brian costello show

Date: 4/28/07
Location: The Empty Bottle
Show: The Brian Costello Show with Matt Flaiz, Max Glaessner, Chris Deguire, The Screaming Yellow Zonkers, and The Tony Sagger One Man Band
Cost: Free
Things I missed to be there: "Finding Our Roots: The Chicago Anarchist Conference" at Loyola University; Version>07 NFO XPO at the Zhou B. Art Center
Reason for Going: Iunno, I always forget or miss it. Figured it was about time

There wasn't jack shit worth paying for on Friday night so me and Sarah stayed in, drank some Makers, and watched a bootleg of Hot Fuzz. Like most couples, we have our little tiffs, and like most couples who fight, the things we're most likely to argue about are sex and aesthetic design. This particular argument was about whether or not the movie was a parody or an homage. To be honest, we weren't fighting so much about the movie itself but about the concepts we would use to describe it. When I was wasting away my parents' money in writing school, I had a very specific concept of "parody" hammered into my head. In fact, 'parody' was the main element that separated Fiction II from Fiction I. There were less than a dozen of us, week after week, writing our own version of Gogol's "The Nose" or Kafka's "Metamorphoses" or Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener". Little by little after the first wave of stories came in- "The Cock", "Bartleby the Gangsta", and dozens of stories where unsuspecting men awoke to find themselves ferrets, squid, and no small amount of intangible ephemera, we learned two things:

1. Parody doesn't have to be funny, and is in fact, often a terrible venue for comedy.

2. It only works when there is an element of love. A story making fun of another story is not one that will last. A story poking fun, using hallmarks of the original's style or genre.

That's what Hot Fuzz is. A story that understands how stupid the buddy cop genre is, but also how fun, and how lasting, and that these elements are not mutually exclusive.

No one would understand this more than Brian Costello, because, well, he teaches Fiction at the school where I wasted a great deal of my parents' money. Brian Costello plays drums in the Functional Blackouts and recently published the novel The Enchanters VS. Sprawlburg Springs. Once a month or so, he hosts the talkshow "The Brian Costello Show with Brian Costello" at the Empty Bottle. It's kind of an indie rock Tonight Show.

After maybe three years of missing it, I dragged myself out because it was a nice enough day to do so. The show could be considered a parody. While it isn't filmed, it uses many of the same tropes that have been talk show standards since before Johnny Carson, including the introduction of the show with a skit and a monologue, the regular cast of characters including a a bandleader, a cohost, celebrity guests and lots of booze to warm them up. The show didn't go for the lowest common denominator humor of Leno or the avant garde nonsense peppered throughout Conan O'brien's show, but rather resembled an unpolished version of Letterman at his best. It is Letterman, after all, who seems at his best around normal, weird people, whether they be Harvey Pekar, Larry "Bud" Melman, or Rupert from the deli down the street.

Brian's guests were a former satanist, who told stories about editig the Church of Satan's myspace page, and a "Wisconsin expert", who handed out cheese samples. In between, Brian gave up the stage to his sideman, who in turn stripped down to a shirt that said "Fuck Yeah!" and threw a Risky Business-style party, only to have Brian come back a few minutes later, bedlam on stage, beers everywhere, announcing that he wasn't really leaving for the weekend and, stripping into his own "Fuck Yeah" shirt, announced that his protege had passed the test. As the band Screaming Yellow Zonkers tore through a surf number, Brian led volunteers from the audience through a multi-round Hula Hoop competition.