kevin murphy

Please pay attention, this is for your benefit.

If Paul Hogan taught us anything about survival in the outback or on the city streets, he certainly demonstrated that the ability to discern a knife from other, less useful and possibly extraneous objects is crucial.  

Sure you laugh now, until you find yourself trapped in a canyon by a bloodthirsty koala and all you have going for you is an under-ripe piece of tropical fruit.

This stuff may seem elemental, but you'd be surprised how many Americans, Europeans and even Asians find it difficult to distinguish weaponry from footwear. 

I know.  I was thrown when I first saw it too.  Absolutely gob-smacked.  All this time I could have mistakenly had a prominent American cleric strapped to my waist.

This entry was provided as a public service.  Please, before traveling anywhere, be sure you know how to recognize a knife from a member of the mustelid family. No matter how cute it is, it will do you no good in defending yourself from kerchief-wearing eighties street toughs.  

All right then, we can all rest soundly tonight.  You're welcome. 

Special thanks to those of you who corrected my taxonomy of the ferret.  

Two weeks in Australia and one in New Zealand.  Damned little time for such an undertaking, but work - God love it - affords us damned little time to do otherwise.  But I want to write about it, because Jane and I took a leisurely pace, instead of covering the continent we dug deep into a few selected bits of Victoria and New South Wales, getting to know them and the fine people who populate them a bit better than the coast-to-coast Cook's Tour would allow.  

So I'll take a few entries to describe the place, since there is so much to describe.  If pictures speak volumes then I'm in trouble, because Jane took over two thousand of 'em.  I'll try to be concise, and I hope you enjoy the ride. Cheers.

I may be a bit hard to reach for the next three weeks.  My beloved Jane and I will be touring Australia And New Zealand as a gift to each other for our twentieth wedding anniversary. Australia's a country I grew to love in a very short time.  Here's a country that has had as many troubles, as many challenges, as many heroes as my own, but they seem to have figured out what they are in the present moment with a grace and canny spirit that reminds me of the country I grew up in, good, bad and otherwise.  

By the way, their health system works pretty damned well.

I'll be visiting New Zealand for the first time, but I'm terribly excited after having had my introduction to the Maori people on the island of Rarotonga.  See, traveling for me has a way of stretching my mind and my will, my perceptions of how good or bad my own life is, and it builds in me the sort of planetary patriotism that inhabits my favorite travelers, from Darwin to Ben Franklin to Mark Twain to Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux.  Life is too short, or perhaps too long, and the world is to small, or perhaps too big, to harbor a provincial conceit that passes as love of country.  Don't doubt that I love my country, but I also love that it's a big, wild, amazing world out there if one is willing to leave the home block and look around.  

So I'll report back when I return.  I think I'll be disengaging from the online world for the duration of the trip, looking out, rather than looking in.  But Jane has her cameras and I my notebook, and we'll be landing with a hearty appetite.

Cheers.

-kwm

So  

This week, Thursday to be exact, our alarmingly successful Rifftrax Live show from August 19 will be rebroadcast across the country.  This makes me very happy for many reasons.  First, There are an impressive amount of people who have written or twitted to me expressing their disappointment at missing the live show, I'm happy that it will be piped out once again, and although it won't be live this time, it will be real-time, and hopefully will capture all the flavor of that night, which for me was the most fun I could imagine with my clothes on. 

Second, and since I had so much damn fun doing it from the stage, it'll be an interesting experiment to sit in the audience and watch it with the mobb.  It does however give rise to some nearly metaphysical quandaries:  I'll be sitting in an audience watching a big-screen high-definition screening of my cohorts and me, playing to an audience watching us on a stage some weeks ago, while thousands (thank you so much) watched us from movie theaters, including the one in which I'll be sitting.  There's something freakily Stargate-y about it, although I won't be able to reach in and change the past, meaning my handful of badly flubbed lines, But I'll be tempted.  I'll also experience a weirdness of seeing myself perform, something I don't much like to do, except as part of a critical, note-taking function, in which case my face generally isn't blown up to the size of a Prius and my voice blasted out in Dolby 7.1.  I'm bound to cringe more than I did at Halloween 2.   

But I'm willing to let that self-conscious bullshit go.  I'll be sitting with you folks, the good guys.  What we Riffers do is essentially to be a professional Groundling, an audience member busting through the fourth wall from the wrong side, storming through the front door to take over.  We're on your side, you're on ours.  the invective is aimed at the screen.  So I'll be in good company, and I'll try not to cringe at myself too much.

For those who have already seen it, and those who may miss it again, fear not.  This live theatrical streaming is a really cool technology, and it allows us to do something rather wonderful, which is to bring the fun of a live riff to a whole lot of people, not only in big cities but also in small towns, in nearly every state in the country, and reach people who otherwise would never get a chance without considerable travel and expense.  And we can do it at a price doesn't sting that much.

We'd like to do it again soon, and I really hope we do.  Being up on that stage, cracking wise at Tor Johnson and Dudley Manlove and a host of black-and-white stewardesses, peeking out at the audience joining in the goofiness, I then would glance at those huge cameras in the back of the room and feel a connection with my wife Jane and her parents watching in Minnesota, My sister Kass in Madison, Brother Brian in Illinois, friends in about fifteen states, fans who had written in from nearly every state, including Hawaii; and it may have been the most thrilling moment I've ever had on a stage.  it felt so huge and yet so intimate, a goofy evening with friends, just joking and riffing and singing and acting like an occasional zombie.  

That thrill came from you folks being there.  I'm most grateful.  Thanks to all of you.  Keep watching.

-kwm

Photograph by Jeremy Beckham

The Hell you say?  Live?  Nationwide?  How can that be?  The details are here and here, but to sum up, we'll be performing onstage live from the Belcourt Theater in wonderful Nashville.  The show will be simulcast to more than 433 theaters coast to coast.  There's a fair chance that one of these theaters is near you.  

It's going to be fun.  We're going to lambaste Ed Wood's astonishing Plan Nine from Outer Space, a movie that has become the 1812 Overture of movie badness.  We're also going to premiere an all-new riff of a delightful short film to whet your appetite.  Internet superstar Veronica Belmont will be Master of Ceremonies, and our special musical guest is 21-Century Troubadour Jonathan Coulton.  There will actually be prizes.

We've been wanting to do this kind of thing for a long time, to bring our goofy brand of funny to as many places as we could without killing ourselves or limiting ourselves to big metropolitan areas.  We're hoping you'll come, the ticket prices are pretty cheap, the riff is damn funny, and seeing it in a crowd, live, with a live crowd and some good friends, may well make you giddy.

Thanks to Jeremy Beckham for the photo above.  Very classy, Jeremy.