Frosty Chicken Productions: August 2012

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

One Man Show: KEVIN PIASTRA EATS LUNCH AT YOU

"The sad thing is we cut out a lot of footage. No, there won't be outtakes in this, but I eat take-out!" --Kevin Piastra

WARNING: If you have been diagnosed with ADD you will not be able to sit through this tiring drivel. Seriously, a pointless, uppity, snarky, avant-garde, experimental ART short that almost makes Mitt Romney seem interesting.

See how little he accomplishes within the standard running-time of a Spongebob episode.
Kevin Piastra's debut internet one-man show is really a satirical parody on the bullshitting and pretentiousness rampant in avant-garde cinema and experimental filmmaking. Kevin illustrates his point through the use of humorous Dadaism. By simply sitting in front of a webcam for 12 minutes, eating his lunch, this auteur comedically reveals the common narcissism and context-less self-importance that modern technology and pop culture has infused America's youth.
Simultaneously Piastra mimics forms of so called "high-art" with irony, thus becoming his own concrete example of a genre he does not understand at all. He expresses his confusion and frustration at the fact that motion pictures often give their audiences no clue about the use of metaphors, symbols, themes and motifs in modern movie-making, just as in literature. By frustrating and boring the viewers of this very video, Piastra is an intentional depiction. He is demonstrating the thesis, specifically feeling slighted and ignorant. Suspecting that there is not more in a lot of art than meets the eye, rather it is a scam put on by artists of all mediums in order to appear more sophisticated and intelligent. As if a white canvas with off-white paint splashed on it is supposed to speak volumes in the eye of the beholder. Well, so too is the very one-man show you are reading about.
Is Piastra REALLY making these points or is he just some young guy with a webcam and a sandwich who thinks he's clever? if you aren't reading this, you are getting nothing out of the short. That's the problem, artists are lazy. They never make up meaning the way Piastra is for this video. It's usually up to the audience to see what they want to in each piece, thus inserting their own deeper meaning into a work. This strikes Kevin as lazy on the artists part and stupid on the part of the masses who are doing all the work of enriching the oeuvre of someone who doesn't wish to directly and clearly communicate their ideas and emotions, probably because there aren't any! Just as with the novel "To Kill A Mockingbird", all the deep meaning and analysis was added years later. The author herself said "I wanted to write a simple love story".