Wanted: Ambitious Young Filmmakers

This article was written for NYU Livewire:

After her original editor bailed, writer/director Nancy O’Mallon desperately needed a film editor for her first feature documentary, about a journey across New Jersey’s blueberry country.

She turned to the online network Shooting People and found Melissa Ulto in New York.

“We ended up working really well together, and now we are partnering on a few other projects,” said Ulto, who became both editor and animator for O’Mallon’s The Mighty Humble Blueberry.

Part social network, part job search and message board, and part video showcase, Shooting People and other new sites like it are helping filmmakers, actors and crew find each other to produce films — and also to show films to new audiences.

Other specialty film sites include the Asian American Filmmakers Network, the Louisiana Independent Filmmakers Network, Queer Screen (for Australian gay and lesbian filmmakers), and Intellifilm, aimed at college film students.

Three New York University film students started Intellifilm in 2006, to help their film school peers cast and produce their work. Membership is free, and more than 1,000 filmmakers and movie-lovers have joined.

“People put all this money into making their movies, but the sad truth is, a lot of them don’t get watched,” said Eric Krausz, who started Intellifilm with fellow students Surjyakiran Das and Steve Gnoza in 2006. “Short films don’t have a long life after they’re made. So we wanted to make a venue where they could be watched, where a film doesn’t get lost among viral videos, like on YouTube.”

Before they find an audience, though, filmmakers need a team to make a movie.

“You can’t make a film on your own,” said Jess Search, who co-founded Shooting People with fellow filmmaker Cath Le Couteur in London, then helped expand it to New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. “Film is different from photography or painting or really any other art. People come together to make a film.”

For his 2006 DVD Yoga 4 Fellas, a spoof of instructional exercise videos, London actor and filmmaker Ailon Freedman went to Shooting People to find actors and get advice on topics ranging from casting to DVD distribution to publicity. His DVD has now been picked up for international distribution.

Shooting People members have won awards at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, premiered at Sundance, been nominated for Oscars, screened at Cannes and have found wider audiences than they might have otherwise, its founders say.

The network began with 60 of Search and Le Couteur’s friends; today, about 30,000 members participate in more than 100 productions each week. Membership costs $40 per year, but its founders say Shooting People has yet to make a profit.

Dr. Simone Ahuja often travels to India, where she is shooting a PBS travel series to be called “Indique: Untold Stories of Contemporary India.” In Bombay, she spotted a Shooting People ad for a producer to work on a film about the national diabetes epidemic. She eagerly signed on, to a production that eventually ran on CNBC as “Diabetes Around the World.”

Shooting People’s Mobile Cinema also crosses the country each summer, screening its members’ films along the way — in theaters, bars, even living rooms.

“There’s a plethora of ways to get films seen, especially on the internet,” said Ingrid Kopp, the network’s U.S. director. “But it’s sometimes hard to separate the ‘noise’ from the good creative filmmaking.”

Not everyone is sold on the idea of linking up with strangers online, though.

“Every job I’ve had on a movie has come from another job,” said NYU film student Scott Rashap. “I would not think to look online, because it’s all based on personal relationships in the film business. Why hire someone you’ve never met?”

But one connection leads to another. Many established filmmakers also look to Internet sites to find fresh, young talent.

“There’s no big corporation here,” Search said. Each member is “just a guy trying to make a film.”

A Cigarette For Your Life Story

This story was written for NYU Livewire, the New York University Department of Journalism's feature syndicate. The article currently appears in the Resident and Worldpress.org:

I am standing outside a bar in the East Village with my cigarette clenched between my lips. A young man walks out the door.

“Hey buddy, do you have another cigarette? I’ll give you half a joint for it.”

I have nearly a full pack in my pocket, so why not? He shows me the joint, but I shake my head.

“Thanks. You got a light?”

You might think this would be the end of our encounter. But it is only the beginning.

Tonight as so many other nights, in front of this bar as so many other bars, a cigarette is exchanged for a life story, crammed into the five to seven minutes between lighting up and stomping out.

This man is in his mid-twenties, with greasy brown dreadlocks, piercing eyes and an unkempt beard that obscures most of his face. He extends his hand and tells me his name is Noah, nice to meet you.

Noah says he is an artist and that all of his work is created with materials he finds on the city streets, in trash cans, and in the subway. Broken subway tiles and defunct tokens are repurposed as a belt buckle. Discarded ketchup and mustard packets become a painting. Colorful bits of shattered glass find their way into a mosaic. The city is, quite literally, his palette.

