Anyway. Twenty twelve. The year the Maya predicted [not actually] for the end of the world [not remotely] by ending their calendar [which plots out through 13th October 4772] when the planets all line up [in 1998] long after they went extinct [they're still around, and laughing at you]. Also the year Cthulhu is equally likely finally to be elected. Or something.

Not that ragnarok didn’t sprint enthusiastically into position this year. Friday’s show had problems. Animal couldn’t be there this month, so neither could his soundsystem; instead, the film started up as a silent picture [notwithstanding a tonedeaf audience trying to sing along anyway] until someone plugged Cable A into PonyAmp B and got a bit of noise to happen; that might be something to figure out more completely before the next show, on the twenty-fourth, when Animal’s likely to be in New Orleans.

Otherwise, things worked out well enough. I think. I actually had to split a few minutes early [which is why the images run out before the credits roll] since I and the guy I was helping move were exhausted. But I don’t think anyone actually died this month. Which…might be a good thing, fun though the alternative usually is.

Also, this month was another straight [ish] show—no themenight. February’s show should me thematic again, I think; I wanna say that it’s about Valentine’s Day, but I could be wrong. Let’s assume that until or unless I come back with an update about it.

See ya then, if the world doesn’t suddenly end on us….

December having been an evennumbered month [You know: twelve], the show was a themenight again—this time XXXMas. Over which, obviously, I’m outraged: I don’t think it was XXX at all; it wasn’t even really NC17. Sure, there was some muppet sex; but—c’mon—we already had Muppet Babies, and knew they’d come from somewhere. Even if, technically, we’d never guessed that they’d evidently come from Al Franken and Gene Simmons. It’s weird, the things you learn….

But, just to be certain, I looked through the shots I got tonight, watching for actual XXX material. Didn’t see any. Uploaded the batch anyway. So, maybe it was an ironical sort of thing; if so: funneee….

Already looking forward to Prudes&Puritans Night, assuming that’ll be all about irony too.

Of course, it’s possible that I’m joking about all this, and that it totally was an XXXRated themenight, and that you missed it completely if you weren’t there, and that I carefully avoided getting any shots of anything truly unclothed because…erm…actually, there’s no way that would ever make sense; nevermind.

So, yeah: January’s show will be back to normalish. Meaning that there won’t be a lot of thematic surprises. Meaning that any surprises will occur within the parameters of a normalish show. Not that the show’s ever been all that commonly normal. I mean: we’re talking about a group of people fulfilling promises of XXX material by having a muppet sit&spin on a federal agent until John Waters would squint twitchilly and then leave the building; it’s all…kinda…weird.

Hope to see more of you next month—meaning, of course, hidden behind less clothing….

Not that there was much black to it. Or for that matter a lot of Friday. Technically, the show was after midnight and into Saturday; and, however metaphorically, I suppose it was more blue than black. But Blue Saturday isn’t really a thing, so we didn’t call it that. This time.

So, that’s…that. I guess.

There really wasn’t a theme to tonight’s show, apart from having a lot of loud fun and kinda marvelling at the number of people showing up despite the external temperature. I mean: I was wearing enough layers to double my weight out front, and I was freezing to death; meanwhile, half the audience were waiting out there for up to an hour wearing glorified floss. So, either you people really dig the show, or you’re all uncommonly crazy. Though I suppose it could be both.

About the show: this is where it’d be really cool to mention that we pulled it off without a hitch; also it would be kinda untrue. As it was, the show worked just fine—music and dancing and robostrobes and all—but a couple additional things we’d been planning for the last month puked at the last minute. One of them, we discovered at zerohour, woulda set off the fire alarm and sprinkler system. So we’re going back to the drawingboard on those things.

Also, and on the subject of technological disasters, my DigiCam’s back to normal. Sucking. Though I’ve developed a hunch about that. Well: two hunches; the obvious one’s that the warranty ended about ten years ago. The other’s that it seems to get like this, with the battery leaping from three hours left to ten seconds, mostly when it’s really cold outside. It’s possible that it would work a lot better if I let it warm up before trying to use it.

