FuzzyCo

Team Gerdes-Plus-Noah is proud to present another in our growing stable of odd little websites: Onomatopoetically.

The site was inspired by a site cartoonist Adam Koford (aka Apelad) put up -- Onomatopedia.com. On that site, Adam sells original cartoons inspired by onomatopedic words supplied by his customers. (I bought a cartoon of the word "poot".)

I like making funny sounds, so I thought it might be fun to do a similar thing with audio. The domains onomatopeia.com and onomatopoeic.com are held by a domain speculators or somesuch, but onomatopoetic is an acceptable alternate spelling and I liked the way that that it has "poetic" buried in there. Onomatopoetically describes how we're going to be saying these things and makes the domain name so long and difficult to spell that no one is ever going to be able to find the site*.

So the way it works is pretty simple. You suggest an onomatopoetic word (either a real one like "bark" or just some sort of sound spelled out) and if we like it, we'll record ourselves using it in a sentence and then post it on the site. It's likely to be pretty sporadic, so I suggest subscribing to our feed in your favorite feed reader.

* Oops.

If you were planning on coming to the Town Hall Pub today to help us shoot a music video, please don't*. We're having to reschedule the shoot. Stay tuned. Thanks.

* I mean, unless you just want to visit the bar for a tasty beverage.

I guess we're back on the air, here. If you've tried to send me email over the last 24 hours or so and it bounced, please send it again -- I think we're back up and stable now (fingers crossed). If you enjoy car wrecks, you can go read about how my internet host had a bout of crippling slowness, thought they fixed it, discovered they had not, and then discovered that a process in their system had decided that the best response to the whole situation was to delete everyone's DNS records. La la la. Oh yeah, and all the while their supposedly off-network status page that's supposed to kept us loyal customers appraised of network problems like this got borked, too.

For future reference, if this site is ever down for any extended period of time, I'll likely post on fuzzygerdes.vox.com. Unless, like today, I'm in a training class all day without real Net access. Urp.

I've been suffering under a massive comment spam attack for the last few days, so I've had to turn moderation on for all comments -- so if you leave a comment, it may take a few hours to show up. Sorry, but the bad guys are winning right now.

Fuzzy's Pizza in Peoria, AZ is, oddly enough, a Chicago-themed pizza and hotdog place.

Previous Fuzzy sightings.

The Chicago Public Radio website features a "photo of the day" drawn from a Flickr group and today's photo is by me. Hoo-rar!

It's time once again for FuzzyFest -- the annual celebration of the day I was born! Please join me on Saturday, February 3 for:

a performance by Pastor of Muppets at the Playground (3209 N Halsted) at 8 pm

and/or

the appearance of Dr. Baron Ludwig von Evilschlager at Don't Spit the Water at the Playground (3209 N Halsted) at 10:30 pm

and/or

drinking and conviviality at the Twisted Spoke (3369 N Clark) around midnight.

The February Chicago Magazine profiles me (along with the editors of several other Chicago group blogs) for being the city captain of the Chicago Metroblog. Amongst the neatness is this little pixel portrait of me, based off of a photo that Erica took.

Illustration by Nana Rausch for Chicago Magazine

I finally did the same change to this blog that I did to the New Improv Page back in November. I think I've got every thing working OK, but let me know if you notice any weirdness (with the web pages, this is, we strive for weirdness otherwise).

I discovered today that I had broken the FuzzyCo Vodcast back in May. I also haven't posted anything to it since May, so you weren't really missing out on all that much. But it's back! I'm sure future posting will be as erratic as ever, but at least it's working. If you'd like to subscribe to the Vodcast in a News Aggregator, here's the RSS feed. Or to subscribe using iTunes, click here.

I answered some questions for Jill Bernard so she could write a side-bar to a piece she was doing on festival submissions and they ended up publishing my tips as a complete article: Improve your Submission Tape.

