Sometimes potential roommates would pull a bait-and-switch scenario when we’d exchange Facebook profiles. Upon seeing my pictures, a hip-hop DJ in Carroll Gardens asked, “Why doesn’t a finelooking lady like you have a boyfriend?

Maybe I could be the one to change that.”

I could practically smell the Axe Body Spray wafting through the computer screen. Plus, the last thing I needed was a living situation where I’d need to sleep with one eye open and a can of mace in hand. It was a definite “Thanks, but no thanks” scenario.

Then there was the man who made a pass at me sight unseen. I had inquired about a room in Brooklyn, and the guy wrote me a polite apology because he decided to give up the apartment and just find a place where he could live by himself. About a week later, I received another email from him claiming that I sounded like the kind of person he could settle down with. “I like jazz,” he wrote, “and leisurely Sundays with a special lady.” He clearly mistook his response email for the “About Me” section of his Match.com profile. At first, I wondered what it was about my email that made him think I’d want him to light candles around a bathtub while Al Green played on the stereo. Was it the fact that I had a cat? That I didn’t smoke? That I paid my bills on time? My email was just your rudimentary housing query, not a desperate plea for a greencard marriage.

The tone shifted when I received an email from a woman who was offering me a room in an apartment that I would share with her husband because her job required that she live across the country. I’d only have to pay $300 a month in rent. The catch was that I’d have to take over her role in their master-andservant relationship, which included humiliating the husband on a daily basis and demanding that he do all of the household chores.

“This arrangement isn’t about money,” the woman explained. I played this line over and over again in my head in the kind of shrill, authoritarian tone reserved for the severe headmaster in a B-movie about a reform school for girls. If this situation wasn’t located about 25 miles outside of the city proper, a couple hundred dollars a month and a personal housekeeper upon whom I could unleash all of my frustrations wouldn’t have sounded like that bad of a deal. However, dating in New York is hard enough without having to explain to any guy I bring home why there’s a married man with a ballgag shoved deep into his mouth camped out in the living room.

Looking back, it was naive of me to think that this woman’s request for me to dominate her husband in her absence would be the most disturbing way I’d be sexually solicited during the apartment hunt. That honor went to the gentleman who sent me a form email that was more of a hostile manifesto than a friendly roommate inquiry. His list of demands came in the form of a mass email that he undoubtedly sent out to every woman who had posted an ad seeking an available room. “I’m tired of having long online correspondences with women I never end up meeting…” the email began. One line in and already he sounded angry. Promising. Next, he laid out a massive indictment of the opposite gender. “Women waste their entire lives waiting for the perfect man to come along. Meanwhile, they overlook guys like me, guys who own their own home and have a good job.” As if that alone didn’t make him a catch, I bet he always remembers to say “please” when he orders his hostages to put the lotion in the basket.

Some people might also raise an eyebrow at the two pictures he enclosed with the email. The first was of a cartoon princess traipsing through an enchanted forest with a castle in the background. “This can be your life if you choose me,” the caption explained. The second picture was of four skeletons seated around a card table, kind of like what the Golden Girls would look like if they all met their ends while playing a round of gin rummy. “This is what happens when women waste their lives waiting for the nonexistent perfect man,” the second caption read. Clearly, they should settle for an entitled, mouth-breathing sociopath who is likely to trap his roommate/life partner into some kind of perverse Boxing Helena scenario. Unlike the situation with the submissive husband, in this guy’s fantasy, the chick is definitely wearing the ballgag.

What might have been even more disturbing than the picture of the skeletons was the fact that he included a recipe in his missive. In addition to the various chores that he expected his partner to share, he also demanded that his roommate/ girlfriend cook for him every once in a while. In order to take out the guesswork, he included one of his favorite barbecue chicken recipes. How thoughtful.

