Uncertain times like these prompt a man to consider their future moves upon the devious Chinese Checkers board of life, awash at all times with the knowledge that a single false move can leave you cornered on a massive, multicolored pentagram, desperately seeking an interstitial escape route while facing the dawning inevitability of your own compulsory ritual blood letting. (I am hazy on the rules for Chinese Checkers.) Point being: I am engaged in single combat with one of the chiefest lieutenants of Big Bastard Life, the Future. The moment has come to seek greener (possible blacker) pastures and pursue new windows of opportunity (which may be windows to oblivion), and it is to this end that I brilliantly faked my death so as to remove myself quietly from the daily goings on of the Villains and set my sights on Studio City.
See, my heart's wish would see me finding gainful employment, rich avenues for personal growth and ample opportunities to exploit my interest in the written word. But, we are, in the words of Nickie R, "living in a world of whores." A world made by whores, for whores.
True words, sir, true words. But in order to supply myself with a fitting delusion of potential until my ultimate barista-centric destiny unfolds, I have all but solidified a scheme that will take me to the west coast, and the doomed lands that gird its terminal reaches. It would be nice to produce comedy for a "for reals" living; this I regard very seriously as the Ideal Outcome. Granted, the possibilities are fraught with disappointing outcomes: even if I get a script bought, there's all the reason in the world to think it would be mutilated and reengineered to fit the needs of financial advisors to mighty studio heads, and the beacons to which the filmgoing publics proverbial dollar is drawn is a bona fide shit festival indeed. Yes, the stakes are high indeed. It will take a high degree of risk, endless hours of soul-shattering work and impeccable good fortune….
Which is exactly why I am led once again to reflect on one of life's truest axioms: The world is your oyster if you're a con artist. Oh, God, is it ever. Sure my quaint notions of writing for the joy of it might be dashed agin' the rocks and left to putrefy in a metaphorical tide pool, but with even my modest mastery of the written word, I could possibly attempt to cash in on a vapid lighting-in-a-bottle situation, after the fashion of the creators of Twilight and Harry Potter. With only minimal effort and negligible amounts of imagination, I could obtain the closest our society affords you to a license to print money- and oh how sweet it would be. I mean how much actual time do you supposes it took to write? 3 business days? 4? In any case, something within one week, I imagine. And for that one week's desultory labor you are made wealthy beyond my wildest imaginings. The conclusion we must draw is clear: Fuck you, dreams! From now on I'm all about the shysterism! Hell, it'd even work to get paid oodles just to not make anything, right?
The exchange in my head goes somewhat like this:
The producer snaps up my shitty script, nods approvingly, says:
"Now this is the kind of bullshit that could make someone a lot of money! That someone is not us, because we will never make this turd. But we also don't want anyone else making it; it's just the kind of crap that could sell today. So we'll pay you for it. We'll pay you for it and never, ever produce it. Take this $200,000, less than couch cushion money to me, but a sum vast beyond reckoning for yourself. Take it and festoon your tiny existence with garbage to excess the likes of which you never imagined possible until now! Do so with such single-minded fury that your next salient thought will be only the realization that you are already dead!"
And I would, I would do this thing. I would take his money in a heart beat.
And the producer guy would lean back, those baleful doll's eyes of his devoid of human expression, and he'd ejaculate vociferously across his desk, like a blinding torrent form some infernal geyser, and I would gleefully lunge hither and yon, catching as much of his rage seed in my gob as possible, letting globules splatter upon me like so many raindrops.
And amongst the maelstrom, a cheque for 200,000 big ones would make its way to my hand, groping blindly against the deluge, and I'd turn heel and run form his office with all haste as he screamed oaths after me, with a kind of rage that would kill an angel.
I would steal away to the bank and cash that bastard of a paycheck with nary a missed beat, semen stains still visible on my person. The teller would nod knowingly- she has seen this all before.
"Sold your first screenplay, huh?" she'd say.
I'd cough up a healthy wad of greed semen on her fine polished desk, and she'd laugh it off:
"Oh don't worry, we have a guy for that." she'd say.
"We have several guys."
