August 2003 Archives

Last Sunday, on the occasion of the impending release of her new film, Lost in Translation, I joined a couple of journalists in a group interview with Sofia Coppola. The interview took place in New York City at the end of her press junket. I found the suites capacious, the sofas commodious, the sandwiches copious. "Big Brother" was hanging around, but he rebuked us; Roman stayed mostly near the buffet.

Not being a reporter, I failed to get the names of my interviewing colleagues. So rather than use their uncredited questions and responses, I've replaced one with Lynn Hirschberg and another with Official Questioner, and spliced in relevant replies from the NYT Mag and official movie website, respectively. In Hirschberg's case, no questions were available, so I made that sh$* up interpolated them myself.

The third interviewer, a slightly kooky, festival-hardened critic-without-portfolio, was too good to leave out. I have renamed her Barbara Walters. Her questions are left intact, cuz you just can't make that sh*% up.

Greg.org: What IS good this year?
Official Questioner:: It's just a bad summer. I mean, even Spy Kids 3 is going to clear $100 million in two weeks.
Barbara Walters: Spike Lee has a movie out?

Awkward silence descends. Sofia enters and joins our table. Cue greetings. We all feel protective of her immediately, just like Wes Anderson predicted.

Read my Sofia interview here

My DVD rental queue is down to dangerously low levels. What you should see is...

You should sign up with GreenCine, by the way, not the big red DVD subscription service Gawker sold it's soul to (I'm sure they used the money to buy an expanding T-Rex sponge. Chum...p).

Most recently in the machine:

On BoingBoing (Never let it be said I don't link to Xeni's posts), BurningMan Bingo, which apparently relates to Hipster Bingo, something I've never clicked on.

This quote, however, is unignorable fun:
"Numerous BoingBoing readers have e-mailed to ask why John Perry Barlow's head was selected to represent 'A Bad Trip' (shown at left) That is not John Perry Barlow's head. That is Chuck Norris' head."

Attorney General John Ashcroft rose nice and early yesterday [Sunday] morning to check out the Home Depot on Rhode Island Avenue NE in Brentwood a little before 9 a.m. An unnamed federal employee spotted him and his swarm of Secret Service agents as they pulled into the parking lot in a huge SUV. Clad in a dress shirt sans tie, Ashcroft was perusing the patio furniture in the garden area.

Related:
The Ten Commandments (including the 4th, "Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.")
Pharisees and Saducees, the ostensibly hyper-religious bad guys of the New Testament.
Official Assemblies of God doctrine on keeping the Sabbath day holy.
Patio Furniture from Home Depot, to ease you along your way. To hell.

Not new information, just more of it. From the NYTimes, the unidentified remains of those killed at the World Trade Center will be preserved in the hope that future technology will make identification possible. The remains will be interred at the memorial:

"Right now I can look up at the sky and talk to him, but I can't go anywhere and reflect on his life,' said Lorie Van Auken, 48, whose husband, Kenneth, was on the 105th floor of the north tower on Sept. 11. His birthday is in a few days, and she said she yearns to have a place to visit on that day. "I go outside and I don't know where to look for him. You feel lost. This would give me somewhere to go."

In the Guardian, British docu maker John Brownlow tells about the tricky business of writing a screenplay about Sylvia Plath, one of the most fought-over writers of the modern era. With duelling critics, conflicting biographies, testy literary estates controlling the rights to Plath's and Ted Hughes' poetry, and an ending even Hollywood can't spin, it sounds like an impossible task. Oh, and "there had to be humor." Humor and a head in the oven.

Brownlow ended up completely re-researching Plath's and Hughes' stories to find a bearable story, and, after realizing the couple didn't "speak in verse" with each other, he says, "[I] cut dialogue and if I couldn't cut it I made it as banal as I could, while ensuring the situations were dramatic."

His writing war story is long, maybe not really of general interest, but if you write, you won't want to miss it. Two good lessons: 1) Brownlow is a huge fan of treatments and outlines and the discipline they impose on the writer's story, and 2) he wants to direct.

Interestingly, I just rewatched Steven Soderbergh's Solaris on DVD, and in his commentary (with the deeply shallow James Cameron), he talks about cutting and cutting dialogue, too, in order to reveal the characters' emotional subtexts. From what he says, I think he greatly improved the movie (which I liked better the second time, btw). Soderbergh tells people if they don't like the pacing of the first ten minutes, they should leave, "because it's not getting any better."

BCE Galleria/Heritage Square, Toronto
1992, Santiago Calatrava, image: Galinsky.com

On Slate, Christopher Hawthorne writes about Santiago Calatrava, architect of the transportation hub, um, slated for the WTC site. Hawthorne's got good architectural sensibility, but I think he's wrong to worry about Calatrava ignoring the context of his projects. True, many of Calatrava's flashiest designs look like they're sitting on a giant dining table, like an overwrought centerpiece, but that's what he's been asked to do.