His newest project is MetroCard art. “I’m having a lot of fun with that right now,” he says.

“It’s great because I can do it all with what I find on the street. People throw out so much stuff that they don’t even think about. And then I go and sell it right back to them.”

I stomp out my cigarette and promise that I will look out for some good trash for him.

I’ve met innumerable people like Noah — although no one else, of course, at all like him. I have talked to homeless people, drunken partiers, bouncers, bartenders, confused tourists, delivery boys and bike messengers. A few entrepreneurs have tried to sell me vinyl records and light-up yo-yos. All as I stood outside taking a few drags of that slow-burning cigarette.

Restaurants and nightclub smoking bans now protect the health of employees and patrons in nearly half the United States. But they’ve also pushed people out into the streets. The unexpected side effect: the bans force us to talk to one another.

A downtown bouncer tells me about his two loves — a Danish woman who lives in Amsterdam with their son, and a Chinese woman who moved back to Beijing after the birth of their daughter.

A West Village waiter taking his smoke break is incredulous that a foolish friend has been paying alimony and child support in cash. “Man, I just know he’s gonna end up paying that woman twice!”

Outside an Off Track Betting outlet an old man smoking a cigar says he’s lived in this neighborhood since he and his wife emigrated from Poland almost six decades before.

They had to move, on two days notice, when the city condemned and demolished their apartment building years ago. They used to own a clothing store on this block, but that too is gone. He barely recognizes the neighborhood, now. But he refuses to ever move again.

Then he goes back inside to place his bets.

I leave Grand Central Station and light up. A man steps in front of me and asks could I spare some change, or maybe a cigarette? His gaunt face is almost hidden under a stained gray beanie, and his bright red windbreaker is full of holes.

“That’s Jake,” he says, taking a long drag from the cigarette I hand him, and pointing to an old Labrador retriever crouched at his side. “My name’s Carl. And those guys” — he points to a group of three men huddled around a shopping cart — “they’re my buddies. We’re all ex-marines. Now we live here on the street.”

They take care of each other, he says. “And I take care of Jake.”

Carl says he is 44, but he looks much older.

“I have cancer,” he says matter-of-factly. I’ve already given him my change and a cigarette, so I assume he is telling the truth.

“And I mean, I don’t really care about it anymore, because what can I do? But I’m all he’s got.” He tells how he rescued Jake from a friend’s apartment, where the dog had been chained in a closet, often unfed.

“I had to punch the guy a few times, ended up breaking a chair over his head. When I left with Jake, I wasn’t sure whether the dude was alive or dead.” The ex-owner and Carl no longer speak.

Maybe the reason these encounters are so exciting is that I know they’ll end when my cigarette does. I listen to people’s stories, or at least the bits and pieces they choose to share, and feel I’ve learned something about the city and its people. It’s just too bad that, even while cigarettes are offering me such a wide view, they’re killing me inside.

Bob Saget is one of the best people on the planet.

Bob Saget recently came to NYU to film an upcoming HBO stand-up comedy special. I got the chance to talk with the actor/comedian before the release of his movie in January (but never wrote about it until now):

On a January afternoon, five reporters sit at a small round table in a cozy room at the Gramercy Hotel, fiddling with tape recorders and arranging, and rearranging, their notebooks and pens and bottles of sparkling water in front of them while they wait for Danny Tanner to arrive. Sorry, not Danny Tanner – Bob Saget, former star of the mega-hit family TV show “Full House” and also one of the dirtiest minds in stand-up comedy.

Saget doesn’t make them wait long. He enters the room with a broad grin, as everyone stands to shake his hand and introduce themselves. The 50-year-old comedian actually seems happy to be here for the next hour to talk about Farce of the Penguins, his low-budget straight-to-DVD spoof of the hit documentary March of the Penguins. His smile and laughter are infectious, and set a mood as if everyone is just bullshitting with their divorced uncle at a family picnic.

And like your uncle, Bob Saget will use his polite indoor voice and offer fatherly advice in front of your mother. As soon as she leaves the room, though, he’s joking about having sex with the entire cast of “Full House,” or his current favorite: penguin anal rape.

“I’m affectionate to this crazy thing,” Saget says of his new movie, once the official questioning begins. “I just said, you know, I’d love to take March of the Penguins and just be an idiot and make a stoner movie out of it.”

