August 27, 2012
My great great grandmother had an awesome name: Mary Argent Mozingo. She was married to the equally well-named Ruffin Sullivan. They were country people, farmers, I suppose, in Wayne County, North Carolina. I knew their daughter, my great grandmother, who...
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1:22 PM
October 31, 2011
A piece I left out of my Rirkrit's blingy objects post yesterday may be more important than I originally thought, and for more reasons than its shininess. Untitled 2005 (the air between the chain-link fence and the broken bicycle...
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6:27 PM
October 7, 2011
While doing some family history research, I discovered that one of my grandmother's cousins, Charles Burr, a farmer in Burrville, Utah, had been killed by W.A. "Boss" Lipsey, a neighbor, in March 1943. The Burr family version of the story...
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4:41 PM
May 15, 2011
I just watched Tarkovsky's 1975 film The Mirror for the first time as an adult, basically; when I saw it in college, I had no clue and was bored out of my gourd by it. In fact, for a...
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10:16 PM
March 16, 2011
NYT Mag staffer Aaron Retica posted some childhood recollections from Akira Kurosawa of the horrible aftermath of the 1923 Kanto Earthquake, and the xenophobic hysteria that followed. It makes me wonder, though, if Kurosawa ever spoke about his decision not...
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1:26 PM
May 7, 2010
The Park Service's stated goal for Gettysburg is the "rehabilitation" of the battlefield to its 1863 condition by removing modern structures like Richard Neutra's Cyclorama Center [designed, it should have been noted a long time ago, with Robert Alexander]...
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7:36 AM
May 4, 2010
So a quick recap: the National Park Service is determined to demolish the Richard Neutra's Cyclorama Center, built at the Gettysburg National Military Park in 1961. It was designed to house Paul Philippoteaux's massive panoramic painting, made in 1884,...
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10:30 PM
May 3, 2010
The significance of the battle at Gettysburg was seized upon almost immediately, both for the vast scale of the casualties, but also because of the strategic and symbolic importance in the North of repelling the Confederate incursion. Dealing with...
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8:03 AM
May 2, 2010
We just got back from a weekend trip to Gettysburg, PA, and I was not quite prepared to be so fascinated by it. Gettysburg the town was attacked the Confederate Army in the Civil War partly because of its...
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9:37 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
December 29, 2009
For the Allied forces, The Battle of Hürtgen Forest was the longest and one of the bloodiest, most pointless battles of World War II. Between October 1944 through February 1945, over 33,000 US soldiers were killed in the dense...
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1:51 PM
November 6, 2009
Greg Knauss's mention of the ancient web and an obituary spurred me to back up a little piece of my own hard drive that is the web. From Rootsweb/Ancestry.com's republished obituaries from Piute County, UT, is by great uncle's obituary,...
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12:54 PM
September 8, 2009
"I don't know if you can escape what you are," said Philip Van Cott, a retired US Marine and Vietnam War veteran who began treatment for PTSD ten years ago. Generation B | The Damage of Vietnam, Four Decades Later...
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11:29 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
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 5, 2009
Last September was the first anniversary of what's now called the Saffron Rebellion, where Burmese monks took to the streets to protest the military government. As a commemoration of that movement, the Stedelijk Museum showed the first of three...
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1:47 PM
March 22, 2009
I'm not interested in the so-called PC aspects of discussing hair loss. The parody of an apologetically sensitive term like "follicularly challenged" is still of a piece with the negative connotation baked into the term, "hair loss" itself. Same with...
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10:16 PM
March 2, 2009
Over the holidays, I taped an interview with my great uncle Wayne. He is my paternal grandfather Champ's older brother. [Yes, I did ask him about my grandfather's name. His recollection was that my great grandfather Chester Jehiel Allen hated...
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3:29 PM
January 11, 2009
I'd had the idea all worked out, and the script outline--or a draft of it, anyway--all ready for a couple of years, but my paternal grandfather Champ passed away before I was able to make the original documentary about him...
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9:29 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 13, 2007
I've been working with a recent episode of WNYC's Radiolab on in the background. The subject is memory, which also happens to be the subject of my series of short films, The Souvenir Series. There was a typical brainy [sic]...
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11:40 PM
October 4, 2006
Like Pompeii in reverse, Gibellina has been remembered by its ghost-like burial instead of an unearthing. In 1968, an earthquake devastated villages throughout the Belice Valley of western Sicily. The Italian government's incompetent response to the disaster and the...
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12:38 AM
November 28, 2005
Mama Stamberg's cranberry relish was what finally woke us up. Attributions are a vital ingredient to that get added after a recipe is passed along, often without the original chef's knowledge. We've been eating Val's rolls at family gatherings for...
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9:27 AM
August 20, 2005
J.G. Ballard takes a new look at the films of Michael Powell on the centenary of his birth. I think of Powell as a prophet whose films offer important lessons to both film-makers and novelists, especially the latter, who are...
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12:43 PM
July 17, 2005
I'm heading to Japan for a month with the family. Tokyo this time, so there's a lot to do and see. I've got a couple of projects I'm working on in and around Tokyo, and I'm going to shoot another...
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11:34 AM
March 30, 2005
...they appear uninvited, grab you by the throat, flood your senses and then shoot away in a microsecond, leaving few traces. Mr. Lelyveld explores some intriguing themes: How much do we really remember? Why do we forget? What would happen...
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10:02 AM
January 28, 2005
The writer-director Noah Baumbach, 35, based the film on his own experience of his parents' divorce. He said that he had struggled for years to find his voice as a filmmaker after making Kicking and Screaming in 1995 but...
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12:49 PM
June 10, 2004
I started this weblog to document a documentary I was going to make, a remembrance of sorts of my grandfathers. That film has been subsumed into the souvenir series. This week, even though he was never the subject of that...
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7:49 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
March 30, 2004
In the last couple of weeks, I've decided to shoot a fourth short film, which may be part of the Souvenir Series, or may not. We'll see. It was not in the original outline of the series, and it's out...
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12:09 PM
July 23, 2003
"In 1960 I began to experiment with the idea of constructing stories whose subject matter would consist of disparate elements and unrelated characters taken directly from life and fitted together as in a mosaic." That's Paul Bowles, in the preface...
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Posted by greg at
3:11 AM
January 10, 2003
"I had a professor once who said that as Chekhov got older he lopped off the eventful beginnings and twist endings of his early works and that quivering middle was the mature short story." -David Edelstein, SlateHere's to you, David...
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10:28 AM
December 2, 2002
Early in the editing of Souvenir November 2001, I decided to eventually expand the short film into a related series of shorts, all ultimately interconnected a la Kieslowski's Dekalog (See the movie index for more references). A couple of weeks...
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3:00 AM
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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Posted by greg at
12:26 PM
October 23, 2001
Still too distracted in the aftermath? Project in turnaround? The terrorist subplot deemed inappropriate for our new entertainment environment? No, no, and no. Just the rest of life--including work-related stuff, shuttling between NYC and DC, planning to build one house...
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Posted by greg at
10:59 AM