Jason Stephens of Split Pillow writes:

The Around the Coyote Arts Festival, one of Chicago's biggest festivals, is having their winter show in Bucktown Feb. 10-12. As part of the festival, they screen short films at Rodan (1530 N Milwaukee) at 6pm on both Friday the 10th and Sunday the 12th. This year, the festival asked to screen exclusively "The Best of Split Pillow." A movie you were involved with has been selected by the Festival selection committee (we gave them every short film Split Pillow had ever had a hand in producing and they made the decisions). Congratulations.

The FuzzyCo film being shown is Dog. It was filmed for Split Pillow's Challenge, so over Memorial Day weekend 2004 we filmed a script written by another team (Jamie Pilarski & Lauren Austin) and we handed off the footage to yet another team to edit (Jennifer M. Fah). The FuzzyCo team included Shaun, me, Sarah Pappalardo, Andrea Swanson, Clifton Highfield, Jin Kim, and Ryan Stone.

I live-blogged our efforts, so take a little trip down memory lane with me:

Challenge - first night & day
Challenge: 1st Location
Challenge: 1/3 done
Challenge: 2nd location
Challenge: Editor Friendly
Challenge: 2/3 done filming
Challenge: Exteriors
Challenge: 99% done
Challenge: 100% done (filming, anyway)

Via Mugsy, a "your year in review" meme: I've taken the first sentence of the first entry of each month here and it's an odd little overview of what 2005 was like for me.

January 2005: Raza Obrera wear orange overalls and have a harp player who dances around with his full-size harp the same way a guitar player does.

February 2005: We're in Miami!

March 2005: Hey, Erica's choreography was on national television!

April 2005: I spent part of my Saturday painting the trim in the front hallway (finally finishing an 11-month-old project) and listening to Mitch All Together in memory of Mitch Hedberg, who died last week.

May 2005: Pretty uneventful second weekend of the Chicago Improv Festival -- except for the Odd Political Thing that I had to fix in my video unexplainably reverting to the Old Wrong Name the one time the Important Person was there.

June 2005: Over on the Chicago Metroblog I just posted a round-up of our favorite french fries (yay - alliteration).

July 2005: Some weekend suggestions from FuzzyCo HQ: The exhibit at the Lincoln Park Zoo that Kate did all the art for has opened.

August 2005: We're back from Ann Arbor -- a wonderful trip; Dan, Trish, and Sabrina are delightful hosts.

September 2005: Though this one could be a poster pull-out quote: "Newcity's 5 shows to see now."

October 2005: Even when he's just typing, Shaun swears a lot.

November 2005: We finished up our 5th full run of the Neutrino Project in Chicago with another daaaangerous show.

December 2005: I left off that last post a little abruptly... I had to go run meet the plumber, who, once again, did not show up.

Getting my act together to take real screen grabs from the TiVo is not going to happen any time soon. So I just pointed my littlest camera at the screen and took some shots the old fashioned way.

Update: Of course they have the story on their website. Duh.

So... the London Metrobloggers were mentioned and quoted in the mainstream press for their street-level coverage of the London bombings. The New Orleans Metrobloggers are currently getting the same sort of attention for their personal coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Today on my lunch break I was interviewed by CBS 2 Chicago for a piece they're doing on... spiders. Well and so. The piece should air sometime next week and you can be sure I'll post more information as I have it.

Some notes from the interview:

As we were setting up for the interview, me sitting on a park bench, the producer, Lisa, to my left and Aleph(sp?) and the camera directly in front of me, an old man came and sat down very close on my right. We all three just stared at him for a moment and he gave us a look back like, "it's OK, I'm next." (When dumb-founded staring didn't work, Lisa asked him to move and he was happy to do so.)

I've been feeling bad lately that all I have for my video camera is a plastic white-card for doing white-balancing -- I know I should get one with shades of black and grey to help with color correction later. Until Lisa scrounged in her purse to produce a folded memo that Aleph white-balanced off of.

