Stadium Status is what’s good. We’re shooting. We’re brainstorming. We’re in the street doing our investigative thing. I feel like somehow we always end up shooting the outdoor movies in the heart of winter. We went to the site of the Atlantic Yards development this past Sunday and fought the cold to see where exactly they were going to put the East RutherfordNewark Brooklyn Nets and what kind of buildings would be going up to keep them company.
That’s Ian – our cinematographer – tracking after Dallas and Rafi in the distance. We ran a full lap around the entire project’s footprint just to try and understand how much land the development was going to wind up affecting. Answer: a lot.
We shot for about 4 hours and burned through 3 tapes. We’ve now shot 7 tapes for this project and probably have one more day left to go before we call it. We’re pretty determined to keep this movie under 10 minutes. So if we do end up shooting 9 hours of footage, that’ll make it a smooth 54 to 1 ratio. We usually employ a pretty insane shooting/editing ratio but this one is impressive even by our standards. The bloopers reel will melt your computer.
Cheers to Dallas and his new haircut and also cheers to Dallas for leading us on a post-shoot lunch expedition. We almost hit up a spot on Fulton but they were closed for a baby shower. We scolded the expecting mother for halting our lunch progress and tromped through the snow to 67 Burger near BAM where we did some work on their very excellent burgers and fries. It was a great lunch… but no mofungo
^ Mofungo was the post shoot lunch highlight from our previous shoot at Citifield. Dallas directed that lunch too. Rafi ate the Mofungo.
Our next shoot will take us back to the Bronx. We’ve got some people to see, some political corruption to chart and some important questions to answer – namely, where will we be having lunch that day?!?
Stadium Status is cool but what about Academia Status? That is truly the business.
We got called up from the minor leagues to the ivy leagues this week when we learned (via Google Alerts) that a student at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation was researching our methodology. The mysterious but obviously brilliant Jocelyn Oppenheim has taken a close look at three of our videos: Bodega, Vend Diagram and Urine Nation and analyzed the missions and common techniques.
Her summary:
Internets Celebrities probe the underlying intricacies of seemingly commonplace sites and occurences in New York City.
Internets Celebrities are especially interested in exposing the social injustice, race-based and political factors that contribute to policy-making and shape institutions that are often taken for granted.
Through their work, Internets Celebrities urge other New Yorkers to also ask questions, push the limits of policy and work within existing laws and frameworks in order to challenge them.
Hey, we sound pretty good! I can only assume we’re a few videos away from our first honorary degree.
The KGB used the spire of St. Olaf's Church as a radio tower from 1944-1991. This is not where we will be appearing on February 23.
On February 23, we’ll be appearing at KGB Bar on East 4th St in NYC. The theme of the evening is urban studies and we’ll be screening a couple of videos and talking about documentary filmmaking. Theater professor and performer Kyle DeCamp will be representing documentary theater.
You probably already know that it’s Doppelganger Week on Facebook. That’s where people post celebrities they might kinda sorta look like but probably not so much.
We want to play too but first we have to figure out who makes the perfect doppelgangers for the Internets Celebrities:
Is it Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor?
48 Hours stars Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte?
Pulp Fiction stars Bruce Willis and Ving Rhames?
Last Boy Scout stars Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans?
Cop Out stars Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan?
West 3rd Street stars Rafi Kam and Tracy Morgan?
Chocolate and Vanilla?
Geniuses of rap, Das Racist?
The Yahooligans Peter Rosenberg and Cipha Sounds?
Kanye West and Taylor Swift?
Jay and Silent Bob?
I don’t think we’ve found it yet… chime in if you have a good one.
Two British designers put together an interesting project to show which fonts require the most ink to print. Their method was to write and fill in a sample word (“Sample”) on the wall with a ballpoint pen and then use the pen’s remaining ink to show each font’s mileage.
Of the eight fonts tested they found Garamond to be the most efficient, and Impact to be the most wasteful.
Ink-guzzling Impact has been our chosen font for videos since Day 1 and we’ve also rocked it for our name on bootleg business cards and website headers. Now I feel some sort of remorse having learned that we’ve been recklessly promoting the most ink-wasting-est font in the universe.
Then I remember we make stuff for the post-literate Internets, not the printer-nets.
Besides I prefer to look at the ink-cartridge as being half full. Given our preference for white text on a black background, we’re actually using the font that creates the most white space. So please, let’s think of Impact as the most responsible and least wasteful font to use – when you’re already printing a big blob of black ink.
