December 2004 Archives

The Center For Social Media conducted a study of the costs and effects of clearing intellectual property on independent documentary filmmakers. They look at the costs, the process, and the impact on how films are made and on what subjects. Then they make some recommendations.

To any filmmaker who thought they were the only one who had problems with clearing an image, a trademark or--heaven forbid--a piece of music, take comfort: it's an expensive pain in the ass for everyone. You just can't do anything about it. Yet.

Some eye popping examples of their key finding:
Rights clearance costs are high, and have escalated dramatically in the last two decades. [thanks in part to consolidation of film and photo archives (hello, Corbis, Getty...)]

This just in, in time to seal 2004 as The Year Of The Sponsored Short, is A-Clips, a series of aggressively unsponsored shorts:A-Clip plays with the aesthetics of cinema commercials, which are reproduced, satirized or subverted. Each of them has a length of approximately 50 seconds and will be shown on 35mm film among the commercials at movie theatres, with the illicit co-operation of the projectionists and management of individual cinemas.

Among the advertisements for lifestyles products cinemagoers are surprised by short movies that contain critical messages and disrupts the linear narratives of the commercials that surround them. Each film comments on aspects of urban life from its own thought-provoking and subjective perspective.Good luck finding them. Of course, if you're a subversion-minded projectionist or theater manager, why not drop A-Clip a line from your Gmail account?

A-Clips [via coudal]
Previously: Amazon Theater, GettyImages, Interpol Shorts, Nike's Art of Speed, or Commission A Short Film Portrait by Jeff Scher

KINKS: The way-finding isn't working. By the second or third day, we had to put up signs to help people. The bathrooms needed signs coming out, instead of being flat on the wall. The library's organization makes complete sense to us. But for the public, it's not obvious. One portion of the seventh floor is six feet higher because it spirals around. So if it says something is on seven, what does that mean?

"A lot of employees are pretty upset that a lot of money was spent on the award-winning design but little was spent on things like water and restrooms," said Stephen Beck, a consultant with the Professional Engineers of California Government union.

The 13-story, 716,200-square-foot structure has four drinking fountains, all on the ground floor. And at each end of each floor there are two bathrooms, one for women and one for men. The problem: only four urinals on each level.

Inside the year's best-reviewed buildings [NYT]
Matt Howie's photos of temporary signs at the Seattle Public Library [flickr, via waxy]
Building puts form over bodily function [LAT, via archinect]

I would put Origins Clear ImprovementÆ Active Charcoal mask to clear pores as my number one.

I was introduced to this miracle product many years ago, when I got a tube in a gift bag after an art benefit (Origins is owned by Estee Lauder co., which is owned by--oh, you do the math.). Well, I've been in love with it ever since.

Nothing I've tried provides quite the feeling of cleansing, tautening rejuvenation that I get from just a fifteen minute sojourn behind Origins' silky black mask. It's as refreshing and invigorating as any gallery visit--and you get to experience it in your own home! Definitely a must-have in any collection.

Note: The charcoal color is manly enough to use at the gym, but think twice about putting it on right after shaving. It'll burn like cuh-razy.
Buy Clear ImprovementÆ Active Charcoal Mask, $18.50 for a 100ml tube [Origins.com]

Or maybe it's greg.org: the videoblog. It's a veritable greg.orgy: everybody come! [uh...]

On Monday, January 10th, I'm presenting a program of short films (including one of my own), video art, scenes from features, and other stuff, as part of The Reel Roundtable's Film and Blogs series.

But more than an elaborate excuse to show and talk about my own work (don't get me wrong, it IS that), I'm interested in seeing how a weblog functions over time as a programming/editorial/curatorial venue. The program re-imagines the weblog as a movie, or as movie-like, an event that you experience in a movie theater.

There are several ways a weblog's video/audio content could be transmitted as a program: as you find it (serendipitously, or chronologically, as you read it (reverse chronologically) narratively, categorically, or thematically. If this had remained only a production journal, it'd become a DVD extra. I took the thematic path.

