A Big, Empty Casino

when you don't want a gig to sell out

I’ve got three gigs coming up in October. A little mini-tour through the Midwest: Milwaukee, then Hammond, Indiana, and finally Flint, Michigan.

And I’ve got a problem.

The show in Milwaukee — at the gorgeous Pabst Theater on Wells Street — is selling very nicely. Probably gonna sell out. I’m getting in a day early, hosting a screening of Dudebro Massacre III at the Oriental Theatre, and then waking up early the next day to shoot an episode of RedLetterMedia’s Wheel of the Worst. I’ll do the Pabst Theater show that night — Thursday, October 9th. All good!

Two nights later — Saturday, October 11th — I’m at The Capitol Theatre in Flint, Michigan. This show is ALSO selling well, which makes me happy, because I’m donating a big chunk of the night’s gate to Flint Rising because how in the FUCK do they still not have clean water?

And then there’s Hammond, Indiana.

On Friday, October 10th — in between the Milwaukee and Flint shows — I’m going to be at The Venue at The Horseshoe Casino in Hammond, Indiana.

That’s right — another casino gig. Anyone who knows of my experience at the Tulalip Casino in Washington State can understand what I’m about to tell you:

Yes, there’s the potential for another drunken recounting of my CV. Which I’m fine with. I’m in this business for the money and the anecdotes.

And The Venue at the Horseshoe Casino is shaping up to be a great anecdote. Because, unlike the packed-to-the-walls-with-boozers Tulalip gig, unlike the selling-well shows at The Pabst and The Capitol, the Horseshoe is not selling.

Like, at all.

The venue holds 2,612 people. And as of this moment I’ve sold — wait for it — 202 tickets. Two hundred and two. In a room that size.

But now comes my conundrum —

I kinda want that to be the size of the audience.

Two hundred and two people in a room that seats two thousand plus is strangely appealing to me. There’s a real cinematic honesty to zeroing in on two hundred people in a vast, mostly-empty venue. If the Horseshoe holds at a low audience count I know that show will be something unique, totally unlike the shows I’ll do in Milwaukee and Flint. It will become this event that I and those two hundred people will probably think about, amidst all of life’s other work and entertainment that melts into the huge, grey slurry of memory. That one will pop — good or bad — and now I’m obsessed with it. It hasn't even happened and I can’t stop envisioning it in my mind. It’s a bleak, hopeful, early 70s movie about perseverance and grace in the autumn landscape near Lake Michigan. It’s the kind of Netflix special Terrence Malick would have filmed.

If you’re one of the 202 people who are holding tickets to this show, I truly can’t wait to see you. We’re gonna make sad, existential magic that night.

OZ DON’T SLEEP

COMICS

They Choose Violence, by Sheldon Allen over at AWA Studios. Holy SHIT. Three issues in and I have yet to read something this explosive, enraging, brilliant, hilarious and bloody in a long time. The only reason this isn’t making more noise is because the content-cunts in the MAGAverse haven’t discovered it. But when they do, may it launch a thousand frothing, gum-flapping bleats of YouTube goodness.

MOVIES

Watched the entirety of the Criterion Channel’s SAMMO HUNG KICKS ASS series last month — 7 films, from 1979 to 2016. Wow did that dude range all over the place. Hard, pitiless action (some of the scenes in Eastern Condors are just clearly people for-real beating on each other) teeth-scraping comedy (as charming as the ensemble in My Lucky Stars is…YEESH) and bonkers, supernatural-meets-martial arts brilliance (Encounters of the Spooky Kind wasn’t the first hopping vampires movie, but it put the genre on the map). The tone changes so fast from scene to scene you can get whiplash, but every film contains at least one jaw-dropping sequence, like this one from 2016’s My Beloved Bodyguard:

I am canceling my class action lawsuit against the Criterion Channel. Sammo Hung, indeed, kicks ass.

BOOKS

I’m re-reading Mo Daviau’s Every Anxious Wave because, like Station Eleven or Beat The Reaper or Cloud Atlas some books deliver and keep re-delivering even when you know the plot backward and forward. Or, in the case of Every Anxious Wave, backward and forward and sideways.