Offline occurrences, previously known as life, have preoccupied me lately, and I’ve been working, consuming, seeing, reading, and writing less, hence a lighter-than-usual posting volume. Well, actually, I did some writing last week, but I prefer not to post it here, at least not yet. It’s not that it’s irrelevant, just the opposite.
For more information, please refer to my post of 11.24.03
Author: greg
Corrections you probably won’t see in the Times or Post
Due to copyediting euphoria in the wake of Bush’s secret Thanksgiving daytrip to Baghdad, the following quote from Richard Keil of the Bloomberg News service was incomplete:
“Mr. Keil leaned across the aisle, shoved aside his i-Pod headset and grinned as he said, ‘The president of the United States is AWOL, and we’re with him. The ultimate road trip.’ ”
The full quote should read, “The president of the United States is AWOL again.”
Buy me an i-Pod. Buy you an i-Pod.
On the Meaning of Six Months
I remember when I found Wired, it felt written by people about six months ahead of me. After a couple of years, though, I stopped reading it when I felt I was about six months ahead of it.
In the early weblogging days, I felt six months or so ahead of the New York Times, but also felt that the Times has been closing the gap a bit lately.
I’m quite used to being six months ahead of Wired, but what does it mean when I’m three and six months ahead of boingboing?
[update: ditto. Xeni Jardin’s Wired Interview with David Byrne. And a direct link to that holiday gift of choice, David Byrne’s artist book/DVD, E.E.E.I. (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information).]
Harpers.org Embarks on Path To Sentience By 2051
[via TMN] Harpers.org has been completely reconstructed using Paul Ford’s homegrown FTrain code. Is it enough to call it code? Here’s what Paul says about it:
The primary goal of Ftrain.com, the goal which all other goals serve, is to make the site fully conscious and self-aware by 2051. Conservative estimates place computer power as equaling brainpower by then, and after 10,000 nodes (200 a year for 50 years), there should be enough inside the site for it to come to its own conclusions. I will return to this topic at a future date.
Related: my first giddy, gushing post about exploring FTrain
As for Harpers.org, I’m very pleased they’re launching the site with The Proclamation of Baghdad (coming Dec. 4). Subscribe, sure, but get this month’s issue for the “Weekly Review”-style look at recent scientific findings on the back page.
(via cel) slc airport lines, by length:
3) tsa
2) starbucks
1) cinnabon
also, tsa doesnt know what a collar stay is.
Memorials: not as content-free as once believed
First, a cautionary tale about the what “just-the-facts”-driven memorials (e.g., victims’ tallies, 92 trees for 92 countries, etc.) inadvertently reveal about the times and people who made them. Muschamp, meanwhile, hits some right notes with what symbol-laden memorials inadvertently reveal about the politics and people who make them.
Related: My post last year on how the data in the Pentagon Memorial competition guidelines substantially dictated the designs.
Havana: about making films, about art
Excellent story in the Guardian by Chris Payne about a film school outside Havana whose students’ production–an actually independent feature film– doesn’t officially exist, but nonetheless is getting plugs for Sundance. There’s more story here to be told.
Also from Havana, the Biennial. Maria Finn’s Times article has an interesting angle: the economic impact of international art world attention on Cuban contemporary artists. Even emerging artist-level prices (ie, in the thousands or low five figures) enable artists to live like kings in the dollar-starved Cuban economy. But collector friends who just came back from Havana noticed how outsize success–or at least the trappings of it on the ground, which also often signal collaboration or acquiescence with the regime–polarizes artists.
From what I’ve heard, and from what Blake Gopnik’s ecstatic survey in the Post says, the quality of the art was incredible. But alongside the disparities it creates, an internationalized Cuban contemporary art market runs the risk of exploitation. In the Outsider Art market, this meme is already too well established: art world slickster “discovers” a naive, native genius, buys up all his work, establishes some “gatekeeper” stranglehold on his production, and manipulates the prices to her own–not the artist’s– advantage.
Maya Lin: The Problem, not The Solution for the WTC Memorial
While I’ve been contemplating what to write about the WTC Memorial, most of the ideas I’ve wanted to write about have been put out there.
