This was his third show of the evening, during a weeklong marathon in which he was refining material for a new tour and his hosting gig at the MTV Movie Awards (which will be shown live on Sunday night).
One morning in 1997, when he was refining the design for his chef 's knife, a passerby, stunned by the sight of a blacksmith's shop in downtown Seattle (Kramer moved to Olympia in 2005), popped in and started badgering him with ideas.
"He's refined his game quite a bit.
"He's refined, but not as refined as Blair Waldorf wants him to be," said John Stephens, an executive producer of "Gossip Girl".
He's refined, aloof and reticent, a "philosophical observer who looks on with wry amusement at the follies of others but is too wily and cynical to risk becoming entangled himself".
He is refined but not prissy, literate but not bookish, good-looking but not model-perfect, romantic but not mushy, lighthearted but not manic, a sports fan but not a jock.
He's refined that technique of using rollers, even adding printing squeegees into the mix, and from it he's harnessed an elegant and clean style that belies much of the carnage that went into creating it.
His grip on power has only tightened since then, as he's refined his trademark brand of authoritarianism, press repression, nationalism, and heavy surveillance, packaged under a thin veneer of democratic legitimacy.
With a magnifying glass held over the 18-point type, Mr. Chisolm prepares the sermons he delivers monthly at Mount Vernon Hospital, where in a chapel and occasionally at bedsides he is refining his preaching technique.
He is refining the treatment for other cancers by skimming patients' blood and then inserting a gene into their T-cells that targets a different protein, called NY-ESO.
