MOE’S BOOKSTORE Presents WHOLPHIN DVD
Wednesday, January 31, 7:30pm
2476 Telegraph Ave. Berkeley, CA
Click here for a map

We will be screening a selection of films from the past three issues of Wholphin, as well as something new from the upcoming #4.

Starts at 7:30pm. Free, plus pizza for the taking.

At long last, Brian Fischer of Cal Academy reveals the methods of eating an ant. Click for the film:

Edited by Kendra Coleman.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

I never owned a Che T-shirt, but in college I had a tee that proclaimed: “It’s Not A Revolution If You Can’t Dance To It.” I rarely wore it because it was a little blousy, but when I did, it was better than a Che for impressing flowering-feminists that I was a conscientious boy-radical worth getting drunk with and ranting all night to about the sorry state of the proletariat.

I looked it up, and when the great radical-granny-fem-anarchist, Emma Goldman, supposedly uttered her most-quotable line she was not, in fact, promoting my life of frat-tastic free-for-alls. She was instead responding to an impudent proto-punk who had taken her aside at a party to chastise her for dancing at Anarchist functions. Emma was always getting down at parties, with or without music. In between leading the fight for female contraception, co-founding the anarchist movement, and being arrested and jailed for high treason, she shook it. The boy tried to convince her that her incessant dancing was disrespectful and dangerous to the group. He was afraid that if people saw one of the new party’s leaders showing such silly displays of emotion they would never take the movement seriously. The kid had a point. As liberals repeatedly prove by, say, disowning Howard Dean for getting excited at a rally or nitpicking Obama’s every move or attacking Hillary’s singing, the left loves to devour its own. But Emma thought it was crucial to keep a sense of playfulness in one’s political activism. Nervous Nelly’s be-damned. So she told the little prick, “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.” Oh well. She didn’t stop dancing, and capital A “Anarchy” today is a couple of pony-tailed guys calling Cheney a fascist on Berkeley late-night public access television.

The point is Emma would love how The Daily Show’s Scott Jacobson* and Josh Glasser have taken the piss out of all of us faux-revolutionaries in their new short film, “Wearing Che.” Ernesto Che Guevarra on the other hand would have had them both executed by a Bolivian firing squad. Touché, T-Che. Viva la Circle Pee!

PLAY WEARING CHE

*Scott co-re-scripted The Japanese Bewitched on issue #2.

The Howard Dean Screaming Action Figure:
This audio-equipped collectable goes for $29.95 a pop.

I have a screen saver pulled from a pharmaceutical company’s 2006 conference DVD. All these beautifully animated, abstract, microscopic images float across the screen only to be labeled, “Pancreatic cancer cells,” “Trastuzumab, leaking out of a tumor,” and things like that. My friend Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary, “My Kid Could Paint That,” is like that screen saver.

The film is about Marla Olmstead, a four-year-old girl who is plucked from childhood and catapulted to fame in the art world. Marla’s paintings are cool and her family, happy. And then the labels start popping up. Fraud. Puppet. Con artist. Part Tom Wolfe’s “The Painted Word,” part Bravo’s “Showbiz Moms & Dads,” Amir floats a seemingly ideal family across the screen only to see them infected by the tumor of celebrity. It’s a great story and a huge hit at Sundance. I know this because everyone I meet tells me about the $2 million dollar deal they just signed with Sony (speaking of diseases).

Click the thumbnails for larger versions:

M. Ward is a phenomenal guitar player with a voice like unfiltered honey. Also, we discovered, the man is a gentleman and, if he ever wanted to be, a goddamn foosball champion. At least compared to us. Last night, he stopped by our condo before his show at the Celcius Lounge (where he and the equally-wonderful Zooey Deschanel slayed a double-packed, triple-drunk house with dulcet duets) and humiliated me on the table, slamming shot after shot into the back of the goal. He claims he never plays.

M. Ward playing with Zooey Deschanel at the Celcius Lounge in Sundance, click for larger versions:

Teeth are gleaming at their absolute gleamiest in Park City this year! Gleamier than ever before, if you can imagine such a thing. We love white teeth. But it seems sometimes blindingly-gleamy teeth can be perhaps a shade too white. It becomes impossible to turn away. They are unused bones. We are not intimidated by all the blinding gleamyness around us. Wholphin has gleamy-ish teeth too, despite what some children say. We will share our personal teeth-whitening regimen with you: eat blueberries before bed and don’t brush your teeth. That’s what we do. The blue stains we acquire somehow seem to counteract the yellow stains from all the coffee we drink. We don’t know why, but in the morning our teeth are mysteriously gleamier! It is a matter of light refraction. We think. This is a personal revelation about our personal grooming habits and we hope you will not use it against us.