Farce of the Penguins, the newest entry in the growing penguin genre, is comprised entirely of stock documentary footage, in which the penguins have been given voices by Saget’s friends and colleagues – ranging from Lewis Black and Mo’Nique to Dane Cook and Abe Vigoda, and countless more – to deliver 80 minutes of sex and fart jokes. Samuel L. Jackson narrates.

Farce allowed the comedian and host of such TV hits as “America’s Funniest Home Videos” and “1 vs. 100” to showcase what he does best – add middle-school humor voiceover to shots of people getting hit in the balls, or more often in this case, penguins taking a crap.

“We’re desperate for footage. It’s one in the morning. [Editor] Michael Miller’s gone home - he has a life. I’m in the editing room thinking, ‘What are we gonna do? We’ve got two weeks. We gotta deliver. We’re overtime.’ And the assistant editor goes, ‘I got some footage of a monkey banging a coconut, you wanna see it?’ He was just a beaten man. And I’m like, ‘Yeah!’”

Although recent high-profile appearances in “Entourage” and The Aristocrats have allowed, or even encouraged, Saget to show off his dirty old man persona, in real life he is as charming and pleasant as Danny Tanner. And even if it is all just an act (because after 30 years in show business, celebrities like Saget tend to be savvy with the press), the reporters at the Gramercy sense his sincerity.

“People ask me to do cameos and be the dirty guy in the movie,” Saget says, “and I’m like, ‘I’ve done seven cameos in the past five years, that’s enough.’ I think we’ve suffered enough. Because it takes ten years to get a job, and then ten years to do the job” – in this case, playing a straight-laced single father of three on “Full House” – “and then ten years to tell people you’re not that person.” He laughs and says, “Please forgive me for what I’ve done.”

One more from the vaults...

This article was also written for Wissahickon High School's Trojan Times:

Phish return to Philly

Phish have been working hard to reclaim their title as jam band kings, having both released a new album and finished a winter tour that is their first in over two years. The break was a temporary hiatus for the band, each member pursuing solo projects until they were ready to reenter the studio together once more. Now Phish have returned triumphantly, as evidenced by their stop at Philadelphia’s First Union Spectrum on Tuesday, February 25, in the middle of their two-week tour of the country.

The first set opened with the energized “Julius,” and also included particularly vibrant performances of the live favorites “Slave to the Traffic Light” and “Water in the Sky.” As is characteristic of the band, several songs were extended into lengthy jams, some exceeding fifteen minutes while never losing their pace or energy. Following an intermission, Phish returned for a second set, which would include “AC/DC Bag,” “Cities,” and “Runaway Jim,” among others. For three hours, the band played their unique mix of funk, jazz and rock.

Throughout the night, the band played a varied mix of songs, choosing tracks most often from Billy Breathes, as well as their most recent album Round Room. Noticeably absent from the set was anything from the 2000 release Farmhouse, arguably the band’s biggest hit to date. Instead, Phish opted to play for their long-time fans, with a set spanning their entire career. This focus on the band’s roots resulted in a far more rewarding concert, dedicated to the spontaneous jams the band is famous for.

Phish first formed in 1983, and has since steadily grown in popularity. Their following is even compared to that of the Grateful Dead by some. In fact, after the death of Jerry Garcia, it seemed as if Phish had claimed the jam band title that the Grateful Dead had left behind. It was this sudden burst of fame that eventually led to the band’s two-year breakup.

Guitarist and band leader Trey Anastasio, bassist Mike Gordon, drummer Jon Fishman (the band’s namesake), and keyboardist Page McConnell have regrouped, more dedicated to the music than ever. Instead of the usual antics and gimmicks that have become a staple of Phish’s live shows – flying hotdogs, amplified vacuum cleaners, on-stage trampolines, or thousands of colored balloons, just to name a few – the band played on a simple, well-lit stage at the Spectrum. The focus was on pleasing their fans with the music that has not been heard live in over two years. They succeeded.

Through two decades and twelve albums, Phish has become one of the hottest live performances in rock music. They did not disappoint on this latest tour. If you missed the show, or want to relive the experience again and again, you can check out phish.com, where each date from their winter tour is available for download as part of the Live Phish promotion. For only $9.95, you can download an entire concert to your computer; and while it may not exactly make you feel like you were there, it might be enough to get you excited about Phish’s next concert.

From the vaults

This concert review was written for Wissahickon High School's student newspaper, the Trojan Times, in 2002.

Aerosmith rocks the Tweeter

With one of the most tumultuous careers in rock music history, it is simply amazing that Aerosmith even managed to take the stage on Saturday, September 7th at Camden’s Tweeter Center.