That… that is more or less what I've pieced together about how LA works from second-hand accounts, anyway.
In truth, eschewing all stability and sources of income in favor of becoming one of Hollywood's catamites is still thinking small. When I think of the inordinate reward bestowed upon bastard lords like drug king pins and televangelists by all societies in human history, I find myself wishing only that I was on the winning side of the bastard struggle. It would be nice, to fully appreciate the fetid underpinnings of society but to also be one of the few who can be nothing but unilaterally benefited by it. To see the most corrupt public figures and hear the most deplorable sentiments broadcast bereft of shame and know that these creatures are not my nemesis, but my competitors.
Those are all mostly already crowded fields, the entrances to those old boys' clubs heavily guarded, and I imagine they are rightfully suspect of outsiders. More feasible perhaps would be worming my way into some low-level government job, like a state lawmaker. Do those positions pay much? Even if the pay is modest, it seems like a pretty sweet gig. I think I'd make a dandy no-name politician- I would never need to be concerned with being featured in national reporting except as an anonymous effigy of all that's wrong with whoever some yokel happens to want me to represent, and there is virtually nothing I could say or do that would be so ludicrous as to disqualify me from the position. A fine racket, I must say. And a tempting one, too, as the ship has sailed on the college textbooks.
God, so many bullshit industries! A world teeming with whores! And why am I not fortunate enough to be one of them? Probably because they generality require charisma in vast quantities. Even a simple holistic medicine scam requires too much single-minded drive. Starting a business, even a brick-and-mortar trap for slow pokes, takes a certain kind of moxie that my withered heart is too frail to play host to. But this… thing I've written has already gone to strange, terrible places. And for some reason I detect a slight current of negativity throughout- this is not my mind! It is merely the result of staring down the daunting magnitude of the tasks ahead. But my ambitions are there, and my moves are not chosen in caprice. With luck, they will not prove my undoing.
Here's hoping, you vile fiends!
--KCR
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Hiatus over
So obviously there was a period of time where we weren't making any videos but it kind of seems like we're going to be able to make videos a lot more often. At first the loss of Keith Richards in the fire was huge and resulted in several pools of thought being forever untappable, but we were able to find someone who stepped up and tried to help us fill the void, so you might have already noticed a new regular showing up in our movies. Also at the cost of Keith's life, we are now able to film on a some-what more regular schedule and somehow in the grief state that most people have entered people are seemingly more willing to appear in front of the camera, with some already having done so and others making verbal agreements.
The last video we shot was "Nicholas vs the Order" and some people might be curious the origin to this one. Well, I think it was more or less a conversation exactly like what happened in the video. One thing that we could not do though was actually go into a fast food place and shoot the video as there would have been sound issues and inconsistencies that would have spouted up in between shots due to people coming and going so we had to green screen it. Although of our better green screen ventures, it is of course not at the best it could possibly be, as we do not have the space to use a green screen correctly. But hey, a lot of you didn't even notice, so whoops killed the magic.
Anyway wanted to say we're being a lot more active again so check out our stuff.
-Kyle
The last video we shot was "Nicholas vs the Order" and some people might be curious the origin to this one. Well, I think it was more or less a conversation exactly like what happened in the video. One thing that we could not do though was actually go into a fast food place and shoot the video as there would have been sound issues and inconsistencies that would have spouted up in between shots due to people coming and going so we had to green screen it. Although of our better green screen ventures, it is of course not at the best it could possibly be, as we do not have the space to use a green screen correctly. But hey, a lot of you didn't even notice, so whoops killed the magic.
Anyway wanted to say we're being a lot more active again so check out our stuff.
-Kyle
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Keenness Unbidden
After the long, cold figurative winter of this long, cold factual winter, Our Diminutive Enterprise has at long last generated a new helping of its dreaded content. The thing's title was yet, last I checked, an amorphous and ever vermicular thing, somehow attempting to frame the subtitle 'Snow Fracturing' around a name sounding convincingly like that of some kind of "artist spotlight"-type TV special. I think in the end we evoked the BBC in some way in a bid to lend it an air of legitimacy. Anyway, it's there.
