February 2005 Archives

So we finally caught Sideways, twice, on the plane back from Amsterdam. The fat white trash sex scene was edited out, of course, and the PG dubbing was awkward [how can they not say "get you laid"? It's the characters' whole point.] with one exception: they replaced "a**hole" with "Ashcroft" which, at least in the first occurrence, just sounded like Oscar-worthy writing.

Meanwhile, on the other channel, Alfie was so full of humping, naked birds and profanity, it would've been outrageously offensive--if anyone could've been bothered to watch it.

[update: Slate linked to this Thursday WashPost report of the Ashcroft thing. Airline movies run for a month, but presumably, it didn't raise any eyebrows until now.]

Issue of 2005-03-07
Posted 2004-02-28

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So while he is taping himself for "his talk show on skates," Tony Danza runs into The Gates and falls flat on his face. I don't know how to unpack this little gem of a story, though:

Holy smokes, the IFP awards were a total dogpile on Sideways. I can't remember all my votes, but even though I'm a Payne/Taylor fan, I spread the love around a little bit more.

Yeah, and on that Oscar, too. We just flew back from Amsterdam, and not just our arms are tired. I was banished from the (TV-equipped) bedroom, so I "watched" the Academy Awards on Gothamist and Defamer [who got the NYT to sponsor their 10-month anniversary party, complete with a gift, um, sac from Fred Durst, you know, the one on Rodeo?]

20th IFP Independent Spirit Awards Winners [ifp.org]

The story of Donnie Dunagan, the child actor who was the voice of Bambi and went on to fight in Vietnam and to lose his most of his savings in the Enron collapse.

[2/23 update: for Jason's sake, I hope having thousands of micropatrons is not the same as having thousands of microbosses: "Eyy, get to work, Kottke, it's 9:30 already! I wanna see some posts!"]

Tangentially related to both preparations for my upcoming talks on the art market in Rotterdam and to The Gates being rather showily not for sale, I've been thinking about art you can't buy or sell.

Shameless plug first: I'm speaking and participating in two panel discussions at Art Rotterdam this week. Thursday at 2000 hours [when is that? someone please tell me.] I'm talking about the effects on art and artists of the art market's global dynamic. That's at Het Wilde Weten, an alternative art space in Rotterdam, where the other panelists include: artists Jeanne van Heeswijk and Joep van Lieshout; Mondriaan Foundation director Gitta Luiten; journalist Marc Spiegler; and Amsterdam gallery owner Maurice van Valen.

Then on Friday afternoon at 1500 hours, I'm on a panel about private funding of art and museums. The other folks are Peggy Guggenheim Collection's special events officer Claudia Rech; Rainald Schumacher, Director Goetz Sammlung; Kees van Twist, Director Groningermuseum; and
Frank Lubbers, deputy-director Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. The moderator is Prof. Dr. Arjo Klamer of Erasmus University.

Issue of 2005-02-28
Posted 2004-02-21

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I just made myself a little batch of "apprentice of nothing" t-shirts, which should be here in about 10 days. I'm taking a couple, and the rest are available--first come, first served--for $20, domestic shipping included. [mon. night update: they're gone.] They're American Apparel superfine jersey, not fitted (L, XL) and come in just one style: white text screened on saffron.

[limited edition apprentice of nothing t-shirt]

[update: in the spirit of transparency, I thought it best to lay out the budget and revenue projections for MY saffron-colored project:

Printer: Customink.com [highly recommended]
Batch size: 12 shirts
Total unit cost: $13.75
Shipping expense: free for standard delivery
Total cost: $165.00

Unit sales price: $20
Gross margin: $6.25
(less postage) $1.85
(less envelopes) $0.50
Unit contribution: $3.85
Total units available for sale: 10
Total contribution: $38.50
(less cost of 2 shirts): $27.50
Project Operating Profit: $11.00
(less design expense, $450/hr): $900
(less managment expense, $$900/hr): $1,800
Net profit (loss): ($2,689)

To: greg.org
From: someone using the name of a recognizable artist of Christo's generation
Date: 2/20/05, 22:06
Subject: the blog of greg allen!

