June 2004 Archives

I heard Newsweek's Michael Isikoff barking on WBUR last night about how the shifty Michael Moore has not released a transcript of Farenheit 9/11, the easier to dispute the points he makes in the film.

[Is irony really, truly dead after all, that so many of the tortillas being flung at F9/11 from the right-field bleachers are because Moore "makes inaccurate insinuations from unrelated facts and dishonestly leads people to jump to conclusions that are otherwise unsupported?" Matthew Continetti, the Weekly Standard water carrier on On Point kept making that argument, and I'm like, what veep-in' Vice President have you been listening to the last three years?

As I see it, the only possible vindication worse than Michael Moore's is Graydon Carter's, my glass-house-livin' slavishly administration-supportin' friends.]

Anyway, waxy and daily.greencine.com point out that Drew at Script-o-rama has found and documented self-serving inaccuracies and bias in the transcript used by many Moore critics, including Isikoff. I certainly feel better when I say it: go factcheck yourself.

Mail fraud charges--for improperly ordering high school science-level lab samples--were announced yesterday against Prof. Steve Kurtz, a member of Critical Art Ensemble and a colleague.

Despite absence of ball, game, playbook, rules, Feds decide to keep kicking.

Mike Mills will be at an AFI screening of his Air documentary Eating, Sleeping, Waiting and Playing Wed. 6/30 at ArcLight Hollywood. 8 o'clock. It's being shown as part of an AFI series of music documentaries, which until last weekend, people thought made a lot of money.

Critics who don't buy this also don't buy this [via bloggy]

I guess if the Observer isn't going to have art critics whose recommendations ever make sense, at least they can have critics whose pans are consistent signals of worthwhile shows.

Issue of 2004-07-05
Posted 2004-06-28

THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT/ WARS AND IDEAS/ George Packer on ideologies of government in the new sovereign Iraq.
DEPT. OF BUILDING/ WINNING THE WEST/ William Finnegan on a stadium, a highway, and the fate of the West Side.
ON THE MAT/ TAKEDOWN/ Ben McGrath on the U.S. womenís wrestling team.
INK/ GANGSTA CONTENT/ Adam Green on Don Diva, a magazine about the streets.
DEPT. OF DISCRETION/ BY POPULAR DEMAND/ Dana Goodyear on Princess Dianaís former butler and his one-man show.

SHOUTS & MURMURS/ Paul Simms/ A Prayer
LETTER FROM FALLUJA/ Nir Rosen/ Home Rule/ A report from behind opposition lines.
FICTION/John Updike/ "Elsie by Starlight"

THE CRITICS
BOOKS/ Adam Kirsch/ Reckless Endangerment/ The making and unmaking of Dylan Thomas.
BOOKS/ Thomas Mallon/ Wide Turns/ In a new novel, Jerry Stahl channels Fatty Arbuckle.
DANCING/ Joan Acocella/ Tribute/ The Balanchine centennial.
THE CURRENT CINEMA/ David Denby/ Wanderers/ "Before Sunset" and "The Terminal."

FROM THE ARCHIVE
THE TALK OF THE TOWN/ Notes and Comment/ John Malcolm Brinnin/ Issue of 1982-03-29/ Brinnin, who remained anonymous for the piece, describes the dedication ceremony for a statue of Thomas at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

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 it was a stellar phenomenon or some man-made interference. If the signal was indeed real, its source was unknown to science at that time. They took to calling it "little green men."

There was a meeting just beofre Christmas 1967 which I stumbled upon. I went down to Tony's office to ask him something and unusually, the door was shut. I knocked and a voice said, "Come in." I stuck my head around the door and Tony said "Ah, Jocelyn, come in and shut the door." So I went in and shut the door. It was a discussion between Tony Hewish (my supervisor), Martin Ryle (the head of the Group), and probably John Shakshaft (one of the other senior members of the Group). The discussion was along the lines of "how do we publish this result?"

I went off on holiday and came back to the lab wearing an engagement ring. That was the stupidest thing I ever did. In those days, married women did not work...My appearance wearing an engagement ring signalled that I was exiting from professional life. Incidentally, it is interesting to notice that people were much more willing to congratulate me on my engagement than congratulate me on making a major astrophysical discover. Society felt that in getting engaged I was doing the right thing for a young woman. In discovering pulsars, I wasn't...

What IS certain, however, is that Ryle and Hewish were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1974, Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars." Although some argue differently, Bell is widely thought to have been robbed of a Nobel Prize. She is currently Dean of Science at the University of Bath.

Bell's fascinating first-hand account of the discovery was reprinted in the June 2004 issue of Status: A Report on Women in Astronomy, which is published by the American Astronomical Society [PDF only].

In her telling, the N-word never comes up, even indirectly, but it looms large as day-to-day details of the players' actions and theories build up. The excerpts above are about as close as Bell comes to explaining why she thinks she didn't share the Nobel.

The only woman to win a Nobel Prize for Physics was Marie Curie in 1903, for discovering radiation. (She won again for Chemistry in 1911, for discovering radium.)

If you are going to call yourself a Christian -- and I don't -- then you have to ask yourself a fundamental question, and that is: Whom would Jesus torture? Whom would Jesus drag around on a dog's leash? How can Christians tolerate it? It is unconscionable.

So now my big complaint about WPS1 is that you can't link to broadcasts very easily.

I've been listening to a series of lectures the art historian Leo Steinberg gave at MoMA in 1960 about contemporary art and the public's reception/perception of it. There are three hour-long lectures; the first appeared last week (6/15), so work your way back through the 'previous broadcast' section to them.

