Morning Music Video: Elysian Fields - "Channeling"

Start the day with some magic musical mushrooms.  There's a hell of a lot of visual crazy going on in Steven Mertens' music video, but it's the sort of crazy that works beautifully with Elysian Fields' groovy track.


Elysian Fields - Channeling from Steven Mertens on Vimeo.

TOO MANY COOKS + kittens = TOO MANY KITS = A Thing That Should Not Be

Y'know, I think of myself as a "glass half-full" kinda guy.  I genuinely enjoy everything that I put up on Watch This Thing unironically - even the most ridiculous stuff, because they create their own little world with a distorted, glorious logic all their own.  I don't like pointing out things that are so genuinely bad that they have to be made an example of.

But then there's this.  I'd call it a "parody" of the hit online sensation TOO MANY COOKS, but that seems like it overshoots the film's ambitions.  It just takes the concept of TOO MANY COOKS, adds some cute cats, adds some "funny," "random" names and hopes for... what, exactly?  What is this for?  WHO is this for?  Surrealist kitten fanatics who really feel the need to have an online in-joke stripped to its most basic, dumbest core?  Is it, in itself, an experiment in meta-humor on how you can basically just slam two concepts together and hope for the best?  It's honestly horrible and awful and a terrible idea and I'm oddly fascinated by its mere existence. 

"The Pet collective" isn't some deranged cat lady who watches the hell out of Adult Swim in between changing her dozen litter boxes, by the way.  It's a megalith in the cute pet video market, sporting over 400,000 YouTube subscribers and over 250,000 Facebook fans.  They've also made half-assed versions of DIE HARD, GONE GIRL and SCREAM with pets, in which the idea isn't any more well-developed than "let's put cute pets into some scenes from a movie everyone knows."

It's a strange world.

Watch This Thing - "Wanda," a 1990 short film about a cat

Cat shorts don't have to be goofy or cute or ironic.  Produced at Cal Arts, Ruth Hayes' beautiful 4-minute short film is a tale of ownership, desire and envy -- and a compelling use of mixed media.