Internets,
Greetings from sunny St. Ma’arten. My summer of rest, relaxation, recharging and realization continues from the fair shores of the famous Dutch Antilles isle. I’m in a cafe, stealing a wireless, the ocean before me, latte beside me, sunblock on and cooking. I would have loved to tell you that Oprah lent me her crib so that I could finish the scribework on my memoir.
Its the story of the prodigal son of New York City who turned his back on everyone and everything that raised him until he was brought to his knees, within an inch of his humanity, and had to begin the difficult journey of finding his way back home. I hope this story will help teenagers get through the tough years when peer pressure forces them to do things they might otherwise not.
Awww, who am I kidding? No one gives a shit about morality or humanity or any of that fruitbaggery anymore. We are beyond books and beyond spirituality. What I’ve really been trying to do is Facebook friend Caroline Gu911ani since I learned that Sephora declined to press charges against her because of who her dad is. Maybe I can convince her to do a smash and grab at Tiffany’s?
I’m still following the news feeds in St.Ma’arten although I’m gathering news using legacy methods like newspapers and television news. I’m about to turn off my Twitter accounts and leave my Facebook page alone. I feel like the information cycle and focus that exists online doesn’t serve me for learning about stories or the people that make them. I’m returning to a simpler existence.
Fuxing around on a Caribbean island can be a sweet reminder for all the things you forgot were important. I take so much shit for granted back in NYC. I try to do everything possible. I want every plum project at my day job. I want to attend every free outdoor concert and every open bar advertising or entertainment industry party. I want to buy every sneaker that has air in the midsole. And then I want to go back home and sit in front of a computer until the sun rises to tell everyone about everything. But its not possible to do everything — and you miss so much when you try.
The trip to St.Ma’arten was mostly to find some time to be alone with my girlfriend. I refer to her on the blogs as Chocolate Snowflake. I called her that because she does all kind of crazy shit that I only associate with the white, but then again she and I went word for word on every song at the Hall & Oates concert last year at Coney Island. I wouldn’t trade my Chocolate Snowflake for anything.
Dallas Penn in virtual reality is pretty fun to fux with. DP in real life reality is just as dope. As a matter of fact, DP is real reality. I’ve just been waiting for the rest of you to catch up with me. Don’t do me like Rakim and have my shit be obsolete by the time you get up to speed. The very fact that you are here at IC.com means that you are capable of moving faster than the speed limit. In a minute we are going to take you on a journey as fast as the speed of light. Faster even. We are going to take you into the future.
Tomorrow may never come
For you or me
Life is not promised
Tomorrow may never show up
For you and me
This life is not promised
I ain’t no perfect man
I’m trying to do, the best that I can,
With what it is I have
Dear Internets…
Dear friends of the inter-connected networks. The Twitterers, the FaceBookers, the folks that have this page as part of their RSS feed, everyone still on my Hotmail e-mail blast list… How the hell are you?! Have you gone to any of the free concerts being held all around the city. I was able to catch Gil Scott-Heron at Central Park’s Summerstage. I will definitely be in the park on Sunday, August 15th for Public Enemy as they commemorate the 20th anniversary of their greatest album – ‘Fear Of A Black Planet‘.
Gil gave us some blues that makes me recall the oil spill in the Gulf.
How has the summer been treating you so far otherwise? Excellent, you look well. Me, not so much.
If you have recently looked at my face when I didn’t know you were watching me you have seen that I don’t smile as often. It isn’t anything that you have done per se. You’ve actually done your best to keep me in good spirits. You watch the videos that are produced by the ICs collectively and singularly, you also read the blog posts that we all generate in various online locations. You’ve done your part to keep us together on the web, but I still got the blues.
This could be that male menstruation thing that I read about somewhere and maybe I’m cycling thru that right now. Actually to be honest with all of you I know why I have the blues. I received an eviction notice from my home for the last almost 40 years. Not my co-operative apartment that acts as a warehouse for all my shit from action figures, to hundreds of pairs of sneakers and over twenty years of Polo Ralph Lauren clothing. Not my mother’s basement (which incidentally is now located in an Atlanta suburb called Marietta).
The home I’m referring to is Never-Never Land. I’ve been the steward of this place for as long as I can remember. Everyone that has come thru here during that time has pretty much deferred to me. They’ve allowed me to guide them on adventures that have been delightful, daring and sometimes deadly. Each year I welcome the next group of adventurers and we fly thru this land making our own rules and avoiding Captain Hook and his henchmen as best we can.
