My wife is leaving for Japan this morning, so our alarm was set for 5:40 AM which, coincidentally, was the precise instant WAMU, the public radio station in DC, started running a promo for Latino USA. So instead of being rustled awake by subdued, overeducated murmuring, we got Tito Puente’s brass section as loud as a dorm room prank.
But this has happened before. The gentle piano intros to NPR’s Weekend Edition that practically brought your first Diet Coke of the day to your bedside are too-old school. Public radio is now trending loud.
WNYC runs the BBC World Service at 9 AM (thank you, I’m up by then), which used to start with no music at all, just the world-synching clock from Greenwhich to cue us and the news reader: “beep beep beeeeeep. 1300 hours, Greenwich Mean Time. BBC World Service. The news, read by Fiona Somebody.” Now, there’s a rousing brass intro with a rapid crescendo.
[I’m linking to these shows in the hope that you’ll know what the hell I’m talking about. This invisible-to-them music isn’t mentioned or credited, and who knows if it’s in the archived streams of the show? My head is full of untraceable music whose existence is not even acknowledged. Where did you go, BJ Liederman?]
But the most consistently startling so far (“We’re public radio. We don’t shock, we startle.”) while mercifully temporary, couldn’t have come at a worse time. WNYC ran promos ad nauseum for its May 7 broadcast of Bernstein’s Candide, which was being given a rare performance at Lincoln Center. As I commented impulsively on TMFTML’s review of the review, “#&^* Candide. The promos on WNYC for that thing blare the oh-so-famous prelude so suddenly, it scares our 2-mo. old and starts her crying every damn time it comes on.” What can I say, it made me feel better.
Like many people, I suspect, I don’t Listen To The Radio; I use it as a kind of aural carpet, the ambient track to my day. Encountering these Startling Themes is like stepping on a toy in the dark. Or it’s like (NPR People, now I’m talking to you) rearranging the furniture in a blind man’s house. A cranky, old, blind man, who lives next door and is always barking, “Turn down that music, you lousy punks!” Damn kids these days.
Author: greg
How To Be an Architecture Critic
[via archinect] On a day when the Times praises his shoplifter-friendly, open-air Prada store on Rodeo (a feature the real customers, who valet park in back, will never see),The Project for Public Spaces pokes a sharp stick in Rem Koolhaas’s eye for the deadened, bleak streetscapes he created all around his vaunted Seattle Public Library. Of course, when they hear “lively streetlife,” Official Seattle may still think lobster puppet-wielding WTO protestors burning dodwn the Starbucks, so it’s understandable.
And why believe the (nominally NYC-based) PPS? They praise, of all things, the Hugo Boss store on 5th & 56th, as if it created the lumbering t-shirted mobs who clog up our midtown sidewalks (and as if SUV-loads of people who don’t know how to walk down an unenclosed street are desirable in the first place).
So while their advice on influencing your local architecture critic screams undiagnosed Post-Muschamp Stress Disorder, their spot-on “Tips for being a do-it-yourself critic” reveal a touching truth: We’re all Muschampers now.
1. Have a sense of self-entitlement
2. Be self-conscious
3. Stare at others
4. Gossip
Start Drooling. Canon Releases the XL2
I’ve been a Sony man myself (VX-1000, PD-150), but plenty of festivals have been entered, reels filled out, and development deals struck with the Canon XL-1. Well, that’s all so much Fassbinder the bridge (it’s ok, I’ll wait…with me?) now. Canon’s released the Canon XL2, which, according to Gizmodo’s way-too-technical-for-me description, can sync settings between multiple cameras and “…there’s just so much to this camera, though, it’s sort of hard to explain.” It’s coming in around $5K. Time to dole out producer credit to “Amex” and “Visa.”
Canon XL2 product page
Are you sure Steven Seagal isn’t involved?
Police in the Sicilian town of Trapani clearly don’t read Gawker. If they did, they wouldn’t brag so blithely about spy-camming the Oceans Twelve “beach scenes [where litigation-happy, bikini-clad-photo-squelching] Catherine Zeta Jones swims in the sea at midnight.”
The cops went to elaborate lengths to justify this surveillance, even “arresting” 23 of their cousins for being in the Mafia and plotting to extort money from the production.