To be fair, this guy has clearly lost years of his life corresponding with online women who were likely a group of middle-school boys giggling around a laptop in between dice rolls in a Dungeons & Dragons game. In a way, it makes sense that he wants to skip right past the awkward dating stage and rocket right into the obligatory live-in concubine phase of any healthy relationship. Plus, there was a small part of me that wanted to drop him a line in a few years and ask if he ever learned that sending strange women pictures of skeletons wasn’t quite the panty-dropping finishing move he thought it would be. Another part of me wondered who would play me in the episode of Law & Order: SVU that would inevitably be ripped from the headlines that would run after I tried to move out. It would have to be a brunette with offbeat good looks. Maybe Juliette Lewis wouldn’t mind a quick foray back to television.

Once I made the move to New York and got settled into a decent living situation, I experienced the same dating dry spells every other woman in the city encounters at one time or another. I figure that if I ever hit that wall where I really need to get laid, all I’d have to do is start looking for apartments.

_

Maggie Serota is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. Every day she makes up a new urban myth for you to tell to your gullible friends at dailyurbanlegend.tumblr.com.

Associated with acts such as Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Huggy Bear and Team Dresch, the Riot Grrrl movement was exemplified by its use of raw and raucous punk rock to foster the exchange of ideas surrounding feminism, queer identity and grassroots political activism. Still, "everybody wants to call it a zine collection," laments Darms. And if there’s one thing Darms is adamant about, it’s that the Riot Grrrl Collection— open now at NYU’s Fales Library & Special Collections department—is not a zine collection.

In fact, as it stands, zines are only a modest component, numbering somewhere between 40 to 50. Sure, handmade zines and master copies from the movement do comprise an important component of the archive, but the collection boasts a vast variety of equally relevant and defining artifacts. To illustrate her point, Darms unfolds a navy-blue baby doll dress, and identifies it as the dress worn on the cover of Bikini Kill’s seminal Pussy Whipped album. Perhaps the collection’s most prized object is the actual filing cabinet used by Riot Grrrl pioneer Kathleen Hanna to catalog the various clippings, documents, articles and reviews related to Bikini Kill and other prominent figures central to the movement. Hanna started archiving her own personal collection chronologically since 1989, and used the cabinet to house zine masters, liner notes, recording masters and photography, in addition to examples of other people’s work. Although the cabinet has functioned as a storage space for important documents, it has also been cataloged as a vital artifact in its own right.

The cabinet itself has certainly seen better days, as evidenced by its smattering of dents and layers of faded and peeling band stickers.

"Kathleen has even toured with it. At one point, it held the seat up in the Bikini Kill van," explains Darms.

It’s certainly an impressive collection, but one that is cloistered away from the public at large. The catch is that you have to be a scholar to access it. If you’re writing your dissertation on feminist theory, you’re in luck. If you just want to see the blue dress because Pussy Whipped changed your life—and, if given the chance, it certainly will—that’s another story entirely.

In addition to these items, Darms pulls out some old fliers and handouts, one of which consists of a variety of quirky slogans, declarations and bullet points posing the question of why boys aren’t called sluts (pictured here) and urging the reader to cry in public.

Darms sees this handout as not just representative of the anger Riot Grrrl espoused, but also of some of the underexplored ideologies within the subculture.

"Sure, the whole angry thing came across, but the ideas expressed also included the deconstruction of cool and not being jealous. It functioned almost like a self-help group," Darms explains. Although that notion seems a little crunchy, it makes sense.

The collection itself serves as more than just a resource for the history of a certain subset of punk rock. Scholars from all over the world have expressed interest in accessing the archives for a number of research topics, including feminist manifestos, zine circulation, the history of activism, queer and gender studies, D.I.Y. culture and even food studies, as veganism is a prominent aspect of the punk lifestyle.

"I’ve been building this collection for about a year and a half," explains Darms. "I plan to be building it for the next 10 to 20 years."

Although gathering and processing all the materials has been a nearly overwhelming endeavor, the project has been something of a labor of love given her personal connection to the culture and ideals of the scene. Darms was introduced to the punk scene back in 1984 when she started going to shows. In 1989, she moved to one of the movements’ epicenters, Olympia, Wash., where she attended Evergreen State University at the same time Hanna and other key players were laying down the roots for the growing movement. Although Darms never identified herself as a Riot Grrrl, she certainly can’t deny that the developing scene influenced her own world view and burgeoning sense of feminist politics.