This one follows something slightly different from our usual approach to short-making, in that Kyle basically just galavanted out into the first substantial snow of the season, Ruggles in tow, and proceeded to film him in the process of dicking around in the cold for a few hours. After the fact, in true documentary fashion, he cobbled together what footage could be used to construct something approaching a coherent narrative, while we had the fun of working to come up with a narration that fit the scene and included the requisite funny or subversive elements. It was sort of a neat exercise to take a silent montage and try to make it something more interesting than an iMovie-style stock clip of a guy making, and subsequently unmaking, a snowman.
Actually, this seems more Windows Movie Maker's bag
I actually rather cotton to the finished product, for a few reasons. First, I believe this is the first of our skits that is filmed extensively outside; the sparse winter landscape affords us a slightly different looking video, and it serves as a fittingly bleak disruption of our fortnights-long stretch of inactivity. Second, with free time at such a premium that our other, more ambitious ideas need necessarily be put on indefinite hold, it's refreshing to have such an impromptu skit evolve purely out not nothing. The serviceable David Attenborough approximation lends a quasi-authentic documentary feel to this nonsensical tangent. It's also good for the ol' self worth that I can claim contributor credit to something other than logging yet more hours into motherfucking Civilization V for another month straight.
Now, I'm nowhere near pretentious enough to start dropping names of obscure artists just for the sake of it, but it's a non-issue because I'm nowhere near cultured enough to know a lot of them in the first place. But, this video having ended up as it did being a sort of mockumentary of a nonexistent artist, I fancy I should mention some of the actual artistic influences that have only recently begun to penetrate the benighted but safely insulated sum of my lifetime experience.
For one, it was in recent months that I became aware of the works of Kim Miru, who has instantly become one of my heroes. Her uniquely intrepid method of on-site photography did provide some inspiration for our own artists' (admittedly comparatively malevolent) approach. What with my enduring affinity for all things forsaken and dilapidated it is easy to see why I would be so drawn to Kim's work; her Naked City Spleen collection appeals to the parts of my brain long starved on a steady diet of mediocre web comics (at least since Achewood ended) and gambling addiction, and I'm happy to know it exists. It's a special kind of thing, and you should give it a look.
Further, on a recent and disappointingly Miru-less trip to the Leeum museum in Seoul, I did learn of another artist whose showcase immediately appealed to my sensibilities in a Way or two. While perusing the lower levels of a modern art exhibit floor, one of those big, blinking electro-mechanical signboard caught my eye. It was one of those old, programmable LED display boards that refreshes itself with a different image at regular intervals, like they used to have at sports stadiums before they invented those machines that transmit holographic shame simulators directly into your brian. The lonesome artifact roused itself with a grinding mechanical tumult, and with the pass of its refresh bar there was spelled out this message:
"YOU ARE TRAPPED ON THIS EARTH SO YOU WILL EXPLODE."
Naturally, I immediately took a shine to this sign, this message spoke to me. I can always appreciate a signboard ready to lay down some unsolicited truth. I looked into it and found the creator to be one Jenny Holzer, whose portfolio also spans the gamut from nifty to brilliant. I bet if Harold ever finds out about her, he too will have found his foot in the door to the wild world of conceptual art.
This one follows something slightly different from our usual approach to short-making, in that Kyle basically just galavanted out into the first substantial snow of the season, Ruggles in tow, and proceeded to film him in the process of dicking around in the cold for a few hours. After the fact, in true documentary fashion, he cobbled together what footage could be used to construct something approaching a coherent narrative, while we had the fun of working to come up with a narration that fit the scene and included the requisite funny or subversive elements. It was sort of a neat exercise to take a silent montage and try to make it something more interesting than an iMovie-style stock clip of a guy making, and subsequently unmaking, a snowman.