Allen, the fastidious analysis of Christo's project you make, the stupid remarks and investigations over his car, his plates, his parties and his private parts [?? -g.o] make you look a moronic paparazzo searching for the Olsen Twins for a cover in "Daily News" or any other tabloid of your choice. Now, you should say that this art is a waste of money, the artists are rich and they should give the money to charity. You really have a lot of free time or either you don't know to write about art, so waste your time in freaky painstaking accounts of other's money and stolen photos. Pathetic, laughable, useless, pointless. Shameful and childish. Get a life and write something interesting, you ridiculous apprentice of nothing.

Just to clarify a couple of points: the Christos' $350,000 Maybach is not part of the $20 million; in fact, it's not even theirs. It's being
made available to them by their friend--in the Maybach marketing department. Maybach's Leon Hustinx, coincidentally, purchased two C&J-C works related to The Gates, which he has graciously made available to the Daimler Chrysler Art Collection.

The Christos' do not accept donations or sponsors for their projects, preferring to pay for everything themselves. While the Christos' Maybach 62 is the extra-long version, it was not custom manufactured in any way; it's safe to call it a common Maybach. Maybach, you may be interested to know, is German for "people's car."

Maybach involved in art project [daimlerchrysler.com]
Christo's Maybach on flickr with the NJ dealer plate obscured, how thoughtful [flickr.com]

I was an initial, albeit paying skeptic, then a non-practicant, then I bought the last issue of The Believer magazine primarily on the promise of its accompanying DVD filled with short films.

That promise has not yet been filled--I have only watched Mike Mills' Deformer, the unassumingly homoerotic tale of the iconoclastic painter/skateboarding star Ed Templeton and his subject/wife from Huntington Beach, and I couldn't really get started on any others yet--but the interview subjects seem rather interesting. And the latest issue, just out, features long interviews with Todd Solondz and Eve Sussman.

Then, on the The Believer website, they have this idea for the taking, which I believe has been tried, but not lately:

Someone should produce a short-film quarterly, published on a DVD. It would include short films by independent filmmakers. Each issue could have a central theme or genreódocumentary, gender issues, cold medicine abuse, etc. A subscription would be cheap and the packaging would be tasteful and recyclable.

No doubt after a euphoric and joyous walk through the park yesterday morning, and a group hug with the world, Daily Show writer Rob Kutner got back to work--making Gates jokes.

My favorite is above: "Shut UP Jen. I'm totally at The Gates."

The Gates A Photo Essay By Rob Kutner [supermasterpiece.com]

Don't get me wrong; I'm just as giddy as the next schoolgirl [sic] about The Gates, I just can't see how they cost $20 million. That's what the Christos say they cost, and it's a figure which is dutifully reported in every story, but it's something which I've never seen examined or analyzed.

Most discussion of The Gates focuses on their populism; this is not just public art, but an artistic experience given to the people. The back seat of a Maybach seems an unlikely spot from which to promote "art for Everyman," [to use Michael Kimmelman's phrase and Andy Towle's picture] but for underlining the noblesse that comes with your self-proclaimed noblesse oblige, it's just about perfect [even if it is borrowed].

I don't think it's being ungrateful to take a closer look at this $20 million figure. We don't consider it an act of magnanimity when Paramount ponies up $200 million to provide us with the grand collective experience of Titanic. In fact, I believe the Christos' consider the budget to be an important aspect of their work. The artists themselves make a big deal about how much their projects cost, how they don't accept government financing, donations or sponsorships, and how they pay for everything themselves by selling related drawings, models and ephemera.

They also consider the sometimes decades-long process--materials testing and procurement, engineering studies, bureaucratic navigation and and political negotiations--as intrinsic to their work. Their website is full of factoids on fabric, hardware, topographic studies, and the corporate machinery and machinations that underpin their projects. [To see an example, scan developments for Over The River, a project-in-progress.]

Using the Christos' own descriptions and published reports of the installation, I priced out The Gates. Let me just say that to get to $20 million requires some rather creative--maybe even artistic--accounting. Whatever else they may accomplish, Christo and Jeanne-Claude may have also created a unique approach to the subjective and often arbitrary exercise of valuing a work of art.

Art in General's hosting a screening of Tarnation at 3, and Jonathan Caouette will be entertaining your questions while you all drink their wine at around 6.

