Empire Vista Social Club -- July 2013

We had another great installment of Empire Vista Social Club last night at Otto's Shrunken Head. (Village Voice's Best Tiki Bar of 2011!) Good set of musicians, enthusiastic crowd... good times all around.

The night was also important for another reason--I tried out some new stand-up material I've been working on. I've been re-reading parts of the Bible lately, and let me tell you, that book is absolutely ripe with material. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, it's the comedian's bible!

So the other purpose of this post is to preview some of the new material.

"So is anyone here familiar with Abrahamic Covenant?

This is the one where God tells Abraham he'll bless his family and all his descendants and smite his enemies, give him all the land in the middle east, etc... and all Abraham has to do to hold up his end of the bargain is agree to circumcise every male child from now on. This is all well and good, of course... but something that gets glossed over sometimes is that Abraham was 100 freakin years old when he made this covenant! Imagine if your great granddad came in from the garden and told you, 'good news, I just talking to God, and he promised us great blessings! And all we have to do is cut off the tips of our dicks!' You'd throw him in a home immediately."



"And then there's the Noahic Covenant, which is the one God and Noah made. This is the one where, after destroying most of the living world like so many bags of kittens, God has some second thoughts and tells Noah that he won't ever, ever do it again--that he promises never to kill every living creature in the world again... only later, we find out that what he *really meant was, he'd never do it again with a flood. Death by fiery comets? Totally still in play. Giant space monkeys? Sure, why not? It's not a flood! So basically God made this deal, but he has his fingers crossed behind his back the whole time.

And another thing--this was after God 'rewarded' Noah by making him spend 5 months in a floating box with one window and all the animals in the whole world. Seriously, it sounds like the ones who drowned were the lucky ones."

(This is the part  where I take my bow and let the rapturous applause wash over me like a warm rain.)

Last but not least; Crier Brothers playlist time!

• Best of Friends, Palma Violets
• Frontier Psychiatrist, Avalanches
• San Francisco, Foxygen
• Song for Zula, Phosphorescent
• Queen of Hearts, F**ked Up