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Happy birthday, you hateful animals. Look for this friendly face in the near future.

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.

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.