But then Tinkerbell came to me with the message that NeverLand was being developed as a resort island. There is no way I’m going to be able to avoid the bulldozers that will uproot all my favorite treehouses and cubbyholes. It’s finally time for me to grow up. Growing up isn’t about just paying bills on time, altho’ that is definitely something I will need to work on. Growing up is living your life in service of others. Family, friends and even total strangers. I’ve been a solo act all of my life. Even when I had a younger brother I was on my own shit. Even with a girlfriend I still went in my own direction at my own whims.
My life changed a bit when my father died, but my mother was still independent despite contracting multiple sclerosis. As she has become elderly and now invalid I am asked to assume the responsibility of the leader of my family unit. I have been a leader of the Lost Boys, but that isn’t how you lead a family. Leading the Lost Boys was still an exercise in selfishness. The boys that couldn’t keep up with my madness were cast off from NeverLand. If you didn’t have the courage to follow me into the mouth of the volcano I called you a coward and mocked you. I had no patience for those with fear.
I was like that because I had so much fear. I used to afraid of being alone. My mother left me alone a lot when I was young. I was raised by her grandmother. My mother was young and pretty and she had many suitors. I’m sure she loved my father because she married him and gave me his name, but his drug abuse demons drove her away. So as a young single mother trying to get by in New York City she had to leave me. For days and weeks and months my great-grandmother did her best to replace her granddaughter. And she did a wonderful job. My great-grandmother was a Scottish goddess named Beryl O’Loughlin.
I just returned to NYC from visiting my mother in Atlanta. Her condition is deteriorating after falling and breaking her hip last year. She isn’t able to walk any longer and the MS is stripping her nervous system of control of her life. I suppose I should start looking for a place in NYC that offers assisted living because she isn’t going to be able to remain in Atlanta for much longer when the family that is living with her has to go their own way. This is the sound of the bulldozers and excavators entering Never Land.
I brought my nephew with me to see his grandmother. He is the middle child of my kid brother’s 3 x 3 litter. 3 sons by 3 different mothers. This child is the only one of the three that I know. For various reasons of the American story that is how shit goes. I haven’t seen the child for over a year. He reminds me of my brother too. I have to make sure that my nephew doesn’t end up a Lost Boy. Not too many kids can get thru that period without gaining horrible scars or worse. I was lucky that I was smart and emotionally unavailable. He needs my help and I see this.
Now Peter Pan has to become a parent or dare I say a patriarch. I didn’t want this day to come because I never wanted to be responsible for anyone other than myself. So this is why I’ve got the blues. But the good thing about my blues is that it isn’t the song of defeat or humiliation. My blues is the song of redemption. My blues is the phoenix that rises from the ashes to spread its beautiful wings to the sky.
When we finish a new movie, it has become a minor tradition that Dallas very graciously buys Raf and I new kicks. To wit:
I’m rocking them today as a final testament to the completion of Stadium Status which we uploaded to Vimeo about 9 days ago – on the heels (see what I did there?) of a fantastic week for the ICs. You may have seen some of the highlight moments but just to contextualize the rollout of Stadium Status, here’s a few other things that went down around the same time:
1) We sneak previewed (aka unofficially world premiered) Stadium Status along with 4 of our older movies (Bodega, GBM, Cereal is Dope and Checkmate) at the Brooklyn Public Library. Here’s us onstage doing a little q&a:
I’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating: If you make movies for the internet, you really should show them on the bigscreen sometimes, especially with an audience. Watching your work with other people is such an informative experience. It’s also good for the soul if you’ve spent a lot of time isolated in your lab, editing your work. A vacuum is good for certain objective decisions but pacing and jokes hitting are best considered with a group watching (and you secretly watching the group through various doors in the auditorium).
Anyway, it was crazy fun to show at the Brooklyn Public Library. Great theater with a nice screen and intimate audience/performer set-up. It felt like school assembly – but the good kind with the cartoons on the rainy days. And speaking of school, we had a lot of surprise friends from all over the timescape show up to the screening. It filled my heart with glee. Especially, because most peeps stayed and closed the bar with us at the after party. Dope!
2) That same day as the screening, we got the best press of our young video essay making lives. New York Times. Bong! Shouts to the author David Gonzalez for coming out to meet us and writing a really nice piece that finally legitimized all of us in the eyes of our mothers. And the photographer, Librado Romero who made us look like professionals (note the scripts in our hands).
