Oy. If I see one more mention of Spike Jonze being the “heir” to “the Spiegel catalogue fortune…” This title is nothing but an artifact of lazy-ass entertainment journalism.[not you, Gawker. I know you’re not journalism.]
1. Spike’s, aka Adam Spiegel’s father is Arthur Spiegel III, a healthcare consultant in New York. [So he’s an heir to the APM/CSC fortune?] Trip, we can assume, is descended from Arthur Spiegel, one of the sons of one of the founders of the Spiegel mail order furniture business.
Trouble is, that Arthur way back then left the mailorder business for Hollywood. David Selznick convinced him to invest in World Picture Company, a pre-Gone With The Wind flop. Arthur died early and rather unattractively in a New York hotel room. Drugs? Suicide? Something. But was he an heir to anything? And did he have any descendants to be heirs to anything?
And heir to what? The Spiegel fortune itself, such as it is/was, had more than its share of ups and downs. The company nearly went bust more than once because it had overextended credit to indigent rural shoppers to finance their purchases. It’s certainly no Marshall Fields fortune, which actually exists and continues to underpin socialite lifestyles and hippy chic communes to this day.
And anyway, the Spiegel that almost anyone alive now knows was the work of the German conglomerate which bought the catalogue in the mid-70’s, and which has been bleeding red ink for years, both on Spiegel and on the “only the Ford Explorer’s worth a damn” brand, Eddie Bauer.
The only family member to have been involved with the company in ages is Ted Spiegel–a fourth cousin?? I don’t know–who was also a marketing professor at Northwestern.
How the Spiegel cousins four generations ago divvied up their stock is a mystery to me, and frankly I don’t care. And why should I? By Spike-profile standards, I’d be scion to the Ethan Allen furniture fortune.
If you’re an “All the research I need comes from Entertainment Weekly” journalist looking for a meaningless tidbit for yet another piece on Spike, why not try something more interesting than “heir to the Spiegel catalog fortune”? How about “abandoned by parents and raised in a skateboard shop,”? Or, if you are some genetic determinist, how about “Spike Jonze, son of the guy who replaced rent control with rent stabilization” or “Spike Jonze, whose great grandfather didn’t invest in Gone With The Wind?” At least that one’s got something to do with films.
As for Sofia Coppola, in addition to being the heir to a Central American shack-n-hammock resort fortune, she IS the scion of a middlebrow wine fortune. But now that it comes in cans, it’s not just for tables anymore.
Author: greg
Spike Jonze, scion of my BUTT
Oy. If I see one more mention of Spike Jonze being the “heir” to “the Spiegel catalogue fortune…” This title is nothing but an artifact of lazy-ass entertainment journalism.[not you, Gawker. I know you’re not journalism.]
1. Spike’s, aka Adam Spiegel’s father is Arthur Spiegel III, a healthcare consultant in New York. [So he’s an heir to the APM/CSC fortune?] Trip, we can assume, is descended from Arthur Spiegel, one of the sons of one of the founders of the Spiegel mail order furniture business.
Trouble is, that Arthur way back then left the mailorder business for Hollywood. David Selznick convinced him to invest in World Picture Company, a pre-Gone With The Wind flop. Arthur died early and rather unattractively in a New York hotel room. Drugs? Suicide? Something. But was he an heir to anything? And did he have any descendants to be heirs to anything?
And heir to what? The Spiegel fortune itself, such as it is/was, had more than its share of ups and downs. The company nearly went bust more than once because it had overextended credit to indigent rural shoppers to finance their purchases. It’s certainly no Marshall Fields fortune, which actually exists and continues to underpin socialite lifestyles and hippy chic communes to this day.
And anyway, the Spiegel that almost anyone alive now knows was the work of the German conglomerate which bought the catalogue in the mid-70’s, and which has been bleeding red ink for years, both on Spiegel and on the “only the Ford Explorer’s worth a damn” brand, Eddie Bauer.
The only family member to have been involved with the company in ages is Ted Spiegel–a fourth cousin?? I don’t know–who was also a marketing professor at Northwestern.
How the Spiegel cousins four generations ago divvied up their stock is a mystery to me, and frankly I don’t care. And why should I? By Spike-profile standards, I’d be scion to the Ethan Allen furniture fortune.
