Photos by ABole, visiting gobsmacked Canadian.

$2.89 per gallon? Those were the days…

For example, Andre Royo has recently relocated to Silverlake with his wife, who runs Canele in Atwater. He should be getting ready to collect his fifth Emmy for his portrayal of Bubbles. Instead, you may have seen him for a second and a half, getting wordlessly gunned down in the background of an episode of Terminator, the Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Robert F. Chew, who played the amazing Proposition Joe, is still in Baltimore, and given the parts he’s been asked to read for by Hollywood production companies, maybe that’s a good thing. (listen at about 20:30 mark.)

At least Lance Reddick is showing up on Lost, when he’s not hawking Cadillacs.

Anybody else seen or heard of Wire alumni here in town? Anybody see them in other shows, in parts big or small?

And is there any hope for a sitcom starring Isiah Whitlock, following the antics of a lovably corrupt public official with a penchant for a certain extra-syllabic epithet? Or how about pilots for Wendell Pierce or Clarke Peters?

Tomorrow night, Casey Wilson makes her debut as a member of the Saturday Night Live cast, after honing her skills at L.A.’s Upright Citizen’s Brigade theater. (h/t Defamer)

Personally, I think she’d make a wonderful Commedia Dell’arte clown.

If you’ve ever seen Flight of the Conchords, you know and love their long-suffering manager Murray “Ginger Balls” Hewitt, imbued with genius by Rhys Darby.

Darby is filming a DVD of stand-up material at the El Rey and we’ve teamed up with Goldenvoice to give away three pairs of tickets so y’all can get your Ginger Balls on. They’re doing two shows for the taping; we’ve got one pair for the 7:00 show and two for the 10:00 show.

To claim the tickets, comment below with your favorite Murray-ism. If you’ve got a preference for which show, put it in there, along with a valid email address.

More Darby:

Rhys Darby home page (dig the Star Trek fonts)

Rhys Darby on MySpace

The Best of Murray Hewitt

Leggy Blonde

Cheer Up, Murray

Now that I’ve gone vegan, the Traditional Jewish-American Christmas of chinese food-and-a-movie has an added wrinkle. While it’s sometimes a challenge to find an LA chinese restaurant open on Christmas, finding one to serve my meat-averse, soy-loving, un-Christian behind makes it even harder. Oh, what’s a pinkocommieveganyid to do?

Thankfully, there are some options if you head on out to the San Gabriel Valley:

Vegetarian Wok: 529 E. Valley Blvd., #128, Alhambra, CA 91801. Open until 3pm

Fine Garden Vegetarian Cuisine: 841 W. Las Tunas Drive, San Gabriel, CA 91776. Open until 11pm

Happy Family Restaurant Vegetarian Food: 111 N. Atlantic Blvd., #351 (Third Floor), Monterey Park, CA 91754. Open until 8:30pm

Closer to the city proper, there’s the old standby Kung Pao Bistro:

Kung Pao Bistro: 7853 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, CA 90046 // 11838 Ventura Blvd., Studio City, CA 91604. Open until 10:30pm

P.F. Chang’s has some veg-friendly options, and while I wasn’t able to confirm if they were open, with the amount of movie theater traffic tonight, I’d be surprised if they stay closed:

P. F. Chang’s: Burbank Town Center // Beverly Center // Paseo Colorado // Sherman Oaks Galleria.

In all cases, I recommend calling to double-check how late places stay open, as I met with a lot of confusion on.

Happy whatever-holiday-you-celebrate. I intend to have some sort of veggie lo mein dish, so I can properly honor my ancestors with tradition Jewish Chinese food, as well as pay homage to the FSM’s culture-spanning noodly appendage

Like any great war, the Format Wars of the late 70s/early 80s cost many lives on both sides, and yet from the ashes was created some of the most beautiful, haunting music of our age. Come relive those heady analog days, where a tracking knob could make the difference between life and death.

We’ve got three pairs of tickets to give away for Sunday night’s VHS or Beta show at the El Rey. The first three to email me here will get ‘em.

And while you’re basking in the glow of that conflict for the ages, please spare a thought for the impending casualties of our current format showdown.

BTW, I’m backing HD-DVD. I know Blu-Ray is technically superior. But remember the list of classic blunders. As we all know, number 1 is “never get involved in a land war in Asia,” and number 2 is “never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line.” But only slight less well know is number 3: “Never, never, ever, ever, bet on Sony in a format war.”

theOffice is a writing space in Santa Monica. It’s a great place to get some work done, if you’ve got the pockets to pay for it. Which is why you won’t see me there very often. But I am on their mailing list, should they decide to open a space downtown at drastically reduced rates.

