No Film School

Here, the nitty-gritty from our press release:

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – MAY 6, 2008 - The 12th Annual Webby Awards today named The West Side as Best Drama Series of 2008. The show is self-produced by co-creators Ryan Bilsborrow-Koo and Zachary Lieberman.

Described as an “Urban Western,” The West Side transforms contemporary New York City into a unique, alternate universe by melding together elements from two disparate film genres: the grit of an urban setting with the tradition of the American Western. Presented in episodic form on the Internet at http://thewestside.tv, the show is written, directed, produced, shot, edited, and designed by Bilsborrow-Koo and Lieberman.

“This award is a perfect example of the opportunity the Internet represents for truly independent filmmakers to showcase their abilities,” said Bilsborrow-Koo. Added Lieberman, “for the judges to recognize the quality and ambition of our show is a great honor.”

Bilsborrow-Koo and Lieberman will be honored at the star-studded Webby Film & Video Awards in New York City on June 9th.

–

More here.

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To: Ryan Bilsborrow-Koo
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The West Side has been nominated for Best Drama Series at the 2008 Webby Awards, which are the “Oscars of the Internet” according to the New York Times. With only two episodes up (as we just posted the third this week), we somehow bested 80 episodes of the Michael Eisner-backed Prom Queen—along with some other undoubtedly better-funded shows—for a nomination.

While it’s up to the judges to determine who wins amongst the five nominees, there’s also a People’s Voice award determined by… well, people. If you consider yourself a person, please head on over to the voting site, complete their quick registration, and cast us a vote!

And no, there would be no way to gerrymander the internet without some sort of convoluted system of awarding delegates per district instead of the overall popular vote, but I just wanted to use one of my favorite words. Unlike certain other ongoing elections, at least you know if you cast your ballot for us in the Webbys that your vote has no chance of being discarded by a superdelegate.

“Very good” in French means “three well” in Spanish. It’s almost a pun, and almost relevant because we’ve just released Episode Three (tres!) of our Urban Western, The West Side. Sorry, I had to come up with a post title other than “Episode Three,” and figured I’d use my extensive knowledge of foreign languages to do so.

The same goes for Episode Three as did Two, so I’ll just change some numbers and quote what I said about the last one:

Episode Three of The West Side is finally live, a long four months after we posted the last; blame Murphy’s Law. Be sure to start with Episode One if you haven’t seen it. If you have an iPod or iPhone (or you use iTunes), subscribe to our podcast in iTunes and get new episodes automatically. Episode Four should be up in much shorter order.

Except Episode Four won’t be up in much shorter order, as we don’t already have any scenes in the can for this one (as we did with Three). As detailed on The West Side blog, this is both a blessing and a curse; so it goes. At least I already have a post title ready for the next time: Cuatro Bien.

One of my favorite artists when he was a Fugee (when I was 15), Wyclef Jean has since strung together a frustratingly inconsistent discography, characterized by intermittent guitar playing, occasional repurposing of his own catalog (Wyclef Jean featuring Claudette Ortiz: Dance Like This became Shakira featuring Wyclef Jean: Hips Don’t Lie) moral and/or religious grandstanding, general stonership, on-stage bonership (it came up as I was pulling the Shakira video… which also sounds like a pun), some bona fide hits, some bad covers, some even worse covers… Actually I’m not sure where I’m going with this. If I get the chance to work with him one day, will I go back and delete this post to cover my tracks?

Anyway, this is not one of those “Seen” posts where I share a video I like. Instead, I believe Wyclef’s latest video, “Fast Car,” may in fact be a bona fide New Low in product placement, and thus worth sharing at this particular post-millennial corporate synergasm in time. And while I didn’t expect it to be the greatest music video ever made (after all, the video wasn’t directed by “the best who ever did it“), I at least expected to understand what the hell was going on during the next four minutes. Instead, the corporate agenda on display obliterates all pretense of a sensical narrative, and after watching it a few times I still can’t figure out if anyone had the balls to actually put forth a treatment, or if they just strung together a bunch of shots and called it a day.

Why is “nonsensical” a word, but not “sensical?”

Anyway, Wyclef is on Sony BMG. Paul Simon, featured on the song, is also on Sony. Burnout Paradise, the videogame featured throughout the music video, is currently available on the Sony Playstation 3. At the start of the video, Wyclef’s previous single, the catchy “Sweetest Girl“–which features singing by Niia, another Sony artist–is playing on a Sony TV. A kid walks past a Sony-format tape deck (HDCAM?), with a Sony MP3 player around his neck and a Sony bluetooth headest in his ear, picks up his Sony Playstation controller (note the Playstation itself on the desk), and then e-mails Wyclef on his Sony Playstation Portable (the PSP can e-mail! take note!). Wyclef opens his trunk to grab a Sony controller from in front of another Sony flastcreen. Once inside the Burnout Paradise virtual world (which makes sense, because the song is titled “Fast Car,” and the game has… cars), the white guy stand-in for Paul Simon checks his Sony PSP (while driving at top speed), and to conclude the video, the kid takes a picture of himself on a Sony webcam.

Here is a partial list of companies that did not pay for the video’s production:

Microsoft
Nintendo
Cabot Cheese

I just finished the final season of what will go down as the greatest standard-definition TV series in history, HBO’s “The Wire.” And while someday I’d like to write a eulogy for my now-concluded favorite show, at this point it’s easiest to react to the reactors: I’ve been following along with Slate’s episode diary. In one entry, Slate’s columnists discuss the pronunciation of the word “shit”–drawn out to comical duration, so that it sounds like “sheeeee-it”–by the character of Clay Davis (Isaiah Whitlock), as if it were something heretofore unheard, as if Whitlock invented it. Their final entry attributes it to Whitlock’s uncle. But as I was reading their entries I was wondering where these people were from that they hadn’t heard it before.

Still, I didn’t want to respond with “I’m from Durham, North Carolina, a predominantly black southern city and y’all are white fools for thinking “sheeeee-it” is something new,” as I’m in fact from the suburbs of Durham and am myself half white(/Asian), but as I was reading Jack Kerouac’s On The Road last night, I stumbled across the word and its particular pronunciation three times in the space of a page (200):

Yah, what’s good’s a ball, life’s too sad to be ballin all the time, said the tenorman, lowering his eye to the street. “Shh-eee-it!” he said. “I ain’t got no money and I don’t care tonight.”

…

We saw a horrible sight in the bar: a white hipster fairy had come in wearing a Hawaiian shirt and was asking the big drummer if he could sit in. The musicians looked at him suspiciously. “Do you blow?” He said he did, mincing. They looked at one another and said, “Yeah, yeah, that’s what the man does, shhh-ee-it!

…

The big Negro bullneck drummer sat waiting for his turn. “What that man doing?” he said. “Play the music!” he said. “What in the hell!” he said. “Shh-ee-eeet!” and looked away disgusted.

Not to suggest that On the Road premiered the term, but it does offer proof beyond the anecdotal that the elocution is (at least) fifty years old. So there you go, Slate folks: it ain’t nothin’ new. Sheeee-it.