Shooting the Messenger, or Making a Connection Between Star Trek and My People, then Killing That Connection

So at the NY Comicon we were taking a series of pictures where people would put on a red shirt and we'd kill them, with the intention of putting the series on the Start Trekkin NY website. The Red Shirt Diaries, which will include online episodes of Trek officers recounting the grisly death's of their unfortunate junior staff, is not up yet, but hopefully will be soon, as a crack team of interweb savvy experts are reworking the site as we speak. But I guess somewhere in there, we took these pictures with an an amazing Italian artist named David Messina. His blog is completely in Italian, so I'm assuming that this gentlemen, as his blog seems to indicate, is actually an illustrator for Star Trek Magazine, with which I'm not particularly familiar. And he's freakin great. That said, here's a short series of pictures that he's taken and altered into a small story.
My sister Christine is an Italian professor and she's been kind enough to translate, so you, the avid blog reader, can know his story in two languages:

"...A group of perplexed Star Trek fans don't know whether to be happy or not to have met the designer of the series..."

".... until it dawns on them who he really is...."

"... and their furious reaction!"

Me and Ghandi are So Word

Okay, so I filmed this piece with Phil Armand for a commercial competition this winter 2008. It was for Net 10, a cell phone company who's slogan is "No Evil," which I can get behind. We shot me walking around with a poker picking up trash in Brooklyn and looking very serious. I was rocking a sweet beard and I seem to be having a good hair day.

But dammit, I can't figure out this whole RSS feed thing. It just doesn't make no sense to me. So you'll have to go here and scroll down to find my short among the many. When last I looked it was film number 6 and its titled "cleaning our streets."

Hope you can find it and that you'll derive a modicum of enjoyment from it or perhaps be so swept away by the selflessness of the whole theme that your identification with separation and the ego is dashed against the rocks of pretension and you realize your god-self and maybe hang with Dr Manhattan on Mars or something. (I just saw a Watchmen movie blog this evening and it made me happy).

There is no spoon. And no evil. That said, we didn't win the competition.

the Lost Episode of Mediocre New York

This was the first episode of Mediocre New York I hosted. I actually look like I bathed before the shoot, and if you check out the other episodes I host, you'll see how I eventually look like a homeless man who stole a broken microphone from a low budget TV show. Never to be out-mediocred....

Laydeez and Gentlemens, I give you... the New York Inn:


Also, here's a link to my "about the host" page on the MNY website. I thought it was kind of funny.
YOU DECIDE
if I was right, or just plain dumb.

My first foray into animation

My buddy Marc Lesser approached me about creating a short animation piece for a website. We made this sample, which I think they liked, but they had already gone in another direction by the time we had finished it. Too bad for us. Anyway, I think its kind of funny, and its my first attempt at animation, so not bad, all things considered.

In case you missed the link the first time, click here to see our nifty cartoon.

Red Shirt Massacre at the NYComic Con

Here's a cool pic somebody took of us at the con. The photographer was duplicating famous photographs using people dressed as superheroes and other fictional characters. Here's Frank, Kate, Ben and myself replicating the famous, tragic image from the Kent State Massacre. Can you guess which guy I am? Hint: I'm wearing a red shirt, the subtext of which any Star Trek fan will understand.