I'm a lazy fan of Steinberg, whose unabashedly erudite tone I find very engaging. He invariably uses it to deliver extremely smart insights, all the while bringing you along his observational and analytical path. His method and criticism still strike me as entirely applicable to art-seeing and -making today.

It's about as much fun as an audio recording of a slide lecture can be, I imagine. And it's fascinating to listen back on a time when artist like Jasper Johns or John Chamberlain were seen as controversial provocateurs. Check it out.

It's like WPS1, but it's almost two years old. The Walker Art Center operates The Walker Channel, an online collection of streamable artist interviews and other programming.

This is one prong of the museum's strategy to maintain and expand their presence while their building is receiving a Herzog & deMeuron makeover.

Most of the recordings are interviews with people I've never heard of, and there are no explanations. But there IS a 2002 interview with Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, one of the principals in the cool Tokyo architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow. They published Pet Architecture, which is a very cool book and site.

It's simultaneously heartening and depressing to note that this interview with an architect I'm very interested in is almost as excruciatingly underproduced as the early WPS1 bits I whined about earlier.

So you better treat her right.

Approximately a hundred friends at Downtown for Democracy are organizing a fundraising party and silent auction of works by 35 established and emerging artists Tuesday, June 29, at Passerby.

Buy a $75 ticket to bid (silent auction runs from 8-10:30) or to see the preview (11-6). [And even though Bush & Co are the world's problem, federal election regulations don't permit (non-permanent resident) foreigners to give money or bid. Sorry.]

D4D is a PAC mobilizing the arts and creative community to raise hard money to, among other things, clean up the language on the Senate floor.

Curbed has a warning for NYC apartment hunters: "Fear The Lamp."

Apparently, ARCO lamps--designed by the late Achille Castiglioni--are turning up in real estate listings with alarming frequency. [One possible reason: they're freakin' heavy. I had a chance to get one from a b-school friend's apartment (where, according to the landlady, it had been abandoned many tenants before), but the solid marble block base was too unwieldy to carry down three flights of stairs. I'm sure it's still there.]

Apartment buyers, sure to ask if The Lamp conveys; if it does, you may get a price break. But if you're the guy in the apartment without The Lamp, a vintage 60's version can be found on ebay or wherever for around $1,000-1,500, about half the cost of a shiny new one.

From the preface to his excellent Slate review: "In 20 years of writing about film, no movie has ever tied me up in knots the way Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 (Lions Gate) has. It delighted me; it disgusted me. I celebrate it; I lament it. I'm sure of only one thing: that I don't trust anyoneópro or conówho doesn't feel a twinge of doubt about his or her responses. What follows might be broadly labeled as 'waffling,' but I hope, at least, that it is bold and decisive waffling."

Meanwhile, I was in NYC Wednesday afternoon and passed by a theater showing F9/11. Then I arrived at our place in DC just in time to watch the crowds and paparazzi for the "US Premiere" disperse from the theater across the street. Since then, I've seen references on the news to the film's "Premiere" in DC.

Somebody should write a book someday about a culture where the only reality is what people hear and see on TV.

The production company has published some pictures from the set on their website. They reveal some useful tips for imagemakers who need to utterly transform an alcohol and drug treatment center into a TV-friendly black-box studio.

First, the basics:

"Gibson, the director, producer and screenwriter of The Passion, was named the world's most powerful celebrity by Forbes magazine on Thursday, dethroning 'Friends' star Jennifer Aniston who held the No. 1 spot last year." [CNN]

Related:
Also in the Top 100 by "Power Rank": Rudy Giuliani (#88), Paris Hilton (#70), QEFTSG(#78, with the other four no doubt pulling Carson down), William Hung (#96), Lindsay Lohan (#97).

Best quote, from the sidebar on Carson Daly (who nevertheless didn't make the list): "This is some dummy type for the sidebars in the celebrity some more dummy the side bars in the celebrity issue."

Related links: CDDb--The Carson Daly Database; Matthew Ch. 6, KJV.

When Picasso painted a portrait of Gertrude Stein (which she gave, alas, to the Met), someone said it didn't look like her. "It will," he replied. Such is the long horizon on which art's influence operates. Remember this when you look for the weblog on the JA site, because the Museum has called it a 'notebook'. A Typepad-powered notebook. We may not call weblogs notebooks now, the Museum seems to say, but we will.

I, of course, trendchaser that I am, suggested that the site be called JA Rule. After all, it/they does/do. For a young person in the city, it's probably the greatest opportunity to get involved with a truly amazing institution. And as the calendar of events attests, JA's get to do some really cool stuff. (For the reopening shindig this fall, being a JA is like having the golden ticket.)

In the end, the Museum's rejection of my JA Rule idea was correct. The main requirements for becoming a JA, you see, are 1) an interest in seeing and learning about art, 2) a desire to support the Museum, and 3) $500 a year, or as it's known in the haut monde of museum committees and high-priced benefit galas, 50 Cent.

Now I fear that my entire life may be punctuated incorrectly (it is).

"W Ketchup would like to thank President Reagan for his selfless service to this nation.

"Reagan won the Cold War, let private enterprise flourish, and most of all made Americans proud to be Americans again...

"You donít support Democrats. Why should your ketchup?

"W Ketchup is Americaís Ketchupô."

In the Old Testament, prophets regularly warned God's People against bowing down to the graven images of Baal that so entranced their Phoenician and Babylonian neighbors. B’le worship is again white-hot, or so reports Le Monde from the just-ended B’le Art Fair.

