August 18, 2010
When it was publicly announced in March 1990 that the National Gallery of Canada had purchased Barnett Newman's 1967 painting, Voice of Fire for $1.8 million (Canadian), there was an immediate press and political uproar that so much public money...
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Posted by greg at
7:23 AM
July 14, 2010
View Larger Map Like leisure boats, beach houses in Emerald Isle, NC, where our family has gone for many years, are often given names. It appears that the practice tracks somewhat the expansion of the beach cottage rental directory business....
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Posted by greg at
11:07 PM
July 12, 2010
I was talking shop with Tyler Green this weekend, and he told me that the Washington Post's art critic Blake Gopnik actually did devote more than a paragraph in a review of two unrelated shows at a different museum to...
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Posted by greg at
10:00 AM
July 1, 2010
Souren Melikian's auction analysis for the International Herald Tribune/ New York Times is almost always entertainingly specious, but he is at his best/worst when he writes about contemporary art, about which he obviously knows nothing:The next lot, "Cristina Passing By,"...
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Posted by greg at
11:56 PM
June 29, 2010
How much of discovery is really just rediscovery? or learning remembering? I was waiting to read how editor/art historian Barbara Rose had decided to model the chronology at the opening of her 1991 book, Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad...
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Posted by greg at
1:08 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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Posted by greg at
3:03 PM
May 14, 2010
Apex Art just announced that Courtenay Finn and Gary Fogelson were selected for this year's open curating slots. Finn's proposal uses a work by Bruce Nauman as a jumping off point for a show about "the role of reading in...
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Posted by greg at
4:26 PM
May 9, 2010
It has been fun reading The New Art (1966), one of critic Gregory Battcock's contemporary anthologies of critical art writing. Also sobering, how dated and/or blinkered many assumptions these pre-eminent minds operated under turned out to be. Not the least...
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Posted by greg at
10:20 AM
May 2, 2010
'There was a discussion January 1972' That's it. The complete documentation of one of the conversation works by Ian Wilson in the Panza Collection, as reproduced in Art of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies the second edition of the...
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Posted by greg at
3:46 PM
April 29, 2010
God bless him, even if he's on the wrong side of [most of the intervening 40 years of] contemporary art history, you gotta love Hilton Kramer's eviscerating takedown of MoMA's 1970 conceptualist exhibition, Information, curated by Kynaston McShine:The exhibition is,...
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Posted by greg at
11:03 PM
April 27, 2010
Alright, all y'all who didn't tell me about Otto Piene's classic of the books-written-in-longhand era, More Sky: what else have you been hiding?Otto Piene literally opens up new horizons here in both art and art education. His book is a...
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Posted by greg at
4:35 PM
Thanks to Judd [no relation] Tully, I pulled Martha Buskirk's book, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art down again and was reminded of how awesome it is on the fascinating conflicts between Giuseppe Panza di Biumo and Donald Judd [and...
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Posted by greg at
10:41 AM
April 25, 2010
On 2nd, 3rd and 4th of April 1985, there was a discussion between Christopher Knight and Count [sic?!] Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. What was said remains in the collection of Christopher Knight. And in the Archives of American Art. And...
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Posted by greg at
8:30 PM
April 17, 2010
Figure in Landscape, 2009 I'm probably enjoying reading the legal filings in Craig Robins' lawsuit against David Zwirner a little too much. [Randy Kennedy's got a nice summary in the NYT today; basically, Robins says Zwirner revealed a confidential...
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Posted by greg at
8:59 AM
April 15, 2010
Cross a first edition of Yoko Ono's 1964 "event score"/instruction-based art book Grapefruit off my Ones I've Let Get Away list. Turns out it's not just me:There are no copies of the first (limited) edition of Grapefruit currently being...
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Posted by greg at
9:13 PM
April 14, 2010
You could argue that Primary Information's facsimile editions of Avalanche, the awesome artist-run journal published in the mid-1970s by Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp, are only the 3rd and 4th greatest editions of Avalanche, after Wade Guyton &co's bootleg photocopied...
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Posted by greg at
8:42 PM
April 9, 2010
Making no small plans, the very first issue of Aspen contained a little booklet titled, "Configurations of the New World,", papers, speeches, essays, discussions on the future [of cities, mostly] from 13 of the whitest guys they could find, as...
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Posted by greg at
1:34 PM
April 4, 2010
Maybe that should be, "Hast du mich gesehen?" Do you have Andrea Fraser's Michael Asher book? Because as of Summer 2008, she would still like it back. Please mail it to her gallery, no questions asked:I PURCHASED MICHAEL ASHER'S Writings...
