“Gibson, the director, producer and screenwriter of The Passion, was named the world’s most powerful celebrity by Forbes magazine on Thursday, dethroning ‘Friends’ star Jennifer Aniston who held the No. 1 spot last year.” [CNN]
Related:
Also in the Top 100 by “Power Rank”: Rudy Giuliani (#88), Paris Hilton (#70), QEFTSG(#78, with the other four no doubt pulling Carson down), William Hung (#96), Lindsay Lohan (#97).
Best quote, from the sidebar on Carson Daly (who nevertheless didn’t make the list): “This is some dummy type for the sidebars in the celebrity some more dummy the side bars in the celebrity issue.”
Related links: CDDb–The Carson Daly Database; Matthew Ch. 6, KJV.
Author: greg
‘Verily I say unto you, he has his reward’
“Gibson, the director, producer and screenwriter of The Passion, was named the world’s most powerful celebrity by Forbes magazine on Thursday, dethroning ‘Friends’ star Jennifer Aniston who held the No. 1 spot last year.” [CNN]
Related:
Also in the Top 100 by “Power Rank”: Rudy Giuliani (#88), Paris Hilton (#70), QEFTSG(#78, with the other four no doubt pulling Carson down), William Hung (#96), Lindsay Lohan (#97).
Best quote, from the sidebar on Carson Daly (who nevertheless didn’t make the list): “This is some dummy type for the sidebars in the celebrity some more dummy the side bars in the celebrity issue.”
Related links: CDDb–The Carson Daly Database; Matthew Ch. 6, KJV.
Now MoMA has a weblog
In anticipation of the reopening of the midtown museum building, MoMA’s design department created a new website–including a weblog–for the Junior Associates, a group of 400 or so people who do all kinds of art world-related activities. As far as I know, it’s the first museum weblog. (I know, Eyebeam eats weblogs for breakfast, but they’re not a museum. They ARE quite cool, though, and hosted a swell party and exhibition walkthrough for the JA’s, which, although it has passed, remains enshrined in a gif on the JA welcome page.)
When Picasso painted a portrait of Gertrude Stein (which she gave, alas, to the Met), someone said it didn’t look like her. “It will,” he replied. Such is the long horizon on which art’s influence operates. Remember this when you look for the weblog on the JA site, because the Museum has called it a ‘notebook’. A Typepad-powered notebook. We may not call weblogs notebooks now, the Museum seems to say, but we will.
I, of course, trendchaser that I am, suggested that the site be called JA Rule. After all, it/they does/do. For a young person in the city, it’s probably the greatest opportunity to get involved with a truly amazing institution. And as the calendar of events attests, JA’s get to do some really cool stuff. (For the reopening shindig this fall, being a JA is like having the golden ticket.)
In the end, the Museum’s rejection of my JA Rule idea was correct. The main requirements for becoming a JA, you see, are 1) an interest in seeing and learning about art, 2) a desire to support the Museum, and 3) $500 a year, or as it’s known in the haut monde of museum committees and high-priced benefit galas, 50 Cent.
Now MoMA has a weblog
In anticipation of the reopening of the midtown museum building, MoMA’s design department created a new website–including a weblog–for the Junior Associates, a group of 400 or so people who do all kinds of art world-related activities. As far as I know, it’s the first museum weblog. (I know, Eyebeam eats weblogs for breakfast, but they’re not a museum. They ARE quite cool, though, and hosted a swell party and exhibition walkthrough for the JA’s, which, although it has passed, remains enshrined in a gif on the JA welcome page.)
When Picasso painted a portrait of Gertrude Stein (which she gave, alas, to the Met), someone said it didn’t look like her. “It will,” he replied. Such is the long horizon on which art’s influence operates. Remember this when you look for the weblog on the JA site, because the Museum has called it a ‘notebook’. A Typepad-powered notebook. We may not call weblogs notebooks now, the Museum seems to say, but we will.
I, of course, trendchaser that I am, suggested that the site be called JA Rule. After all, it/they does/do. For a young person in the city, it’s probably the greatest opportunity to get involved with a truly amazing institution. And as the calendar of events attests, JA’s get to do some really cool stuff. (For the reopening shindig this fall, being a JA is like having the golden ticket.)
In the end, the Museum’s rejection of my JA Rule idea was correct. The main requirements for becoming a JA, you see, are 1) an interest in seeing and learning about art, 2) a desire to support the Museum, and 3) $500 a year, or as it’s known in the haut monde of museum committees and high-priced benefit galas, 50 Cent.
