We were talking conspiracy theories during the writing of Episode 54 and I offered up my only homegrown conspiracy theory. That Steven Spielberg had Vic Morrow killed. A lot of people have forgotten that Vic Morrow died on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie, but even less know that Spielberg produced that movie, fewer know that he was never called into court, that he was protected by the studios who were protecting their golden boy, and EVEN LESS know that Spielberg ordered the hit, HOLLYWOOD STYLE.
The year was 1976, Jaws was the surprise biggest hit in Hollywood history by a long shot. The record set by The Godfather, who nobody thought could be beat was smashed by Jaws. Jaws was so big it would take Star Wars to make everyone forget, every B studio in the world popped up with their Jaws ripoff, Pirhana, Octopus, Orca, but only one ripoff dared to use...a shark. It was called Great White, entirely financed, crewed, and shot in Italy. And seen by an adolescent named Adam Witt who was obsessed with sharks and shark movies.
Meanwhile the heads of Universal were not happy. Great White was the only ripoff they hauled into court and sued because it was the only one that dared to have the exact same plot as jaws, and it starred as the Quint ripoff, Vic Morrow. Money from Spielberg's pocket taken by Vic Morrow. And Hollywood's Golden Boy didn't take it sitting down. Five years later Vic Morrow played a man trying to rescue two kids in Vietnam while being pursued by a helicopter when something went wrong. The helicopter banked sharply to the right, cutting Vic and the two children in half. Spielberg was never called into court. He had already more money for the studio than any previous director made in their careers, they were careful to distance him from the events.
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
THE SINGLE SHARK THEORY
IT PAYS TO TAKE YOUR COMPUTER ON THE EL
The gut in leather tries to catch up to his portly perhaps 1/4 samoan lady who has already sat down. The train brakes sending him flying forward, catching a rail in a dramatic and fake way. he states that in parachuting they say "just go with the flow." He's wearing leather jacket, leather pants, leather gloves, a leather jacket and a shirt with big letters making some profound statement, but since the jacket obscured much of the sentiment I'm left thinking it says "I'M STILL WEIRD". He looks like Tom Waits' younger brother. Her peacoat is adorned with AIDS ribbons, yellow ribbons, American flags.
He shows her a piece of art I can't and never do see and asks her if she'd like to buy a print. He response is that "Airbrushing is hard to do." "Well when you begin, yeah."
He mentions he's got to get more sleep tonight, they were up until two and she can't believe when she woke up he was still talking. I, however, can belive it.
The Gut tests out a vibrating glove. They are hard to get on and he's not happy about it. He tries it on and touches her knee with it. It's not very effective, he describes a pair he saw once that were very effective, they'd make people jolt. Then he bitches how hard they are to get off and examines the battery pack. He complains that the cover of the box for the vibrating gloves show people using them in a hottub and comes to the conclusion that these would never make it in a hottub. She says that's how she broke her first vibrator.
Too busy writing. Missed the segue in the conversation but he said "you should try Salerno" "What's Salerno?" She says. "Nudist camp." "No thank you" "Well it's clothing optional."
And I got off.
Friday, May 27, 2005
Episode #55 **SPOILERS!!**
I'm so excited, we've got a couple great shows coming up. There's #52, The Teacher's Lounge recorded live last weekend which I think is pretty good considering we recorded a 47 minute show, which gives Justin lots of room to cut out stuff that didn't work (haha, we're so sneaky), and then #53, He Didn't Start The Fire, which was my FAVORITE first draft of the retreat, it just wreaked of smart, plus it has tons of really good pop references, and I mean tons, even for us, it's a lot. And then #54, may favorite idea of the season.
**SPOILERS**
YES! My first spoiler warning on the website. I so kick ass Aint-It-Cool-News style. But seriously, if you don't want the whole concept of Episode 54 revealed to you right now, in it's infancy, you will go elsewhere in the Department, perhaps look for one of my observations on how men and women are different. I tried writing this without saying the concept and just alluding to it and it sounded so stupid. So here we go
**SPOILER** in
5
4
3
2
1
Okay,
Okay, wow, so I'm logging this in at 12:30 am and I'm really cranking on this script for SuperSecret Show X. It's tricky, it's very different for us. The show is simply, one long conversation. Everyone not reading this will assume at any minute the people talking will give way to a comic premise but it never does. Two people just talk for a half hour.
