Hey! I'm a singing chick! (Really!)

How cute is this?

Some months ago, I started doing voiceover work for the award-winning PBS tv show Peg + Cat. I LOVE voiceover work, especially animation. It's fun to pour everything into my voice.  When it's educational, it's especially gratifying to know that I'll be teaching children how to read thanks to Word World and yes, basic math skills thanks to Peg + Cat.  That kind of blows me away. My friends kids are watching, where ever they are all over the country -- and all over the world, really. My little nephews and cousins are watching. My 3 year old Goddaughters Evia and Avia are watching. Television is a powerful medium. I still love Schoolhouse Rock.

One particular episode is dedicated entirely to Billie Holiday, and is set in New Orleans for Mardi Gras. (As arranger/composer/musician for the series, Emmy award-winning wonder J. Walter Hawkes did brilliant work on this one.) I got to sing -- and talk! -- like Lady Day herself. I remember thinking, what a great way to introduce little tots (and adults) to an iconic jazz vocalist.  There were other moments that I forgot about, voiceover work in other Peg + Cat episodes that came and went that had me singing all kinds of things, and now they pop up inadvertently, like this little blip on Twitter the other day.

I am a work-from-home dad and I have all the Peg + Cat info you need pic.twitter.com/5gFplmzEcK

— Phil Dzikiy (@phildzikiy) September 10, 2015

What's cracking me up is, I think this little chick looks just like me -- if only for the way it's standing at a tilt and putting the flower just so.

Here's the song.



Cute, right?

Nothing's changed.

This editorial cartoon was drawn by Arthur Burdett Frost. In 1876.

Cartoon Saturdays -- Bugs Bunny: Hillbilly Hare

Because it's really not Saturday morning unless I'm watching Bugs Bunny in my underwear -- and because I'm such a generous and benevolent monarch (heh.) -- I thought I'd post this little gem for your cultural edification/amusement/etc.  And you can sing along and everything! Wheeee!

I'm going to serve up a weekly heaping helping of Chuck Jones to the world any Saturday it strikes my fancy.  God, I love him.  How sad am I that we never met.

This stuff will never get old.

Working Can Wait -- This Is Paradise!

i'm too busy prepping for auditions and hustling for gigs this weekend to blog anything worthwhile today.  the weather is crummy. i have no endurance in boxing conditioning class and i'm hoping running will fix that.  i'm still decluttering and editing my closets and scouring everything and eating clean.  i'm diligently practicing the ukulele, mostly because it's fun. it's time for a guitar lesson from kelvyn bell.  it's time to get recalibrated. yes, my plate is full.

whenever i'm especially busy, i always think of this porky pig cartoon porky's bear facts with it's sing-a-long song working can wait.  when i first came to the city and no one would give me a job, i gave myself a job and hustled until i had gigs singing in bars and restaurants almost every night of the week. my brother ramon (who was touring back and forth with ronald shannon jackson at the time) and i used to sit around the harlem apartment we shared and sing this  --  sarcastically, of course. I was half-killing myself, I was working so hard.

saturday classics

when i was a kid, it wasn't really saturday unless i spent the morning watching bugs bunny in my pajamas. so of course nowadays something in me wants to oversleep, crash land on the couch in my underwear and watch cartoons.  i can't think of a better way to start the weekend.

i don't understand people who think that television is bad. i think there's something fundamentally wrong with them -- especially when they watch tv shows on whatever computer they use.

it's not an idiot box. it's whatever you make of it.

i love bugs bunny -- but more importantly, i love chuck jones. he was and still is a constant inspiration. through those wb cartoons, i learned about opera, slapstick, vaudeville and consequently, the proper usage of the lazzi from the classic commedia dell'arte tradition.  because you really can't do comedy without understanding the anatomy of the lazzi -- and nothing teaches it to you like a good bugs bunny cartoon. 

of course, i learned a lot of novelty tunes and tin pan alley songs. sometimes i even sing them on my gigs. more on that some other time.