The band of Boston natives, recently inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, released their self-titled debut album in 1973. They stumbled along the road to fame in the early 80’s, but have since made a startling comeback - sparked by Run-DMC’s hip-hop rendition of the classic “Walk This Way” in 1987.

Not only have they become rock icons in their own right; the boys of Aerosmith, all over fifty years old, can still stomp out the jams with the best of them. From the raucous set opener “Toys In The Attic” to the immortal “Sweet Emotion;” from the power ballad “Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” (the band’s biggest hit to date) to the crowd favorite “Dude (Looks Like A Lady),” Aerosmith has cemented their status as one of the greatest American rock bands of the last thirty years.

Steven Tyler sang with abandon, a feat that is rare for a performer of his age. He swaggered and strutted across the stage, at times riding his trademark tasseled microphone stand like a horse. Most importantly, you could tell he was having fun up there.



Guitarist Joe Perry was in equally fine form that night. Perry was especially impressive during his many extended solos throughout the show, and once took a turn in front of the mic with the Eric Clapton-esque “Stop Messin’ Around.” He and Tyler shared a chemistry that exuded energy for the sweaty crowd of thousands.

There were many surprising highlights during the show. In the middle of their set, Steven Tyler shouted to all the fans on the lawn, “We’re coming to you!” The house lights went down, and the band soon appeared on a small stage in the middle of the Tweeter’s lawn seating area to perform three of their best, including the anthemic “Dream On.”

An unprecedented encore closed out the already unforgettable concert. A set list full of variety and energy culminated in one of the greatest finales I have ever seen. Opening acts Kid Rock and Run-DMC joined Aerosmith onstage for a truly rocking performance of “Walk This Way,” a perfect blend of rock and rap that will never be matched by the likes of Korn or Limp Bizkit.

For all the positives of the night, however, one thing remains constant: Steven Tyler is still as hideous as he was thirty years ago, and years of drugs and a life on the road have not been kind. But the music remains ageless.

OTB

Off Track Betting was introduced to the world of horse racing over 30 years ago to combat illegal bookies and organized crime, but ever since, the organization has dealt with the same corruption from the inside while also encouraging gambling in the city.

There are over 60 Off Track Betting, or OTB, sites in New York City’s five boroughs, all of which allow gamblers to bet on the day’s horse races around the country, rather than have to go to the racetrack to do so.

Off Track Betting accepts an average of 1.6 million sales transactions per day and handled over one billion dollars in bets in 2004, according to the NYC OTB, and there are currently about 18,000 active telephone accounts on their Automated Telephone Betting system.

Thomas Hart, 86, has been betting on horse races for 60 years. “I used to go to the track, but now I don’t have the time,” he said. “I use the phone now, so I don’t have to wait in line or worry about tickets. Now I can watch [the races] at home on TV. OTB makes life easier.”

But many contend that Off Track Betting simply allows New York’s poorest residents, many of whom are compulsive gamblers, to consistently lose money, on the same scale as alcoholics and drug addicts.

Hart said he goes to the OTB on Delancey Street “almost every day.” Whereas OTB’s advertising sells the image of attractive young people enjoying the spoils of successful gambling, in each OTB establishment one is more likely to find a crowd made up of cigar-chomping men with gray hair and discolored hats, crowded into a sparse room lined with televisions along the walls, standing on a floor littered with betting stubs, advertisements and candy bar wrappers.

Off Track Betting is the one of the few legalized gambling venues in New York State. The men gather not only to place their bets, but to watch the races and cheer on their favorites. Each of the nearly two dozen televisions displays a different track: Aqueduct, Santa Anita, Laurel, Gulfstream, the list goes on. The end of each race is marked with shouts of “Come on!” and “Please God,” in English, Chinese and Spanish, among other languages.

The convenience, not the atmosphere, is what attracts most bettors to Off Track Betting.

“I don’t come here looking for friends,” said Sam, 46 (whose last name is withheld at his request), who has been betting at the OTB on Lafayette Street about three times a week for the past 10 years. “The track is just too much out of the way. Plus prices are up. They do nothing to get you over there.”

Sam’s friend Joseph, 63 (who also requested his last name withheld), recognized the dangers of such a convenient betting system. “At OTB, you can lose a lot of money real fast because it’s so much easier to bet over the phone than to go to the track.”

Sam and Joseph met at Alcoholics Anonymous, and have since maintained their bond by gambling instead of drinking.