Whatever you can get him to do in that mystical hour or so between when the movie ends and the reception begins remains to be seen.

3-6 PM Tarnation Screening
Jonathan Caouette interrogations (dress: Basic Instinct)

Art in General
79 Walker Street
East of Broadway somewhere, on the SE corner of some street

Art in General video program [artingeneral.org]

Jason's got his photos of The Gates up, I'm sure the rest of the camera-equipped world will follow.

Albert Maysles talks on WPS1 about the 25+year-long process of making his film about The Gates, The Gates. Maysles is making this film with collaborator Antonio Ferrera for HBO, but he also made other Christo and Jeanne-Claude films over the years. [Actually, a lot of them at the time were just Christo films. I'll let the gender studies art historians figure that one out. Ask Coosje van Bruggen about it, too.]

Maysles has switched to DV lately, and revels in being able to be even less obtrusive and more flexible than 16mm used to let them be.

Kottke-gate [kottke.org]
Maysles-gate [wps1.org]

Jason interviewed David Bernal, aka Elsewhere, the popping dancer who recreated Gene Kelly's Singin' in The Rain dance scene for a recent British VW GTi commercial: "...they had us watch the original Singing in the Rain scene so many times that I started unconsciously moving a bit like Gene Kelly. The director at one point even told me that I was moving too much like Gene and I needed to move more like me."

Golf GTi Commercial and Elsewhere [kottke.org]
previously: Definition of "to be Jar-Jarred"
VW commercial shot on the same soundstage as Oliver!
Musical, Re-animated, with Xanadu references

First, I'd like to welcome and give a passionate cry to new greg.org advertiser Kinsey, an American Experience documentary airing Monday, February 14th on PBS. Psst, even though Kinsey's work is half a century old, don't tell the Secretary of Education.

Meanwhile, Daddy Types may sound like something Kinsey would've been into, but it's actually a site for new dads. Check that one out, too.

I can't quite say why, but I had a pretty intense Jon Jost phase when I first moved to New York. I saw his All The Vermeers In New York several times, lured in by the title, but kept there by the film's demanding and precise construction, and its underlying art-vs-money themes. [That said, I don't remember it too well; better add it to the rental queue.]

Anyway, I'm sure--pretty sure. kind of sure. hoping--that when the Whitney Museum put then-Vivendi/Universal chairman Jean-Marie Messier on its board in the late 1990's, it was NOT it in the hope of adding one more Vermeer to New York City's collection.

FBI looking at Messier as part of its investigation of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft, which netted someone a Vermeer and some Rembrandts [bostonherald.com]
All The Vermeers In New York[imdb.com, amazon]
FYI, New York's Vermeers are at the Met [5] and the Frick [3]

Do not think of Alien.

I admit, a lot of Sundance went by me in a blur. No one I knew I knew was showing anything this year, and I knew non-film work would conspire to keep me out of Park City, so maybe I'm the only person who DIDN'T know about New York Doll. Well, in the last week, I've heard about it from three different people, each of whom called it one of the top films at the festival.

Greg Whiteley started shooting a documentary about his friend from church, Arthur Kane, when Morissey called [?!] and asked if his old band, the New York Dolls, would reunite and play for the first time in 30 years at the 2004 Meltdown Festival in London.

Turns out Brother Kane, who may be more familiar to rock fans as Killer Kane, joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in the late 80's, and when Morissey called, he was working in the genealogy library near the LA temple on Santa Monica. Imagining Kane fitting in in the Mormon Church, Blondie drummer Clem Burke said, "It would be like Donny Osmond becoming a New York Doll."

It also turns out--and this is less of a surprise to music fans--that the New York Dolls were possibly the single greatest influence on glam-rock and punk in the early seventies, and were a key inspiration for everyone from Morissey to Blondie to the Ramones to the Sex Pistols. I'm not giving anything of the film away to point out that the Meltdown reunion--for which Kane dressed, not in feathery glam drag, but in a ruffled shirt inspired by the 19th c. Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, and which featured the three band members who hadn't died of punk-lifestyle-related causes--was a star-filled, exuberant success. Additional tour dates were hastily set, then just days later, Kane died two hours after being diagnosed with leukemia.