Actually, this seems more Windows Movie Maker's bagI actually rather cotton to the finished product, for a few reasons. First, I believe this is the first of our skits that is filmed extensively outside; the sparse winter landscape affords us a slightly different looking video, and it serves as a fittingly bleak disruption of our fortnights-long stretch of inactivity. Second, with free time at such a premium that our other, more ambitious ideas need necessarily be put on indefinite hold, it's refreshing to have such an impromptu skit evolve purely out not nothing. The serviceable David Attenborough approximation lends a quasi-authentic documentary feel to this nonsensical tangent. It's also good for the ol' self worth that I can claim contributor credit to something other than logging yet more hours into motherfucking Civilization V for another month straight.
Now, I'm nowhere near pretentious enough to start dropping names of obscure artists just for the sake of it, but it's a non-issue because I'm nowhere near cultured enough to know a lot of them in the first place. But, this video having ended up as it did being a sort of mockumentary of a nonexistent artist, I fancy I should mention some of the actual artistic influences that have only recently begun to penetrate the benighted but safely insulated sum of my lifetime experience.
For one, it was in recent months that I became aware of the works of Kim Miru, who has instantly become one of my heroes. Her uniquely intrepid method of on-site photography did provide some inspiration for our own artists' (admittedly comparatively malevolent) approach. What with my enduring affinity for all things forsaken and dilapidated it is easy to see why I would be so drawn to Kim's work; her Naked City Spleen collection appeals to the parts of my brain long starved on a steady diet of mediocre web comics (at least since Achewood ended) and gambling addiction, and I'm happy to know it exists. It's a special kind of thing, and you should give it a look.
Further, on a recent and disappointingly Miru-less trip to the Leeum museum in Seoul, I did learn of another artist whose showcase immediately appealed to my sensibilities in a Way or two. While perusing the lower levels of a modern art exhibit floor, one of those big, blinking electro-mechanical signboard caught my eye. It was one of those old, programmable LED display boards that refreshes itself with a different image at regular intervals, like they used to have at sports stadiums before they invented those machines that transmit holographic shame simulators directly into your brian. The lonesome artifact roused itself with a grinding mechanical tumult, and with the pass of its refresh bar there was spelled out this message:
"YOU ARE TRAPPED ON THIS EARTH SO YOU WILL EXPLODE."
Naturally, I immediately took a shine to this sign, this message spoke to me. I can always appreciate a signboard ready to lay down some unsolicited truth. I looked into it and found the creator to be one Jenny Holzer, whose portfolio also spans the gamut from nifty to brilliant. I bet if Harold ever finds out about her, he too will have found his foot in the door to the wild world of conceptual art.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Hear Our Tale of Betrayal
It is under less than ideal circumstances that I reveal to you, suddenly and without prompting, like unto the wiles of a run of the mill sex offender, the ephemeral fruits of our misbegotten labors: behold our Super Bowl advertisement.
I say "less than ideal" because, regrettably, our modest communique did not see its glorious debut aloft the moribund effuse of the Air's eminent waves. The exact machinations that set this tragedy in motion we cannot know, but we can infer with little uncertainty that it had something (read: everything) to do with the decidedly un-sportsmanly manner in which we delivered our message. It would seem that disembodied, animalistic braying and ominous encroaching thunderclaps are less than ideal companions to the average Joe's atmosphere of bacchanal.
For me the greatest disappointment isn't merely in the stymieing of our self promotion, but the lack of advance notification; a correspondence clearly codifying the network's philosophical opposition to our product would have been a much easier manner in which to swallow this particular pill. Additionally, it would have been a fun sort of thing to print, frame and utilize as the first subject in my personal collection of such "endorsements." (Joining it in the future, hopefully, would be a cease and desist from Adam Sandler or his lawyers- apropos my persistent and fanciful positing that the former's having a heart attack would automatically constitute comedy gold.)
Anyway, the Games have come and gone- now but a forgotten effluvia in the annals of entertainment history, and we remained wholly uninvolved in the event. Thus do we proceed through our Year of the Nihilist more or less as expected: crestfallen and, in Nick's case, combating a terrifying series of vivid auditory hallucinations, convinced at all times that bees are upon him.
Oh well, you can't win 'em all! But really, if anyone knows of a kind of medicine that makes you stop thinking that you are beset upon by bees that don't exist, please send us a link or something.
