August 24, 2010
MOS, of the PS1's woolly mammoth carcass MOSes, is one of seven architecture firms and collaboratives included in "Workshopping: an American Model for Architectural Practice," at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The exhibit is curated by Michael Rooks of the...
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1:38 PM
August 20, 2010
And thus we see the painful difference between meaning to buy Wary Meyers' awesome-looking design project book Tossed and Found and actually buying it. I would have been inspired by their Enzo Mari autoprogettazione-esque mantle many months ago. What...
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1:31 PM
August 15, 2010
Dealer-turned-public art empresaria Emi Fontana talking in Artforum about West of Rome:...people believe that public art needs to occupy planned and assigned spaces. What we're doing is much more fine-tuned: You have to find the space that resonates with the...
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3:47 PM
August 13, 2010
A couple of weeks ago, I watched Henning Lohner's film essay/documentary about working with John Cage to make One11 and 103, Cage's only feature film project, completed just before he passed away in 1992. It's on YouTube, chopped up...
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2:18 PM
August 9, 2010
In addition to being the subject of his film and photographic work, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's Light Space Modulator modulated light and space as a sculptural installation, and it served as a Light Prop for an Electric Stage. But in 1930, the...
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11:15 PM
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Licht Raum Modulator, 1970 reconstruction, image: bauhaus.de Did I say a few minutes? Laszlo Moholy-Nagy spent around eight years [from 1922-30] building his Light Space Modulator, and then he carted it around Europe, and to America, reworking...
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4:14 PM
July 29, 2010
I'd known Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's 1930 kinetic sculpture Light Space Modulator indirectly as a film subject, and then in 2002 through incredible color photographs Oliver Renaud-Clement showed at Andrea Rosen in 2002. [And again, in direct relation to the artist's sculptures...
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9:15 AM
July 23, 2010
In addition to the world's greatest artist website, artist Gerhard Richter also makes paintings. Now these two endeavors come together with the debut of a micro-site devoted to 4900 Colours, the set of 196 5x5 grids of 25 randomly...
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8:28 AM
July 14, 2010
So woohoo, Andrew Russeth pointed back to a Charlie Finch artnet gossip column from 1998, and just wow. I was there, I mean, I remember a lot of that stuff, and it is freaking me out how alien and...
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10:44 AM
July 5, 2010
Photomultiplier Tubes, or PMT, are vacuum tubes used to detect electromagnetic energy. In 1979, Hamamatsu Photonics began development of the world's largest PMT, 25 inches across, which would be used in the Kamiokande proton decay detector being constructed by the...
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2:15 PM
NPR's Robert Krulwich had a fascinating story the other day that works even better online. Because there are slideshows and video footage of Starfish Prime, the hydrogen bomb the US detonated in space on July 9, 1962. The launch...
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1:44 PM
July 3, 2010
This FT essay by Daphne Guinness about buying Isabella Blow's estate before it was dispersed at Christie's is a wonderful, sad, incredible thing. [via @artnetdotcom] All the way back in 2002, I overwrote a long post about Blow, Walter Benjamin,...
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4:32 PM
June 28, 2010
See, now here is another reason I've gotten so backed up: I was overwhelmed by the awesomeness of this. It's currently freaking me out how much is turning on the Osaka 70 World Expo. It's as if there's a...
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11:21 PM
June 19, 2010
I didn't follow Sigmar Polke's work closely. At least not consciously. This excerpt from Reiner Speck's essay about Polke's 2004 artist's book Daphne is awesome, even if it sounds a bit like someone's been huffing toner at the end:An...
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9:16 PM
May 29, 2010
Sure, there's Dutch Camo Landscapes, and Razzle Dazzle, and the Civilian Camouflage Council, but it all pales in comparison to the truly epic WWII camo accomplishments of Jasper Maskelyne and The Magic Gang. Maskelyne was a British magician-turned-Army camo mastermind...
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3:03 PM
May 26, 2010
So fantastic. I stumbled across this inadvertent diptych in Google Books, it's pp. 86-7 of P. Ch. Joubert's 1844 addition to the Manuels Roret series, Nouveau manuel complet du fabricant et de l'amateur de tabac. It's beautiful, somewhere between...