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Posted by greg at
11:48 PM
March 27, 2010
Hello, English-speaking media world! What have you been doing the last twenty years that you have not ever produced an article on Tejo Remy, the only designer to consider the borders of furniture and art? Never mind, Blake Gopnik is...
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Posted by greg at
8:22 PM
March 18, 2010
Ivan Lozano's post about Marina Abramovic, Joan Jonas, Tino Seghal, and the conservation of performance art is absolutely fantastic. [It's built off the Performance Workshop Klaus Biesenbach held a couple of weeks ago, which was written up by Carol Kino...
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Posted by greg at
11:31 PM
March 15, 2010
I'm slightly fascinated with the talk-based artwork of Ian Wilson. The last couple of weeks, I'd been working on a Conceptualism-related proposal, and so I had out my catalogue for Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer's awesome, formative [for me, anyway]...
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Posted by greg at
4:34 PM
Can I just suggest that, when you buy an article from the New York Times Archive, you go ahead and buy a 10-pack? In addition to supporting your local paper in their time of financial distress and dire need [ahem],...
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Posted by greg at
11:09 AM
March 5, 2010
Jeffrey Weiss's Artforum article on the implications of forensic analysis of paintings has me stoked to see "Radical Invention," Stephanie d'Alessandro and John Elderfield's incredible-sounding exhibition of experimental Matisse in the 1910s. Weiss calls out the potential trap of uncritically...
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Posted by greg at
10:21 PM
February 25, 2010
I've been thinking about this image from Google Street View, the one of the Mauritshuis which contains two distorted images of the guy's head. As that elongated lower head shows, Google's image knitting algorithm apparently combined two photos of...
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Posted by greg at
11:29 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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Posted by greg at
11:15 PM
February 19, 2010
As you can guess from the mentions of Sherrie Levine, I've been studying the issues around copying and reproducing and originality and authorship. And whenever you do that, Walter Benjamin comes up, specifically his concept of aura. Basically, it's what...
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Posted by greg at
8:44 PM
Who are the freaks and nerds who call out picayune corrections in newspaper articles? Me, for one. On a New York Times piece I did once, I changed an entire line during the copyediting process. The piece was much,...
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Posted by greg at
10:30 AM
February 5, 2010
The ever-unfolding scandal of the Andy Warhol Authentication Board and the Warhol Foundation's apparently massively criminal machinations is just mind-boggling. Richard Dorment wrote in the New York Review of Book last fall about veteran London dealer Anthony d'Offay's run-in with...
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Posted by greg at
1:35 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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Posted by greg at
8:04 PM
January 31, 2010
I finally picked up a copy of the exhibition catalogue for the 1973-4 Duchamp retrospective organized by the Philadelphia Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. Here is the end of Hilton Kramer's non-review of the show for the New...
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Posted by greg at
9:35 AM
January 30, 2010
I was going to call it a guilty pleasure, but entering Souren Melikian's reality distortion field every weekend is clearly a vice. Melikian covers the art world for the International Herald Tribune--which, for him, begins and ends at the auction...
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Posted by greg at
7:29 PM
January 18, 2010
I've been telling people in person all about Lucy Raven's multimedia tour of Daybreak, Utah since it came out last fall; it's way past time that I mention it here. Daybreak is a massive real estate development strategy disguised...
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Posted by greg at
9:02 AM
January 10, 2010
Recently I've been researching the postwar history of contemporary art and architecture in Washington DC. This article sounds like it could have been written last week:The Art Game in Washington Amid a growing art boom, local artists feel they are...
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4:43 PM
January 5, 2010
Last night on very short notice, I went to "Running for Cover(age), A panel discussion on arts criticism in the DC area," organized by the Washington Project for the Arts. Here are the impetus and content of the discussion in...
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Posted by greg at
9:58 AM
December 4, 2009
I understand the back to basics theme that Holland Cotter's working with in his Chelsea walkaround. But I'm baffled by the retrograde sniping about authorship in his non-review of Alighiero e Boetti's maps:Gladstone on West 21st Street has pulled...
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Posted by greg at
10:38 AM
November 25, 2009
In 1969, Allen Ruppersberg created Al's Cafe, a detailed, functioning facsimile of an archetypal diner, which was to operate/perform one night a week. Allan McCollum, who was making work in Los Angeles at the time, wrote about Ruppersberg and Al's...
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Posted by greg at
9:08 AM
November 18, 2009
I don't know who Bruce MacEvoy is, but his is the most exhaustive series of comparative analyses of various theories of color theory I've found. [aha. A web guy/artist who sold YHOO better than I did.] As I debate in...
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Posted by greg at
2:38 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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Posted by greg at
12:54 PM
October 22, 2009
From the Observer profile of Massimiliano Gioni:Growing up outside Milan in a town he likened to Newark, Mr. Gioni found himself drawn to art precisely because there were no adults talking to him about it. "It didn't belong to the...