I say "less than ideal" because, regrettably, our modest communique did not see its glorious debut aloft the moribund effuse of the Air's eminent waves. The exact machinations that set this tragedy in motion we cannot know, but we can infer with little uncertainty that it had something (read: everything) to do with the decidedly un-sportsmanly manner in which we delivered our message. It would seem that disembodied, animalistic braying and ominous encroaching thunderclaps are less than ideal companions to the average Joe's atmosphere of bacchanal.
For me the greatest disappointment isn't merely in the stymieing of our self promotion, but the lack of advance notification; a correspondence clearly codifying the network's philosophical opposition to our product would have been a much easier manner in which to swallow this particular pill. Additionally, it would have been a fun sort of thing to print, frame and utilize as the first subject in my personal collection of such "endorsements." (Joining it in the future, hopefully, would be a cease and desist from Adam Sandler or his lawyers- apropos my persistent and fanciful positing that the former's having a heart attack would automatically constitute comedy gold.)
Anyway, the Games have come and gone- now but a forgotten effluvia in the annals of entertainment history, and we remained wholly uninvolved in the event. Thus do we proceed through our Year of the Nihilist more or less as expected: crestfallen and, in Nick's case, combating a terrifying series of vivid auditory hallucinations, convinced at all times that bees are upon him.
Oh well, you can't win 'em all! But really, if anyone knows of a kind of medicine that makes you stop thinking that you are beset upon by bees that don't exist, please send us a link or something.
Monday, January 30, 2012
The End of Proper Villains; Say Hello to The Bidwillii Bros.
Some time ago, we showcased a skit, one of many of ours fitting snugly in the "abortive joke" sub genre. In it was featured a man of vague ethnic parentage whose undefined but seemingly dearth-influenced culture, we decided (owing to one of our better but purely accidental instances of impromptu backstory), places inordinate emphasis on over-sized objects as a form of humor; shoes, stock animals, pinecones, and so on. Regarding the latter, our stock fish-out-of-water foreign character posed the question to his erstwhile conversational partner: "What kind of tree is making such huge pinecone?"
Well apparently, life imitates our meager art: there are, we have discovered, indeed such things as produce massively oversized pinecones, and they go by either the mundane name of bunya pines, or the aggressively delightful name of Araucaria bidwillii. With this revelation in mind (and surely, there will be little else that will be able to occupy it for the near future), I am announcing the official renaming of The Proper Villains to The Bidwillii Bros.
Expect varied and drastic measures to promote ourselves under the new and improved monicker; a haunting trademark will soon adorn coffee mugs, t shirts, and soon too, hopefully, everything from cell phone skins to feminine hygiene products. So frenzied shall be the attempt to propagate our name, for naught but the sheer love of the featured word, that I predict there will be no recourse ultimately but to stage a massive press conference, wherein our brief but forgivable careers will culminate in a stunning and audacious live-broadcast wherein we stand at three points on a stage and simultaneously shoot each other fatally, to ensure that we never live to dishonor the name.
The sincerest fact of the matter is that we, like in all endeavors, conducted no research nor cogitated in advance on any significant portion of the script, such as it was. Indeed, even on those few days where we can devote our spare time to rewrites and editing, most of it is occupied by Nick having to comb each page for and to remove the many passive-aggressive barbs I unvaryingly direct at our director and actors in each script, subtly slipped into the slug and action lines on every page. Think, INT.- JUSTIN'S FETID APARTMENT or Suddenly, Kyle's corpselike visage assails the screen. It's pretty great.
A minor aside is how happy I am that, after nothing short of hours of cajoling, I finally managed to compel Écouter Kyle to begin an otherwise innocuous scene with a stifling moment of black lead-in, followed by a Law & Order-style metal-clang "shocking" sound effect, something I have wanted to accomplish for ages. Basically I'd start a kid's show like that.
Sadly, there was to my infinite chagrin, no eerie turn-of-the-century harmonica-laden blues music featuring a gravel-voiced old black vocalist to play in the background, which I thought would be somehow ideal for this scene. At least, until the "troubles" begin at about 2:25, at which point we were delighted to find that Final Cut Pro supplied us with an ideal stock recording of a humming bird supping on a flower's nectar. Perhaps someday, should we be supplied something suitably public domain (probably very doable, given the anachronistic nature of my mad master vision) a director's cut type edition can happen.