If you’re an “All the research I need comes from Entertainment Weekly” journalist looking for a meaningless tidbit for yet another piece on Spike, why not try something more interesting than “heir to the Spiegel catalog fortune”? How about “abandoned by parents and raised in a skateboard shop,”? Or, if you are some genetic determinist, how about “Spike Jonze, son of the guy who replaced rent control with rent stabilization” or “Spike Jonze, whose great grandfather didn’t invest in Gone With The Wind?” At least that one’s got something to do with films.
As for Sofia Coppola, in addition to being the heir to a Central American shack-n-hammock resort fortune, she IS the scion of a middlebrow wine fortune. But now that it comes in cans, it’s not just for tables anymore.
Meta
“[Altman] then asked a reporter if he wanted to be an extra in the scene with Redford. The reporter thought for a moment about La Dolce Vita, in which an entertainment journalist ends up orchestrating a drunken orgy in the Italian countryside. ‘O.K.,’ he replied.”
— Michael Agger reporting from several sets at once for The New Yorker
Classically awful Showgirls now available in self-mocking DVD version, complete with drinking game and joke commentary. For which you pony up an extra $15?? Not funny. [AP via NYT]
Included on the Wonderland DVD (Val Kilmer as John Holmes? Gets caught up in a murder? Doesn’t sound familiar? Probably because no one saw it.) is the actual LAPD crime scene footage of the actual murders. There’s a feisty discussion about it on IMDb’s message board. [Viewing hint: Rent, don’t buy.] [via Scrubbles]
Meta
“[Altman] then asked a reporter if he wanted to be an extra in the scene with Redford. The reporter thought for a moment about La Dolce Vita, in which an entertainment journalist ends up orchestrating a drunken orgy in the Italian countryside. ‘O.K.,’ he replied.”
— Michael Agger reporting from several sets at once for The New Yorker
Classically awful Showgirls now available in self-mocking DVD version, complete with drinking game and joke commentary. For which you pony up an extra $15?? Not funny. [AP via NYT]
Included on the Wonderland DVD (Val Kilmer as John Holmes? Gets caught up in a murder? Doesn’t sound familiar? Probably because no one saw it.) is the actual LAPD crime scene footage of the actual murders. There’s a feisty discussion about it on IMDb’s message board. [Viewing hint: Rent, don’t buy.] [via Scrubbles]
Naturalist Bourne Killer
Slate’s David Edelstein hitting for the fences on The Bourne Supremacy: “a virtuoso demonstration” of “the effect of cutting-edge video and documentary techniques on ho-hum movie material…”
“…simply a tour-de-force of thriller filmmaking…”
“The film has hand-to-hand battles so close and blurry and tumultuous that they summon up your primitive fight-or-flight instincts. It’s as if the filmmaker (and the camera operator) are thinking on their feet alongside the hero, moving instinctively to keep up with their subjects for fear that said subjects will fly out of the frame. And the audience is just as wired-in: I could barely look down at my popcorn.”
Naturalist Bourne Killer
Slate’s David Edelstein hitting for the fences on The Bourne Supremacy: “a virtuoso demonstration” of “the effect of cutting-edge video and documentary techniques on ho-hum movie material…”
“…simply a tour-de-force of thriller filmmaking…”
“The film has hand-to-hand battles so close and blurry and tumultuous that they summon up your primitive fight-or-flight instincts. It’s as if the filmmaker (and the camera operator) are thinking on their feet alongside the hero, moving instinctively to keep up with their subjects for fear that said subjects will fly out of the frame. And the audience is just as wired-in: I could barely look down at my popcorn.”
Hawking on Hacking, or How Utah is the Center of the Mediaverse
So I get out of the city for a couple of days, take the kid to Grammy’s house (not to be confused with Latin Grammy’s, whose calls we don’t return), take a break from the hubbub.
Little did I know that Stephen Hawking would pick the day I arrive to alter the laws of physics and dump me into the middle of just about every slow-summer, lame-ass media story in existence. It turns out the new elemental particle in physics is the ‘ward,’ the Mormon term for a parish or congregation, and I’m getting bombarded by them.
With highly tawdry, slow-summer news approaching morning-of-Sept-11th levels (Remember the headlines that day? Lizzie Grubman.), the end of the world is coming up fast, or as they say here, “It sure is the Latter Days.” So start repenting:
Hawking on Hacking, or How Utah is the Center of the Mediaverse
So I get out of the city for a couple of days, take the kid to Grammy’s house (not to be confused with Latin Grammy’s, whose calls we don’t return), take a break from the hubbub.