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Posted by greg at
7:28 AM
September 16, 2009
Not that it doesn't sound fascinating, but a diagram of this sentence would be as big as the Lightning Field itself: In this lecture Chris Taylor will present Land Arts of the American West as a work that makes other...
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Posted by greg at
9:17 AM
September 14, 2009
From Henry David Thoreau's Walden, quoted by Mark Noonan in the Columbia Journal of American StudiesBut while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but dialects and...
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Posted by greg at
8:45 PM
It's got shiny spheres, and science re-creations, and DC artists and quotes from curator and museum director friends. But it's been a few weeks now, and the only thing I can say about Blake Gopnik's mind-numbing/blowing article on Jim Sanborn...
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Posted by greg at
1:58 PM
August 19, 2009
Maybe it's just me who figured at the time, everyone was caught up in the giddy, optimistic hype of the World's Fair. I guess I hadn't counted on E.B. White. His nonplussed review of the 1939 New York World's Fair...
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Posted by greg at
1:25 AM
July 12, 2009
Gay Talese writes everything everyday on shirtboards-- INTERVIEWER Do you use notebooks when you are reporting? TALESE I don't use notebooks. I use shirt boards. INTERVIEWER You mean the cardboard from dry-cleaned shirts? TALESE Exactly. I cut the shirt...
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11:54 PM
May 25, 2009
David Kurtz, writing on Talking Points Memo about finding the grave of Corporal Pearl B. Wilkerson, who was killed in action in April 1945, just before the European war ended:But what lingers for me about Wilkerson is how Memorial Day...
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Posted by greg at
9:41 PM
April 17, 2009
He starts out a little twee, and there's a tugging undercurrent of ambivalence, but Andrew Hultkrans' Artforum writeup of an artistic evening at the Angel Orensanz Foundation inspired by David Maisel's Library of Dust is pretty awesome. He totally nails...
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Posted by greg at
3:54 PM
February 26, 2009
I discovered the Maysles brothers' 1975 documentary Grey Gardens in my first semester of busines school. My marketing professor showed us Salesman, and it floored me, leaving me to track down the rest of the Maysles' work. So I can't...
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Posted by greg at
10:28 PM
February 21, 2009
Awesome, I just read through the announcement of the 2008 Arts Writers Grant recipients, and I have to give a huge shoutout to Paddy Johnson whose Art Fag City is one of the first two blogs to be recognized by...
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Posted by greg at
11:25 PM
February 17, 2009
Whether it's right or not, this book sounds fantastic:Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did. In fact, if artmaking did not tell you (the maker)...
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Posted by greg at
10:50 AM
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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Posted by greg at
9:03 AM
November 8, 2008
Before Jonathan Lethem could call 2666, Roberto Bolano's novel, recently translated into English, a masterpiece, he referenced a Philip K. Dick story titled "The Preserving Machine," so we knew he wasn't taking the term lightly:Dick's parable evokes the absurd yearning...
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Posted by greg at
8:34 PM
November 2, 2008
Steve Rosen found a 1981 interview with Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray at the flea market. He transcribed a bit onto Airform Archive, starting with an encounter Ray had with the 1913 Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore:Satyajit Ray: I'll tell you a...
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Posted by greg at
7:11 AM
October 25, 2008
How the hell did The Onion AV Club manage to score an interview with John Hodgman??AVC: What is the process like on The Daily Show? How do ideas get developed and refined into a bit? JH: I can only speak...
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Posted by greg at
12:27 PM
October 13, 2008
I was talking with an artist friend yesterday, and he made a reference to "Krauss's 'Sculpture and the Expanded Field'," and I was all, "huh?" And he was all, "WHAT?" And so I was like, "Don't know it," and he...
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Posted by greg at
12:37 AM
September 20, 2008
From the i-banking obit the NYT has waiting on the shelf for just such emergencies: "I hate to use the phrase 'masters of the universe,' but they're not in investment banking anymore, they're in hedge funds," Mr. [Tom] Wolfe [who,...
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7:54 AM
September 14, 2008
Holy crap, David Foster Wallace died Friday night. [1] I thought we had a deal [2] we were going to grow old together.... dammit [1] hanged. [2] the deal: he writes, I read....
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Posted by greg at
8:05 AM
September 5, 2008
"This is the place that matters." And this just gets better and better. Walter Reed Middle School served as the backdrop for the presidential candidacy of Democratic congressman Matt Santos--as played by Jimmy Smits on West Wing. West Wing...
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Posted by greg at
2:12 PM
August 23, 2008
"The guys from The Politico brought her [my mom, Cindy McCain] flowers, which I still think is the most adorable thing ever, so thank you. I thought it was so cute that they decided to bring my mom flowers,...