I'm not really sure why the "big pinecone" guy made his debut as part of this strangely meta joke about editing one of our own films, but I can only assume it was a desperate conflation of several ideas caused by the pressure of having absolutely no time to devote to these things. What other mischief I might have deemed an ideal vehicle for the guy I'm not sure, but I distinctly remember at one point entertaining a primitive scenario wherein this character had some kind of voyeuristic obsession with watching people prepare pancakes, so maybe having him vapor-lock in this oddball non-sequitur is just as well.
Good night, and good luck.
--Keith R.
Well apparently, life imitates our meager art: there are, we have discovered, indeed such things as produce massively oversized pinecones, and they go by either the mundane name of bunya pines, or the aggressively delightful name of Araucaria bidwillii. With this revelation in mind (and surely, there will be little else that will be able to occupy it for the near future), I am announcing the official renaming of The Proper Villains to The Bidwillii Bros.
Expect varied and drastic measures to promote ourselves under the new and improved monicker; a haunting trademark will soon adorn coffee mugs, t shirts, and soon too, hopefully, everything from cell phone skins to feminine hygiene products. So frenzied shall be the attempt to propagate our name, for naught but the sheer love of the featured word, that I predict there will be no recourse ultimately but to stage a massive press conference, wherein our brief but forgivable careers will culminate in a stunning and audacious live-broadcast wherein we stand at three points on a stage and simultaneously shoot each other fatally, to ensure that we never live to dishonor the name.
The sincerest fact of the matter is that we, like in all endeavors, conducted no research nor cogitated in advance on any significant portion of the script, such as it was. Indeed, even on those few days where we can devote our spare time to rewrites and editing, most of it is occupied by Nick having to comb each page for and to remove the many passive-aggressive barbs I unvaryingly direct at our director and actors in each script, subtly slipped into the slug and action lines on every page. Think, INT.- JUSTIN'S FETID APARTMENT or Suddenly, Kyle's corpselike visage assails the screen. It's pretty great.
A minor aside is how happy I am that, after nothing short of hours of cajoling, I finally managed to compel Écouter Kyle to begin an otherwise innocuous scene with a stifling moment of black lead-in, followed by a Law & Order-style metal-clang "shocking" sound effect, something I have wanted to accomplish for ages. Basically I'd start a kid's show like that.
Sadly, there was to my infinite chagrin, no eerie turn-of-the-century harmonica-laden blues music featuring a gravel-voiced old black vocalist to play in the background, which I thought would be somehow ideal for this scene. At least, until the "troubles" begin at about 2:25, at which point we were delighted to find that Final Cut Pro supplied us with an ideal stock recording of a humming bird supping on a flower's nectar. Perhaps someday, should we be supplied something suitably public domain (probably very doable, given the anachronistic nature of my mad master vision) a director's cut type edition can happen.
I'm not really sure why the "big pinecone" guy made his debut as part of this strangely meta joke about editing one of our own films, but I can only assume it was a desperate conflation of several ideas caused by the pressure of having absolutely no time to devote to these things. What other mischief I might have deemed an ideal vehicle for the guy I'm not sure, but I distinctly remember at one point entertaining a primitive scenario wherein this character had some kind of voyeuristic obsession with watching people prepare pancakes, so maybe having him vapor-lock in this oddball non-sequitur is just as well.
Good night, and good luck.
--Keith R.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Read About Tornadoes
With a new year comes a new, terrifying ocean of opportunities for failure to jump you like a gunsel in the night.
Appropriately enough 2012 shall present itself as the year of the Nihilist. We'll someday soon premier Harold, a character from the dark, doom-addled recesses of our minds who contends with the pressures of proselytization in the new decade, matters of economic import, and the stark inevitability of the destruction of all things good and pure in the world.
