David Misch on Funny, rethinking pole dancing, Disney and the Reagan Library, the roots of homelessness, and Brian May on 3-D photography.
Be blue better: Dylan Brody's 'Modern Depression Guidebook'
Commentator Dylan Brody, a Paxil user himself, has just released an e-book called The Modern Depression Guidebook, with much more advice on getting the most out of melancholy.
There’s something my third-grade teacher told me about homework that my wife recently repeated to me in bed. If you have to do something anyway, you might as well give it your best effort. That’s why I wrote The Modern Depression Guidebook.
Like millions of other Americans I sometimes get depressed. My mood can swing like Diana Krall on a three-martini lunch.
Sure, Scientologists might believe that what depressed people need is a punch in the arm and a hearty, “cheer the hell up,” but you and I know that’s utter nonsense. You don’t need cheering up, lip-stiffeners, medication, meditation or herbal tea, dietary advice, exercise, therapy or self-help books. You need to be left alone to watch reruns of Criminal Minds and wallow.
You don’t want advice on how to be less depressed because in depression you have at last found something you are good at.
But are you good enough at it? Of course not. Nobody in a depression ever said, “I’m good enough.” Well, I think it’s time to improve your skills. I’m here to help you make this your best depression yet with a new game Self Loathing for Idiots. This game will surely help you on your way to your deepest possible lows and you can play it alone inside your home, so you don’t even have to take a shower and change out of your bathrobe.
Here’s how it works. Look around you until something, anything catches your eye. Now, see how few thought connections you have to make to get to your current mantra of self-degradation. It’s like Six Degrees of Kurt Cobain. For example, from where I sit right now I can see that one of my bookshelves needs a minor repair.
1. That’s an easy fix.
2. I’ve been aware of this problem for some time now.
3. Why am I so lazy?
4. I hate myself!
Just four steps! Once you start playing, you can’t stop. It’s fun, easy and you can do it while carrying on other activities; not that they’ll be productive or worthwhile activities like doing the dishes or changing out of your bathrobe. Practice until it becomes second nature and pretty soon you’ll have your mood spiraling downward like Stephen Hawking at the Guggenheim.
Before I go, here are two other quick tips for increasing your self-loathing and deepening your depression and these two are incredibly easy and take almost no time at all.
First of all, think about the things you have done in your life of which you are most proud. Now think about what your parents would say about those things being your greatest accomplishments. Now, don’t you feel crappy?
Second, for a double dose of downer, compare your accomplishments to date with what you once imagined your accomplishments would be at this point in your life.
Now you’re doing depression right!
If you have to do something anyway, you might as well give it your best effort!
"Call Me Rabe" - Off-Ramp host's "Call Me Maybe" parody best/shortest
Rabbi, Rabies, Raimi ... the curse of being named Rabe (pronounced RAY-bee) has followed me my whole life. Now, I speak out about my suffering in "Call Me Rabe," which, if not the best "Call Me Maybe" parody on the web, is certainly the shortest.
Now, please, make this video viral.
Meantime, I'm hard at work on next next version...
This song is stuck in my head.
It makes me wish I were dead.
And it won't go away ...
It starts with that 4/4 beat.
Then I start tapping my feet.
I run out into the street.
It will not go away...
The beat it is growin'
My front teeth are showin'
No peace I am knowin'
Can't you stop it ... maybe?
Disneyland's 1955 opening was a disaster, and why wasn't Cummings fired?
It's a logistical nightmare: open an amusement park the likes of which the world has never known. Then have the plumbers go on strike and scoundrels counterfeiting the tickets. Then, try to do a live broadcast with dozens of cameras. Then, discover one of your hosts is making out -- on camera -- with one of the dancers.
But, Disneyland kept making people happy, ABC stayed on the air, and Bob Cummings kept acting til he was 80.
Off-Ramp host John Rabe and producer Kevin Ferguson engage in a little schadenfreude.
Pole position: fitness convention straddles the line between sexy and sporty
Pole dancing has a lot of names. Some call it dancing, some call it striptease — but after a decade-long re-branding, more and more women who attend America's hundreds of pole studios have dubbed it everything from pole fitness to pole sport to sexy yoga.
The third annual International Pole and Exotic Dance Fitness Convention (or IPEDFC) is plastered with these terms, and dozens more. Almost a thousand pass holders paid between $99 and $139 to be at the LAX Marriott and attend the dozens of workshops, demonstrations and competitions that have taken over its bottom floor.
Heather West is the owner of Luscious Maven Pole Dancing Studio in North Hollywood. She says almost all her students come in thinking they'll be "the only one who doesn't get it."
"I actually had someone say, ‘I was scared it was gonna be girls in high heels smoking cigarettes,’" laughs West. "I was like, where would you get that from? I have all respect for exotic dancers but this is not a strip club. A pole studio where you’re coming to learn is not a strip club."