"It was an incredible time and an incredible community," Darms reminisces. "For me, Riot Grrrl is theoretically sophisticated and smart. It challenged institutions, but not intellectualism."

The archives will be further augmented by the inclusion of Hanna’s personal journals. Although it’s likely that the collection won’t receive the journals for quite some time—it is set to inherit the documents only after Hanna passes away. And while we’ll be deprived of juicy scene gossip—remember when Courtney Love socked Hanna backstage at Lollapalooza?— here’s hoping we’re still around to read about it, assuming we’re getting our doctorates in rock ‘n’ roll catfights.

Sex Our Bodies,Our Junk isn’t the first book Mike Sacks has, at least in part, written. It is, however, the first book he doesn’t want his parents to read. “My father told me that he was at Barnes & Noble and he mentioned that there was only one copy of the book left,” says Sacks. “He ended up buying a John Grisham novel instead. He hasn’t read [my book], he doesn’t want to read it and I’m not begging him to.”

Would anyone beg his father to buy a parody sex manual containing chapters titled “Foreplay: Penetration’s Waiting Room” and “Masturbation: Sexuality’s Midget Sidekick”? Probably not. Let’s not even get into what parents would think of the illustration of a couple spending naked time on a bean bag chair.

Fortunately, Sacks can shoulder the blame with his co-authors, Emmy Awardwinning former The Daily Show writer Scott Jacobson, former The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien writer Todd Levin, actor and writer Ted Travelstead and The Onion’s Jason Roeder. For the purposes of this book, the authors wrote in character, specifically as the comically ineffectual sex researchers comprising the fictional think tank The Association for the Betterment of Sex.

The idea to make fun of the inherent ridiculousness of landmark sex manuals such as Our Bodies, Our Selves and The Joy of Sex seemed so obvious and ripe with material that Sacks was shocked to find that it hadn’t been done before.

“As kids, everyone sneaked a peak at their parents’ books,” Sacks recalls. “Apparently, no one forgets the first time he has the images of ‘hairy hippies getting it on’ burned into his mind.”

Referencing the patently unsexy and mildly disturbing illustrations of naked Kris Kristofferson clones, Todd Levin laments, “I remember reading Our Bodies, Ourselves, and I probably would have had sex five years sooner if I hadn’t.” There’s a cruel irony in filling a sex reference full of images of the last people anyone wants to see having sex. This irony certainly wasn’t lost on the writers.

“Reading The Joy of Sex is like talking to a complete creep,” Levin adds, specifically referencing the sections of the book that compare sex to making soup. “The fact that the illustrations are watercolors of the author adds an extra layer of creep.”

So, what exactly qualifies a bunch of pasty comedy nerds to write about sex?

“Nobody understands how awkward sex can be more than creepy nerds,” offers Levin. “Sex is just this awkward arrangement of bodies that is just inherently funny. It’s even funnier when you try to explain it.”

Given the subject matter, one has to wonder if the members of the Association For The Betterment of Sex decided to take a more hands-on approach and conduct their own field research.

“There was a lot of bumping up against people,” explains Levins, “and long cuddles.”

“Our wives and girlfriends wanted nothing to do with this,” laments Sacks, “so, naturally we hired whores.”

Sacks then admits that the crew did no hands-on research except for the one area in which they all excelled: masturbation. In that arena, their fact-finding couldn’t have been more thorough.

When asked which member of The Association is the best at the actual practice of sex, Todd Levin named Travelstead as the group’s prime swordsman.

“He has the most body hair, which probably creates the most friction. Ted is a very robust man,” offers Levin.

However, there’s only so much one can glean from reading a sex manual. Thankfully, Sacks, Levin, the rest of the Association and a few special guests, including comedians Jessi Klein and Allison Silverman, will be on hand at the Greenlight Bookstore’s monthly Steamboat reading series Sept. 23 to ultimately bring a more interactive element to the text.