While I haven't been to the Milwaukee Museum, Calatrava's pavilion may signal a Bilbaoist nadir; pictures of it make it look both pointless and useless, like the pyramid without the Louvre. But Toronto's Heritage Square is one of the best public spaces in town. Calatrava carved it out/knitted it together from the interstitial spaces of various downtown buildings, and it's beautiful. Even if it doesn't blend in, his Zurich station, too, inhabits its site well.

On BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow calls Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World "one of the most important texts of the decade." I'm pretty sure he means the decade starting in 2000, (or, say, September 11, 2001), not the last ten years.

Schneier's a/the security expert, and Beyond Fear, Cory says, "utterly demystifies security" for a non-technical audience. My bet is, it guts every Ashcroftian rights-and-power grab in the name of security like a trout on a church griddle. [I know, Ashcroft is so not Catholic, so the fish thing's not applicable. Work with me here, people.]

I'm using Schneier's landmark text, Applied Cryptography, as a reference for my animated musical script, of all things. After all, the video store's bargain bins are overflowing with tapes of animated musicals that included crypto but couldn't bother to get it right. Aren't they?

Newsday reports the WTC Memorial jury will select up to eight finalists, who will receive over $100,000 each to refine their designs more fully ("to develop models and three-dimensional computerized designs"). A winner (from among the finalists) will be announced in October or November.

Jurors apparently walk around placing dots on the designs they like. Designs without dots are then pulled from subsequent rounds. [No mention of how many dots a juror gets, or if later rounds require multiple dots. If not, a juror may be able to repeatedly dot a favorite design into the final rounds.]

Via Hugh and Ellyn, who submitted a design from Kansas. At first I was surprised, now I'm really pleased, but I've now heard from a couple dozen fellow entrants, most of whom contacted me through the site. The competition's gag rule has thrown approximately 5,199 of 5,200 people into a weird, cagey limbo; we really want to talk about our entries, but don't want to get disqualified. Maybe we should form Entrants Anonymous. ["My name's John, and I designed a spire." "Hi, John."]

[via the always-excellent Wooster Collective] A gang of 10-16 year-old Iraqi children painted up this disabled tank, a Russian-made T55. (Fortunately for the cause of world peace, that's a tank model, not a Terminator sequel title.) Neal Rubin's Detroit News article has more pictures and info.

Thanks to the adoring fans who commented on my article in the NY Times yesterday about video art tape trading. I won't list them by name (mostly because it's possible to list them by name, and doing so might crush my carefully crafted illusion of worldwide fame).

I met Chris, the "star" of the piece several months ago, a guy in a small southern town who has become an impassioned expert on, of all things, video art. My working title for it was "The Cremaster Thief," after Susan Orlean's article/book, The Orchid Thief, about a guy in a small southern town who became an impassioned expert on, of all things, orchids. He's a fascinating and very helpful guy.

Related:
Chris Hughes' online collection of video art (Remember, they're not for sale. But if you have a copy of Doug Aitken's multi-channel Electric Earth, Eija-Liisa Ahtila's Love Is A Treasure, or Salla Tykka's Lasso, I bet he'd do a deal with you.)
My "research," watching Cremaster 2 (and other works) on my VCR
Christian Marclay, whose experience with unauthorized dubbing of his work didn't make it in time for the article. (His work rocks, btw.)
Baltimore artist Jon Routson, whose video works also rock, including his edited-for-TV version of Cremaster 4 .
The "I Survived Cremaster 3" T-shirts that were so popular in Basel last year.
The Cremaster Cycle, an exhaustive and lush reference to the symbolism and interpretations of Barney's films. By chief Koolaid drinker, Neville Wakefield

Notice the Google Ads on this Britney Spears post (which I, um, happened to, er, click through to accidentally. Actually, as you can see, it's an AOL version of IE, so it's hardwired to load any and all Britney stories immediately).

What words in the story triggered these ads for drapery, I wondered? None that I could think of. Then, I remembered way back to 2002, before "gawker" meant Gawker.

Elizabeth's out of town one day, and Gawker's moving to the head of the service journalism pack.

Slide from David Byrne's DVD/Book of PowerPoint Art

Veronique Vienne's got a sweet article in the Times about David Byrne's artistic exploration of PowerPoint. She casts a rather benign look at the way PowerPoint influences forms of discourse and thought. Maybe it's Stockholm Syndrome; after all, Arts & Leisure editor Jodi Kantor used to be at Slate. ("But some of my best friends use PowerPoint!")