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Posted by greg at
11:51 AM
July 16, 2008
-From the otherwise excellent Observer profile of recent NYC returnee Steve Guttenberg, which inexplicably leaves out one of his best New York projects, the Village People vehicle Can't Stop The Music:"I am a seducer, I'm a salesman," [The Goot] said....
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Posted by greg at
10:08 AM
May 27, 2008
Interesting. The script for one of my favorite Scorsese films, his dark, odd 1985 After Hours, appears to have been heavily lifted from a 1982 performance by Joe Frank, one of my favorite dark, odd radio dramatists. Andrew Hearst has...
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Posted by greg at
11:30 PM
April 6, 2008
Choire's interview with Elizabeth Berkley reminded me of some unfinished Showgirls business here on greg.org. Back in 2002, right after Beyer Blinder Belle released the first, banal master plans for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site, a...
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Posted by greg at
8:31 PM
Shotgun! Does anyone know who wrote about visiting a gun show and the NRA convention for Spy? The caption under the photo of Charlton Heston was "Guns 'n Moses." The title of the magazine got everyone they talked to...
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Posted by greg at
8:03 PM
February 25, 2008
Wow. It feels like there's an entire novel just waiting to forth this, the most solipsistic headline Cory's ever put on boingboing. Remixable German documentary about me and Internet freedom [bb]...
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Posted by greg at
12:43 AM
November 15, 2007
This is funny: Not The Daily Show, With Some Writer But this is funnier: From the Colbert Report writers: hungvp158: "Very successful entertainment executive, who is also quite young for his position, on why scribes' strike is asinine. Not tooting...
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Posted by greg at
6:15 PM
August 21, 2007
At a recent conference talk on magic given in Las Vegas, Teller [the quiet one] gave the most amazing definition of magic I wish I'd heard before writing about Scott Sforza for Cabinet Magazine's magic issue:[Magic is] the theatrical linking...
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Posted by greg at
6:43 PM
July 21, 2007
I only discovered the Chinese government's published evisceration of Michelangelo Antonioni's 1972 documentary Chung Kuo - Cina after I thought I'd finished my Cabinet article on Scott Sforza. Jonathan wondered if Susan Sontag's On Photography might have a relevant...
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Posted by greg at
11:06 PM
July 19, 2007
Can I just say, I've reached a point in my life where I don't know what's left to accomplish? I mean, how can I top the thrill of getting to write for Cabinet Magazine? I just don't know. I've had...
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Posted by greg at
11:15 PM
May 7, 2007
Under the guise of giving advice for our own screenwriting projects, John August makes some good points about coincidences in the Spiderman 3 script. He divides coincidences into two basic categories: Fundamental and Minor. The latter are often the result...
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Posted by greg at
9:19 AM
May 2, 2007
I've always known that you never passed anything from one set of chopsticks to another because it was part of the Japanese funeral service, but I never had any idea... "Letter from a Japanese Crematorium," Marie Mutsuki Mockett's incredible essay...
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Posted by greg at
5:57 PM
March 14, 2007
Tom Scocca does a great takedown of The Economist, and by association, the unalloyed Economist worshippers in the magazine industry: "When other magazines say they want to be like The Economist, they do not mean they wish to be serious....
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Posted by greg at
9:36 AM
March 4, 2007
Didion has some notes in today's NYT about adapting her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, into a play. She could write a laundry ticket and I'd be impressed, but it really is fascinating stuff.I have been asked if I...
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Posted by greg at
9:41 PM
January 19, 2007
As someone whose desktop contains several drafts of an adaptation of a straightforwardly narrative but slightly magically naturalist historical novel, I've watched the discussion of Screenhead's list of unfilmable novels with vested interest. It took over forty comments for my...
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Posted by greg at
9:05 AM
November 20, 2006
She goes to the trouble of using both "quinary" and "kith," but for some reason, Thomas Pynchon's new book, Against The Day, does not face the unbridled, in-character wrath of The Full Kakutani....
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Posted by greg at
3:07 PM
November 4, 2006
That was my original choice for a title, but I'm happy enough just not botching the Hamlet reference. Thanks to all the people who helped with interviews and research and editing. Since the story closed, I've heard from a couple...
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Posted by greg at
11:37 PM
August 20, 2006
David Foster Wallace loves himself some footnotes, even when he's writing for the New York Times. So I allowed myself a flash of curious anticipation, even though I knew that when that linky glow showed up on Ralph Lauren's name...
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Posted by greg at
2:51 PM
June 10, 2006
For the writer for whom a $20 Faber Blackwing pencil is just not stressful enough may I suggest Carbon Copies, "pencils made from the carbon produced during cremation. A lifetime supply of pencils can be made from one body of...
