No doubt saying something offensive and hilarious.

I galloped down to the West Village with my buddy Sam last night to see Louis C.K. tape a few bits for his upcoming FX show (March). It was brutally hilarious. I suspect some of the material might be too horrifying for the FX audience but if he puts out a DVD of the show it might have some of the crazier stuff from last night. Oh yeah, we got to sit right in the front, too.

Louis (@cklouis) gathered the audience via a tweet the day before. This was by far the most exciting thing to happen via Twitter.

This is Sam’s favorite C.K. video bit; his YouTube channel is pretty golden.

Farewell to an enormously influential writer-actor, Patrick McGoohan, who is reported to have died in Los Angeles yesterday at age 80.

I had been planning to post about AMC releasing all of the episodes of The Prisoner for online consumption, but unfortunately that news comes with this much sadder notification of McGoohan’s passing.

True screen icons are diminishing, I think, and he carried the torch. McGoohan was a forceful actor and brilliant mind–don’t forget, came up with the concept for the show and wrote and directed many episodes. As comparable as someone like JJ Abrams is in the latter, Abrams certainly doesn’t have the acting chops.

If you haven’t watched The Prisoner, take a rainy Sunday and loaf in front of the screen and watch at the AMC site. They’re preparing some sort of remake, which will be interesting.

But then I considered it a bit more, and wrapped my head around the fact reality television is absolute garbage, trading on the most odious traits of humanity, and responsible for a large part of the general decline in social values historians will surely cite as part of our millennial breakdown. I’d rather be slapped in the mouth repeatedly with a sock full of bolts than watch two prime-time hours of network reality programming. So if Wallenstein is going to fall on the grenade, as they say, and subject his mind to a raw drip of poison to spin that into a thirty-second dirge for my entertainment, hey, have at it, buddy.

But here are some reality shows I’d like to see.

Street Art USA

Ten street artists are each assigned to a middle-American town, and instructed to cover its barns, warehouse walls and other semi-public places with their messages. Each week we’ll see the artists select a site, come up with an idea, and execute it. A celebrity panel including the likes of Banksy and Mark Ecko will confer and decide whose art has the greatest impact and thus deserves our attention, praise, and, of course, dollars. The winning artist gets a show at Jonathan Levine, with a percentage of profits and ad revenue funnelled back into the town’s community chest. Losing artists are still allowed to sell their work, pursuant with the permission of the property owner, who may remove the piece wholesale for showing or simply decide to sell the property in total. Odds are, if the show is as popular as hoped, the value assigned to the art will double or triple the value of the structures and land. Conflicts occur when the artist encounters locals who take issue with any of the sticking points of public/street art. A a few rogue wild card characters drop in to random artists’ towns each week with the express purpose of acting like actual old-school graffiti writers and painting over, crossing out and generally harassing the art school kids trying to do a wheatpasting commemorating the evils of NAFTA.

eBay Maven

Everyone has a friend with an unhealthy hobby which has been transformed through the wonders of e-commerce into a preternatural level of ability on eBay. Vinyl toys, soul 45s, vintage guitars–you name it, odds are you know someone who fits this personality trait. Personally, I’m most frightened of sneaker freaks. One friend, who I love and respect, maxed out my wacky meter when he opened his closet, to reveal it was entirely full of sneaker boxes. ‘I never wear any of them,’ he said to me, opening up a box. Then he leaned closer to me (we were in an empty house) and pulled one out, putting it up to his face. ‘What I love more than anything,’ he said ‘is the way they smell.’ Then he took a long, full huff with the sneaker flush to his face like an oxygen mask. But, let’s not lose the plot. He’s sick on eBay. An utter wheeler-dealer. He’s built a tiny infrastructure based on mining Detroit’s wholesale shoe warehouses for rare colors and flipping them, or knowing skateshop owners who hook him up with wholesale prices. Other buddies of mine have collections of rare disc golf discs they buy on eBay. They know every production run, what colors or unique properties the Innova plastics from 2004 have.