World Movie Magazine has the “official version,” but we know what really happened. I mean, come on, what Mafioso would make a move against Warners, which produced no less than five Steven Seagal movies (and don’t even get me started on The Sopranos)?
Related:
From Action Lama to Achtung Lama
Threads woven together, like the saffron robes of a reincarnated lama
How I Would Protest At The Republican Convention
Due to a work-related trip out of the country, I will miss the Republican Convention when it comes to town. If I were here, I would protest. I would not use signs, or puppets, or chants; I would protest by reenacting the shocked, dusty exodus from lower Manhattan on the morning of September 11th.
Here’s how I would do it:
– start downtown, maybe even below Canal street
– wear expendable business attire.
– set up a step ladder on the street and,
– using a mesh tray like they use for goldpanning or a handsifter, even, I would have a friend cover me with dust.
– It would be chalk dust, or line chalk from a football field, rosin, baby powder, or some other fine, whitish, grayish non-toxic dust.
– I would cover my mouth with a handkerchief while doing this, snd keep it with me to wipe my sweaty, dusty face.
– I would offer to cover as many thousands of my fellow protestors in the same manner.
– Then, I would start walking north.
– Or I would start walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, en masse.
– I would let verisimilitude and photogenics dictate my route more than proximity to Madison Square Garden.
– I would be eerily, even unsettlingly, quiet and orderly.
I would take seriously my responsibility as a New Yorker who lived through that horrible day, and take its symbolism back from the politicians who ignored the warnings, did nothing to prepare, sat or flailed wildly when it happened, sowed fear with it ever since, used it to falsely justify a war of misplaced vengeance, put us all in even greater danger than we were before, and who are now coming to town to usurp the most widely shared monument to their failure.
But maybe that’s just me.
The Best D.C. Art isn’t in D.C.
In the late 1990’s the artist Donald Moffett began making extraordinary paintings that seemed like a departure from the politically charged work that first garnered attention–and controversy–in protests against the Reagan/Bush-era AIDS debacle. Seductively minimal paintings where it seemed the material itself was the subject: oil paint extruded–somehow, the technique is hard to grasp–into lush carpets, finely woven nets, menacing razor-like bands. These highly aestheticized paint objects have a powerful physical presence.
Then last year, in a show at Marianne Boesky, Moffett completely transformed his paintings by projecting video–of The Ramble in Central Park–onto their silvered surface. The intricacies and painterly effects were still there, but deliberately harder to read. Meanwhile, the uneven surface of the canvas lent the slightly distorted video loops a ghostlike, immpermanent air. Questions of furtive, hard-to-pin-down identity filled the bucolic, elegant works.
Now through Saturday at London’s Stephen Friedman Gallery, Moffett is showing D.C., a similar body of paintings-and-projections, and it feels like one of the art world’s veteran protestors has come out of retirement, to show a new generation how it’s done. D.C.‘s projections feature the FBI building, the White House, Watergate and other loaded symbols of power. Definitely check out White House Unmoored, one of the few works where the artist used a handheld, rather than a fixed, camera. And read Moffett’s interview with Kultureflash; he’s one of the nicest, gentlest people I’ve ever met, but boy, does he sound pissed. [US pissed, angry. Not UK pissed, drunk. just to clear that up…]
Riding the Dependent Film Gravy Train
Matador Records released the ten winners of, well, a $1,000 budget to make an Interpol-related short for the band’s upcoming new album launch. The finished films are due August 15.
Top on the list: Gregory Brunkalla, whose couch-slugs-in-spandex short was one of the funnier installments of Nike’s Art of Speed series. Nice work if you can get it.
Related:
The Rise of Dependent Filmmaking
Interpol film contest
Art of Speed reviews
How to Make a Guerilla Documentary
NYT Magazine previews Robert Greenwald’s latest documentary, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War On Journalism, which starts showing this week. It’ll be rolled out via selective and massroots screenings organized by MoveOn.org and the Center for American Progress. It’s the same model that quickly sold 120,000 copies of his last film, Uncovered, the critique of a certain Iraqwar-mongering administration.