I'm not sure how much of what I said they'll use (if anything) -- it's a short piece. But let me confess, even if they never air them, to two things. Erica pointed out, when I was recounting the afternoon to her, that I mangled the words to "Itsy-bitsy Spider". When I reference "according to the comics I read as a kid, Spiderman is so strong because he's got the proportional strength of a spider," it's an accurate statement, but I am, of course, fronting -- I still read comic books.

And another confession: the above photo is staged. We were done with the interview and Lisa offered to take some shots with my little camera. Thanks, Lisa.

It's a big weekend here at FuzzyCo HQ. Which I've started calling FuzzyCo HQ. I think you'll all just have to deal with it.

Friday night, Erica's improv ensemble KOKO will be performing at The Playground at 8 PM (Mustang Repair, Show Pony, and American Dream also appear). If you're a fan of those ladies, you'll be delighted to know that all 5 members will be at the show, which hasn't happened in awhile.

Then, at 9 PM it's the Neutrino Project at the Improv Kitchen. You've read about the show in the Tribune and Time Out. I've been yapping out the show for years. Just come see it and get it over with.

Saturday morning the Little Corner Restaurant is open again after the owner's three week vacation and it may not affect you, but it brightens our whole weekend.

Saturday night, Erica is doing a short play as part of the Abbie Hoffman Theater Festival. Change goes up at 8:15 pm. It's only 20 minutes or so, but there's plenty more going on during the festival -- plenty of good stuff and undoubtedly some crap. But at $25 for 41 hours of theater, that's about 61¢ per hour. How can you pass up such a bargain?

And since you'll already be up late at the Abbie Hoffman, you can duck down the street at midnight to see Documentary South, at The Playground. We only have three shows left and it's really a different improv show, so please come out. And this week we have special guests The Franchise opening up for us.

And my friend Lawrence is visiting this weekend. Again, doesn't affect you, just thought I'd mention it. Whew. I'm worn out just typing it all.

If you can read this, the move was successful. Here's looking forward to a stable and happy FuzzyCo.

Things are going to be a bit quiet here for the next few days as I try and move FuzzyCo.com to a more-stable server. Come see the show if you're in Michigan!

I have successfully upgraded the back-end software that runs the blogging here at FuzzyCo and the New Improv Page to Moveable Type version 3.12. Do you care? Probably not. You shouldn't notice much difference in my site, except that maybe now I'll be able to put the time I had spent on fighting comment spam towards actually writing a post or two.

I did a simple update last night that ended up taking down the whole FuzzyCo server. Which makes me a little nervous about my planned upgrade to Movable Type 3.11. (But I have to upgrade soon, because comment spam is driving me crazy...)

I signed FuzzyCo up for the Fast Forward Film Festival on Monday night and we were team #1, so I'm guessing there are still plenty of spots left.

Evidently this Fast Forward is going to incorporate the organizers' friends Zach and Bob from the East Coast. We're going to have Alex in from New York (and Shaun's dad from North Dakota) that weekend, too, so, not to pre-plan, but I have a feeling the FuzzyCo entry is going to be guest-star-a-riffic.

In just a few hours I'm going to get in a car with Erica and three other members of KOKO and hit the road for New York. KOKO is going to be performing at the Del Close Improv Marathon (they perform Saturday, 7/31, at 2:30 pm).

Originally I was just going to tag along to visit New York and support KOKO at their show and see a little improv. Then Kurt called -- because so many people from around the country were going to be in town for the DCM, Neutrino was opening up their Friday night show to members of the other Neutrino project casts. Would anyone from the Chicago Neutrino Project be in New York on Friday night? Well, me (and Andrea Swanson). So we'll both be part of the Neutrino Video Project show on Friday night at 10 pm 9:30 pm at the PIT (154 W. 29th St., between 6th and 7th Ave).