It's missing a lot of love and care. We ultimately do around 6 drafts of any script and this one is still raw from out last writing retreat in January. Draft 1. One top of that it's a very tough concept, very new for us. We agreed that more writing needed to be done, so that more can be cut. If that makes any sense. Writing is a process, editing is not. I think. Anyway, I'm writing the second draft of SSSX right now and I'm having a blast. It was my favorite idea at the writing retreat, but it was so different, we would need to stretch very different muscles for this one as writers as well as actors. But the thought of the challenge all along has thrilled me, so not only did I get a very large acting part in the episode which I'm thrilled with as an actor who likes to challenge himself, but I was given the opportunity to write a draft on my own tonight. Right now I'm trying to find some beats, draft 1 was a very monotonous procession of pretty much a single event, other events need to happen without making the audience too aware that there's been an interruption.
12:45 Listening to the Complete Miami Vice by Jan Hammer and it's about the best music to write to in the history of the world.
12:50 these two need some point where all this is headed, a ticking bomb that gives us an out that we're aiming towards, right now I have them trying to get back to writing. Which is good for now.
1:00 Stopped writing for a second to familiarize myself with the three pages of notes & otehr ideas that were taken on this beast. There's a lot, but I wrote a few scenes down there to get the subjects in my head so hopefully they'd pop out at the right time while writing.
1:15 - Wow, three pieces of the puzzle came together all by themselves. The great thing about this show is that all the information continues to converge and refer back to previous discussion points, bringing things full circle.
1:30 - These characters aren't gettin any closer, no emotional arc, I'm forging head just to get the dialogue and topic discussion solid and then I'll make another pass and beef up the tension between them.
ugh, so slow. Why do i write so slow. Must pick up the pace.
Ultimately I would go to bed without finishing, and then many more random submissions were added by Stephe, Kate and Sandy the next day.
THE NEXT NIGHT
Okay, we did a ton of structure work tonight. So the delivery of information is set, but a lot left to go. We started working on everything that needed it tonight and I could seet things going awry. Luckily we caught ourselves and realized we weren't going to save the world tonight, we needed to A) lay out the order of the conversations. B) Figure out how they link and flow C) make the dialogue realistic D) Figure out their relationship and E) Add jokes. We got to A, but it was a lot to get through. We cut a ton of stuff and now I am home to make love to this script. I have to do B and C tonight and if I get it done we'll really be in good shape. Wish me luck!
Thursday, May 26, 2005
The Marvelous Obsessions of Mr. Chris Sienko
Last night Mark mentioned that he had run into Chris Sienko on the way to the office, we all talked fondly of our friend Chris, who's been dedicated to this group since the beginning, which means we're very hip, and decided today that we would all write about Chris, though Justin wasn't in on the discussion so will probably be discussing the bears.
Chris Sienko is hip, so hip he would make Tarantino puke. He has an intense innate understanding of the underground and a music collection so precisely dedicated and vast that all dabblers burst into flames just setting eyes upon it. All of the obsessions of Chris are precise to the point where to enter his apartment is to know him instantly, he's laserlike in clarity for what he likes in this life and has mastered the art of divorcing himself from the kind opinions of others. In a world where many people are many things I've met few people who are themself more than Chris. .
The first time I met Chris he lived above Mark and came down on New Years with a hat that had half a fish poking out the top and the fishes tail poking out the back to give the illusion that the fish had gone through his head and had a ball jar filled with, as far as we could tell, moonshine. Chris proceeded to dance, on his own, all night long. That was my introduction to Chris.
Chris and I share a special obsession for movies and filmmakers, and he does these events that are straight from my heart. He picks a filmmaker and then through all his underground connections and eBay gathers EVERY SINGLE artifact from that directors career including stuff the director themselves probably can't get a ahold of and then runs them IN ORDER for three days straight only taking 6 hours off to sleep. ALL START TIMES RIGID (as you can see in the picture Chris staring at the clock ready to hit play when it turns over) He's done it twice, once for Robert Altman and one for John Cassavetes and they are two of the best things I've ever been a part of. It's really amazing to get the full perspective on a filmmaker from beginning to end, and be able to talk about it during this fest with unabashed learning and fervor and love. And after I feel really special in my knowledge of that director and the discovery of these amazing random and obscure works that will influence me for the rest of my career. If it werent' for Chris I probably would've never seen Altman's amazing Three Women or California Split, or Cassavettes' Minnie & Moskowitz and those are some special movies that should be required viewing for any serious film fan.