I sifted through every film, short, animation, video, video art, and TV reference on greg.org, looking for common threads and recurring themes. I narrowed the list down to the ideas--and the works related to them--that I thought would make an interesting, entertaining, and representative evening. Maybe it's not surprising that most relate to the site's over-arching "making of" theme. Here's what I've come up with so far:

Film/Video Game Cross-Pollination: Sorry, no Matrix. I'm thinking more of the trifecta of Red vs. Blue, Gerry, and yes, Elephant.

an NYT interview with RvB co-founder Burnie Burns.

an interview with Dany Wolf, Van Sant's longtime producer

previous mentions of Gerry and Elephant

Artists Approach Video: aka, the making of video-based art. Methods vary from the self-consciously simple, like Gabriel Orozco's "found" images, edited in-camera; to the bafflingly complex, like Christian Marclay's minutely edited appropriations. There's culturally literate/literal, like Jon Routson's reconceived-for-TV Cremaster 4, and conceptual (like the artist whose permission I'm still awaiting).

Gabriel Orozco's videos

on Jon Routson and the future of video art

Call it 'Homage': Or in my case, call it a substitute for film school. When I ran into "editor's block" while cutting Souvenir (January 2003), a short about, um, well, about ironing, the solution was revealed while watching the Clooney/J. Lo seduction sequencein Out of Sight. Then on the DVD commentary, Soderbergh admitted he got the idea from a Donald Sutherland/Julie Christie sex scene in Nic Roeg's Don't Look Now. Shown here together for the first time, obviously...

Souvenir (January 2003) production log and related posts

How a J. Lo sex scene inspires a movie about nostalgic ironing

On watching Nic Roeg's Don't Look Now

Surprise US Premiere (TBC): I've been working on it a while, and I'm hoping to have a special screening of a film that caught the attention of the media and filmlovers alike in 2004 (and no, it doesn't involve Paris Hilton). Stay tuned.

And for details on the rest of The Reel Roundtable's series, check out the site, or Elizabeth's IndieWIRE blog.

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 I've shot--those'd be Souvenir installments at this point--I find they lay absolutely everything out, with no insinuations or hints.

But then when I look at the footage, I see I've corrected for that, but then I still overshoot. I cover nearly the entire script, but with more restraint, more naturalism, less intentionality than the script contains.

It's only when I edit that things get pared down, cut back, cease to be so didactic, almost, or overly melodramatic. I remember, for example, listening to some raw Bjork song while writing, thinking of it as the soundtrack while shooting, and then being repulsed by it during editing, where we replaced it with an almost-silent ambient drone.

I'm reminded of this because I turned in a draft for an off-site writing gig yesterday that was easily 2.5 times longer than I knew the final product would be. Which left my poor editor to crank on it in a day and give me back a version that's only 25% too long, I'm guessing.

I feel/cause your pain.

Richard Polsky does a round-up of the 2004 art market on Artnet and makes some predictions for 2005, and guess what? Of the dozens of artists he looks at, only four--Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, Felix Gonzalez-Torres (??) and Ross Bleckner--are anticipated to go down next year. Most are going up, or are predicted to be "status quo," which I take to mean either "they'll go up, but I don't know why" or "they'll go down, but I don't want to piss off my dealer/artist/collector friends by saying so."

Murakami and Nara are cheap/easy shots: their auction prices have been wild for a while. Bleckner's market has been sort of sleepy for a while, so no one's shocked by that. And Felix, he's just wrong on that one: the work that came up this year was either atypical, or sold very well. Soon enough, people looking for good Felix's will find there aren't that many left. I think Polsky's just being pissy.

In any case, his analysis reminds me of the i-banks' stock recommendations during the bubble: all buys, no sells, with all arrows pointing up. And we know how that turned out.

Art Market Guide 2004 [artnet]

Issue of 2005-01-03
Posted 2004-12-27

FROM THE ARCHIVE
LETTER FROM ROTTERDAM/ Elizabeth Kolbert/ Beyond Tolerance/ A report on the strange career and death of Pim Fortuyn/ Issue of 2002-09-09
TALK OF THE TOWN/ Ballyhoo/ John Lahr recounts his evening with Tony Kushner for the Tony Awards/ Issue of 1993-06-21

James Meyer: You turned eighty last year. Has age, in some way, affected your work?

Anne Truitt: I don't think age makes any difference except that it endows a person with freedom. Age cuts you off, untethers you. It's a great feeling. The other thing is, when you get to be eighty, you're looking back and down, out from a peak. I can look down and see my life from my own little hill; I see this plain, all the years of experience.

JM: Does that mean making the work is somehow easier?

AT: No, it's harder. It costs me much more; I have all those years that I have to face and it takes a certain amount of courage. It's not a light and foolish thing. Color is getting more complex and harder and harder to mix. There are more complexities in it because my own experience is much more complex.

JM: Is it physically more difficult to work?

AT: It's not more difficult to be faithful, but I have to be faithful to more and more. And I have less psychic energy as I get older. Heaven knows I have less physical energy!

