Dallas, Rafi and I just finished a new movie about street vendors and we would like very much for you to watch it.
It’s our longest movie to date (which I know isn’t a selling point on the internets) yet I still feel like it just barely scratches the surface of street vendor culture in New York City.
Take this fact omitted from the movie for instance:
The # of licensed street vendors ALLOWED in NYC = 853 (Merchandise) and 3000 (Food Vendors).
And it’s been like that for over 2 decades. I always thought anyone could get a license or permit to be a street vendor after passing a test or doing an interview. I assumed the number of vendors was based solely on the number of people who wanted to be vendors. Well, I assumed wrong.
Like a lot of our movies, we chose for our subject, something we three New Yorkers have taken for granted growing up in this city. I can’t speak for Dallas and Rafi but I’m fond of the knish, the pretzel, the hot dog and very occasionally the bootleg DVD. Before we made this movie I never really wondered who comprised the workforce that brought me these city delights. Sadly, I think it’s human nature to push a lot of stuff into the background. Hopefully, this movie shines a little light on a population that has had its business and its rights compromised by an effed the eff up economy, an overzealous police force and the lobbying efforts of Big Retail.
Enjoy the movie, let us know what you think, spread the word if you’re inclined and afterwards, if you feel worn out, Fux with naps!
(That last bit might make more sense after you watch the movie)
Has it really been over a year since the last i.C. feature presentation?
Sure, I do all kinds of Ricky Retardo shit on my site – DallasPenn.com and my corresponding YouTube page, and Casimir still makes films that are LOL funny and Rafi still dissects the egregious commercialization of Hip-Hop at the revamped OhWord.com, but as far as Internets Celebrities goodness there hasn’t been a flick in a minute.
We all enjoy a modicum of success in our own separate endeavors, but when we form the three-headed social justice Cerberus not even an army of Michael Vicks can drown out our barking. The great news is that in a short while you will all see our latest project. The three of us take to the streets of NYC to get a portrait from the frontlines of the U.S. economy. I wanted to say street level view but using the word ’street’ in the sentence twice looked like bad form.
Anyhoo…
As the new movie is about to roll off the Final Cut Pro console we thought we could entertain you with a mini-clip from the virtual cutting room floor. Cas chopped up a nice little clip from one of the interviews we conducted while on the grind for this new project. The funny backstory for this clip is that the subject essentially volunteered to be interviewed since he saw us with our fancy camera out.
There are certainly eight million stories in the city when you consider the folks that are homeless as a lifestyle choice. This man has no overhead and free entertainment provided by the New York public library system. The bonus is that he gets high everyday. Homelessness for the win. Internets, meet Jean aka Scott, Homeless Celebrity.
I just finished a brand new documentary about buying baseball cards at my local card store and the sweetly tragic nature of collecting (at least I think it’s sweetly tragic):
The baseball card industry has radically changed. As one of the regulars at the store says: “The kids are out.”
A few weeks back, around the weekend of Daylight Savings Time, I thought to myself: Wait, is Daylight Savings time this weekend? Is it Saturday? When the hell is it?
So I turned to google for help. Punched in the full question and as you can imagine, got back a shitload of links. I clicked on one of the top links – one that had a promising description – and went to the page. At the page, I had to scroll down, sift through some visual noise (ads, other time-related links, or way too much information) and only then, did I see that in fact Daylight Savings Time was that weekend – that Sunday morning to be precise.
The sad truth is that I was annoyed that I had to complete four steps to get an answer to that question. The search, the pick, the sift, the answer. And the pick took surprisingly long. I thought the clearest url would make my choice for me but they were all extensions of things like webexhibits.com, infoplease.com, aa.usno.navy, etc. The clearest one I could find was timeanddate.com but that led to a website dominated by an unnecessarily informative essay.
I didn’t want to learn a single thing about Daylight Savings Time. I just wanted to know the exact day when I should set my clock back.
I told this to fellow Internets Celebrity, Rafi Kam. Rafi told me we had the technology to not only make a site that counted down until Daylight Savings Time but we could automate it. I told Rafi, “that is fresh!”
I wanted the url for this site to be the most basic version of the question I wanted answered. I wanted to sidestep google even. If you took your question and plugged it in to your browswer, you’d get the answer you were looking for. In theory, we made it a one-step process. But that level of browser-faith might not be realistic. At the very least, I felt like we’d saved people valuable seconds.
Anyway, this got us thinking: what other notable dates took more than a one-step process to find out when they were happening. These are what we came up with:
As I admired these sites, I realized I’d learned some things during their creation.
