Spooky Snack

Here's a commercial I acted in when I first moved to San Francisco late last year.  I finally got a hold of a copy.  Its a little silly, but the special effects are cool.  I was performing with an actor wearing a head to toe green screen suit, so that he could be edited out in post.  Also, the Doritos spilling out of the bag when I fall off the counter and the Dorito at the end of commercial that I grab for and it disappears are totally animated.  I think it looks decent.  Nice to have been part of movie magic.

While I'm At It...Start Trekkin NY at NY comicon 2009

Here's a fun series of videos. Taken with a friend's phone, these two performances from the 2009 NY Comicon were only able to be filmed one minute at a time (that's how long her phone could take videos). So what you are seeing are the bits of both performances that made it to digital documentation. Some fun bits in there - I am typically over the top. Good luck adding in the rest of the story you aren't getting here...think of it as a fun project, where you can make up your own stories and transitions to fill in the blanks.

Here ya go:

PhilRistaino.blogspot.com/Cafe Antarsia

New Stuff!

Well, not really. I've recently rediscovered this footage from a play I performed in called Cafe Antarsia. It was a musical of sorts, more of a play with music, complete with middle eastern musicians and score. The theme of the show was essentially the occupation of Turkey on an island in Greece near the turn of the twentieth century. (Can you believe we live in the 21st century? I never really considered that until now. Whoa....)




I play Kariogiosis (spelled something like that), the half Greek, half Turkish weasel who sort of inspires unrest and keeps the peace in sly ways, always to further his own survival. That's me with the red fez running around and yelling in the strange, poetic dialogue the playwright invented. This might be the first footage I've found that demonstrates what its really like to do physical performance art. This show was directed by fellow Skidmore alum and old pal Ian Belton, and performed at the Here Arts Center in NYC circa 2005. I believe Cafe Antarsia the band is still a going concern, and you can find out more about them here.

I also want to encourage whomever stumbles upon this blog to check out my new website of sorts, PhilRistaino.blogspot.com. This is my attempt to begin to organize and catalogue my various art forms into a more accessible clump or clumps. Funny enough, I find in some ways by assembling whatever I can from the past, I'm still only scratching the surface of past works, and really wish there was much more documentation of all the plays I performed in over the last 15 years or so. Oh well, theater has always been what I consider the most ephemeral of art forms....

The "Phil Sessions" for Bones Rodriguez' "Kirk's Guide to Women" blog

Supreme gentleman and now a member of Start Trekkin NY improv, (of which I am, alas, no longer a member), Skidmore College alum John "Bones" Rodriguez has written Captain Kirk's Guide to Women. A tome of sexy proportions, Kirk's Guide takes you step by step through the seduction of the space-lady of your affections by following in the footsteps of the master himself, Capt James Tiberius Kirk.

In promotion of the book, Bones invited myself and a couple actresses over to play dress up and shoot a little film. What resulted hath been dubbed "The Phil Sessions" over there on Bone's blog.

(Note : the sound quality is a little overdriven on these shorts, so please forgive the fuzzy dialogue.)

(Double Note: "Kirk" means "Circle." Take a moment to consider that perhaps why Kirk is so successful is because he represents the perfection, the wholeness, the self-fulfilled, and the very symbol of the divine female, the manifestation of all matter in the universe.)

(Special Triple Feature Note de El Shabbaz!: If you look carefully, you will be witness to the extra special cameo of the Sid Barrett of the 21st Century, the now mythical Dave Smits.)

Just Because

Its been a while. Months and months and many more months. Several dozens of collections of hours between then and now.

So....




I've really chocked up a ton of hours down at the Regal Beagle. Janet has been extra annoying and Chrissy is still hot, but is soon to be replaced by that dumb chick and then Terry, also hot.

So....




So there's a couple from that classic turn of the century film, "Today Will Be Yesterday Tomorrow,"  starring the Flackman Bros, Martin and Max, and yours truly as the mythical Mystical Bill. Thanks again to Max for hooking me up with the clips -- the debt shall be repaid. In spades!

Oh, and sharp eared viewers will recognize that wonderful chestnut from the Troy Westfield Experience, "For A While," playing in the background (of your mind) during the second scene face-off with a nic-fit-quitting Martin. Its track number 11 in that album just to your right. Go ahead. Check it out. For once in your life, do what's right, I tells ya!

Til Little Nixon makes a comeback....

A Sound Christmas Thrashing

Yours truly gets punched in the face (twice) in a new web commercial for weheartfighting.com.



This website is dedicated to promoting Street Fighter 4, apparently, and also features a lengthy exposition about a guy dressing up as Santa Claus in full body armor, going out to what appears to be right around Penn Station in NYC, and getting his ass kicked. Repeatedly. Has Christmas changed? It has.