3) From the Times article, we landed on the radar of MSNBC who called to inquire about our availability for an interview on the Dylan Ratigan show. But before we could even click the wikipedia link for more info on who Dylan Ratigan was, we were told that we were actually going to be interviewed by a guest host, Elliot Spitzer, who you might remember from such road signs as “Welcome to New York State. Governor: Elliot Spitzer” He was super nice, seemed sincerely interested in Ghetto Big Macs, knew more about public funding for stadiums than we did and gracefully laced a single off a perfectly thrown Dallas Penn curveball. And after the lightning-fast 5 minute interview, he took a fun picture with us:
4) And then full circle we released Stadium Status onto the internets. We had intended to go up with it at youtube but a disagreement they’re having with Warner Bros. got us redflagged for use of an unlicensed Warner Bros. movie theme in our movie. We’re up at youtube now. But the bulk of our views have been at vimeo since we went up there first, not knowing when/if youtube would allow us through.
So there you go – a good goddamn week with the ICs. Thanks for rolling with us. I’m looking forward to scuffing these nikes on the next location, next movie, near future!
Our starting point for this movie was simply asking the question: why did the Yankees and the Mets get to build record-breakingly expensive stadiums in the SAME YEAR? Considering we were on the brink of a massive recession and now face massive budget shortfalls in New York state, it seemed problematic that so much public funding went into these buildings – with little assurance of any tangible public benefit.
From there, we employed our usual investigation methods. Namely, go to a place and start filming. We actually got into Citifield and were able to film there. Yankee Stadium confiscated our tape – but we still managed to talk to people and capture the exterior of the massive new structure.
We looked at the communities being affected by these stadiums and tried to see who exactly was benefiting from these teams getting to build new revenue-maximizing ballparks – directly across from the old ones.
It’s a big topic, could probably fill up a feature film or two and in the end is our longest movie to date – coming in at a potentially unviral 18 minutes.
We could not have made this movie without you, internets and if you dig it, please pass it along to anyone else who might enjoy it. In the end, we’re baseball fans and still root for these teams. But it doesn’t mean it’s not worth questioning their methods.
Let’s face it, there’s a certain joy in being First.
That’s why yesterday we sent a download link for Stadium Status out to the people who supported the video at Kickstarter. Never mind that some of these people have yet to receive their Bodega gift boxes, those are going out this week. We strive for authenticity here – Bodega food is never fresh.
But anyway, yesterday the producers of Stadium Status became the first to watch the video. A gesture of our gratitude to them and a chance for us to get some early feedback.
On Tuesday when we screen Stadium Status at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, another group will get to be first. The people there with us that evening will see the video before it even hits YouTube, the first time we’ve screened a movie before putting it online for the general public.
But there’s another group of people who might not be producers who donated money to the cause, or who might not be folks in the New York area that can come out and see us next week. But they are still people we think deserve a shot to be some kind of first. I’m speaking of the good folks on the Internets Celebrities email list.
If you join the Internets Celebrities email list, you’ll get posts from this site emailed to you so you won’t miss any updates. And you’ll also get occasional goodies: love notes from us or early access to new videos like Stadium Status.
So sign up for email updates now and you’ll be able to check out Stadium Status FIRST – ahead of the rest of the internets.
Because being First isn’t just about whether someone did something before you. It’s also whether you were among the first to do something before BILLIONS of other people even had a chance at it. Put on your puffy jackets because the feeling of satisfaction that brings is ice cold.
This Tuesday, June 1, we’re going to be screening a bunch of videos at the Central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. So come out to the fabled Grand Army Plaza at 7pm and check out some of our classics on the big screen, ask us questions and be among the first humans to see our new documentary STADIUM STATUS.
Stadium Status is a documentary which examines the rush of new sports stadiums in NYC, the public money that drives these private developments and the impact they have on the communities around them. The creation of Stadium Status was funded by you via Kickstarter!
You won’t find too many Af-Ams going to the shrink (or a general practicioner for that matter). We’d rather spend our available dollars self-medicating. The problems which arise from the skin we are in can’t be mitigated on a couch or even a comfortable leather chair.
Now don’t get me twisted, I am not morbidly obese because of racism, altho’ if I were motivated enough to push the narrative I’m sure I could find the institution of racism inside of my weight gain. No, I’m fat because I have chosen to be. I have chosen to find emotional comfort in foods that are unhealthy.
So how do I break this chain of self-abuse because the fatter I become the less people want to be around me or afford me the opportunities to move upward in life? Let’s be honest with each other in this forum and admit that Blacks in America (unless they are endowed with supreme athleticism or entertaining ability) are already considered second-class citizens.