With Harold, we have on display a small sampling of what I call the Greater Gayness and Sadness Theorem. That being, that the world we inhabit is directed by twin forces of gayness and sadness, and these are the influences that color the majority of events on this planet and beyond. It's a bit like Yin and Yang, only the relationships between these forces and the state of things can be summarized more succinctly: any event that is sad or wrong or generally disagreeable to the sensibilities of decent folk can be chalked up to the basic nature of the universe at large.
Don't mistake this for simple cynicism, mind. The Greater Gayness and Sadness Theorem does not contend that good things are impossible; indeed such anomalies are well accounted for. Consider the phenomena of a cyclone, where opposing air currents will wrap over and around each other to create a whirling vortex, in the center of which is found a spot of perfect calm. Similarly, when the natural forces of the universe find themselves situated in perfect counterpoint, there is in the midst of their turmoil an 'eye '. With the evils of reality held- however briefly- at bay, such feelings as joy, love and general satisfaction are able to be experienced unabated, as the storm-tossed sea of Despair roils unceasingly 'round us.
However, like the noble dust devil, such occurrences are few and fleeting indeed, and ere long the natural order is reinstated. The best one can do is recognize the signs and seize the opportunity to enjoy your time in the Eye's midst so long as you may, and if possible, try to move along in your life in such a way that you might yet keep apace of it a while, until the inexorable Despair overtakes you again.
We also kill a gnome. We kill a gnome in one of our "stories."
Another recent development of relative import to our diminutive enterprise has been the production of an ad- per the parlance, that is, a Super Bowl ad.
I should probably qualify this seemingly audaciously false proclamation with the esoteric insight that said ad is made, free of commission, to be aired on Air Force Network Korea's mirror broadcast of the Games in conjunction with the live event back stateside. So, not quite the kind of full-blown exposure would have been to be had from the more traditional venue, but still an exciting prospect is that of a much wider-reaching exposure than reddit alone, with the added benefit of probably being about as much of an outreach as we really warrant with our current workmanlike, but admittedly crude production quality.
Besides this, producing an "amusing" commercial to feature in any capacity during this thing is s much a staple of American culture as surely are cookouts, frivolous lawsuits and police brutality.
The real challenge was to generate something that would be deemed suitable by the venerable Everyman to be fit for general broadcast- in stark contrast to our usual fare. (Members of our modest following might note that our most viewed skit is 100% about crediting Satan- who is the antichrist- for the successful congregation of neighbor and stranger alike on our more tender and intimate of holidays.)
So, basically, though any reference to our Super Bowl ad should really be printed with a substantially emboldened asterisk astride it, it's fascinating to think that we have successfully infiltrated the airwaves of old media with news of our terrible trade. It was also a fun challenge; naturally anything for TV would be hard to do because everything we ever think of as fertile comedy soil is colored in our twin hues of sadness or gayness- see again the opening paragraph- and we're interested to see what impact if any this will have on our viewership population.
As for the ad itself, our loyal fiend Ruggles was the brainparent of the entity that will (fate willing) grace the television screens of many a stunned captive audience member in the near future- though I do not want to spoil its contents here before the air date. (Whenever the hell the Super Bowl is.) There were however a few other ideas generated, among which this and one other idea were determined to be ideal candidates.
The one that didn't make the cut- due primarily to time constraints- featured a board room executive importuning a room full of lifeless dolls for innovative marketing concepts- all while complaining of some phantom heat source. Our final ad message was to be splayed across the screen as his tremulous pleading for answers faded to silence, an ominous humming audible throughout. You know, comedy!
Another idea I came up with today (though not necessarily for an ad, but I like to think in an alternate universe it would have made for a delightful run indeed) features a vampire scoffing at a crucifix held aloft by his would-be vanquisher, declaring that he fears only "real Gods"- only then to be terminated by an errant Tiki statue. I am resolv'd to make this idea a reality, worked into some glorious larger context, ideally, but ILM hasn't been taking my calls and I simply cannot manage without realistic face melting effects.
Appropriately enough 2012 shall present itself as the year of the Nihilist. We'll someday soon premier Harold, a character from the dark, doom-addled recesses of our minds who contends with the pressures of proselytization in the new decade, matters of economic import, and the stark inevitability of the destruction of all things good and pure in the world.