“We’re gonna hand out ponchos to the first two rows,” Levin muses. This will certainly be appreciated should the reading turn into a glandular Gallagher performance.

Sacks also mentions the possibility of the authors reading their parts in characters they’ve cultivated in the book.

“Ted is going to show up in a laboratory smock,” Sacks explains. “I’m hoping he reads shirtless. It usually doesn’t take much to get Ted to take off his shirt.”

“Ted posed for our cover,” Sacks explains, referring to the illustration of the burly, naked, bearded man who looks like the Brawny Paper Towel Man recovering from spring break.

“No airbrushing there,” boasts Sacks.

–
STEAMBOAT SPECIAL EDITION: THE SEX EPISODE!
Sept. 23, Greenlight Bookstore, 686 Fulton St. (at S. Portland Ave.), Brooklyn, 718-246-0200; 7:30, Free.

Of course, the word “nerd” doesn’t really carry the weight it used to, especially since being one became hip. Hell, these days anyone who has so much as glanced at a CliffsNotes copy of Ulysses calls himself a nerd. What makes this tousled-haired pretty boy deserving of the title?
“I was a proto-nerd when being a nerd was not hip. I was in chess club tournaments. I studied Latin. I owned my first computer in 1981. I was the president of the Classics club and got my ass kicked for being a nerd,” proclaims Hardwick. “Now it’s this hip, retro thing. Now if you wear an Atari shirt it’s cool, but if I wore one when I was a kid I got stuffed in a trashcan.”

His nerdiness has carried into his more experienced years in the form of the occasional Dungeons and Dragons game with fellow comedians Brian Posehn and Patton Oswalt.
“Sometimes Patton would sing a song that his drunken dwarf character made up about a zombie’s vagina,” recalls Hardwick.

As if Hardwick’s poindexter credentials wasn’t already solidified, he also admits to being able to recite pi up to about 180 decimal places, which must drive the chicks wild.
“They love it,” Hardwick boasts before admitting, “No, no they don’t.”

Even Hardwick sometimes gets caught up in the debate of who qualifies as an actual nerd. He recalls an email he received from someone reacting to a joke he performed about how nerds fight, which is that they make no physical contact, repress emotion and go home to angrily masturbate.

“This kid wrote to me and said that ‘my nerd friends would kill you with a PVC pipe.’ And I’m thinking, those aren’t nerds, those are sociopaths.”

Because Hardwick is clearly no fan of free time, he even started a book proposal for a book on how to help his bespectacled brethren manage their own time.

“Nerds tend to have an acuity for obsession and this book is laser focused at the nerd,” Hardwick explains. “I’m pitching it as The Nerdist: Life Management for Creative Brainiacs.”

Hardwick promises that it will have more of a snarky, comedic point of view than the typical crunchy, new age self-help fare. If he plays his cards right, he could position himself as the next Tony Robbins, except without the gigantic head.

Given the range of Hardwick’s achievements, he’s still a little taken aback by the fact that he’s mainly known as the guy from Singled Out, despite the fact that he’s been doing stand-up since his days as an undergrad at UCLA.

“I always assume that people know that I do stand-up and that I don’t suck and I’ll even hang out with people after the show.”

Hell, if the audience members ask nicely, maybe he’ll even help them with their math homework.

>Chris Hardwick

Mar. 12 & 13, Comix, 353 W. 14th St. (betw. 8th & 9th Aves.), 212-524-2500; $20 and up.

“I think it took three or four shows for the audience to be like ‘OK, this can be serious.’” Allison explains.

The medium can also expose a new side to some well known personalities.”Someone like Michael Ian Black has a very well known persona and at his performance people were taken aback when they realized that he was not a snarky asshole, but this very soft-spoken man,” says Allison.

“With storytelling, you’re speaking to the audience as a peer or a friend,” says Allison, “Stories make us feel like we understand each other a little better and they force the performer to go out on a limb. It’s refreshing and cathartic.”

