January 2007 Archives

In retrospect, 1939 was a rough year to be a diehard pacifist. But that's when Hugh Harman's Peace On Earth anti-war cartoon was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Mahatma Gandhi was nominated that year, too, but '39 was the beginning of five-year stretch when the award was not given.

The timing makes me think of some of the giant WWI memorials in France which were conceived at the height of unalloyed pacificism. The Australian National Memorial in Villers-Bretonneux, for example, wasn't finished until 1938, just in time for the French to use it--unsuccessfully--as a position for repelling the German invasion.

Anyway, the cartoon is about the merry little forest creatures of Peaceville, who are picking up the pieces after all the humans have killed themselves off. Enjoy. [via fred]

The constroversy over Peter Baxter's decision to pull Super Columbine Massacre RPG! from Slamdance's Guerilla Gamemakers Festival hit the New York Times this weekend, and Baxter has yet another explanation for his actions.

This time, it's not complaints by a sponsor, hypothetical complaints by a sponsor, or even his own personal distaste for the game. It was, as he explains to Heather Chaplin,

because of outraged phone calls and e-mail messages he’d been receiving from Utah residents and family members associated with the Columbine shooting. He was also acting on the advice of lawyers who warned him of the threat of civil suits if he showed the game.

Chaplin writes of SCMRPG!'s "champions" and "detractors," which I think misses a major point. In the glare of attention and the fallout surrounding the game, and certainly around the decision to pull it. It's pure media Heisenberg: as events unfolded and garnered more attention, everyone--Baxter, Danny Ledonne, the game's creator, other designers who pulled their games in protest, and observer/critics--adjusted their own positions and justifications for their moral stances in light of what new had transpired.

Greg Costikyan posted a reader's refutation of his legitimating defense/review of the game which is at once perceptive [and not just for using the twee critspeak, "games qua anything"] and entirely beside the point. Whatever Ledonne's ex post facto interpretations of his game, the argument goes, his earliest discussions of it were not ironic metacommentary; they were the rantings of a dumbass who was wallowing in the Columbine killers' actions. The game isn't a self-consciously retro exploration of society, but an amateurish hack by a guy who didn't know how to change the default settings on his RPG gamemaking software.

Conclusion: SCMRPG! sucks as a game and should never have been juried into the competition in the first place. Which sounds true, but irrelevant to this situation.

Sundance's jury let in an exploitative, sensationalistic, controversy-seeking POS starring Dakota Fanning this year, but you didn't see Redford pulling rank and yanking the film. It just got the critical drubbing it deserved and will presumably slip into oblivion as it should.

Instead, the fact that a POS like SCMRPG! got into the competition at all should spur debate over the critical standards for judging games, which seem poorly thought through at best. Get a smarter jury, one which isn't just interested in flamethrowing qua flamethrowing by introducing a crap game to the competition.

But the combination of as-yet unformed critical consensus about what makes a "good" game or a game "good," combined with Baxter/Slamdance's knuckleheaded, ass-covering conservatism only strengthens the case that games need a new, different venue of their own. Whether it's a festival, a competition, whatever, is up to the gameworld to decide.

As for SCMRPG!, I'm still inclined to cut Ladonne some slack. If Trey Parker and Matt Stone had turned tail after their musical Cannibal! was rejected from Sundance, there may never have been a South Park. And there may never have been a Slamdance, for that matter.

Artists are not always clear or conscious of what goes into their work, and they're certainly not in control of the response it engenders when it gets into the world. Whatever the merit (or lack thereof) in SCMRPG!, it still resonates because of its uncanny similarity to a scene in Gus Van Sant's Elephant. The two killers-to-be are loafing around a basement bedroom. One plays the piano [fur Elise] and one plays an RPG on a laptop. It was an effortless kill'em game set in an empty desert.

The targets were dressed like the characters from Van Sant's Gerry. After expressing surprise that anyone had noticed, the producer of Elephant, Dany Wolf, told me that they had to create their own game [using the Doom engine], because they couldn't find a company who'd allow their video game to be used in the film.

Video Game Tests The Limits. The Limits Win. [nyt]

When I was a freshman at BYU, I had a hopeless crush on a girl from Hawaii. She was really nice to me, and we eventually became friends. But I never had a chance because, unlike her boyfriend at the time, I had not been an extra in Footloose, and I had not been immortalized [sic] on film picking my nose, and wearing a powder blue tuxedo.

