Thursday, January 31, 2008

Deleted Scenes.

I haven't posted much lately, what with just getting married and work and all, but I've really been workng my ass off on my personal writing projects. Plus, I have this idea for my next Davezine, which will feature Low Level Bureaucrats 3, and...deleted scenes from the story I scrapped!
This is the intro to that section that I am working on. I hope you enjoy it!
--Dave G.




Low Level Bureaucrats 3 has taken many turns since I began it so many months ago. I thought it might be fun if I presented the version of LLB3 that I scrapped as “deleted scenes,” like on a DVD.
The basic summary of that story was this:

Karl Love, disguised as a younger man named Kyle Jones, seduces Loretta the meter maid to get an “in” to the heavily fortified Beatown Parking Authority. Jones waits for a crucial piece of equipment to arrive that will enable him to execute his plans. While he waits, he stumbles upon a fetish for women in meter maid uniforms, which makes the sex between him and Loretta amazing. Meanwhile, Loretta, happy in her current position, gets summoned into her supervisor’s office and is promoted to a job she doesn’t want. She quits her job in protest and comes home to Jones, only to find that he is no longer as attracted to her now that she is not a meter maid.

Loretta spends her days looking for another job. She goes to job interviews and feeds the meters. Jones spends all day on the internet looking at meter maids and waiting for the device to arrive. Eventually he finds a meter maid that he brings home and has sex with, while stealing her security badge. Jones tries to pick up his package, but is frustrated by the incompetence of Shit Ex (the corporation formed when a local shipping company merged with a popular laxative) and is told to wait at home tomorrow. Loretta looks around at the crop of meter maids which are a “disgrace to the position,” but she turns her back to it-- “the world is just going to have to get by without the best meter maid in the department.”

Loretta becomes suspicious of Jones, who only stays because he waiting for his package. She goes to a job interview that takes three hours, thinking that she will be getting a parking ticket--then is pissed off when she doesn’t get one. “What the fuck! I was in there for three hours and I don’t even get a parking ticket!” She marches back to the Beatown Parking Authority to get her job back, roughs up William Shatner (the boss who was a dead ringer for the Canadian actor, who in fact changed his name to confuse everyone) on his way out to his car, and then suits up in her old powder blue uniform and goes on a tear, writing tickets left and right.
Meanwhile, the detonator arrives, and Jones is thrilled. He is just about to leave the apartment when Loretta comes back, full of confidence in her powder blue uniform. He drops what he’s doing to make love to her on the floor…
…then afterward discovers his cheating, and is more incensed that he is cheating with a meter maid of inferior quality.
He leaves, sneaks in to the BPA, plants his devices in the meters--”all I need is one!” and then she finds out what he has been doing on-line, and stumbles across his plan to destroy Beatown. She calls the authorities (“Don’t put any money in the meter!”), then follows him where she thinks he will be. The two confront one another, and Jones destroys Beatown.


I thought the idea was really funny, but as I worked on it for months and months and got stuck, I came across the idea that I really wanted to be working on. It came from an article about a drug used to treat Restless Leg Syndrome, which claims compulsive gambling as one of it’s side effects. For whatever reason, it got me to thinking: what if Karl Love’s gambling compulsion of LLB 2 had actually been the result of his taking a drug that he used to treat his Freudian Slip? And the idea morphed into the story I have presented as Low Level Bureaucrats 3: The Rise of the Collective, which I wrote in two months.

And I was left with 12 pages of material destined for the trash can (or the recycle bin on my desktop). But one again my plucky resourcefulness kicked in, and I thought, what if I just made Davezine 13 a sort of a collection of the best of the gags that would otherwise be lost…like the deleted scenes/alternate endings on a DVD? So here we are.

www.daveygandthekeyboard.com

ps--new show announcements soon!

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

A new year in Davey G.

I guess this may be a little late (seeing as how the new year started 2 weeks ago) but I wanted to offer a preview of what is on my agenda for this year, both in Davey G and the Keyboard and the Davezine…before my wife and I start having cats and I’m forced to end my career, get a real job and spend all my money on cat food.

* The Davey G live album (release date undetermined, but probably late in the year), courtesy of the Baltimore Taper. It is a great live recording of my last show at the Hamilton Arts Collective (really, really hope they can get back in business!)

* Davezine Number 13 (going to shoot for March), with Low Level Bureaucrats 3, which will conclude the saga of Beatown.

* 6 more shows, to keep up the “a show every other month” thing.

* My Autobiographical book, the “How I Became Mr. Awesome” story. This may take some time.

* An expanded collection of three of my longer stories, presented in a novel form. This may involve some severe revisions of stuff I wrote as long as 10 years ago, but I think I have some good stuff that would work together.

I also had a dream one night that there was a graphic novel version of my 2001 story Little Bits of Heaven, and the idea has never left my head. I may bug you more about this to help me make this a reality (seriously--I need an artist who would be willing to spend some time on this and probably make very little money. If you know anyone who might be good for this, let me know!) But for now that’s just a dream.

Anyway, I hope 2008 is a good one for you! Keep reading and listening and coming out to Davey G shows!

www.daveygandthekeyboard.com

Monday, January 07, 2008

Criticism

Davey G and the Keyboard was recently the target of some vicious criticism, in print, from someone who apparently was not going to like it no matter what (Let me just say that this person objected to the fact that I play with a Casio keyboard, supposedly indicating a lack of seriousness--nothing could be further from the truth--and the rest of this blurb flowed from that rather unfair prejudice). Rather than respond to it directly, or dignify it by even mentioning it’s source [no, it’s not my arch enemy on Park Ave.] , I would like to offer some thoughts for others who may experience the same thing.

The best criticism, they say, is done in private, with a loving arm around your shoulder, and is never meant to embarrass or hurt.
And then there’s the other kind. The flat-out mean, the “I didn’t get it but I’m going to shit on it anyway” sort of unconstructive stuff that can only lead the person criticized to discouragement.

I invite myself open to criticism every time I get up on stage, or anytime anyone listens to my music, and though this may be shocking for me to admit, people don’t always love me. It’s just a fact of life, and I accept that.

It was especially obvious back in the days I performed at the comedy club. A lot of the times I would do two shows a night, and often it was bittersweet--the early crowd might absolutely adore me, and then a different later crowd would hate me. What it taught me is that I am the same every time: it’s the audience who changes. That is not to say that people are “wrong” not to laugh, or to enjoy my act--it is just to say that sometimes the situation can be stacked against you and there is just no saving it. That is when I just have to trust that I know what I’m doing and get through it, even if I’m not feeling the love from the crowd.

In the last three years of performing as Davey G and the Keyboard (of a total of seven), I haven’t really had a bad show (thankfully) and I have been doing this for so long that my act truly “is what it is.” If someone doesn’t like it, there really is no changing it. And that is what I tell myself, the thought that helps me deal with harsh words: I know what I do is good, because I feel it, because many, many people (who have nothing to gain by kissing my ass) tell me it’s good, because it is me, and it flows from me.

“All Art is a search for truth,” my old acting teacher said, and while I do not believe what I do is Art, for me it is truth. No bad words against me are ever going to shake me from that truth.

Thanks for reading!

--DGK.

www.daveygandthekeyboard.com