Chris has every episode of Schadenfreude on cassette, he missed an episode early on and I told him I could get him a CD and he declined. He felt that radio comedy is best preserved on cassette, taped off the radio in real time. That's Chris.
Amongst his other obsessions are Album Comedy of the 70's (Firesign Theatre) and Noise, which from what I gather is a type of music. He once held a 24 hour listening fest to some Noise band that...he could tell you the whole story, it's a band you've never heard of, but after listening to Chris talk about them you not only know who they are, but their place in music and how music you like couldn't exist without them. That's Chris. I went to that festival just to see Chris in his element. He has his own Noise band called Gays In The Military who's albums have names like Oceans of Butter, Rivers of Blood, and The Secret Art of Meat Smoking. That's Chris.
Next festival - A full-on education on Werner Herzog, check the column for details. It'll be a good one.
One last thing. Chris, I have to get your Cassavetes 1 and Buffallo Bill and The Indians back to you, I'm so sorry. I'm a bad video borrower, I borrow videos for years at a time. That's me.
Monday, May 23, 2005
Pete Grosz leaves Second City!
from left to right: Rob Janis, Case Clay, Pete Grosz, Seth Meyers, and Deb Downing, originally uploaded by PinthGarnell.
Last night our good friend and one of the better human beings placed on this Earth, Pete Grosz left Second City and his pencil-thin mustache behind in Chicago as he moves on to write a pilot for Comedy Central and continue to hock hamburgers for Sonic. We'll miss you Pete!
The Teacher's Lounge
We did a live show Saturday night and reportedly it was a big success. It was a tough show, the first time we've done a live recording that wasn't just a series of sketches, but a full show with some semblance of a plot, just like a regular radio show. It was pretty cool, but it was hard. We met all week to get the script in shape and then rehearsed from 10:30am to showtime at 8pm. Thanks to everyone who came out and laughed so hard. I was looking at my script right up until showtime and luckily, I think, hit most of my lines. We did a pickup session after the show where we re-did a whole sketch I was in in which I played Brent Wickerman as a school driving instructor, taking the kids from pool to pool so I could hit on ex-students. When the sketch was done early in the show, I was done with it mentally. Then we had to re-do the entire sketch and I was kind of lost. We were cracking up during the re-rcording and it was real personal with audience being in on the process and laughing at things I forgot (like my shirt), which is probably why Greg Allen said it was his favorite part of the show. And then, just to throw a hitch in the show and give the audience a good old fashioned Schadenfreude moment, we stunted the end of the show where I screw up a line, then get in a fight backstage with the group. The fight spills out into the audience and then we hit Jumper by Third Eye Blind and we all make up. It's a really old sketch actually, but the great thing was it was so unexpected that not only did it work for new Schadenfreude fans (like the young kids in the front row!) but also longtime fans like Tommy Pritchard, who, when he realized that HE of all people had been duped, had a smile from ear to ear. It was pretty cool and I don't know who in the group I need to credit with that idea, but WHAT A GOOD ONE that may have made the entire show.
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Just Got Out Of Episode III
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Sex Ed
This show we're doing live this Saturday is a show we wrote at the last writing retreat, but got swept under the rug. I was a way better show than what we were able to make it into in the course of rewriting and editing. So we had the idea to produce it as a live show and make it work the way we knew it could.
So we're working on it last night and couple ideas came together, we always had the idea that Lisa of Lisa & Janet (Lisa get's Janet and online date in Zodiac and Lisa and Janet make a awful flirtatious overture to Ira Glass in Diner) sounds like she's having an orgasm when she laughs, random idea. But then last night Katie Watson was talking about potential new ideas in this show and one of them was how poor the government sponsored Sex Ed was, and how it's abstinence only. So then we made Lisa the Sex Ed instructor so that Prinicipal Back and Coach Koch are always asking her to describe certain things and then tittering like little school boys.
Which got us on the topic of Sex Ed
Supposedly everyone's blogging about their Sex Ed experience today. I didn't have one. But since I have had sex, obviously I've been educated in it. SO how did I learn?
The year was 1986, and I'd only seen naked women in Richard Jones' extremely well thumbed issues of High Society slid into my bag on the bus in a trapper keeper folder stuck in between issues of Mad and Fangoria Magazines as camoflage. But I didn't know exactly how sex worked. Oh, I could guess, but I didn't know exactly. The real education would be when I got my hands on the Holy Grail of porn, VIDEO. That was the undiscovered country, watching real people have real sex. There were screencaps of porn movies in the video review section of the magazines (including a lot of Tracy Lords movies at the time) and those fascinted me more than any of the centerfolds. Porno has always been like Sci-Fi to me, this weird fantasy world where everybody can have sex. It's not real, it's in come galaxy far away that has a huge output of documentaries on their universe. I realized recently how much those screencaps stuck with me when I saw a porn trailer and saw an exact image which I knew and had obviously been in one of those screencaps I obsessed on twenty years ago.