Footloose was filmed in the wide open grain and alfalfa fields of Lehi, Utah, just north of Provo. The Lehi Roller Mills where Kevin Bacon's triumphant school dance was held, was Lehi's only landmark, visible from the desolate stretch of highway leading to Salt Lake City--and civilization [sic again]. There used to be a rest stop near there.

Hang gliders would sometimes soar over the southern, Provo side of the Point of the Mountain, which separated Salt Lake Valley and Utah Valley [or, as it's also known, Happy Valley.] On the north side of the Point, above the prison where Gary Gilmore was executed by a firing squad, bikers'd stage a widowmaker hill climb [I don't know, annually?] that'd carve deep ruts into the grass.

Tract houses have long since crept along the foothills and over the fields on both sides of the Point, but it's always been an empty, rural place people pass by, around, through, on their way to the city. That's the mental image, anyway, of folks who lived in or visited Utah more than ten years ago.

Next week, though, Brandt Andersen, a 29-year old software & real estate developer from Provo, who owns the local franchise for the NBA Development league, will unveil the plans for an 85-acre plot in Lehi, just south of the Point, and right across the freeway from Thanksgiving Point, a large entertainment/recreation development by the WordPerfect folks.

The mixed use project will contain " a 12,000-seat arena, a five-star hotel, high-end shopping, restaurants, offices, a wakeboarding lake, and a massive residential community." The architect for the project is Frank Gehry.

Said Gehry, whose other mixed-use urban center project, Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, has met considerable opposition, he likes the absence of a "big city bureaucracy." Says it's nice to be able to just have lunch with the mayor when you need to. Gets things moving along.

For his part, Lehi Mayor Howard Johnson is "most excited about the project's proposed lake, which Andersen has agreed to let Lehi use as a secondary irrigation reservoir. The city would be able to store water in the lake and use it when necessary. 'That is of a rather sizable financial value to Lehi,' Johnson said."

For my part, I'm hoping Andersen will throw in a Gehry-designed church or two for all the Mormons moving into his massive residential project. Back in the day, before business school, when I was high on his architecture [just as the Weisman Museum opened in Minnesota, but long before Bilbao] and feeling low about the bland, utilitarian, sameness of contemporary Mormon buildings, I decided I was going to just commission Frank Gehry to design a chapel. Then I'd build it, and hand it over to the Church, fait accompli. I hadn't thought to build the Mormon neighborhood required to go with it.

When he was introduced to such bigwigs are there are in Lehi at the moment, Gehry was self-effacing, and promised not to airdrop in some flashy, Bilbao-y blob. "We won't build something that people won't buy into. It's subtle how culture translates into architecture. And there is a culture in Utah." Amen to that.

Moroni, I know. But I'm just sayin'...

Lehi goes postmodern with Frank Gehry [harktheherald.com via archinect]
Legendary architect agrees to design a big Lehi project [deseretnews.com]
A n unofficial rendering of the massing plan [skyscraperpage.com]

Marcos Vilarino has recreated some early landmarks of modern photography in Lego, including this interpretation of Laslo Moholy-Nagy, Feininger's "The Photojournalist" {note: it's Andreas, not Lionel/Lyonel, who was a painter] and the world's first photo, Niepce's view out his window in 1826 [discussed previously.] [via kottke]

Philip Nobel encapsulates my hate-to-love/hate relationship with Rem Koolhaas and his work in this greatly entertaining Metropolis Mag column, "I ♥ IIT… But I Still Don’t Like Rem". [1]

Rem may have changed my thinking about China with a late 1990's Columbia lecture that should've been called Delirious Pearl River Delta, but after being disappointed by supposedly seminal buildings from Utrecht to Lille to Prince Street and more, I can really find no excuse anymore for his antics.

And besides that, the Prada Parfums website is an AGONIZING, MIND-NUMBING EMBARASSMENT. A.M.Oy. [fortunately for the world, no one's seeing it.]

[1] My tab bar shows that "|" is actually a "[heart]", but I think a "|" is better, especially for Mies's IIT. Kind of like those "I [square] Judd" stickers they sell in Marfa.

As someone whose desktop contains several drafts of an adaptation of a straightforwardly narrative but slightly magically naturalist historical novel, I've watched the discussion of Screenhead's list of unfilmable novels with vested interest.

It took over forty comments for my personal favorite Unfilmable Novel to come up, though, which gave me plenty of time to get reflexively critical of the list. What hasn't really emerged, though, is any real discussion or analysis of what makes a novel unfilmable.

There are nods to textual density and complex narrative structure, but honestly, if "unfilmable" really just means "no obvious three-act structure" then we're really just talking about "Unfilmable by Syd Field alumni," and guess what? Not interesting.