JM: But it has not changed the fundamental process or ambition of the work. If anything, the ambition has increased.

AT: Yes, I would say, by leaps and bounds.

It took us a few months to realize it, but one summer evening, the street we were walking along grew increasingly familiar. We'd driven on this street, I told my wife, this is where we parked to go meet Anne Truitt. Sure enough, around the corner was the house she'd invited us to over a year and a half earlier, after I'd asked a curator and mutual friend had introduce us.

We had a wonderful time; she was very gracious, very engaged, talked at length about NASA and science with my wife; she'd just emptied her studio for a show, so there wasn't much to see, but we'd see it when we came again, she promised.

Once we realized we'd moved into Anne Truitt's neighborhood, we decided we should invite her over. The heat of the Washington summer made me doubt whether she would see a visit to our seemingly under-air-conditioned apartment as a fair return for her hospitality, so I waited until September to write her. We'd had a baby, &c., moved into the District, &c., realized you were nearby, &c. Within a week, she wrote back, and I spent October planning the best occasion to have her over. We'd have her for tea [note to self: buy tea], or maybe even dinner [note to self: finally light stove]. We'd invite some younger artists, friends who had been inspired by her work and success in an art world that was still--in the minimalist 60's and 70's, especially--a hard-edged boy's club. We'd invite some collector friends, who'd in turn thank us for introducing them to such an important artist. But mostly, we'd probably talk about our daughter--it's all we ever do these days, anyway--who Mrs. Truitt had congratulated us on, and who she said she was eager to meet. And we'd trade stories about kids--and grandkids--and just enjoy her company.

Then in November, I saw one of her early, pioneering minimalist sculptures in the newly reinstalled MoMA. How's that feel, I'd ask her. Have you seen the installation yet? No? Don't worry, the pink Flavin in the far corner doesn't reach your piece. Ryman's, on the other hand... We'd share an insiders' laugh, quietly acknowledging that the recent appreciation of Truitt's work was the flipside of many years where her contributions and accomplishments were written off or unknown by many in the art world. History was written by the victors, they'd say, and she was Clement Greenberg's girl... No doubt Truitt would bristle at the condescension behind the word, then she'd get back to work.

Last week I went to Baltimore for an upcoming screening, and I stopped at the Baltimore Museum of Art, which has some of the best holdings of Truitt's work. Kind of a screwy museum, but it was nearly empty on a Wednesday morning, so I had the two Truitts and the neighboring (Ellsworth) Kellys and the McCracken to myself. I'd tell her about the visit, how her works seemed so evocative, minimalist in form, but imbued with some human aspect, made by a person, an idea that artists like Judd tried to omit from their work. And how still, I had to admit, the Judd plywood box nearby had a marvelous grain.

In the bookstore, I looked in vain for a nice edition of Truitt's published diaries--the entry point into her work for many students and artists who came of age when Truitt's work was in the critical backseat--that I would ask her to sign for me. With Christmas coming, it might not be proper to intrude on family time, I thought, but wouldn't it also be a good season to let her know we were thinking of her?

Now I learn she's gone, and I look back on all the chances I missed to speak with, and listen to an artist I admired very much, and it makes me quite sad.

Previously: Anne Truitt on greg.org
Related: Modern Art Notes links.

I first compiled this list for the NY Times, who, after clearing up (mis)communication from some over-eager assistants, didn't ask for it after all. I am publishing it here, as is. The works in the order I wrote them, nothing else. In my mind, they're all winners:

"Katie Hepburn was a great friend of mine," Ms. Bacall said. "Cate Blanchett had her mannerisms, expressions, everything."

Oscars?

"Don't ask me about the Oscars," Ms. Bacall said. "I don't give a damn about the Oscars."

A young woman went by with a tray of crab cakes.

"Hey, hey, why did you pass me?" Ms. Bacall said. "Where are you going? What are they? You got some nerve walking over there."

But it did enable her to be briefly airborne [NYT]

I have removed the identifying information from this email, after assuring myself of the writer's veracity. If I can give the entertainment journalism world just one gift this Christmas, it'd be a sharp thunk on the melon of anyone who asserts that Spike Jonze is "the heir to the Spiegel Catalogue fortune":

To: greg.org
From: [name withheld]
Subject: Spike Jonze is not a Spiegel heir at all
Body:My name is [snip] and I live in [a Midwestern city... I am the great-[grandchild] of Modie Spiegel Sr, the man who made the Spiegel company a nationally known enterprise.

