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August 31, 2005

Sketchstock Aftermath

First of all, I want to say it on as many places on this website as I can: All the performers, volunteers, and audience members at Sketchstock 3000 were unbelievably awesome.

Second of all, I’d like to make sure the following milestones don’t go unnoticed…

A) Saturday the 27th marked AWOK’s tenth show. (Or 12th, if you want to count tiny emcee bits we performed Thursday and Friday. Regardless, let’s just say that sometime over the weekend, we did a show that counted as our tenth.)

B) A curious thing happened Saturday, which hadn’t happened before in my memory, which is that once or twice during our set, we got hearty applause at the beginnings of sketches, especially the Thumblettes. Presumably, this is because a certain segment of the audience must have recognized the sketch we had just started, and were happy about it. Does that make us rock stars now? All signs point to yes.

C) This weekend was living proof of what is now the Central Pillar of the AWOK Comedy Philosophy. That Pillar is: “It’s funny when Chris from Fearsome does a cameo.”

Anyway, thanks everybody. Since July 30th, we’ve just plain had the coolest month in our history, and everyone’s responsible.
And now that the market has been saturated with AWOK shows, we’ll be taking it pretty easy in September and getting a lot of new writing done. Stay tuned to the blog and front page for news as we solidify more details about a run we’ll be negotiating for a brand-new show, which will probably be Tuesdays in October.

Posted by Nate Kushner at 01:23 AM | Comments (0)

August 24, 2005

Welcome Time Out NY Readers

We’d like to greet everybody who might find their way here via the listing for Sketchstock 3000 in Time Out New York, and make this correction: There is no Sketchstock show on Sunday. The three shows are Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. See you there!
Also, Chris O’Connor of Fearsome has just been added to the Saturday lineup. Click here for reservations, and don’t forget to get the weekend pass!

Posted by Nate Kushner at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)

August 23, 2005

Finally…

Online ticketing is finally available for Sketchstock 3000!

Get them tickets now. They’ll be hoarding them after the nuclear war.

Posted by Nate Kushner at 04:23 PM | Comments (0)

August 19, 2005

“Monumental Upcoming Week for Sketch Comedy? (Welcome, Apiary readers!)

Hey, a hearty welcome to everyone who found their way here via The Apiary. I have to heartily agree with them that this is going to be a fantastic weekend for New Yorkers who likes their sketch comedy. (The Apiary itself being a really cool website for people who want to know stuff about cool NYC comedy shows.)

If you haven’t already, take a look at how sweet the Sketchstock 3000 line-up is. It’s even more complete now than it was when the Apiary made his post, and we’re even more excited.

Please come out to this thing, people. We’ve packed a lot of fun into each of these shows, and with the weekend pass option, you can’t do much better than $5 for a comedy show.

Posted by Nate Kushner at 12:33 AM | Comments (1)

August 11, 2005

For those on a low Carbon-14 diet…

Click that picture. It’s all anybody needs to say about the whole Intelligent Design fiasco in Kansas.

Hopper, don’t click this. There’s a lot of talk about “noodly appendages”, and I know that’s a sensitive topic for you.

Posted by Nate Kushner at 11:29 PM | Comments (3)

August 10, 2005

Mothers Against Drunken Sailors

I definitely just saw a TV ad for a car dealership. Fine.

Except I swear, the score for the ad was an instrumental version of “What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor?”

I guess what they would have us do with a drunken sailor is put him in a brand new car…earlye in the morning.

As a proud member of Mothers Against Drunk Sailors, Drivers Against Sober Sailing, Sailors Against Drunk Mothering, and Drinkers Against Drunk Drinking, I have to call shenanigans.

Posted by Nate Kushner at 11:36 PM | Comments (3)

The Inter-sketch-group Rap Battle Treaty of 2005

Thanks to all who attended our show at West Bank tonight, and we hope you enjoyed all the surrealism that occured therein. If you like rap battle sketches, then you really missed out tonight. If you don’t like rap battle sketches, then you were probably in a figurative hell, and we apologize.
I will attempt to speak for Elephant Larry, Dawghaus, and ourselves, when I say that from now on, we should fully disclose to each other our intentions next time we think about including a rap battle sketch in a set.

Let’s not have another repeat of the disaster of the 1922 New York Sketchfest, when more than 44 audience members* lethally overdosed on Teapot Dome Scandal sketches.








*45 audience members.

Posted by Nate Kushner at 01:07 AM | Comments (2)

August 08, 2005

Sketchstock 3000!

Hey, everybody. The cool thing that we said we were itching to announce has been announced, and we’re all feeling well-scratched.

Mosey on over here for continually updated news on the Sketchstock 3000 festival, produced by your own A Week of Kindness.

