May 2006 Archives

What we need in this scene is a very dramatic showdown over separation of powers. Perhaps we could all pretend to argue amongst ourselves over some picayune case, preferably one that involves a corrupt Louisiana Democrat. That way, not only do we get to look concerned over separation, Hastert gets to look separate, and Gonzales gets to look principled [maybe he could even threaten to resign.]

Then while that's going, we can get provide cover for getting Hayden--who was behind the big executive branch abrogation of co-equal government in the first season--confirmed and still not have him have to answer to Congress for anything about it. AND we still get to hype a Democratic corruption investigation through the long weekend.

Why is that not the headline for any of the stories about the Smithsonian's exclusive TV programming deal with Showtime?

Smithsonian officials signed a 30-year contract with CBS Corporation's Showtime division giving them rights of first refusal to any "commercial" films produced using the Smithsonian's collection, archives or experts in any more than an "incidental" way.

Look back 30 years and ask yourself what changes have been wrought in the cable TV market, the Internet, and film production. How many of them did you foresee? How many of them did you write into your contracts in 1976?

Then ask yourself what changes might occur in the next 30 years. Look what's happened to the distribution of independent and user-created video with YouTube and Google Video in just the last year, for example, the same year it took for Showtime and Smithsonian to negotiate their secret deal. And since the Smithsonian sale came to light in March, AOL has also announced its own video competitor to YouTube.

From Robert Rodriguez' home studio operation and Soderbergh's HD Bubble to Jonathan Caouette's DV/iMovie Tarnation to Rocketboom to liveblogging to Matt Haughey's Star Wars Kid remake, we're in the early days of an independently-created video content revolution. How many tens of thousands of potential documentaries, features, and shorts and who-knows-what-kinds of programs could be created in the next three years, never mind the next thirty, if the national patrimony held by the Smithsonian were made available in the way that, say, the BBC is planning to do? They're opening their entire archive for remixing and reuse by the people who paid for it--the citizens and residents of the UK.

Instead, the Smithsonian has locked its holdings up for thirty years with a single company--CBS/Showtime--and for what? The right to make six programs per year outside the agreement, a 10% stake in the Smithsonian On Demand service, and guaranteed payments of $500,000 a year, plus some unknown percentage of future profits or revenues.

At even the most conservative calculations, the present value of those $500,000 payments is around $7.9 million. At a more typical discount rate (the historical risk-free rate of 8%), Showtime sews up 30 years of exclusive use of the Smithsonian's resources for a freakin' $6 million.

So not only did Smithsonian executives sell out America's patrimony to a single, giant media corporation, they sold it for practically nothing.

Is there no other way for the Smithsonian to bring in $500k/year? Did they look at any other options at all? Did they consider at all the benefits and costs beyond guaranteed annual payments? For screenplays it helps develop that get turned into actual films, The Sundance Institute asks for a donation of a fraction of a percent of the film's production budget, and 1% net profit participation.

What would be result if the Smithsonian charged a 0.5% fee for each program it cooperates with? It signed an average of 180 media contracts/year between 2000 and 2005. With an average budget of even $250,000, that's already $225,000/year. Now imagine thousands or tens of thousands of filmmakers using the Institute's collections to make tiny-budget--but commercially viable--content in the near future we're already beginning to imagine.

The Smithsonian executives' dogged insistence that only a very few filmmakers are affected demonstrates an inexcusable lack of some combination of vision, integrity, or sense of responsibility, and it shortchanges both the Institute and the country to the exclusive benefit of CBS. From the standpoint of what we got--and more importantly, of what we lost--we, the American people, have been thoroughly ripped off.

Smithsonian Hands Over TV Contract [wapo]

Yeah, I've got a post about the MoMA gig with Jim Mangold on Tuesday, which was a lot of fun. Great guy.

But first, this picture from Curbed, which was taken on 21st Street between 10th and 11th Avenues:

Now compare it to this 2003 shot from the same block:

Art is in the Eye of the Property Holder [curbed]
Elmgreen & Dragset, Opening Soon / Powerless Structures Fig. 242, 2003 [tanyabonakdargallery.com]

And let me put it this way: when you're talking about the films of James Mangold and you see the words "star," "stud," and "special" together that can only mean two possibilities: Joaquin Phoenix or Sylvester Stallone.

And if either of them are a no-show Tuesday, I'm sure moderator Anna Deveare Smith'll be able to channel them as only she knows how.

In one of my other lives, I'm the co-chair of this benefit for MoMA's Film and Media department, A Work In Progress, which this year honors Walk The Line director James Mangold.