This commercial was produced by old school chum Yehuda Duenyas, (he's the guy with the pointy beard in the commercial who looks like one of the three musketeers), and also features many former Skidmore college classmates and friends; Ryan Bronze (the guy at the table saw), Ahna Tessler (woman annoyed at being followed and eventually punched), Steve Donnely (1/2 of a couple who are punched by a pirate), and Matt Kalman (the pirate).

Yehuda, Matt, and Ryan are all members of an absurdist avante garde theatre company called the National Theatre of the United States of America. They paint the stage with historical/hysterical monologues, big dance numbers, and lots of moving platforms, slamming doors, and a myriad of death-defying surprises. NY theater not to be missed.

Start Trekkin NY: Ten Minutes Left of Money

Start Trekkin NY performed at the Big Apple ComicCon a few weeks ago (Mid November, 2008). For some reason, they will only book us to do a 15 minute episode. Not sure why, I think we could at least do a half hour without breaking a sweat or screwing up their schedule. At any rate, we've developed a cliff-hanger-type technique for little gigs like this, which hopefully brings in new fans and briefly entertains convention-goers. Someone was kind enough to film the sequence and put it online (thank you, stranger). Since you're here, you might as well check it out:

As Seen On TV

Hey. I know I promised a blog about the orbs in my last mural post, (for those 2 or 3 of you who've been reading these blog posts) but I wanted to post this TV pilot I hosted for my good friend Phil Armand (please check out his website). This show was created summer 2008.

Phil created this idea to enter into the New York TV pilot festival, and got some good responses from those who saw it, but unfortunately it didn't get anywhere. This hopefully will be the closest I'll get to selling my soul, in terms of content--the show is about me testing products advertised on television. I think Phil did a nice job putting the show together, it looks pretty good, moves smoothly, and there are some funny things in there. One thing of potential interest: aside from the voice-over narration, everything you see here is completely improvised. Enjoy:




Also for your perusal, I found the Net 10 commercial I made with Phil this past winter 2008:

Start Trekkin on I09

Awesome review of September's Start Trekkin show on I09.com.

I get some good face time with the article, and they cover one of my characters:

"Any improv group that is going to make fun of a tattoo-wearing secret monk society that doesn't actually help — but saves the day in the end — is aces in my captain's log, especially when they try and rip said tattoos off."

Please check it out.

Also, I'm going to start keeping a record of the notices for our shows. Here's the one for tomorrow's show 10/3 at the Sage theater, NYC.


Feel free to visit our website, myspace, and facebook pages.

Master and Margarita Radio Play

One of the first things I did when I moved to NYC around 1998 was weasel my way into a live performance of an adaptation of the famous Russian novel "The Master and Margarita." I was living in the spare room of old friend actor Mike McCartney (another Skidmorian) and answered a phone call for him about an audition for this show, and I turned it into an audition for me. Its not something I'd normally do, but something about this was more or less fated, as I made some great friendships from participating in this show, so I just chalk it up as being meant to be. Mike got the part anyway. So I became a pivotal part of the show, acting as the sound foley, the announcer, and several comedic characters.


The show was first shown as a live theatrical show, then graduated into a live radio broadcast. This is a recording of that 2nd show. Hope you dig it. Special thanks to Megan Ryan, who directed, Cami Delavigne, who wrote the adaptation, Sharon Unterman, the Margarita, Steve Strauss, who drew the postcard, and of course, the mythical sergeant of love, Mike McCartney.

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!"

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.

NYComicCon

I had a crazy weekend. Start Trekkin performed at the New York Comic Con at the Javits Center--it was a huge convention! I'll write more soon, but I just wanted to put up this interview for posterity. I am a total nerd in this interview, I was standing next to the Geek Squad host so he asked me all the questions and I think my brain dropped into my appendix or something, cause most of my answers are fairly lame. But it was an amazing weekend, for reasons I will explain soon...

check it out...

Start Trekkin NY on the Radio

Just wanted to post a couple Start Trekkin images.

The first is the new logo I designed with our producer Lauren Hunt:

It was actually her idea, I just re-drew it. We passed it back and forth over the net until it turned into what you see.

Next you can check out a radio interview of the STNY crew with Joey Reynolds, late night talk show host on WOR am radio in NYC:

Now playing: radioshows

In the summer of 2007 we were on for about an hour and 1/2, broadcasting nationwide, and got to share the mic with Joey and the Amazing Kreskin! Kreskin was cool and did a few tricks on the air. The guy is legit! He told a funny story about how he used to get confused for Leonard Nimoy back in the day. If you look closely at the photos, you can see the resemblance...

Kate, Frank, Kreskin, Joey, Me, Karie, Casey and Cap'n Ben

Mediocre New York

Phil Armand and Rob Albrecht are hard working guys. They are always digging into a new project. I've been lucky to work on a few of them over the past few years. Did you see Battle of the Band earlier in this blawg? Its one of theirs. Well folks, here's another one.