But video porn was impossible to find in Lewisburg, Oh as a 13 year old. Then one day it happened, a friend of Mike Ballard's who lived way out in the country had a satellite dish which got everything, including two porn channels, the TuXXedo network, and another network which I forget the name of because I only saw that tape once.
Then the rumor started, we have video. Repeat, we have video confirmation of the sex act. WHEN CAN IT GET IT?!?! Don't know. The leadup to actually watching real sex caught on video was unbearable. Finally Mike got his hands on a couple videos and after he got his use out of them gave me one. Now I had to wait until my parents were out of the house, which seemed to take weeks. One day my Step-Father was out mowing the lawn and my Mom was planting flowers and I threw it in the VCR for just a glimpse. It was great, just a glimpse, such a memory. And then one day they left and I watched Beyond Desire in it's entirety starring Seka in full punk mode haircut common to "new wave" porn at the time. TuXXedo was a double-x network, no penetration but I got the idea. Also on the tape was If My Mother Only Knew with Amber Lynn (god what a perfect name for a porn made in '86), and on the tape was brief segment of Hyapatia Lee in Tasty. Later the video pipeline opened up and I finally saw my first XXX porn, The World According to Ginger. Pretty mind blowing stuff for a 13 year old. And Peter North blowing stuff for Ginger Lynn (boom! zinger! I'm on fire when I'm talking about the porn)
So that was my sex education. And why? Because my school didn't support it as a curriculum because Christ would prefer that I find out by watching Amber Lynn fuck Randy West. Hey, way to go Christians, you've once again got this one down.
According to the subcommittee investigations set up by Nixon and Reagan these videos have no negative effect on me, but according to Nixon and Reagan, they do. So take your pick.
As a sidenote, to this day I can't watch porn made before '85 or after '93, it lost something after that. Porn to me is more about nostalgia and the films and stars of that time than it is about sex, that's fun too but it's, it's, I don't know, it's sci-fi. And as a film fan there's something extremely enjoyable about the presentation that the movies had back then, the uncommitted improvised dialogue mixed with some of the actors who present the dialogue with such conviction, the production design (you will see the same locations and hear the same music over and over), and the fact that all the same people are in every movie. It's like the studio system of the 40's in someway, more stars than the heavens.
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
Funny Story
So I woke up and had to pee. My roommate was taking a shower, so I couldn't pee. But while holding the pee back and making breakfast I noticed that the trash had to be taken out. So I took it out. And the door locked behind me, I was outside in my underwear, having to pee, my roommate was in the shower and our front door buzzer was broken. I wasn't pressuring my landlord to fix it, after all this particular scenario had not come to mind. I went out front and threw things at my roommates window, but he didn't hear, i went back to the gangway and stood on the dumpster and banged on the window. Not only didn't he hear, but somehow he slipped out the front and went to work without me noticing, in my underwear, having to pee. So I leaned a 2x4 against the wall to make a defacto stepladder and climbed up to the window and somehow got the screen, storm window, and inside window open with one arm while the other held me up there. I've never broken into a window that high. I made it inside without breaking a thing only to slide forward into the apartment like a baby being born with such force that my momentum kicked my foot up into the storm window, smashing it. Funny story.
Told You My Mom Mommed The Shit Out of My Place
Look at that Mantle. Perfectly composed. Where the fuck am I going to put my mannequin torso lamp?!?
Monday, May 16, 2005
No more "Clapper" jokes
My Mom Mommed the shit out of my new place
Sunday, May 15, 2005
Edgewater!
Here's the long-promised picture of the elegant Edgewater. While introducing a friend to the diversity of my neighborhood on Friday a prostitute put her head down and forcefully barrelled into my chest with her shoulder then backed off and gave me an open-arm "watch where you're going" gesture, it was weird. And I don't think my friend wants to come back here, but I think I made good on my claim of diversity. The prostitute didn't look happy, she had obviously come from a pretty back trick perhaps one that went wrong. But how did it go wrong? The citizens of Edgewater are left to imagine various scenarios and that's one of the ways the neighborhood is so challenging mentally.