The gig is this coming Tuesday, May 23rd, from 7-11pm, at MoMA and if past years' have been any indication, the event will be awesome (and will run slightly over schedule).

Check out the invite here, and then buy a beneficently priced ticket or two here. [$400 to see the celebrity ear hair, $225 to see the celebrity bald spots, and $150 to eat the celebrity hors d'oeuvres.]

A Work in Progress: An Evening with James Mangold [ersvp.com]
Previously: And the AWIP goes to: Marc Forster, Alexander Payne, Sofia Coppola, David O. Russell

Whit Stillman not only lives, he writes in the Guardain about what the heck he's been working on all this time. Some adaptation that didn't work out, a script about Jamaican gospel churches...

As I've gone from identifying with the protagonists of Metropolitan to the aging yuppie at the bar at JG Melon's in Metropolitan, I have to say, I'm a little put off by Mr. Stillman's apparently laconic--or wary, maybe--approach to filmmaking.

But that's probably because I seem to be doing the same thing, bouncing back and forth in stolen moments between pipe dream projects and adaptations. I just haven't got three features under my belt.

Confessions of a serial drifter [guardian via greencine]

Documentary director Alison Chernick's newest film, Matthew Barney: No Restraint, sounds like a must-see, and not just for the rare behind-the-scenes footage in includes from the set of the artist's own latest production, Drawing Restraint 9. [That's the new one. You know, the one with Bjork. The one shot on a Japanese whaling ship. The one that has people pretending sure, they knew what a flensing knife was before they read the production notes, didn't you read Moby Dick or something? Same page here? Great, let's move on.]

No, MB:NR offers some things even rarer in the Matthew Barney-verse: dialogue. explication. edits. time for dinner. [The docu runs an audience-friendly 70 minutes.] From the trailer, it looks like there are some thoroughly objective interviews with disinterested folks like Barney's dealer, his curator, his Guggenheim director, and his employees. And the film is being distributed by Barney's distributor, too, who must be considering this a kind of primer for Barney neophytes, a gateway drug, if you will, to vast vats of Vaseline.

But enough snark. I kid because I love, more or less. And I think MB:NR can provide some interesting insights into Barney's process, if not exactly into his work. Which, given its sculptural, material, and experiential nature, is probably as close as you can get
expect to get.

Matthew Barney: No Restraint debuted at Berlin and in the US at Full Frame, and it's continuing on the festival circuit. But The Walker Center is also screening the film next Thursday, May 25, at 8pm. See the WAC calendar for details and tickets.

Matthew Barney: No Restraint filmsite [matthewbarneynorestraint.com]
Previous Barneyana on greg.org

Because I happen to know that she prefers the US spelling, "autarchically," I believe this interview with Sofia Coppola is translated from the French:

SC/...I had been interested also by this period myself, the XVIIIth century in France, for quite a while, the atmosphere at Versailles, a place that functionned autarkically. I liked the idea of reconstituting that period, of doing a costume drama: to do that became then some sort of challenge for me.

JML/ Did you first try to do that film before shooting Lost in Translation?

SC/ I was working on MA's screenplay much before LIT. In fact LIT was at first nothing but a distraction from MA, a means for me to get away from a project that I knew was going to be rather Pharaonic. After LIT I decided to concentrate myself entirely to MA, it then became a sort of obsession for me. I really put myself to work on the screenplay of MA on the very day that followed the end of LIT's shooting.

There's very interesting reporting, but nothing too surprising or too comforting, in Joe Hagan's NY Mag feature on the complete disaster that is Michael Arad and his WTC Memorial design.

Within two weeks of the jury choosing Arad's design, it seemed clear that the jury and the LMDC wanted to design and alter the memorial as it wished, and that Arad's inexperience and youth--and the concept's many unresolved elements--were thought to be "the most amenable to their impending directives."

And within two months, there were stories of Arad not playing well with others being leaked by his LMDC overlords.

The only relief would be comic if it weren't such a serious topic. Hagan shows that Arad had patterned his violent, stubborn arrogance after that Organ Grinder's Monkey For Freedom himself, Daniel Libeskind, the guy who claimed victory for his concept at every step, even as his "master plan" was being altered out of existence, in large part by Arad's own contribution. [bonus Libeskind hissyfit quote: "I'll fight this! I am the people's architect!" You can take the boy out of Poland...] But without a Jewish Museum to beat people over the head with, or a steely wife to wield a cudgel in his wake, Arad had nothing but his empty, facile, original vision, which he defended at all costs. Check out Hagan's Arad-sourced description of the problem with a Port Authority-authored change to two central ramps into the memorial:

Although [Arad] didnít object to the central hall per se, having the ramp entrance there destroyed his notion of drawing visitors through a distinct walking narrative that focused on the experience of the pools, especially the initial breathtaking view at the bottom. Now that experience was marred by the tourist facility.

