Karina’s Capsule: Food Party

From San Francisco to Saginaw, there’s been just one question on the minds of food-porn-loving web video watchers for the past few weeks: “What is the deal with Food Party?” It’s been compared to “Iron Chef meets Eureka’s Castle” and praised for its “Pee-wee’s Playhouse-like primitvisim”; I see it more as an overtly comic version of Stephane TV from Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep, but without the melancholy narcoleptic subtext.

Food Party is the creation of Thu Tran, a Brooklyn-based sculptor and mixed media artist who so far has produced three episodes and a charmingly untimely Christmas special in collaboration with director Zacharia Durr, puppet specialists Matt Fitzpatrick, Peter Van Hyning, David Krofta and Daniel Baxter, and cinematographer/effects guy Steven Probert. She also keeps an associated blog.

It’s a semi-regular comedy cooking show, full of recipes that are mostly impossible to try at home. “We’re gonna make everyone think that you have a food budget that rivals Scarface’s coke budget!” Thu promises in the first episode, which I guess is our first indication that most recipes will incorporate luxe ingredients such as quail eggs and … um, rhinestones?
You could probably serve leftover pizza, as Thu does in episode one, in a pyramid stacked on top of a laserdisc, stuck together with “food glue” (aka cheez whiz) –– and if I could get my hands on a surplus of laserdiscs, I probably would. Maybe you’d be able to rock Thu’s gingerbread Frank Gehry house from the Christmas special, but not with the ease afforded to her by her magic oven. You certainly wouldn’t be able to rock the stunt that starts the episode, in which Tran makes egg nog by squeezing the udders of a stuffed chicken until milky liquid fills a crystal bowl. Deeming the raw product “a little bit boring,” Tran proves her literally fantastic resourcefulness: “Good thing my house is made of chocolate!” One ice cream scoop to the wall later and Tran has “a chocolate egg nog float.” It makes her “guest friend,” a real, live cat, flinch.

As far as Thu’s “guest friends” go, I prefer the existentialist snowman, who forces a fade to black with his lament that “my happiness is just a thin veneer, covering over a deep, deep well of sorrow.” Cardboard cutout Jay-Z and Beyonce, dinner guests in episode 1, are also good, as is episode 3’s guest star, Yolk-o Oh-No, who complains of being “an egg-sistential shell of my former self.”

Food Party’s form matches its (mostly) live-action cartoon content. Its gloriously DIY production value resembles a cable access show with a deliberate psychedelic wink, but Tran’s calculatedly stilted performance belies the inspired artistry of the puppets, animation, costuming and set design she plays off of and around. Jokey sound effects and canned laugh track punctuate a score that seems to be mostly hacked together from Casio preset rhythms and various generic cellphone ringtones. If there’s any weakness to the way Food Party is put together, it’s length; the energy and hilarity rarely flag, but at 18 to 30 minutes the full episodes are too long for the web, and in most cases, they work just as well cut up into smaller bits (you can watch each in chunks on YouTube).

Its length may be tied in to its art world origins. Tran has premiered episodes at restaurant/arts space Monkeytown in Brooklyn, and sells DVDs of each episode on her site. With units priced up to $20, it’s a somewhat ballsy move for monetizing content that’s mostly available on the web for free, but it very much ties into an old-school art world emphasis on the physical object as commemoration of conceptual art. If I had to bet on it, I wouldn’t put much money on the idea that Tran’s raking it in on DVD sales — but there is something interesting about well-done web video having another life in the physical realm.