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Posted by greg at
11:33 AM
March 23, 2006
"It's a nice masculine aesthetic," said Robert Tagliapietra, who with his similarly bearded partner, Jeffrey Costello, designs a collection of pretty silk jersey dresses under the Costello Tagliapietra label.Also, Ulysses S. Grant does not actually appear in Cold Mountain....
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Posted by greg at
10:33 AM
January 4, 2006
Although he IS credited with the screenplay for Gus Van Sant's Elephant, I confess to not being a fan of JT LeRoy. Not that I've ever read the work, mind you. [Hold that thought.] Recently the authenticity of his identity,...
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Posted by greg at
2:06 AM
September 28, 2005
Paul smashes his guitar of truth into the speaker tower of fiction, finally revealing to the world that he is Gary Benchley, Rock Star with a book deal--and a reading next Thursday in [where else?] Williamsburg:As the serial progressed I...
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Posted by greg at
9:50 AM
September 24, 2005
I recall being seized by a pressing need not to let anyone at The Los Angeles Times learn what had happened by reading it in The New York Times. I called our closest friend at The Los Angeles Times. I...
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Posted by greg at
10:09 AM
September 16, 2005
I shouldn't be surprised that I'm getting this question a lot these days. Here's what Ang Lee told the NYT's Karen Durbin:"When I first read the story, it gripped me. It's a great American love story, told in a way...
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Posted by greg at
7:34 AM
July 12, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/arts/design/10alle.html">And Now, a Word From the Streets. Thanks to Noah at Critical Massive and Edmar at Lumpen for their help, and a special thanks to Marc at Wooster Collective, for both his help and his insights; it always amazes me...
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Posted by greg at
12:34 PM
So someone wrote to the Observer suggesting--in the nicest, possible way, really. really--that maybe it's your "yucky" outfit. Maybe the expensively groomed people you're covering aren't recoiling at your little tape recorders, dear Observers, but at your obvious lack of...
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Posted by greg at
11:21 AM
May 22, 2005
I had a small piece in the Times today about artists' unrealized projects, which is really based on the interviewing work of the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. Unlike architects' unbuilt projects, Obrist notes, which are published, debated, and considered critically...
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Posted by greg at
10:36 AM
April 24, 2005
Used to be when Roger Avary was the only screenwriter with a weblog. No more. Here are three other screenwriters' blogs that are well worth reading: JohnAugust.com: In addition to film credits such as Go, Big Fish, and the upcoming...
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Posted by greg at
11:16 AM
April 18, 2005
Venezuelan president (who's working on the "for-life" part)Hugo Chavez is distributing 1 million free copies of Don Quixote to his countrymen as part of a nationwide literacy campaign based on a Cuban model. According to the BBC, Chavez called for...
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Posted by greg at
8:39 AM
April 14, 2005
"Please don't publish narratives in our Home Section; we don't embroider the wallpaper in your maharani boudoir." Or how about, "A decorator with a narrative is like a mule with a spinning wheel. no one knows how he got it,...
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Posted by greg at
5:40 AM
April 5, 2005
First Jim Taylor and his writing partner Alexander Payne spoke at MoMA as part of the museum's Great Collaborations series, then Jim Taylor and his wifing partner Tamara Jenkins spoke at MoMA about their collaborative, parallel screenwriting/moviemaking as part of...
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Posted by greg at
4:47 AM
April 4, 2005
[John Patrick] Shanley, whose screenplay for Moonstruck won an Oscar in 1988, received the drama Pulitzer for "Doubt," his Broadway debut. "I have been trawling around for a long time before they let me come up out of the muck."Other...
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Posted by greg at
10:34 AM
January 25, 2005
What with all the access preserving, the source stroking and the advertiser cultivating going on, I guess I shouldn't be surprised at the utter lack of real context or actual reporting when it comes to fashion. Stories about Helmut Lang's...
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Posted by greg at
7:36 AM
January 20, 2005
When Richard Hatch of Survivor fame [sic] got busted for failing to report his $1 million prize to the IRS, my mind raced back to some of the first tax advice I ever heard:You.. can be a millionaire.. and never...
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Posted by greg at
10:56 AM
January 15, 2005
The shows are almost entirely presented as direct addresses, and the actors will often talk to one another between plays, using one another's real names. Every performance of "Too Much Light" begins like a political stump speech: someone stands up,...
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Posted by greg at
12:20 PM
January 3, 2005
"As we discussed Beth's bizarre ability to speak the Klingon language, it suddenly hit us: Why not translate the Book of Mormon into Klingon? It was just quirky enough to be interesting. So Beth whipped out her two volumes...