1) Daylight Savings Times are not equidistant from each other. Someone told me that it was changed not too long ago so that now it’s like 230 days between Springing Forward and Falling Back and then like 135 days on the other end. I heard that the last change was on account of trick or treaters so that they could have more daylight on Halloween. Um. That’s weird.
2) The reason I don’t know when Daylight Savings Time is anymore, is because I don’t listen to the radio. I listen to podcasts but I don’t do a lot of real-time radio listening. And that’s where I used to just casually hear about falling back or springing forward. It’s not that big a revelation but there’s something lonely about not all hearing at once about mundane things like clock-setting.
Tron Guy was nice enough to answer some pressing questions regarding the new Tron movie, the fact that he owns a plane and what we have to do to save the economy.
At the end of the day Mountain Dew blue didn’t call for me to go to South by South West. That didn’t change my feeling for Mountain Dew blue either. I want to be with Mountain Dew blue. We have fun together. We like the same things like action figures, anime and Adult Swim.
I appreciate all the time that Mountain Dew and I have spent together, but I’m ready to move on with Mountain Dew blue now. I just hope Mountain Dew doesn’t call my phone when blue and I are together alone. That might get uncomfortable.
The iC’s were hoping to make the jump to the South by South West Media and Music Conference this year with one of our pics on our plate but no dice from the SxSW braintrust this time around. That’s too bad since we could have painted the town iC red (its the color you get when you mix blood, vomit and cherry Kool-Aid together) something like we did when we were at the Sundance Film Festival.
Anyhoo, I’m still petitioning to make the trip to Austin, but I’m hoping that a bigtime corporation will foot the bill since my rent money is late again. It turns out that PepsiCo is a bigtime sponsor of the conference and I just happen to use Mountain Dew Voltage as my substitute for water. At least I did until I decided to boycott Mountain Dew Voltage because they weren’t sending me to SxSW. Yes, I am retarded for staging a boycott, but that is what my mom calls me when I leave the basement to make a Ghetto Big Mac.
I’m hoping that enough of my friends will support this Mountain Dew Blue boycott along with me to convince the folks at Mountain Dew to send me and a cameraman to Austin to film the goings on. If Mountain Dew wants iC quality production then they only need to come up on some iC dollars. This is PepsiCo internets. These are the dudes that underwrote Shaquille O’Neal’s first rap album.
Sending some of us to film in Austin Texas >>> Kazam! (^ and you know this maaaaaan)
* Monday Bonus * Monday Bonus * Monday Bonus *
DP x 40 Deez loose in the BX (<- that's the Bronx, but you knew that)
Damn it feels good to get back to work. In the blustery, brick ass winter we did what we do. We also did it in Manhattan which is the first time we got to use this boro as our co-star. As always though, the i.C.’s is a production unit that has to cross their fingers for it to all come together.
I called Caz in the morning to remind him to load up on battery power for the shoot today with the idea that we would have one of those marathon sessions like we did in Utah at the Sundance Film Festival. Caz informed me that Rafi would be late since he missed his scheduled commuter train. Out meet up time of high noon was pushed back to 12:30.
This was cool for me since I was leaving this brunch spot with my lady Chocolate Snowflake and I was overcome with an intense sense of the bubbly. I pulled up into the Brooklyn public library at Grand Army Plaza and found a secret bathroom perfect for deucing. I handled my handle and came out happy as a clam. Now on to Manhattan.
The subways are effed the eff up on the weekends. The lines get all criss-crossed with the different trains that share the same platforms. The eastside line is running on the westside, the local train is using the express track. It’s all a big clusterfuck for people who don’t live here in NYC and have to use the maps. I already know what to expect so I instinctively get on the wrong train because it will be stopping where I need it to.
Rafi arrived at the meet up spot (ROFLcon NY) earlier than expected and for the first time evar it was Cas who was on iC time. When Cas showed up he promised to foot the bill for today’s meal. Here’s the idea… Our time together is precious and valuable. We have to take that seriously and respectfully. Being on time is a sign of that respect for one another. Yeah whatever dude, we are getting free food. Cas knows how to dangle that carrot in front of Rafi and me.
Our meal was wild good too. We hit up this little BBQ spot in the Lower East Side on Orchard Street and then we returned to hang out with the ROFLcon folks. You may end up seeing a video somewhere on the webs with Rafi and I sandwiching ObamaGirl. It really happened. I was there. I seen’t it. We capped off the night by following Cas into a secret underground ping-pong lair where he summarily pwned us on the tables. Overall we had a great day that you folks ill be proud of at some point.
But mainly, the iNternets Celebrities got back into our New York groove…
Join us on 
Follow on 
Watch on 