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5:53 PM
April 25, 2010
Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, interviewed by Christopher Knight in 1985 for the Archives of American Art:DR. PANZA: Well, the connection between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art was made through Rauschenberg, because if you look at Rauschenberg, you see also the...
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9:04 PM
April 18, 2010
Following on to their 2008 retrospective of ZERO, Sperone Westwater is exhibiting work by the group's co-founder, Otto Piene. " Otto Piene: Light Ballet and Fire Paintings, 1957-1967" runs through May 22nd. [16 Miles has very nice installation shots.]...
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2:50 PM
April 12, 2010
HUGE news from on the Enzo Mari autoprogettazione X [Scandinavian Furniture Giant] mashup front: The Finnish manufacturer Artek will announce 'sedia 1- chair,' "the first object from Mari's thought-provoking project 'autoprogettazione' to go into production" with the company. "the...
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12:55 PM
April 3, 2010
I was reading Calvin Tomkins' 1963 New Yorker profile of abstract sculptor Richard Lippold, who was a favorite of the International Style and High Modernist architecture crowd. Depending on your mood, Lippold's giant, intricate, and ambitious metal & wire works...
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9:23 AM
March 3, 2010
From Ken Johnson's thrilled NYT review of "Pride of Place: Dutch Cityscapes of the Golden Age," which was at the National Gallery last winter:The painters of the golden age in Holland brought the city onto center stage and made...
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1:36 PM
March 1, 2010
Joerg has an interesting recap of Thomas Ruff speaking with Philip Gefter a couple of weeks ago at Aperture. I'm a fan of several of Ruff's series of work--and distinctly not a fan of others, but hey. Here's a...
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9:43 PM
February 23, 2010
These are mostly for me, just kind of gathered here without order or comment for the moment. I've been thinking about Alberto Giacometti lately, and his sculptural, spatial pursuit of that moment when a figure comes into view. Arthur...
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11:15 PM
February 21, 2010
The inconvenient intrusion of war and political upheaval [i.e., the collapse of the Dutch government and the looming withdrawal of Dutch troops from their frontline deployment in Afghanistan] into my Dutch Landscapes project has sent me trying to re-find...
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5:27 PM
February 17, 2010
Here's Sherrie Levine talking in 1993 about the making of her Meltdown woodblock print series with BAM's Constance Lewallen in the Journal of Contemporary Art. Levine did just what Susan Tallman, who reviewed Meltdown kind of negatively in 1990, feared:...
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3:42 PM
February 3, 2010
I swear, I didn't plan to go all Errol Morris and do three posts about one photo in one catalogue about one artwork. So look at this other photograph! The second thing you notice--first if you just crack it open,...
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8:04 PM
February 2, 2010
A 2001 visit to Gerhard Richter's studio, from when Michael Kimmelman used to write about art:He puts a canvas on an easel at the end of the room and slides the photograph into a projector. The photo appears, projected onto...
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1:12 PM
January 17, 2010
As someone who backed into a project last September of making paintings of readymade abstraction, I was nervous, stoked, and inspired by "Besides, With, Against, and Yet: Abstraction and the Ready-Made Gesture," the group show curated by Debra Singer which...
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3:29 PM
January 8, 2010
Sometimes I worry about the dishes. I think we have half our dishes out, and half in storage. Not fancy china, which we felt right off was a pointless wedding scam, but the everyday stuff, which we still have a...
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1:00 PM
The California College for The Arts is organizing an open pin-up show to honor Larry Sultan, the photographer, conceptual artist, and teacher who passed away last month:This show is a way for us to mark his passing and his enormous...
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8:24 AM
January 6, 2010
Inspired by Hans Ulrich Obrist's perennial interview question, I wrote about artists' unrealized projects a few years ago for the NY Times. As I stack up some [as-yet] unrealized projects of my own--including, alas, catching up on my unread e-flux...
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11:34 PM
January 2, 2010
I'm fine with somethings in the air, and zeitgeists, and influences, and inspirations, and appropriations. When I finish some of these Dutch Landscape paintings, I'll go up to Mary Heilmann and Gerhard Richter and a dozen other folks and give...
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5:47 PM
December 13, 2009
Considering how important and incredible the work is, it's funny how ambivalent the Times' Gabriel Orozco feature sounds. Ann Temkin did a great show of Orozco's work in Philadelphia, and yet she comes across as a bit flustered discussing the...
