This is our Minolta Super 8 outfitted for sound with a Sony tape recorder.
Martine when she was 15.
The Neistat brothers have a reputation for causing trouble. Self-taught filmmakers Van, 33, and Casey, 27, first became notorious in 2003 when their video iPod’s Dirty Secret, which protested Apple’s policy against replacing the batteries of its mp3 player, went viral. More Internet celebrity followed in 2006 with Bike Thief, in which they demonstrated how easy it is to steal a bicycle in New York, and more still after they were asked onto Good Day New York to demonstrate their lock-breaking technique and instead punked reporter Jodi Applegate when Van appeared to cut Casey’s throat with an angle grinder.
They’ve also conducted experiments on goldfish, carried knives onto planes, and ridden bikes through the Holland Tunnel at rush hour, documenting their antics with consumer-grade cameras and using Apple’s iMovie to edit their footage into You Tube-ready shorts.
It’s a sensibility the brothers developed partly in response to the national climate after 9/11, Van says. “America went into this gnarly win-at-all-costs personality and there was too much seriousness. It was like the fun was missing. And there are certain things in the world that are wrong, and you have to correct them. You have to be a dissident.”
For them, that’s a nobler calling than the Jackass school of filmmaking they’re sometimes lumped with. “I don’t want to be labeled as a prankster, because it takes away from all the hard work we put into this stuff,” Casey says. Their ambitions are grander: they want to launch a broadside against the sterile artifice of contemporary entertainment. “There’s such distance now between pop culture and what’s made by man, what’s tangible,” Casey explains. “All signs of humanity have been removed. There are no hands.”
The Neistat brothers’ eponymous, new, no-budget HBO series bears out this philosophy. Reflecting the advice of their onetime mentor, artist Tom Sachs, to “show your scars,” it’s all hands. The brothers announce their intentions at the outset of the first episode: to present a series of short films about their lives, with interstices. They begin by documenting the build-out of their lower Manhattan studio (pictures of which appear here), then move swiftly to more poignant stuff, including Van’s trip to Maine to meet his biological father (the Neistats are half-brothers) and the directorial debut of Casey’s 9-year-old son Owen, starring Casey as a blue sea monster. More deeply personal revelations follow in later episodes. “This show is just whatever’s on our minds,” Casey says. “The only way we know how to deal with our issues is to make a show about them.” “The first video camera we got in ’ 85,” Van adds. “It was always around the house. Our mom was always shooting stuff. And I don’t think there’s much difference between that stuff and this stuff. This is just a continuation of Casey at the baseball game.” Jesse Ashlock
The Neistat Brothers begins airing on HBO in early 2009 www.neistat.com
VHS is our favorite format. Our collection is enormous. You need a ladder to get to the A’s.
A photo of each visitor to our new studio. There are 314 in total.
Casey designed and supervised the construction of our new studio. He thought we needed a half-pipe, and we did.
Our Biggie Smalls shrine. There’s a couch with lyrics to “Juicy,” a stereo that only plays “Juicy,” two cups with Biggie portraits on them, and Welch’s grape juice. B.I.G. R.I.P.
Casey’s universal remote with a diagram of how to use our 50-inch screen, Dolby-surround sound PS3/DVD/VCR/ Mac TV nightmare.
This gray box turns on 125 7.5-watt bulbs.
Tom Sachs’s studio-warming gift.
An upskirt of our assistant Elsa on her way up to the loft.
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