Author: greg

As If You Didn’t Have Enough Reasons To Evacuate New Orleans

“Not an hour goes by that we do not spend a lot of time thinking about the people who are actively suffering.”
– Michael Chertoff, DHS Secretary, in the aptly names White House Rose Garden. [As NYT: White House Anxiety Grows, Bush Tries to Quell Political Crisis]
“We’re making progress.”
-GWB, a million times on The Daily Show [blogcritics.org, anyone have the video?]
“I think about Iraq every day. Every. Single. Day.”
– GWB, a US-EU press conference. [transcript, whitehouse.gov]
“I want them to know that there’s a flow of progress. We’re making progress.”
–GWB yesterday at NO airport [whitehouse.gov]

MoMA-Hatin’ On My Mind, Nerves

Well, things could certainly be worse, but I’m pretty fed up with the achingly nostalgic, self-appointed populist heroic, knee-jerk MoMA-hating that passes for an enlightened, progressive cultural standpoint in certain quarters of New York these days.
James Wagner takes it personally and politically when PS1 won’t let him shoot images of the Greater NY show. The MoMA Man holding him down. Sure, it puts a cramp in your photodiarykeeping to not be allowed to take pictures, but please.
PS1 generally, historically–and GNY particularly, famously–is a seat-of-their-pants, chaotic circus. Photo release language in the lending documents–assuming there even ARE lending documents–is exactly the kind of thing I’d expect to slip through the cracks there. Little harm, little foul.
And as for those works being lost forever because you couldn’t snap’em? I thought the conventional wisdom about GNY was that everyone in it was already discovered, represented, and getting famous already. I thought up half a dozen artist names in the show and found images of their GNY work and more on their galleries’ websites. It’s more time-consuming than uploading from a digital, but that’s about it.
The one that really bugged, though, was critic/polymath Terry Teachout’s sob story of his visit to MoMA last Friday, how it’s a crowded mall now, not as good as Cleveland or as conducive to artviewing as the Met. Well, I happened to be at MoMA last Friday, too–I had a meeting there earlier in the day–and not only didn’t it suck, experience-wise, it was actually nice, and there were some revelatory art moments the likes of which Terry apparently couldn’t be bothered with, because he was bitching about the escalators too much.
1) The “mall” escalators are not a core element of the Taniguchi design, but they can be a core element of a visitor’s experience there if you choose them to be. First, they’re 1% the mall that Cesar Pelli’s escalators were. Remember those? Second, the stairs are not only less crowded, they’re highlights of the spatial experience. If you want a contemplative visit, leave the escalators to the tourists and take the stairs.
1a) In fact, the staircase Terry complains Diebenkorn has been shunted to is one of the most sublime elements of the whole Taniguchi building.

rebus_rauschenberg.jpg

2) Terry’s right about the Monets; they’re finally in a gallery where they belong. But he has not a word for what replaced them: giant Cy Twomblys that have never looked better than they do right now, alongside the Museum’s latest purchase, Rauschenberg’s giant Rebus. As an awestruck friend pointed out to me, Twombly and Rauschenberg were hooking up at the time Rebus was painted, so putting the two artists side by side again–and making you think about where that scribbling on Bob’s canvas came from, or as I rephrased it, “You’re wondering where Cy’s hands were?”–is at once hilarious and important. That painting, as my friend said, is “the best $30 million spent on art this year.”
to PS1: but they’re called the visual arts, aren’t they? [jameswagner.com]
One Big Blockbuster [about last night]

Finally, I Can Start Using Email Again

For several months in 1999, it seemed the only reason I even had an email account was for sending and receiving copies of this article from The Onion. Then the chain was broken, The Onion had no online archive, &c., &c., no need to bore you with the details. Now that the paper has made their entire archive available online, I have a reason to log back in to my hotbot account. Thank you, The Onion!

“I was at the Olive Garden by Woodfield Mall,” Koechley said, “when I noticed a small sign stating that the restaurant was one of over 1,500 Olive Gardens nationwide. I didn’t think about it at first, but later on it hit me: There are only about 40 of them in Schaumburg. Where are all those others?”


Schaumburg Man Dimly Aware Of Shadowy, Non-Schaumburg World Out There [theonion.com via waxy]

Richard Dreyfus’s Living Room Was Booked

A friend just told me she is going to Devil’s Tower in Wyoming for a screening of Close Encouters of The Third Kind. It’s part of a 21-day tour called the Rolling Roadshow that screens films where they were shot.
Films we’ve already missed: The Last Picture Show [Archer City, TX]; Once Upon A Time In The West [Monument Valley, AZ]; Planet of The Apes [the first one, Lake Powell, AZ]; and Repo Man [in LA somewhere, just yesterday].
There’s still time to see The Goonies, though, and the movie tourist-weary locals only delayed the Sideways screening not cancelled it. Gives you more time to kick your tacky merlot habit.
Rolling Roadshow 2005 [presented by Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse Cinema]

Worth The Wait

2046_wong_still.jpg
Given its subject–loss and longing that spans and haunts the characters’ entire lives–wouldn’t it be perfect if the two+ year delay in bringing of Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 to theaters was somehow intentional, planned, not just a part of the marketing, but of the movie’s experience itself?
It was a gorgeously made film, with incredible cinematography [pace Christopher Doyle], sound, music, acting, production design. But it’s so sad, relentlessly sad. Maybe not the best movie to see alone and away from home.