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7:54 AM
November 30, 2009
I've thought about similar situations before, so when I saw the mention in the NY Times article about all the dela Cruz's Felix Gonzalez-Torreses I realized I was surprised at how infrequently I hear or see Felix's partner mentioned...
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6:23 PM
November 24, 2009
The uncovered radiator was starting to seem a little dangerous in the kids' bath, and since I had a bit of Ikea shelving left over, and a leftover can of primer turned out to match perfectly the color of...
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7:25 PM
November 21, 2009
I'm diggin' the crazy cats at WNYC and The Jazz Loft Project. After abandoning his family in Westchester, longtime LIFE photographer W. Eugene Smith wired his 6th Ave loft for sound and recorded the hell out it for several years...
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2:25 PM
'We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die' The headline was glib enough that I waited several days before actually reading it, but Spiegel's interview with Umberto Eco does turn out to be worth it. SPIEGEL: But why does...
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1:37 PM
November 4, 2009
Walter Hopps' 1991 exhibition at The Menil, Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s, changed my art life, basically. Bob and Cy trekking around Italy. Bob and John and Merce collaborating. Bob and Jasper, whoa. Did not hear much about that...
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12:36 PM
October 18, 2009
Unbelievable. The Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica refused to sell his work; his estate, the Projecto Helio Oiticica, held an estimated 95% of his entire output when he died in 1980. The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston had a...
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10:30 PM
October 11, 2009
So I decided to make the Dutch landscape paintings I wanted to see made from those incredible security-obscured Dutch Google Maps I found a couple of weeks ago. I'll print the images out and paint over them. Since they...
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9:39 PM
September 3, 2009
Grain Edit has some truly spectacular gouache/lithograph-based advertising work done for the late TWA by the late David Klein. It's one truly beautiful poster after another, starting with this piece featuring the Gateway Arch. Tyler Green just got back...
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3:02 PM
August 28, 2009
If I'm reading John Cage's first book Silence: Lectures and Writings correctly, this is a quote from "Where are we going? And what are we doing?" a lecture/text/performance piece he first performed at Pratt in 1960:I was driving out to...
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8:37 PM
August 26, 2009
Turns out the IPK is on the cover of one of Andy's favorite books, The Best Book Designs 1997, designed by Simon Davies: Also, from Metric Views, a blog of "commentary about the British measurement muddle," a PDF of "Standard...
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8:36 AM
August 4, 2009
Wow, Jennie Livingston's incredible documentary Paris is Burning, about vogueing gangs and balls, is on YouTube. This was a formative New York City film for me. I've given talks about it in church, even. I found it one of...
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6:26 PM
July 31, 2009
Regular readers of greg.org know it, but I'll say it upfront: I'm Team MoMA. I've supported the museum for years--I feel like I grew up in it, art-wise. And film-wise. Right now, MoMA's film department and programming are stronger than...
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12:05 AM
July 27, 2009
I'm surprising myself by how much I feel the loss of Merce Cunningham, or more precisely, how much more acutely I'm feeling an appreciation for his work right now. From the LA Times' obituary by Lewis Segal:"When you work on...
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8:43 PM
Bell Labs engineer Billy Kluver helped design photocells so that dancers triggered lights and sounds and films [with images by Stan VanDerBeek and Nam June Paik.] According to media art net, this excerpt was from a 1965 TV performance...
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11:05 AM
July 20, 2009
I've had Christy Lange's long 2005 Tate Magazine essay about revisiting conceptual art systems open in my browswer tabs for weeks now, but I hadn't read past the Walter deMaria section that first led me to it. Well, it's just...
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11:48 AM
June 5, 2009
Apparently, it's Chris Burden day. Kottke just posted a clean clip of Chris Burden's 1979 work, The Big Wheel, in which a massive, 19th century iron fly wheel is set into rapid motion by a little motorcycle wheel. I think...
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10:20 AM
April 28, 2009
This gorgeous Darren Almond photograph, Infinite Betweens: Becoming Between, Phase 3, of an impossible-to-map landscape covered with Tibetan prayer flags is coming up at Philips in a couple of weeks. It reminded me how quietly strong his work is,...