This weekly newsletter contained the following, interesting little tidbit:

REGARDING THE WGA STRIKE:

We realize that many of you belong to the Writers Guild. And because of that some of you are concerned about working in a public place like theOffice.

We want to remind you that whatever goes on between you and your laptop computer is your own business. What if you’re writing a novel, or composing letters to your grandmother, or balancing your checkbook?

The Writers Guild has more important things to do than to send out spies to theOffice to check up on your work. Besides, no one has the right to demand to see what you are working on unless they have a court order.

“Pencil’s down” means not doing any work for hire. But if we’re going to allow paranoia to spread this early on in the game, then the Producer’s Alliance will have won. And we can’t allow that to happen.

We support the WGA, and we are confident the WGA will prevail, and we will all return to work with a new contract under our belts. But let’s do so with cool heads and a steady hand.

I wonder what’s been going on there that made them feel the need to send this message out. WGA spies? Looking over shoulders? Paranoia? That’s some creepy language.

A few weeks ago, before the fires forced evacuation, I went on an overnight trip at my favorite zoo, the San Diego WIld Animal Park. I’m not much of a zoo guy, since most of them get me bummed out by the confinement of the animals. The Wild Animal Park is a joyous exception.

But this time, I had a recurring experience which was unsettling. And once I noticed it, its frequency became increasingly disturbing. I’m curious to hear if anyone has made similar observations at the L.A. Zoo. I’m especially want to hear Will’s take, as he used to work there. More after the jump.

Intelligent Design is the latest guise of a longstanding theoretical attempt to explain the world known as teleology. A teleological argument supposes “that there is purpose or directive principle in the works and processes of nature.” (From a wikipedia article that has a nice overview of the history of the teleological argument).

The teleological viewpoint was pretty well smashed to bits by theories of evolution, and yet it survives with a grip on popular imagination as an easy answer in the face of the world’s complexities. Again from wikipedia, a summation of the argument can go something like this:

1. X is too (complex, orderly, adaptive, apparently purposeful, and/or beautiful) to have occurred randomly or accidentally.

2. Therefore, X must have been created by a (sentient, intelligent, wise, and/or purposeful) being.

3. God is that (sentient, intelligent, wise, and/or purposeful) being.

4. Therefore, God exists.

So, we’re at the zoo, going on tours and listening to tour leaders talk about all the different animals. And over and over again, I hear the same sentence construction:

The [animal] has those [traits/skills/behaviors] so they can do [task].

Over and over, this same construction was used. And then the problem hit me: the word “so.”

“The giraffe has that long neck so it can reach the high leaves” implies that the giraffe was given that neck in order to get to those leaves. The unspoken question is WHO gave the giraffe that neck. The question implicitly assumes agency – that someone or something is responsible for giving the giraffe that neck in order to fulfill a purpose. It’s a fundamentally teleological assertion.

And it was definitely the one sentence. Notice the difference in meaning if it’s read as two: “The giraffe has that long neck. So it can rach the high leaves.” Nitpicky on paper? Yes. But spoken alound, the two version have completely different meanings.

If it happened once or twice, I could see it just being a simplification or a random choice of words by a given tour leader, many of whom are volunteers. But once I started paying attention, I saw that almost EVERY time an animals’ characteristics where described, they were talked about in this fashion.

At best this is lazy education. At worst, it’s laying the groundwork for the public acceptance of intelligent design and denying evolution. And this is at on of the premiere zoos in the country, if not the world.

Have any of you noticed anything similar at the LA Zoo, or any other Zoos you’ve been to? Have you had experiences as Zoos where the keepers or tour guides went out of their way to explain things in more complex evolutionary terms, or has the pressures of the marketplace to be entertaining shown you zoos that simplify and dumb down as much as possible?

While we’re in the middle of a strike over the impact of the Internet on writing, I’d like to invite you to check out The Loose-Fish Project, an experiment in using the web as a storytelling medium which we launched at BarcampLA4 this past weekend.

For the past several years, I’ve been writing screenplays, tv specs and stage plays. But I’ve gotten burned out on scriptwriting. Scripts are very strange little creatures. And I’ve come to believe that they’re just not good vehicles for telling stories, at least not in the straightjacketed fashion that Hollywood demands they be written. When you want a good read, do you curl up with a screenplay? They’re not used as primary texts. They’re blueprints for someone else to tell a story. Or in most cases, they’re just used as sales documents, and treated with as much care. Now, I’ve never heard of anybody whose life’s ambition is to write the Great American Powerpoint Deck. It’s certainly not why I started writing. But I found I’d become less concerned with “am I telling a good tale?” and more concerned with, “how do I keep from doing anything that could make a script reader or development executive stop reading.”