But, to get to the point, these obsessions breed unique knowledge of the marketplace eBay has created for their given commodities. So essentially you created an investment show, or a speculation show, with a play styled like Ice Road Truckers or another of those where they keep track of how much money you’ve made, or crabs you’ve hauled. Everyone’s got to stick to their chosen discipline, so the 45 guy can’t start slangin’ guitars halfway through the show. Viewers will also learn about the interesting things in each discipline, say why the price recently increased or what makes a particular edition special. A psychologist who specializes in collecting and hoarding instincts and a successful small businessperson will be around to comment on strange behaviors or explain business actions. Mainly footage will focus on the collection of these items, the 45s guy going to explore the dusty old basement to pull out records or the shoe collector who goes to China or the guitar gal who visits the aging heroin-addicted bluesman to buy old axes. Otherwise it’ll be geeks clicking around on their computers, which makes for about as compelling viewing as one of those ill-conceived live design-offs where two Photoshop jockeys duke it out with their Wacom tablets. Conflicts arise due to the nature of the market as well as planted flakey bidders who foil crucial sales and act all shady.

This one would need eBay’s approval, and might even be more useful as a branded content type play. CAA, call me.

Eco Griefer

Twelve ambitious eco-committed people are charged with returning to their ancestral tract and changing the lifestyle of their kin; the winner will be the one who can reduce their family’s carbon footprint the most. Challenges include getting Dad to give up his 12 mpg Range Rover, turning the group vegan and getting them gardening, fixing solar panels or other alternate energy source onto the house or similar fuel swap and convincing deadbeat brother Larry fine Peruvian cocaine is not ecologically sound. Budgets will be extremely limited, prompting scavenging, dumpster diving, and various other humiliating-yet-earth-friendly outcomes.

Hack My Ass

In the spirit of the Oscar-winning film “Ass” in the alternate universe portrayed in 2004′s Idiocracy, “Hack My Ass” is a fitness show devoted solely to carving participants’ asses into unique, personality-reflecting shapes, created in the initial show along with a computer graphics wizard and a plastic surgeon who specialize in the buttocks. Fitness instructors tailor unique ass-blasting exercises to each contestant’s goals, and a panel of experts containing an Internet entrepreneur in the adult industry, a bodybuilding judge, and a Southern Senator evaluate callipygian glory and tragedy at the conclusion of each weekly show. Pitfalls include Twinkies and the sofa. Huge sponsorship opportunities would be available for Hanes and other underwear manufacturers as well as metabolic enhancement products. Web crosover includes a 24/7 ass-cam mounted on each contestant’s waist.

blatantly borrowed from ny mag

I’m entirely happy my favorite NYC newscaster and true-blue journalist, Pat Kiernan, has launched his own site, Pat’s Papers, where he’s been basically vlogging the biggest stories in the day’s newspapers.

All ye lucky ones who have seen New York’s Best Canadian on NY1 know “In the Papers” is a daily staple for thousands. Some people don’t get it—‘So, wait,’ they say, ‘he just reads the newspapers? What’s so special about that?’

But there’s something to starting your day with Kiernan, where he’s basically briefing you with a calm voice and dry wit, that’s confident and friendly—it’s one of those New York things, like knowing the names of your coffee cart guy’s kids, that lets you tame parts of this wild beast “In the Papers” always feels like such a valuable segment, a sort of hidden thing giving you a little bit of a boost as you go about your morning business.

While the first couple webisodes don’t have the rhythm Kiernan has on the teevee (probably due to NY1’s production team and those forgiving studio lights) I’m subscribed, and anxious to see him expand into this new format.

Of course, this raises a whole greater slew of theoretical brain busters. Like, wait, so he’s reading newspapers, on the Internet?

Just relax, and let Kiernan into your life. A great profile him was published earlier this year in the Observer—give it a read.

Man, I was watching three Battlestar Galactica episodes a night, now that Season 4 is on, I’ve got major set lag.

Wednesday evening as many office workers began their commute a steam pipe ruptured in midtown Manhattan, causing a massive explosion and subsequent geyser in the middle of the intersection of Lexington avenue and 41st Street. One woman died and several dozen were injured. Initially, though, everyone thought it was much, much worse.

