Month: November 2003

Moment of Zen #8

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TOBY: http://www.meetup.com/
BRIAN: what is this
TOBY: you ever hear of meetups?
BRIAN: they look to be largly political
TOBY: you can create meetings for just about anything
TOBY: there is one in there for goth
TOBY: and another for chihuahuas
BRIAN: excellent
BRIAN: for petting or eating?
TOBY: who knows
TOBY: maybe we should attend meeting
TOBY: and say, I think the legs taste the best
BRIAN: yeah and get pelted with tiny sweaters

Now with more Parrot

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now with more parrot!You know how milk is color-coded by what type of milk it is? It’s not consistent across companies, so it’s not like an industry standard or anything, but for example the Whole Milk will have a red label, the Reduced Fat (2%) will be blue, the Low Fat (1%) will be green, the Non Fat will be pink… and but for the color differences, they all have the same general design. Sometimes you get exotic types of milk like Butter Milk or Heavy Cream, or Eggnog.

I dreamed last night that I was looking at a half-gallon carton of milk, mostly white with a pastel green label. Where the phrase “Reduced Fat Milk” would usually be, there was just a single word: PARROT.

So now my question is, is it Parrot-Flavored Milk? Maybe made with actual Parrot? Or milk for consumption by parrots? I can just see a parrot dairy with rows and rows of parrots being milked.

Or maybe there is no milk in there at all, just a parrot. I totally should have bought one just to find out.

They Stole My Idea #3

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Xtreme Granola!! Turns out there is a real show called “EX-treme Dating,” which isn’t exactly the spelling we used, but it still cracks me up… I was worried for a second but it sounds like it’s every bit as bad as our hypothetical show. Although I haven’t heard of the girl having to date a sodomy clown.

Plus, as you can see, it looks like there is yet another “Xtreme” product out there- although this is not so bad, because

  1. how obvious is “Xtreme” anyway
  2. When we used the phrase Xtreme it was supposed to be stupid… which looks to be pretty accurate thus far!

On the way to Burning Man; I was in a terrifically bad mood from herding flakes for the last 20 hours and we pulled up next to some frat guys wearing no shirts and wrap-around sunglasses. I said “fuck you lookin at, ya X-Games motha fucka?” or something like that…

kangaroo notebook

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Whoa. Japanese surrealism, about as nihilistic as Kafka and as disjointed as William S Burroughs. The main character wakes up one morning not turned into a gigantic insect, but rather finds daikon sprouts growing out of the pores in his shins.

He is treated, strapped to a robotic bed, which takes him to a resort which seems to be the River Sai, the Japanese Styx. He sees children in the underworld turned into a tourist atttraction, and falls in love with a series of young girls with sloping eyes.

I’m not sure what the point of this book was, but it was very entertaining!

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Green Card Fever vs Pink Floyd: The Wall Redux

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ShaColby & I were at Videoscope the other day and met a guy, Vijay, who runs a local production company,
Net Effect Media, Inc..

He was there to buy some DVDs (Videoscope has an incredible selection of foreign and cult DVDs for rental and sale)
and had dropped off a DVD of his new movie, Green Card Fever.

The owner of Videoscope, Nona, was very excited, and introduced us, since she knew that I am making short films… she pointed out a DVD they had for rent, “Pink Floyd: The Wall Redux,” which was a short student movie made by one of her friends. Nona supports local filmmakers, and I think that is pretty cool. She has at least ten different local indie directors who rent from her and give her copies of their new movies. Come to think of it, I should make a list of them and post it here.

“Pink Floyd: The Wall Redux” was entirely self-produced and seemingly done mostly on computer… Vijay eyed it with disgust and started dogging on the bad inkjet / color copy that the DVD cover art was printed on, and then mentioned that his was a “real” movie, “on 35 mm and everything,” and not a “home movie” like this one was. I can only imagine what he would think of ours, which was shot on miniDV.

So Shac and I asked Vijay if it was possible to rent his movie, and he got all flustered… he said that the copy he brought was for watching, not renting, and that if Nona wanted to rent it out he would “cut her a deal.” He seemed interested in our 48 Hour Film Project experience, but apparently only to name-drop some deal he had in the works with Sony to do a similar project. Maybe I misinterpreted somthing, but damn, what an asshole.

His (nonexistent) site is Net Effect Media, Inc., and here’s the movie site:
Green Card Fever. Note the insane usage of Flash… The trailers are a little on the painful side, but maybe it’s just because I’m not into the “corny romance-comedy” genre of Hindi movies.

So I surfed the site a little bit… then my friends surfed the site. And as is their wont, they did a little digging… and a little more digging. Turns out nearly all the reviews for this movie are super bad, but the producers still quoted tiny pieces of them on their site. These guys should work for the Bush Administration. A few examples:

Reviewer Text from their review As quoted on the GCF site
NYTimes “an amiable but highly didactic romantic drama” “Anita Gates pronounces … ‘Romantic’.”
Village Voice “Though it’s high time for a probing drama that illuminates the labyrinth of America’s immigration system, those responsible for Green Card Fever should have their artistic licenses revoked … The film’s problems are too numerous to list, but look for the boom mic at approximately 45m. Racial sensitivity corner: Why make the villainous lawyer a Chinese American (Robert Lin), his corruption supported by like-raced minions?” “Ed Park calls it a ‘Probing Drama’.”
NY Post “Earnest but not terribly original.” “V.A. Musetto says ‘Cast & Crew work hard … the result is earnest’.”

Bar Monkey

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A Bar Monkey is a machine that automatically mixes and dispenses alcoholic drinks. The original Bar Monkey v1.0 was created by Steven Avery, Dustin Cooper, and Brad Greer. The total cost of this Bar Monkey was $235 and took 3 months to complete.

Web link of note: Bar Monkey
(At http://www.barmonkey.net/)