Whether it's Pulp Fiction, Requiem for a Dream, Memento, or Koyanisqaatsi, a film can reject quite a few filmic storytelling conventions and be the better for it. So Eoin's concern about Beckett, "How on earth could anyone adapt a novel that fails to have a character?" doesn't bother me as much as "How on earth could anyone adapt a novel under the suffocating restrictions of the Beckett estate?"

The problem of filming long and episodic novels like Don Quixote is largely artificial, like trying to turn a novel into a comprehensive sculpture. The Sopranos, The Wire, even Lord of The Rings should show there's no need to whittle a thousand great pages into a single, 120-page script.

My own favorite novel I can't figure out how to film is Nabokov's Pale Fire, which turns out to be structurally similar to my second favorite unfilmable novel, DFW's Infinite Jest. Both are footnoted, hypertextual extravaganzas which require juggling thumbs and threads as you jump back and forth from "story" to "supporting material," even as they call such distinctions into question.

As it turns out, Soderbergh has talked about his interest in Pale Fire, too. In 1996, Stan Schwartz suggested Nabokov as an interest/inspiration:

:Oh hell, yeah! Pale Fire. Yeah, he's great. There's a huge deconstructive element in his work. The acknowledgment that you're reading a book. And there's a lot of that in Schizopolis. The awareness that you're watching a movie, and the film's awareness that you're aware that you're watching a movie.

The subjectivity inherent in the list is amplified by attaching directors' names to these dream projects, "if anyone can do it, Tarantino/Lynch/Soderbergh/Aronofsky can"-style. There's nothing inherently unfilmable in these titles; it's just that we can't imagine how to do it. The problem isn't the novels'; it's ours.

But maybe there IS something else, a structural problem. How many studio execs or producers have actually read Joyce or Proust or Nabokov--or Cervantes? When I chose the name of my production company from Don Quixote, one project on my initial slate was shooting an adaptation of the novel without having read it. That became citing Don Quixote as an inspiration/reference in press material, knowing full well that almost no one would ever question or refute the claim. People "know" many of these novels as Great and Difficult, but they've rarely actually read them. [Hell, I still haven't read Ulysses or finished Infinite Jest, for that matter.]

The amount of imaginationpower being thrown against possible film adaptations is thus exponentially smaller than we imagine. Meanwhile, in addition to the mindset of executives, the film industry's production and funding infrastructure is designed not to make challenging, experimental, or unconventional films. The result is not exactly fertile soil for these projects to develop.

Terry Gilliam's Depp-meets-Don Quixote project didn't fail because Cervantes is unfilmable; in fact, the unbaked, chaotic ridiculousness of Gilliam's film/script/vision itself was the least of the reasons that production imploded.

From the Jan. 07 issue of Esquire: What I've Learned -- Producer Rick Rubin [Johnny Cash, some other stuff]:

Here we were in Mr. Chow's, and literally, it was like World War III had broken out. And when I really thought about it, this person causing it wasn't famous for anything that you could really put your finger on. It was an interesting comment on our society

There are very few artists I'd like to see a documentary about. For one thing, the narrative arc of a movie is usually ill-suited to either an artist's story/ideas or to the experience of the work itself. And no one can hold still, for fear, I guess, of boring the viewer, so there are invariably lots of slow pans, zooms in and out, dolly shots through empty galleries [if the budget's high enough to lay track, though I've seen a cameraman improvise a dolly by sitting in a mail cart.]

And their ostensible populism usually results in a grating boosterism of PBS or the Hagiographic School, whereby the case must be made for the Artist As Genius. [Damn populist medium again, but the October-y intellectual monkey tricks of art critical dialogue never seem to find their way into documentaries. It's as if everyone figures they need to dumb it down, or maybe it's just impossible to edit paragraph-long sentences into anything remotely watchable.]

Which is all a long way around to saying that Agnes Martin is one artist I would love to see working and hear talking, and not just because I miss her in some irrational, oddly personal way. [I never met her.] I have some old lecture notes from a talk she gave at ICA or someplace, and they are windswept-free of pretense and the cruft of art criticism and history.

From the review of Mary Lance's documentary, “Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World,” which she shot over four years, starting in 1998, Martin sounds like a refreshing, invigorating, and lucid counterpoint to the careerist whirl of the art world today. [And on top of that she sold tons of work.]

Anyway, Lance's film opened yesterday at Film Forum, and it's paired with a documentary about Kiki Smith. Lance will conduct a Q&A after the 8pm screening Friday [tomorrow].

