Internets Celebrities

The IC’s are going to be selling some product soon… Expect to see some T-shirts and dvd’s available here in the near future.

Right now we want to put out a t-shirt based on our rallying cry of “Chea!”. So we’ve created the poll below so that you guys can help us decide which of our shirt designs would be a better choice to have printed up for sale.

You can click on the images in the poll for a larger view.

Chea for your participation!

Today is Veteran’s Day, celebrated elsewhere in the world (and once upon a time in America) as Armistice Day.

This is a holiday to remember the end of World War I which formally took place on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Naturally, people wanted a holiday to remember WWI aka “The Great War” aka “The War to End All Wars” (SPOILER ALERT: didn’t actually end all wars).

But I think maybe people just wanted a holiday about the date eleven-eleven. It’s cool to say eleven-eleven. Eleven is the smallest number to have three-syllables in it. And unlike the next three-syllable number “seventeen”, eleven sounds pretty… I’d have to be pretty drunk to want to say “seventeen-seventeen”!

In numerical form, 11 11 also looks cool. If I catch the clock when it’s 11:11, I say a wish. How about you?

So here we are on the eleventh day of the eleventh month and our producer widget is flashing $1,110 – just $1 short of $1,111!

My 11/11 wish is that someone donates the $1 to get us up to $1,111.

And then my $1,111 wish is that we’re speedily helped along to $2,222. My birthday is 2/2 so I’m pretty keen on those twos too.

In exchange for your dollar (or larger contribution) you will actually become a producer of the next Internets Celebrities video. We’ve already started on one about Real Estate and gentrification but we’re thinking about getting out a smaller one first, interviewing kids who sell candy on the subway. We take producer feedback very seriously so if you want to weigh in with suggestions on either of the above ideas or other suggestions.. Put your money down and holler at will!

Happy repeating digits day. And chea to all the world’s veterans. The IC’s salute you.

I got thoroughly interviewed.

And in that interview, I talk about:

The spectacularly casual origin of The Internets Celebrities.

The splendidly exciting ascent of Crying, While Eating.

The viscerally humbling experience of film festivals.

The thrillingly unpopular (but close-to-my-heart) Hello Curve.

For anyone making video out there, I talk some talk about the tools I regularly use for the editing and the shooting.

Shout to Jesse Thorn from Sound of Young America (who was interviewed last week) for putting Emerson and Lyle of Media Sound Off in touch with me.

Thanks for listening!

Pensive Cas stands with head down amongst the other filmmakers for the Q&A session after Friday’s show.

Ok, so I told you what happened before and after our show but let me tell you a little about the other short films that Bodega played with at the Woodstock Film Festival 2008.

The Unhappy Traveler: A New Yorker in India directed by Basia Winograd. This one was presented as a series of vignettes excerpted from a larger work (the director is working on a feature from this material) interspersed throughout the show. These clips focussed primarily on Ramon, a young New Yorker who is having a rough time on his vacation in a crowded, impoverished India as opposed to the storybook version he had in his head. Another traveler is a girl who came to India seeking a meditative journey towards enlightenment who is disheartened to find only a bunch of beggars sticking their dirty palms out to her. Both eventually make the best of the situation at hand and, goshdarnit, learn something along the way. Perhaps to be grateful that they’re just visiting.

The Ramon section of Unhappy Traveler has an appeal similar to the very viral “Mark Wahlberg talks to animals” skit from SNL. In both, a tough-talking city kid with a heavy accent is brought down a notch as he tries to communicate with indifferent simple creatures.

Would it be wrong and grossly over-simplifying to say Mark Wahlberg Talks to the Animals plus Darjeeling Limited’s trailer (foolish Americans go to India in hope of quick enlightenment) equals the Unhappy Traveler? Probably, especially since I never even saw Darjeeling Limited but I think that’s what it’s about. And yet, here I go…

Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

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Next came a short called Knock On Wood by Ron Grunhut about percussionist Valerie Naranjo. In the 1980s Naranjo fell in love with an African instrument called the gyil and traveled to a village in Ghana to learn from the gyil masters and break the local taboos about women being allowed to play this instrument.