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Posted by greg at
4:49 AM
December 28, 2004
There are some habits that are hard to break. For example, when I get lost driving, it's usually because I've exited or turned too early, not too late. In writing, meanwhile, my tendency is to overwrite. Reading back through scripts...
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Posted by greg at
9:24 AM
December 9, 2004
Over at TMN, "Rick Paulas has tips for turning your art-house script into big money." The future? In one word: product placement. Of course, unlike, say, American Pyscho, which placed so many products it could've been a Bond film, [wait,...
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Posted by greg at
9:45 AM
December 8, 2004
That whole "Canadian Flags On Backpacks" craze is so 2003. If you're gonna be all embarassed by American folly and all weary of explaining the Bush administration to every foreigner you meet, at least try to look like you've been...
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Posted by greg at
8:20 AM
December 5, 2004
So I've been writing a few pieces for The New York Times lately, which is great, but I can't read them. Or almost any stories at the nytimes.com site, for that matter. Whenever I click on a NYT link, the...
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Posted by greg at
9:40 AM
November 23, 2004
a couple of the things I would've missed had I not actually read the printed version of the Sunday Times: In her interview at Cannes, a thoroughly justified Manohla Dargis somehow manages to not point out to Jean-Luc Godard that,...
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7:27 AM
November 22, 2004
So now some guy's drinking only Pepsi for 45 days and blogging about it? 45 days? Call me when you get to three years, pal. This entry, like the 1425 before it, was brought to you by Diet Coke. Now...
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8:03 AM
November 19, 2004
In the nineteen-thirties and forties, Damon Runyon was the most widely read journalist in the country, and his movies like Double Indemnity and Broadway plays like Guys and Dolls were hits. Runyon held court nightly in Lindy's Restaurant on Broadway...
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5:11 AM
November 17, 2004
As part of a settlement in a discrimination suit, Abercrombie & Fitch will create an "Office of Diversity." $50 million buys a lot of waxing [SJ Mercury News]...
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7:57 AM
November 12, 2004
A round of applause to the advertisers who keep greg.org swimming (ok, maybe wading...ok, maybe slightly damp) in MoMA tickets. Please show them we're not ALL poverty-stricken Marxist anti-consumerists: KevinKringle.com (it's getting to be some time of year, anyway) Moretosee.com...
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9:25 AM
November 11, 2004
Just what's been on my mind: Louis Feuillade was the French anti-Griffith, whose crime serials and mystery, Les Vampires embraced elusiveness over narrative primacy; they were met with disdain from French critics. The director in Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep was...
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11:19 AM
November 3, 2004
That's the gist of just about every pundit I've heard today: those pesky gays and their persistent existence cost Dems the election. Sounds like it's going to be a long, hard, punishing four years for gay folk in this country....
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2:52 AM
October 30, 2004
Hats off to writers Christian Newton and Casey McAdams for their hilarious NickNolteDiary.com, and for their help in putting together the timeline in the Times Sunday. I happily traded a greg.org mention in the piece for the byline, duh. Alas,...
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10:22 AM
October 19, 2004
"...a knifeóstrongly made, well balanced, and with an absolute minimum of moving parts. -Michael Swanwick "...looking through a keyhole. A novel is a 360-degree panoramic window. -Matthew Klam "...something you could do in a fit of passion...Writing a novel is...
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7:22 AM
October 15, 2004
Father forgive me for ever doubting the authenticity of NickNolteDiary.com. After all, Ireland Online has reported about Nolte's traffic accident with Rosanna Arquette. Nolte crashes into Arquette [Worldwide Entertainment Network News, via IOL]...
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2:34 AM
October 13, 2004
From the awesome Nick Nolte Diary: [on templates] August 14, 2004, First Entry Well, Diary, here I am on the internet. And at the top of my bookmarks menu is my new site. I have enough trouble with my computer...
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12:37 PM
October 12, 2004
Which was registered two years ago last week, it turns out. Registrant: Pending Renewal or Deletion P.O. Box 430 Herndon, VA 20172-0447 US Phone: 570-708-8786 Domain Name: GAWKER.COM Record expires on 05-Oct-2004 Record created on 05-Oct-2002 Update: Trying to think...
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10:26 AM
October 6, 2004
I love this place: BYU newspaper yanks T-shirt ad [Deseret News] And I love these t-shirts: I Cant...I'm Mormon...
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11:33 AM
September 26, 2004
That's what I'm thinking of changing the subtitle of this weblog to, although I'm still unconvinced. It works in Europe, where I am not, at least most of the time. Top ten lists on the radio are called "le best...