It's easy, at first, to see the confusion. Pole-dancing took its first stiletto'd steps on the elevated platforms and glitter-strewn walkways of what dancers call "the clubs" — i.e., the strip clubs. There, women do handsprings and backflips onto metal cylinders attached to the floor. They twirl around poles, picking up cash the appreciative audience chucks on the floor, all while supporting pounds of hard muscle using just their arms, butts or thighs.
"I actually worked in this one club in South Carolina that had 30-foot ceilings and poles that went all the way up," recalls Austin Lee, a convention attendees — and a former stripper. "And this teeny little girl would climb up it, upside down, and hang from the ceiling. And I was like… Oh, I wanna do that."
Over the past decade, competitive and performance-based pole-dancing has seen an explosion in popularity as women latch on to the intoxicating mix of obvious fitness bonuses — strength, flexibility, killer abs —with, well… sexiness.
Thousands of dancers from around the world train to perform in international competitions while mostly self-made pole dancing stars produce their own product lines and workout DVDs. At least two magazines have spawned solely to cover pole, and dozens of "pole diary" blogs dot the webosphere.
Over 6,000 participants recently petitioned to make it an Olympic sport in the 2012 games.
As pole dancing (or pole fitness) grows, so does its clientele. The halls of the Marriott are lined with 22-year-old actresses next to 62-year-old grandmas; plus-size pole stars pull-off headlining numbers while international champions stretch outside.
"Since it hit the mainstream and became a fitness thing there are a lot of different backgrounds that people are coming from, that are drawn to it," explains Lee. "I feel like my background is starting to die out – people that were strippers."
There’s even a handful of men in the halls—including 23-year-old Josiah Grant.
"When I dance on a pole, I try to make it as masculine as possible," says Grant. "I’m not dancing around like a ballerina and turning men away. Dudes will see me and be like, ‘Dude, you’re dope!’ I get a lot of love."
Grant started pole when he was 16, practicing in his bedroom and posting videos of his progress up on YouTube.
Girls from the strip club down the street would come show him tricks. But today, he says, the community has "drastically changed."
Lindsey Kimora, a rep with the convention's primary sponsor X-Pole, attempts to explain.
"So bringing it to Crunch gym, running certification programs on how to teach it, making it more known to the public," she says, ticking the possibilities off on her fingers. "Now I think it has the potential to develop into something like Yoga or Zumba."
That might explain the slightly schizophrenic nature of PoleCon, where panels with titles like ‘How The Pole Saved My Life' and ‘Grip Strength Training’ share a board with something called ‘ATL Booty Clap Workshop’.
While she loves that something so many people love is becoming the hot new thing in hip young fitness, former club girl Austin Lee admits to mixed feelings.
"As far as myself, I do get frustrated sometimes when people feel that they need to so harshly distinguish themselves," she admits. "I wanna be like 'Hey, don't forget where your sport came from.' We still wanna wear the sparkly shoes but we…don’t want to do it naked or something?"
Heather West agrees.
"When I first started I would say ‘Hey, I’m a pole dance instructor’ and one of my friends would be like 'Oh, but she’s not a stripper! She’s actually a really great dancer!'" she laughs. "Now, when I say I’m a pole dance instructor, people’s faces light up. There’s a huge respect. Even my brothers are proud of me."
The roots of humor — David Misch and 'Funny, the Book'
David Misch began his long comedy career as a standup in Boston and New York, got his first TV gig writing for the sitcom "Mork and Mindy," and wrote many episodes of a great cartoon series starring the voice of Jason Alexander, "Duckman."
Now, he's written the definitive book on the art and history of humor, "Funny, the Book," which he bills as "The single most popular book on comedy ever written by David Misch this year!"
He explained the book to Off-Ramp commentator Hank Rosenfeld at Izzy's Deli in Santa Monica.
On statistics that say childen laugh up to 300 times a day, adults less than 20 times:
This is actually a study that showed that and I believe it's an explanation for why young people live so much longer than old people.
On where comedy tropes like "slapstick" originate:
The term slapstick originally comes from Commedia dell'Arte, they had oly a few props, but one of them was a board with two wooden slats which they used to hit people and the person would fall down and because it made that noise it would sound even funnier. It was called the batacchio, which in english means slap stick, and when it was adapted to Vaudeville in the 1920s and 30s in America, they would use a goat bladder stretched on a board, which I am fine with, except I just don't like envisioning how they got it.