But then, she's got a pretty clear-eyed quote from Byrne: "You have to try to think like the guy in Redmond or Silicon Valley. You feel that your mind is suddenly molded by the thinking of some unknown programmer. It's a collaboration, but it's not reciprocal." [8/21 Update: the title of Info design guru Edward Tufte's Wired Mag article says it all: "PowerPoint is Evil" Bonus quote: "PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play -very loud, very slow, and very simple."]

And before you leave the Times' place, why not look over my article on video art bootlegging.

David Kirkpatrick's got an interesting article in the Times about how DVD sales are an increasingly important factor in greenlighting films.

Net net: men buy action blockbusters. No one buys anything else. DVD sales projections drove the glut of pathetic action movie sequels this summer. If anyone buys those things on DVD, we are all doomed.

Part Two of a Washington Post series on the rebuilding of the WTC features George Tamaro, one of the original engineers of the slurry wall which is the centerpiece of Libeskind's memorial site design.

The more I think about it, the more similarities I find between this aspect of the Libeskind proposal and Lochnagar Crater, the powerful, preserved, accidental memorial to WWI's Battle of the Somme. [This crater was central to my first short film, Souvenir November 2001, where a New Yorker came upon the crater while searching for a much larger, much more "designed" memorial at the nearby town of Thiepval.]

Related:
BBC history tour information on Lochnagar Crater and the Thiepval Memorial
Tales from shooting SN01 at these memorials (Feb. 02)
1972 New Yorker article by Edith Iglauer on building The Bathtub

[via ArtForum] An interesting article in the Financial Times on the conservation challenges posed by ephemeral art, especially color photography and video. C-Prints, by far the most popular format for contemporary art photography, have a very uncertain future. Video and film, in the mean time, require a transfer plan, making sure the medium and format stays current (and the work stays true to the artist's intent).

The article doesn't quite get it sometimes, though. Advocating for collectors to receive certificates? It's a dopey collector who doesn't get them already. And the last quote by Tony Oursler feels a bit too off-hand. Of an old video work he recently remastered for exhibition this fall, he says,"It looks better now than then." That's great, but that means that how it looked then is now lost.

Related:
The Variable Media Initiative, which sponsored a fascinating conference on this subject in 2001. (Fascinating if you're a conceptual art geek, that is.)
AXA's Ad Reinhardt Research Project, which focuses on the conservation of contemporary painting (and Reinhardt's work in particular).

If karma were an Islamic teaching, the blackout map would've included Washington, DC and the Pentagon. And there'd be a teeny, gerrymandered congressional district-style finger reaching down to Crawford, Texas.

As it is, though, the blackout hit New York and war-opposing Canada. NPR's Anne Garrels sardonically shares thoughtful Iraqis' tips for surviving a blackout in a heat wave.

Besides, as the occupation governor of Iraq, Paul Bremer explained rather presciently on Tuesday, "Freedom matters. I think it's important to ... look beyond the shootouts and blackouts" and just soak in the freedom.

I got out of NYC yesterday afternoon--actually, I was on Long Island and apparently couldn't have gotten back in if I'd wanted to--by flying Southwest out of Islip to Baltimore. It felt like we were the only people getting anywhere.

Of course, now NYC sounds so fun, we're going back. Besides, I'm sure our fridge has defrosted all over the floor.

Christian Marclay's awesome Video Quartet is on view now at LA's Hammer Museum, as part of a mid-career retrospective of Marclay's art-meets-music work. [In the LA Times, Chris Knight reviews the show--and misses some major points--with nary a mention of the video. the CS Monitor has a better review.]

I remember MoMA exhibiting his 1989 piece, Tape Fall, where an audio tape of running water pools onto the floor. It was cool, but Video Quartet blew me away. Marclay brings his sampling and mixing experience from DJ'ing to his artmaking, "plumbing the deeper meanings of that intersection."

Of course, I found out about it one day too late, but it turns out the selling of Marclay's 1995 work, Telephones, perfectly encapsulates the challenges video poses to artists and dealers.

According to a curator/dealer I've known for years, Telephones was sold in two editions: a small, signed edition of 25, and a larger, unsigned edition of, say, 100. They were priced at $1,000 and $200, respectively. [While not Jayson Blairing these numbers, I should say I don't remember them exactly. They're directionally accurate, though.]

But several people who bought the unsigned edition apparently felt no compunction in copying it for friends. Without the signature, these dubs were essentially identical to the unsigned tapes. The result [with no offense to the Fab Five]: it queered the market for the larger edition.

Infinite reproduction is, theoretically, at least, inherent in video-based art. But in Marclay's case, the talismanic, even fetishistic, signature was enough to make some buyers think twice before dubbing. But it's a little finger-in-the-dike, though, as the unsigned, now-unlimited edition proves. I'll give Marclay a call about this some time.

Until this spring, there was still a press release on Art House Films' website heralding the coming DVD release of The Cremaster Cycle . If Matthew Barney's films are obsesed wtih potentiality, announcing and never releasing the DVD's seems somehow appropriate. After all, cremasters are designed to rein things in, not let 'em hang out, right?

