greg – Page 296

From the Gawker Section of the NYTimes

I have to admit, I was kinda bummin’ for a while. The week HBS’s most powerful alum decides he wants to fly in a fighter jet (n.b.: not the one he went AWOL from during Vietnam), my Wharton alumni magazine arrives in the mail with the cover story: “Wharton entrepreneurs capitalize on trends in the food industry” about a dude with a crepe stand.
But then a boost to my alumni pride, via this exchange (in the article not about blogging):

And then there was the tall, good-looking young blond woman holding a purse made out of a Mexican cigar box. She had on a sunburst-print minidress by Ms. [Benhaz] Sarafpour.
I [fashion reporter Cathy Horyn] asked her if she worked for the designer. “I’m a student at Wharton,” she said. “At the University of Pennsylvania.”
Adopting that tone of voice reserved for small children, I asked the woman what she wanted to be when she grew up.
“Well, my dad’s in real estate, so I’m planning to go into that.”
“And what’s your name?”
“Ivanka Trump.”

[Sidebar: Never mind that Ivanka’s been modeling for six years, since she was like 10, and that Horyn should’ve seen her in several shows, at least. I’m sure the NYT would never run a reporter’s so-good-you-can’t-bear-to-factcheck-it story.]

Badass Buddy Icons and the Honda Element

Thanks to a 13-year old niece of Boing Boing, I found Badass Buddy. It’s a site with 1,200 AIM free buddy icons, a collection which, over 2+ years, has evolved from simple riffs on the little AOL dude (you know, the one who hooked up with Sharon Stone) into a unique medium of its own.

In addition to the predictable ones–Fart, Spongebob, Jackass, School Sucks– BAB has created little narratives that are HI-larious, timely, touching, and pretty damn cool. To tell these tiny stories, BAB sometimes treats the icon window as a screen, or as a camera. And they adapted some recognizably cinematic visual language, including “camera” angles and movement (e.g., pans, zooms), lighting effects, editing (shot/reverse-shot, establishing/close-up, jump cuts), even Bullet Time.

image:badassbuddy.com

But they also play off the unique characteristics of the medium–a medium which was probably never intended as one, but which has been embraced and exploited to express the worldview of an IM generation.
image:badassbuddy.com

But as soon as I try to decide which buddy icon I’m gonna use, an alarm sounds in my head, which brings me to the Honda Element. It’s ugly, I know, but I like it, and I kinda want one. The wife’s worried it might be Pontiac Aztek-ugly (i.e., lame and embarassing) but my gut tells me it’s Citroen 2CV-ugly (i.e., cool and if you just don’t get it, you’re lame). I’m almost always right about that kinda stuff, though; that’s not the problem.
The problem is something new to me, age-appropriateness. According to Honda, the Element was designed as a “dorm room on wheels.” According to the auto industry’s demographic master strategy, I shouldn’t want a “dorm room on wheels” any more than I want a “living room on wheels.” But even if there were a “loft on wheels,” my indignation at being so target marketed would probably keep me from buying it. (It’s a Gen-X thing, you wouldn’t understand. Unless you read Newsweek.)

But if I buy an Element, I worry about two equally bad scenarios: 1) it’s only marketed as designed for the under-30 demo, which means it appeals only to people over 35, who try too hard. I buy one and subsequently telegraph my aging wannabe-ness. Call this the Miata Scenario, and if you’re old enough to remember the launch of the Miata, give up. It’s already too late for you. 2) it’s actually designed for the under-30 demo, and they embrace it. I buy one and become as lame as when your dad starts saying he’s “down with that, yo” to you. Call this one the Badass Buddy Scenario.

Photos–new & old–from off the Japanese Grid

panawave and mirrors, image:mainichi.co.jp

Unless I missed the evite, the world didn’t end Thursday. (And even if it did, Armageddon’s no reason to stop weblogging.)
The Pana Wavers above are using mirrors to deflect scalar waves, not just to create wonderful photos. There are more in Mainichi Daily News‘s Pana Wave photo special. [It reminds me that our inaugural Netflix movie was, fittingly, Agnes Varda’s wonderful obsessed-with-death-in-long-lost-Paris film Cleo de 5 a 7, the Criterion edition. Varda uses mirrors beautifully through most of the film, at least until the superstitious Cleo breaks one. It’s 1960, B&W, and all the cars in Paris were Citroens. Heaven.
Anyway, here are a couple of 1959 (!!) photos I said I’d post, from Yukio Futagawa’s stunning Nihon no Minka, a painfully rare book on Japan’s long-lost rural architecture. They’re old, but eerily topical: a rural road, a house with a powerline. Is it just me, or does reliving the 1950’s suddenly not seem like a bad thing, at least aesthetically?

Nihon no Minka, 1962, by Yukio Futagawa, BSS

Nihon no Minka, 1962, by Yukio Futagawa, BSS

Have you heard of this movie, Matrix Reloaded?