Fittingly, Baal (OT) means both "Lord" and "something possessed." B’le, in the mean time, means acquisition.

If you still don't know what the hell I'm talking about and you don't want to read French--do I have to mention that B’le is the French spelling for Basel?--the contemporary art market is rapidly becoming an overpriced, popstar-driven hype bubble, where artwork bought at auction just months ago is now back on the market for 2-3 times its last price. Basel is the money- and status-grubbing epicenter of this international folly.

Or so say the French. And Swiss-based critic and Basel symposium speaker Marc Spiegler, who compared the contemporary art world to the pop music industry in its growing reliance on churning out crowd-pleasing, money-making product made by "fresh meat."

The best quote is the first, though, an Italian collector who summons the spirit of B’le when he indignantly refuses a $50 DVD of African video art created to raise money for AIDS: "I do not buy cheap art."

Issue of 2004-06-28
Posted 2004-06-21

THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT/ WINNER/ Hendrik Hertzberg on what Reagan did right.
PEN PAL DEPT./ TIME SERVED/ Ben McGrath on what the shoe bomber Richard Reid is reading.
SH-H-H!/ WORSE THAN HIS BITE/ Eric Konigsberg on hushing the cityís dogs.
THE PICTURES/ GROSS AND GROSSER/ Michael Agger on a peculiar Asian film festival.
RETURN TO SENDER/ BRAINS/ Marshall Efron on the plight of a literate letter.

POSTSCRIPT/ Edmund Morris/ The Unknowable/ Remembering Ronald Reagan.

SHOUTS & MURMURS/ Bruce McCall/ Olympics Countdown Quickens

ANNALS OF NATIONAL SECURITY/ Seymour M. Hersh/ Plan B/ Israel explores its options in Iraq.

FICTION/ Louise Erdrich/ "The Plague of Doves"

THE CRITICS
BOOKS/ John Updike/ Silent Master/ Henry James becomes the hero of a historical novel.
BOOKS/ Louis Menand/ Bad Comma/ Lynne Trussís strange grammar.
POP MUSIC/ Sasha Frere-Jones/ Singles/ Whatís on the radio.
THE CURRENT CINEMA/ David Denby/ George & Me/ Michael Mooreís viciously funny attack on the Bush Administration.
ON TELEVISION/ Nancy Franklin/ The Fox Box/ The network cancels our summer vacation.

FROM THE ARCHIVE
PROFILES/ Larissa Macfarquhar/ THE POPULIST/ Michael Moore can make you cry./ Issue of 2004-02-16 & 23

On WNYC this morning, Sara Fishko trained her typical I'm-lyrical-yet-significant gaze on Slavko Vorkapich, the Serbian experimental filmmaker who became the leading montage editor inearly Hollywood. He sought to create, not just a story, but "pure cinema," a rhythmic experience of light and sound. The frenetic "flying newspaper headline/oblique tight shot of typewriter keys" style he created became a ubiquitous cliche. Later on, as the head of USC's film school and through wildly popular lectures in the sixties, he turned a generation of filmmakers, cinematographers, and artists into his pure cinema groupies.

If WPS1 ever streams an archive tape of a Vorkapich lecture at MoMA, I'll let you know. In the mean time, Fishko's report, disguised as a tone poem, is on the WNYC site.

Welcome to a very special greg.org tribute to lowculture:

And I am an optimistic person. I guess if you want to try to find something to be pessimistic about, you can find it, no matter how hard you look, you know?

"You know what?'' she said. "I don't look at it that way. I'm a very positive person. I really always think positive. I think of good thoughts for people, and when you have a negative thought you know what you have to do?''

(Why do we think she thought we were particularly needful of this advice?)

"You close your eyes,'' she instructed. "You dismiss it and you think of something that you love and you know what I think about? You're gonna laugh. A Hansen's cake!''

We looked at her blankly.

"This great bakery in Beverly Hills, California,'' Ms. Hilton said. "It's got lots of sugar hearts on it and roses and little butterflies. I close my eyes like that'' - here she demonstrated - "and you dismiss it. Negativity only brings negativity around you. ''

In the Guardian, Thomas Kineally tells the rambling, sentimental story of coming across the Oskar Schindler story in 1980, when he dropped into a Beverly Hills handbag shop. Literally.

And in a rambling rant that ranges from the importance of obtaining copyright clearance for period music to the size of Reagan's bowel movements (Hey, I report, you decide.), John Patterson gives crucial advice to filmmakers trying to authentically recreate the past on a tight budget. So what's he say? Beats me; it makes almost no sense.

My advice: Do whatever Todd Haynes did in Velvet Goldmine. (Yeah, you could copy Far From Heaven, and almost go bust. Ask Killer Films if $16 million is low budget.)

[via waxy] A Flash movie of Tibetan monks making a sand mandala, made by David Hirmes using photos from the U of C.

Also on Hirmes.com, the Lewitt Variations, three Flash animations of possible interpretations of the instructions for a Sol Lewitt wall drawing. [to find it, check the periodic table-looking menu in the lower right corner for 'Lw'.]

from an AP report, Coalition's sealed compound includes a brisk bar scene:

The plushest tavern is the CIA's rattan furnished watering hole, known as the ''OGA bar." OGA stands for ''Other Government Agency," the CIA's low-key moniker.

The OGA bar has a dance floor with a revolving mirrored disco ball and a game room. It is open to outsiders by invitation only. Disgruntled CPA employees who haven't wangled invites complain that the CIA favors women guests.