Inexplicably, nine hours in the Guggenheim's theater didn't give me enough Cremaster in my art/media diet. So after bailing on the mass market DVD's, I went out and got me a copy--in the interest of journalistic research, you understand--of Cremaster 2 to watch at home.

As any of you who has dropped the six figs for the vitrine editions know, watching Cremaster at home is a different ball game (some pun intended). I have to say, If I were gonna spend that much money on a film, it'd be my own. And returning Netflix discs is stressful enough, so I didn't borrow a real copy. Besides, how do you ask someone to loan you their art? Nah, I borrowed a super-clean VHS copy from, well, you'll know where it came from, soon enough.

1. They're video. Even in theaters, it was obvious that the first two installments (C4 and C1 had been shot on video. Not so for the last three, which were HD-to-film transfers. Barney squoze far more than ten pounds of production value into a five pound bag. Not since Sally Potter's Orlando has a filmmaker gotten such an expensive-looking film out of such a small budget. [Howard's End, yeah yeah, but I digress.] The copy I got was clearly not HD-to-film-to-DVD-to-VHS, though, and it shows. Like when I caught Agnes Varda's Gleaners on TV; there's something very "pull back the curtain" about seeing these works as video.

Cremaster 2 production still, Matthew Barney image: Biennale of Sydney.org

2. It's still long. Even though C2 is my favorite, it still felt long. Argue that Barney wants it to be long, to force the viewer to experience it at that pace, fine. But the power relationship shifts when you pop the tape in. Let me tell you, if you've got a remote control, you're gonna use it. You can use it for good or for evil, of course, and it's just as nice to rewind the salt flats as it is necessary to fast forward the seance.

3. The DVD's coming out after all, but it's The Order, the video game-like segment of C3 which played on the big monitors in the Guggenheim rotunda. It's on Amazon right now, in fact, for $18.74.

Apologies for not posting as much lately. I've been on the road a lot, without net access, in the day, and working on an editing deadline for an upcoming, non-greg.org gig. Stay tuned.

In the mean time, I still have to post about the meeting two weeks ago with Avery, who's composing a great new electronic score for Souvenir November 2001.

For suddenly film-related reading, add Gawker to the list: Elizabeth's in LA, doing a driveby of the Mormon temple (as if Spielberg'd live below Sunset. hah.) and not pitching film ideas.

In the mean time, the animation on MTV's Spiderman is pretty sweet. For all the attempts to coax more realism out of CG, it's amazing how long it took for people to master the aesthetic benefits of simplicity.

Yeah, it's August, but someone's really phoning it in at the Guardian. After spotting some headlines in the IHT about the twin critical flops of Gigli and John Poindexter's terrorism futures exchange, Duncan Campbell straightfacedly proposes "a futures market in which we all bet on filmic atrocities." [Note to Duncan: If you call it, oh, the Hollywood Futures Exchange, don't be surprised to find your British arse sued by the positively ancient Hollywood Stock Exchange.]

This is an unusually daft article, and not just because HSX was repeatedly reported as an inspiration for the Pentagon's policyanalysismarket.org. I mean, the Guardian already discovered the seven-year old HSX way back in January.

That's John Wayne, of all people, talking about High Noon, a vengeance-filled film he turned down. Depressingly, Burt Kearns, the producer of a documentary on the retired White House projectionist, says this is also the all-time favorite movie of American presidents, screened by all, including GWB. [The docu's on Bravo, and it's painfully shallow, full of "the magic of movies" homilies from president-spawn (Ike's daughter) and demonspawn (Jack Valenti) alike.]

Triangulate John Wayne's comment, "Bush Doctrine" author Donald Kagan's view of the US in the 21st Century ("You saw the movie, High Noon? We're Gary Cooper."), and Jim Shephard's Believer Mag rumination on laconic cowboy precedents for Rumsfeldian obfuscation (work with me here, people): it follows that Bush's admin is "the most un-American" ever.

I'm working on a couple of new features, or Features, interviews with some interesting filmmakers.

Greencine must know that, because they're throwing up so many interesting filmmaking reads, including:

Steven Soderbergh and Richard Lester's Getting Away With It: Or: The Further Adventures of the Luckiest Bastard You Ever Saw,

and Lawrence Grobel's Above the Line: Conversations about the Movies
. Read an Austin Chronicle review for excerpts.

Congratulations to Euan and Lucy on their new baby, who'll have a helluva time fitting his name into application forms for anything: Heathcliff Felix Alistair Euan Rellie.

As for the distinction of being the first baby reported on Gawker, well, that speaks for itself. To schedule a playdate with little Heathcliff, check out his Friendster account, or drop by the SoHo House nursery.