the making of, by greg allen
My second short film, Souvenir (January 2003), features a man who carefully irons his shirt before spending the day at a rural dry cleaners.
Here are two ironing-related websites:
In an article in the Village Voice, Kate Mattingly gives new details of a disturbing casualty in the US government’s campaign for Homeland Security: the increasing difficulty and expense of securing visas for international artists and performers is keeping more of them out of the US and causing arts organizers to give up scheduling non-US programming.
Here’s the visa application process under the Dept. of Homeland Security:
New background checks >> bigger backlogs >> longer/impossible turnaround times >> fallback to once-optional, prohibitively expensive Premium Processing Fees >> non-profits sunk by $1,000/petition fees originally meant for the tech industry >> artists may not get approved anyway>> dance, music, art, film, theater organizations give up programming international talent.
An example cited in the article: Visa applications for an 11-engagement BAM Next Wave Festival cost $29,304, compared to $600 in peaceable 1988, with the possibility that some artists are still denied visas.
One of the first to pay the cultural price of harshened visa policies was last year’s New York Film Festival. As I posted then, Abbas Kiarostami was prevented from attending his film’s US premier, and the Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki decided to boycott in solidarity. (“If the present government of the United States of America does not want an Iranian, they will hardly have any use for a Finn, either. We do not even have the oil.”)
When the photographer Thomas Struth spoke to a small group of collectors and curators in February, he wondered aloud about the possibility of the highly influential people who participate in the art world–collectors, trustees, sponsors, artists–working in concert to prevent the war in Iraq. Private opinion over the war was probably too divided for such an effort to be made, though.
But creating an effective and affordable way for internationally recognized artists and performers to visit the United States and contribute to our own cultural production seems like a cause worth working the phones for.
According to the little-known Osmosis Theory of Writing, while trying to write a tight, sharp, crime thriller, you should watch a tight, sharp crime thriller, like, say, Ronin (directed by John Frankenheimer, screenplay by David Mamet on JD Zeik‘s story). It helps if it’s got insane chase scenes over roads you used to travel regularly (Paris, Nice, La Turbie). If you do this, the doors will fly open, and your screenwriting muse will spray you with inspiration, like so much shrapnel in a waterfront ambush.
That’s the theory, anyway.
Your screenwriting kit should include: Ronin (with the Frankenheimer’s commentary) and his 1962 classic, The Manchurian Candidate, on DVD, and Frankenheimer interviews at The Onion AV Club and Movie Express.
Partly in preparation for the impending release of T3, partly because I’ve been describing my Animated Musical as “Terminator meets West Side Story,” we watched T and T2 back-to-back last night. Pertinent findings: 1) That’s a lot more Linda Hamilton than the average human constitution is prepared for, and 2) my worries about having taken too much inspiration from films I hadn’t seen for 19 and 12 years, respectively, were unfounded.
And besides, at the end of the Terminator DVD, there’s an unusual credit, “acknowledging the works of Harlan Ellison,” which prompted me to IMDb to see what’s up. Turns out Cameron bragged on the set about “stealing the idea for the movie from a couple of episodes of Outer Limits.” As Cory “BoingBoing Doctorow points out in his countdown of the greatest sci-fi lawsuits ever, Ellison figured it out, too, since the similarities are rather glaring. So he sued Cameron. Several times. And he took out big ads in Variety slamming Cameron for the, um, homage. The verdict: don’ t piss off a guy who cooks up indestructible killing machines for a living.
Another unheralded precedent, for SkyNet is the little-seen Colossus: The Forbin Project, a bleak 1970 film by Joseph Sargent about the disasters that ensue from turning global defense over to a supercomputer. It’s probably not worth getting a laserdisc player for, but I’m looking forward to seeing it.
In the spirit of Gawker, two datapoints make a trend. And when both of those datapoints come from Gawker itself, well, it doesn’t get any trendier than that. So what’s the scoop, you ask? Self-Indulgent, Dishonest Idiots and Starbucks.