Thursday, May 12, 2005
Brought to you by the Edgewater Tourism Bureau
When you first come to this city Wrigleyville seems like THE place to live, back then I loved telling everyone how close I was to Wrigleyville, i even sent out a bevy of postcards of Wrigley Field from an aeiral shot with an arrow pointing to my apartment when I first moved here. Then I moved away to Ravenswood for two years, during which every member of Schadenfreude was within a block of each other (fun times). Then I got an offer to live with some friends in, where else, Wrigleyville. It was almost a deal killer but since I was living with Mark Hanner at the time and the prospect of staying there despite the fact that his new boyfriend had just moved in seemed a bit awkward. So W*********** is was (I can't even type it). But my desperate hatred of moving led to me living there for 2.5 years, and so desperately did I hate moving that I spent a year and a half of that living with the roommate who no longer deserves a name but who shall forever just be called Devil.
But when living with Devil went South and the our slumlord threatened to toss us out based on the $1800 he owed, The Magnificent Steven and I had to find an apartment, I wanted to live somewhere I'd never lived and ended up living somewhere I'd never heard of. Evidently the area between Andersonville and Roger's Park is called Edgewater and I love it.
Wrigleyville was so uninteresting in every possible way, ALL the people in Wrigleyville look the same, and all the places you can go are just kind of there, no personality to them, no interesting origin or even intensely UN-interesting origin, and anything classic is faux classic est. 1998. Also freestanding ATM machines. And the way the meatheads swagger with their overly large chests, loud antagonistic speaking voices, and homoerotic way of physically communicating with the full irony of being a block from the gayest neighborhood in the midwest hits this very tense part of my brain which just makes my fucking cerebellum hurt. Every corner in Wrigleyville holds a bad memory of some form of desperation, and in my new neighborhood I'm so comfortable it's disconcerting.
In Edgewater nothing's trying to be anything but simple necessity for the people who have been here a while, it's a largely hispanic family neighborhood with an nice mix of the condo crowd who're all buying just south of Ridge in Andersonville, and of course middle-class like myself who's just here because Thorndale was too upscale. We picked the nieghborhood because that was where our awesome apartment was. I only discovered how cool it was later. Well it's not so much "cool" as it just "is." And compared to Wrigleyville THAT is fucking awesome. And once I really got into the neighborhood I explored the mysterious forgotten land EAST of the Bryn Mawr platform which contains a Bank One and a Starbucks, which I can totally utilize, oh AND I'm closer to the lake than I was in Wrigleyville, AND I don't live with the Devil, AND my apartment kicks ass, AND it doesn't smell like Cubs Fan puke. It smells like Working Class Husband Puke, which I will take any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
Shit, I thought I had photo's of the 'hood in my computer. I'll post them tomorrow.
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Phudi Mart at the Abbey Pub
Wow. So a while back a friend of Stephe's who runs the Really Short Film Festival asked us to submit a film. We submitted Phudi Mart because it was our favorite of the one's we've done. We shot Phudi Mart 5 years ago but we'ver never submitted any of our films to a film festival, they were all shot for use in various shows and are connected to those shows in various degrees and usually don't really stand out as their own story. Run Hanner Run proceeded Mark coming onstage at the Improv Festival 2002, Hotel & Casino played in the lobby accompanying our show, and Phudi Mart was supposed to lead into a sketch that had Brent working at McDonald's. But out of all of them Phudi Mart probably comes the closest to telling a full story. Also we use all Copyrighted music in our movies and you have to get the rights to the music to present them at a festival, which the RSFF didn't seem to care about.
The RSFF was last Saturday and everybody from the group was out of town leaving me the lone representative of the film at the festival, which I suppose makes sense because I shot and chopped it. But I wasn't really looking forward to watching it with a crowd, I've never really liked Phudi Mart. To this day I'm still very proud of the editing, which is still some of my best, but the reason Brent was taken out is just too simple, there's no lead up, and his demise, the major plot, is resolved within the same introduction the other characters get, which is odd, but whatever, after all it's Phudi Mart.
Also, I've lost complete perspective on Phudi Mart in five years, it's like looking at white paper to me, so I was very surprised when I saw it at the Abbey last Saturday. We got a great response from the crowd, even the mention of our names. My Mom noted that several people were elboing each other in a "these are the guys I told you about" sort of way. At leas that was her interpretation.