"off the air" is off the chain

somewhere around 4am found me bouncing out of bed listlessly and crash-landing onto the sofa, where i decided to channel surf to get my visual bearings before i ripped into rewrites. adult swim is always a good idea, even when they're playing something i don't like. and i don't like a lot of what's on their top 10 list - although i'm slightly addicted to robot chicken - especially the star wars parodies - and of course the venture brothers. squidbillies is insane.

after a rerun of king of the hill came and went, some wierd grainy footage slid across the screen and imploded, melding into day glow imagery of an eagle. when that bird took flight, picked up a goat and tossed it off of a cliff, i was riveted. i don't know why. it was so violent, so completely unexpected. drop dead hilarious, somehow. and strange. very, very strange. believe it or not, things got progressively more disturbing from there: a vivid, mesmerizing, stream-of-consciousness visual rant on animals. at first glance, it looks like one big acid trip. i was almost tempted to think, maybe i'd enjoy this a lot more if i were on acid. or at least high. and yeah, it smacks of psychedelia but it's actually way bigger than that.

it reminded me of superjail, definitely, when everything goes haywire with a superjailbreak and they do their trippy sequences.



mpb thinks that the warden of superjail looks exactly like james habacker, the artistic director/costumed host of the slipper room. (yes, they're still in exile and rebuilding the space.) i think he's right.
off the air also has that stitched together local cable access feel of tim and eric: awesome show, great job.



this is a less-bizarre-than-usual trailer, but it's still got that high creep factor that makes me flinch involuntarily if i watch it for more than 10 minutes.

that's the other thing. off the air was only about 10 minutes long, but really - that's just about all i could take, especially at 4 am. it was so definite about how random it wanted to be.

of course, everyone doesn't get it. of course, there are those that do. i mean, hey. whatever blows your hair back.

on the other hand, your eye has to mature and develop and grow, just like your ear and your tastebuds and your reading level and your intellect and everything else, if you are to fully engage and experience whatever it is that falls onto your lap or your plate. if you do it right, you keep learning and growing. reading is fundamental to this process. so is eating clean - i'm convinced of it. some people don't get past the basics. for them, pollock is splatter, coltrane is noise, foie gras is just chopped liver and dostoyevsky is overwhelming. what's especially discouraging is that the system in this country doesn't really encourage this way of functioning in the world. the public school system doesn't teach students how to think critically and the powers that be don't exactly encourage it.

too bad that the more visually arresting stuff on tv is so hard to find. now if only there were more than two episodes of this freakshow...

The Car of Tomorrow

Classic cartoon that's got this month's "tomorrow" theme all over it. Enjoy.

yes, another voiceover audition -- "pulp friction"

whether i'm singing or just talking, i've been twisting my voice around to make it sound like whatever i want it to be ever since i can remember. if singing is this close to the bone, can voiceover work really be that far off the mark? isn't it all some form of vocalizing? both have their own skill set but either way, i'm acting my way through it. and now that my commercial demo is up and at 'em online, there are a lot more voiceover opportunities coming at me all the time. weird, the way doors that i've walked past for years can suddenly spring open out of nowhere. i always thought, i have a nice voice, i should do voiceovers -- but i didn't have a clue as to where to begin and once i got ahold of that clue, i didn't know how to put it all together. but i'm past all that now. thank God.

i can't remember the last time i did an audition on a sun-drenched saturday afternoon that would normally find me running a 10 minute mile but i suppose there's a next time for everything. this one was for the pilot of an animated series called pulp friction that's similar to what you might find on adult swim. i knew that they wanted a monologue but i just didn't have one in me. after writing 3 one person shows, improvising whatever i need in the moment when i have to yammer on cue for 2 minutes has never been an problem. they warned that that they were videotaping, so i threw on a little makeup and, preoccupied with what i looked like, i zipped out of my place without a headshot/resume. super-smart, right? right.

i didn't even realize that i didn't have what i needed until i was in the elevator on my way up to ripley-greer studios. by the time i signed in with the audition monitor, i felt like a complete idiot. but that "i'm a complete idiot" feeling wasn't enough to make me not go through with the audition. i figured, whatever. the bottom line is, i'm here and how i feel about whatever ball i've dropped is irrelevant. feelings fake me out all the time. it's not that they aren't valid or real. it' s just that when the stuff hits the proverbial fan, they aren't the main thing i should be paying attention to. and too often in the past, that's the way the ball bounced. the smoke clears and phrases like, "i felt that this was..." or "i had a feeling about how we would..." feelings, whoa, whoa, whoa feelings. whoa. let's think this through: i'm not afraid to look stupid, probably because i know that i'm smart.