“It’s a lot of the same people here all the time,” said James Hill, 30, a security officer at the Delancey Street OTB. “Even though they won’t admit it, you can tell there’s kind of a community here. They all know each other.”

Stranger in a Strange Land

The population of international students at New York University is slowly declining, even as immigration to New York City has been steadily increasing since 9/11, according to NYU’s Office of Institutional Research and Program Evaluation.

International students have contributed a progressively smaller percentage to the student body for each of the past three years. At the same time, however, immigration to the New York region continues to increase, with rapid growth among Hispanic and Asian populations, according to an analysis of 2004 Census estimates by the Brookings Institution.

Paula Kupfer, 19, is a native of Panama City, Panama, and a freshman at NYU majoring in journalism. She has encountered frustration at being part of such a small minority at the university, where according to the College Board only seven percent of students are Hispanic, and far fewer are from Latin American countries.

“I wish more of the international students were Latin American,” Kupfer said. “Sometimes I meet someone from Ecuador or Brazil or other Latin American countries, and it just feels like we click. We get each other. Americans just operate on a different level.”

Kupfer came to the United States in September because she felt that a degree from an American university would be more valuable than one from Panama. But even in a city where non-Hispanic whites are becoming a minority, Kupfer found it difficult to adjust to a culture that is very different from her own. She has no family in the United States, and she still misses her native country.

“Living in New York, I miss nature, going to the jungle or going to the beach,” she said. “Just to be surrounded by trees. [Panama City] is a major city, but in an hour you can be at the beach, or you can grab your gear and go scuba diving or go camping.”

New York City is the world capital for international students with over 30,000 enrolled in colleges and universities in the five boroughs and about 45,000 foreign students studying within a 50-mile radius, according to the Institute of International Education.

“It’s good to get out of your own country for a while, and New York seemed like it would offer good exposure,” she said. But “people in America, especially in New York, are colder - more about themselves. I like going to school here, but I don’t love the lifestyle.”

Before coming to America, Kupfer briefly worked for La Prensa, the leading newspaper in Panama. She said that she was published in the newspaper several times a week in the months between her high school graduation and the beginning of her NYU career. Now Kupfer works at the front desk of the Deutsche Haus at NYU, because as a foreign student she cannot legally apply for work study or any off-campus job.

Although NYU sponsors activities that promote a sense of community among its international students, Kupfer stopped going to them very often when she became disheartened by the lack of people involved. She said that it remains difficult for her to meet new people from a similar background as her own.

But overall, Kupfer values her experience in New York City and plans to remain in the city after graduation, if only for a year or two.

“I love the independence of being here. Whenever you leave home you feel that, but in New York it’s especially strong.”

In advance of Easter Sunday...

For many New York University students, Easter Sunday is a day to eat jelly beans and marshmallow Peeps, dye hard-boiled eggs and maybe watch Charlton Heston part the Red Sea. But far fewer treat Easter as a churchgoing holiday, a time of religious reflection and prayer.

“I feel like it should be special,” NYU student Ryan Kalb, 20, said, “but really it’s like any other Sunday. I'm not very religious but my mom is, and she treats it like it’s such an important day. I'm like, who cares.”

Kalb’s sentiments are typical of his generation, it seems. There are about 2.6 million Catholics in New York City, and 53 percent of Americans worship weekly – down from about 80 percent three decades ago, according to Father John P. McGuire of the Catholic Center at NYU.

“There’s a category of people who consider themselves good Christians, but to whom weekly worship isn’t very important,” McGuire said. “They’re cultural Catholics, not religious Catholics.”

While nearly all of the students in an informal survey agreed that Easter - and Christianity in general - has apparently lost its meaning on NYU’s liberal college campus, McGuire is quick to contend that religion is not dead yet. Since he joined the Catholic Center in 1995, McGuire said that it has grown to about four times its size and reaches more than 1,100 of NYU’s 18,000 Catholic students weekly.

At the same time, McGuire said that only about 10 percent of his weekly congregation is comprised of students; the rest, he said, are older member of the community.

“I like Easter because it's a cultural tradition for my family,” said NYU student Alexis Buryk, 20. “But the religious bit doesn't mean a lot to me. I look at it more as a metaphorical resurrection, not really in celebration of Jesus, more as a celebration of Spring rebirth.”

Buryk and Kalb reveal a common sentiment among their peers – that Easter has taken on a meaning based more on familial conventions than religious convictions.