The big laughs came on Tony Smalek straightening the SoftScrub on the shelf (which always gets a good laugh), the three products he breaks to "damage them out", which the audience really got, Kate snorting coke, Wickerman trying to shove a banana in Tony's tailpipe, and Stephe, as Caleb smoking a joint with Wickerman, big laughs. It was just really good to see how that played with a crowd for the first time in years.
Thank you, everyone who attended and applauded and who continue to shove your support for us in the face of everyone else.
Thursday, May 5, 2005
Shit, I Didn't Kick That Cold's Ass
Episode #50 Movie
As a sidenote, there's a lot of reference to "Such Great Heights" in this weeks episode, it's us making fun of how popular that song is with the 20-somethings. So I initially put "Such Great Heights" as the music track, but you get a WAAAAAAY different movie, it began with a Justin pep talk first thing in the morning about that days recording and then went into slo-mo as we all walked out to the mics, beautiful...and a much better film than I had time to make in three hours. It will show up someday, but i had to decide early on that THAT was not the film I could make with my time. S at 3am I stuck "Happy Go Lucky Me" from the movie Pecker under the movie I had roughly edited thus-far because anything goes with that and his has the pace to support the paltry number of clips I had. It had to work because it was now 4am and I had to get up for work the next morning, so, very embarrasedly I sent it to Stephe, so flustered that I incorrectly called it Episode 49 because I made no short for 49 (which prompted Stephe to call me because he couldn't find 50 on the server...my bad).
I was waiting for the big thumbs down, but then Justin loved it, that was a huge relief, and the one compliment he had was on the one teeny little shred of the movie that I "found", the one element I found was showing the numerous arenas the show takes place in, almost every clip is in a different location. That was the only story element I found, and that was the only detail Justin mentioned. That feels good, it's still the worst film I've made for the site in two months, but for your worst to be passable is a good place to be as an artist.
Oh, and once again, the very last edit made is my favorite thing in the movie, the cold opening with Sandy and Kate is the best part of the whole thing and the last edit I made right before I exported it. The last edit made in Beautiful Intrusion was the shot of Martin Mull that shows up at the end, which is the best part of that movie. A decision I made, once again, RIGHT before export.
I Kicked That Cold's Ass!!
Tuesday, May 3, 2005
The Ridiculously Complex and Unsimplistic Phone I Want
-Adam, why do you want this phone?
-Because it's got everything.
-What do you need with all that stuff? Your new blue phone calls people.
- I know, but this one goes on the internet.
-Your on the internet right now without the phone.
- But I can get my email.
-Oh come on, you can do better than that.
-Hey, fuck off, it's a gadget, I'm a gadget guy, I need gadgets, okay?!?! This is the king of all gadgets, this gadget could kill any other gadget with an finger stab to the jugular of any other phone.
-Wait, one thing I know this phone can't do is finger stab another phone in a jugular that that phone doesn't have.
-Yeah, but it could learn how to ON THE INTERNET.
-That I can't disagree with. Allright, fine, trade in your simplicity-in-blue for the this crazy thing.
-Can't, don't have the money.
-Then what are we arguing about?
-Whether I should.
-But you can't.
-I know, but I should, if I could.
My Completely Simple and Necessarily Uncomplex New Phone
So I moved into my new neighborhood and lost another phone, two phones in three weeks. I'm kinda bad that way. Actually, I lost my really nice cameraphone, that roundish blue flipphone that everybody has now, and when I lost it I just pulled out my first cellphone, the old piece of shit motorola circa 2001, and reactivated it. I was offered plenty of good deals on new phones that day at the T-Mobile store but obstinantly said no, my old piece of shit works, why get unnecessarily complex? Well, I really forgot how big a piece of shit my old piece of shit was. I understand some of the new phones can take pictures, calculate the minutes until you die, emit a soothing masturbation gel, and on some of the older models, call people, but I don't think a phone can be considered too complex by having an unbroken lcd, which was the dominant feature of my old piece of shit. I also forgot one of it's most endearing features, it often shut down when someone called, which really is purpose-defeating. So I woke up in my new place after sleeping off a hellish 20 hour move (shit I really am behind on my blogging) and realized I'd lost my shitphone, actually i may not have lost it, but I wanted it lost so I walked down to one of my new neighborhoods landmarks next to the Checks Cahsed place, the cellphone store. The choice quickly came down to the phone you see pictured, a phone with such endearing features as calling people, text messaging, and calendar. Um, yeah, that's about it, oh, and AIM, which I'm obsessed with. But that's it. The othe choice, was the other end of the spectrum...