We were at Creativity HQ, at 43rd and Third, when it happened. Initially I don’t remember hearing much of anything, a little commotion–nothing more noticeable than any bumps or bangs you’d hear from the second floor above any commerce-heavy New York City street. But for many thousands in that area, myself included, the scariest part wasn’t the explosion itself, but the reaction among the crowds. There’s really nothing to get your heart racing like what we felt looking down from the second floor and seeing people sprinting up the street, looking behind them, faces full of raw, animal panic. The old Indiana Jones lookback. After a second or two of surveying the scene, Jonah, the editor of AdAge, said something to the effect of ‘Guys, we should probably get out of here,’ and everyone walked fairly calmly downstairs.

The initial chaos had calmed a bit in the time it took us to get downstairs. Groups of workers from the building’s offices huddled to make sure everyone in their team had made it out, wondering things like ‘Where’s Karen? Who wants to go back up to look for her?’ The only word then was a bomb had gone off at Grand Central and the station was now on fire. Later I’d find out details from closer to the scene from my friend Angela, who was at Lexington and 42nd when the pipe exploded. She said people were abandoning their cars they were so terrified.

But you couldn’t see a fire, or much smoke, we just heard a distant rumble and the faint smell of debris. So was something on fire? It didn’t sound that way. So me and a colleague Ken went down to check it out while some others hit the bar to check the TV for news and get a belt. I started taking snapshots of concerned looking people.

The roar got louder. At 42nd we could see more smoke floating up over the Bowery Savings building from the direction of Lexington. Police had closed off 42nd and there were firefighters and volunteer EMTs standing around. We went a block further down against the tide of traffic and, as the noise became louder still, I saw what was making it–a giant, raging hole in the ground spewing nasty greyish-brown stuff. I figured it wasn’t smoke–it was too light a color. I checked the heat of the manhole cover I was standing on and, feeling it was cool, figured the pressure hadn’t spread to the sewer system, so we were probably OK to stand and look a while. I took some video of the beast and chatted with a guy who was covered in spattered mud–he’d apparently been very close nearby in a bus when the pipe ruptured.

I called my mom first thing, just to let her know everything was OK, figuring if something terrible had happened she’d hear and be worried and the phone lines would be more and more clogged. So then, with a few images and videos, I thought I’d upload them immediately to show her what happened. So I went back to the office and threw the photos on Flickr and sent the video to YouTube. Then to editors at Gothamist and the New York Post to see if the latter wanted to use a few snaps in the early edition.

The Post wound up passing, but Gothamist posted the link to photos and embedded the video, initiating what has become an interesting study into the nature of media. From there, the video went to the top link at the Drudge Report, and ABC, CNN and the AP all got in touch looking to buttress their ‘citizen journalism’ initiatives and run footage sent in by an ordinary Joe–even though I guess I technically don’t count as one in this case. In addition to the offline outlets, the vid got links online from the Daily News, Wired, AOL Video and the New York Times. It’s now Saturday, and after racing up the YouTube charts on Thursday and Friday things seem to have settled down, though I’m still a bit amused and a bit appalled over the sheer volume of idiocy in the comments. I tried to mod out the white power spam, Harry Potter spoilers and other bits of random nonsense, but I left the conspiracy theorists, political fanatics and general menagerie of idiots who felt inclined to express all manner of numbskull opinion about a broken pipe.

At any rate, I guess that’s all this came down to. A broken pipe. It was scary because the day before the government decreed we were going to be attacked and the pipe happened to break near a major target near rush hour, an event made frightening 5 percent due to the initial accident and 95 percent by what almost seems like a conditioned reaction. At least that’s what I tried to convey when CNN interviewed me for the Situation Room and Anderson Cooper and I had to watch cable news for the first time in months to describe to them what was happening in the video.

Clearly, though, this stuff sells newspapers, and keeps people glued to the TV. One of the more cynical comments on the YouTube thread, one that’s stuck with me, is something to the effect of ‘the media wanted it to be a terrorist attack so they’d have a better story.’ As much as I don’t think that’s true, I think ‘they,’ the media in general, the bigwigs, whoever programs the programmers, have their fingers poised over the ‘EXTRA: Terrorism’ edition of the paper and might have seen this as a good dry run. The negative side of the neighborly feeling and coming together these events (9/11, Katrina, the blackout, etc) manifest in people is the want to know, the drive for information, most of which is slow to come and filled with empty bloviating on the news.