On how laughter plays into John Wilkes Boothe's assassination of Lincoln:
Boothe was, in addition to being a Confederate sympathizer, as most people could figure out, he was also a prominent actor. He used his fame to get into Lincoln's box during the performance of "Our American Cousin," which was a well-known comedy of the time, and he waited for a specific line that he knew would get a laugh. And the laugh was "Don't know the manners of good society, eh? Well I know enough to turn you inside-out you sockdologizing old man trap!" So sockdologizing means manipulative, but my God who wouldn't want to say sockdologizing, it's much more fun, it just rolls off the tongue. Boothe waited until that line got a laugh, then he fired hoping the sound of the gunshot would be muffled by the uproarious laughter, but evidently he was wrong because people did notice that the President had been shot.
On how comedy was once considered taboo:
It was actually considered bad for most of history, it started with Plato and Aristotle, those hacks. They claimed that it was bad because it indicated a moral failing on the part of the laugher. That is that you would laugh at the misfortune of other people. This whole feeling that laughter was somehow an indication of a bad character lasted for hundreds and hundreds of years, to the point where many people derided it as the "mind sneezing," the hiccup of a fool, invariably injurious and sometimes fatal.
On how comedy is God:
Some people may consider that as bit of a leap, but the reason I think that is that comedy is directly related to spirituality in that the key to laughter is surprise. I say in the book that Peek-A-Boo is everyone's first comedy routine. The key to Peek-A-Boo is that its a sudden unexpected revelation.
Another version of that is a very different phenomenon called religious ecstasy, which all the saints had, they had this moment of blinding revelation, well that's frequently defined as a sudden unexpected revelation. Same as Peek-A-Boo. So the relationship between laughter and religious ecstasy draws a direct line between Joan of Arc and your baby cousin.
But the other interesting thing is what do we do in that moment of laughter, we're outside ourselves, we're somehow in touch with something larger, same thing with religious ecstasy where people feel that they see God, and that's true of another phenomenon, orgasm. Where we're out of ourselves, we're feeling pure bliss, pure ecstasy, and the relationship between laughter, religious ecstasy and orgasm is something I would go into, but I really feel more comfortable if everyone involved has a few drinks.
Misch reads from "Funny, the Book" at Book Soup in in Hollywood on July 26. Get tickets here.
Read a brief excerpt from "Funny, The Book:"
Excerpt from "Funny, the Book"
Matt DeBord talks with Rabe about being a shiny happy person
Following up on my recent effort to convince Rabe that we should start thinking about human rights for robots, I headed down to his high-tech recording studio-slash-office to convince him that we should reconstruct our economy to favor happiness over blunt growth.
He quickly accused me of being a commie! Then we reviewed "The Communist Manifesto," a copy of which Rabe keeps in his office for quick reference.
(The truth is, I'm probably more of what the novelist Walker Percy once called a "Southern moderate," which basically means I enjoy a good mint julep from time to time.)
Anyway, I was able to introduce John to the work of USC economist Dick Easterlin, who's credited with developing "happiness economics" in the 1970s. I've written about Dick and his work a number of times. He's sometimes talked about as a potential Nobel Prize winner. And he's one of those economists who has a concept named after him: the Easterlin Paradox, which very crudely stated says that rich people are generally happier than poor people, but that rich societies aren't happier than poor ones, and that rising economic growth doesn't make societies much happier, after a certain plateau is reached.
If you look at this on a graph, you get a flat happiness line and a rising growth line. The Easterlin Paradox has been found over and over again in societies through the decades. Recently, Dick published some new research that suggests life satisfaction has leveled off in former Eastern European societies, as well as in China, where economic growth has been very strong in since the old Communist system gave way to a state-sponsored variation of market capitalism.
What Dick concludes is that happiness is more likely in societies where there's job security and a strong social safety net. So in China, for example, people aren't as happy as we might expect them to be because the old communist-era protections have weakened.
Other economists look at the happiness research and say, "Hey, maybe GDP isn't the best overall way to measure how an economy is doing!" Gross domestic product is a really broad method of measuring what an economy is producing. The assumption is that you have to grow unendingly, over the long term, to be successful (you have recessions and even depressions here and there, but overall, the line is supposed move up and to the right FOREVER).
But is that all there is? If an economy is growing but everyone is miserable, is a society actually doing well? Or just trading well-being for affluence?
Happiness economics has gained a lot of respect in the past decade — previously, it wasn't viewed as being hardcore enough, in terms of its math and methods — and it's entered the mainstream conversation about economics in a much bigger way since the financial crisis, during which the traditional economics profession didn't exactly cover itself in glory.
I'm not sure I convinced Rabe. But I think I made him a little bit...happier.
Chamaine's Story: from the streets to success
On any given day in LA County more than 50,000 people are homeless. That’s the population of Glendora, or Rosemead, or Cerritos. Men, women, and children living on the streets, in their cars, in motels, or on the floors at their friends’ houses.
The causes are simple and complicated: no job, domestic violence, drug use, mental illness, rising health care costs, lack of affordable housing. And the challenges of maintaining a “normal” life while without stable shelter can be insurmountable.
