Author: greg

David Foster Wallace parody contest finalists. [via Kottke]
Not enough for you? Just buy Infinite Jest. Hint: the used copies haven’t been opened beyond page 25. They were on the coffee table, not the nightstand.

Xu Bing, a Chinese artist whose frequently subtle engagement with opacity I admire, has installed a piece at Artes Mundi, an exhibition at the National Museum in Wales, made of dust the artist collected on September 11th in lower Manhattan.
Xu scattered the dust across the gallery floor and wrote a Zen poem in it with his finger,
“As there is nothing from the first,
Where does the dust collect itself?”
Several years ago at P.S. 1, Xu placed a giant vase of mulberry branches in the lobby, which were eaten by silkworms, whose cocoons gradually replaced the leaves.
Artes Mundi opens Saturday, (as) if you’re in Cardiff. They’re giving a big prize in order to get press coverage. Read Maev Kennedy’s profile of Xu in the Guardian .

Dramatis Personae: Blacktable, a website of a certain age; Gawker, who witnessed the event.
Setting: Writers hilariously mourn the recent decline of the New York Times‘ Monday write-in feature, Metropolitan Diary by imagining cute crosstown bus encounters that didn’t make it past the Diary’s new editors. [note: any similarities of to these anecdotes last year’s “Adam Gopnik’s Metropolitan Diary“ are purely due to the utter predictability of the MD format.]
The anecdotes I submitted to MD (both of which were published–Choire take note–for a fee of zero dollars per word) were written to highlight my own sophistication and cultural superiority in a suitably oblique way (e.g., “…As the exasperated waiter came out of the Carlyle dining room…” and “…where I overheard two Italians conversing about…”). The one time I recognized myself in someone else’s submission, I was making smartass comments on Canal about buying street turtles.

Film critics David Edelstein and A. O. Scott take time–and wordcount–off from reviewing films to discuss books. Books about films. By critics. J. Hoberman’s The Dream Life, a political/cultural history of film in the 60’s and 70’s and Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures, a bitchstory of independent film in the 90’s.

How many times have you replayed the Richard Pryor movie, Brewster’s Millions, in your head and said, “I could spend $30 million in 30 days and have nothing to show for it, what’s the big deal?” Not counting P Diddy’s entire, hapless, yacht-renting existence, Howard Dean is the only person I can think of who’s actually done it. He’s a veritable Doctor of Spendology.

In addition to what I wrote on Gothamist,

1. Do these nominees follow the Zapf Zipf distribution? It seems like they’re either mega-blockbusters or tiny independent films. Granted, many so-called “indie” films are made by the studio-owned mini-majors, aka Dependents, but still.
2. I’m burning through like $10/day on Google ads for people who misspell Sofia Coppola. She’s now famous enough to have her name spelled correctly. I’m sure the kids from Spellbound would agree, if they weren’t all in some rehab program for washed up child stars.
3. Is Cold Mountain the first movie edited with Final Cut Pro to be nominated for Best Editing?

I would add a big 4. There is no Elephant is this room. That’s more than a Punch-Drunk Love-level snub. I think Gus Van Sant has completely replenished his indie cred. [1/31 update: The Observer‘s Philip French clearly doesn’t vote in the Academy; he calls Elephant “a chilling tour de force.”]