According to Genesis, there was a time when human beings understood one another. They spoke one language and began building the Tower of Babel. However, the Lord caught wind and quickly disbanded the members by eradicating the common tongue.

It’s a good story, sure, but we think it’s crap. People never understood one another. And that’s why we need art. Art and Mitchell Rose’s short instructional video, Learn to Speak Body. You have no idea the degree to which your face offends.

PLAY LEARN TO SPEAK BODY

For a few hours on Tuesday night, Club Mezzanine became the material manifestation of my own personal Shangri-La. I of course refer not to James Hilton’s mythical place, where lazy people drank honey dew all day, but to the much more productive Ticonderoga-class aircraft carrier, the USS Shangri-La, commissioned by President Roosevelt in 1944. The place was in full force is what I’m saying. In one corner, our friend Dr. Steve Haddock from the Monterey Bay Research Institute displayed mind-melting new creatures from the deep, like this living amoeba made of glass called a Radiolari –

– and squirted people with his bioluminescent squirt gun –

– and impressed us all with his ability to bridge the gap between science and party. In another corner, a high-speed camera shot 1,000 frames a second to capture the world’s fastest tongue in a raspberry contest that was as popular as it was childish (at the movies, you see 24 frames a second). The winners will be posted soon, but until then here’s a sample of the current contenders:

Jeff B.

Colin D.

David, our webmaster…

…here’s my attempt…

…and Emily’s, on the same camera model, but black and white and four times slower. It was a crowd favorite.

On top of all that, Brian Fischer from Cal Academy brought over a small colony of gravity-defying trap-jaw ants. As owners of Wholphin No. 3 know, these ants are the new world-record holder for fastest predatory strike in the animal kingdom. In other words, sexy. Here’s an excerpt:

But the main event of the night was a showing of a selection of films from all three issues of Wholphin, people cheered after Walleyball; and I got a little teary.

Fun night. We’ll post some pictures soon.

David and Nathan Zellner seem like the type of kids that rocked your playgroup growing up. My guess is an average afternoon went something like this:

You’re all coloring quietly in the living room when someone suggests playing Pirates. You reach for the construction paper and start cutting out cute little eye patches and paper swords. Then the Zellners arrive. They relocate to the backyard, cut into the water mains, flood the entire block and within twenty minutes have sailed away with all the cutlery in the neighborhood.

PLAY QUASAR HERNANDEZ

Arm-in-arm with the Zellners at this weeks’ Sundance Film Festival. See their latest film, Aftermath on Meadowlark Lane, here and their art-gone-awry piece, Floatsam/Jetsam, on Wholphin No. 3.

Even the most advanced thermometer on Earth, one invented by a man named Dwight Adams, cannot measure down to absolute zero. It can only measure to .0009 degrees Kelvin. As Dr. Adams once told me, this is because “cooling to a lower temperature is a process of lowering entropy.” Entropy is a measure of the disorder or randomness of a system. [i.e. a measure of motion.] Because the entropy is approaching 0 regardless of the state of the material providing the cooling, the amount by which you can decrease the entropy (and the temperature) in one step gets smaller and smaller. Perhaps the analogy of walking across a room to the opposite wall will help. If you cut your steps in half each time, you would have to take an infinite number of steps to reach the other side of the room.

Basically, lowering entropy is lowering motion, randomness, chaos, and thereby heat. In other words, there must be no love in San Francisco today. It is that cold.

Tactical Advantage director Daren Rabinovitch, also in San Francisco today, advises us that the perfect movie to watch on an afternoon approaching 0 Kelvin is Three Women by Robert Altman.

SF360 FILM/CLUB Presents WHOLPHIN DVD
Tuesday, January 16, 7pm
Mezzanine, 444 Jesse St. San Francisco

Join us as the San Francisco Film Society’s 360 Film Club presents Wholphin. The night will include a selection of the latest Wholphin films with introductions by the directors themselves. An instructional demonstration of the proper use of a “pooter” (human appendage for transformation into an anteater) by mymecologist, Brian Fisher. A show-and-tell session with marine biologist, Steven Haddock, and special guest, the manta ray. A camera that will capture your tongue wagging at the disturbingly revealing rate of 3000 frames per second. A select screening of never-before-seen films from the Wholphin archive. Free beer, and more.

If you’d like to reserve a ticket, please email info@sf360.org by noon on 1/16 with WHOLPHIN in the subject and your name/affiliation in the body. Or just show up! Tickets are $5.

Mezzanine
Tuesday, January 16, 7pm
444 Jesse St. (between Mission, Market, 5th and 6th)
San Francisco, CA
Click here for map
$5, Free Beer