Little did I know that Stephen Hawking would pick the day I arrive to alter the laws of physics and dump me into the middle of just about every slow-summer, lame-ass media story in existence. It turns out the new elemental particle in physics is the ‘ward,’ the Mormon term for a parish or congregation, and I’m getting bombarded by them.
With highly tawdry, slow-summer news approaching morning-of-Sept-11th levels (Remember the headlines that day? Lizzie Grubman.), the end of the world is coming up fast, or as they say here, “It sure is the Latter Days.” So start repenting:
How Russell Simmons and Xeni Jardin would protest the Republican Convention
Three may be a trend, but four makes it a regular feature. I’m going to start collecting protest tips, fashion, and celebrity profiles in the runup to the RNC. Come September, greg.org could become a veritable InStyle magazine of Republican Convention protesting, the must-read bible for the protesting lifestyle.
Today’s installment is a 2-for-1.
How Russell Simmons would protest: Let photographer Glen E. Friedman post Linkin Park and Bronski Beat lyrics in the windows of a loft he owns overlooking the WTC site.
how boingboing’er and NPR-jockey Xeni Jardin would protest the Republican Convention: by promoting another event as an alternative, like, say, a phonecam photo exhibit she curated.
Other How’d They Protests:
Louis Malle
Me
How Russell Simmons and Xeni Jardin would protest the Republican Convention
Three may be a trend, but four makes it a regular feature. I’m going to start collecting protest tips, fashion, and celebrity profiles in the runup to the RNC. Come September, greg.org could become a veritable InStyle magazine of Republican Convention protesting, the must-read bible for the protesting lifestyle.
Today’s installment is a 2-for-1.
How Russell Simmons would protest: Let photographer Glen E. Friedman post Linkin Park and Bronski Beat lyrics in the windows of a loft he owns overlooking the WTC site.
how boingboing’er and NPR-jockey Xeni Jardin would protest the Republican Convention: by promoting another event as an alternative, like, say, a phonecam photo exhibit she curated.
Other How’d They Protests:
Louis Malle
Me
Depeche Mode on Relationships
I remember at college in 1989 a friend proposed to his girlfriend my singing her Depeche Mode’s “Somebody”. At the time this seemed supremely lame to me, mostly because it was from like 1984, three albums earlier. It was a high school song.
Now, though, and for several years, I’ve found “Somebody” to be quite a touching song. Touching, but not unaware that overly romantic notions of love can “make you sick”:
…But when I’m asleep
I want somebody
Who will put their arms around me
And kiss me tenderly
Though things like this
Make me sick
In a case like this
I’ll get away with it.
Of course, this is on the same album as “Master and Servant”; I guess what Martin Gore is trying to tell us is that relationships can be complex.
And when I’m awake
I want somebody
Who will put a ball gag on me,
whip me mightily,
Depeche Mode on Relationships
I remember at college in 1989 a friend proposed to his girlfriend my singing her Depeche Mode’s “Somebody”. At the time this seemed supremely lame to me, mostly because it was from like 1984, three albums earlier. It was a high school song.
Now, though, and for several years, I’ve found “Somebody” to be quite a touching song. Touching, but not unaware that overly romantic notions of love can “make you sick”:
…But when I’m asleep
I want somebody
Who will put their arms around me
And kiss me tenderly
Though things like this
Make me sick
In a case like this
I’ll get away with it.
Of course, this is on the same album as “Master and Servant”; I guess what Martin Gore is trying to tell us is that relationships can be complex.
And when I’m awake
I want somebody
Who will put a ball gag on me,
whip me mightily,
WPS1: Picking up speed, and not just because I’m on it
Ok, they’re definitely getting the hang of it. This week, WPS1 broadcast an archival MoMA artist panel that was, in retrospect, formative to me, one of the art events that really resonates with me:
In 1994, Kirk Varnedoe hosted Richard Serra, Brice Marden, and Francesco Clemente in a discussion of Cy Twombly. I went for the Twombly and Marden, but I stayed for the Serra.
Through sheer intelligence and what I later came to recognize as great panel stunts–tossing off the exact measurements of a 1959 Twombly canvas as if he’d memorized the catalogue raisonnee, witty tie-em-up-with-a-bow metaphors and descriptors–he OWNED the evening.