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11:47 PM
April 25, 2009
Untitled (Autoprojettazione, 1123 xE/1123 xR), 2004 courtesy kurimanzutto As I've said before, the first Enzo Mari autoprogettazione furniture I ever saw was by Rirkrit Tiravanija. He had tables and chairs fabricated from polished stainless steel, which his gallery from...
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5:01 PM
April 24, 2009
In its first iteration in 1984-5, The Territory of Art I was described as "a sixteen part series of half-hour radio programs that explored issues of contemporary art and design through commentary, interviews, original drama, and new music from more...
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11:20 AM
April 16, 2009
These are the last two segments from the lecture I gave at the University of Utah School of Art in 2007, titled Visiting Artist [sic]. They're both about Robert Smithson. The first [above] is about Smithson's own1969 slideshow lecture...
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9:19 PM
March 31, 2009
Errol Morris is unfurling another fascinating investigation of a 19th century photograph on hit NY Times blog. Today, in part 2/5, he talks with author and Civil War historian Mark Dunkelman about a breakthrough in researching the life of Amos...
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8:56 PM
March 25, 2009
The closest I've ever come to getting a tattoo was this one, a 1992 work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The artist first showed this motif, a circle of dolphins that looks like it could have come from the border of...
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9:58 AM
February 24, 2009
I can't believe it. New Yorker Films is closing after 43 years in the independent and foreign film distribution business. In the business? They were the business for decades. When I was working the projection booth at International Cinema at...
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8:45 PM
February 8, 2009
The first time I finally dared go into Kim's video, I thought I was ready, so I asked why Blade Runner wasn't in the Ridley Scott section. [Yes, son, back when I was a boy, we had to go all...
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11:04 PM
November 11, 2008
"Writing fiction takes me out of time," he explains. "I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That's probably as close to immortal as we'll ever get. I'm scared of sounding pretentious because...
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9:03 AM
October 31, 2008
This morning I was buying a Diet Coke at the gas station, which forced the lady to get up from her chair by the radio. "Arlo Guthrie! I didn't even know he was still alive!" "Really! You know who I'm...
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5:38 PM
September 7, 2008
Former NGA curator and Dia director Jeffrey Weiss writes about the state of Land Art in the latest issue of Artforum. His focus: T.S.O.Y.W., a 3-hour Earthworks road trip movie/installation by Amy Granat and Drew Heitzler shown in this year's...
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10:33 PM
August 20, 2008
Daniel Birnbaum in Artforum, discussing "Beckett/Nauman," a Spring 2000 exhibition at the Kunsthalle Wien The organizers of "Beckett/Nauman," Kunsthalle Wien curator Christine Hoffmann and art historian Michael Glasmeier, aren't really out to prove anything, but their juxtaposition of works by...
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11:24 AM
August 10, 2008
Just, wow. John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Louise Nevelson, and yet the sycophancy and superciliousness of this 1974 interview in SoHo by a couple of early Interview contributors is almost unwatchable. Almost. I just watched it again:R. Couri Hay: My...
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12:00 AM
April 19, 2008
In 2005, Robert Gober curated a show at the Menil Collection in Houston. In his catalogue, Robert Gober Sculptures and Installations, 1979-2007," for the Schaulager show, Gober says, "Initially, I was only interested in curating from the collection and not...
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1:21 PM
March 14, 2008
My daughter got Tibetan necklaces for Christmas when she was two. I asked her if she knew where Tibet was. And then I told her, "It's next to China." image of Buddhist monks in Xiahe, Gansu province [in China]...
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11:39 PM
March 8, 2008
From "Jeremy Blake in Three Parts," written by editor/curator Bennett Simpson for PS 1's "Greater NY" show. In 2000, Blake's 20-min. digitally animated abstraction titled Angel Dust was in both the harried, hasty "Greater NY" and the Pompidou's "Elysian...
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4:10 PM
March 5, 2008
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } blue_before and after, originally uploaded by scottburnham. In 2000 curator Scott Burnham organized a projection...
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Posted by greg at
12:10 AM
March 4, 2008
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } It's A Longshot, originally uploaded by JPaul23. I've had Derek Jarman on the brain the...
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9:14 PM
While is ridiculously easy to soak in Derek Jarman's work in the UK at the moment, it's nigh impossible to find anything programmed in the US. Fortunately, one of Jarman's most easily accessible bodies of work--music videos--is also one...
