Toronto, it's not you, it's me.

Hey, Toronto.

I would’ve liked to have told you this face-to-face, but I guess it’s just easier to write you. I don’t think we should see each other anymore.

You’re great, really. It’s just that I don’t think it’s going to work out. When we first met, things were great: all was new, we went on some crazy adventures- it was exactly what I needed at the time. So much potential. Now though, I don’t think things have changed so much as the more we learn about each other the less of a chance you and I really have. We don’t click.

You’ve done a lot for me, I’ll admit. You got me into doing shows again, taught me the power of a community of super-talented and smart people. And you have the coolest friends! I’ve met the greatest people through you, and though I think they’ll probably side with you in the split, I’m hoping they’ll still keep in touch. Also, thanks for getting me that job.

The thing is I just don’t see us together long-term. Your style and mine are ultimately incompatible and though it sounds cold it does sadden me to rationalize it so. I wish I were more flexible, I do! But if I don’t follow my heart/guts/cojones, well then anytime we fight and let each other down I’m just telling myself “I told you so!”

It's... well it's Vancouver. We've always been close and yeah, I've been seeing Vancouver a little bit here and there and I guess I never really got over it. We just work so well together. I’m a west coast boy. I need greens and blues, I need my temperate climate and my buckets of rain. My family’s almost all there, and I never get to see my old friends anymore… I know, I’m making excuses. The basic underlying theme is that I’ve never felt any sense of permanence in this whole thing, and I think it’s time for me to move on. I know you’ll be fine without me. Maybe after some time has passed we can still hang out.

You’ll always have a special place in my heart.

Love, J.Rai

P.S. I hope it's okay if I stick around for a few more months while I find a new place.

Today's existential crisis

Usually when I start into a train of thoguht like this, I start to worry I'm going to blow a blood vessel in my brain because it just starts to feel like feedback. What follows is a chat session I had after my lunch break today. I figure a transcript is as good as re-writing it.

 
me: What a great lunch-walk.

Nat: Where did you go?

me: Just through Trinity Square, to the bank and back.

I overheard some middleschoolers discussing ESP and karma and then I had my own existential crisis and now I can't stop smiling.

Nat: Tell me about your existential crisis! I feel like it could make my day (Not the crisis aspect.)

me:  Well there were three middleschoolers, girls walking behind me chattering away.

As we passed a psychic reading place, one iof them asked "Do you believe in ESP?" and the other two responded "yeah" without hesitation.

Then before the end of the block one of them said "Karma!" about something I don't remember.

And I thought it was funny being at the age where you just believe those things because... I guess you want to, or you don't question things or whatever.

Then I thought about my own list of things like that I would create in order of descending believeability, putting ESP above Karma

And then I thought about where God would go on that list, the very top or the very bottom

Because if you put God in there then you must credit God with the creation of teh universe, which I don't

So if you eliminate that, then there's just the universe's natural existence

But why does the universe exist?

And why does anything exist at all?

Like, why is there... anything?

There could literally be nothing anywhere at all on any plane of existence.

In any dimension.

At all.

Why is there stuff?

But

There IS stuff.

There are quarks and atoms and waves of energy and as a result there are these three middle school girls, on a School day, at 1 pm, with a skate board and rollerblades in downtown Toronto having some little personal adventure

Or just a ditch day

And I get to wear a polyester sweater and use the internet.

And go outside and the wind blows in my face.

And that's pretty sweet.

Nat: Exeunt.

SoundCloud

I finally moved on an ages-old suggestion by Threeboy to jump on SoundCloud and do some audio dumping. I've put up some of the back catalogue of musical and aural things I've come up with for various TrueNuff projects of the past - I don't think it'll just be final stuff though, I want to throw up some of the bits and pieces, the works-in-progress that make up the vast majority of the things I've actually recorded.

If it weren't for the deadlines of things like the video projects I don't know if I'd ever release anything as final. Perhaps I should rename my personal studio to "Development Hell."

J.Rai's sounds on Soundcloud

On Movember

It’s now the end of November, and thus comes with it the end of Movember and its antics.