From Gail Sheehy in the NY Observer

Before their F.A.A. superiors forbade them to talk to anyone, two of the controllers told the Christian Science Monitor on Sept. 11 that the captain of Flight 11 [the first plane hijacked], John Ogonowski, was surreptitiously triggering a "push-to-talk" button on the aircraft's yoke most of the way to New York. When controllers picked up the voices of men speaking in Arabic and heavily accented English, they knew something was terribly wrong. More than one F.A.A. controller heard an ominous statement by a terrorist in the background saying, "We have more planes. We have other planes."
...

To this writer's knowledge, there has been no public mention of the Flight 11 pilot's narrative since the news report on Sept. 12, 2001. When Peg Ogonowski, the pilotís wife, asked American Airlines to let her listen to that tape, she never heard back.

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 to -

2003: Ffifteen hardworking, single-parent years later, woman seeks fame and fortune in the entertainment industry. Ends up writing a weekly column for little conservative journal. Lives in Silver Lake, a raw-but-rapidly-gentrifying city in East L.A. full of "hippies," "gays, bohemians, and industry types," and which has one of the few public schools "where the children speak English at home." In an overwhelmingly anti-war town, woman is a lonely pro-war supporter.

March 2003: Seeking fame and fortune in the entertainment industry that so many of her unshaven neighbors seem to have attained, woman starts blog. Receives, not a script deal, but positive reviews--from "the Matt Drudge of porn," local warblogger, other Hollywood hangers-on.

First full-length post tells of her run-in at a gourmet grocery store with smug, self-absorbed, peace march-organizing creative type and his 4-year old son. Coins the term "Silver Lake Dads," which is picked up by exactly one person--the warblogger--to praise the woman's blog for "baiting hippie Silver Lake Dads"and to announce the availability of $5 wine on his failed Gawker clone.

June 2004: One week after organizing an Entertainment Industry And Political Bloggers In LA panel (still no development deal), woman is decried by writers, bloggers, hippies, creative types for her hatred and exclusion of same on panel. And, she says, for not linking to their hippie blogs.

In need of Father's Day story, woman recycles 15-month old blog post about self-absorbed hippie in the supermarket. Attempts to reinvigorate failed coinage, Silver Lake Dads, All dads who do not abandon their children and who are not her dad are like peacenik Hollywood writers. Professes admiration for the fictional creation of same, a dad character on TV. Still no script deal. Still single.

If you're in London this Father's Day: The artists Elmgreen & Dragset have put together a short program (49') of film and video works which "examine architecture's complicit role in defining our enactment of psychological states." It will be shown at the Tate Modern, this Sunday at 15.00 (3:00 pm for the yanks). [via kultureflash]

Half of that time will be taken up by Jean Genet's long-banned silent film, Un Chant d'Amour. It's from 1950, the Eisenhower Era, when prison sex and erotic power-tripping guards was still considered an import, not an export, in the US.

It's one of the landmarks of gay cinema [the DVD Times UK translates: "it contains possibly the earliest images of erect penises seen on a cinema screen."]. The film influenced Derek Jarman, inspired Todd Haynes' Poison, and lives on in every Calvin Klein perfume commercial you can think of.

Whether you take your father with you is none of my affair.

And they look so innocent...Elmgreen (l) and Dragset (r)

And this, from just one piece in the Times about the Ziegfeld Theater premiere of Farenheit 9/11:

1. "Can an artist have a luckier break than someone in power declaring their work should not be seen?...It is our belief, seeing the crowd, that HARVEY WEINSTEIN should send MICHAEL EISNER a plant."

Plants replace muffin baskets as the speed-dial thank-you gift of choice in Hollywood. With all the Atkins going around, muffins are now the f***-you gift. Unchanged: still unsure how to read a muffin basket from a 300-lb monster. The unseen impact: slave wage assistants lose their only reliable source of grains.

2. Standing ovation now comes BEFORE the film.

3. "Yhere was some hissing when CONDOLEEZZA RICE appeared on screen."

Supersized auditorium, darkness, loosen inhibitions and turn the Ziegfeld into the largest, loudest, most accurate test audience in town. [Oh wait, that stays the same. If you want to accurately predict public reception of your film, just run the trailer at the Ziegfeld. Those people know how to boo.]

4. "LEONARDO DICAPRIO, in a backward baseball cap and wispy facial hair, did group interviews at Mr. Weinstein's request."

We now care deeply what celebrities think about politics.

5. "Is it important for celebrities to be public about their political beliefs, a reporter asked.

Ooops - we're running tight on space. YOUR NAME IN THIS SPACE to the person who can tell us what Mr. DiCaprio's answer was."

[stet]

Last night while I was rendering some footage in Final Cut, ("Estimated time: about 2 hours...") I decided to watch the short films in Nike's Art of Speed series.

The 15 filmmakers were asked to "interpret the idea of speed." Well, by the end of the first film, David Ahuja's Obstacle Course, MY idea about speed was, "Damn, I need a faster processor!" WMP generated so many video artifacts, Ahuja's film ressembled a futurist painting. As the camera followed the running protagonist, the primary-colored objects in the background created jagged smears across my little video window. The guy would stand up, the video would freeze, and suddenly I'm looking at a pixelated motion study photograph straight out of HE Edgerton. Which, considering what I was watching, worked out just fine.

The Futurist Manifesto declared "that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace." [Umm, what's that goddess's name again?]