One offhand comment he made haunted me for years, how art history since had been based on a misinterpretation of Cezanne. By about the third time I talked with him, I finally had to ask what he’d meant. He politely pretended to remember what the hell I was talking about, but he didn’t, in fact, have some deeply revisionist art historical theory lurking beneath his thick paintsticked hide.
[In painful contrast, Schnabel was there, too, on the front row, pointedly not on the panel, but nevertheless he put himself on it with a rambling self-congratulatory statement about “Cy” and “Cy and Jasper” that took up a big chunk of the q&a.]
I asked my question of Marden, though, and his reticence bit me in the ass. Clemente jumped in and mis-answered my paragraph-long question–the last of the evening. Marden asked me to repeat it, to groans from the audience. For his answer, I’ll just say, let’s go to the tape. But over a year later, I got stopped on the street and asked if I was the guy who’d asked that question at that one MoMA event. And then he laughed at me.
In any case, Marden taught me that making highly successful work doesn’t automatically mean he has to talk very garrulously about it; if Marden could convey everything he wanted to in mere words, he might not need to paint.
In another future-historical broadcast, WPS1 also has Yvonne Force, Tom Eccles, and Anne Pasternak talking for an hour about laying casino carpet in Grand Central.
And last but not least, Steven Schaefer interviews Danish director Per Fly about his new film, The Inheritance.
WPS1: Picking up speed, and not just because I’m on it
Ok, they’re definitely getting the hang of it. This week, WPS1 broadcast an archival MoMA artist panel that was, in retrospect, formative to me, one of the art events that really resonates with me:
In 1994, Kirk Varnedoe hosted Richard Serra, Brice Marden, and Francesco Clemente in a discussion of Cy Twombly. I went for the Twombly and Marden, but I stayed for the Serra.
Through sheer intelligence and what I later came to recognize as great panel stunts–tossing off the exact measurements of a 1959 Twombly canvas as if he’d memorized the catalogue raisonnee, witty tie-em-up-with-a-bow metaphors and descriptors–he OWNED the evening.
One offhand comment he made haunted me for years, how art history since had been based on a misinterpretation of Cezanne. By about the third time I talked with him, I finally had to ask what he’d meant. He politely pretended to remember what the hell I was talking about, but he didn’t, in fact, have some deeply revisionist art historical theory lurking beneath his thick paintsticked hide.
[In painful contrast, Schnabel was there, too, on the front row, pointedly not on the panel, but nevertheless he put himself on it with a rambling self-congratulatory statement about “Cy” and “Cy and Jasper” that took up a big chunk of the q&a.]
I asked my question of Marden, though, and his reticence bit me in the ass. Clemente jumped in and mis-answered my paragraph-long question–the last of the evening. Marden asked me to repeat it, to groans from the audience. For his answer, I’ll just say, let’s go to the tape. But over a year later, I got stopped on the street and asked if I was the guy who’d asked that question at that one MoMA event. And then he laughed at me.
In any case, Marden taught me that making highly successful work doesn’t automatically mean he has to talk very garrulously about it; if Marden could convey everything he wanted to in mere words, he might not need to paint.
In another future-historical broadcast, WPS1 also has Yvonne Force, Tom Eccles, and Anne Pasternak talking for an hour about laying casino carpet in Grand Central.
And last but not least, Steven Schaefer interviews Danish director Per Fly about his new film, The Inheritance.
Geek My Ride: Dependent Filmmaking Ad Absurdum
30fps@140mph = f[(2*2.5GHzG5) + 3.5TbHD + FCP4.0 + 42in.HDTV + PS2 + IS300]
Got that? It also equals the most ridiculous incarnation of dependent filmmaking this year.
In the feat of boys-and-toys bravado that’ll surely earn them front row seats when the revolution comes, tech superpowers, pimped geeked out a Lexus IS300 with a full 30fps HD video editing system, including a 42-inch flatscreen you have to put in the backseat (oops, there goes the sound engineer and PA). [See specs and pics.]
At least the station’s on the passenger side, so you’re not tempted to cut the dailies while you obliviously cut off that school bus. full of handicapped orphans. that just drove into the lake. (Hey! Exclusive footage!)
Anyway, Wired reported on the rig at MacWorld, where the company sponsored “a competition to find the best short film about Macworld that was edited in the car.”
I would get American Standard to sponsor a competition for the best short film about a turd that was dreamed up on the toilet. Oh, wait. Michel Gondry already won that one.