I have become interested in my family's geneaology, and Googled Edward Spiegel. Your post about Spike not being a Spiegel heir was one of the first listed. [Umm, yeah. Hope you're not too upset about that "scion of my butt" comment. -g.]

You make a very good point in your post, and nearly everything you say is true, but I felt I should correct you on your errors and provide you with a few facts.

Spike's great-grandfather Arthur was considered the "boy genius" of the family. It was actually he who came up with the idea for buying on credit, and the catalogue was basically his idea. He left Spiegel to form his own movie business.

Now here is where you make your most egregious mistake. Arthur died in 1912, and although his company fell apart soon afterwards, he had made it quite successful. Also, after his death, (of pneumonia by the way) his widow remained close to the family for many years, but it is true that none of her children were ever involved in the company.

You are correct that Spike is not an "heir" is terms of money. [Hmm. but if a 'scion' is also a 'descendant,' not just an 'heir,' does that mean he IS a scion?] Sidney left the company after a fight with Modie's son Modie Jr., and Modie eventually gave the shares of the company to his four children: Modie Jr, Freddie, Polly and John [one of these is the writer's grandparent. -g.]

Modie Jr. ran Spiegel Inc. for nearly thirty years after his father retired, and after it was sold to the Otto family, the money from the sale was split amongst him and his siblings.

I have no idea how the idea got started that Spike was an heir. I believe that he has denied it on occasion, but it still seems to get mentioned in every article about him. [no kidding. -g.]

Sincerely, [snip]

Related: Spike Jonze: Scion of my BUTT

At Filter Magazine, David Fear interviews screenwriter/director Noah Baumbach about his collaboration with Wes Anderson on the script for The Life Aquatic.

How long did you guys work on this?
About a year. We met every day at an Italian restaurant in Soho. We both keep odd hours, so weíd always plan to meet at 1pm then someone would show up late. Then one of us would anticipate that the other person would be late and the time would consistently pushed back. Then weíd go, "Okay, tomorrow, we actually meet at one!" Naturally, one of us would be late. But weíd stay through dinner, and just keep working on the script. We ended up using a lot of the items on the menu to name the fish. Some of the regular patronsí names ended up in there as well which we used for the crew members and such.

Wow, I want to find this restaurant so I can order the jaguar shark!
That actually came from somewhere else.

Oh.
Sorry.

Next up for Noah & Wes: a stop-action animation adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox, in collaboration with Henry Selick (the guy behind Nightmare Before Christmas).

The Life Aquatic: A Conversation With Writer Noah Baumbach [filter-mag, via Jason]
Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox [filmforce]

So after playing softball with his own corporate overlords the Weinsteins at a MoMA Q&A last Thursday, Quentin Tarantino chased some skirt on his flight back to LA. Read the dovetailing eyewitness accounts below.

[greg.org making wiggling-thumb-and-pinky-as-phone gesture and mouthing 'I'll call you' to a fast-receding blackout Navigator.]

Shill Bill [artforum diary]
Tarantino's Airport Pick-Up Service [defamer]

[update via GreenCine: Sheldrake publishes a complete transcript--or maybe you should call it a fanscript--at AICN. Yow.]

From Peter Wollen's essay on Jarman's Blue, recently published in Paris/Manhattan and quoted at length on In Search of The Miraculous, one of Brian Sholis's millions of projects:

However, there were more specific reasons for Jarman's growing fascination with Klein. Jarman always had an ambivalent relationship with film and particularly, as we have seen, with television. Towards the end of his life he made it clear that he was only interested in films which were deeply personal, which were about the film-maker's own life. Blue is just such an autobiographical film, dealing with Aids directly as an experience lived by its maker. Blue was the colour Jarman saw when eye-drops were put in his eyes in the hope of alleviating his blindness. Paradoxically, blindness allowed Jarman to see, beyond the distraction of images, directly into the realm of colour, as Yves Klein had wished. Aids was too important to Jarman for it to be represented by images.