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12:03 PM
September 5, 2004
I just assume that everyone knows about PublicRadioFan.com, Kevin A. Kelly's up-to-the-minute online programming guide for public radio stations. The more I listen to radio online, the more frequently I find myself crafting my own programming schedule; I'll listen to...
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8:42 AM
September 4, 2004
"We are starting to go buggy, just getting on one another's nerves," Mrs Mildred Mauney, 81, told The New York Times, after spending the night with some strangers in a classroom-turned-shelter in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Whatever, Millie. Join the...
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2:27 AM
August 16, 2004
Until I see them standing side by side, I'm going to assume that "Jessica Coen" is really Choire Sicha indulging his "breast-wielding, 24-year old D-girl" side. I mean, it's not like he needed an excuse to read WWD... Or waitaminnit,...
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5:36 AM
July 28, 2004
To be filed under P for Playah Hatah: Setting: the downtown 6 train, 59th - 50th street. Dramatis Personae: a shapely 20-something woman of a certain race with a JPMorganChase totebag, two 30-ish gentlemen of a certain race with knee-length...
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11:14 AM
July 22, 2004
So I get out of the city for a couple of days, take the kid to Grammy's house (not to be confused with Latin Grammy's, whose calls we don't return), take a break from the hubbub. Little did I know...
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12:35 PM
July 9, 2004
" Like a soufflÈ or brain surgery, the supernatural requires a delicate touch." - Alessandra Stanley's NYT review of "The 4400," a remarkably good-sounding USA Network movie about alien abductees. "One is always on the lookout for an excuse to...
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9:49 AM
June 27, 2004
After discovering an inexplicable pulsing signal (a "sniggling quarter inch" blip that showed up for 5 min/day) in her PhD radio astronomy data (thousands of feet of paper charts) at Cambridge, Jocelyn Bell and her adviser Tony Hewish, wondered if...
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11:38 AM
June 22, 2004
Now I fear that my entire life may be punctuated incorrectly (it is)....
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10:06 AM
June 16, 2004
Not necessarily in that order. 1989: Woman gives birth to baby girl. Man helps change diapers at first, then abandons woman and 10-month old child. Woman laments the lack of real men like her father, moves in with father. cut...
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9:15 AM
June 2, 2004
On Design Observer, Michael Bierut initiated an interesting conversation comparing the collaborative arts of graphic design and filmmaking (initially, it was just screenwriting). Most discussion is about credit and credit-taking, and presupposes some ideal of creative--that is to say, individual...
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12:42 PM
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 21, 2004
If you combine reading this hi-larious script with a flip through an oily Brad Pitt photo shoot from [throw rock, hit any current title] Magazine, it'll be like watching Troy--only 2.5 hours shorter*, $10.25 cheaper, and ten times funnier:Beach of...
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11:53 AM
May 4, 2004
That was my dilemma last night in attending Gothamisty NY Bloggers forum at the Apple store. Like everyone else, I went to drum up traffic for my own weblog. Sure, some will act like they care about the Freddie Nick...
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2:41 AM
May 3, 2004
[via kottke] Peter Kaminski points out that Google set their IPO target at $2,718,281,828, which is the natural log value, "e." Hi-freakin-larious. Who needs i-bankers to pull valuations out of the air when you've got a Googleplex of phd's who...
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12:33 PM
May 2, 2004
Marlise Simons reports in the Times on celebrations under way all over Spain to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Don Quixote, the country's "secular bible." Festivities included a marathon 44-hour mundo hispanico reading, which mirrors nicely my own weeklong marathon...
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11:43 AM
May 1, 2004
MMMMWAHAHAHA. Wendy Mitchell demonstrates why she gets the big pro blogger bucks. Like free sample day at the Whole Foods cheese department, she's laid out bites of Elvis Mitchell's ripest metaphors for you to sample with your little review-reading toothpick....
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7:53 AM
April 29, 2004
Whether it's momentum, or a mindshare takeover, or a drive to push the site out of the nest and let it learn to fly, or the fact that I've changed 200 diapers in the last three weeks, I've been posting...
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11:52 AM
April 20, 2004
The following were not reasons for my not posting for five days: Was walking the dog in the park at 4AM and "fell for a con" [Is that what they call it on Oz now, Kevin?] Was hiring a hitman...
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12:13 PM
April 14, 2004
At that graduate writing lecture? The one on the front row of the auditorium, with the grimy totebags stuffed with sheafs of paper? The old dude, who kept asking about, didn't you ever notice in Shakespeare's Titus how...? and how...
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7:22 AM
January 16, 2004
[via IFP] New York Women in Film and Television is sponsoring a panel titled The Art of Adaptation on Jan. 28 in New York, thank you. In fact, it's at the Alliance Francaise/French Institute, East 60th St, so even I...