Many of my writing projects are adaptations. I like taking classic stories, revamping and reformulating them (yay public domain!) One screenplay I wrote took the Shakespeare play Coriolanus and made the protagonist into a modern-day baseball player. If you ever want to blow a pitch meeting, just say the word Coriolanus. Another project I spent a long time working on was a sci-fi adaptation of Moby-Dick. I think these ideas are highly commercial, but alas, I seem to be the only one.

There are loads of other kinds of artists who don’t worry about persuading the middlemen anymore. They’re using the Internet to go directly to their audience. Novelists, short story writers, musicians, video makers are uploading their work to the web, and viewers and readers can experienced it as their creators intended. But for screenplays, or really any form of dramatic writing, it’s not quite the same. You can’t really just put your script up online and expect people to read it. So, how do screenwriters get in on some of that hot circumventing-the-gatekeepers action?

You could produce the work yourself, which a lot of people do. But what if your stories are of a larger scale than you can produce with even the most hardcore group of dedicated friends? You can’t really self-produce Moby-Dick with and handycam and final cut. Well, maybe Orson Welles could, but he’s dead.

So what to do?

I found an answer in Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs. What the heck is an ARG? I was fortunate enough to be involved as a player during the 1st great ARG, The A.I. Game, also known as “The Beast.” Those of us who played it spent years trying to explain it to others, without a lot of luck. So let me defer to the wikipedia definition, which reads: “An alternate reality game is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions.”

I found myself wondering if you could have an ARG without the Game component. Just story. And then I wondered if I could take these classic stories I’m so fond of working with, and adapt them into that shape. There’s an explosion of new platforms, and every week, there seems to be some new channel, technology or social network. I started to see how they could be used as narrative surfaces, as carriers of story content.

But I was on the fence – I’d been working for over a year on my Moby-Dick screenplay. Was I really jut going to chuck it out the window so I could go in a completely new, experimental direction?

And then I read this quote from Warren Ellis and I knew I had to do it: “The hurdle to credible publishing on the web, now, is the nine dollars it costs to buy a domain name from GoDaddy, which can be mapped on to a free Tumblr or Blogger space.”

Nine dollars to publish my own work when and where I wanted in, in a format that wasn’t weighed down by a century’s worth of cruft.

Thus was born The Loose-Fish Project. It’s a storytelling hub with online distribution via the medium or media that best suits the particular qualities of each given story.

This past weekend, we unveiled the first of these stories: The Good Captain, a science fiction mystery tale told via Twitter. It’s based on “Benito Cereno,” a novella by Herman Melville. I chose Twitter because the original story hinges on the viewpoint of its protagonist. What better way to get inside the perspective of a character than the first-person descriptions of a Twitter feed? The story will unfold over the course of 6-8 weeks. We’ve started with a handful of updates per day, but shortly the pace will pick up.

While The Good Captain is playing out, I’ll be starting work on the second story — adapting Spoon River Anthology into a series of profiles on Facebook. After that, we’ve got several more stories in development. A contemporary version of Pride and Prejudice where the Bennett Sisters run a group blog. A series of linked websites that retell the story of Dracula.

And one I’m very much looking forward to. I mentioned before I’d been writing a sci-fi epic adaptation of Moby-Dick. Most people think of Moby-Dick as a revenge story, but what its main theme really deals with is that, no matter how much information you possess, how much you classify and quantify the world, some things are inherently unknowable. For a story about the collection of knowledge, what better vehicle than a wiki.

As part of this hub is a blog, The Fishery, which will be a discussion site for brainstorming about new narrative forms, examples of similar projects, and anything else that could be relevant to developing the future of online storytelling.

One of the things that we’ve been talking about is that the web-as-storytelling-medium is currently where the movie industry was in 1905. We’re just at the beginning of the journey, and who knows where it will lead. It’s all really wide open.

Which brings me to one last thing. Why “Loose-Fish?” In Moby-Dick, there’s a chapter called “Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish,” which talks about the laws that govern possession of whales on the high seas. A fast-fish is one which is claimed, or fastened to a ship. One that’s been tied down. Any fish that isn’t fastened, is up for grabs, or loose.

The future of storytelling is one whopper of a loose-fish.