Jessica Stickles occasionally blogs here from what I understand.

A Ham Thief!

For the past two weeks, I’ve been spending afternoons writing and working out of Gigi Cafe in Midtown East because it’s near enough to my physical office to go print stuff and then come back. It also has wifi and “okay” coffee, because understandably it’s not billed as a coffee cafe. It’s billed as a panini cafe. And they have good salads, which is good for all the men who work at the Bloomberg building. Salads, at this establishment, are in fact ordered mostly by men.

Nothing of any sort of mention has happened over the past two weeks until today. Perhaps because today was finally the day I became a regular, as evidenced by the fact that the Indian cafe manager came up to me to ask what I was writing by asking “What are you writing? (seeing it was a script) The next Juno?” His name is Ari and he is my new writing partner.

Today around 2:30pm, a man ordered a ham sandwich, presumably. About 5 minutes later, a woman wearing a big fur coat and really awkward heels (those shoes that look like you’re a horse?) presumably also ordered a ham sandwich. I missed these initial orders since I was listening to this annoyingly wonderful chestnut over and over and over again, so I can’t confirm this information.

Suddenly I see a giant, elegant bear flail his mighty paws. I take off my headphones to see that unfortunately it wasn’t an elegant bear at all but a graceless woman screaming at the man waiting at the counter. Evidently he grabbed the first ham sandwich that came up. She screamed, “That’s my ham sandwich, sirrrrr,” extending the R, not realizing that wasn’t the important word in her sentence. He told her to calm down and “take a pill.” She replied with, “You are a HAM THIEF!” She is now Ari’s and my third in our writing team.

This went on for a few minutes til the manager assured her that her sandwich was on the way. The man left with the argued about ham sandwich, to which the beast replied, “I wont forget this. None of us will let this go,” I suppose referring to me, an asian couple in the corner, a bus boy, a mother and two kids (probably hers?) and a man with a red sweater and painty pants. She was given a ham sandwich and a complimentary cookie, which sends a bad message to those kids there and to me.

I thought about whether or not this kind of scene would happen in Los Angeles. And I just don’t think it would. Mostly because no one eats ham out there.

Ventures

I’ve gotten a bunch of requests from various people lately to follow weird, specifically topical twitters and tumblrs and tumors. I can only assume the motive behind this movement is that people are trying to get book deals, on the heels of those website-made-to-books like Garfield w.o Garfield and My Cool Parents are Alive (or whatever that one is called). So, okay, hey sure, okay, I’ll join the party.

Here. Follow @LarryBirdBirds, which is a twitter about birds that could possibly be mistaken for Larry Bird. Soon to come, the tumor about what songs would be better if sung by owls. (Spoiler: All songs)

Four years in new york city...

I believe today is my 4-year anniversary of living in New York City.

I’ve lived in Weehawken, sleeping on a Victorian couch while a man with a beard practiced banjo in the other room. I’ve lived in Williamsburg, in a treehouse loft room with 4 Carnival Cruise ship musicians that rotated their stay in the apartment. I’ve lived in Long Island City, with a landlord that made Middle Eastern Funk Jazz Fusion music and roasted goats in our backyard. I’ve lived in Astoria, in a French woman’s home who had a picture of a bald eagle crying on the front door. I’ve lived in a different apartment in Astoria, where an old crazy woman neighbor would scream across the way at me “I know what he’s doing to you. You should run.” She died 2 months before I moved out. And I now live on the Upper West Side, in a room that has a toilet room, with only a toilet… a closet with a toilet in it.

I’m not a real person.

My final Coco Proclamation... I promise. Maybe.

I feel a little embarassed that I can’t stop talking about this Conan/Leno business, but this thing has hit me in a way I wasn’t expectng. Maybe it’s hit some of my friends in the same way. Here’s my final peace… I think.

I grew up watching David Letterman. A 12-year-old girl, who loved watching television sets get thrown off buildings, hams being tossed through the air, giving out gift certificates for free Kaiser rolls… I couldn’t believe the insanity. I was mezmorized. Here was a man who honestly had the mentality, “You think this will be funny… who knows. Lets try it.” Growing up, I wanted to write for him. As I got older, I decided I wasn’t really a late night kind of writer. I wanted to write longer comedy pieces — plays, tv, movies. But Letterman, as a comedian, a performer and a writer, had a profound effect on my life. He influenced my sense of humor and by doing so completely changed what my life would have been had he not existed. So yeah, it seems like a huge, silly statement to make, but Letterman changed my life.

I was obsessed with the whole ‘Late Shift’ thing once I found out what it was. I studied it. Read all the books. Read about every article on it. Ended up doing a 20 page college TV Business paper on it.

I think what blows my mind is how dumb people are to actually think that Leno has “no idea what’s going on” and that he just “happens into these situations because of the mistakes of NBC.” There’s a difference between being a nice guy, just being the pawn, not knowing whats happening and being absolutely manipulative and desperate.

