D.C. Pierson's Blog, page 10

I’ve posted the latest CRAP KINGDOM CUSTOM RAP for the...

I’ve posted the latest CRAP KINGDOM CUSTOM RAP for the 51st thru 100th people to pre-order CRAP KINGDOM. 

If you pre-order my new book I will rap about you as I have done for these fifty people. Only for a limited time, so act NOW.

Pre-order the book at Amazon (http://amzn.to/OnJO53 Kindle: http://amzn.to/QPq5JU) or at Powell’s (http://bit.ly/OlWo2j) or any other online book retailer (eBook pre-orders also accepted,) forward the receipt to CRAPKINGDOM@GMAIL.COM and acheive immortality in a custom rap (or “crap”). I’ll e-mail you when your rap has gone up.

DC Pierson performs one half-hour of stand-up for the goodly...

DC Pierson performs one half-hour of stand-up for the goodly citizens of NYC.

comedynerdsunited:ATTENTION NYC NERDS: DC Pierson is going to...

comedynerdsunited:

ATTENTION NYC NERDS: DC Pierson is going to be back in your air-space in October! As I’m sure LA nerds and anyone else who’s seen him perform can attest, he puts on one hell of a funny show. His last one to hit UCB’s Chelsea stage, DC Pierson Is Bad At Girls, literally left my sides hurting from laughter.

These will probably sell out fast, so keep an eye out (and I’ll try to post about it) for when they go up!

magicbagla:This Sunday - September 16th - on Magic BagJulian...

magicbagla:

This Sunday - September 16th - on Magic Bag

Julian McCullough

Sue Smith

Will Weldon

Sean Patton

Sara Schaefer (pictured)

Hosted by Eliza Skinner & DC Pierson

Little Modern Theater, 6476 Santa Monica Blvd, Hollywood

Sunday, September 16th at 8pm.

FREE!

Our show is in the Comedy Lounge, more info on the club...

Our show is in the Comedy Lounge, more info on the club available on their website. Click this link to buy tickets. Tickets will also be available at the door (cash only, I’m told.)

UPDATE: The show is apparently 21+ and costs $10.

Commencement Speech

…and remember: If anyone ever even remotely questions the wisdom of your selfish choices or points out how your rationalizations for your actions are a spider’s web of delusion and self-help tropes gleaned selectively from pop songs and reality shows, that person is NEGATIVE and you need to GET THEM OUT OF YOUR LIFE.

And whatever you do, never, ever grow.

If you pre-order my new book CRAP KINGDOM I will rap about you...

If you pre-order my new book CRAP KINGDOM I will rap about you as I have done for these fifty people. Only for a limited time, so act NOW.

Pre-order the book at Amazon (http://amzn.to/OnJO53 Kindle: http://amzn.to/QPq5JU) or at Powell’s (http://bit.ly/OlWo2j), forward the receipt to CRAPKINGDOM@GMAIL.COM and acheive immortality in a custom rap (or “crap”). I’ll e-mail you when your rap has gone up.

What It Means To Be From Arizona, A Great State With Terrible Laws

I am from Phoenix, Arizona.

The events of my novel The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep And Never Had To take place there. When my writing partners Dan and Meggie and I started writing a screenplay version of the book last year, we decided to open the script with a quote from a George Saunders essay about Dubai:

“…out in all this open space, where anything could be true, and what is true might even be good.”

To me, the quote evokes the potential of my home state. The promising void that can be made into paradise if you just add ideas, endurance, and pioneer spirit.

Everything where I grew up grew up around me, highways and shopping malls brimming with mid-90’s optimism. Suburbia is a fun thing, as a teenager, to feel pleasantly alienated by. At the time, I believed it would always grow, and I would always feel pleasantly alienated by it, and I would fret for the souls of those so content with their multiplexes and their corporate food, MAAAAAN! But something far darker happened, far less pleasantly alienating, something much more difficult to summarize with an early Green Day song. The economy tanked and shopping malls began displaying knocked-out teeth in the form of vacated storefronts. And the shiny-happy-people paradigm I had so looked forward to always feeling better than curdled and became something to be scared by rather than feel superior to. One of the forms it seems to have taken is that of a ceaseless legislative war on immigrants and women. 