In the climax of the short (SPOILER ALERT!) they explain how the village elders were placed between a rock and a hard place because they have a strict custom about treating visitors with utmost respect but also a strict custom about not treating women with enough respect to let them play this wooden xylophone thingy. The drama in this conflict of values and in the sexual subtext of a worldly light skinned women surrounded by dozens of African dudes were both heightened to a dizzying apex by the elegant pajamas worn in broad daylight by many of the men in the village.

Inevitably the American woman sways the village elders to allow all women to play the gyil. At this moment we see a dancing woman of the village let out a joyful cheer and behind us in the theater some women began to clap. Yes, it is a nice story but perhaps next time they set out changing Ghanaian minds on how local women are treated, they may want to start with genital mutilation instead.

My favorite short in the bunch was also the film that won the documentary short competition. Pickin’ and Trimmin’ by Matt Morris lets us gaze in on an extraordinary barbershop where the haircuts, the lively characters and even the back room housing magical bluegrass jam sessions are all secondary to the sense of community. The barbershop is a home away from home, an extended family for the locals of Drexel North Carolina. And for film festival viewers this is a glimpse of an America you practically can’t believe actually exists. Hell, this movie almost made me a republican.

As for the award, Puffy is good (I don’t really know Matt Morris but I like to call him “Puffy”) but the Internets Celebrities are for the children.

The last movie was Dinosaurs and Rocketships by Liz Fulton and Bruce Stanbery which spends time getting into the head and the work of sculptor Steve Heller. Heller is likable enough to make this work, a middle-aged city kid who never grew up, instead he moved to the woods not too far from Woodstock where he spends all of his free time exploring his childhood obsessions (the two mentioned in the movie title). He welds junkyard material into 20 ft tall dinosaurs and turns old car fins into rocketships.

I think the five shorts worked really well together. All five (even Bodega) united by an explicit theme of outsider eyes, either those of the documentary subject or those of the documentary’s audience, entering a foreign world. Open questions raised: what does it take to be capable of moving in between worlds and what makes for a good guide? What is universal about the human experience and how do we have empathy for situations that are not our own?

I remember sitting in the green room of the Brian Lehrer show before our interview, talking with the producers and they were in total shock when Dallas and I told them that neither of us were from the Bronx. But, you walk around there so comfortably! With such familiarity.

The Way of the Internets Celebrity is to know that yes the world is large and diverse but more importantly it is also small and interchangeable.

This may surprise you but there has yet to be an Internets Celebrities get-together that has started at the time we originally planned. The problem is both Dallas and I operate on C.P.T. (Computer People Time) so if you tell us to show up somewhere at 7, that’s about the time we get off the Internets and get on the road. You can probably expect us there sometime between 7:30 and 9.

This goes back to our beginnings. On the fabled day that we all got together for the first time to shoot Ghetto Big Mac, Dallas hit us up by phone around the time he was supposed to be showing up to give us directions to where we could pick him up instead. When we were all flying out to Sundance for our first professional gig, Cas and Ian caught our early morning flight, while Dallas and I both showed up to the airport a few minutes too late. By the time we made it to our Park City hotel we had lost a whole day. You’d think that would have been an effective lesson to teach us to change our ways but … not so much. That’s why I only appear in half of the Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival video footage. I was on C.P.T. that day.

In September, after spending the summer focussed mostly on other things, the IC crew reunited on the night of Rooftop Films screening Checkmate. We planned to meet up early to grab a slice of pizza, discuss upcoming projects and shoot some press photos in a Bodega.

I called Cas from the highway to tell him I was going to be about 40 minutes late. In frustration at myself I said “next time, just tell me a time about an hour before you actually want me there.” Without missing a beat, Cas shot back a no. He shouldn’t have to lie just to account for my irresponsibility. “How about you just learn to get to places on time,” he chided.