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9:04 PM
January 30, 2008
Daniel Thompson, the guy behind Clean Flix, [1], Flix Club, an Orem, Utah video store that, like Clean Flicks before it, edited sex, nudity, and swearing scenes from Hollywood movies, has been arrested for paying for sex with 14-year-old girls....
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10:03 AM
October 22, 2007
I'm still looking around for anyone who gave an account of yesterday's discussion of Warhol films at the American Museum of the Moving Image. Warhol Film Project director Callie Angell and film critic Amy Taubin were supposed to "discuss the...
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11:38 PM
September 22, 2007
I've been listening to WNYC's anniversary tribute programming for John Cage, and it's really great [if a bit over-narrated; I mean, who's going to listen to 24h33m of John Cage programming on-demand who isn't at least somewhat familiar with...
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11:44 PM
August 14, 2007
Seeing William Burrough's old Nike commercial reminded me of Burroughs' 1996 music video Thanksgiving Prayer, directed by Gus Van Sant. Classic stuff....
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12:15 AM
July 31, 2007
today: Michelangelo Antonioni, 94, Italian Director, Dies [ap/nyt] yesterday: Ingmar Bergman, Master Filmmaker, Dies at 89 [nyt]...
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7:28 AM
July 20, 2007
From Theresa's blog, The Wit of the Staircase:From the French phrase 'esprit d'escalier,' literally, it means 'the wit of the staircase', and usually refers to the perfect witty response you think up after the conversation or argument is ended. "Esprit...
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1:03 PM
May 29, 2007
This is awesome. John Cage performing "Water Walk," live on the 1960 TV quiz show, I've Got A Secret. John Cage performing "Water Walk" [youtube] John Cage on a TV Game Show in 1960 (video) [WFMU's awesome blog, with...
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12:09 PM
April 7, 2007
So I'm researching camera angles for an article I'm writing, and so I break out the trusty Susan Sontag, On Photography, and I finally get to the last essay/chapter, which I guess I've never read. It's the one where she...
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11:57 PM
February 6, 2007
The idea to use a large heliostat to deliver winter sunlight to a small village deep in a valley of the Italian Alps, was a success: The mirror — 870 meters, or 2,900 feet, above Viganella and measuring 8 meters...
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9:26 AM
December 20, 2006
I used to live downstairs from Nam June Paik. I was too starstruck to ever talk with him at length, but we had friendly chats when we'd see each other in the stairway of our Little Italy loft building....
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3:17 PM
November 21, 2006
After memorizing The Player, the visceral Short Cuts got me hugely excited for Pret a Porter. Oops. At the time, I had to learn for myself what Pauline Kael knew long ago: she "joked about his fertile seventies output that...
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9:58 PM
November 10, 2006
Even when I worked for The Mouse, I cringed and laughed at the pile-up mash-ups of corporate life and pop culture. On the rarest occasions, like with Atomic Revolution, the nuclear propaganda comic book produced by adman M. Philip Copp...
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1:10 PM
December 24, 2005
As I type this, the Maysles Brothers classic Grey Gardens is playing at MoMA. Unfortunately, I'm in the wrong time zone to see it, but watching those Crazy Edies suddenly seems like an excellent Christmas Eve tradition. Meanwhile, I will...
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3:34 AM
October 18, 2005
For the 1993 Venice Biennale, PS1 produced an exhibition of and about John Cage's work calledIl Suono rapido delle cose. This week, WPS1 has added a webcast of the accompanying CD to their archive. The CD features performances by Lee...
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9:54 AM
October 5, 2005
Bill & Nada's was an unassuming Salt Lake institution, a 24-hour diner ["we never close"] that sat on a downtown corner for decades, providing eggs & brains, pancakes with coconut syrup, hot coffee and a haven for folks who...
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8:37 AM
September 18, 2005
UCLA Medical Center is the epicenter of the Los Angeles basin or something. Robert Wise died there this week at 91. In between editing Citizen Kane and flacking for Scorsese's Gangs of New York [Scorsese was a big fan, so...
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8:02 AM
February 4, 2005
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...
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9:50 AM
November 26, 2004
I've admired Hirokazu Kore-eda's films since seeing Maboroshi at New Directors/New Films in 1995. His 2000 film, After Life and Agnes Varda's The Gleaners and I were what finally stoked the fire under me to get me finally start making...