I don’t think this was a feeling exclusive to Arizona, but growing up there in the nineties, the tone of our education was one that said, racism’s in the past, sexism’s in the past, once we clean this environment thing up (something you kids can make a big dent in by cutting up plastic six-pack rings) we’ll pretty much be post-history.

I also don’t think this has been a feeling exclusive to Arizona, but the last twelve years have felt like a non-stop terrifying reminder that not only are those struggles far from over, but that those who would return us to the past have concocted ever more movie-villainish tactics in order to send us there.

And it always seems like my home state is at the vanguard of this backwards march. It seems like whenever a subject is thrust onto the national stage and all my liberal friends set their social-media networks alight with this-can’t-be-happening-in-20XX-right kinda sentiments, that my home state will stride proudly in the middle of the debate and show everybody not just what side of the issue it’s on, but that it has gone so far as to get a ghastly unremovable prison tattoo reading WE HATE WOMEN or MEXICANS GO HOME or whatever the case may be.

We seem to be this laboratory for the newest and worst ideas in ultra-conservative thinking. It’s like we combine the ingenuity and boldness I would like us to be known for with shockingly regressive ideology, so that when we go to the past, we don’t even go there in a goofy HG Wells time machine, we go there in a Delorean.

Put another way, if the red states are a gang of ne’er-do-well 13 year olds, I have often thought of us as the low kid on the totem pole who’s always trying to do the craziest stuff, like eat toads and blow up cats, in order to impress the cooler kids in the gang, who are happy to have us around to do that crazy stuff and cement the gang’s reputation as a bunch of really bad dudes, but wouldn’t actually go so far as to do it themselves, because toads taste gross and come on, they maybe want to actually kiss a girl someday.

It never stops making me sad. We are still so new. We could be a laboratory for kindness and for empathy, a Holodeck in which to project a miraculous future instead of acting out the worst of what has past. A place where, as Saunders said about another desert, anything could be true, and what is true might even be good.

As a kid, I was always insanely proud that the Jabba’s sail-barge scene in “Return Of The Jedi” had been filmed in Yuma, AZ. Our landscape is totally and wonderfully alien sometimes. Our late-summer storms are practically Martian. Our major cities could be spaceports, rendered habitable for the masses only by science and by pluck. I’d hope that if humans ever populated an actual faraway planet, we’d take the opportunity to correct from the ground up the injustices that seem woven into the fabric of our Earthbound civilization. I think we have the opportunity to practice doing just that, right here right now, in a state as relatively young and extraterrestrially beautiful as the one I’m from.

We may have been doing exactly the opposite for several years. But as we’ve all seen in commercials where a sports car goes drifting at ninety miles per hour past some a heat-shimmery sand dunes, in the desert, there is plenty of room to turn.

This latest bit of Arizona jumping out ahead of everyone with draconian legislation (IE, the idea that pregnancy begins two weeks before conception) comes just as I’m due to return home this weekend to be inducted into my high school’s Hall Of Fame, alongside a Chicago Cubs third baseman and an Army Captain and Silver Star recipient, among others. I couldn’t be more excited. I’m told we’re going to get in a truck bed and they’re going to drive us around at halftime of the football game on Friday night. 

While there, I’ve been asked to speak to some theater classes about careers in entertainment, and I expect to mention this political stuff not at all. I expect that I will be talking all about hard work and self-determination and all of the values I, according to the ultra-conservative caricature of a liberal, am supposed to abhor.

But I love those things. I learned them from my dad, an Arizona small-business founder, and from my teachers at an Arizona public high school. I’m proud to have learned them in Arizona and proud to be from Arizona. I just wish it were perceived as the great place it is. I wish it always acted like the great place it is. I hope someday we stand up and fulfill that destiny, and that the utopian sheen it seemed to have when I grew up wasn’t just a function of my naiveté but of something deeply true about the place. 

We are such a beautiful amalgamation of people from all over the country and from all over the world. Our landscape is unlike anything in the world, and the suburbia I grew up in was Spielbergian in its perfection, probably because Spielberg grew up there too. Our Mexican food RULES. The weather is always either gorgeous or so hot that by enduring it you automatically become heroic.