From Steven Kaplan's accounts of Art Basel Miami Beach, a report from the Rosa de la Cruz party:

Before discussing the highlights of the collection, I need to address some unseemly carping that emanated from other coverage of the evening. Regarding the traffic jam -- countless limos, cars, buses and taxis -- surrounding chez [how about casa, Steven? -g.] de la Cruz, which required certain august personages to walk a couple of blocks just to reach the house (the horror!)...Dispatch from ABMB No. 3

Apparently the adjoining house, which is not quite ready for occupancy, already has its own installation of art, supervised by Alison Gingeras, who was in town. As I was not invited to the event that inaugurated the house, I cannot report further.
ABMB Dispatch Nos. 1

A tedious fifty-minute taxi ride from Miami Beach got us to the de la Cruz's block just after midnight. Block, not house, because as we turned onto Bay Drive, we were greeted by a gridlock of limos, yellow taxis, Mercedes sedans (with drivers), and chartered buses that provoked even the relatively patient to hoof the home stretch.
Open Casa, by Alison Gingeras [artforum diary]

6. Living a Beautiful Life, Corinna Schnitt, United States/Germany (2003, 13 minutes). A beautiful couple in a Beverly Hills mansion describe what appears to be their perfect life; their dialogue actually comes from Ms. Schnitt's interviews with 14-year-olds in Los Angeles about their ideas of happiness.

10. The Landscape Is Changing [see image above], Mircea Cantor, Romania (2003, 12 minutes). A march, staged and filmed by Mr. Cantor in Tirana, Albania, in which the demonstrators carry large flexible mirrors that create undulating reflections of the city around them.

Related: Blockbuster Art, The top 5 most frequently borrowed titles from e-flux video rental [NYT, Greg Allen]
e-flux video rental [thanks Anton and Julieta]

Very little pun intended.

The LMDC and its architects released details of the latest incarnation of the World Trade Center Memorial. Salient changes/evolutions: the giant waterfall voids seem reduced in size and scale. The space for the names of those killed, which is where visitors encounter the waterfalls, is rather low, almost intimate-looking. Conversely, the lower chamber, where footings of the (North) tower columns, at least, will be visible, seems much loftier. The skylit bathtub wall--resurfaced several times since it was exposed in the debris removal process--will loom over the space.

It's an interesting (and a major) shift for Arad, who acknowledged as recently as September that "Bedrock is something that wasn't too important to me at the beginning of design."

What else: there's a wall along West Street where the road slopes down and the plaza/park elevation stays level. Remember how the West St entrances of the North Tower and the hotel were a big story below the plaza level? Same thing.

Also, with the interpretive center/artifact space on the south side, it's not clear where "memorial" begins and "center" ends. A mixed program reminds me of the Kennedy Center lobby, which happens to house a JFK Memorial, but who knew? I think/fear "memorial" in this case will be a highly programmed experience.

Renderings of the park/plaza level read as very unassuming, even conventional, while those of the memorial spaces--or the approaches to the memorial, actually, are almost exaggeratedly austere. The slate is still blank.

Memorial will preserve Twin Towers' remnants [NYT, David Dunlap]
LMDC Press Release [renewnyc.com]
Curbed totally rocks on the WTC site posts, btw [curbed.com]
No Lack of Rhetoric at WTC Designers' Panel [metropolismag]

Or 'U', for that matter. Or Anybody.

And after Scott McClellan gets through explaining, America will think we're the ones who've been misspelling 'Challanges' all these years. [thanks, Tyler]

Bush's Social Security Phase Out Summit [Yahoo News]

Related: I thought Chas Bowie's Scott Sforza piece for The Portland Mercury was hilarious and brilliant, and then I realized it was an interview with me.

Untitled, 1962
exhibited in "Agnes Martin: Five Decades," April 2003 at Zwirner and Wirth, New York.

Related:
"Agnes Martin: Five Decades," Zwirner and Wirth
On the artist in Taos: Lillian Ross meets with Agnes Martin
Art worth crossing the street for
Agnes Martin: Homage to Life, what turned out to be her final show at Pace Wildenstein, where she broke with her traditional grid and painted geometric shapes that recalled her earliest work.

Normally, I'd say, "Thanks, Tyler," but it doesn't seem appropriate here. [Modernartnotes]

In a bit of tail-eating snake-ism, The Arts Project at The Center for The Study of The Public Domain at Duke sponsored a contest as part of this year's Full Frame Documentary Festival [got all that?] for the best 2-minute or shorter film about intellectual property's impact on art, specifically music or documentary film.

Well, the finalists are in, and you can view and vote for them online.

The Arts Project Moving Image Contest [Duke Law]

But we yearn for more than a cloakroom and gift shop in the cavernous entrance; the atrium cries for the really big gesture -- even Barnett Newman's "Broken Obelisk" becomes a decorous gesture that ceases to alarm. This requires a powerful, perception-altering work, a site-specific creation that deals fearlessly with the scale -- something new, provocative and outrageous -- a naughty newcomer that must wait to be judged worthy enough to be invited in. MoMA has never looked so uptight as in this stupendous new space. Something needs to turn that void into a connection between past and future, something that takes a chance on the transformational experience only art can provide. MegaMoMA is fail-safe and risk-free.