The production details for Outfoxed are kinda cool, if you have access to a lot of volunteers and interns: Greenwald set dozens of DVD recorders to capture Fox News 24/7 for about six months. MoveOn orchestrated volunteer monitors to watch the network and note the exact time of footage that showed any of a dozen or so distortion techniques that Greenwald wanted to document. Then teams of highly paid editors became teams of low-paid editors to sort and structure the narrative.
All this was done without obtaining clearances from Fox. I guess when Larry Lessig’s your permissions guy, you get a little crazy on the ‘fair use.’
On the dislocation of airports
Like the road, the airport is a nonplace, something encountered on the way to going somewhere else, better measured in time – always too long – than in square feet. Now that it is unsafe to hitchhike, and affordable to fly, the terminal makes a better canvas for transition or self-discovery. As such, it is the setting du jour for our narratives of romance, longing, adventure and intrigue.
“It’s unlegislated territory,” Mr. Iyer said. “It’s a psychological limbo that becomes a meeting place of the human and posthuman – people are meeting loved ones, sending them off to war, meeting for funerals, all in the midst of a network of Body Shops, Sharper Images and other stores whose names even speak of displacement.”
-John Leland, “Unchecked Baggage: Our Airports, Ourselves”, NYT
Related: Souvenir (November 2001) Shooting Day 1: Charles de Gaulle
Blogging From Inside Project Greenlight
Art director Scott Smith is a directing finalist on the third season of Project Greenlight. He’s keeping a weblog of his experience over at agency Coudal Partners, whose new slogan is either “we put the ‘cou’ in cool,” or “no, our stylesheet’s not broken.”
The weblog may go on for weeks, or, if he gets dinged, it may end tomorrow. For Smith’s sake, I kind of hope he takes a clean second, earning enough recognition to get a real deal, without having to put up with all the documentary shenanigans. Besides, the two Greenlight movies to date have done about as well as Ben Affleck’s latest gigs. [Maybe it’s Kevin, not Scott, Smith, that needs Chris Moore’s brand of tough producer love.]
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go over here and burns some Triggerstreet bridges…
White House Production Notes: Summer Blockbuster Edition
From: Scott Sforza, Head of Production, White House Studios
To: Karl Rove, CEO,
RE: Summer Schedule
As requested, sir, an update on this summer’s production/release schedule. It’s filling out quite nicely, and there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind it’ll go well. That said, it IS a lot of work for one man. I would ask you again to rethink the NO INTERNS policy; we could really use an extra hand down here.
– The Sidekick/Mentor/Villain is still causing trouble, and not testing well, either. We could finesse recasting, no problem. First, though, I recommend The Gyllenhaal Strategy: float the idea of replacing him with look-alike for the sequel. Looking good in a uniform‘s nice, but remember: we can always stuff a sock in the jumpsuit. We just need someone with a temper who knows his way around a combover. And who can swear like an oilman. [via boifromtroy]
– Release date for the ‘Foreign Production’: It’s exciting to hear we’re buying the rights to a new war picture, even if sellthrough on the last one is underperforming in both domestic and foreign. Still, I have some serious reservations about the release date–“the 26, 27 or 28 of July”??
I’m know this has serious tentpole potential, but HAVE WE EVEN SEEN THE ROUGH CUT? With all due respect to the many studio execs who came back from the set saying, “This is great stuff!” and “It’ll be done on time, no problem!” I’d feel more comfortable if we had some people in the editing room for this. Never mind, I’m told it’s being taken care of. Sorry. I still have that “They’ll shower us with flowers” song stuck in my head. [via Talkingpointsmemo]
– The Broadway Musical: What can I say, it’s costing more than we budgeted. I still don’t understand why we couldn’t shoot this in Toronto instead. The unions are whining, surprise surprise. Can’t wait for that scene in the sequel where we ship’em all of to Gitmo. haha. Bloomberg’s dealing with the leafblower-extortionists on the set problem, though. Sending them to the park or something. The “extras” are ready, and we’ll have a fleet of Prius’s ready to shuttle anyone who wants to see Hairspray, undetected. The set will look fabulous.