“Easter is an Americanized holiday more than a religious one,” NYU student Chris Kalicki, 20, explained. “The religious aspect was kind of taken out of the equation, and I feel like it’s sort of a fall-back holiday that you can celebrate without necessarily being or feeling religious, since the Easter bunny has little to do with J.C. himself.”

Even though many Americans worship only once a year, weekly church attendance is higher in the United States than in any other nation at a comparable level of development, according to a worldwide study based at the University of Michigan.

Overall, the importance of religion has been declining in the developed world, while in countries experiencing economic stagnation and political uncertainty, religion has remained strong, according to Ronald F. Inglehart, a researcher at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research and director of the World Values Survey.

This may also be a result of higher education, which grows alongside economic development - especially at a school like NYU, with a typically liberal student body.

“I think [the church] is much stronger than people think,” McGuire said. “The diversity of the students we reach is phenomenal.”

But for every churchgoing student at NYU, there is another like Jeff Polley, 21, who seems a bit confused. “Is Easter the day God died, or the day God was resurrected?” he asked.

Comedy = Tragedy + Time

The other night, I ran into a comedian in Washington Square Park who I had interviewed months ago for a school assignment. Here, just in time for April Fool's Day...

“The truth is, the status of stand-up comedy in New York is like a sideshow,” says comic Ashley Strand, one of the city’s countless struggling up-and-comers. “It’s a footnote. ‘We were in the Village and the weirdest thing happened – we went to a comedy show!’”

From high-profile comedy clubs like Dangerfield’s, Caroline’s and the Comedy Cellar to low-rent joints such as Comedy Village, Underground Lounge, and hundreds of nightly open mikes, there are plenty of fart and dick jokes to go around in this city. But most of those jokes are told by people like Ashley Strand, a hard-working comic whose name you’ve never heard – or if you ever did hear of him, you probably don’t remember.

Don’t worry, he’s not insulted. “There are very few levels in stand-up comedy,” Strand contends, “where anyone remembers the name of the acts after they leave. They just don’t, unless you’re on TV, or if you specifically buy tickets for a single act.”

Most comics have to work for more than a decade before anyone remembers their name. Strand has been working the comedy circuit for the past two years – but he has not yet been paid a cent for his act. So this tall, expressively bug-eyed and caterpillar-eyebrowed stand-up still has to keep a day job installing home theater systems.

“It’s kind of cool,” he says, “since I’m 34 and I have no marketable skills. I’m like, alright, finally I’m going to learn how to do something. I mean technically I’m a moron. But you gotta do something to support yourself during the day, and it has to be this balance of something that’s not so mind-numbing that it saps you of your energy or leaves you too stressed to perform.”

Strand originally came to New York to pursue an acting career. But like many aspiring actors, he eventually became disillusioned with the theater. “I thought, I’m gonna be eating Ramen noodles until I’m 60 for this?” Strand says. “I don’t think so. I can be dissatisfied with more lucrative shit.”

Of course, stand-up comedy offers even fewer opportunities for financial success, but Strand heard about an open mike night and decided he had to try it at least once. So he showed up at Siberia, a dive bar far west on 40th Street, expecting a room full of comics.

What he found instead was an empty club and an immediate offer to host the weekly show – unpaid, of course. With no prior experience, Strand ran the show for about a year, then realized he had to move on and work up to what he calls “the real comedy clubs” if he ever wanted to progress as a comedian.

When he started out at other open mike nights and various comedy clubs over a year ago, Strand says, “It was two months of total ego annihilation. And not in the good, Eastern, ‘losing attachment’ sort of way. It was the bad, Western, still-trying-to-maintain your-ego-while-being-crushed way. Some places I did so badly that I thought, I can never even walk down that block again.”

Even after each bad set, Strand knew he had to just get up there again, because he says that he immediately felt more comfortable on stage as a comic than he ever had as an actor. He still has to deal with the typical insecurities that face any performer – the difference is that comedians use those same insecurities to make other people laugh.

Strand performs Friday nights at the Underground Lounge, on the Upper East Side at the corner of 107th Street and West End Avenue. The room holds about 20 to 30 people, many of whom are amateur comics who are either performing there or evaluating the competition. You’ll hear jokes about the mundane (“Pet health insurance? When I was a kid, pet health insurance was a new pet!”) or the bizarre (impressions of Al Pacino as a librarian, Antonio Banderas as a high school janitor or Robert DeNiro as Santa Claus), racial stereotypes and jokes about aging, or the typical repertoire of sex, drugs and more sex.