It's odd, considering there are works by Eve Sussman, Chris Ofili, Elizabeth Peyton, Josiah McIlheny, Peter Doig and Jeff Wall literally within spitting distance of each other, not to mention a dozen other living artists a generation or two older, but I feel an absence of contemporary energy, of connection to the immediate practice of art, at the new Modern. I think Huxtable's phrase, risk-free, is all too apt. Is it still too early to start taking some risks?

... In MoMA's Big, New, Elegantly Understated Home [WSJ, via archinect]

Great art's demands are more important than the wishes of the mere collector who bought it. The fabric of our culture has been rent in twain, and no one will donate to a museum ever again. I've heard it all already.

Frankly, I think they should have left the Barnes Collection where and as Barnes left it. It was the Barnes Foundation board that needed to be packed up and transplanted to the juvenile detention facility (conveniently, the future site of the Barnes Museum). Those inept, self-important idiots ran that place into the ground, creating unnecessary crises through decades of obstinate mismanagement. They have betrayed Barnes' own legacy and wishes, and they keep on doing it.

Barnes was crazy, a crackpot, a rude, difficult parvenu, so what? He had a tremendous eye for art (yeah, sure, there are an awful lot of mediocre Renoirs, and even more portraits of fleshy nude women), yet he was snubbed royally and mocked by the Philadelphia establishment of his day. His Collection and the restrictions he placed on it were a reaction to this small-minded and snobbish mistreatment.

Decades later, the judge just handed Barnes's legacy--which nobody in Philadelphia wanted during Barnes's lifetime--over to the same names that once shunned him. If only Barnes had lived long enough to see Scarface--"First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women."--he'd have realized what step he was skipping.

Does it matter where this painting hangs? [Um, Yes, Roberta. NYT]
Tyler has a Barnes Newsraising [Modernartnotes]

My secret indulgence the last couple of weeks--and the reason I didn't care that I missed Art Basel Miami Beach this year--is Artforum's new Diary feature. It's like an art world reality TV show, where the magazine's editors and contributors compete for the Walter Benjamin-inspired title of Greatest Flaneur.

Translation: a bunch of highly educated, insider's insidery, seen-it-all-before snobs go to art parties, dish jaded, bitchy gossip, and try to outdo each other with how over it they are. In other words, it's nearly perfect.

Check out these representative quotes from whatever entry was on top of the heap, in this case, by Steve Lafreniere:

The crush at the New Museum's opening for "East Village USA" was snarly yet fun, a little like being jammed into one of those unisex bathrooms at the Mudd Club, sans vomit. It was Old Home Week for the art world's Class of '81, seemingly a less-reserved bunch than one typically encounters nowadays, with air kisses replaced by cries of, "Shit, Anastasia, I thought you were dead!" The flamboyant mobótwo glasses of wine were knocked out of my hands in five minutesówas a veritable who's-left of the era....

Another gallerist observed, "I can't believe all the twenty-somethings here tonight. There's this undergrad art groupie-ness in the air!" As if on cue, a young woman trotted past squealing, "Oh my god, RoseLee Goldberg!"

Artforum Diary

"Brilliant! Best PowerPoint of The Year!" -Peter Travers, Rolling Stone.

The Indianapolis Star has a play-by-play account of the investigation into the Pacers-fans brawl during the Detroit Pistons game Nov. 19. To announce charges against both fans and players, the prosecutor's office in Pontiac, MI created an elaborate PowerPoint presentation full of witness quotes, video clips, and a breakdown of the incident.

My staff worked countless hours, and many nights past midnight," Oakland County Prosecutor David Gorcyca said. "I don't know how much it cost, other than it being a helluva lot."

Elaborate PowerPoint presentation culminated extensive brawl probe [IndyStar.com, via fimoculous]

Cinecultist Karen is at it again, this time working the crowd of above-the-line talent at the The Life Aquatic junket. No word on the buffet, which I would expect to contain smoked salmon, shrimp cocktail, or some other agua-themed items.

Gothamist on the [The] Life Aquatic Junket [gothamist]
Cinecultist: Crazy For Movies

[update: a-ha. the catering details are on Cinecultist. Fresh fruit and lukewarm coffee.]