Then Asaf called. "I see you're going to be in New York on Friday. Would you like to sit-in with The Sickest F***in' Stories I Ever Heard?" But, of course. So I'll be the "bartender" in the New York SFSIEH, also at the PIT, Friday night at 11 pm.

Two shows -- not bad for "just tagging along". (I looooove getting invited to do shows. I don't know if people assume I'm too busy, or if they just think I'm a talentless hack, but I don't get asked to do shows very often. So ask me to do your show, bucko!)

Saturday night we'll be seeing Avenue Q -- I'm looking forward to some foul-mouthed puppets. And Sunday morning it's back in the KOKO-mobile to return to Chicago. I'm taking a wireless laptop, but we'll see if I have time or inclination to post anything.

I've started blogging over at Chicago.Metroblogging. It is, as the name implies, Chicago-oriented writing. I'll likely cross-post everything I post there here also (though not vice versa -- there will be stuff here that's not there). But there's plenty of fine writing over there that's not by me.

We won the award a few months ago, but I just found this picture of us accepting the eFilmCritic.com award for Ted McGillicutty, Man of Action at the Chicago Really Short Film Festival. As you can tell from my formal wear, I was expecting to win an award.

So... I'm going to Scotland the first week in August to sit-in with Neutrino as they present Neutrino: The Instant Movie at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I'll be running camera and acting in the movies and running tech and handing out flyers and so on. In other words, the usual.

Neutrino has posted a nifty trailer that features footage from their last two appearances at the Chicago Improv Festival and so has a few Chicago Neutrino Project folks scattered throughout.

Jin and Shaun represented FuzzyCo well in WNEP's Duo Improviso last night, coming in second place. (Cough, cough. Don said, "the Duo Improviso has one first place winner and nine second place winners.") The Duo was held on the set of Loser's Bracket, which explains the boat, bass, and bar in the background.

One of my jobs as the Chicago Improv Festival multimedia coordinator is to organize an archive of all the pictures and video (mostly digital) that were shot this week. If you were here this week and shot any pictures or video, I'd love to get a copy of it. Them. Whichever. Send me an email (fuzzy@fuzzyco.com).

Pictures from CIF? I've taken a few. Stories? A thing or two has happened. Time to post it? Nope. I left the Schad/Fuz/Haus party at 4:15 am so I could get home by 5:00 to drive Shaun to the airport (I had one beer at the party, thank you very much). Tonight I'm doing video bits on the mainstage (I'm waiting for a few DVDs to burn right now) and then I'm off to run the Improv All Night until 6 am. Shaun was supposed to run it, but he's off to a wedding in Nashville. I owe him an IAN, since two years ago I was the IAN coordinator and got food poisoning that afternoon and Shaun had to go straight from running one of the other stages to do IAN all night.

A party? We had some DJs lying around gathering dust, and what are we going to do with all that beer, and, hey, there are all these CIF attendees standing around with nothing to do. A party!

3036 N Lincoln Ave - 2nd Flr
Friday, May 7, 10:45pm

It's Schadenfreude and FuzzyCo and the Big House, together again for the first time.

We're asking everyone to chip in $10 to help us cover the price of DJs, live band, food, shocking amounts of drinking fluids, and a party that should hopefully run very very late. Want to know which dozen of your friends have already RSVPed? Check out the evite.

Well, the Chicago Improv Fest starts tonight and takes over my life for the next week (in fact, it's taken up most of this week already). I'm the "multimedia co-ordinator" which, as far as I can figure out, is a fancy name for "video guy."

We'll see if I can get a chance to give you a glimpse of the sights and sounds of the biggest week in improv(tm).

I'm finally updated my GeoURL to reflect my move one mile north and one block west.

I was also the big winner at the last Sickest Stories, raking in a big $8 (I might have won more if the dealer could have stayed focused on the game instead of his own stories)(I kid, I kid).

We had an excellent range of the kinds of stories we've had over the years at SFSIEH... puke stories, poop stories, awkward sex stories...