In 1992, Leno claimed the same kind of ignorance. Where he didn’t have direct hands in the stuff that his manager Helen Kushnick was doing, he found out soon after the fact, he knew pieces were being moved. He’s not dumb. He stayed out of the way. He wanted what he wanted, with no clear reason or passion for it, other than he wanted what he wanted. He claimed back then throughout all of it, he just wanted to do right by his staff. Well flash forward, here we are again. Same “Don’t blame me,” “it’s NBC”, “I was just trying to save my staff.” It’s nonsense. And I’m annoyed there are some people who believe that.. staffers mostly, who believe in the delusion that their boss is doing this for them. He’s doing this for him, and his staff is just there as the scapegoat. As is NBC. NBC are the villians, Leno’s staff are the innocent victims and Jay Leno is the hero. The story he has written twice now.

Since I actually grew up through all of Conan’s time on Late Night, I’d say he had just as profound an effect on me as Letterman. (Also Whacking Day is perhaps the best Simpsons episode to ever exist). I can tell you, with all honesty, growing up, I didn’t watch Jay Leno. Maybe every so often for the ‘Penus Butts Wedding’ newspaper clippings bit, but other than that, I found him unoriginal and insincere. He turned The Tonight Show into Caroline’s comedy club. And he will get to do it once again in a few months.

I honestly don’t hate anyone in my life. Not even the ex-boyfriend of mine who broke up with me to get engaged to a Mormon girl (a story for another time). Hate is a tiresome, burdensome emotion. And while I don’t hate Jay Leno as a person, I hate the idea of Jay Leno. A whiny, self-obsessed comic who looks to do nothing to further comedy or the art of comedy, if you will, but just further himself and promote himself. He’s the exact opposite reason I like doing comedy. It is people like him that constantly make me check myself to make sure I’m not doing what they’re doing. Empty shallow stolen material. I don’t understand comedians who would give up a semblance of a normal, sane life to do comedy unless you actually wanted to push comedy or challenge it. Musicians push themselves to create more and more challenging work, songs that tell stories, that break genres, that push their instruments to the brink. Artists paint portraits, landscapes, abstracts etc to push what the mind’s eye sees as art. I think comedy is the same way. And to have someone come on television every night at 11:35pm, tell a bunch of awful, stale material that you think is just the warm up comedian coming on before the actual host, and that man gets to host The Tonight Show — well that upsets me. And to have that man feel he can take away the opportunity to let another comedian reshape, reform and thus evolve The Tonight Show (while yes understanding the technicality of the fact that Conan said he wouldn’t do a Tonight Show at 12:05am which is being spun as he quit, and Leno had “no choice” in being pushed back to 11:35pm) makes me close to hating Jay Leno. But I’d rather hate the idea of Jay Leno. And use it as the cautionary tale.

I have been listening to all of the podcasts, interviews, late night shows, xm radio, etc etc stuff to do with this Leno/Conan thing over the past few weeks. And literally everything that has come out, that hasn’t come from Jay Leno or Jerry Seinfeld, speaks to that same emotion. That Leno is a hack. That he is clinging to something that isn’t his. And that at the end of the day he will be forgotten as a blip. Whereas I do think a Letterman and a Coco will be remembered for changing, pushing and helping comedy to grow, in the same way many of their heroes did, Carson, Paar, Allen, Hope, Dixon etc.

I really care about this far past the level of a stupid late night show war. To me, and perhaps this is silly to say, this moment is a statement about comedy and about the idea that supporting the growth and the experiment of comedy is a cause worth getting riled up for… I mean, I gave up getting married by the age of 25 to spend my time in tiny offices writing jokes about riding a hotdog cart like a chariot. This is the time for passion.

That’s why I’m with Coco.

” What’s happened at NBC — already a perennially anemic network — over the past week has been, quite simply, one of the most shameful fiascoes in the history of modern broadcast television. We’re talking one for the ages. Pushing out Leno to keep Conan O’Brien was questionable enough a move; giving Leno a prime time slot despite the threat of rebellion from the affiliates whose revenue stream you’d be damming up, just because it’d be a corporate cash cow, was worse; pulling the plug to save a giant deal with Comcast Cable was worse still. Now this: taking back the show that was given to Conan to keep him from jumping ship all to keep Leno from jumping ship — forcing Conan to gracefully and humbly bow out because he refuses to tarnish the good name of a legendary NBC brand, one that NBC itself apparently has no compunction about making radioactive. It’s breathtaking, sociopathic incompetence. It doesn’t even make good business sense because, once again, the short-term fears of the twitchiest suits might be salved — Leno’s deadly show at 10pm is six feet under and Conan’s underperforming stint on The Tonight Show is cut short — but the chilling effect that this will have not only on audiences but on any young talent from which you might hope to cultivate loyalty is utterly decimated. Why should anyone trust anything an NBC executive says from here on out? ”

- NBC and Zucker: The Downward Spiral by Chez Pazienza (via The Huffington Post)