What, no Amazon links? The little red critics over at the Voice have put together their list of the best DVD's and DVD collections for 2004, and then they didn't add shoppertainment links. Here's my distilled list:

Issue of 2004-12-20 and 27
Posted 2004-12-13

FROM THE ARCHIVE
ANNALS OF LITERATURE/ Elizabeth Bishop/ The Art of Losing/ A set of correspondence from the poet/ Issue of 1994-03-28
FICTION/ William Maxwell/ "Homecoming"/ Issue of 1938-01-01
PERSONAL HISTORY/ John Updike/ Christmas Cards, an essay/ Issue of 1997-12-22
FICTION/ James Thurber/ A Visit from Saint Nicholas (In the Ernest Hemingway Manner)/ Issue of 1927-12-24

Again, a thousand unposted excuses, I've been writing toward a rather cuh-razy offline deadline.

Meanwhile, I haven't been seeing movies like The Life Aquatic. I DO plan to see it, but judging from David Edelstein's review in Slate, it may be quicker to just make it myself.

It would be all too easy to Make Your Own Wes Anderson shot. Put a quirky person, dressed in loud but stylish colors, in the center of the frame; use a lens that spreads out the image and shortens the distance between foreground and background, creating a two-dimensional puppet-stage effect; stick an object or a character off to one side to throw off the symmetry; and, voilý. You're in the New York Film Festival.

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, didn't American Psycho come first, so the era of Total Bond Sellout could've been a Bret Easton Ellis novel? But I digress.] Anyway, Paulas's "art house script" sample sounds suspiciously--and promisingly--like a spec script for CSI.

I think this boy's got a hi-res future, Wednesdays at 9.

Using Product Placement In Your Serial Killer Script [TMN]

I'm a bit crazy with an offline deadline, so I'll just give you your assignment:

Starting with the prospect that wax does not, in fact, melt when submerged in the fiery pits of hell for all eternity by a wrathful God, please plot rank the following in order of sheer implausibility:

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 doing it for a couple of years already.

Uh-oh, Canada: unpacking the CFOB phenomenon [feb. 2003]
Tom Ford and Matthew Barney on CFOB

When I saw this link the other day, I didn't click on it. Execution couldn't be any funnier than the concept, I figured. Boy, was I wrong.

Dubyamovie.com [via Jason, Andy, ]

The Gothamist Life Aquatic contest is over, and Congratulations! Everyone's a winner. A few people won more than the rest, obviously. And G-mist and Cinecultist's Karen--whose brainchild this publicity coup was--got the big prize, a phone interview with director Wes Anderson himself.

Eerily enough, it sounds like he's right there with her at Lucky Strike.

Karen came to last night's Reel Roundtable screening of After Life [thanks, Elizabeth!], by the way; and on Jan. 17, she's starring in a Reel Roundtable screening of Kieron Walsh's When Brendan Met Trudy, so clear your calendars.

Today is Wes Anderson Day! [cinecultist]
Wes Anderson: he knows where you are [Gothamist]
Reel Roundtable's Film & Blogs Series [reelroundtable.com]

Issue of 2004-12-13
Posted 2004-12-06

FROM THE ARCHIVE
FICTION/ Louise Erdrich/ A Wedge of Shade/ Issue of 1998-03-06
EXCERPT/ Lillian Ross/ The Third Decade: 1945-1954/ An essay on cartoons, from The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker [which would still make someone an excellent holiday gift, don't you think?]

Seriously, though, is there some kind of running bet among the wireservice photographers, whoever discovers the exact shot Scott Sforza has designed for them first, wins a, a what? I have no idea.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants [wonkette, via MAN]
Bush speech at the Library of Congress Churchill Exhibit, with backdrops on loan from The White House Collection[whitehouse.gov]

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 login screen pops up, then refuses to log me in because my browser (Mozilla) doesn't accept cookies.

The problem first popped up [sic] a few months ago when the Times hired a Utah research/survey firm to monitor user activity via their own cookies, which were rejected by my Moz "accept cookies only from the originating server" restrictions.

But lately, even after I thought I'd already laid back and thought of England, cookie-wise, I've still been rejected. Turns out that I still had the "cookies expire after 90 days" setting , and the Times wanted to place one 6-month, three 1-year, and one 10-year cookie in my browser.

To which I can only say, "Um, yes ma'am?"

In order to shoot interior scenes of Barry Lyndon entirely by candlelight, Stanley Kubrick had two extremely fast Zeiss photo lenses from NASA custom-adapted for a motion picture camera. There is a third Zeiss lens in existence, un-Kubricized, and Justin at Chromogenic would like it for Christmas, please. With a Nikon mount.