Mediocre New York is a crackpot idea about making an interview show where the hosts hunt New York City for the average, the mundane, and the crappy, and make a big deal about it. I look at it as shedding light on the cobwebs and toilet bowls of the unknown, the mysterious, and the cheap. I was brought in as one of the hosts. My job was to wrangle the funny out of the guy that let you play World of Warcraft on his dirty computers. I was the guy who would ask a tenant why he so prominently featured his SuperMario Bros soundtrack tape collection. I was the guy who kicked rust off your car. I was the guy that made fun of your toilet. Ahhh, dreams.

Check it out:
This one is a review of a mediocre coffee shop


this is an interview with a mediocre apartment renter


a mediocre spotlight on that NYC fixture, the New York Inn


and here's a interview with a mediocre car owner

This last video is featured on cashtomato.com. If you go there and give it 5 tomatoes, the filmmakers and I might actually win some dough. Clams. Uh, money.

Tales of the TWE

Ladies and Gentleman! Children of several ages! I'm sorry? Which ages? Go away son, ya botherin' me. Ehem, 'scuze me folks. (muttering with advisers) Let's say those ages are 7, 13, and 16 & 1/2, (those are the kids ages, that is).

Haaah? Heh, don't mind me, folks, but a tiny, bald, gnome-like transient is whispering in my robot ear. (more muttering, more advisers) All right, I'll let kids who are 14 and born on a leap year in, too.

But those bastiches is gonna hafta pay duble.

Aaahhhhh, yeeeeeesss! (Puts on W. C. Fields hat and nose, holds cigar to side of face, cane in right hand, third hand intermittently waving wildly behind ears and held limply akimbo, elbows apparently twisting into dodecahedron-shaped rifts in time space and reappearing out of anthills.) I was just about to tell a tale of the late, great Troy Westfield Experience!

Who is Troy Westfield, you ask?

This, my friends, is Troy Westfield:

Don't worry, he won't eat you. He's actually a very nice man. Trust me, I've known him for most of my life. Hell, I probably owe him money.

Troy Westfield was born Mike Gordon, (though his birth record mysteriously professes his name to be "Swartzwalder Keirchtort") hailing from my hometown of Franklin, MA. Upon our first meeting in kindergarten, I knew immediately I had met my own personal musical guru, as Gordon poured his Ovaltine into my hushpuppies and declared "Its like a fudge tabernacle."

I promptly displayed my admiration for Mike by avoiding him until junior high, where we had both signed up to play snare drum in the school orchestra. Mike's approach to drumming was unusual, to say the least. One evening, during a performance, as he strove to play the theme to "Hogan's Heroes" with a chicken leg, double stick tape, and a melted copy of "Helen Reddy, the Los Vegas Years," I had an inexplicable vision of times to come. With the rumble of a single rat-a-ma-cue, Mike was transformed before my eyes into a perfect gold pyramid, spinning off kilter on its ruddy axis, its apex spewing forth rivulets of sparkly particles and fatty tissue. Just as suddenly as the vision started, it came to a quick halt. "Nuthin' but net," Mike winked, wiggling his kettle drum's spit valve. I immediately blanched, vomiting horrible, deranged slogans and running 15 miles in approximately 8 minutes. Days later, when I was found scratching the phrase "Viva El Gordo" into the side of a water tower with my own fingernails, the policeman who brought me back to my family told my mother I was "paler than goose shit" and smelled "country." Luckily, Mike soon moved on from drums to guitar. But I was hooked.

Gordon/Westfield wrote his first song, "The Road Leads to Nowhere," a poignant ditty about the hardships of Frodo Baggins traversing the badlands of Mordor. Not only did the songwriting betray a startling maturity, but the young genius performed the ballad by vibrating the strings of his guitar with the rushing air of the pan flute. By high school we were making rock n roll.

Our first band had a few names: Guys with Ties, Gaza Strip, and Contrary To Popular Belief, the last name still holding its place in the Ruprick's Book of Rock Legend as "#1 band name to invoke malaise in the entire 1988 US Olympic Luge Team." The band would practice rock covers in our friend Denis' basement, cutting our teeth on perfecting alternating versions of the theme to the 70's cult classic "Convoy" and that perennial favorite of 80's hair metal, Dokken's "Honey, Smell This To See If It's Still Good." And lots of other crap. But it was fun. We also wrote a few originals. All of them gambling songs.

Denis was originally the lead singer for the band, but when he left town for a few weeks on an exchange program in the subcontinent, I seized my chance at rock-god-dom by weeping on the microphone during a particularly jaunty, reggae tinged version of "Smell This." Mike/Troy saw in me perhaps a kindred and/or easily exploitable spirit and allowed me to front the band. Soon Denis returned, and after a brief bout of confusion and dork toggling, we eventually both became lead singers in the band, which apexed at a talent show in the Franklin High School Ruth Buzzy Memorial Auditorium and Storage (a spectacle fellow students would describe in their yearbook memories as "if the phoenix bird fucked a stop sign") and then fell like a bubble gum juggernaut to the gnarley drag of the tide of maturity and horrible metaphors.