The film includes interviews with the musicians who were inspired by the dolls as well as Kane's bishop, who talked about the joy Kane was deriving from the upcoming reunion. Whiteley showed some of his rough footage at Kane's funeral, then edited like crazy to get the film ready for the Sundance screenings last month.

As of right now, the film's distribution is not decided.

Official Sundance info for New York Doll [sundance.org]
IndieWIRE email interview with director Greg Whiteley [indiewire.com]
Film details Mormon's final wish: to reunite punk band [reno journal]
New York Dolls play SENSATIONAL comeback show at Meltdown [nme.com]
Arthur Kane, Punk Rock Bassist for New York Dolls, dies at 55 [NYT, via mills.edu]

No, these are just strange commercials, discussed on Design Observer by Momus.

Previously: The Suntory Commercials of Akira Kurosawa
'Lost' Swedish Soap Commercial Director Ingmar Bergman Finally Gets Recognition

In the NY Times today, David Pogue reviews Sony's new prosumer (i.e., sub-$4,000) 3-chip, high definition camera, the FX1. Net net, it gets pretty high marks. It's got a stunning, true 16:9 CCD, which can shoot HD30 or film's 24 frames per second. One feature I'm eager to see in person is the pre-programmable settings with which you can automate changes in exposure and focus to match the changes in a shot--moving from a bright exterior to a dimly lit interior, for example.

Eeven so, it's still saddled with one of Sony's persistently annoying dumb-downs--no XLR sound inputs--meant only to protect the far more expensive professional market. They did this with their first 3-chip camera, the VX1000 as well, making people use add-on XLR adaptors until the PD-150 was introduced several years later.

Anyway, if you think you're ready to shoot HD, the FX1 is for sale at Amazon. I'm probably not supposed to tell you the price, but I will say that if Amazon paid me a 10% commission--which they won't--I'd earn $334 off of each one of you budding, shopping filmmakers.

Buy the Sony HDRFX1 High Def Camera at Amazon
Home Video Made To Watch on High Definition TV [NYT]

Microsoft has commissioned Alex Garland (28 Days Later, um, The Beach, but we don't talk about that) to write a script for Halo--a v1.0, if you will--which will be offered to producers along with with the game's film rights as a "turnkey" package.

This is a brilliant, precedent-setting move for a multitude of reasons:

Artforum's gossip columnist Rhonda Lieberman wasn't on the list for artfully poseurish artworld duo [Yvonne Force-Villareal and Sandra Hamburg] Mother, Inc.'s recent Fendi-sponsored CD listening party, so she traded a blowjob for entry. At least that's how it reads.

A little context: Mother, Inc. started as backup singers for Fischerspooner. The title quote above comes from the oh-so-vigilant guards watching the sponsor's display case.

Hot Commodities [artforum scene & herd]

You know how, for whatever reason, some ideas that once seemed like slam-dunks take so long to come to fruition, they fizzle out and disappear because the country's media parade has already passed by? Garfield: The Movie's a good example. Jeez, my heart goes out to those folks.

Well, for a moment this morning, I worried that the same fate would surely befall C4's new TV special, "The Guant·namo Guidebook," which tells the true story of seven strangers, picked to live in a [tricked out east London ware]house and have their lives taped, and find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting REAL. The Real World! tortured the way the US government is doing at Gitmo, using the techniques described in declassified military intelligence documents and first-hand accounts. Did I say torture? Sorry, don't want to overpromise. The producers and documents actually call it "torture lite."

Then I find out there's a book, too: The Torture Papers, which Michiko Kakutani compares to the greats of the genre:

Justice Department and Defense Department memos on this subject make for chilling reading, and they transport the reader from the sunlit world of "democracy" and "freedom" and "human rights" frequently invoked by the president to a dark place located somewhere in the nether latitudes between Orwell's Animal Farm the Godfather movies and one of Joseph Heller's or Kurt Vonnegut's black comedies.

C4 lines up Guant·namo-style torture show [media guardian, reg req, via mediabistro]
Following a Paper Trail to the Roots of Torture [nyt]
Buy The Torture Papers at amazon

At Design Observer, Bill Drenttel has a nice rumination on Chris Marker's classic short film, La JetÈe.