On Facing Among Other Things Facts
Now I fear that my entire life may be punctuated incorrectly (it is).
On Facing Among Other Things Facts
Now I fear that my entire life may be punctuated incorrectly (it is).
WNYC on A Montage Maestro
On WNYC this morning, Sara Fishko trained her typical I’m-lyrical-yet-significant gaze on Slavko Vorkapich, the Serbian experimental filmmaker who became the leading montage editor inearly Hollywood. He sought to create, not just a story, but “pure cinema,” a rhythmic experience of light and sound. The frenetic “flying newspaper headline/oblique tight shot of typewriter keys” style he created became a ubiquitous cliche. Later on, as the head of USC’s film school and through wildly popular lectures in the sixties, he turned a generation of filmmakers, cinematographers, and artists into his pure cinema groupies.
If WPS1 ever streams an archive tape of a Vorkapich lecture at MoMA, I’ll let you know. In the mean time, Fishko’s report, disguised as a tone poem, is on the WNYC site.
Let Them Eat Cake
Welcome to a very special greg.org tribute to lowculture:
And I am an optimistic person. I guess if you want to try to find something to be pessimistic about, you can find it, no matter how hard you look, you know?
– 7/15/04, George W. Bush, talking about what he never promised in the Rose Garden.
“You know what?” she said. “I don’t look at it that way. I’m a very positive person. I really always think positive. I think of good thoughts for people, and when you have a negative thought you know what you have to do?”
(Why do we think she thought we were particularly needful of this advice?)
“You close your eyes,” she instructed. “You dismiss it and you think of something that you love and you know what I think about? You’re gonna laugh. A Hansen’s cake!”
We looked at her blankly.
“This great bakery in Beverly Hills, California,” Ms. Hilton said. “It’s got lots of sugar hearts on it and roses and little butterflies. I close my eyes like that” – here she demonstrated – “and you dismiss it. Negativity only brings negativity around you. ”
– 7/15/04, Kathy Hilton, reality TV star and voice of Barbie, demonstrating how we’ve found the level of the political room in this country at Tavern on the Green.
On Finding Schindler’s List and Making Period Films
In the Guardian, Thomas Kineally tells the rambling, sentimental story of coming across the Oskar Schindler story in 1980, when he dropped into a Beverly Hills handbag shop. Literally.
And in a rambling rant that ranges from the importance of obtaining copyright clearance for period music to the size of Reagan’s bowel movements (Hey, I report, you decide.), John Patterson gives crucial advice to filmmakers trying to authentically recreate the past on a tight budget. So what’s he say? Beats me; it makes almost no sense.
My advice: Do whatever Todd Haynes did in Velvet Goldmine. (Yeah, you could copy Far From Heaven, and almost go bust. Ask Killer Films if $16 million is low budget.)
On Finding Schindler’s List and Making Period Films
In the Guardian, Thomas Kineally tells the rambling, sentimental story of coming across the Oskar Schindler story in 1980, when he dropped into a Beverly Hills handbag shop. Literally.
And in a rambling rant that ranges from the importance of obtaining copyright clearance for period music to the size of Reagan’s bowel movements (Hey, I report, you decide.), John Patterson gives crucial advice to filmmakers trying to authentically recreate the past on a tight budget. So what’s he say? Beats me; it makes almost no sense.
My advice: Do whatever Todd Haynes did in Velvet Goldmine. (Yeah, you could copy Far From Heaven, and almost go bust. Ask Killer Films if $16 million is low budget.)
A Tibetan Sand Mandala Movie
[via waxy] A Flash movie of Tibetan monks making a sand mandala, made by David Hirmes using photos from the U of C.
Also on Hirmes.com, the Lewitt Variations, three Flash animations of possible interpretations of the instructions for a Sol Lewitt wall drawing. [to find it, check the periodic table-looking menu in the lower right corner for ‘Lw’.]
Bloghdad.com/Party_Zone
from an AP report, Coalition’s sealed compound includes a brisk bar scene:
The plushest tavern is the CIA’s rattan furnished watering hole, known as the ”OGA bar.” OGA stands for ”Other Government Agency,” the CIA’s low-key moniker.