Posted by Nate Kushner at 11:00 PM | Comments (2)

August 03, 2005

A Concert Review of Kindness: The Wrens at Maxwell’s, Hoboken

Scarcely a fortnight after headlining Pitchfork’s Intonation Festival in Chicago in front of nearly 10,000 pairs of black-rimmed glasses and humans to whom those glasses were affixed, Indie-stalwarts The Wrens returned to Maxwell’s in Hoboken last Thursday to rock a sold-out crowd of perhaps two hundred people, your humble music-fancying AWOK member among them.

My friend Kevin and I hit the Washington Street Strip in Hoboken (like the Vegas Strip with fewer adults and casinos) around 8:00, and we didn’t want to show up for the 8:30 concert on time, cause we’re not losers, plus we didn’t want The Wrens to think we were too anxious, so we popped into a nearby bar with a chalkboard outside advertising $3 margaritas. This is important to the review not because we ended up getting drunk and stage diving or some predictable “oh-that’s-where-this-story-was-going” crap, it’s important because every minute the two opening acts were onstage, we were angry we’d chosen to see them and not to continue chewing on frozen strawberries.

We arrived at 8:50, not fashionably late enough, and by “fashionably,” I mean that the opening band, The Amber Jets, was not good. In addition to expending about three calories of energy moving during the entire set, the lead singer was distressingly old-looking—the word “Amber” perhaps referred to the singer’s having been trapped in amber for thousands of years before being reconstructed using the DNA of a frog that lacked lilly-pad presence. They finished at 9:45ish, and we found a place to sit at 9:46ish, but before we’d come up with a pun on Amber Jets that sufficiently described their mediocrity—“Lame-ber Jets” was about as close as we got—The Milwaukees hit the stage and we were instantly deafened and still are. It was the loudest non-Ozzfest performance I’ve ever been subjected to, and granted, we were right by the speaker, but there’s never a need for a wannabe Eve-6 / Jimmy Eat World foursome to ever be unleashed on the public anyway, much less at nine billion decibels per square suck. While the rest of the crowd pretended to be rocking, Kevin and I were sitting and had our fingers in our ears, which was less a statement against the band than it was pure survival instinct. So the Milwaukees weren’t good. And they were from Jersey, not Milwaukee. And Robin Yount wasn’t even in the band, which was bullshit.

So finally, the Wrens hit the stage at 10:50, then proceeded to set up their own instruments and undergo a sound check that took literally twenty minutes, prompting Kevin’s comment, “more like the Whens!” They kept starting songs and riffs and people kept cheering, but no one could tell if it was the actual concert or still the sound check; if Charlie Kaufman had written it, it would have been brilliant. Funnier still, the guitarist was, oddly, the only member of the band who didn’t look like a fortysomething guitar teacher, and I grew convinced that their new single, Let’s Start By Learning The Peter Gunn Theme, has got to be in the works. Finally, after singing the opening thirty-second track from the Meadowlands album (without the crickets, which made me instantly yell for my money back) the band ripped into the set at nine billion decibels, and the concert was off and running, or should I say, flying, because, you know, that’s what wrens do.

The venue was phenomenally fan-friendly and the band took full advantage; at one point, Kevin Whelan pulled a drunken frat-looking kid onstage and let him sing about half of Faster Gun and he absolutely nailed it, which was awesome enough, then Whelan punctuated it with the comment, “I’d like to thank my dad for coming up onstage and singing with us.” Later, Whelan’s triumphant proclamation, “we are from fucking New Jersey!” was greeted with massive applause and cleared up any doubts about the hometown origins of the band whose two albums are called The Meadowlands and Secaucus and were playing in Hoboken at a benefit for Jersey Beat Magazine. Needless to say, they owned the crowd from the opening millisecond well through Happy and Hopeless, their two best songs, and some scorchers from Seacaucus, which they delivered masterfully. After the last song, the band left the stage, and, since there was no backstage and nowhere to go in the packed room, they just sort of walked through the crowd, then back onto the stage for the encore, obliging shouts of “She Sends Kisses!” by playing the pseudo-ballad at nine billion decibels, then shooting into a finale at twelve billion decibels to cap off an absolutely stu-Wren-dous set. As much as I love the introspective, bitterly subdued Meadowlands album, hearing The Wrens live gave me a new perspective on just how angry and bleak they can be while still rocking harder than any other band on earth named after a type of bird. Unless, of course, you count the Fabulous Thunderbirds.

Overall, on my Indie-Concert-O-Meter, The Wrens’ performance at Maxwell’s scores three ironic T-shirts out of four. Well done, you adults!

Three ironic T-shirts

Posted by Dan Hopper at 10:24 AM | Comments (4)