This was my third year participating in the fundraiser and my goal this year was just to top my last year’s total (when I raised $440.) This year I solicited friends and family and per usual, trying to be as low-pressure as I could but maintaining visibility by trying to create some kind content that people might wanna see and judge to be worthy of some kind of recognition of the effort.

I did some promo in the weeks leading up to November 1 when the activity kicks off. I put up some photos from last year, did some blaspheming of my record collection, some fun with photo apps, and then The Grow began.

The thing about The Grow is that it is unpleasant. I fell that the idea of the Movember Grow is that it’s the little personal sacrifice/effort, much like running a 5k or a rock-a-thon or whatever people do for fundraisers to be novel now, and it gets sponsored as a reward for your effort. There are rules (that a lot of guys skirt around in truth) that make The Grow more obvious (shave clean on Day 1, no goatees, no chops) and yes, you look awkward for the first few weeks. Some guys are lucky to fill in fast. I do not. On top of that, there is a surprising amount of blonde hair in my ‘stache, which I don’t get because I have rather dark hair. Very brown, at least. I had fairly blonde hair when I was young though. Maybe because the moustache is so young (concatenated, it’s only about 4 months old) it’s still quite young.

As usual, I got generous support from my family. We all want to give now and then and our family’s been touched by cancer, and I don’t do this kind of thing often so I suppose I don’t ask a lot. Thanks this year go to my parents, and bro and sis, Gary, Linette, Jim and Fiona who all made me feel better about the whole effort. As well, a lot of friends new and old threw in too. Some of them were supportive from the start, others were coerced with my new approach at a viral campaign this year (it worked!) – although I gotta say guys, the comments, sharing and all are really great (hundreds of views, dozens of comments, Facebook like sand re-shares) and thanks, but only like three donations came out of it! Come oooooooonnn… okay, enough. I don’t like guilt-for-charity any more than you guys do.

Anyway! This year was a great success for me, I crushed my total from last year and will probably finish in the Top 10 of my work team! This thing I find really interesting about Movember internationally is that Canada has really embraced the Movember campaign. Worldwide Canada has raised the most money per country by far (over $33 million, a $10+ million lead over Australia and the UK, triple the USA total) and we don’t even have the most participants!

Of course competition is not the key. All the money goes to the right place, research (etc.) and the awareness and promotion of getting regular checks is already reflected in my own friends and family. I want to thank every person who donated, emailed, comments, shared a photo, linked my page, re-tweeted a tweet and looked at my Movember page. You set the bar higher this year for me, so next year, I’m gonna have to work it to push it higher. 

Anyway, there's still time to donate if you're so inclined. It goes on weeks into December and if you think the effort was deserving, you can visit my MoSpace Page and donate online. You get an official receipt and everything! I will say though, I'm looking forward to shaving tomorrow. This thing is uncomfortable.

Stay healthy and thanks!

UPDATE: 3:40 pm EST Huge postscript thanks to Sarah, Iana and wee Jessica for their generous closing day donation and my first corporate sponsor ever, Flight Centre Cambridge! You guys have gotten me to almost DOUBLE my number from last year. I have to start planning the next campaign now if I ever hope to clear it. You guys are awesome.

King Kong Delta

...and we're back!

Finished my first shoot today with the new team. What team, you ask? King Kong Delta.

Impatient Theatre Company is rolling out a new project codenamed ITC Digital featuring several production teams all creating new videos in parallel. Hopefully with this much motivated talent we should be churning out a healthy stream of content very soon (first video already released!)

My production team is called King Kong Delta. I will be wearing the producer hat with them, due to my involvement with the mighty TrueNuff TV! The planning of writing meetings and shoots is a routine I'm kind of used to, and I can also contribute to the technical junk since we did the guerrilla DIY production game for several years, and we're working sans budget. WIN!

The shoot was a lot of fun: short, but it felt good to wear those shoes again. Out team is awesome and in the future we'll be casting people outside the group so it'll be good to work with various people and learn from each other.

So a little over a year later, I feel like there's enough going on to update here again. Not that I couldn't have found things in between, but if there's any relevancy to be had here then at least I should be allowed to be specific. Upcoming topics include more classes with Impatient Theatre, ITC digital, the Canadian Comedy Awards, and some other shows I'll be getting involved in. Hope to keep it interesting.

