paulette's hypermeaningful weblog

TOTAL WASTE OF TIME!!!

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Cousins Tour 2011 Press Release

Press contact: Paulette Nichols

paulette@pauletteinternational.com

For Immediate Release

A Functional Family Tours the Pacific Northwest

Mr. Let’s Paint TV, a.k.a John Kilduff, and Paulette Nichols will be embarking on a week long tour of northern California, Oregon and Washington, the state. They are second cousins and found each other in later life to the acclaim of audiences everywhere. The tour starts in Oakland, CA and goes as far north as Anacortes, WA, hitting the cities of Arcata, Portland and Seattle along the way.

They will be driving in a ’92 Toyota Tercel, a car Paulette wrote a song about which was played on NPR’s Car Talk.

John Kilduff is the Star and Creator of Let’s Paint TV, a huge underground internet sensation with his youtube page having received over 1 million hits. He has performed in Canada, Los Angeles, Australia, Kansas City, New York City and Florida. He has also performed on America’s Got Talent and The Tyra Show. His show is like Bob Ross’ except it involves multi-tasking, making food, playing ping pong, answering viewer calls, and exercising at the same time mostly on a treadmill.

John, a.k.a. Mr. Let’s Paint a.k.a. Mr Paint, has been doing his show for over ten years now. Originally starting on Public Access in Eagle Rock, CA, he moved his show to his Los Angeles home studio after funding for the public access studio was cut.

Paulette is a singer and a songwriter based in Oakland, CA who sings and writes songs about what it’s like to be alive and moving around in the universe. She has fans on 3 continents, at least that’s what itunes sales of her music indicate.

One purpose of their tour is to bring attention to the lack of creativity in the world and the fear surrounding the lack of creativity in the world. There are other purposes to the tour, but they might not be evident for many years to come, in fact, they might never become evident. The main premise of the tour is that it is not pointless.

Nov. 4   Smokey's Tangle,    Oakland CA

Nov. 5   Blondies, Arcata CA

Nov. 6   Somewhere in Arcata.....

Nov. 8   The Way Post, Portland OR

Nov. 9   Urban Oasis, Seattle WA

Nov. 10  The Business, Anacortes WA

Nov. 11   Cafe Racer, Seattle WA

Nov 12   Experimental Half Hour, Portland OR

Thursday, October 06, 2011

SPAM: Spam from Paulette

Dear FAn,
 
two things.
 
One, we have 5 dates for the Cousins Tour
 

Nov. 4   Smokey's Tangle,    Oakland CA

Nov. 5   Blondies, Arcata CA

Nov. 6   Open

Nov. 7   Open

Nov. 8   Open

Nov. 9   Open

Nov. 10  The Business, Anacortes WA

Nov. 11   Cafe Racer, Seattle WA

Nov 12   Experimental Half Hour, Portland OR

 

As you can see, we have dates open from Nov 6 to Nov 9, so if you know of somebody between Arcata and Portland just dying to see us, maybe let them know or let us know or let everybody in the universe know.

 

Two, I started a story about reviewing a band.

 

I hope you have a lovely day.

 

Sincerely,

 

Paulette

Here I am, Telling a story

 

Dear undercritical, overly forgiving fan of my work,

Here’s something I dug up and reworked from a journal entry of mine about 6 or 7 years back. It’s called make-believe, and it’s sweeping the nation. Pretty soon, people who write, writers, will make up stories and say that they were divinely inspired, that their words came from a higher power, and that if you don’t live by these stories, you will be alienated, persecuted or worse. So pack your emotional baggage, buckle up and get ready for the greatest thing to hit literature since spelling, MAKE-BELIEVE.

I didn’t know what to do, so I decided to become an impoverished writer in Oakland, writing about music, theater, movies, anything, songs, live shows, cd’s and what the fuck. And since I really committed myself to doing this writing thing, writing about these things, music, anything, plays, and more, I got in touch with an editor, Jim Writerguy, of The Oakland Crier, one of the most prestigious papers on its block and told him I was interested in writing about crap happening in town.

I wanted to write about crap.