Celebrate the life and artistic legacy of Roy DeCarava…
C.S.’s father was an accomplished artist who was supremely and fiercely principled. Because of this he would eschew much of the acclaim that other less courageous artists would accept for themselves. DeCarava demanded that he be viewed as an artist, without qualification as an African American artist, or street artist, or a documentarian.
He took his camera everywhere he went. He lived and raised his family in Bed Stuy, but was born and raised uptown in Harlem. The art world tried to marginalize him because so many of his early subjects were the residents of the neighborhoods where he lived and worked. He knew that this made his subjects and his art no less great, even as the T.I.’s tried to say otherwise.
I’m proud to say that I was a fan of Roy DeCarava’s photographs decades before I had met him. In real life he was as compelling as the images he crafted. Speaking truth to power and expressing the beauty of it all, DeCarava is in large part the inspiration for why I do what I do.
In memory of
ROY DeCARAVA
A celebration of the
life and work of
an American artist
Monday, May 10th at 6:30 PM
The Cooper Union Great Hall
7 East Seventh Street at Third Avenue
New York City
Just a little announcement here. We’re formally embracing Creative Commons licensing and “uncopyrighting” all of our work (with one caveat, see below). So you can consider everything we’ve done so far in video or even written on this blog to be fair game for you to do whatever you like with. You can incorporate parts of our videos into yours, you can screen them, put them on a dvd like we did and sell them on your own. You can even put any of our catch-phrases on a t-shirt which you could then sell to the friends of the IC’s on facebook if you like. That would be totally cool and you’d have our blessing.
If you want to give us attribution with a link back to us that’s appreciated. If our work helps you make money somehow and you want to kick some back to us that’s extra appreciated. But neither of these are required for you to have permission to take any of the videos and do what you like with them.
Caveat: We still submit our new videos to film festivals from time to time, and some of them have funny preferences about screening exclusivity so this Creative Commons license will go into effect one year after each video premieres on YouTube unless we specifically state otherwise or put the videos in the copyleft directory before this one year period is up.
If you are unsure whether a video is free to use, or you don’t see what you’re looking for in the copyleft directory, just ask.
Why we’re doing this
In 2007 when MySpace still “mattered”, our video Ghetto Big Mac went up on the social network’s homepage. This caught us off guard because we hadn’t uploaded the video there. Some fan of the GBM had grabbed it, presumably from YouTube but possibly from somewhere else, and posted it to their account. Were we mad that this guy had uploaded the video to MySpace without our permission? Hell no. We were overjoyed that a few hundred thousand people were seeing our work.
Now the flipside of that tale. About six months after that MySpace thing we were again surprised, this time to be contacted by some nice people from the Mayor’s office here in NYC. They wanted to use our video Bodega as part of their “Healthy Bodega Initiative” to educate and advocate for those in the low-income areas our video focused on. They were hoping to license the video and wanted us to do some edits to it first to clean up some of the language and especially some of the political trash-talking at the end. They asked us to name our price, warning us that they were on a limited budget. We deliberated and came back to them with a number we thought was fair. We waited for them to hear back from whoever they had to hear from for budget approval. Eventually, a while later we heard that they wouldn’t be using Bodega.
In hindsight, I still kick myself for that. It would have been great for our video to have been part of that program. A little bit of money from the city wouldn’t have done all that much for us but being part of something that actually changed policy or reached out to people in the community is priceless. I don’t think we were being greedy either, particularly since they had asked for a new edit of the video. But it’s just that money causes friction. Even having to contact people causes friction.
Imagine if instead of having to reach out to us for the rights to the video, the video was just available for them to grab and they could have edited it themselves. Now imagine it’s not just the mayor’s office but anyone who could do that. There’s three of us (but we’re not the beatles) and we can only do so much on our own. So we’re opening up our videos to you and we view anything you do with them – especially if you profit from it – as helping us out.
I’ve written about my problems with copyright double standards in the past. At the same time, I’ve been upset on several occasions when people have appropriated my work or my friends’ work as their own. I’m not saying those people were in the right but I am feeling more Zen about the whole thing. And yes after this announcement anyone who takes IC material from the copyleft folder to do whatever they want with will be in the right.
We have no idea whether any of you are inclined to use our material. Maybe not. But we wanted it out there that you can if you want to and we’re more than happy to offer it for that purpose.
Join us on 
Follow on 
Watch on 