When I finally showed up to the pizza place, I apologized to Cas and to Dallas who told me it was no big deal to him as he had just gotten there himself. Rushing to eat, I ended up burning my lip and chin with some scalding hot cheese from a shrimp and chicken slice. We still ended up getting off a couple of decent Bodega photos, with that red burn mark on my chin giving me some badly needed street cred.

So, we faced a great challenge at the start of this month. Bodega was showing as part of the Documentary Shorts program at the Woodstock Film Festival. Cas had been up there for the whole festival but Dallas and I were to join him on Sunday morning at 11 when Bodega was showing. We decided it made sense for the two of us to share a single Zipcar for the two hour drive to Woodstock and so we formulated a plan for Dallas to pick me up around 8am so that we could be in Woodstock by 10. Knowing our tendencies it was important that we add in this extra hour. Of course the problem with a padded hour as CPT is concerned is that if you know it’s just an imaginary self-imposed deadline, you tend to imagine it away.

So at 7:45 I gave Dallas a call to see how he was doing, he had a zipcar reserved for 7 but the garage wasn’t open until 8. When I spoke to him ten minutes later he was taking a cab to a different zipcar location where he was going to pick up a different car. So much for 8am. On the other hand we had given ourselves that extra hour….

Around 8:30 I realized I needed to pick up something from the supermarket for my family. Called Dallas who was now on the highway heading towards my home. We agreed that I definitely had 5 minutes for a supermarket run. But what I didn’t have time for was the McDonald’s Drive Thru visit plus longer supermarket run that I went on instead. By the time I got back home it was right around 9 and Dallas was already there waiting for me.

The only thing Google Maps didn’t count on when it estimated the two hour drive to Woodstock was that we’d be driving a BMW (Zipcar had given Dallas an upgrade from the Toyota Matrix for his troubles) which seemed to ramp up to 90mph with the greatest of ease.

A hundred miles, a piss break and a tightly rolled blunt later, we showed up in the parking lot of the community center in Woodstock around 10:40 am. There was a line already assembling for people to buy tickets. Cas wasn’t around yet but we knew he had our tickets and should show up any minute if he wasn’t already inside the building.

Behind the community center was a baseball field and a group of middle aged to senior-aged locals were playing some mean softball. A long drive was hit to rightfield and Dallas and I watched in astonishment as the rightfielder – whose hair was more salt than pepper – stepped on the gas looked back over his shoulder and made a Willie Mays style grab. The very next play was a bullet to shortstop which was also fielded like a pro. That guy’s Willie Mays and that one’s Ozzie Smith, Dallas said instantly and convincingly transforming the race and professional experience of these older softball stars.

As it was now just about 11, I gave Cas a call. The cell phone signal was finally working and Cas was on his way and had our tickets. He said not to worry as he’d be there within 10 minutes. He seemed rather calm considering he was about to make us late for our screening. “Doesn’t the show start at 11?” I prodded. Cas paused, “Yeah, uh, it’s actually starting at 11:15.” I congratulated him on the nice job lying to me about the start time. Apparently an hour was out of bounds but fifteen minutes was fair game to our director. I hung up the phone and said to Dallas, “the show’s actually at 11:15!” Yeah, he already knew that.

The important thing is we made it on time and we were thus rewarded on that Sunday morning with the phenomenal defensive acrobatics of the Woodstock AARP crowd. That’s not the kind of thing you want to miss out on.

As for the festival, we feel like we got so much love that day. We got love from the crowd during the show, from the festival’s organizers, from the other talented filmmakers we met and then from people stopping us on the street repeatedly to chant “Bo-de-ga” or tell us they loved the movie. That’s also not the kind of thing you want to miss out on.

All of this grows out of the love we’ve gotten from you. That’s what sustains us: the comments, the blog posts, seeing people who want to spread our work to people they know or who want to support our efforts by donating their dollars and becoming producers.

I don’t want to get too lovey-dovey on you guys but there must be something in that chili I ate up in Woodstock. When I tell you the joy of having the all-important fourteen year old white girls excited to see you on the streets of their small town, that is a high like no other. You put us there so when we go we always represent for the Internets.

We are stardust, we are golden. And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden… at a reasonable time.