At the live shows, each performer is expected to tell a story revolving around a designated theme. For example, the Feb. 11 show is about “Obsessions: Things We Get Carried Away With At Some Point In Our Lives.” Some other themes slated for later shows in the series are “Blindsided,” “Unique: I’m Not Like Most People,” and “The End: When Something Is Over.”
“The irony of the ‘Unique’ show is that the audience will end up relating to what each storyteller thinks makes them unique.” laughs Allison.

When asked if there are certain themes that have worn out their welcome Allison is quick to offer that he is “getting a little leery of ‘bodily fluid stories.’

“It’s a little surprising to learn that some point everyone has pooped their pants.”

In addition to the live show, Risk! also has a companion podcast which features recorded stories from regular people in addition to the usual roster of actors and alt-comedy stars. If the numbers are any indication, the podcasts have certainly resonated with its audience. The last podcast achieved almost 25,000 downloads just a few days after it went live. The numbers are all the more impressive when considering that listeners have been amassed mainly by word of mouth.

Not bad considering the show was essentially born from a creative limbo Allison experienced after The State disbanded, when he found himself at a loss for the next stage in his career. Uninterested in pursuing work as a stand-up comic, Allison instead performed one man shows as various characters, however something wasn’t quite working for him. After a performance at the San Francisco Sketchfest, Allison hit up fellow State alum Black for some constructive criticism.

“Mike told me that it seemed like I just wanted to speak as myself to the audience,” recalls Allison. That lead him to what might be the most rewarding aspect of the performances.
“When you tell a joke, people will say it was funny, but when you tell a good story people will say ‘thank you.’”

>Risk!
Feb. 11, 92YTribeca, 200 Hudson St. (at Canal St.), 212-601-1000; 7, $15.  

“I mentioned to Genesis that I couldn’t believe that someone didn’t put this out.” Martin recalls. So P-Orridge suggested that Martin should put the record out himself.

Later, Martin called a friend in L.A., Gibby Miller, with the proposition to start a label. By the end of the day, the pair had a website. With no real financial backing except for some money saved from their day jobs and a few eBay sales, the pair had launched Dais. This was a little over two years ago.

“We didn’t really know what we were doing,” says Miller with a laugh. From then on it was a crash course in all aspects of record production, from packaging to mastering to distribution all the while juggling day jobs, musical projects and, in Martin’s case, continuing to act as P-Orridge’s manager.

When I ask if he was daunted by starting a label in the midst of an economic downturn, Martin just shrugs.

“Before I started I had heard every horror story about running a label, that records wouldn’t sell and I’d be sitting on tons of copies,” Martin explains. This hasn’t been a problem since, at the time of this interview, eight of the 12 Dais releases have sold out of their print runs. According to Martin, The Tony Conrad/Genesis P-Orridge collaboration Taking Issue sold out within 24 hours.

Martin also isn’t intimidated by decreased albums sales due to downloading.

“I was just reading that vinyl sales are actually up.” Martin offers.

Dais followed the Early Worm release with the Whip & The Body Hear on Exile 7” featuring vocalist Michael Berdan and drummer Jeremy Villalobos of Brooklyn’s abrasive noise outfit Drunkdriver. The record is the result of Villalobos and Berdan playing together after a handful of Drunkdriver practices. This also sold out of its press run. Not bad for a band that has never even played a show and, technically, doesn’t really exist.

The label will also add some more name recognition to the roster in the near future by putting out a full-length by porn star Sasha Grey’s experimental noise outfit aTelecine. Miller describes aTelecine’s sound as “dark, noisy and haunting.”

In addition to salvaging otherwise lost recordings, Dais has also become an arbiter of current taste by releasing one of the first Cold Cave records.

“Gibby’s friend Wes was just recording in his bedroom under the name Cold Cave. Since I was putting out records by my friends, Gibby wanted to put out a record by one of his friends,” Martin explains.

The fact that Cold Cave has since been signed to Matador shows that the fledgling label has the ability to put out music with broad appeal in addition to putting out experimental records.

Considering how in demand his releases are, one has to wonder if the founders of Dais will be able to leave their day jobs and focus on the label full-time.