Strand tries to take his set a little further each week, testing his audience to see how far they will go with him. A bit about female ejaculation leads to the “man-gina” game (he will have to explain that to you himself), or a tirade about hating sex altogether. Not that he actually hates sex, he says, he just thinks it’s funnier to take all those little insecurities or annoyances and combine them into one sex-hating rant.

“All of my comedy is based on my suffering,” Strand says. “I’ve been sucking for a long time, with a few moments of not sucking mixed in. But the few moments of not sucking really kick ass.”

After months of struggling at open mike nights around the city, Strand refuses to return to them. “Open mikes are terrible, because comedians are the worst audience ever. For the most part, everyone there is nervous and fearful and thinking about their own act. Or they’re embittered and hateful and competitive. Either they’re not listening to you or they’re listening to you and hating you. No one wants to be in the audience; they want to be on stage.”

To avoid the open mikes, Strand resorts to a route taken by many unpaid novice comedians. He stands outside the club before a show, “barking” and handing out fliers for two hours in exchange for a few minutes of stage time; or he performs at “bringer” shows – bring people to the bar for their two-drink minimums, and you get your time. And even if there is no pay involved, the experience is invaluable. After all, it takes more than the best sex jokes, the best celebrity impressions, or the best one-liners to get noticed.

“Live comedy is all about dealing with what’s in the room,” Strand says. “You can’t hide on stage. You have to get up in front of a room full of strangers and form a relationship within the first thirty seconds, and then maintain that. And it’s extraordinarily difficult.”

Which brings us to the comedian’s worst enemy – the heckler. Perhaps the greatest challenge any comic faces, beyond having to keep an audience laughing for the duration of his time onstage, is a heckler.

But how does Strand avoid a Michael Richards-style meltdown when the jeers overtake the laughs? He says that the best advice he ever got was to “just be funny. You just have to come back with something funny. Get back on track.”

He remembers a particularly harsh heckler who had been bothering every comedian who took the stage one night at Comedy Village, where Strand performs regularly.

Some sort of flight or fight instinct must have come alive in Strand. He had been heckled off the stage two days earlier, and he fumed on this night while he watched a drunken bully interrupt every other comic’s set. When the time came for Strand to get up there and face the heat, he was prepared.

“First thing I said when I got on stage: ‘Uh, hey, are there any drunk British people in the audience?’ Everyone laughed, and from there I didn’t even tell a real joke until the very end of my set – I just went to work on this guy for eight minutes.”

He says that you have to be careful not to anger or alienate the entire audience just to go after one person, but when the right time comes, he relishes the opportunity for some karmic retribution. As long as the room keeps laughing, roll with it.

“Comedy means being a craftsmen and an artist,” Strand says. “I mean, that’s sort of high-flown rhetoric for a guy who tells dick jokes. But it’s fun and it’s hard and it’s exhausting – and worth it. When I stop doing it is when it stops being worth it. And I haven’t made a cent doing it and nobody knows my name.”

Perhaps more people will know the name Ashley Strand in the future. Until then, he’s just trying to make people laugh, one night at a time.

Chris Rock's domestic side

This article appears in the March 12 issue of amNewYork:

Comedian Chris Rock expects some criticism for his new movie, "I Think I Love My Wife," in which he plays a black family man living in white suburban Westchester and working in an even whiter Manhattan investment banking firm. People may say he's gone soft; fans may worry that he's lost his edge.

But Rock is OK with that.

"I hope I get softer over the years," says Rock, 42. "You evolve. I can't be the guy I was 20 years ago.

"I was never angry. I was only edgy compared to other things. … I was only edgy because you watched Paul Reiser before me. But he's not not edgy, he's just Paul. And I'm not edgy, I'm just Chris."

Rock wrote, directed and stars in "I Think I Love My Wife," co-starring Gina Torres as his devoted wife and Kerry Washington as the bold bombshell who draws him into adulterous temptation, blowing his formerly routine life out of the water.

"I like playing a grown-up," Rock says of his role. "I think most comedians play guys that won't grow up. And I think my comedy comes from being a grown-up."

"I Think I Love My Wife" is based on the French film "Chloe in the Afternoon," directed by Eric Rohmer, about a happily married Parisian man who fantasizes about other women but never considers infidelity until an old acquaintance drops by and tries to seduce him.

If a witty, elegant, French character study seems like odd source material for a Chris Rock comedy, he isn't exactly surprised.