At least they have now that Clay Risen’s article in the Observer lays into the stifling influence of Maya Lin’s minimalist memorialism. It’s a topic near to my heart (I complained last year that the Pentagon Memorial competition had “far too many Lins”).
Even so, Risen pulls his punches, and I underestimated the spread of Linphoma the competition finalists reflect. I only estimated 40-50% of the finalists would be Maya Lin mimics, but it’s more like 75-88%, depending on how you count. Six of the designs list”The Names” on a wall somewhere in their design. The three designs with alternate schemes (some have multiple elements; 6+3=8 here) go the OK City/Pentagon route, with individual “memorial units.” Out of the minimalist frying pan, into the fetishy individualist fire.
What’s most frustrating is the tremendous inspiration Lin has been to me and so many others; she was instrumental to the idea for my first film, after all. Still, whether its her juror’s eye or her daunting memorial legacy, we all just need to move on. I’m just about ready to call for the LMDC to scrap the eight designs, plus at least one juror, and go back to the hopper for some more appropriate ideas.
Agnes Varda Speaks (and shows film, of course)
[via GreenCine] Doug Cumming’s got an account of Agnes Varda discussing a screening of her latest short film in Seattle. Also, an earlier bonus Varda discussion at Filmjourney.
My Google Ad, which used to read, “Damn you, Agnes Varda/The Gleaners made me make a film/it’s showing at MoMA next month,” wouldn’t be allowed under Google’s prissier, clean up for the IPO-style terms of service. feh.
Today, though, Doug’s tells of an Errol Morris performance at a Fog of War screening. I disagree with Doug’s negative read on the conclusions Morris draws (or doesn’t, depending), but he’s worth reading. I found the movie extremely revealing of McNamara’s steel-willed self-delusion/preservation, and I think that self-righteous aggression rules the day in Rumsfeld’s Pentagon. Long story short: If you’re planning on feeling thankful for not having to relive the Vietnam war fiasco, I suggest you get a backup plan.
Shipping Containers, v. 4
It’s an inadvertent but recurring subject of interest here at greg.org: the architectural use of connex shipping containers. Sunday, NPR aired a puffy little interview with Zalmay Khalilzad, the new US envoy to Afghanistan; it turns out he’ll be living in a shipping container on the heavily fortified grounds of the embassy in Kabul. He’s not alone. According to this AP story on AfghanNews.net, over 100 containers were refurbished in Dubai to provide instant housing for the influx of US personnel. This picture comes from an account of someone posted to Kabul. Americans may have added microwaves, TV’s, private baths, A/C, “some tentative-looking shrubs and bushes” out front, and in one case, a pink flamingo to their containers, but except for their fresh coats of paint, they’d blend right in to the Kabul skyline. Except, of course, that US containers are reinforced with sandbags and ringed with concertina wire.
Don’t let a construction industry devastated by 30 years of chaos
get you down! Rebuild your marketplace with containers!
image: Barnaby Hall’s travelogue in Duke’s alumni magazine.
Turns out you can fit a lot of irony into a 40-foot shipping container. And just when you think it’s full, well, you can stuff in some more. Another Afghani-related compound, Guantanamo’s Camp Delta, is built from shipping containers. But so, it turns out, is the Army/CIA’s interrogation center at Bagram Air Base, the site of reported torture and human rights violations in the name of our war on terror. (As the WP quotes one official, “If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job.”) They’re also the structure of choice for expanding Israeli outposts in the West Bank. Containers, concertina wire, and conflict apparently go hand in hand.
With their adaptability, rapid portability, and instant utility, containers are the architectural embodiment of “Flexible Response,” Donald Rumsfeld’s doctrine of military transformation. Of course, “Flexible Response” isn’t new; it grew from the Korean War, and Rumsfeld’s predecessor Robert McNamara implemented his own quant-heavy interpretation in Vietnam. The 21st-century version is just air-conditioned for our comfort.
Here’s the AP’s glowing, realtor-like description of Khalilzad’s new pad: “Three containers were used to create his relatively palatial hootch, with a formal dining room that can seat eight, a front sitting room and a side lawn. A wooden fence around the ambassadorial residence gives it privacy and a suburban hominess.”