“No. I would have to make print runs of thousands,” Martin says and shudders. “I would have to have showcases and hype things and have ads out there. Having to hype things would repulse me. People are asking me why I don’t reprint records to make money. When I put out a record, it’s done and time to move on to the next one.”

Martin is loath to think of himself as a businessman, instead seeing himself as just a record geek putting out records he would like to own. Helpfully, the label pays for itself.

“We can do a few records at a time and not have to worry about what’s in the bank,” Martin reports,” We haven’t made a dime off the label, but we haven’t lost a dime either.”

Still, Martin seems more pre-occupied with his upcoming release schedule. “I’m pretty much booked for the next two years with 22 releases,” he says a bit wearily. But if I don’t have a project, I’ll go crazy.” 

Temping is certainly something author and comedian Bob Powers has experience with. Like many New Yorkers with lofty artistic goals, Powers put in his time—a decade to be exact—as a temp before he was finally able to write for a living. This experience lays the groundwork for the second installment (out July 7) in his Choose Your Own Adventure styled Just Make A Choice! series.

“I’ve temped for a bank, an ad agency and The Metro North Police. The most painful assignment was at a finance firm. I had to be in at 7:30 am and had to deal with ‘stock guys.’ They were all these guys that just got out of college and still wanted to be in college.” Powers muses.

However, in Powers’ decade of temping, one has to wonder whether he has come across a boss like the book’s stand-out character Haviland Payne, the lascivious CEO of a school uniform manufacturer who gets her kicks out of seducing men 20 years her junior after making them dress up in schoolboy uniforms.

“Nope, I’ve never had a cougar boss and I’ve never been prey to a cougar. Maybe I just got a kick out of that power structure. I still might be temping if that was going on,” Powers claims.

In addition to becoming his silver fox superior’s boy toy, the anti-hero could become an unwitting gay porn icon, the victim of a gory murder at the hands of a reclusive author or a runaway boarding a mythical bus to pharmacy school—it all depends on what adventure the reader chooses.

“The choices are a good punchline to the chapter,” explains Powers. A prime example of this can be found at the end of a chapter offering the option “If you want to tell Haviland that you absolutely demand she take you home immediately and let you fuck her until she’s limp, go to page 177.”

One of the fringe benefits of publishing the Just Make A Choice is the public readings which involve heavy audience participation.

“The best thing is reading the book live. The audience votes and they go nuts for that,” Powers explains,” I can usually predict how the story will go. If the choice involves sex, the audience will pick it.”

During readings for his first Just Make A Choice! book You Are A Miserable Excuse For A Hero, which involves the anti-hero trying to avoid rescuing a promising first date who was subsequently kidnapped, Powers notes that only one audience didn’t vote for the option of the anti-hero sleeping with his ex-girlfriend. “I was stunned.”

Given that the Powers just sold the movie rights to You Are A Miserable Excuse For A Hero, it is unlikely that he will have to go back to temping to support himself. When asked who he would like to cast as the hapless anti-hero in the first book, Powers is quick to suggest “any of the Jud Apatow man children that Hollywood is crawling with.”

Given all of the possible endings and serpentine plot twists for his Just Make A Choice! books, the reader could very well not experience all of the endings, no matter how depraved many of them may be.

“You know, one day I’m gonna write a novel or a book where the intention is that you are supposed to read every page,” Powers muses,” Provided the reader doesn’t think it sucks.”

>Bob Powers
July 8, Barnes & Noble, 396 6th Ave. (at W. 8th St.), 212-674-8780; 7:30, FREE

“There you have it, your traditional narrative film,” Lipstate says and laughs as she shuts off the television set. These days, Lipstate may be best known as a guitarist in Brooklyn’s Parts & Labor, but her most compelling project is arguably her Noveller incarnation. A Noveller performance typically involves Lipstate dragging a bow across a guitar hybrid she constructed herself, combined with projected footage of one of her films.