"It's weird," Rock admits. "I know it sounds like a joke. But I loved ["Chloe in the Afternoon"], and I got [co-writer] Louis C.K. a copy and he loved it, and we both thought that we could get a lot of comedy in here. We thought it was like a house with no furniture: there's a lot of jokes that could go in here."

The result is a story that probes the fuzzy line between fantasy and infidelity, telling the humor-filled truth about the pratfalls of married life.

"Is [the movie] autobiographical? No," Rock says. "I definitely relate to the character. I've been married 10 years; I have two kids; I live in the suburbs; I commute into the city – all that stuff. It stops there, pretty much."

He adds, "Any guy, anybody -- gay, straight, whatever -- you see attractive people every day. You notice them, and you keep moving."

TMZ.com reported in November that Rock was filing for divorce after nearly 10 years of marriage to wife Malaak Compton. But he has since refuted the claims, and says now that, "It's nothing. It's all rumor. We know Britney cut her hair. But it's a rumor that she's crazy."

"I Think I Love My Wife" opens March 16.

Steak wit'

Pat Olivieri probably didn’t know, more than 75 years ago, that he had created a city-defining sandwich when he sliced up a rib-eye steak, slapped it into a roll and tossed some onions and melted cheese on top for lunch. But the cheese steak, as it would be called, became the iconic Philadelphia food.

It’s not hard to explain the basics of a cheese steak to someone who’s never had one. The name gives it all away – cheese and steak. Put it on a fresh Italian roll. Add some fried onions if you like (Philly natives know it’s your first time if you skip the onions). Sure, there are all sorts of variations: cheese steak hoagies, pizza steaks, mushroom steaks…the list goes on. But the original recipe is pretty damn simple.

More difficult is explaining the cheese steak’s essence – why that brown and yellow mess in your hand is actually the most deliciously satisfying meal you could imagine. You just have to devour one for yourself.

The Olivieri family is still grilling up the best cheese steaks in town at Pat’s King of Steaks (that’s the full name but, really, everyone just calls it Pat’s) on Passyunk Avenue in South Philly. Tourists come looking for a cheese steak, and some get distracted by the imitators that have popped up along South Street, in shopping malls, and in the wilds of suburbia. They think that all cheese steaks are created equal. But when the sign on the window advertises “Real Philly Cheesesteaks!!!,” you can be pretty sure they’re not.

You know that someone has done their research when they ask how to get to the corner of 9th Street and Pass-ee-unk Avenue (please explain to them that it’s much easier to just say Pass-yunk). They’re probably looking for Pat’s Steaks; hopefully they don’t get lost and accidentally end up across the street at Geno’s. Oh, what folly.

But once they get to the window to order , make sure they know how. Those counter guys show no mercy if you screw it up. If you want a steak sandwich with cheese wiz and fried onions, just say, “Steak wit’.” The only place to get gooey melted cheese whiz on a steak is Pat’s – anywhere else, you’re better off with some sliced provolone rather than the unnaturally orange liquid mess they squirt on, which will drown your steak in tangy artificial flavoring. (Why, for goodness' sake, don't the other places don’t buy their whiz from Pat’s suppliers? Maybe it’s some sort of trade embargo to keep Geno’s from ever truly being able to compete.)

The line is usually too long to politely ask for a “cheese steak sandwich with cheese whiz and fried onions, please,” and you’ll probably get laughed at anyway while someone tells you what you did wrong. Try again.

Fight back the tears of embarrassment while they giggle and make your sandwich. It’s worth it. As soon as you receive your steaming bundle of meat, cheese, vegetables (onions count as veggies, right?) and grease, you will have to sit right down at one of Pat’s outdoor tables and inhale it. It’s just too messy to be mannerly.

But even this is an art. Eat too slow, and the cheese will begin to drip down your hands and burn your wrist. Too fast, and each gluttonous bite will push the steak out the back of the roll until you have some cheesy bread in your hand and a pile of steak and onions in your lap. Steady, there, you’ll be fine.

The best time to go to Pat’s is around 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, right after the fresh Amoroso Italian rolls have been delivered, hot and soft enough to form a mold around your hand. No better late-night snack than half a pound of thinly sliced steak after a long night of drinking at the bars, or especially after the Eagles win on Sunday, the Sixers pull it out in overtime, or the Flyers drop another game to slip further down in the standings. Comfort food. And several hundred of your closest friends stand in line and order the same thing – Steak wit’.