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8:15 AM
September 5, 2004
Driving up the foothills to my mother's house in Salt Lake City, you pass a nearly unbroken carpet of lawn, with the thickened, careful edges at the sidewalks that only result from successive generations of earnest teenage entrepreneurs. A couple...
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1:56 AM
July 19, 2004
I remember at college in 1989 a friend proposed to his girlfriend my singing her Depeche Mode's "Somebody". At the time this seemed supremely lame to me, mostly because it was from like 1984, three albums earlier. It was a...
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11:09 AM
May 31, 2004
It's my guess that we cling to the harsher bits of the past not just as a warning system to remind us that the next Indian raid or suddenly veering, tower-bound 757 is always waiting but as a passport to...
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11:08 AM
May 6, 2004
Derek Jarman's last feature film, Blue is composed of a poetic/narrative soundtrack and 79 minutes of unexposed color film, which was printed blue. It rocks. Tonight at Passerby at 8:30, Whitney video curator Chrissie Iles will explain how hard...
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5:35 AM
Vladimir Nabokov's son and translator Dmitri has sold his collection of his father's books and memorabilia at auction. The Times has a poignant story about it. Many books contained marginalia from the author himself; most prized were those containing...
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2:12 AM
April 28, 2004
"Certainly the show is inventive and cool looking. The voices, most done by the creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, are also hilarious. (Cartman's pronunciation of 'authority'ó aw-THOR-eh-tah ó is unaccountably perfect.)" - Virginia Heffernan, writing in...
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1:18 AM
April 6, 2004
After a night of hanging out with The Man, and sipping from the firehose of his conversation (hey, whatever it takes to get the movie made, right? ahem.), it's no surprise at all that there are fansites dedicated to picking...
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3:24 AM
February 20, 2004
Last week, in the Sony Classics offices on Madison Avenue, I sat down to talk with Errol Morris, whose current documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, was nominated for an Academy...
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12:03 PM
February 17, 2004
Ever since 1992, when I stumbled, completely ignorant and unprepared, into a screening of the restored version introduced by Agnes Varda ("she does documentaries or something, right?" was all I had in my head), I've been transfixed and fascinated...
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Posted by greg at
1:09 AM
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February 10, 2004
Since relaunching their website, Harper's has been posting selections from their 140+year archive. For example, "Battle Gossip," an 1861 column by Charles Nordhoff. In addition to vivid accounts of women in combat, Nordhoff writes about Napoleon III's use of balloons...
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5:55 AM
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January 14, 2004
[via Kultureflash] John Cage Uncaged is a weekend of performances, films and discussions ("and mushrooms!") at Barbican Hall. Cage symphony performances are rare enough to make them not-to-be-missed events. Highlights: Friday's BBC Orchestra concert, "Cage in his American Context," (which...
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9:51 AM
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January 13, 2004
I'm listening to the composer Vijay Iyer and poet/rapper Mike Ladd discuss their collaborative song cycle, "In What Language," on WNYC's Soundcheck. It explores the inner lives and thoughts of people in international airports, and it rocks. Iyer and Ladd...
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2:48 AM
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January 4, 2004
has me talking/writing like a knight. I.e., half Quixote, half medieval times. oh, and all posts will be 900 pages long....
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9:36 AM
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December 10, 2003
Gus Van Sant, Elias McConnell, and Dany Wolf at Cannes 2003, image: festival-cannes.com There he is, scorched in Death Valley and on the Saltflats of Utah; in a mold-closed school with a barebones crew on scooters; and on the...
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3:59 AM
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November 25, 2003
[via GreenCine] Doug Cumming's got an account of Agnes Varda discussing a screening of her latest short film in Seattle. Also, an earlier bonus Varda discussion at Filmjourney. My Google Ad, which used to read, "Damn you, Agnes Varda/The Gleaners...
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3:50 AM
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November 8, 2003
In a Guardian interview, Ennio Morricone talks about composing music for films. My favorite of his theories: "The music in a film must enter politely, very slowly," like an uninvited guest at a party. [Guess they raise a more genteel...
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4:35 AM
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November 4, 2003
Gus Van Sant's the center of the universe, you see, or you will see, by the end of this post. [Before, I'd been forced to the alarming conclusion that the universe revolved around Norman Mailer, so you'll understand if...