Festivals, classes, books and radio

So I'll start on the regular front: The Carnegie Hall Show. The summer's been an interesting season - while most shows take breaks because so many of the performers have opportunities to tour shows, do theatre festivals or follow the Fringe around, we too have lost each (and sometimes all) of our cast to other engagements during the summer but soon will have the whole gang back together, at least for a while. Not that the "original lineup" is the only recipe for a sure-fire show of course, we've had a slew of awesome guest performances.

The reunion of the cast is just in time though, as our show has been picked for both the Toronto Improv Festival and the Montreal Improv Festival this fall! Unfortunately, after some attempts at shuffling dates around we are unable to make the Montreal party - but there's always next year. Our Toronto date is September 23rd - Wednesday! That should be easy to make.

This week's show will be a bit of an experiment too, only in the sense of re-purposing the show as a fundraiser for a charity I'll be doing a bit of work with next month, The Sandals Foundation. Through them, while on a trip to the Turks and Caicos next month we'll be building community gardens and playgrounds in some of the less fortunate villages on the islands, and also doing a bit of environmental protection work protecting the local reefs. We're going to use this week's event toward a fundraising goal I've been challenged with through my office and we'll see what the community can provide us.

In other news, I'm in at Second City! By "in" I mean that they finally called me in about the great new Musical Directors program they've started up. They have a very cool series of workshops sharing the tricks and methods that the Second City shows use to involve live improvised music into their shows. I'm most excited about this because since I've just been making this up as I go along (which in improv, I guess is allowed!), I'm very interested to really talk techniques and go-tos with other more experienced Musical Directors. I'm already going to start more regular session accompanying classes in the training centre soon and I'll also be taking the classes while I'm there. It's very exciting!

Outside of improv, I finally got a copy of And Here's The Kicker which is a very cool book of interviews with the relatively nameless writers behind the most popular TV shows and comedians of all time. So far I've learned a lot about the development of a lot of the templates for today's talk shows, sitcoms and film comedies, but also the writers themselves are of course very funny and insightful. There's also a lot of little inter-chapter sidebars about how books get sold, jokes turn into jobs and a few "Whatever you do, don't..." lessons learned the hard way many times over by writers over the decades. I'm not even halfway through but it's already the most satisfying read I've found about writing since I finished Crafty TV Writing.

Also I've gotten back into radio in a big way lately by finding out about a lot of public radio shows in the states, notably The Moth and This American Life. I've wanted to do some kind of radio-format podcast for some time now and so many forms are so appealing, but I think I'd have to settle somewhere around radio play or documentary. Obviously those are both BROAD categories, but I just don't know the words to form the specific type that I'm thinking of yet. I've reassembled my portable recording kit so I'll get to start experimenting on locations again soon. If only I knew anything about documentary...

Until next time!

Beer Pop/Music

As I mentioned previous a couple weeks ago while I was in Vancouver visiting I hung with the TrueNuff boys and did some video-ing. While I was there James also showed me the newest addition to the merch store: a Cute little Japanese "safety bottle opener" they labeled as the "Beer Popper." We wanted to shoot some kind of commercial clip for the new item (even though by the time it went live they'd already sold half their stock!) We did land on an idea of something in the vein of Vince "Offer" Shlomi of ShamWow and Slap Chop fame:



What we ended up shooting was an improvised informercial pitch spot in that style. With a little clever editing on the dudes' part it came out this way:



Now one of the best things to ever happen to the Slap Chop brand was a killer video and music remix by the now-much-better-well-known DJ Steve Porter that was known as "Rap Chop"



So as an exercise in what I figured was inevitability, I thought I'd beat out the a) request for me to try doing a remix and b) the other fans that might just do one first anyway, and do my own. I wasn't going to do the auto-tune/vocoder stuff of the other one, I just wanted to edit, beatmatch and slice. While trying to make some drum beats for it though, I realized I was trying to replicate the beat from The Soulsonic Force's "Planet Rock" - so I figured screw it and I just decided to do a Mash-Up, which seems to be all the rage right now anyway (or at least it was, it may be on it's way out yet.) Here it is:



Doing the edit was a lot of fun and I forgot how much fun it was - I hope to find other little things like this to have fun with coming up.