Previously: Im Memoriam: Agnes Martin

Awesome. Just. Awesome. A couple who lives in the Rockefeller Apartments across 54th St from MoMA was watching the museum test the projections for the their upcoming Doug Aitken installation.

Your Video Art Here [flickr via curbed]

One of my early formative MoMA shows was Gabriel Orozco's Projects series in 1993, where he ran a scroll made of pages from the phone book down the center of the esclator handrails, and where he placed oranges in vases and cups in the windows of various Rockefeller Apartments residents.

For the 2006 Turner Prize exhibition, artist Phil Collins had Tate Britain set him up with an office in the gallery, where he and two hired researchers worked every day on Phil's next project: "finding people who feel their lives have been ruined by appearing in reality television shows."

Collins used the media hype around the Turner competition itself to garner the attention of his intended subject/collaborators. And according to the firsthand account of Lena Corner, one of the researchers, the strategy succeeded brilliantly.

She wrote about her experience of being on display while trying to actually get work done for The Independent last fall. It's an uncanny parallel to the spectacle and exhibitionism Collins & Co. were researching, though fortunately for Corner she seems to have suffered no lingering effects.

Gillian, the cleaning supervisor, pops in. Apparently the cleaners have been too scared to empty our bin in case it's an artwork. In 2004 German-born artist Gustav Metzger created a piece of "auto-destructive art" for the Tate. One element was a bag containing rubbish that he had collected from within the gallery, but a cleaner mistook it for a bag of rubbish and threw it out. Metzger declared the piece to be ruined. No wonder the cleaners are a little nervous.

With six trans-oceanic flights last month, I ended up seeing The DaVinci Code with the sound off at least two dozen times. The only thing that surprises me about this Reuters story is that it's taken this long for other craven museums to get into the movie tie-in game:

In the next two years [the Louvre and the Musee d'Orsay] will between them underwrite screenplays by seven critically acclaimed international filmmakers for films to be shot -- at least partly -- inside their walls.

Meanwhile, to comemmorate its 20th anniversary, d'Orsay is "working with" [?] director/producer Francois Margolin's company Margo Films to make four $3mm films starring Juliet Binoche [?], and directed by Olivier Assayas, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Raoul Ruiz, and Jim Jarmusch.

"Though it's probably not conscious, the ripple effects from presenting an image beyond museum walls is about branding -- the art collections and the museum -- to potential visitors from around the world."

Museums getting key parts in films [thr.com]

Ian at Water Cooler Games has been writing about an incident at Slamdance. Seems the founder of the alt-alt festival yanked Super Columbine Massacre, a charming -sounding RPG that tells the tale of some innocent, young, all-American scamps, from the Slamdance Guerilla Gamemaker Competition.

At first, the line was extreme sponsor displeasure with having a Columbine-themed title in competition. [I mean, just look at what it did to Cannes and Cannes. No one's ever heard of them again.] But now it turns out that it was really just Slamdance president Peter Baxter's own call in anticipation of possible sponsor displeasure--or else his own distaste for the game itself. Either way, it sounds like crap.

There's a lot of heated discussion among gamers and developers about the artistic merits of games vs their "mere entertainment" value. I think that's ridiculous and beyond discussion. Games have as much claim on "art" as film does. If anything, the nexis of creative, literary, and narrative innovation has shifted to games and away from almost any other medium I can think of at the moment.

This just sounds like a dumb-ass move by a blindered geezer whose vested interests are too tied up with the establishment. Exactly the kind of rejection and narrow-mindedness that spurred the creation of Slamdance in the first place. The only proper response, obviously, is for gamers to break off and make their own damn festival in response.

Then after this happens seven times, the Matrix collapses and has to be restarted from scratch.

Slamdance: SCMRPG removal was personal, not business [watercoolergames.org via boingboing]
the always awesome Greg Costikyan's reponse, plus they posted the game: SCMRPG: Artwork or Menace? [manifestogames.com]

Previously: Gus Van Sant's Elephant is part of the canon around here. Read my interview with producer Dany Wolf about the in-movie homebrewed video game based on Gerry.
Also: the art-movie-as-video-game-at Sundance, Gerry/video game connection.

1/9 update: Costikyan reports that to date, five gamemakers have withdrawn their titles from the festival. Yesterday, it was just one.