Thanks to Don, Shaun, Rebecca, Amanda, and everyone who came out to see it for giving the old show a nice send-off. (sniff)

A few years ago, Don Hall and Shaun Himmerick were talking at one of Don's summer cookouts. Shaun likes playing poker and wanted to develop a show where he could just sit on stage and play poker (there have been worse artistic impulses). Don had just seen The Weir, where the characters just sit around in a bar and tell ghost stories. It'd be great, Don said, to do a show like that, only WNEP-style, so they'd be gross stories.

Before you could say "You got your chocolate in my peanut butter..." they had created a new show, "The Sickest F***in' Stories I Ever Heard". (The asterixes are part of the title. I loooove swearing, but Don and I both think it's funnier that way.)

The show is a simple idea: five people sit on stage, drink real beer, smoke real cigars, play real poker for real money, and tell real stories from their lives. Which, you know, tend to be gross.

It's so simple and so compelling, that we've produced the show for three seasons and it's been performed in Boston, Memphis, New York, Seattle, and Toronto. And tomorrow night at midnight is your last chance to see this show in Chicago.

The Around Midnite Series, which has been Sickest's home for the last years, is wrapping up this month (Your Little Ponies next week, Cinema 2.0 the week after, and the Gong Show Finals on May 15). And so is The Sickest F***in' Stories I Ever Heard.

We've had dozens of guest players over the years, but for this final one we're bringing it back home to WNEP. The cast will be me, Don Hall, Shaun Himmerick, Amanda Cohen, and Rebecca Languth. I've got a couple of stories I've been saving up...

WNEP's Around Midnite Series is wrapping up in April (with a special Gong Show finale May 15). You get two more doses of freaks on parade (Apr 3 & May 15), one more hit of dirty-talkin' poker players (Apr 10), a special appearance by Your Little Ponies (Apr 17), and a final bad movie made fresh and new (Apr 24).

Fight Club is back on. Same place (3209 N. Halsted) same time (Tuesdays @ 10:30 pm).

Dan says, "It's an open jam, but not in a drunk late night bad kind of way, but in a smoky underground jazz club open jam. It's a show with no audience, everybody plays. Raw, unrehearsed, uncompensated, uncompromised. Improv at its most pretentious."

Everyone is welcome. We start exactly at 10:30 pm (and end exactly at 11:30). If it's your first time, you're in the first scene. Other than that, your level of participation is entirely up to you. We all try to bring our best work; we're all working to improve.

Anyway, it's a little late to imagine anyone who might even come tonight reading this in time, but we're running through the end of April.

Hey, if Second City can claim him, we can too; Jose Hirohito and His All-Girl Orchestra alumnus Joe Kelly has been hired by Saturday Night Late as a writer. It'd be hard to find a nicer guy than Joe, and I wish him all the best in his new job.

Sunday night, Beth and Shaun MC'd the Lavender Cabaret's appearance at the Beat Kitchen. I had my good camera, but the light in there was terrrrible. So you get a blur-a-licious picture of Beth and Shaun improvising some bit or another.

Oh, I can see what you're dreaming of... you want... you desire... MP3s of news satire radio segments I did 4 years ago. And so you shall have them.

(Little cough, lean in a little too close) Have I mentioned that I'm the executive producer of the Around Midnite Series? OK, I don't really do that much (no, really, I don't really do that much).

When we moved the AMS over to the Lakeshore Theater, we lost one of the shows that made up part of the series. Rather than try and find a new show that could commit to once-a-month performances from January to May, I decided to fill the slot with 5 different groups and call the slot "Wild Card." The first Wild Card was WNEP's Angry White Guy last month. This month, on Saturday, February 21 (at, duh, midnight) we have Chicago's own Schadenfreude.

Schadenfreude is one of Chicago's best sketch comedy groups and this marks one of their rare live appearances since they began airing their radio show on WBEZ (91.5 FM). And it's only $5.