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8:39 AM
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October 23, 2003
I came to Kieslowski for the fateful mystery of La Double Vie de Veronique, but I stayed for the unassuming, naturalistic power of the Dekalog. This seminal ten-part series of films is playing this weekend at Symphony Space in NYC....
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11:07 AM
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October 3, 2003
To explain how I came up with my Souvenir series of ultimately inter-related short films, I went into an extended discussion of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Dekalog with someone recently. Now it turns out Riverside Studios in London is screening the entire...
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2:07 AM
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September 16, 2003
Get the greg.org e-commerce fire hose ready*. I'm wrapping up Soderbergh's book, Getting Away With It, and I've rather liked it. Makes me want to see Schizopolis, one of the movies he angsts over in his journal entries. Trouble...
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11:53 AM
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July 14, 2003
The Guardian's Lee Roberts reports on Iranian film godfather Abbas Kiarostami's debut stage production of the Ta'ziyeh, a compilation of classic tales of the death of Mohammed's grandson, Hussein. The plays are a traditional part of fervent religious festivals in...
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5:08 AM
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May 25, 2003
Swearing may be better in French, but teen shooting? That's best en anglais, mon ami. Gus Van Sant just won the Palme d'Or and Best Director awards at Cannes for his latest film, Elephant, which is Columbine-esque, but actually...
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9:21 AM
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February 23, 2003
The compelling/amusing Super Mario Brothers: A Literary Criticism (thanks, Jason!), which puts paid to my (non-)critique of the connections between Gerry, its filmic antecedents, and SimCity-style video games....
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3:38 AM
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February 18, 2003
Watch Matt Damon and Casey Affleck stagger, scramble and trudge through the desert in Gerry to forget the snow that you staggered, scrambled and trudged through to see it. If that reasoning's too circuitous for you, though, skip the...
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11:58 AM
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December 27, 2002
View from the window at Le Gras, 1826, Joseph Nic�phore Ni�pce image: Ransom Center, UT Austin Or specifically, the Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin: 1) to see the world's first photograph, a view out his window...
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4:28 AM
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November 19, 2002
It's not quite like whipping out your copy of Lolita at the playground, but it sometimes feels weird to read Gravity's Rainbow "in public." Can't say if it's the book itself, which is rather unsettling and is shot through...
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11:27 AM
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"Mistral Island Manuscript acquired by Univ. of Texas" According to this report from last week, Pynchon collaborated with Kirkpatrick Sale in 1958 to create a musical set decades in the future, where IBM controls the world. Sale gave "Luddite" its...
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2:40 AM
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October 21, 2002
"Great web philosopher" David Weinberger weblogged several talks at PopTech 2002, which had the theme of Artificial Worlds. From his posts, it sounded like a lot of thought-provoking fun. But what's in it for me you ask? (Me meaning me,...
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11:12 AM
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October 18, 2002
Palm recharging at home, I had a little red notebook with me on the train last night, and, still stuck on the entry from the other day, I wrote "Who are such mystics, astronauts, filmmakers, ?, people with a Knowledge,...
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12:20 PM
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July 3, 2002
To paraphrase Max Fischer: I've applied for early admission to the Edinburgh Film Festival and Cannes. Sundance is my safety. [wesanderson.org is a good source for active fans.]...
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1:18 AM
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June 5, 2002
When I saw an hour and a half on Sundance Channel blocked out for Meet Mike Mills, I couldn't figure out how interesting he could possibly be. 90 minutes with Scorsese, sure. But 90 minutes with Mike Mills? Naturally,...
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12:26 PM
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May 25, 2002
"Damn you!" campaign results (source: Google Adwords) Findings: The low number of searches/impressions for Varda and Maysles was surprising, as was the high rate (2x) of Wes Anderson searches vs PT Anderson and Soderbergh. And this was a week...
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8:32 AM
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May 24, 2002
The greg.org "Damn you!" ad campaign on Google is just about half-over, and the results are rather interesting. (The launch is mentioned in this post.) The campaign appears on searches for the names of directors who inspired/influenced me, either stylistically...
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1:34 AM
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April 22, 2002
So tonight, Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse is on Sundance Channel as I come home from the gym. It's the first time I've seen it on television, not in the theater, and the image difference is quite noticeable between video-to-film...
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11:48 AM
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