A hootch? If you have to ask–and I had to– a hootch is soldiers’ slang for instant housing, particularly the aluminum sheds they inhabited in Vietnam.
Related: the Darren Almond shipping container post that started it all, plus some unexpectedly moving memorial realizations.
Talking like a gamer
I’ve been rewatching Gerry this past week, partly to prepare for an interview (stay tuned), partly to imagine a remake, and partly to just understand what Gus Van Sant & Co. were up to.
The dialogue keeps catching my ear, and not just because there’s so little of it. GVS, Casey Affleck and Matt Damon wrote in esoteric language and wrote out all explication. Discussion of a Wheel of Fortune player’s gaffe is specialized but recognizable to a TV audience. Other conversations are only comprehensible to much smaller populations, particularly gamers and the two Gerrys themselves.
Which made reading Greg Costikyan’s article/glossary, “Talk Like a Gamer,” so enjoyable. [thanks, BoingBoing]
Art Roundup
You should feel horrible for missing Gabriel Orozco’s latest show at Marian Goodman. His elegant, biomorphic sculptural shapes are recognizable at first as found objects: bones, husks, driftwood. In the rear gallery, though, less finished “sketches” of polyurethane foam extruding through fine wire mesh point to Orozco’s material process. Gradually, it dawns on you that the artist didn’t find the previous shapes; he created them by manipulating quick-drying foam on sheets of latex with a hard-to-fathom series of gestures and pauses. What looked so familiar becomes perplexing and unknown. At least it did until Saturday.
Start making it up by going to Sargent’s Women at Adelson Galleries. It’s a museum-quality exhibition of portraits, scenes, and studies by an artist whose paintings I like for their photographic influences, which I discovered at the giant National Gallery show in 1999 (which rocked). [via About Last Night]
Then, if you go to Feigen for the Joseph Cornell show, and then buy Robert Lehrman’s unprecedented, awesome-looking catalog/DVD-ROM tour of the boxes, you’ll be just fine.
Was Nathan Hale Here?
This plaque is on the Banana Republic near my house. It’s the first bronze plaque I’ve seen with a URL. It was put up 110 years after a researcher at the NY Historical Society determined that Hale was hanged near this spot in September 1776. The British Army camp where he was executed sat in front of The Sign of The Dove, a tavern on the Old Post Road, at the five-mile marker. Or, as it’s known now, 3rd Avenue at 66th street.
Hale’s dying words, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” are part of the American Revolution’s historical fabric. But I’m sure not one Banana Republican in a thousand knows they’re shopping at the spot where Hale uttered them.
This comment in the Times reminded me of the plaque: “‘[A memorial at the WTC site is] trying to remember something on the very ground where it happened.'” It is faced with an “inescapable specificity…meaning that people died here.”
I fear–and the WTC memorial finalist designs make me even more certain–that a memorial centered on the twin towers’ footprints marks precisely the wrong thing: the buildings, not the people. I hope it won’t take 200 years for future historians to realize this error.
Factchecking Sofia Coppola
While I was being protective of her, Sofia was opening up to me, revealing that her inspiration for the Suntory whiskey commercials in Lost in Translation was a photo of her father Francis and the emperor of Japanese cinema, Akira Kurosawa, who made Suntory commercials for years.
I reviewed a whole raft of these commercials, which are hidden on a Kurosawa documentary DVD. Coppola’s nowhere near them, I concluded. I made it sound like I watched the entire doc, not just the easter egg commercials. Weeelllll, I only got around to watching the actual show a couple of days ago. Turns out a huge chunk of the doc’s vintage AK footage comes, uncredited, from the ads, which is odd (frankly, the whole director-free NHK doc style feels like production lifestyle fantasy of a middle-aged civil servant/executive producer, i.e., Suntory’s target demographic. But I digress.) All of a sudden, there’s Francis Ford Coppola milling around the set of Kagemusha. I went back and updated the original entry with screengrabs and backstory.
I apologize for questioning Sofia’s story and hope this won’t upset the deep bond that developed in the 30 minutes we shared several months ago.
OK, I may have underestimated the ingenuity of British Protesters
If not their effectiveness. One more picture of Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project at the Tate in London.