This film’s creation was a decidedly low-tech affair, just like most of Lipstate’s projects, which have involved found footage fished out of the garbage and installations constructed on towers of second-hand television sets.This time, however, she did’t go Dumpster diving for film: A doctor in Seattle was happy to hand over X-ray footage.

“I’m not working on some fancy editing suite, I’m working on a 13-inch laptop,” Lipstate explains. It should also be noted that at the time of this interview, she was using an X-Box to preview her film.

Lipstate is quick to produce a copy of her solo LP, Paint on the Shadows, which was released in April; the track “Telecine” will be performed in tandem with the film on Friday, May 15 at the No Fun Fest (read full feature on No Fun Fest here).

“This is one of the longest films that I’ve worked on so far,” she says. “It clocks in at four minutes and 20 seconds.”

“I wanted to make something new for this screening, so I started working on it right when I got back from tour with Parts & Labor back in February and had a pretty good working version of it in the middle of March.”

In addition to kicking off No Fun Fest, Lipstate is also looking forward to play a venue the size of the Music Hall of Williamsburg. For previous performances, she’s been cooped up in various art houses and warehouse spaces.

“There could be 600 people there, which would be the largest audience I’ve ever played for. Even half of that would be the largest audience I’ve ever played for. It’ll be a huge stage with just me up there.”

“I’m a bleeding heart liberal cartoonist, so I can buy you a sandwich. If I drew Mallard Fillmore, I’d tell you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and buy your own sandwich,” Rees muses as he opens his wallet and pays for two falafel sandwiches from a lunch truck in Murray Hill. It is an overcast October afternoon and Rees has just gotten out of a recording session for the animated series of his wildly popular Get Your War On clip-art comic series; however, the only thing currently on his mind is finding a quiet place to do an interview. These days, mouthing off in crowded coffeehouses, especially when shouting swear words in conjunction with the Bush administration, makes him a little uneasy.

“Hell yeah, let’s do the interview right by this jackhammer!” Rees yells as he runs up to a construction site. “All of this noise is why my wife and I moved out of the city.”

After wandering down to Union Square, Rees finally settles on a park bench, unwraps his sandwich and begins pontificating on his comic series’ evolution and his hopes and fears tied to the then-undetermined outcome of Nov. 4.

“Obama is so manifestly comfortable with who he is,” Rees explains between bites. “He doesn’t get rattled and he doesn’t get angry, although I wish his health care plan was a little more communist. However, to Obama’s credit, he does actually acknowledge the existence of ‘poor people,’ since it’s usually left up to the middle class to decide the outcome.”

Rees also has some thoughts on where he believes McCain’s campaign went dead in the water.

“He definitely lost the election when Palin came aboard, but that’s not an original argument.

This election comes down to how can the old man beat the young man, especially since the young man is at the head of the most sophisticated political campaign the Democrats have ever devised. It’s nothing but tactics and nothing but strategy.”

For the previous editions of Get Your War On, Rees donated royalties to a nonprofit dedicated to clearing landmines out of Afghanistan under the guise that he didn’t want to be a war profiteer. That isn’t the case for the final edition.

“I sent those kids $100,000 and they didn’t even send me a card. No, actually I wanted to have the readers be connected to the cause. But for this book, I was just like, fuck, everyone got rich off of the Iraq War but me. I’m keeping all the royalties.”

In the midst of his sundry book tours and creating new strips, Rees was eventually approached to animate the series.

“I was never interested in animating because I like the boring cartoon format,” he explains. Eventually, he was convinced to change his mind and consented to “animate the shit out of it” with the aid of the tech wizards at Fat Black Studios in Austin, Texas.

When it came down casting the actual voices, Rees had a pretty specific set of parameters.

“I wanted two actors that actually look like the two office workers. We got comedian Jon Glaser to do the white office worker, and during the casting call for the African-American office worker we found Anthony Laurent.”

However, the cartoon voices lack that incredulous teenage-boy persona Rees channels when he reads the strips in public, especially when he over-annunciates all the curse words.

“I was probably regressing back to what I was feeling when I first worked on the strip.”