We met Queensbridge rapper Killa Sha a few years back at the Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival. He was talking about being down with Marley Marl and Tragedy and instead of giving him his due respect for years in the game, I heard myself asking him if he carried their weed.
At that point, 40 Diesel who’d brought Sha over to talk with us basically erupted in disbelief which was fantastic. Sha himself took the jab in stride and even closed his time with us with an answer: “And I don’t just hold the weed!”
You can catch our minute with Sha starting around 3:35 in the Brooklyn Hip Hop Festival Lost Tapes video below.
After the video came out, Robbie kept vouching for Sha’s talent so I checked out his album and some other tracks and had to admit the guy we had picked on had skills. Robbie did his part to be our counter-balance and gave Sha a ton of respect at Unkut, culminating in an interview a few months ago.
Today the news hit twitter that Sha passed away of complications from diabetes. I just wanted to say Rest in Peace to a dope and dedicated artist, wish his family strength during their loss, and thank Sha for not smacking me silly that day.
In a strange coincidence, there’s an OkayPlayer event in New York this Wednesday to raise awareness for diabetes. Phife Dawg who suffers from the disease himself is hosting and Ghostface, Jay Electronica and Talib Kweli are on the bill. More info at OKP.
In honor of Martin Luther King Day, I thought we’d run some of our past attempts to get the Internets to stop being racist. Or chickenist. Or hip-hop separatists.
Only Chickenheadz R Racist
On this solo run, Dallas tried to debunk the notion that fried chicken was just for black people.
Rock the Bells
At Rock the Bells we found a high degree of musical miscegenation going on. Most of the white kids were there to see Wu-Tang. The black kids – okay there were hardly any black kids. But the few we found were there for Rage Against the Machine.
MLK may not have gotten there with us – but seeing Dallas get free hits of that white-boy weed would surely have made him proud. Maybe.
I just finished giving InternetsCelebrities.com an extreme makeover with a customization of the Thesis Wordpress Theme (damn straight that’s an affiliate link). Thesis is getting pretty ubiquitous these days but if you’re not already familiar, it’s a premium theme created by uber-web-designer Chris Pearson. This is a homecoming of sorts for us because Pearson also created the free Copyblogger theme that we used when we first launched this site two designs ago.
I’ve been using Thesis at Oh Word since relaunching last year and I’m still impressed by its flexibility and power. Thesis is my proverbial exosuit cargo-loader in the life-or-death battle with an alien that to me best represents website design.
So I was very excited when DIYThemes – the partnership behind Thesis – joined our Stadium Status Kickstarter drive to sponsor the upcoming video. They’re fans of ours, we’re fans of theirs – you couldn’t ask for a better sponsor situation.
Some of the goodness in this site upgrade won’t even be visible to most viewers — the Thesis admin options are incredible, the blog’s source code is clean and honed for search-engine goodness. But we also stepped up the interface and are providing more ways for you to connect with the IC’s.
Best of all, the site has that new blog smell and that should lead to a lot more blogging.
We decided to make our first visit to the famous Di Fara’s for lunch since we were already shooting a video in that Brooklyn neighborhood.
Every pie at Di Fara is made with love by Dom DeMarco and the quality draws a big crowd of pizza tourists even with the long waits and $5 slices. We spent nearly two hours in Di Fara’s, the bulk of that time watching Dom at work on one beautiful looking pie after another.
Finally we got our pie and found out if it was worth the wait.
I love when people make their own Ghetto Big Mac videos.
Canadian Ghetto Big Mac
There’s a German version on YouTube as well but for some reason it’s gone private. But it’s good to know that Ghetto Big Macs are a viable option worldwide.
Ninja Napkins
A group of teens redo the ghetto big mac. Unfortunately the audio has been stripped out of the video for copyright violations.
James Zhou version
Eduardo Carillo
Carillo and friends made a pilgrimage to McDonald’s for his 100th video. This may be the most excessive, grotesque (and wonderful?) of all the Ghetto Big Mac tribute videos. The boys get sloppy while eating, play in the indoor kiddy playground, and faux kiss in the McDonald’s bathroom. You can skip to 7:02 for the McDonald’s stuff.
Waffle House Ghetto Big Mac
This one tries to approximate a ghetto big mac without going into a McDonald’s. It was posted to YouTube just last week. The GBM remake tradition lives!
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