So we’re already heroes. That’s out of the way. I just wish, when it came time to pass laws, that we acted like it.

Downstairs just now in this office building I walked in and Sting’s “Brand New...

Downstairs just now in this office building I walked in and Sting’s “Brand New Day” was starting to play
and I passed an HDTV in a recessed nook in a hallway much too small for anyone to stop and watch.
The TV was showing a Little League baseball game between Japan and Panama.

When all is revealed, I’m excited to find out what it meant,
the song and the TV and the baseball game,
and me walking in from lunch.

Pre-Order My Next Book CRAP KINGDOM And I Will Rap About You

I’m very proud to announce that my next novel, Crap Kingdom, will be coming out in March from Viking. It’s a comedic fantasy-adventure that’s targeted at young adults but is also meant to be read and enjoyed by actual adults. Also, everyone in between.

Here’s a synopsis, but be sure to hang on for an AMAZING SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT about an offer I’m making to YOU if you pre-order the book right now.

THE CHOSEN ONE MUST BE RETRIEVED FROM EARTH

HE WILL BRING DOWN THE WALL AND RESTORE THE KINGDOM TO GLORY

HIS NAME IS TOM PARKING

With this mysterious yet oddly ordinary-looking prophecy, Tom’s fate is sealed: he’s been plucked from his life and whisked away to a magical kingdom to be its Chosen One.

There’s just one problem: The kingdom SUCKS.

When Tom turns down the job of Chosen One, he thinks he’s making a smart decision. But when Tom discovers he’s been replaced by his best friend Kyle, who’s always been cooler, more athletic, and better with girls, Tom wants Crap Kingdom back—at any cost. And the hilarity that ensues will determine the fate of the universe.

A SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT REGARDING CRAP KINGDOM, IMMORTALITY, AND YOU:

If you PRE-ORDER the book (which you can do right now, this second) I will write your name into a CUSTOM RAP (or CRAP, if you will) that I’ll perform, record, and post to my YouTube page. YOU WILL BE IMMORTALIZED FOREVER, BY ME, IN RAP FORM, in a YouTube video you can then share with everyone to show them what a remarkable, book-buying type person you are.

“HOW?” you ask.

Here are the easy steps to pre-ordering and achieving immortality in a CUSTOM RAP:

1. Pre-order the book. You can pre-order it right now from Amazon, from Powell’s, if you want to support independent booksellers (http://bit.ly/OlWo2j), or from any other bookseller as long as they will e-mail you a receipt. If you’d prefer to pre-order as an eBook (for Kindle, iPad, or other eReader) that’s fine too, as long as you pre-order it now and get an e-mail receipt.

2. Forward the e-mail receipt you receive from the online book retailer to me at CRAPKINGDOM@GMAIL.COM. (Include a pronunciation guide if your name is complicated to pronounce. Include your actual name if your name is different than the one on the receipt.)

3. That’s it! Just do it NOW, as this offer is for a limited time only. I’ll e-mail you when the custom rap featuring your name goes up.

WHY SHOULD I PRE-ORDER THE BOOK INSTEAD OF BUYING IT WHEN IT COMES OUT?

The more pre-orders the book receives, the more my publisher will see there’s interest in the book, the more books I will sell, the more I will be able to spend time writing more books for you to read, and creating other things for you to enjoy. The bottom line is, the amount of cool things I’m able to make, and the pace at which I’m able to make them, is directly proportional to the amount of people who spend actual money on the things I make. I know your money and time are precious and I don’t take that lightly.

Plus, on your end, for all your good intentions, you might forget about the book between now and March. If you pre-order NOW, when the book comes out it will show up in your mailbox (or on your eReader) as a fantastic surprise.

Plus…y’know…IMMORTALITY.

For further details/updates/etc. follow me on twitter or follow this very blog. But more importantly, pre-order the book right this very second, and I will rap your name in a video, and you’ll get a book in March, and all will be right with the world.

Thanks so, so much. And thanks to Pete at SlashFilm for breaking the news.