The OGA bar has a dance floor with a revolving mirrored disco ball and a game room. It is open to outsiders by invitation only. Disgruntled CPA employees who haven’t wangled invites complain that the CIA favors women guests.
Someone give that woman a development deal–and a date
Not necessarily in that order.
1989: Woman gives birth to baby girl. Man helps change diapers at first, then abandons woman and 10-month old child. Woman laments the lack of real men like her father, moves in with father.
cut to –
2003: Ffifteen hardworking, single-parent years later, woman seeks fame and fortune in the entertainment industry. Ends up writing a weekly column for little conservative journal. Lives in Silver Lake, a raw-but-rapidly-gentrifying city in East L.A. full of “hippies,” “gays, bohemians, and industry types,” and which has one of the few public schools “where the children speak English at home.” In an overwhelmingly anti-war town, woman is a lonely pro-war supporter.
March 2003: Seeking fame and fortune in the entertainment industry that so many of her unshaven neighbors seem to have attained, woman starts blog. Receives, not a script deal, but positive reviews–from “the Matt Drudge of porn,” local warblogger, other Hollywood hangers-on.
First full-length post tells of her run-in at a gourmet grocery store with smug, self-absorbed, peace march-organizing creative type and his 4-year old son. Coins the term “Silver Lake Dads,” which is picked up by exactly one person–the warblogger–to praise the woman’s blog for “baiting hippie Silver Lake Dads”and to announce the availability of $5 wine on his failed Gawker clone.
June 2004: One week after organizing an Entertainment Industry And Political Bloggers In LA panel (still no development deal), woman is decried by writers, bloggers, hippies, creative types for her hatred and exclusion of same on panel. And, she says, for not linking to their hippie blogs.
In need of Father’s Day story, woman recycles 15-month old blog post about self-absorbed hippie in the supermarket. Attempts to reinvigorate failed coinage, Silver Lake Dads, All dads who do not abandon their children and who are not her dad are like peacenik Hollywood writers. Professes admiration for the fictional creation of same, a dad character on TV. Still no script deal. Still single.
Just say you’re going to an architecture film series.
If you’re in London this Father’s Day: The artists Elmgreen & Dragset have put together a short program (49′) of film and video works which “examine architecture’s complicit role in defining our enactment of psychological states.” It will be shown at the Tate Modern, this Sunday at 15.00 (3:00 pm for the yanks). [via kultureflash]
Half of that time will be taken up by Jean Genet’s long-banned silent film, Un Chant d’Amour. It’s from 1950, the Eisenhower Era, when prison sex and erotic power-tripping guards was still considered an import, not an export, in the US.
It’s one of the landmarks of gay cinema [the DVD Times UK translates: “it contains possibly the earliest images of erect penises seen on a cinema screen.”]. The film influenced Derek Jarman, inspired Todd Haynes’ Poison, and lives on in every Calvin Klein perfume commercial you can think of.
Whether you take your father with you is none of my affair.
And they look so innocent…Elmgreen (l) and Dragset (r)
Related: Press coverage and reviews of Elmgreen & Dragset’s exhibit at the Tate Modern through July 4th. They created a tiny animatronic sparrow which appears to be stunned and dying after flying into the window. Favorite stupid quote: “It took two artists to design the sparrow.”
Just say you’re going to an architecture film series.
If you’re in London this Father’s Day: The artists Elmgreen & Dragset have put together a short program (49′) of film and video works which “examine architecture’s complicit role in defining our enactment of psychological states.” It will be shown at the Tate Modern, this Sunday at 15.00 (3:00 pm for the yanks). [via kultureflash]
Half of that time will be taken up by Jean Genet’s long-banned silent film, Un Chant d’Amour. It’s from 1950, the Eisenhower Era, when prison sex and erotic power-tripping guards was still considered an import, not an export, in the US.
It’s one of the landmarks of gay cinema [the DVD Times UK translates: “it contains possibly the earliest images of erect penises seen on a cinema screen.”]. The film influenced Derek Jarman, inspired Todd Haynes’ Poison, and lives on in every Calvin Klein perfume commercial you can think of.
Whether you take your father with you is none of my affair.
And they look so innocent…Elmgreen (l) and Dragset (r)
Related: Press coverage and reviews of Elmgreen & Dragset’s exhibit at the Tate Modern through July 4th. They created a tiny animatronic sparrow which appears to be stunned and dying after flying into the window. Favorite stupid quote: “It took two artists to design the sparrow.”