so i get in the room. it's a guy behind a camera and in front of him are three guys sitting at a long table. they are upbeat, genuinely interested, affable and friendly. how ideal is that? i told them that i forgot my headshot but that i'd email it right away. no problem. then i told them i had no monologue. that wasn't a problem, either. the guy all the way to the left gave me a copy of the onion and told me to read anytihng on the front page. just make it funny, he added good-naturedly, and as he did, they all nodded. funny, huh i mumbled as my eyes scanned the page. my gazed crash-landed on an article out of the ATL. i considered that to be a sign from God and began to read it in my best texarkana accent that i could muster. as i did, a strange thing happened: i killed. after a minute or so, they gave me a few pages of script and asked me to review 2 characters: clayton, the alcoholic easter bunny and craig, the reindeer that's also a thug-wannabe. both guys. when i began to ask questions, they showed me artist's renderings. i really loved the bunny. he was way too pink and cheery looking and fuzzy, and he clutched a bottle of hard liquor in one hand, and he looked really really fried.

i sat outside, a little dazed that i'd gotten that far and made some mental notes with script choices. when i went back into the room, i asked them if they knew who foster brooks was. i thought it would be interesting to play the bunny that way. all i got was blank faces all around, except for the camera guy, who remarked that when he was reading it that's who he was thinking of.

immediately, i thought of ozzy ozbourne who remarked that he'd never take up with a younger woman because they'd have nothing to talk about. sometimes when i get to talking about whatever i'm thinking of and i start bouncing stuff around to illustrate what i mean, i get blank looks like this. ew.

and yes, my friend knows who foster brooks is. thank God. but i digress.

i made it through that instant callback with flying colors and skipped off to the gym on 125 -- so happy, i ran a mile in 10 minutes. we'll see if i got the gig or not. the good news is, i didn't leave. i drove it home with one headlight.

happy birthday to me!

"in my dreams, i'm bugs bunny -- but when i wake up, i'm daffy duck." - chuck jones

my friend took me to six flags in jackson, nj for my birthday. how cool is that? he also won that marvin the martian for me that i'm holding in the photo above by doing that whole he-man hit-the-stump-with-the-sledgehammer-and-the-pole-lights-all-the-way-up game. he didn't make it "ding" all the way at the top, but he came awfully close.

i love marvin the martian. of course, i never doubted his blackness when i was a little kid. him or darth vader. (or, as logic would have it, darth vader's children.) when i first came to the city, black people in harlem were all about wearing an oversized black t-shirt with marvin's eyes staring out menacingly with a gun barrel pointed at the viewer. them walking towards you in the most casual of circumstances looked like marvin was gunning for you. very effective. there was also another popular one that said "don't ask me 4 shit" in huge letters. heh. in the recent past, it was the warner brothers WB brand and in elaborate WB cursive, with the crest blaring in WB type: "if you see the cops, warn a brotha!"

i don't know when they took over, but warner brothers cartoon characters are everywhere in six flags. i loved it. i'm a massive chuck jones fan. but everywhere i turned, all i could think was, warn a brotha, warn a brotha, warn a brotha. trippy.

no. what was really tripped me out was all the mullets and the doo-rags that were there in full regalia and how bovine everyone was and how loud and bratty and chubby pert near all of the kids were and how almost every young girl dressed like a street-walking whore and the food was plentiful but horribly overpriced. even the water. four dollars for a liter? somebody was definitely tripping on that one.

any amusement park was such a drag when i was a little kid because there was always someone standing there to tell me what i couldn't ride, where i couldn't go, what i couldn't eat. after about a half hour, i was ready to go home. but yesterday, i felt like an 8 year old with a wallet. and a great deal of patience. after awhile, the lines were crazy. my friend remarked that all of it was a lot like war: long stretches of boredom (standing in line) followed by frenzied bursts of action (the ride). my favorite: the great american scream machine. it had not one but four loops. crazy.

my friend insisted on riding the runaway train ride. it's for kiddies really but he used to ride it with his father, who would take him and his brother there often when they were young. before our first big drop and twist, he dedicated our ride to him. that touched me very much.

funny, the things you remember from childhood.