Time passed. College, girls, college girls, marijuana, mushrooms, lsd, dvds, stds, pcp, mainlining paper pulp into our tearducts, college graduation, and then straight off into trail-blazing a carefree swath of abject poverty through the velveteen jungle of modern society. Oh, and lying. Lots of lying. Mike began to record his own music under the moniker The Troy Westfield Experience, a name pastiched from the discovery of the famous "Westfield paramecium" and a thin Jewish undergarment.
Occasionally I would guest-ghost write, drum and sing during the recording sessions, Troy always tipping his hat to me in reference to a particularly inspired turn of phrase or drum fill and saying "good, but how would a visigoth see it?" and then, he'd hit me with a tipped hat. During one recording session, the date obscured in my memory due to my being "extra high," Troy dubbed me "The Post Relevant Movement" saying the name was, "pretty stupid." Thus, the Movement was born, and consequently, over.

Around the year 2000, we both ended up in New York City, and Mike/Troy told me he was ready to record a new album and he wanted me to be his representative for his overseas "Duck Sauce" label. Having a very limited reasoning capacity due to extensive barrette use, I countered his offer with a, uh, counter-offer to instead sing on the album and write all the tunes with him. Both of us virtually chomping at the bit to record a professional quality full length cd, Troy heartily agreed, using words like "kismet" and "marsipan" to describe his enthusiasm and crippling back pain. I actually jumped. Imagine me. Jumping. I know, its crazy. The egg of the twenty first century version of the Troy Westfield Experience was hatched:

Over a year's time, Mike would record single or double guitar tracks on a four track recorder and hand them to me, and in the non-privacy of my shared railroad apartment on 14th st and 1st avenue I'd froth, gibe, and froog my vocal and lyrical syrup all over those demos in an earnest effort to convince the mythic Troy Westfield I actually knew what I was talking about. For some unknown reason, even a mystery to the bastard gods of Asgard, Ohio, Dr. Trojian Westfieldberger reluctantly agreed that I did indeed have "a nut to bust."

Thusly, yeah verily, yon synthesis didst occur:

Having bribed and extorted our way into my college pal Allen Towbin's Maze Studios to record the full length, Troy Westfield and I channeled an orchestra of extra-terrestrial inspiration into a rich tapestry of hamhocks and government ordinances, wafting through the recording sessions in a process Towbin would later describe as "entirely frightening." Employing top gun session men and state of the art "electronics," The TWE would ravage the exoterica with the depth of ten bands, soon emerging from the studio in a scant 2 or 3 or perhaps 7 months with a series of songs Spin Magazine has dubbed as a "perfect doorstop," forcing Rolling Stone, on a dare, to nominate the disc "roundest." This collection has been preserved in all its astounding perfection for you, here and now.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you The Troy Westfield Experience's "Tantric Scrimshaw":

cover to 'Tantric Scrimshaw' (click images to enlarge)

Interior Art

Back cover to 'Tantric Scrimshaw'


And now, Gadies and Lentlemen, by popular demand, I present the never-before-published TWE Tantric Scrimshaw lyrical and pictorial digest (Click images to enlarge):

lyrics to trak 1: Alyssa Gordon
lyrics to trak 2: Who Designed Amanda?
Lyrics to trak 3: Pretty Nazi
Lyrics to trak 4: The Avatars Saved Her From Me
Lyrics to Trak 5: How You Could Leave
Lyrics to trak 6: Obsessed w/ the Five of Hearts/Being Worthless
Lyrics to trak 7: Bridges Burning You
Lyrics to trak 8: More Than Clouds
Lyrics to trak 9: "What?" Is Real.
Lyrics to trak 10: Hank Pym
Lyrics to trak 11: For a While
Lyrics to trak 12: Abiola Backus

Lyrics to trak 13: Two Sources
all music/ lyrics copyright 2001 Mike Gordon/ Phil Ristaino /obsteporous music/postrelevant records.
all art, lyrics and lyric booklet copyright 2001 Phil Ristaino/post relevant productions
except "Abiola Backus" Mike Gordon/ Phil Ristaino/post relevant productions
All TWE photos taken by the illustrious Sonja Stoerr.

Thus ends the first tale of the TWE. Please return, gentle listener/reader/art-looker-atter, for another session of rock n roll legend and other bullshit, as more tales of these ribald bards are sure to follow. Troybless and Movementspeed.

Please check out our myspace and facebook pages, or create a soundclick account to download the entire "Tantric Skrimshaw" album for free!