Chris Marker's La JetÈe [designobserver.com]
La JetÈe is on this DVD collection of shorts

What is it about bunnies and short films? First, the NY Times has a hi-larious, yet thoughtfully insightful interview with Jennifer Shiman, the creator of 30-Second Bunny Theatre. Then Chris Harding's 50's instructional film-style short for Hallmark features a hutchful of retro bunnies flogging greeting cards.

Spielbunny [NYT, oh wait, I wrote that. Not that that taints my judgment or anything...]
Classic films, re-enacted in 30 seconds by bunnies [angryalien.com]
Make Mine Shoebox corporate video [chrisharding.net]

Tony Scott gave Hirokazu Kore-eda and his latest film, Nobody Knows, a strong review:

Nobody Knows is not for the faint of heart, though it has no scenes of overt violence, and barely a tear is shed. It is also strangely thrilling, not only because of the quiet assurance of Mr. Kore-eda's direction, but also because of his alert, humane sense of sympathy. He is neither an optimist nor a sentimentalist - like his previous films, Maborosi, After Life, and Distance, this one presents a fairly bleak view of the modern world - but he does keep an eye out for manifestations of decency, bravery and solidarity. These tend to be small and fleeting, and therefore all the more valuable and worth clinging to when his patient, meticulous eye uncovers them.

Abandoned Children Stow Away At Home [nyt]
GreenCine at IFFR [daily.greencine.com]
Also: Filmbrain's take on the film, an IndieWIRE's interview with Kore-eda, and an IFP article and the film's production notes.
Previously: Kore-eda on greg.org [I mean, greg.org on Kore-eda]

Issue of 2005-02-14
Posted 2004-02-07

FROM THE ARCHIVE
AUDIO Q&A/ Roger Angell talks to David Remnick about his writing and his years covering baseball. From the 2003 New Yorker Festival

When I saw Amazon's A9 Local yellow pages feature, the first thing I thought of was Ed Ruscha's 1966 artist book, Every Building on The Sunset Strip. It was the first Ruscha book I bought, and it makes me laugh to remember how I thought I paid too much for it way back when (it's easily 10 times as expensive now).

Anyway, using Mikel Maron's A9 whole-street-grabbing script, I tried all through that weekend to re-create Ruscha's Sunset Strip. The result was a lot of technical annoyance.

First, starting from a given address, Maron's script grabs an entire street--a damn big proposition in the case of Sunset Blvd. (Technically, The Strip itself is only a fragment, the section from Doheny to Crescent Heights, from Gil's Liquors to the Virgin Megastore.)

Trying to save the giant series created some odd results: one seemingly random image would intersperse itself all the way along. After trying to edit this one out, the resulting series were suddenly non-continuous. Something odd was happening when I saved the series and then reconstituted it.

I hadn't yet cropped the image series at the appropriate intersections, so I didn't get to try knitting them together into two long panoramas. Actually, I found the A9 images' redundancy kind of nice; the periodic picture-taking indirectly revealed the (non)movement of the traffic along the Strip.

Anyway, then I saw Jason pointing to Eric Etheridge's discussion of Every Building, and I think, better to throw this out to the lazyweb and see if someone can tell me how to figure this out, or just do it and make their own selves net-famous.

Issue of 2005-02-07
Posted 2004-01-31

FROM THE ARCHIVES
THE TALK OF THE TOWN/ Social Notes/ Paul Goldberger writes about architect Philip Johnson's return to The Four Seasons restaurant--which he designed--after recovering from heart surgery./ Issue of 1997-10-13
PROFILES/ Forms Under Light/ Calvin Tomkins/ a profile of architect Philip Johnson/ Issue of 1977-05-23

North Korea's ambassador in Prague has demanded that Team America World Police be banned from the Czech Republic; it depicts Kim Jong Il consorting with Alec Baldwin, which, he says, would totally NEVER happen.

Replies Foreign Ministry spokesman Vit Kolar, "We told them it's an unrealistic wish. Obviously, it's absurd to demand that in a democratic country. And anyway, Alec Baldwin is still better than Vin Diesel."

N. Korea Wants Czech Ban of Team America [guardian]

No one rips off quicker than window dressers. They take next week's ideas from last week's paper, or they stop by the magazine stand on the way to Home Depot.