While Rees has a considerable amount of sympathy for Obama—as he feels the next eight years will be little more than economic damage control—he’s also has some choice words for the pockets of the country that aren’t quite ready to accept Obama as president.

“You mean having a black Muslim terrorist as president? They better get fucking used to it.”

BY DAY, HELEN Hong is steadily employed as a TV producer. By night, however, she’s a stand up comedian and the mastermind behind a crew of four funny ladies known as “Little Ethnic Girls.”

Somewhere in the midst of all this, she finds time to date—and talk about it. “One joke I love doing is the one where I talk about my huge Asian tits, since all the Asian guys I date don’t seem to like big tits.” She volunteers that “huge” for Asian guys is apparently 36A. Much to her chagrin, Hong also has to endure the awesome ethnic guessing game as proposed to her by potential suitors. “I call it racist Jeopardy,” she says before volunteering that her background is Korean. Since another Korean comedian has already made a name for herself in regard to talking about dating, sex, body-image issues and immigrant parents, one has to wonder if Hong is a little miffed at being beaten to the punch.

“While Margaret Cho’s act’s more political now, she really broke down a lot of barriers when she first started doing comedy. She was a chubby female comic talking about the first generation Korean experience. No one was really doing that.” Fair enough.

Hong also insists that she wants the crew to represent a fresh perspective on female comedians, since the stereotype is nestled around women being bitter, shrill man haters.

“We’re all cute and have no trouble dating. It’s just that we’d all look really terrible as blondes. Plus, it’s fun to be small and adorable and then get on stage and be filthy, which makes everyone proud.”

Well, everyone except for her parents, but Hong shrugs that off. “They don’t speak much English anyway.” While Hong loves working the show What Not to Wear for cable, her ultimate goal is to be producing her own show. “A lot of people run home after work to their kids; I run to comedy.”

Another member of the troupe, Maria Shehata, explains, “I was the only ‘ethnic girl’ in my school.When I would tell other classmates I’m Egyptian, kids would say things like, ‘I thought you guys were extinct.’”

Another triumph for the nation’s history and social studies teachers! After growing up, visiting the motherland, Shehata finds herself dealing with an entirely new perspective.

“Now whenever people are standing around and speaking Arabic, [others] assume they are a terror cell—and that I can translate.”

The youngest and arguably most feisty of the crew is 23-year-old Liz Miele, a mouthy Italian broad from Jersey. She’s another one that strangers feel totally entitled to exoticize.

“Guys come up to me and ask me if I’m Puerto Rican, Dominican or Jewish before finally guessing that I’m Italian,” she explains.

“It’s like, ‘Thanks cause I was having trouble writing material and ew, get away from me.’” At her young age, Miele is a bit of a prodigy, having started at open-mic nights when she was 16.When she explains her family’s background, it makes sense as to why comedy clubs were the perfect refuge from her suburban home. “Both my parents are mentally ill and I was convinced I was eventually going to go crazy,” Miele relates, “but I refuse to see a therapist because that means the crazy is actually happening.”

Instead, Miele spent her youth reading up on bipolar disorder and manic depression in a morbid fascination to pinpoint when exactly she was going to crack. She even makes a joke in her act about her parents meeting upon the suicides of their mothers.

During our conversation, and in the midst of relaying stories of a dark upbringing, Miele takes breaks to scream at her sisters for interrupting and then outs which of them is lying about her height on her MySpace page. Apparently with the Miele girls, adding an inch or two is an egregious offense.

“I might only be 5-foot-1, but I’m still taller than Maria Shehata,” Mielle boasts. But one has to wonder how she prepped her man of three years to come home and meet a household of loud and spastic short people.

“My dad is very traditional, so I made sure to tell my boyfriend to shake his hand and not to call him ‘dude.’” Miele then pauses before admitting, “I guess my parents did a pretty good job with me, even if they don’t have all their marbles.”

For our sake, we’re glad your parents were missing a few.

> Little Ethnic Girls

Oct. 27, Gotham Comedy Club, 208 W. 23rd St. (betw. 7th & 8th Aves.), 212-367-9000; 7:30, $15.