Nick Denton tells the tale of having the mock-televangelical tax protestor Rev. Billy explode in his face at a friends’ happening. The Rev’s favorite stunt is setting up his pulpit in Starbucks and preaching against some corporate something-or-other. He’s clearly mastered the TV preacher’s self-righteous hubris, but based on his behavior the other night, seems to be reading from some abridged Bible, one without all that pesky “Blessed are the meek, the peacemakers, etc” crap. Well, when someone snaps a picture of him with walking out of an Office Depot with a box of Turbotax, we’ll see if he can crumble as abjectly as Jimmy Swaggart.
What the overly referential Reverend Billy is to televangelism, Fischerspooner is to pop/rock stars. They staged their first guerilla performance in Starbucks in 1998. Carl Swanson reports from their latest concert in the NYT, and now there’s a ga-ga Gawker review.
Like Rev. Billy, though, FS mocks only a few traits of manufactured rock stars (bad performances, lack of talent, diva behavior), while wholeheartedly embracing others. You know how, in Glitter, Billie/Mariah totally disses the guy who gave her her break and she…ahem. You can’t reference Glitter and hope for any credibility, not even in relation to Fischerspooner.
There’s a 2+ year gap in the meteoric rise of FS, at least as it’s told to/by Swanson. Written out of that history faster than Little Richard is Gavin Brown, the art dealer with the “honor” of being the first person to actually let them perform. It was thanks to some ad hoc performances during a 1999 Rikrit Tiravanija exhibit, and a later series of nightly shows in the gallery, that Fischerspooner got any attention at all. Brown helped them put out their first CD and organized some actual (i.e., non-Starbucks) concerts. Just before their UK record deal was announced, Brown got ditched for Deitch; Fischerspooner has been trying to fail upwards ever since.
Of course, if this Launch-a-Pathetic-Media-Grab-In-a-Starbucks movement continues, regular folks’ll learn to avoid the chain in droves, turning it into a niche-y, little Macchiatos for Masochists. Fortunately, like many other best-viewed-at-a-distance trends, you can follow along painlessly at Gawker.
Pillagers Strip Iraqi Museum of Its Treasure, John F. Burns in the NYT.
Mosul descends into chaos as even museum is looted, Luke Harding in the Guardian.
When I said yesterday that the US administration had no interest or care for art, this isn’t what I meant. Honestly, this is as unconscionable as the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statues by the Taliban, which UNESCO’s director general, Koichiro Matsuura called “a cold and calculated ‘crime against culture'”.
In his Bloghdad column on Slate [love the name, Will!], William Saletan scores a direct hit on the “soft bigotry” of Bush’s complimenting the Iraqi people as “gifted.” “He doesn’t mean exceptional. He means ethnic.” For Bush, it turns out, “gifted” and “talented,” are traits shared by many fine non-white races, God bless’em.
It’s funny how things change; when I was growing up in North Carolina, “gifted and talented” meant “white.” To comply “with all deliberate speed” to the Supreme Court’s 1955 Brown vs. Board of Education order to integrate schools, the GT program opened, not equal and technically not separate, on the grounds of Ligon Middle School on the other side of Raleigh, just in time for my 6th grade year, in 1979. Our history teacher instructed us, on the day the one black GT student was absent: “Lord, just don’t call them colored.”
Talk about motivated seller. The Wash. Post‘s Jonathan Finer went to an open house at Tariq Aziz’ place in Baghdad, and like any good open house visitor, he judges the owner’s taste in books, movies, and bathroom reading. It’s gotta be heartening for Graydon Carter to learn that there were “dozens of Vanity Fair magazines” next to the DVD’s (“It’s not just for Oklahoman divorcees anymore!”).
For your total Tariq Lifestlye shopping convenience, I’ve formatted the inventory –including a few of Tariq’s favorite scents–into Amazon Lists:
WNYC is my media default setting. I know several artists who live by WNYC; they have it playing in their studios all day. If they still do this, I don’t know; but I find myself turning off wall-to-wall war discussion more frequently, whether out of distraction, exhaustion, or resignation.