At Least They Got The Font Right
David Dunlap has a nice story about the typeface used for the inscription on the Freedom Tower cornerstone. Inspired by the sign on the Port Authority bus terminal, the typeface was designed by Brooklyn native Tobias Frere-Jones, whose name for the font, Gotham, was not just serendipity. [Read an interview with TF-J where he cites the WTC destruction as an inspirational facet of the design.]
It’s part of a larger Frere-Jones family conspiracy–watch out Jake and Jen!!— to totally own any creative endeavor with a city-related name.
Meanwhile, Curbed (safe. for now.) reports on the best/only way to actually catch a glimpse of the cornerstone.
Greeneland Travelogue
The British Film Institute’s NFT just started a Graham Greene film program(me) as part of their Crime Scene series. Greene cast a strong shadow over British film and film noir.
The series includes a preview of a new BBC documentary by Frederick Baker about the making of Graham’s greatest cinematic achievement, The Third Man. Shadowing The Third Man tells stories of Orson Welles’ on-location “shenanigans” to get more money, and, oddly, projects scenes from the original film “onto the very walls and spaces where it was shot.”
I don’t get it, but it’s listed as a UK-France-Japan production. If that means NHK, take a pillow: the hook for their soporific Kurosawa documentary was a totally content-free stunt reunion of Kurosawa actors and crew, which was no doubt crucial to greenlighting the film. [via Kultureflash]
The Mellowing of Richard Serra
[via MAN] What’s shocking about Richard Serra’s poster for pleasevote.com–a thick paintstick silhouette of the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner–isn’t his use of text or figurative representation, both completely absent from the rest of his work (with possibly one 1960’s exception).
And it’s not his political activity. He’s always been an active liberal, and his art challenges both easy commodification and conservative notions of authority. And who can forget his legal battle with the GSA and anti-NEA zealots like Jesse Helms which culminated in the destruction in 1989 of his sculpture Tilted Arc (besides pretty much everyone, that is)?
No, what shocked me was his positively statesman-like restraint, which stands in contrast to the horrible image in his drawing and to current levels of Administration discourse. With STOP BUSH, Serra–who’s well known for his angry temper–let’s George off easy.
In 1990, he made an etching as a fundraiser for North Carolina Senate candidate Harvey Gantt, who lost after his opponent ran some race-baiting ads that have become recognized dirty tricks classics. The title of that piece (sorry, mom) was Fuck Helms.
2004-07-12 & 19, This Week in The New Yorker
Issue of 2004-07-12 and 19
Posted 2004-07-05
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT/ BLOWING BUBBLES/ John Cassidy on the dubious longevity of Alan Greenspan.
DEPT. OF RABBLE-ROUSING/ THE CHICAGO PRECEDENT/ Ben McGrath on Pat Buchanan’s convention memories– and plans.
THE FINANCIAL PAGE/ PAYING TO PLAY/ James Surowiecki on the new payola.
IN THE BELTWAY/ THE VICE-PRESIDENT’S DOCTOR/ Jane Mayer on what happened to Dr. Gary Malakoff.
SHOUTS & MURMURS/ Patricia Marx/ Chain Letter
LETTER FROM CAIRO/ David Remnick/ Going Nowhere/ The problem with democracy in Egypt.
FICTION/ Judy Budnitz/ “Miracle”
THE CRITICS
BOOKS/ David Greenberg/ Fathers and Sons/ George W. Bush and his forebears.
A CRITIC AT LARGE/ John Lahr/ King Cole/ The not so merry soul of Cole Porter.
THE ART WORLD/ Peter Schjeldahl/ All-American/ Childe Hassam at the Met.
THE CURRENT CINEMA/ Anthony “Mmm, what I’d do with four mechanical arms” Lane/ Swing Easy/ “Spider-Man 2” and “The Clearing.”
FROM THE ARCHIVE
PROFILES/ Margaret Case Harriman/ Words and Music/ Cole Porter, soon after he suffered a debilitating horse-riding accident, talks of, among other things tailoring songs for performers like Bert (son of John) Lahr./ Issue of 1940-11-23
PROFILES/ Truman Capote/ The Duke in His Domain/ In Rick Lyman’s NYT obit for Marlon Brando, this piece is called “a patronizing portrait of a somewhat dim prima donna.”/ Issue of 1957 sometime (don’t they know?)