Moving to my other machine, I watched Obstacle Course as Ahuja intended. And there were still artifacts, this time by design. Digital palimpsests of the character's movement through space. They were the kind of 1970's video effect popularized by the likes of WGBH, the public TV station where many video art pioneers first explored the possibilities of technology. WGBH, which was also the home of ZOOM. [O-2-1-3-4 ]

Ahuja's film was sweet, and my streaming epiphany endeared me to it, but by the sixth hyper-aestheticized, digitally altered racing film, I wondered if the fix was in. Directors' attempts to portray the abstracted or metaphorical notions of speed that exist (presumably pure) in their heads too often ended up showcasing the chosen technology or technique instead.

This, too, may be by design, though. Art of Speed was coordinated by the interactive & effects agency RG/A; given all these render-heavy images, maybe processor cycles are the most relevant measure of speed here.

Then I saw Honest's documentary-style film, The Shortest Race, in which they follow an entire actual competition, from the athletes' deadly serious pre-race strategy soundbites to the winner hoisting a giant check on the podium. The race itself--a 1-meter dash--pokes fun at the sheer arbitrariness of modern athletic contests. Yet it also distills and preserves both the thrilling challenge that comes from competing and the suspense that comes from watching. Hell, it makes more sense than cricket. This is subversion Nike won't break a sweat over. Or they will. While they're running.

[update: AOS posted an interview with the Honest team, Jonathan Miliott and Cary Murnion.]

Gabriel Orozco usually installs his photos interspersed with other works--drawings, collages, and sculpture. The Hirshhorn show which opened last week is the first time they've been shown alone. The show felt instantly familiar, and not because I've been a follower, fan, and collector of Orozco's work for almost ten years. In that time, the artist has published several text-free collections of his photography. The exhibition feels like one of these artist books.

Each image on its own is almost incidental. This is purely intentional. From one of the earliest, most literal works in the show, My hands are my heart, Orozco takes the gesture of the artist as his theme. The gesture, no matter how slight, is at least one degree more concrete than that holy Duchampian standard of Artistic creation, the idea. But that doesn't mean a gesture is any more substantial, just the opposite.

Traces of the artist's breath on a grand piano. Condensation inside a recently removed wristwatch. Ripples from a stone thrown into a rooftop pool. Damp, cyclical bicycle tracks on an empty street. Orozco relentlessly experiments to discover the outcome and significance of even the most fleeting, insignificant gesture. That these gestures won't last even a few minutes is just fine with him.

In some of his work, it's hard to even tell what, if anything, Orozco's done; it's as if he's playing a game of Where's Waldo with us, challenging us to find his intervention. And just as often, especially in the photographs, the gesture is in the snapping of the shutter, the framing of the image. Through the camera's lens, Orozco invites us to see the world differently, to see it through his eyes.

Given the art world's current penchant for photography--especially for giant Gursky- and Gaskell-sized c-prints--Orozco's small format photos seem almost quaint. [Only recently has the artist given in to market pressure and printed his photos in larger sizes. Fortunately, none of these super-sized prints are included in the Hirshhorn show.] Their effect on the viewer doesn't come from easy, overwhelming spectacle, but through the accumulation of small elements over time. As the Japanese saying goes, Chiri mo tsumoreba, yama to naru (dust, too, piled up, can become a mountain).

And this is where the great power of Orozco's work lies, and where the Hirshhorn show doesn't quite deliver. Orozco's evanescent gestures gain cumulative power when they're manifested across various mediums, an effect which is muted by the photographs' formal homogeneity. But put the concentric ripples in a pool next to a boarding pass with compass-drawn circles on it next to a video of a soap bubble floating down the street next to--no kidding--a sculpture consisting of a clear yogurt lid pinned to the wall, and, to the viewer's surprise and amusement, the specific and banal becomes universal and profound. And I guarantee, you'll never see a bubble or a cue ball the same way again. You'll be playing Where's Gabriel wherever you go.

Related: It's almost two years since I took New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl to the woodshed over his negative review of Orozco's work. So Tyler, you're in good company.

Buy Extension of Reflection, the excellent exhibition catalogue, or From Green Glass to Airplane, the even better collection of stills from Orozco's video works.

My heart is full this day, and I would be very ungrateful if I didn't get up and share my gratitude for Brother Hess, who has blessed us all so much this day with his special film, Napoleon Dynamite.

Brother Hess was blessed with the opportunity to make a movie for $200,000, and he was blessed again with the opportunity to sell it to Fox Searchlight at Sundance for a truly special, inspired price, even $3-4.75 million. It's a truly special and righteous price. And while choirs of angels sing his praises in heaven, choirs of critics are singing praises for the movie, which has touched so many people this day, and this weekend when it began a platform release. Even the Gentiles' hearts have been touched by Napoleon's sweet spirit.

Brother Hess shows us how, if we have faith, we can follow in Neil Labute's footsteps and someday become like him. [Even if he's gone astray embracing the fleeting temptation of theater instead of the eternal glory of cinema.] He is also an example unto us of the blessings that can come from exercising faith and hitting up your family and friends for your production budget. Families are forever, so I bet Jared thinks it's a real blessing that he has the opportunity to actually pay them back now.

We should try to liken the movie unto ourselves and take it into our daily lives throughout the week. Napoleon is blessed with the opportunity to overcome the challenges of being a huge dork, and through his words and deeds, he shows unto us what he does with the talents the Lord has blessed him with.

And while I haven't taken the opportunity to see the film yet, for I've been blessed with the opportunity to take care of one of God's littlest, specialest spirits, who's only allowed to see friggin' chick flicks at Loews on Saturday mornings, I want to tell you this day that I know this movie is good, and I have faith that it'll be funny and touching like unto Wes Anderson and Todd Solondz's earlier fruits.

