First there was Ghetto Big Mac
Then there was Ghetto Big Mac 2 (aka Futuristic Brunch)
And now, finally, Ghetto Big Mac 3: The Search for Sauce
Following the Star Trek Chronology, we’d have to make our fourth GBM about going back in time and bringing Grimace back to the future to communicate with the HamBurglars threatening destruction of our planet. And our fifth would just be really, really bad. So we’ll stick with the trilogy for now. Chea!
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!
The brand new movie from the Internets Celebrities is locked and (up)loaded.
It’s called Stadium Status.
And we’d like to invite you to watch it below:
Stadium Status from Internets Celebrities on Vimeo.
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.
Thank you very much for watching. Chea!
Once you are namechecked in a rap song, that can never be taken away from you. We have that now. And it feels good. If you’re ever near two of us when the 2:42 mark of the following song comes on, we will probably be high-fiving.
If you don’t know Das Racist, Dallas summed them up nicely here. Mess with them. They defy the easy characterization. They are the rap. They are the funny. Their “Shut Up Dude” mixtape is coming to the internets very soon. For word on that, I say check them at the myspace or check them at their site.
Chea to lyrics like this: “This is panic attack rap. Eating 4 flapjacks. Trap raps. Let ’em free. They always come back to me. The internet told me that that’s called love. I’m on the internet cause I’m an internet thug.”
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 Rutherford Newark 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?!?
Yankees Steakhouse is not an option.
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)
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.”
Thanks very much for watching.
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!”
Then, we leapt into action.
When Is Daylight Savings Time?
It means what it says and it says what it means.
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:
When Is The Full Moon?
When Is Easter This Year?
And the slowest automated countdown ever:
Then, we took all those sites and grouped them together at:
where we welcome suggestions for other Whens.
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.
Anyway, thanks for checking out the sites.
I love the subway late at night when no one’s on it
I always enjoy watching the lonely glass bottle that no one picks up roll around
And if I’m really lucky, late at night, I get the best of both worlds
Shouts to Dallas, Sydney, Will, Fried, Jessie and Ian for helping me roll 50 bottles around an empty subway car.
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.
Thank you Tron Guy!
“Wisecracking social critics who deconstruct the worlds of check-cashing outlets, street vendors and even sugar-laden breakfast cereal.” Read the rest.