The Zone 2 DVD of 2046 has been out since May [or mai, comme ils disent]

Art: We’re Here To Please

Regine just posted about some artists in the Hungarian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale who made portable chairs available to visitors, [correction: turns out the chairs were sponsor-driven, not artist-driven.] and it got me thinking about the customer service side of artviewing, especially in a setting like Venice.
So much art is about the White Cube, the experience of seeing it, a “critique” of the institution/process, but yet so little of that actual process is actually addressed. A curator friend once told me of escorting her trustees around Venice (the last one, when it was August-hot at the June opening), and they actually had to debate going to see some art based on whether or not the venue was air-conditioned.
An artist like Francesco Vezzolli makes his art movie-trailer-short, sex-filled, and full of fashion and celebrity in order to stand out from the blur of Venice’s gossip-saturated, art-overloaded opening festivities. But that’s just a shrewd reading and anticipation of the setting.
I just came back from Tokyo with a hoard of Takashi Murakami fans, which they were handing out to people as they got off the Roppongi subway stop. It’s not art, I know, but it’s an artist’s move, based on a retailer/developer’s understanding of the viewer experience.
Then there’s Rirkrit Tiravanija’s meals, or last Venice’s Utopia Station, to an extent. Or 2001’s Venice cafe collaboration between Olafur Eliasson and Tobias Rehburger and ___ [I forget, but it doesn’t matter, because apparently it was altered so badly the artists removed their name from it. Somewhere in there, it lost the sanctity that non-artists grant to artwork.]
So what I’d love to see, I guess, is some kind of art-as-customer-service, someone who toys with or explores or highlights the fact that viewing and encountering and contemplating art is often –not exclusively, or even mostly, but often, and especially in the event-centered cases of fairs, biennials, and openings where much of the “art world” places itself– a cultural experience, an activity that its viewers choose over shopping, movies, other forms of travel or tourism, reading, what have you.
Anyway, just rambling when I should be heading out. It’s so hot, I think I’ll take one of these fans.

L.A. In A Nutshell

“Reasons for ever wearing anything like this have nearly disappeared from my world, and yet I love this pervy and glam Christian Louboutin shoe.”
A quote from artist/screenwriter/NY-expat Theresa Duncan’s newly launched blog, The Wit of The Staircase [named after l’Esprit d’Escalier, French for “what you should’ve said instead”]. Like the protagonist in Patrice Lecomte’s sublime film, Ridicule, Duncan’s an observer/participant in the deeply superficial royal courts, only hers is Hollywood.
Perfect for playing Six Degrees when you need to go from Pynchon to Christian Lacroix.
The Wit of the Staircase [theresalduncan.typepad.com]

Strictly Murderball

Radar Online has a print-sized [i.e., too short] q&a with Murderball co-director Dana Adam Shapiro, but it’s mostly about his novel [The Every Boy] and his childhood. It’s interesting that filmmakers don’t get asked how autobiographical their work is as much as novelists do.
On A Roll [radaronline]
Meanwhile, Murderballer Mark Zupan talks to WPS1’s Stephen Schaefer as part of a cross-country, film-promoting, drink-a-thon, which he also blogs about on mtv.com. Zupan is like the wheelchair guy on Jackass, if Jackass had a wheelchair guy, so most of his schtick is about being such a badass.

Beyond The Subtitles: Mark Zupan Interview [wps1.org]
Rock & Roll, Mark Zupan’s blog [mtv.com]

“Films, like memories, seem to re-shoot themselves over the years”

J.G. Ballard takes a new look at the films of Michael Powell on the centenary of his birth.

I think of Powell as a prophet whose films offer important lessons to both film-makers and novelists, especially the latter, who are still preoccupied with character and individual moral choice. My guess is that the serious novel of the future will be serious in the way that Powell’s and Hitchcock’s films are serious, where the psychological drama has migrated from inside the characters’ heads to the world around them. This is true to everyday life, where we know little about the real nature of the people around us, and less about ourselves than we think, but are highly sensitive to the surrounding atmosphere.

The Prophet [guardian]
the National Film Theatre’s Powell retrospective continues through the end of August. [bfi.org.uk]

If I Can’t Have You…

I’ve gotten some pretty angry emails since my International Freedom Center post comparing GWB’s cult of infallibility to Kim Jong Il’s. Most of them single out my insensitive characterization of 9/11 family member Debra Burlingame as a toady, unwitting or not, for the current administration.
I’m no pundit, and I don’t honestly know why anyone cares what I think, but let me say it straight out: I think both the IFC and The Drawing Center should be removed from the WTC site as it’s currently planned. From the beginning, I’ve thought they were, respectively, an awkward, artificial, potentially controversial sham born out of political expediency, and a wholly inexplicable, inappropriate mis-fit with the site. Both institutions were canaries in the coal mine of the WTC rebuilding process; that they’re now controversial and should not be part of the WTC Memorial should’ve surprised no one observing this Georgian (Bush or Pataki, pick your poison) mess.
So on the basis of outcome alone, I would say that Burlingame and I and Jarvis–and now the FDNY, apparently–can agree on the most appropriate outcome: no Other Centers at the World Trade Center site. We only disagree on the reasons (i.e., the politics) why.
Burlingame has repeatedly put herself, and by implication, the families of 9/11, at the service of GWB’s political agenda. In this case, that agenda is served by deflecting responsibility for the Snohetta Centers debacle away from the Bush/Pataki crowd who made this politically exploitative bed. And every time the stalking horses of “America-bashing” and “liberal, politically correct” historical revisionism are cited as the reasons for these institutions being cut–and no mention is made of Pataki et al’s long record of pandering and political manipulation of the WTC rebuilding process–that obfuscatory agenda marches on.