But there are other fingerprints on the scene, and they belong to Maya Lin, the original Minimalist Memorial Artist Intransigent In The Face Of Politico-Bureaucratic Meddling. Here's Hagan on the memorial jury's selection process:

In the secret proceedings, Maya Lin, the designer-cum-martyr of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, pushed for Aradís design; he could not have had a more meaningful advocate. If Lin recognized in Arad something of herself, if she saw in his design a connection to her own extraordinary monument to grief and memory, then maybe Aradís memorial was really equal to this tragedy. And maybe that would protect it from the conflict that had swallowed up every other inch of ground zero.

Then there's this passage about Arad's final presentation of his revised, finalist's design:

Lin recognized the value in Aradís resistance. "Maya was able to set our sights on the kind of intensityóthe scrutiny and the kind of forces that were going to come to play on his design," says Michael Van Valkenburgh, a landscape architect who served on the jury. "We recognized a kind of stamina that he had. It seemed like it would hold up." (Lin declined to comment.)

You may know Brian Sholis from such venues as Artforum and his as-time-permits blog, In Search of the Miraculous.

Brian just posted some behind-the-scenes shots of the first of twelve installations Olafur Eliasson's doing at Portikus, the Frankfurt art space. As anyone familiar with Olafur's work knows, the behind is usually as important as the front.

A sneak peek at Olafur Eliasson's 'Light Lab' [insearch]

Supposedly reluctant starchitect Rem Koolhaas talked with the NYT's Robin Pogrebin about the mutiny in his firm, OMA's NY office, which is headed by supposedly reluctant starchitect-in-training Josh Prince-Ramus. Since the completion of the office's Seattle Library in 2004, PR [sic] has been the subject of many articles in which he professes annoyance at being the subject of so many articles.

"But he [i.e., Koolhaas] said that he didn't seek this status, that stardom had been pressed on him by a media culture that craves major figures. 'In America the cult of celebrity makes the reality of a partnership harder to maintain,' he said."

PR concurs, "The media's desire to make everything about an individual doesn't reflect our reality." Damn media and their craving for starchitects.

Now if we could just do something about those damn clients: Said Bill Lively, the go-to guy for the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts, which is just getting underway, "'We're going to have a Koolhaas-O.M.A. theater.'"

And as the client on another big OMA project in the works, an arts center in Louisville, explained, "'The Koolhaas name obviously led us to the firm, but as I've learned over the years, you're working with individuals...I think Josh is a celebrity in his own right.'" Nice.

Joshua Prince-Ramus Leaving Koolhaas's O.M.A. to Start New Architecture Firm [nyt]
Previously: You can call me Rem

PS: archinect's forum called this story two months ago.

On the eve of the Cannes Film Festival, John Anderson takes a look at the phenomenally large amount of work that Palme d'Or winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne put into making their seemingly artless, effortless films.

And he looks at the phenomenally small amount of money Palme d'Or winners seem to make from US theatrical distribution. [What he doesn't look at, though, is how much films like this will be dependent on DVD sales and rentals to make their actual US money. I thought that DVD was the new Box Office for indie/foreign/specialty films.]

Cannes Gold Tarnishes in U.S. [nyt]

After conducting the biggest contemporary auction in Sotheby's history, Tobias Meyer told Artforum's Sarah Thornton, "The best art is the most expensive, because the market is so smart."

Uh-huh. This is the market that paid a million-one for a generic Yoshitomo Nara painting just because it's big. Meanwhile, one of the last Robert Smithson non-sites in private hands--and artist hands at that, the piece was being sold by its original owner, Keith Sonnier--sold for just its high estimate, $374,400 [or $300K+ plus the 20% or so premium].

The market may be smart at the top, but there's definitely a soft-headed center, too.

Yoshitomo Nara, "Missing in Action," 1999, est. $200-300,000. Sold for $1.08 million at Christie's [5/10/06].
Robert Smithson, "Shells and Mirror," 1969, est. $200-300,000. Sold for $374,400 at Christie's [5/10/06].

I realized when I grabbed this screenshot, I didn't capture the actual GOP disclaimer, which disclaims any affiliation between the Republican National Committee and Apple Computer.

Still, given how hard it was to believe that such a thing as iPods for Special Republicans really existed, I thought my own interpolation was appropriate.