I don't know if Justin has been naughty or nice, but he's sure gotta be nicer than Vincent Gallo, who had--and tried to sell on ebay--another lens Kubrick had custom-built for Barry Lyndon, an Angenieux 20-to-1 zoom.

Speed Demon [Chromogenics.net, via Kottke]
Buy it and make something good with it [greg.org on gallo]
Two Special Lenses for "Barry Lyndon," by Ed diGiulio (President, Cinema Products Corp.) [American Cinematographer, via Visual Memory]

Apologies for the scarce posts lately; I've been busy with offline writing and real work. Still, I don't know how I missed this: The US Film Festival is now called the Sundance Film Festival?? I guess since they added two world cinema competitions for docs and narrative films, the USFF name just didn't make sense anymore.

Here's this year's list of films [minus the shorts, set for release Monday] which all sorts of folks are unpacking. Meanwhile, David Hudson unpacks the unpackers at GreenCine.

RSVP to Mondayís screening of AFTER LIFE and on behalf of IFC Films, receive an invitation to the premiere screening of NOBODY KNOWS.

Ceci n'est pas un McCarthy, mÍme s'il coute $6mm

A performance artist has been arrested in Germany after trying to spray blood on a sculpture of Michael Jackson.

Istvan Kantor tried to squeeze a capsule of blood onto Paul McCarthy's Michael Jackson and Bubbles sculpture at Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof gallery.

Kantor, who's pulled stunts like this before, was being filmed by his own accompanying video crew. He was arrested and released yesterday.

While normally it'd take a whole season of CSI to tell the fake fake blood from the authentic fake blood on a Paul McCarthy sculpture, MJBH is the rare McCarthy (still) not covered in goo. No word on whether any Jeff Koons sculptures of Michael Jackson and Bubbles were harmed.

Bid to deface Jackson art fails [BBC]
Mick Flick Collection at the Hamburger Bahnhof
McCarthy's MGBH in the 2002 Whitney Biennial [public art fund]
Koons' Michael and Bubbles, 1988 [Broad Foundation Collection]
"Food flies. Blood Spurts. Bottoms are bared" in the work of Paul McCarthy [Guardian]

First they ran a contest for Miramax's Hero which had such obscure questions about Jet Li minutiae that not even his agent--or even Li-fanatic-from-birth Jen Chung--could answer, even with a lifetime subscription to IMDb Pro.

Now Gothamist gets all Disney publicity sock puppet on us again, this time with a contest for Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic, distributed by Touchstone.

The prize? Tickets to a 12/7 preview screening of the movie. The contest? Just fill out your name and email already. I guess Wes's fans aren't the kind who pay attention to nitpicky cinematic details. Oh, and this time, Gothamist employees aren't eligible to enter. Jen, I guess you'll have to go to a private screening.

Gothamist The Life Aquatic Contest [Gothamist.com]

Related: Matt goes all Milton Glaser and Dylan on the Life Aquatic poster. [lowculture]

"But enough about me, let's talk about you. What do YOU think of me?"

I hate it that I have a line from Beaches burned into my brain, but once in a while, it comes in handy.

I know what you're saying: "the last thing I need to hear is what a bunch of tea-sippin' euros think of Americans right now." Mercifully, The Americans being thought about here are not Robert Novak's, but Robert Frank's.

On Friday, the Tate Modern is hosting a day-long symposium about Frank's 1958 work, The Americans, which has been called "quite simply and undeniably, the most important and influential book of photographs since World War II."

The 2-part program focuses on The Americans in its time, and on its legacy. Speakers include the book's original publisher, Robert Delpireis, and the awesome photographer Stephen Shore (no slouch in the crossing the country with a camera department).

The day will end with a rare screening of Franks' Rolling Stones concert doc, Cocksucker Blues, which Mick and the boys blocked from distribution after finding their own staged excesses a little too vÈritÈ.

Tickets are £15, or approximately $858 million [heh] at current exchange rates, plus the movie. Kultureflash got the word out in the UK; I'm just here to tell folks who don't have two ha'pennies to rub together that the whole thing'll be webcast [Duh, except the movie. Nice try, though.], so set your clocks to Big Ben.

What We Think Of The Americans,
Fri. Dec. 3, starting at, oh, 1030 GMT/0630 EST [Tate Modern, via Kultureflash]
The story behind Cocksucker Blues [Guardian]