(This weekend at the AMS is The Sickest F***in' Stories I Ever Heard, in a special all-female Valentine's Day edition.)

I set up a nice procmail filter this morning to handle the MyDoom mails that were filling my mailbox. Only I messed up on a return or two. The point? If you sent me email today, I didn't get it. Oops. Try again, please.

A few days ago I was asked if I had any shows coming up. "Nope, not really," I said. Little did I know. Here's what's suddenly been added to my plate:

Bare has a show at Frankie J's (4437 N Broadway) this Saturday night at 10:30 pm. Normally, Shaun and I try to be good about sticking around to see the other groups perform, but we were a last-minute addition to the schedule, so we both have to leave right after we perform to get to our other committment... The Sickest F***in' Stories I Ever Heard, at its new location, Lakeshore Theater.

Also, this week Chicago Sketch Fest starts and on Monday, January 12, at 8 pm I'm going to be a part of OctaSketch, a sketch version of the 24 Hour Plays. And then next Sunday, a show I'm directing (again), Fratricide, goes up at Sketch Fest.

And tonight I'm going to a callback for a show that should have me busy with rehearsals through March. If I get cast, of course. If I don't get cast, expect me to quietly never mention this exchange ever again. "Show? What show?"

More office-moving problems. But now FuzzyCo should be stable. (Fingers crossed)

Oops -- we were offline for a day, just now. Offices getting moved, servers getting turned off by accident, and so on. Sorry.

Man, I leave the city for 10 minutes, and you all get up to the craziest antics...

So the Playground is closed at the moment, which means the Bare show next week is in doubt (the least of their worries, I'm sure, but it matters to me). And WNEP is leaving their space and going itinerant again. But it looks like the Around Midnite Series will be taking December off and then moving to Lakeshore Theater (still as a WNEP production).

I just finished a poster for the next Belmont Burlesque Revue, featuring, well, you can see above.

You've probably already left work where you do all your web-surfing, but here's what you should find yourself psychically-influenced to do this weekend:

• Saturday night @ 9 pm - see Neutrino Project 30,000 at the 3 Penny Cinema (the time is different! 9 pm! different!)
• Saturday night @ midnight - see Cinema 2.0's Fury of the Wolfman at WNEP
• Sunday - rest

We had a Fratricide rehearsal last night to plug-in Zach Ward, who's understudying Mike Burns. Homer had scheduled two rehearsals and a meeting to get Zach up to speed, but it just took the one rehearsal. Somehow it doesn't seem fair -- the rest of us had to work for weeks (and the actors worked a lot harder than I did) to get the show where it is now, and Zach can just waltz in and be ready to go in a few hours (he did have to come in off-book (that is, with his lines memorized. Is anyone reading this who didn't know what that meant?)). It's not that Zach is so brilliant (I mean, he is, but my point is...) there's just something about coming into a show where everyone else already knows what's supposed to happen that makes everything easier.

I just got back from the first day of the Science Project, and boy are my arms tired.

Seriously, I'm exhausted. I was up until 4:30 am, taking care of last details and organizing the practice movies we had made so we could show them while we were making new ones today. I hit some seriously sound problems at about 4:00 am and decided to give up after a half an hour. Got some sleep and all that.

Today we had sound problems at the museum, too. I shake my fist at you, sound.

It all makes me rather nervous, because I can't be there tomorrow (I shake my fist at you, day job).

But we made some nice little movies today, notwithstanding the comments of the grumpy lady at the very end of the day.

I was out at the Museum today to do our tech run-through for The Science Project. It was a pretty fast tech, because the Museum staff had set most of it up for me (ahhh, so nice to be working with competent people). And it's really just projecting video and playing sound. I guess some of the other groups have complicated setups. Not me.

So... the cast has one last get together tonight -- we're going to go over some last-minute details and watch some award winning shorts to steal their ideas open our minds to the possibilities of short film. And then tomorrow at 10 am we start making movies!