One Monday morning, I passed by Bergdorf's on my way to work just as they were unveiling the new windows. I stopped dead in my tracks as, unbelievably, two artist friends' works were ripped off at once: the backdrops were Stephen Hendee's crystalline architectural forms made of foamcore and black tape, and the designers' names were printed in the perspectival receding typeface of Ricci Albenda's paintings. By no coincidence, both artists had been featured in a cover story in art/text magazine that had hit the stands just days before. I called both artists and their dealers that morning, and the whole shebang was gone by the next day.

So I'm a little less shocked, shocked, than Todd is to find out Saks Fifth Avenue windows are decorated with "Dan Flavin" fluorescent lights. I'm also sure that Flavin'd be rolling over in his grave, if only the last work he completed before he died wasn't a Christmas light installation in the windows of the then-new Calvin Klein boutique on Madison.

Flavin on Fifth Avenue [fromthefloor]
Weird. Why have I written almost the exact phrase three times now? [google: "dan flavin" "calvin klein"]

Finally, the business model for the ostensibly-aspiring-to-a- Subway-sized-franchise-empire rice pudding boutique on Spring St, Rice To Riches, is explained in a way even an MBA like me can understand: it was founded with proceeds from a $21 million sports gambling operation and used to launder the ring's money.

[update: Amy at newyorkology spotted Rice to Riches as a location in Hitch, which may have been the shoot Lockhart Steele saw last May.]

Rice To Riches (and back to rice, I'm betting) [NYPost via TMN]
Lockhart Steele, the longtime Eliot Ness of Rice To Riches [google]

American Dad sounds like The Family Guy newly converted to Atkins.

Making lemonade out of an assignment to review Fox's lame-sounding new series, Alessandra Stanley decides to start throwing concussion grenades into the world of animated comedy she apparently knows nothing about, just to watch the nerds scramble out and attack:

Blair Erickson writes about his experience working with director Uwe Boll on an early treatment and script for the Tara Reid vehicle [sic] Alone In The Dark.

Even if it IS the Worst Movie Ever Of The Century Of The Week, it sure has generated a lot of ancillary entertainment opportunities.

Blair Erickson - Behind the Scenes: Uwe Boll and Uwe Boll's "Alone In the Dark" [somethingawful.com]
Bad Review Revue: Alone in the Dark, funny funny funny [defectiveyeti.com]

The exhibition that Choire Sicha curated which inexplicably included me, Regarding Clementine, is closing this evening.

There's a swanky beer bust [sic] from 6-8, a closing party, to which the less stalker-ish among you are definitely invited.

Clementine Gallery
526 W 26th St, Chelsea Arts Bldg, 2nd Floor

[note: For the more stalkerish, the address is 526 East 26th st, and it starts at midnight.]

From the English press kit for Madrid 11M: Todos Ibamos en Ese Tren/Madrid M11: We Were All On That Train, a compilation of 27 short films produced by DocusMadrid, a non-profit organization which supports Spanish documentary films:

On March 11th, 2004, Madrid suffered a chain of terrorist attacks on trains en route to the central station, killing nearly two hundred people and destroying or altering the future of thousands who were affected directly by the tragedy.

A group of film directors had the intention of going deeper than the usual news coverage and wanted to contribute a plurality of viewpoints, resulting in a collective film in memory of the victims of the M11 attacks, in solidarity with them and their relatives, in repudiation of the violence of terrorism and with the will to defend democratic values and the freedom to coexist.

What's not reproduced: the oddly official-sounding bureaucratese of this originally impromptu project's sponsoring organizations.

Madrid 11M site, mostly in Spanish

After all, Eric Steel didn't say he wasn't going to film the jumpers off the Golden Gate Bridge when he applied for a permit to shoot the bridge all day, every day, for a year. According to the federal officials who issued him the permit, he described his project as, variously, "a day in the life" of the bridge or "a powerful and spectacular interaction between the monument and nature."

Steel captured 19 jumpers on film, plus "hundreds" of unsuccessful attempts, including some that were thwarted by his crew's alerts to authorities. Then he went to interview people affected.