The time is far spent, brothers and sisters, but I challenge you to see Napoleon Dynamite and find out for yourself if it isn't a truly good way to spend an hour and a half. In these latter days, if you tarry too long, it'll surely be gone from the theater. But I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the day will come very soon when it'll be resurrected on DVD.

A hapless British journalist was jumped and his article about the rebuilding at the WTC site was hijacked by a band of Rebuild The Towers soundbite whores during a recent visit to New York City. James Westcott published his account of the incident in the Guardian, but it appears he has no idea what happened to him.

The number of guerillas is not known. Activist groups such as Team Twin Towers and Make New York New York Again claim wide "populist" support, but most attacks can be traced back to one man, John Hakala. Hakala's tactic of delivering seductively glib quotes that have no basis in reality is now well known to veteran reporters on the WTC beat.

Westcott's story on unresolved issues and conflict over development efforts at the WTC site was turned into a disturbing manifesto for rebuilding the Twin Towers that betrays the faulty reasoning, impractical banality, and logical inconsistencies of the guerillas' position. One "architectural activist" seeking "restoration" of the Towers criticizes the Freedom Tower: "We are replacing a symbol of world peace and human cooperation with a self-absorbed salute to America," says an "architectural activist". Yes, echos another, "They [the Towers] were us: stark capitalism, power and beauty without explanation or apology."

And Hakala points out the fatal flaw of the Childs/Libeskind-designed Freedom Tower: "You don't see it on a single mug, T-shirt, postcard or pin around the city."

Observers who wonder how a seasoned journalist like Westcott could be so vulnerable suggest he let his guard down after reading a cryptic outburst of support for rebuilding by controversial Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp. Meanwhile, guerillas may have interpreted Muschamp's reference to "Mnemosyne" as a secret code to trigger the attack. Muschamp has since been relieved of his criticking duties.

From the mixed up files of Mr Arthur Robins, an artist who sells his work in front of the Met:

While visiting the Met, Robins was questioned in the recent guerilla attacks on that museum and the Guggenheim, where an unknown artist surreptitiously installed works critical of George W. Bush. Later, he was visited by a phalanx of police and Terrorism Task Force officers. He videotaped the encounter, and, well, I suggest you read Julie Salomon's account in the Times, which would make a perfect commentary track if Mr Robins ever puts out a DVD. Biiiizarre.

[Update: For an entirely different kind of video shot, surveillance-style, by an artist, one which also deals, technically, with criminal activity, read Guy Trebay's piece on Andrea Fraser.]

Rob Storr interviewed Felix Gonzalez-Torres in 1995. Felix identified Helen Frankenthaler as the most successful political artist alive, and then told about the invitation he received in 1989 to participate in the State Department's Art for Embassies Program:

It has this wonderful quote from George Bernard Shaw, which says, "Besides torture, art is the most persuasive weapon." And I said I didn't know that the State Department had given up on torture - they're probably not giving up on torture - but they're using both. Anyway, look at this letter, because in case you missed the point they reproduce a Franz Kline which explains very well what they want in this program.

There are published stories, and unpublished ones. I hear that Muschamp is moving to the Travel Section. Which makes sense to me. His last real architecture review has me planning a road trip to Seattle.

Check out these excellent photos of Koolhaas's Seattle Public Library. [thanks, Hap]

Wow. There's opaque and then there's opaque. The Drawing Center was selected to join The Freedom Center in one of two cultural buildings planned for the WTC Site. Their building will adjoin the WTC Memorial, while the other two cultural organizations--The Joyce and Signature Theaters--will share a performance center across the street.

I'm a huge fan of The Drawing Center, as much as the aggressively unassuming, rather esoteric, old-school SoHo gallery can engender huge fandom. But how in the world did the LMDC come to the decision to put them next to the sure-to-be-corporate-slick American Freedom Experience? Is there some backchannel connection?

If only the artist Mark Lombardi were still alive, he could explain it to us. Lombardi's intricate drawings traced the webs of corruption, power, and influence that spun out of major scandals like the BCCI bank collapse, Iran-Contra, and, ahem, "George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and jackson Stephens ca 1979-90." That's the title of the 1999 work above, which was included in the first major retrospective of the late artist's career--held at The Drawing Center last fall.

In 1999, I conceived and contrived to make a piece of art. It began as an idea for a commission for the artist Olafur Eliasson, but my idea was so embarassingly specific and complete, there's no way I could bring myself to ask him to do it. Even though I cannot imagine myself as an artist, or a maker of art, I had to admit that this was not an Eliasson, it was Eliasson-esque, at best.

The piece is a sort of reverse sundial.*

Our apartment in NYC faces north, and so receives no direct sunlight. At various times in the day, the sun would reflect off of windows across the street, creating sharply angled patches of bright light, which would move across the wall or floor, marking a specific moment in the day.

I devised to place a mirror on the roof of the recluse's townhouse across the street, which would reflect sunlight directly into our apartment. It would have a motor which would track the movement of the sun, thereby maintaining the reflecting angle throughout the day. [Constructing this motorized mirror was a great obstacle. Last year, when I finally told Olafur about this piece, he said a German company made such a mirror, called a heliostat, which was exhibited at the Hanover 2000 Expo.]

Rather than the naturally changing light of a normal day, the apartment would receive constant, consistent, direct light. The light wouldn't shift, the shadows wouldn't lengthen, then contract. At first, the brt lt praised by realtors and sought after by apartment hunters would be welcome, but I expected that, after a while, it would become unnerving, even maddening.