For almost forty years, Union Station Homeless Services in Pasadena has been in the forefront of the fight to help these people, so Tuesday we welcomed several speakers from USHS to the Crawford Family Forum to talk about the roots of homelessness ... and solutions.
The star of the show was Chamaine, whose life spiraled out of control at the hands of an abusive boyfriend. Now, with Union Station's help - "and a lot of praying" - she's put her life back together again. She's no longer living in her VW Bug with her baby daughter. Now, she has an apartment, a part-time job, and her daughter is about to enter Kindergarten.
You can hear all of our forum in the link below, but this week on Off-Ramp, we focus on Chamaine's story, told in her own words with a little help from Union Station CEO Marv Gross.
(We're not using Chamaine's last name or showing a photo of her to protect her from her abusive ex-boyfriend.)
Vindicated: Franky Carrillo's false conviction leads to perseverance, faith and wisdom
The students of El Sereno's Woodrow Wilson high school wait somewhat indifferently for a guest speaker. They line the bleachers of their school's gymnasium, talking among themselves until an administrator quiets them down and introduces them to Francisco "Franky" Carrillo, a man who until March 2011 spent the previous 20 years in prison.
Franky is a casual, easygoing speaker. He doesn't look like he spent most of his life in maximum security penitentiaries. As Franky begins his story, the kids are captivated.
In 1992, Carrillo was falsely convicted of a drive-by shooting in his hometown of Lynwood, California. He served 20 years until he was released on March 16, 2011. Nowadays, he gives a lot of talks and speeches about his experience.
"For many, many years, man, I've had this sort of weird answer to that question about who am I, you know, who is Franky Carrillo? Because for many years I was just a number, I was H56800. I'm grateful to say that although I went through a very hard stage and 20 years of my life, that it didn't break me," he says.
Franky's trial began when he was just a kid, a 16-year-old who hadn't even graduated high school. At that age, Carrillo says he didn't understand the charges against him, let alone the long, confusing judicial process.
"It was so bizarre because I could remember sitting there in court," says Carrillo. "I must have been 17 at this point. I sort of felt like I had a front row seat to this, like, theater and I was just watching a show. Where are the adults here to measure this and gauge this and realize that this is wrong?"
The jury handed him a life sentence. Carrillo says that on the day he found out, the courtroom was nearly empty. "It was a surprise verdict kind of thing and my attorney, he was rubbing my back--it feels so stupid now that he was doing that."
Carrillo spent the majority of his sentence writing letters to state and federal agencies. He eventually caught the attention of the Northern California Innocence Project, and after five of the six eyewitnesses in his case recanted their testimony, on March 14, 2011, Franky was acquitted.
Carrillo's first memory of freedom takes place in the courtroom, still in handcuffs.
"The attorneys for the District Attorney's office came over and apologized to me, says Carrillo. "That was the first memory, in court, I'm still in cuffs. Just the fact that a human being came up and said, 'Hey look, although I'm saying this for the state, but as an individual, I apologize."
Carrillo says he felt unclean after prison--he wanted to take a shower as soon as he made it home. "People want to cleanse themselves from that experience," said Carrillo. "They feel that this filth that's on them, they want to take it off."
Franky now lives with one his attorneys in Manhattan Beach. He keeps a jar of articles he collected from his time in different detention centers. There's a picture he drew while in Folsom that doubles as a thank-you card to those who helped him persevere throughout his time in prison.
Carrillo says the drawing of the naked man is representative of his struggle, and a very personal possession.
"It's an image of a man, who's just sort of sitting there naked, he appears to be sort of stressed out and going through some harsh times there. But the main thing in the image isn't the man, it's more of the chair. This was so personal to me because I felt I had been stripped away from every single thing. But for me, this man to be just sitting there--when he has nothing--is really God's involvement in his life."
The inside of the card reads:
The vindication of Franky Carrillo, March 14th, 2011. Blessed are those family, friends, teachers, mentors, counselors, lawyers, advisers who hunger and thirst for the justice, for they shall be filled.
Carrillo starts this fall as a full-time undergraduate at Loyola Marymount University.
Brian May (Queen guitarist) has a 3D photo obsession and a new book
UPDATE: Brian May will be speaking at the National Stereoscopic Association's 38th annual convention, which will be held July 25-30, 2012, in Costa Mesa, California.
Brian May and Elena Vidal have just published the first complete book of TR Williams's c. 1850 photos of an English village. But these aren't just any photos ... they're stereo cards, and Williams was a master of the art. "A Village Lost and Found" is the culmination of forty years of longing for May, the guitarist for Queen.
Here's the short version of the interview, and for true stereo(photo)files, the long version we released as a podcast Monday.