extended relatives wanting to help but hesitant to be principally responsible for her.

Yet increasingly I hear women today only talk about the costs of pregnancy. Granted, having a child at this stage in my life would set my financial security back considerably, too. But I view children as an investment with a high upfront cost to put down, not as an absolute liability.

Perhaps our social safety networks and sense of individualism have come so far that women want to be allowed to live just for themselves. Perhaps children aren’t such an advantage anymore. But then why do women keep having them, I wondered. Then I thought of helicopter moms and a terrible concept came to mind: children as self-actualization project.