[2007 update: soon after posting this, I told this story to a couple of Olafur's dealers, who, instead of laughing with/at me, said I really should have proposed it to Olafur, because he would have loved doing it. Which is a huge bummer, because then I could have paid 1999 Olafur prices for the piece. Oh well, it's mine now.]

* Olafur actually made a sundial-like piece in 1997 by cutting a round hole in the roof of the Marc Foxx gallery in Los Angeles. The circle of light tracked beautifully across the empty gallery space. The piece was titled, Your Sun Machine. I never dreamed to call my piece My Sun Machine, though.

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 film, I've been thinking about my great-grandfather a lot, too. That's because he died in 1982, at age 90. He had a shorter battle with Alzheimer's than Reagan did. These men differed in other ways, too:

Reagan: Cut a deal to keep US hostages in Iran until after his election. Incubated Islamic militarism and, ultimately, Osama Bin Laden. Armed Saddam Hussein. Sent Rumsfeld to offer support while he gassed the Kurds. OK'ed the invasion of Lebanon. Cut and ran after terrorists killed US Marines. Sold heavy weaponry to Iran to fund right-wing death squads in Nicaraqua. Prevented the government from addressing the AIDS epidemic. Invaded Grenada.
Great-grandfather: Put a plow on a tractor and plowed under half a field of fullgrown corn next to his house before someone ran out to stop him.

Reagan: Conflated speeches with actions.
Great-grandfather: Never said much.

One of my earliest memories of him was a visit we made one summer when I was 4 or 5. I was already too much a city kid, or a suburban kid, really; visiting the farm was already an exotic, scary adventure.

He was wearing worn overalls and a tan shirt. We were kneeling under a giant willow tree in my grandparents' backyard (they'd built just down the street; my grandfather had followed his father into farming.), and he was showing me the carrots growing around its base. He pulled one out and offered it to me to taste. It was small, too early to harvest then, but highly marketable as a baby carrot now, I'd imagine. It's got dirt on it, I recoiled, you have to wash it first. He smiled and brushed some dirt off it, and started nibbling on it himself. Then he pulled out another one and offered it to me. Flush with thrilling fear, I ate an unwashed carrot straight from the ground.

[via waxy] Box office performance prediction models are a business school professor's best tool for drumming up consulting gigs in the entertainment industry they secretly wanted to get into in the first place. For a long time, my old Wharton professor, Jehoshua Eliashberg's model was the state of the analytical art. Now, he's got some competition.

According to Prof. Christopher Dellarocas and some other MIT quantjocks, including , the losers who rush home from the theater to post about the movie they just saw can accurately predict the film's box office take.

We're not talking about blogger-level losers, though, it has to be the down deepest dregs, the posters on Yahoo! Movies, for example, who best approximate the elusive "word of mouth" effect on a film's performance.

So now studio suits will sic all their interns on the message boards to talk up a film during its opening weekend, right? While Dellarocas doesn't make this false logical leap in the study itself , the NetworkWorld reporter gets him to wrongly conflate prediction and causation:

The study also highlights the potential for corporate mischief, given that these review-and-ranking sites are forums for what is essentially anonymous opining.

"Manipulation of forums will become some sort of arms race between studios," said Dellarocas.

Professor? That's Jake's trailer, professor, I don't think you're allowed in there...

Issue of 2004-06-14 & 21
Posted 2004-06-07

THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT/ MONEY, MONEY, MONEY/ Hendrik Hertzberg on what cash canóand canítóbuy a candidate.
EUREKA DEPT./ THE SUICIDE POEM/ Joshua Wolf Shenk reads confessional verse by, perhaps, Abraham Lincoln.
THE ABSENTEE BALLOT/ A DEMOCRATIC IRAQ?/ Ben McGrath on the Donkeys in the Desert.
YOU LOOK MARVELLOUS DEPT./ THE NEW PORTRAIT/ Dana Goodyear on vanity short films.
THE FINANCIAL PAGE/ PERK HOGS/ James Surowiecki on pampered executives.

FICTION/ Aleksandar Hemon/ "Szmura's Room"
A CRITIC AT LARGE/ Joan Acocella/ Blocked/ When a writer can't write.

THREE STORIES/ Alice Munro/ "Chance," "Soon," "Silence"

HOLIDAYS
Junot DÌaz/ Homecoming, with Turtle
T. Coraghessan Boyle/ Nighttime in the Pool
Zadie Smith/ You Are in Paradise
Charles DíAmbrosio/ Train in Vain
Susan Orlean/ Out of the Woods

THE CRITICS
BOOKS/Ian Buruma/ Lost in Translation/ The two minds of Bernard Lewis.
ON TELEVISION/ Nancy Franklin/ The Uncertainty Principle/ Delivering a verdict on "The Jury."
THE CURRENT CINEMA/ Anthony Lane/ Smorgasbord/ An Ingmar Bergman retrospective.

FROM THE ARCHIVE
PROFILE/ John Lahr/ The Demon-Lover/ Ingmar Bergman on his family secrets and the emergence of psychological cinema./ Issue of 1999-05-31
PERSPECTIVE/ Edmund Morris/ This Living Hand/ Reagan's biographer considers the power of the former President's handwritten letter to the public./ Issue of 1995-01-16

It's only half over, but I feel it's safe to declare 2004 l'AnnÈe du Court MÈtrage Soutenu, The Year of The Sponsored Short. Nike got some, Interpol's buyin' some, and now, if you're a socialite, an I-banker, or just a run-of-the-mill moneyed narcissist (not, I admit, mutually exclusive categories), you can get one, too.