If Tad Friend's excellent, disturbing 2003 New Yorker piece is to be believed, bridge officials and politicians are rather warily pre-occupied with its reputation as a suicide spot. Which makes their protestations that they were shocked, shocked at the director's "true intentions" ring a little hollow. Friend's article is pretty damning of the bridge's managing board, which adamantly opposes installing suicide-preventing fences.

When you tire of reading self-righteous condemnations from implicated public figures, there are plenty of snap judgments from utterly uninvolved people on Metafilter.

Film captures suicides on Golden Gate Bridge; Angry officials say moviemaker misled them [sfgate.com]
Suicide Documentary Angers Golden Gate Bridge Officials [ktvu.com]
LETTER FROM CALIFORNIA/ Tad Friend/ Jumpers/ The fatal grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge/ Issue of 2003-10-13 [newyorker.com]
The GGB Suicide Documentary [mefi]
Related: Bureau of Inverse Technology's conceptual(-only) art project, "Suicide Box," which was shown at the Whitney Biennial [bureauit.org]

Update update: Just extrapolated this new definition from a Defective Yeti post about the horribly horrible X-box-game-turned-movie, Alone in The Dark:

Jar-Jar: vt. to oh-so-wrongly insert a performer or performance into a (exploitative of children? stultifyingly boring? crassly commercial? help me here) work, either through editing or the use of digital image manipulation and/or computer graphics techniques. [Jar-Jar into]

alt. To Be Jar-Jarred [Ex.: "And until I hear otherwise, I'm going to assume that Ben Kingsley was digitally Jar-Jarred into this film without his permission."]

Also, as Wayne Bremser might say: "VW Jar-Jarred a long-since-dead and once-revered Gene Kelly into a soulless euro techno music video disguised as an endearing homage advert."

In theGuardian, Steven Brook puffs the Gene Kelly VW ad and provides a very little background, like that Kelly's widow had to approve of the ad, as did Turner and EMI, who control the elements of the movie scene. [See, I guess at the heart of my idea of who'd decide this stuff for my dead self is that I don't want only people with commerical interest in the outcome to make the decisions.]

Anyway, there's an Access Hollywood-level description of the CG process, where they reshot the original scene and masked Kelly's face over the dancer. Irrelevant press packet factoid: the ad was shot on the same Shepperton soundstage as Oliver! [what, it's been mothballed for 40 years just waiting for a worthy freakin' car ad to come along?]

Also, "an interactive version of the advert will launch in late February. Its content will include a video of the car, footage of the making of the ad, and the song." Interactive? Does that mean we can all take the controls in our own version of Being Gene Kelly? Not bloody likely. "People will be able use the interactive advert to request a test drive of the car."

Blingin' In The Rain [guardian, via tmn]

"'We've been given the mandate to compete on a more aggressive level,' says [Paramount Classics co-pres David] Dinerstein, who also helped orchestrate the reported $2 million purchase of Mad Hot Ballroom, a Slamdance documentary widely described as Spellbound meets Strictly Ballroom."

1) One of the odd, still-annoys-me things was that Strictly Ballroom was vaguely a documentary, too. The early scenes were all "talking-head-and-captions," and then it just disappeared. Weird, edgy, or sloppy, whatever, it got him to Romeo+Juliet.
2) Every group with more than five adolescent dorks in it should get an agent, or at least look up "life rights" on Google before the cameras descend. Drill teamers, pep clubbers, band members, chess clubbers, debaters, science fair entrants, video gamers, D&D/RPG players, and incessant IM'ers, this means you.

Strictly Business [Village Voice]

Assuming they don't close down all discussions of art, film, and culture before I get there, I'll be in Rotterdam, participating in a couple of panel discussions around the upcoming Art Rotterdam fair.

In one debate on Feb. 25, Saskia Bos, director of De Appel in Amsterdam, will moderate as we discuss private and public funding for the arts, particularly for museums. [I'm there to discuss my work at MoMA with the Junior Associates.]

Also on the panel:
Claudia Rech, Head of development Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy
Rainald Schumacher, Director Goetz Collection, Munich, Germany
Kees van Twist, Director Groninger Museum, Groningen, NL
Frank Lubbers, Vice-Director Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, NL

The other one is still gelling, but I hope it doesn't involve Islamic fundamentalists. More details soon.

Art Rotterdam 2005