With Harold, we have on display a small sampling of what I call the Greater Gayness and Sadness Theorem. That being, that the world we inhabit is directed by twin forces of gayness and sadness, and these are the influences that color the majority of events on this planet and beyond. It's a bit like Yin and Yang, only the relationships between these forces and the state of things can be summarized more succinctly: any event that is sad or wrong or generally disagreeable to the sensibilities of decent folk can be chalked up to the basic nature of the universe at large.
Don't mistake this for simple cynicism, mind. The Greater Gayness and Sadness Theorem does not contend that good things are impossible; indeed such anomalies are well accounted for. Consider the phenomena of a cyclone, where opposing air currents will wrap over and around each other to create a whirling vortex, in the center of which is found a spot of perfect calm. Similarly, when the natural forces of the universe find themselves situated in perfect counterpoint, there is in the midst of their turmoil an 'eye '. With the evils of reality held- however briefly- at bay, such feelings as joy, love and general satisfaction are able to be experienced unabated, as the storm-tossed sea of Despair roils unceasingly 'round us.
However, like the noble dust devil, such occurrences are few and fleeting indeed, and ere long the natural order is reinstated. The best one can do is recognize the signs and seize the opportunity to enjoy your time in the Eye's midst so long as you may, and if possible, try to move along in your life in such a way that you might yet keep apace of it a while, until the inexorable Despair overtakes you again.
We also kill a gnome. We kill a gnome in one of our "stories."
Another recent development of relative import to our diminutive enterprise has been the production of an ad- per the parlance, that is, a Super Bowl ad.
I should probably qualify this seemingly audaciously false proclamation with the esoteric insight that said ad is made, free of commission, to be aired on Air Force Network Korea's mirror broadcast of the Games in conjunction with the live event back stateside. So, not quite the kind of full-blown exposure would have been to be had from the more traditional venue, but still an exciting prospect is that of a much wider-reaching exposure than reddit alone, with the added benefit of probably being about as much of an outreach as we really warrant with our current workmanlike, but admittedly crude production quality.
Besides this, producing an "amusing" commercial to feature in any capacity during this thing is s much a staple of American culture as surely are cookouts, frivolous lawsuits and police brutality.
The real challenge was to generate something that would be deemed suitable by the venerable Everyman to be fit for general broadcast- in stark contrast to our usual fare. (Members of our modest following might note that our most viewed skit is 100% about crediting Satan- who is the antichrist- for the successful congregation of neighbor and stranger alike on our more tender and intimate of holidays.)
So, basically, though any reference to our Super Bowl ad should really be printed with a substantially emboldened asterisk astride it, it's fascinating to think that we have successfully infiltrated the airwaves of old media with news of our terrible trade. It was also a fun challenge; naturally anything for TV would be hard to do because everything we ever think of as fertile comedy soil is colored in our twin hues of sadness or gayness- see again the opening paragraph- and we're interested to see what impact if any this will have on our viewership population.
As for the ad itself, our loyal fiend Ruggles was the brainparent of the entity that will (fate willing) grace the television screens of many a stunned captive audience member in the near future- though I do not want to spoil its contents here before the air date. (Whenever the hell the Super Bowl is.) There were however a few other ideas generated, among which this and one other idea were determined to be ideal candidates.
The one that didn't make the cut- due primarily to time constraints- featured a board room executive importuning a room full of lifeless dolls for innovative marketing concepts- all while complaining of some phantom heat source. Our final ad message was to be splayed across the screen as his tremulous pleading for answers faded to silence, an ominous humming audible throughout. You know, comedy!
Another idea I came up with today (though not necessarily for an ad, but I like to think in an alternate universe it would have made for a delightful run indeed) features a vampire scoffing at a crucifix held aloft by his would-be vanquisher, declaring that he fears only "real Gods"- only then to be terminated by an errant Tiki statue. I am resolv'd to make this idea a reality, worked into some glorious larger context, ideally, but ILM hasn't been taking my calls and I simply cannot manage without realistic face melting effects.
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