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.”
Author: greg
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.
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.
From Abbot & Costello to Zulu: Movie Title Screens
Shill has a giant library of movie title screens. Not necessarily opening credits sequences–which are an artform in themselves–but a screencapture of the title card.
It’s connoisseur-comprehensive, with four versions of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, for example, tracking the nuanced differences in format and transfer quality for each film’s incarnation on laserdisc, DVD, beta dub, or (horrors) VHS.
One of my favorites is Safe, Todd Haynes’ 1995 film, and the main reason we can forgive Julianne Moore for Assassins [as for Laws of Attraction…]. Turns out Safe‘s restrained, ominous titles were designed by Bureau, the firm of artists Marlene McCarty and Donald Moffett. [via list.absenter.org]
Looking at Tall Buildings
A correction: Reading Herbert Muschamp’s review of MoMA’s “Tall Buildings” show, which includes the United Architects proposal for the WTC site. [The ‘Dream Team’ proposal is in there, too, but I’ve said all I’ll say about that.]
Coming after the pissed-to-be-publicly-accountable Meier, United Architecture’s proposal was surprisingly moving that morning in Dec.2002. They had made a video (it’s still on their site) with cuts of all kinds of happy shiny people looking up from the street, pointing at the new buildings, “like,” I said, “they used to do.” But it’s not really true.
Unless you were a tourist wanting to get fleeced, or you needed to get your bearings, you didn’t come out of the subway and look up at the World Trade Center, and you sure didn’t point.
Except on that morning. It just occurred to me that Farenheit 9/11 opened with shots of people staring, looking up, pointing. Like an uninsidious version of the Dream Team, United Architects unconsciously incorporated the attacks themselves into its presentation.
Conceived after September 11th, in case the world needed a reminder, “Tall Buildings” makes the complicated psychic and emotional power of skyscrapers as its jumping off point. Which is about as complicated a phrase as I can come up with.
[2018 UPDATE: In 2018 The New York Times reports that five women who worked with Meier, either at his firm or as a contractor, have come forward to say the architect made aggressive and unwanted sexual advances and propositions to them. The report also makes painfully clear that Meier’s behavior was widely known for a long time, and that his colleagues and partners did basically nothing to stop it beyond occasionally warning young employees to not find themselves alone with him. This update has been added to every post on greg.org pertaining to Meier or his work.]
The Startling Music of Public Radio
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.
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