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....

New Illustrations for Vision Into Art

Just wanted to commemorate my brand new move to San Francisco, CA with a post of some recent art I completed for the multi-disciplinary arts consortium that is VisionIntoArt. Some time this year (I'm having trouble remembering when) I designed and created two album covers for their two new cds, "Sounds" and "Travelling Songs."

Here's "Travelling Songs":

and here's "Sounds":

Also, I was asked to do a couple new illustrations of two members of the company. Do check them out:
Hopefully they will be added to the roster of over 20 member illustrations I've completed for this group. (You can go here to see the rest of them.) I believe they are updating their website, which will include all the illos I've designed for them. That site can be found here.

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!"

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...

Shaking the Magic Screwball

My good friends the brothers Martin and Max Flackman (aka Marc Lesser and Matt Kalman) are kickass filmmakers and have been kind enough to throw me into their projects from time to time. One idea that has reared its psychedelic head on the web is the dreaded Magic Screwball. Shake him up and ask him the answers to your most crucial or guarded secrets, if you dare, suckers! Appearing on their Joke Project site, created with the guidance of the divine Nicole Stagg, the Screwball dares to rend the very fabric of time and space asunder with a flippant "Uh, I dunno" or "Yeeeeeeaaaaahhhhhh Baby! Yeeeeeaaaaaahhhhhh!"

The Screwball on a smoke break.

Consequently, you can go here and here to see me as a joke telling zombie.

Speaking of the Flackman's and film projects, I've also had the opportunity to design a couple movie posters for these dudes. Check-ch-check-check-ch-czech it out:

Here's the poster for "Today Will Be Yesterday Tomorrow," the Flackman's first full length film. A dream, a day-job, and Billie Dee Williams in Lando duds. Solid stuff.

I played Mystical Bill, who lived inside Max' cigarette case, preparation for the Screwball, for sure.

Then there's the award winning short "Cuando La Luna Esta Llena," directed by Marc Lesser.

A tragic love story wrapped in aluminum foil. Marc asked me to mimic a Dali collage from the great artist's time in NYC. A truly deeply satisfying experience. Truly and deeply.

Start Trekkin NY

Yo Yo Yo

So, like, I'm part of an improv group called Start Trekkin NY

We do improvised hour long episodes of Star Trek in the style of the original series. We don't play any of the original characters, we make up entirely new characters and situations. Is this clear? Its fun stuff, lots of shoulder grabbing and fake fighting. Anyway, check out the website, and if you're in New York, please come see the show. You can go to the Manhattan Comedy Collective's website for dates and times of shows. We also have a myspace page here.





Here's a poster and postcard I designed for the group:



Here's a couple clips from a show in NYC at the Tank:





more pics, more to come:

Vision Into Art

In 2007 I did a series of illustrations for the multi-disciplinary performance group Vision Into Art. They had me draw each member of the ensemble as a playing card, and the playing cards were laid out as programs for a performance series they did at the Whitney Museum in NYC. I'm pretty proud of the series, so I wanted to post them all together so you could see the whole deal. They later had an animation made of the images, which I've seen part of and its pretty cool. When I find out where that is on the web I'll post a link. VIA can be found at visionintoart.com.