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12:37 PM
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November 9, 2003
Salon is not only still publishing, they're publishing the shooting script of the Ronald Reagan TV movie that the conservative closet cases wanted to see on Showtime (the Queer as Folk Network). It's an 8Mb pdf. Of a TV Movie....
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11:53 AM
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September 22, 2003
Absolutely hi-larious then rousing reportage from this weekend's New Yorker Festival by Choire G. Sicha on The Morning News (the G is for Gawker). He too-generously covers the frenetic irrelevancy of Dave Eggers, ("Eggers sold out in 30 minutes (his...
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11:27 AM
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August 27, 2003
Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycling through the red states. C1's playing in Boise, where it was shot (and Barney's hometown), and C3 has apparently won the Strangest Movie Shown In Nashville Award. (Heads up, bootleggers: The Tennessean's Kevin Nance has...
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3:01 AM
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August 23, 2003
In the Guardian, British docu maker John Brownlow tells about the tricky business of writing a screenplay about Sylvia Plath, one of the most fought-over writers of the modern era. With duelling critics, conflicting biographies, testy literary estates controlling the...
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10:55 AM
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July 26, 2003
In the NYT, Stephen Kinzer easily pulls some horrible quotes from major publishers about how Americans don't want to read books translated into English. From a marketing hack at Harcourt: "We [Americans] are into accessible information. We often look for...
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6:15 AM
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June 10, 2003
via Boingboing: On Mindjack, Joshua Ellis writes at length about what he calls Taste Tribes, friendship by cultural affinity--liking people who like the same stuff. Blogs are the engines for the smarter artist/chiefs of their own taste tribes. I cooked...
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9:32 AM
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April 28, 2003
Dear Diary: To be filed under "T for That's New Yorkers for ya": Setting: The M4 Limited. Dramatis Personae: the commuting population of Manhattan, and a male writer of a certain age, wearing an insouciantly knotted ascot, who appears to...
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3:18 AM
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April 27, 2003
Daily Script is an excellent-looking archive of html/pdf screenplays. I'm reading the Three Kings shooting script. I got Daily Script from the Guardian film section's Sites We Like, an excellent mix of the entertaining and useful, the mainstream and...
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11:39 AM
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April 15, 2003
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...
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11:44 AM
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April 5, 2003
Iraqi troops aren't puttin' up a good enough fight for you? Your teams didn't make it into the Final Four? Your need to engage, even vicariously, in tales of the life-consuming urge to win is going unmet? Read Anna Ditkoff's...
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11:16 AM
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February 12, 2003
Hardly ever, frankly. But William Hamilton's wonderful story of the Kellams, a couple who lived alone, together, on an island off Mount Desert Island, really got me for some reason. Hamilton mentions David Graham's book about the couple, Alone...
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11:55 AM
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February 7, 2003
Bill & Nada's Cafe was where I had my first script idea. It's not that the Salt Lake dance clubs were cooler than the ones in Provo, there were no dance clubs in Provo. (Don't talk to me about...
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8:00 AM
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January 1, 2003
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over Triboro Bridge, so many, I had not thought the MLA had undone so many. - apologies to T. S. EliotThe MLA Convention was in town, "but now they're...
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3:41 AM
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December 18, 2002
LIVE@WTC DESIGN PRESS CON. PIX ETC 2 FOLLOW...
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10:01 AM
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November 8, 2002
In the Casino resaurant, not the slightest impedance at all to getting in, no drop in temperature perceptible to his skin, Slothrop sits down at a table where somebody has left last Tuesday's London Times. Hmmm. Hasn't seen one of...
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3:39 AM
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November 5, 2002
Film critic Anthony Lane is writing the diary at Slate. So far, it's been torrid accounts of the perils of writing. It's pretty suspenseful stuff, journaling as a pitch/plea for giving Lane the Charlie Kaufman Treatment. (Kaufman wrote the...
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1:29 AM
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October 7, 2002
Took a couple of short breaks from writing the as-yet unannounced animated musical (henceforth, AYUAM), just to read the paper: David Kehr's profile of Paul Thomas Anderson. "[In Punch-Drunk Love, Emily] Watson plays one of the many guardian angel figures...
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12:33 PM
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October 1, 2002
The way I read this NY Times article, Joseph Epstein is secretly hoping his advice is wrong. "As the author of 14 books, with a 15th to be published next spring..." he writes, "...don't write that book, my advice is,...
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11:06 AM
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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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May 13, 2002
Poetry using Google Adwords: One more non-traditional (at least by contemporary standards) medium for creative expression (besides ebay and amazon reviews, which I mentioned last week.) The difference with adwords, of course, is that it costs you money ($15/thousand views...
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9:42 AM
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