On the bright side, while I only got a couple hundred shots this time, they were mostly redundant anyway. Being one of the only cities to have been doing this since 1975, and for that matter a cast approaching its thirteenth year in existence, we attracted the attention and ultimately the HDV of a documentarian who, starting tonight, has committed to filming the whole scene for approximately the next six months and compiling it into a feature film about RHPS. Which means that A) while my battery was being schizophrenic, I was trying to stay outta his way all night and B) through May or June, showing up to see the show could land you in a film to be released around 2013. I think. Whatever release date works best after a couple dozen hours of footage have been molested into something worth seeing.

So, if you wanna be all famousish, show up starting in December on the twenty-third; if you don’t wanna be famousish, show up with, like, a Guy Fawkes mask, or whatever.

On that note: December’s show is…probably not Black Christmas, amusing though that might be. But it’s something along those lines. Festivus or Cthulhumas or…something; Dawn of the Dead, maybe; whatever you’d call that thing where SantaClaus got nailed in a manger and died to save you from the Grinch—I’m not…real theological.

What counts is that it’ll be a themenight. And it’ll have something to do with Consumermas. So show up wearing a big red bow; other clothes are of course merely optional. Though, supposing it’s gonna get colder before it gets warmer, a big warm trenchcoat might not be the worst thing to bring along to survive the line into the building.

See ya then….

Actually, I knew that last night, once it was too late to unforget it, when I left my DigiCam at home. Once I realised that I didn’t have it, I figured I’d be okay with the PhoneCam in my Droid3, since that’s eight megapixels; it’s not like my Sony DSC717 is the best DigiCam—it’s more like it was the best DigiCam, ten years ago when I bought it.

It’s still better than a PhoneCam. Because the thing in my phone likes to stop and think for a full second after I hit the shutter icon, making shots of moving things impossible; if I’m trying to get a shot of something stationary, the PhoneCam App likes to force itself closed; if neither of those happens, someone calls or texts me.

Basically: I didn’t end up with any shots worth uploading last night.

Because I didn’t upload any shots, I forgot next to write one of these. I’m that used to writing one of these while the shots are uploading.

I just remembered. Mostly because I got a text from Animal, who on Thursday nights has a bedtime and can’t stay out that late, asking how the show went. Because I hadn’t already covered that here.

So, here I am. Hi there. Here’s how the show went….

Lacking a DigiCam, and giving up on the PhoneCam, I wound up sitting there actually watching the show most of the time. Usually, I’m moving around and getting shots of things, which is more visual; it’s all about threedimensional spatial relations, so I’m only listening to anything to the extent that it helps with a sort of confused echolocational navigation thing. So, seeing the show almost like a member of the audience, and in an unfamiliar cinema, I caught a couple things in need of improvement; I’d tell you what they are here but, optimally, they’ll have been improved by the next show, on the twenty-fifth.

Not that the show was bad. Mostly, it was hasty. Precipitous. Rushed to work to whatever extent in an unfamiliar place. Viewing the show as a job to do, and then supposing that the job is, like, telemarketing, and then moving the gig from the office to the middle of the Sahara: a certain percentage of the efforts is dedicated immediately to figuring out how to spam people with whatever offers in a new environment.

In any case, the audience dug it. Which makes it better already than telemarketing under the best of circumstances. More people had showed up than expected: initially, we’d heard that six tickets had been sold; by the time the show began at ten, there were more filled seats than empty. So it kinda all worked out, in the end. There have certainly been worse shows, in the past.

Anyway: that’s that. Now we’ve got two or three weeks off before the show returns to the Esquire on the twenty-fifth—the day after TurkeyDay—with a full crew and a soundsystem and probably a damned DigiCam. Tickets should become available online for that around the eighteenth, I think; or you can wait until ZeroHour and see what’s left onsite at the box office.

See you then….

Halloween can be a stressful time: wake up at nine in the morning with a headache, leave the house forgetting to turn off any lights, end up downtown for the first of two shows, end up across town in a headache coma for a couple hours, turn on the laptop only to have it fry its own motherboard, call the fire department to deal with the tree in the backyard after the electrical lines have set it on fire, go back downtown, and do the film again at midnight. Or, maybe that’s just me.