Oddly, that’s just the opposite of what I did during/after September 11th. For days, weeks, WNYC was this incredible lifeline, an important source of solace, community; I almost never turned it off. Divisions over the war run deep, and positions seem to be calcifying. With the microsegmentation/balkanization of media sources, war coverage itself has become a point of contention. Rather than bringing people together, media–even the media I generally agree with–ends up reinforcing the differences.
For more than a week now, WNYC has been soliciting art from its listeners, by its listeners, art made in response to the war. Submissions to date number nearly 100, and can be seen online. It’s a sobering collection, in ways I don’t think are intentional.
It’s protest art, almost without exception. (I remember host Brian Lehrer’s intermittent pleas for art from supporters of the war/troops/president, which didn’t materialize, apparently.) The exhibit reveals not just overarching bitterness, but an almost pathetic sense of powerlessness. In the tone and content, the raw anger, and in some cases, the sheer obviousness, there’s a subtext of impotent rage. Art, at least this art, seems like the resort of people who tried other means of protest and found them wanting.
In her Oscar speech, Nicole Kidman weakly reassured us that “art is important.” It’s certainly important to its creators. And yeah, it’s important in the whole “what it means to be human” sense. But the absence of pro-war art has less to do with WNYC’s political demographics, and everything to do with deep conservative suspicion of the role of “art” itself. The administration in power/culture in ascendance right now views art, not patriotism, as the last refuge of the scoundrel. And that unsettles me almost as much as the threat of perpetual war.
DVD Talk‘s Gil Jawetz takes a great, informative look at the development of the opening credits for Panic Room. David Fincher‘s credits are almost always events in themselves, and apparently Panic Room is no different. Jawetz makes the connection to Saul Bass’s North by Northwest credits, to which I’d add Bass’s opening for West Side Story, another tour de force montage of NYC skylines.
You can buy Panic Room on DVD, but only if you’ve already bought Fight Club. It’s one of the first mega-DVD’s, stuffed with real, not astroturfy extra content. Of course, there’s also the single-disc edition. Also, Fincher fans should already be flocking to screenwriter/director Roger Avary’s weblog. Avary gives near-daily reports from the lunchtable as he works on the script for Lords of Dogtown. [thanks, hella amusing Gothamist]
For those who aren’t familiar with Phoenix (the US city I’ve most heard Baghdad compared to on NPR), the Webby-nominated Cockeyed.com has published the Baghdad City Size Comparison.
With the ribbon-cutting for the American Express office still weeks away, and Halliburton’s contract to build out the Iraqi ATM network caught up in the whole Cirrus vs. Carte-Bleu Smartchip debate, you may want to take some Iraqi dinars with you before you go. Wired reports on the popularity of Sadaam Dinars on eBay.
Did I say popularity? I meant bubble. “How much is a Pokemon worth today? Or a Nasdaq index? Yes, there is a Saddam Dinar bubble,” confesses collectible currency dealer George Lindgren. But maybe your dotcom experience has enabled you to ride a bubble just right. Go ahead. Otherwise, for now, just take USD.
Last evening, 7:30, heading to a tour a friend gave a museum group of her art collection, I was momentarily freaked out by the light.
At first, I figured it’s how streetlights turn on before it gets dark, but no. The sky was mottled, completely overcast, a bright, diffused, grey>>faint plum lightbox. It was that post-sundown interlude cinematographers call magic hour, except you never hear about “cloudy magic hour.” For some reason, the light was cold, and every streetscape detail had a hardcut crispness.
Then, I turned into my Korean deli, of the narrow middle-of-the-block variety, and was freaked out again. Was it the contrast with the strange outside light? Something wasn’t right. So I asked, and, sure enough, they’d packed the ceiling with new fixtures, all filled with full-spectrum fluorescent tubes. $20 each, the owner proudly boasted. It was like shopping in a Gursky photo. I walked back out–with enhanced calcium absorption powers, apparently–into the separate-but-equally intense twilight.
[Read an ASC‘s interview with Thin Red Line DP John Toll. “Because this is a Terrence Malick film, a lot people will just assume that we sat around waiting for magic hour, but we simply didn’t have the luxury of doing that… We had a 180-page script…Yes, there are magic-hour shots in the film, but only because we had to shoot until it got dark!]
