Extra! Extra!

After weeks of ignoring my blog and using it only to promote the work of friends, finally I have something of my own to promote! Right Jab, Left Hook is the heretofore mysterious webseries I’ve been concocting with Venture Bros-star-political-blog-obsessive James . It peels back the shiny facade of the political blogosphere to reveal the squirming pink egos raging beneath.

And we’re shooting the pilot next week! More to the point, we need extras! If you live in the Los Angeles area, and your corporeal self shows up on digital video, we want you in this pilot! The pilot takes place at the launch party for the titular website, and so we need people to be at that party. And, just like a real party, there will be a lot of standing around and awkward conversation!

From the call put out by our extraordinary producer Holly Golden:

PARTY GUESTS IN COCKTAIL ATTIRE NEEDED for web series pilot shooting in Culver City May 18, 19 and 20.

PLEASE REPLY ASAP W/ PHOTO AND AVAILABILITY TO HOLLY GOLDEN at hollygolden1@gmail.com.

I thank you for your attention.

Snake ‘n’ Bacon lives!

In the seemingly non-stop parade of Alcott-friend projects blasting out into the cultural marketplace at the moment, Michael Kupperman‘s Snake ‘n’ Bacon TV show debuts, tonight, at the home of The Venture Bros, [adult swim]. Starring yet another friend-of-Alcott James as the titular Bacon. All readers of this journal are commanded to attend. It is, in the [adult swim] tradition, 11 minutes of nonstop surreal weirdness, straight from the mind of Michael Kupperman, one of America’s greatest living cartoonists.

Millionaire does Costello

My heart leaped into my mouth when I discovered that old friend sometime collaborator Tony Millionaire has created the cover for the new Elvis Costello album. Finally, two of my favorite living artists united.

Nota Bene

My deepest apologies for bringing this journal to an unplanned screeching halt. I have been deeply enmeshed in creating the pilot for the webseries I’ve been putting together with Mr. James . The difference between Urbaniak and myself is that I’ve temporarily abandoned blogging altogether (while developing a webseries about, er, blogging) while Urbaniak has merely moved his operations over to Facebook and Twitter, two forms of entertainment I find difficult to grasp.

However! Regardless of my temporary non-blogging status, I would be remiss if I did not direct my readers attention to another webseries (all the cool kids are doing them now) by Friend of Wadpaw and lj-er , whose real name is (I’m not telling tales out of school here) Gary Schwartz. Gary and I go way back in Olde Neue Yorke Towne, where we use to direct each other’s work, hang out together and collaborate on the odd screenplay or two. Now Gary’s created his own webseries, Money in the Bank, about a bunch of amoral folks in the financial sector (are there other kinds?) who scheme to swipe some money from somebody. Will their plan work? I sure hope so, I hate it when the plans of amoral folks in the financial sector go poorly. I will say this bunch of crooks is off to a great start — one is an ex-prostitute, one is a bitter middle-management type, and one is a woman trapped in a loveless marriage, and they all seem to hate each other. What could possibly go wrong? Mr. Schwartz’s trademark jaded cynicism and bitter misanthropy runs rampant throughout, and the plot unfolds in a kind of mosaic style, with each episode not-quite-following the one before. The impression is less soap opera and more dark comedy. My favorite episode so far is #3, "The Miscarriages," which mercilessly dissects a woman’s failure to conceive a child in stark, unsentimental cinematic terms.

Also note: Firefox does not recognize "webseries" as a word, which certainly must reveal something about something somewhere.