Something noticed last week: No, Warranties are not “boring,” Princess. When I went to buy my new coffee grinder recently, I was comparing two grinders, different brands, similar prices, and I wanted to see the warrantee information, right? This is the logical next step, it’s smart shopping, it’s informed consumption. Style is somewhat important, function-wise they are all about the same, color's rather limited, but the consumer-report-ish side of things, that’s what guides this smart shopper. Until I realize--and have to chuckle--I no longer have to bother myself about warranties because any product warrantee I find is going to last longer than I do. Shit. If a salesperson starts to explain service protection plans, Apple Care, x-years and just-so-many miles to go, I no longer pay any attention. Back in the grocery store, I shake my head at this, and then grab the grinder in the color I like best and get the hell out.

No, what surprises me, even though I've had a front row seat to the rough, short pancreatic ride, is the utter lack of surprise, just the opposite. Yes, it's extremely disconcerting that cancer took someone I went to school with, a friend, even [though it was really just temporary, situational friendship, like, you know, prison, only our prison was just the same excruciatingly conservative, affluent high school, and instead of orange jumpsuits, we wore torn, white t-shirts--and Polo].

Pancreatic cancer is its own thing; it rarely, if ever, leaves you guessing about the outcome, and yet it usually gives you a finite, yet manageable window--some months, a year, maybe--in which to wrap things up. The kind of stuff you'd call "living," if only living were actually Living instead of the cheap substitute we too often put up with. It's like a whole life in microcosm. That whole "live every day as if it were your last" thing. In fact, if it weren't for the never-ending pain, sounds like a great way to all-but guarantee the conscientious human a guilt- and regret-free exit strategy. [OK, not at 38.]

Scott began keeping a blog of his final act. I'm only a couple of months in so far, and it's fascinating and confounding mechanism for getting to know someone again whom I haven't known or seen for 25 years. I'd say I felt like an interloper, but his writing makes it clear that he's very aware of his different audiences--his exasperatingly Mormon family, friends and students from his life out of Utah--and his comments about comment volume and hit rates, and referrer logs now strike me as hilarious. [Pretend you have six months to live. Do you a) finish your book of poems, or b) refresh your stats one more time?] Until I imagine the reality and comfort that connectivity and communication could be in a situation like that.

Scott's writing is ascerbic--the dude's idea of consolation is to quote Gravity's Rainbow?--and it has a bit of the impatient, maybe-anger I remember, but it's also very heartfelt. Though he tries to stay true to his belief system--though to his parents' regret, no doubt, he traded in Joseph Smith, et al for Bataille--it sounds clear to me that there are no hermeneuticists in foxholes, at least not in this one. Scott read and wrote poetry and literature for its ability to bare and touch the human soul, even if he tried to stay skeptical of their existence. I kind of wish we'd kept in touch.

Do Not Go Gentle — Poetry & Cancer, Life & Death [blogspot]
Scott H. Swaner [sltrib.com]

Arne Quinze has a posse. The Belgian self-marketer began his cross-country promotional tour for the launch of the new Lexus flagship at Burning Man. Though he didn't really mention the tie-in to anyone there at the time, he sure has mentioned the Burn since, and how 2-4,000 people a day would come out to the deep playa to visit the Belgian Waffle.

Oddly, there was no mention at all of Lexus again when Quinze and his firm's US "agent" Antoine Debouverie, spoke last month at Miami Basel to a breathless David Weinstein on WPS1. The Lexus circus had come to town during the fair, and a P.S.1 staffer named Zorana Djakovic arranged for the "emerging master" to be interviewed about his art on ABMB's official art radio station.

You can hear the whole interview, it's only 12 minutes long, but here's my transcription of part of it:

Zorana Djakovic: What do you think, can you imagine one of Arne's wooden constructions at the courtyard of P.S.1 during the Warm-Up?

David Weinstein: That's the Warm-Up architecture project at PS1; there's a special architecture project for the environment for the summer dance parties. It's a competition, and there's a reward, but this would be wonderful there. And beautiful with the old building.

Antoine Debouverie: Have you seen it lit up as well? Because when you put together and create that organic, wooden shape with soft lighting and music, it becomes an incredible communal space.

At Burning Man there were 40,000 people there. We were not advertised anywhere. We were not on the agenda, for what parties at what times, you know? We just did it for ourselves, alright? And every night, I guarantee, there were like five, ten thousand people who would converge to our space to experience the space, the lights, and you know the communion that this piece produces.

DW: I can tell you, our staff was thrilled immediately by this piece, and I urge people to go take a look at it. Our description here leaves something to be desired.

WPS1: Beyond Burning Man: Arne Quinze [pronounced KWIN-zuh, apparently. Now I'll have to change all my too-clever titles.]
previous greg.org over-coverage of Quinze Milan, Lexus, Burning Man, and the Uchronians