The Special Republican Edition iPod Video will be presented to the top 10 fundraisers who organize and host house parties on May 22nd using the RNC's new social networking site, MyGOP [www.gop.com/mygop].

What, I wonder, would come loaded on such a rare edition iPod? [via gop.com/party]

ìMargene, just to let you know, Nicki is just pretending to have a baby in order to have more time with Bill. Sheís still on the pill; sheís using Bill. I believe she knows about Bill and Barbís affair. Nicki has a serious spending/debt problem. Also, Iím sorry no one went with you to the mall.î

* Posted by: mississippigirl19 Apr 30, 2006 2:09 PM EDT

For those who may not be so up on things, Margene is on Big Love, an innovative and groundbreaking documentary/reality television series about a polygamist family in Salt Lake City that's shot and edited live, in real-time, Sunday nights on HBO.

See, when it's dark here in NYC at 10PM, it's still morning in Utah, which is why those kids are goin' to school and-- never mind, it's too technical to get into here.

How stoked are you that AirArabia, the JetBlue of Sharjah, UAE--best known to real estate brokers as "Dubai Adjacent"--used the South Park Character Generator for the little characters on their website?

Each time you reload the site, you get a new one, so collect'em all!

AirArabia.com [via gridskipper, who went to Dubai, and all he didn't get was this lousy t-shirt]

1) Truckload of Missing Art Found in Trailer Park, by Alan Feuer, NY Times.

2) A--

Actually, we have winner right there.

Of course, it's actually called a yukata, and it's for wearing on summer evenings or hot days.

And of course, it's actually Marc by Marc Jacobs, the bridge line, but still. It is the only authentic Marc Jacobs logo kimono on the market right now. Women's sizes only, I'm afraid.

Marc Jacobs yukata, 48,300 yen [marcjacobs.jp via jeansnow]

After you sit back and digest the delicious hilarity that Mr. Hankey's creators will be appearing as "part of The Stanley Kubrick Masterclass series," peruse the NFT description of the event:

In London for this 'Skillset Masterclass', Parker and Stone will explore the art of creating political satire, getting inspiration from Bruckheimer to Thunderbirds, the merits of puppet versus cell animation, the idea of absolute creative freedom and how far is too far.

Also, which one of them grew up Mormon?

The Skillset Masterclass with Matt Stone & Trey Parker [bfi-org.uk via kultureflash]

Considering it's an architecture magazine, I'm surprised there's no mention of his architectural interventions, like turning rooms into cameras obscura [sp?] or cutting holes in the roof to make like a sundial.

Never mind Olafur's proposal for a new music hall in Iceland. Still, it's a good intro.

Optical Magic [metropolismag.com]

I still can't tell if I was the only one kind of weirded out by the sudden and overwhelming outpouring of nostalgic loss and ruminating over the death of Jane Jacobs.

Archinect, Tropolism, Curbed, Kottke, even the Home of the Whopper of Superficiality, Gawker, had a paean to the urban theorist/activist within hours after she died.

Not to speak too ill of her or her vital, inspiring ideas and all, but I wonder if someone with a Nexis account can look up how many mentions Jacob had garnered in the weeks, months, even year or two before her death, just to get a little bit of perspective.

Of course, I'm always troubled when I end up agreeing with Witold Rybczynski, who pointed out what many New Yorkers already know as giant, extruded "luxury" condo towers fill up once-edgy, heterogeneous neighborhoods and a once-risky High Line is on track to become the High Lawn for a dozen-plus starchitected buildings: vibrant city fabric is now a luxury amenity.

But Kottke's right and too nice to be righter when he says that Nicolai Ouroussoff's counter-examples to Jacob's idealized dense cityscape--Lincoln Center and the WTC--are a joke. There needs to be some contrast and some alleviation of the pressure that a dense city creates, but as recently as like five minutes ago, Lincoln Center was a consensus failure set for a Diller+Scofidial jazzing up. You know, to pump up the energy level and get some more street-level activity going.

Meanwhile, mall developers are, oddly, the ones working the hardest to apply Jacobs' multi-use, multi-constituency formulas to their newest urban destination retail experience centers [sic], which are essentially privately owned and managed downtowns.

Ouroussoff's strongest refutation of Jacobism is, of course, LA, but what if that's some kind of Jacobist diversity/vibrancy, just with a car's extended range?

No one going to Manhattan anymore because it's too crowded and expensive. From Williamsburg to The Slope and who-knows-where, Brooklyn is ascendant. I wonder if the Jacobs ideals still hold true, just on a larger scale than her little legs could imagine.