I had thought about becoming an impoverished writer in New York, but I didn’t think it was as glamourous, as interesting as writing in Oakland where all the people from Oakland lived. I wanted to be around Oakland’s people, to immerse myself in all things Oakland, to live, breathe, dream, eat, sleep, walk, talk, cry, laugh, hope, poop, pee, sweat, sneeze, barf, be Oakland.

And so I got a telegram one morning from Jim, and it read thusly:

Paulette

I only have so many characters to say this, so I’ll keep it shor

I figured there was more to the message, so I came in to talk with and look at him while he talked. He looked like this guy who was the publisher at a publishing company I used to work for. He had a face like most people, and he was white, from some kind of European, half-bred, eighth-bred lineage. It really doesn’t matter since all white people kind of look the same. At least in this case it really didn’t matter. Let’s just say he was a non-descript, bland, white-bread, white guy from suburbia who didn’t look obtuse.

I walked into his cubicle and he was there.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi, go write about this band, The Robots, and I’ll give you some money”

“Ok.” I said.

“Great.”

“What happened to your usual writer person?” I asked

Jim looked off into space and told me the following story which I’ll paraphrase for you.

The guy who normally covered those things died of a gunshot wound to the finger. It, the bullet, hit the middle finger of his left hand, nicking the very, very tip of it, knocking off the outer layer of skin. It didn’t bleed, but it opened the proverbial door for a viral infection from his cat, and in a matter of hours, he was dead. He had been trying to open a can of cat food for his cat, but he couldn’t find his can opener because his girlfriend had taken it with her to work. So he was trying to make do with a medium caliber handgun he had found by a crime scene on the way to work one day.

She, his girlfriend, had taken a liking to eating cat food and took a fresh, unopened can with her every day. The lids weren’t the easy opening variety with the built-in finger handle, so she really, really needed the can opener. Her favorite cat food flavor was turducken, a mixture of turkey, duck and chicken, and I have to say here that I’ve tried this cat food flavor, and in a pinch, in the lean times of economic downturn, it really hits the spot.

I left his office in disbelief, feeling that the story was so far-fetched that I was being lied to. I felt like I couldn’t really trust Jim if he was going to blow so much smoke up my ass that it started to come out of the corners of my eyes.

But I was bombarded by mass media once I got out of the newspaper’s offices, and all of the mass media confirmed Jim’s story, proving that it was completely and utterly true. For example, the headlines of The San Francisco Bugle read, “Entertainment Writer Dies Bizarrely.” That’s how they, those headlines, the ones of the San Francisco Bugle read.

I left the Crier’s offices at 10:47 a.m. and had the rest of the day to check my facebook account at the Rockridge branch of the Oakland Public Library. I had been trying for a whole week to think of something really clever to post because my self esteem was flagging, I really didn’t think too much of myself at the time, and it made me feel so liked, loveable, beautiful, fancy, and excellent when people liked what I wrote on my profile posts.

There was no line for the computers because people had mostly lost interest in them, so I got online real quick like. I didn’t have any facebook notices, the red things in the upper left corner of the screen, so I typed out “Even if you’re soul is as black as coal, I still love you,” and hit enter. And then, the power went out at the library, so I had to get a paper book. I went to the how to section for writers and got the book, “How to Write About Musical Performances” by Noel Belvin, who just so happened to be a writer for the San Francisco Bugle.

I found a comfy spot to read in, sat down and fell asleep. It was a relaxing, refreshing nap, so I woke up ready to read the book, turning to the first chapter, “Attending the Concert.” It read thusly:

“If you want to write about a concert, it really helps to attend it, the concert. I know because I’ve written about concerts I have and haven’t been to, and I find it much easier to write about concerts I have been to than concerts I haven’t been to. One time, I had to leave a concert early, before it started, so I had to listen to my friend’s bootleg of it, and this was before small video cameras, so I had to ask my friend what to say about the band’s stage presence and how the audience responded to them. This absentee writing was harder than attendee writing.”

I pondered these words, letting them percolate through my consciousness, through my being, letting them walk through my brain, through the thought tubes. I just sat there while all of this was going on, and around me there were other people reading books about child rearing and home improvement.

Finally, the ideas from the book blew up in my brain, and I said, “Wow” over and over and began to shake violently in a pacifistic way. It was exciting.