The film is of course The Rocky Horror Picture Show—a travesty of filmmaking with the general appeal of mediaeval dentistry, the advertising presence of Ron Paul, and a fanbase lacking in the education to become trekkies. Which raises the question: why do people go to this thing?

Not always an easy question to answer.

Most honestly, it was huge in the eighties. Which to some of you would be as meaningless an idea as Beatlemania. But, over the last couple decades, things have slowed down. Videogames and smartphones and whatever have functionally replaced the idea of going outside, and ending up at a party established sometime in the seventies, involving a film rendered impossible in a world containing videogames and smartphones—nevermind that the film is ultimately about a gay alien building a frankensteinian creature capable of singing like David Bowie; the basic plotpoint is that a castle on a hill in Ohio is closer to the inoperable car than any phonebooth.

It’s not about the film. If it were, then people would stay home and watch it on disc.

It’s about the party, which began sometime in the seventies, arguably peaking in the eighties, still ongoing today.

To that end, some changes have been made in recent times. The film itself is still the backdrop to the cast on stage pantomiming the action; but we’ve been adding a couple layers over the summer: a massive soundsystem with a professional DJ, robotic lights, and so on. The audience are becoming involved again, dragged up onto the stage before and during the show to dance the night away; Animal [the DJ] dug out a couple beachballs to throw into the audience as a rough analogue of crowdsurfing.

In short: the scene is returning to its optimal state—the audience as part of the show itself. You show up, find a seat you won’t necessarily return to, and rush the stage for some reasonably harmless anarchy.

There remains the general idea of screaming at the film and trying to make it cry for sucking so much; you can do that too. But we’re done with sitting otherwise quietly and behaving.

Here are a few hundred shots, lumped together from both of the last two nights, illustrating that point: Halloween2011.

Incidentally, the next show is a special offsite thing, up in Thornton, at 10001 Grant Street; Thornton, Colorado; 80229. You can get tickets in advance at fandango.com; the Cinebarre have set a hard start time of 10PM, since November the Third is a Thursday and therefore something of a school night.

And then, in November, the show returns to its home at the Esquire at 590 Downing Street; Denver, Colorado; 80218 at about 11.59pm on the twenty-fifth.

See you there….

It wasn’t the perfect test; a couple of silly variables crept in and made things a little weird. One was the cold, worse though it could have been; the other was of course Anonymous.

For those not following along at home: last night’s show accidentally coincided with the first night of real opposition in Occupy Denver, as characterised by a couple of cops telling a couple of hipsters to stop living in tents at Broadway and Colfax. Unfortunately, meagre though that reality was, it didn’t prevent those couple of cops from functionally sealing off the entire downtown area, which tends to include Sixth and Downing, making it a little difficult to get to the cinema. So, all other elements being equal, the show only sold about halfway out.

This of course is not a political platform. Which is why it’s safe to talk about Anonymous, who are only as political as Rawn Pawl Lawl and are otherwise a ragtag Island of Misfit Toys collecting to ask rude questions and mock the answers of an establishment they simultaneously admire and lament…so, tell me whether that sounds like a direct competition for RHPS.

The simple fact is that the show sold only halfway out. Whether that was because the target demographic were tweeting that corporations suck from iPhones, or because the temperature dropped down toward forty, or simply because no one did a huge amount of advertising to let people know that something other [?better] than Human Centipede Two was playing at the Esquire on the fourteenth.

None of which matters much, immediately. Two more shows remain this month: Friday and Saturday nights, on the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth; those, by precedent, will be sold out—likely by the middle of the preceding week. You can get tickets to either or both online, starting around the twenty-third, from the cinema’s website. You really might wanna do that.

At least one of those nights [possibly both] will be all about a costume contest. So, last night’s show being a time for CEI to play dressup [not technically uncommon], it’ll be a couple weeks from now that the audience will be judged [and potentially punished accordingly] for their wardrobes. So, plan ahead; and remember: friends don’t let friends go anywhere dressed as The Fucking Crow. Seriously: just…don’t; it’s played.

Incidentally, last night’s show being CEI’s costume party, here are a few hundred shots of how that wound up looking.

See you again in a couple weeks….