Koolhaas talked about the NY Grid and the city center's march northward over 200 years, From within (the) Wall to Five Points to Allen to Bowery to Astor to Sixth to Fifth to Park to. Then once at Columbia, I watched him make the same argument, only about the Pearl River Delta, where the entirety of Hong Kong and Kowloon is the late 19th century Delancey Street of the late 21st century.

Now look what I've done. I started out only wanting to mention that in fact, according to the buzz, Lincoln Center is supposed to suck, [I don't really think it happens to, but then, I don't use it that much, except to enjoy all the unobstructed light it sends into the apartment.] but now I've wound around and ended up agreeing with that monkey who curated the dress show at his "Prada Epicenter" [sic sic sic]. It's late. Let me sleep on this, and in the morning, after a nice big glass of Diet Coke, I'll come back adn solve the Problems Facing Our Cities.

Hal Foster on Koolhaas on urban congestion, Delirious New York, and the Pearl River Delta. [lrb.co.uk]

I don't know what was more hilarious: Stephen Colbert's speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, or the not-at-all-amused faces on some of the folks in the crowd at his unflinching criticism, which was delivered, of course, wrapped in Colbert's dumbly sycophantic supporter character.

There were, of course, obligatory "defending the American way of staging elaborate photo-ops" jokes.

I know what wasn't funny, though: the interminable audition tape bit, which dragged on ten times too long and was lamer than the ending of a hundred SNL sketches rolled together.

I made a Fatal Attraction spoof in college that was supposed to be funny-suspenseful, too, and even some of our 100x-too-long scenes were shorter than this Helen Thomas bit.

Anyway, here's the YouTube, in three parts. Do you get my point that you really only need to watch two?

The House of Representatives, that is. Here is a long lens snap of Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert climbing out of the hydrogen-powered minivan he'd just appeared in at a "we feel your gas prices pain" photo-op--and into his official SUV in order to, as the AP caption puts it on Yahoo, "drive the few blocks back to the U.S. Capitol."

Sweet. Hats off to AP snapper Pablo Martinez Monsivais for the get, and thanks to the morning news for the tip.

While he's been actively posing questions about vision and perception and exploring the relationship between the seen/felt/experienced and reality, I've still had a sense of Olafur Eliasson as a sculptural artist. That object/space/experience thing.

And I mean that, even though it's photographs looming over my shoulder as I type this, not stainless steel artichoke-shaped kaleidoscopic pavilions.

But after seeing his new show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery over the weekend, Hal Foster's phrase "cinematic delirium" stuck in my mind. Foster used it to describe the types of video art where the projected image washes over you.

Because that's what happens in Eliasson's show, over and over. Except there's no image, exactly. Or at least, there's no content. I think.

Upstairs is a giant, multi-faceted chandelier casting discoball-like patterns across the space, and a blackout room with a dim arrow flickering in a circle. It's actually a cam--wait, if I tell you, is it like spoiling the end of a film?

The exhibition itself is called, "Your engagement sequence," the artist's coinage for the viewer's experience of seeing and experiencing the work. It's a notion that architects and exhibition designers--and theme park and real estate developers, for that matter--are familiar with, but it's also similar to the narrative arc of a film or theatrical work. Here, the idea is that the sequence is the responsibility or contribution of the viewer as much as it is the plan of the gallery or the installation of the artist.

So that said, what you [probably actually] see first is the [new] first floor where a large now-familiar circular structure/chamber (gorgeous construction visible, of course) beckons. Inside is a 360-degree horizon line reflected from a pool in the center; the water's movement is concentrated into the undulating line of light on the wall, and on the spectators surrounding the pool.

Directors make dramatic cinematic use of such artificially produced reflected water effects all the time, I realize. But here, it's isolated and concentrated and all its own, not in the service of any particular emotion or mood or narrative. Right?

Behind this piece is a 2004 piece titled, The Uncertain Museum in which the shadows and reflections of four target-like mirrors dance across (and inside) a circular scrim.

Seeing the turning bull's eye projection, I'm immediately reminded of the Dada exhibit, where Duchamp's, Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics) [left], made with Man Ray's help, creates illusory bull's eyes with spinning glass plates on an exposed-for-all-to-see armature. And of course, there are the hypnotic spirals of his Anemic Cinema, too, which closes the show.

Suddenly the whole traumatized geopolitical landscape and context of Dada comes roaring in, and I find myself standing in the middle of this cinematic spectacle and wondering who, exactly, is doing the projecting?

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery [tanyabonakdargallery.com]
The Essential Dada - Marcel Duchamp, AnÈmic CinÈma [chello.nl/j.seegers1]