DD: Boxing is a work in progress, just like all business. A couple years ago the music business wasn’t fair, and just based on the people that are involved, and how they shed the light on the artists, people know how to get a fair deal and certain things don’t happen any more, and I think in this age of boxing, we’re going to smarten up the boxers, where they’re going to be able to benefit more than anyone else, they’re going to be able to reap the benefits of their efforts. So I like the fact that people recognize that we’re fair guys, and I like the fact that I know that in my heart I’m going to try to do best by the fighters, and if they’re surrounded by nothing but love it’s going to be a good experience for that boxer. So no boxer’s ever going to walk away from us saying that they were treated unfairly. I’m not going to say no boxer’s never going to walk away from us, but I bet when they do they’ll say they we should have stayed with those guys, because we have their best interests at heart.

What have you noticed so far? What has made your business Spidey sense perk up?

DD: It’s a very patient business. There’s a lot of politics involved. But the bottom line is that when you’re winning, and you have a lot of people knowing that you’re winning, there’s not too much you can do to stop certain things. But it’s patient. A lot of boxers want to fight fight fight, they’re young and they want to get in there and test themselves, but you’ve got to pace them, you’ve got to let them learn, you’ve got to let them grow, and in the meanwhile you’ve got to make sure they have a future in boxing, so you look at that. So most of the seeds that we plant now will be in effect in five years, so it’s a patient thing, and that’s cool for me, because I enjoy the sport of boxing and I’m doing it for the love.

But I think it’s very interesting to see how we’re going to change things, and, you know, not to be cocky about it, but you know how we changed things in the business world of music, the music world, and how we changed things in fashion; we’re going to change things here as well, and it’s going to be positive for the sport. We’ve got to think of innovative ways, and creative ways to keep people interested, and having a vested interest in the boxers, especially within the African American community, get some support there, but honestly, with Curtis [Stevens], Showtime, Jaidon [Cordrington], Andre Berto and Gary Starks, what they’ve done in the last year, I don’t think any fighter has done in the world of boxing, as far as people having a vested interest in them. They’re in magazines, and they’re on the cusp of pop culture, meaning what’s going on in this current generation. Look at Curtis, you know, he’s a regular guy, he’s a cool dude. But he’s also a very disciplined individual. So it’s kind of showing, just like me, I’m a businessman, but I look at myself like a cool dude. It shows you can look like a regular guy, act regular, but have the discipline of a professional. It doesn’t make you a nerd or a square. I think there’s a lot of good, especially within him and Berto, there’s a lot of good energy, personality, as long as they keep knocking people out they’re going to reap all the benefits of that.

On yet another front, last year Dash made time in his busy schedule for BET’s Ultimate Hustler. Part Apprentice, part Making the Band, Dash auditioned a protege from a group of live-in, aspiring entrepreneurs, with — well, let’s be honest here — tepid results. There were moments, though. So is Damon going to re-up for a sequel?

DD: We’ll see. I’ve got a day job, I’ve got a couple of them, so if I have the time, I’ll do it. You know, I initially did it to teach the community how to get money and have fun while they do it, and be fair, and things like that. Let’s see. If BET acts straight, maybe I’ll be back.

Was that more of a trying thing than you thought it would be?

DD: Only because of the post of it, like the editing, I had to edit it a lot. I’m a perfectionist, on a lot of levels, and it was my likeness and my brand, so I had to sit in the editing room and make sure everything was there. Because I was there, and a lot gets lost in the editing room, and I wanted certain things to remain there, and also, the production value meant a lot to me, so if you noticed, that’s why it was very stylized. I wanted to keep people’s brains working, and also entertain them, keep them laughing, keep some suspense, and at the same time teach them.

1. To declare or affirm solemnly by invoking a deity or a sacred person or thing.
2. To utter or bind oneself to (an oath).
3. To say or affirm earnestly and with great conviction.

A friend left me with a heavy secret the other day and sealed the deal by looking me in the eye and saying “swearengen.”

In HBO’s Deadwood, The Old West pinkie swear is a spit shake. Mr. Wu and Dan, Al’s flunkie, seal deals with Swearengen slick-palmed, so we did too, with an oath of “swearengen” in Wu’s Chinese accent.