For $25,000 (don't forget to ask for your discount), you can commission an animated short film portrait by artist/filmmaker Jeff Scher. Although we're assured "many celebrities and their families" have commissioned portrait films from Scher, party girl Susan Shin's is the first to be feted in the New Yorker.

Completed, a Scher portrait resembles an animated Warhol silkscreen portrait, not coincidentally, a must-have art accessory of 80's-era Manhattan society.

Tell you what I'll do. If you're in the market for Warhol-inspired cinematic immortality, I'll break out a 16mm camera and shoot a Screen Test for you instead. $25,000, less discount.

Reagan hits his last mark, stumping for the Bush/Cheney campaign

Love him or hate him, you've gotta give Karl Rove credit for pulling the plug at the optimal time. He manages 1) to divert attention from whatever new Bush administration embarassments are set to unfold this week, and 2) he figures out how to get some campaign appearances out of Reagan.

Related: Joan Didion's Reagan myth-puncturing essay, The Lion King, in the NYRB.

[Update: finally, a Nader for the right wingnuts. Bush/ZombieReagan '04 campaign site]

I just found and reread this post from a couple of years ago, and I still like it very much, unfortunately.

How Conceptual Art is Like a Renaissance Tapestry

Kathy Hilton is getting a reality TV show. She'll teach some young bumpkins what they really need to do to get head. A head. Ahead in NYC. How to please a man. Manhattan. How to please Manhattan Society.

Bob Morris's Style section piece is so breezily damning, she'll probably think it's good and have it framed. Or not. After all, "Her friends say she is smarter than she appears."

"Anyone who knows Kathy Hilton (and many society women do), knows she has always taken the job of being a parent seriously," writes Morris, who accompanied Hilton home from Cipriani, where she attended an afternoon fur fashion show. "Back in the lobby of the Waldorf Towers, she ran smack into her son Conrad, 10, in soccer gear.

"'Hi Conrad,' she said. 'How was the game?'"

Yes, she's a profound influence on her children. And she'll share her secrets with you--this fall on NBC!

[update: if you're a hillbilly with more back hair than than shame, get yourself over to the audition at Tavern on the Green, "where we've replaced the washed up publicity whores they normally serve with Kathy Hilton!" Thanks, Gawker.]

If it's too late for you to get the money and the inspiration for your short film from Nike--and it is--try Interpol. Matador Records will "fund" ten short films "inspired by the music and aesthetic of the band." I put "fund" in quotes because they're only ponying up $1,000, so no tsunamis flooding midtown.

First, write a treatment, put a storyboard together, shoot a demo or a trailer, whatever you need to explain what you want to do. Get it to Matador by July 5th.

The band will personally choose the ten treatments that "most interestingly embody the spirit of their music in the cinematic form." The only restrictions: 1)if you use music, it can only be from the clip of the new song they provide, and 2) NO MUSIC VIDEO. Oh, and "help us out of the corner we've painted ourselves into" "Black is not the only color."

Details are all at Matador's site, where you can also watch Interpol's music videos--remember, NO MUSIC VIDEO--by Doug Aitken and Christopher Mills. [via The Fold Drop]

Related [?]:
Moby to advise on Joy Division biopic/murder mystery movie
Ex-boy band member fined for soliciting "prostitute" from his moped

[Update: The Joy Division movie is on, but not with Moby, and not with Jude Law (?). Apparently, dueling groups had options that expired, but they announced it anyway, &c, &c. via TMN]

WPS1.org, the online audio program of PS1, has been up for a few weeks now, and it's getting better. Some listening tips:

It's not just for banner ads anymore.

Nick, Choire & co. launched Art of Speed, a weblog-formatted microsite for Nike that'll run for three weeks on Gawker.

Art of Speed runs with ideas about filmmaking and web-based marketing that got a lot of attention in the BMWFilms campaign. Through Ridley Scott's production company, BMW commissioned established directors (John Frankenheimer, John Woo, Guy Ritchie) to create short films with independent narratives, but two recurring stars: the cars, and that guy from Croupier.

After BMW, Ford, JWT and Atom Films launched Focus in Films, a series of forgettable shorts by "independent filmmakers" starring the Ford Focus. Nike's approach, to ask "15 talented young filmmakers" to make shorts on the idea of speed, follows Ford's strategy. But as Gawker's post points out, this kind of sponsor-driven programming "can be done well, or badly." I'm hoping Gawker's Art of Speed is the former.

So in the mean time, check out the show, and the Times article on the de Menil's Philip Johnson-designed house, which was a sharp International Style stick in the eye of Tara-style 1950's Houston.

J. Hoberman interviewed Ghost in the Shell anime director Oshii Mamoru at Cannes, where he screened his latest work, Innocence. As Hoberman reports it, the interview was straight out of the Keanu junket in Lost in Translation, with the director himself barely speaking and the Japanese translator answering for him on auto-pilot.

Totemo mendokusai.

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 creative--control. Not until Pauline Kael is evoked in the way down in the comments does that myth get debunked.

"The director should be in control not because he is the sole creative intelligence but because only if he is in control can he liberate and utilize the talents of his co-workers, who languish (as directors do) in studio-factory productions. The best interpretation to put on it when a director says that a movie is totally his is not that he did it all himself but that that he wasn't interfered with, that he made the choices and the ultimate decisions, that the whole thing isn't an unhappy compromise for which no one is responsible; not that he was the sole creator but almost the reverse ñ that he was free to use all the best ideas offered him.