You know how Justin invented Shoutcast so he could listen to Loveline in Arizona? Well, if weblogs never existed, I’m sure they would’ve been invented yesterday as a way for everyone in the world to review Matrix Reloaded. [Warning: major spoilers and countless review links in Jason’s comments thread]. Until Nick and Meg figure out how to find me the good ones, though, I’m sticking with the pros. Like that Agent Smith of MR reviewers, David Edelstein, who first loves, then hates, the movie in Slate, The NY Times, and Fresh Air.
Matrix Reloaded, I swear I had this idea before seeing the movie. Anyway, mine is completely different. image:slate.com Sure, I could write how the rave reminds me of that annoying “let’s target the ‘urban’ demographic” Kahlua commercial a few years ago, or how I actually apologized to the people sitting next to me for laughing so hard at the Merovingian (who hangs around the corner at Bilboquet like all the time) how the unexpectedly Chicago-esque editing destroyed the lyricism of some of the fight scenes, or how righteous Trinity’s hack turns out to be.
But forget the movie; what interests me, is, well, me. What does the Matrix mean for my Animated Musical, my Terminator-meets-West Side Story? There were a couple of “great minds think alike” points that made me cringe at first, until a bit of satisfaction kicked in, at my occasional avant la lettre similarity to the Wachowskis’ script. On others, I got what they missed. Eat my dust, Wachowskis. I mean– I mean, let’s have breakfast.
Basically, then, I was fine about it, at least until I came home and read Joyce Wadler’s opening party pitch to Joel Silver for Matrix: The Musical. I’m typing this in the fetal position, btw.

White House Stagecraft: Will this be on the DVD?

on the set at the Waco Economic Forum, image:whitehouse.gov

Shoot the conference title from this preset camera position;
state seal and flowing flag when allowed to shoot head-on. images:whitehouse.gov
Sforzian Backgrounds. So that’s what they’re called. At least that’s what Elizabeth Bumiller’s NYT article calls those glib slogan-filled, PowerPointy, made-for-TV backdrops that show up behind Bush whenever there’s a camera around. They’re named for Scott Sforza, a former TV producer, who is finally getting credit/scrutiny for his tireless work behind the scenes in this White House’s quantum leap in visual image control.
Sforza spent days “embedded” on that aircraft carrier, prepping for Bush’s staged arrival. “Sforza and his aides choreographed every aspect of the event,” Bumiller writes. White House cinematographer (yes, there is one) Bob deServi gets credit for angling the ship just right and timing the spectacle so they can take advantage of “magic hour” lighting [a recurring subject here].
It’s about damn time we get a Making Of piece. The best DVD’s now are full of this stuff. Hell, I just saw Making the Animatrix on MTV2, a meta-meta-program on a meta-meta network. (making of animated spinoffs of a movie; spinoff channel for videos for songs. Please keep up, people.)
For the screamingly obvious manipulation/staging of these images, it’s pretty inexcusable that we’ve had to wait this long for someone to report on it. (OK, ABC buried one mention.) I mean, Scott Sforza only has 25 Google hits, and just one ancient credit on IMDb. If some premium cable channel offered a Sforza commentary track for all Bush’s appearances, I’d definitely subscribe.

Seeing the errant boom mike in one shot of What's Up, Doc? was my first realization of the filmmaking process

White House DP Bob deServi: “You want it, I’ll heat it up and make a picture.”
Surprisingly, though, the White House website has tons of media-critique-ready photos which unintentionally (?) reveal the machinery behind these made-for-TV-and-only-for-TV images. The bird’s eye view of Bush’s Waco Forum shows the press getting their White House-designed shot, complete with Sforzian Backgrounds. And check out this photo from a beautifully lit deServi production of Bush and Putin in St Petersburg, which has a boom mike hovering in the foreground.

DiServi's speed dial is mostly floodlight rental agencies

To light this shot, deServi shipped floodlights from the UK
And this pic captures the elaborate staging elements imported to Romania for White House Productions’ biggest (pre-tailhook incident) show, a 2002 Bush speech in Bucharest’s Revolution Square. (Sforza even put up a little “Romania” banner, just in case you didn’t recognize that other flag.)
The sheer volume of photos on the White House site reveals another Sforza favorite, what Bumiller’d call the “men without ties” background, for those ops when a giant slogan just won’t do. He used it at Tailhook, when he put soldiers Skittles-colored turtlenecks in the background. Last month, in an uncrowded but well-draped Boeing factory, Sforza had Boeing workers perch on top of an F-18 to be seen listening to Bush’s Iraqi progress report. Looks a lot like last August at the fair, where he arrayed some farmers on tractors and bales of hay. But not so fast. Sometimes, he uses the “men without ties” wallpaper-style, and sometimes he actually puts them into the Sforzian Background. (Note: the last one has stock photos so nice, Sforza used them twice. Check out the SB in this elaborate 3D setup for conservative conservatism, which looks to mean “black people in front.”)
So, with this media manipulation thing, just like with that whole neo-con American Empire thing, the “run by and for corporations” thing, the “we need and may use new nuclear weapons” thing, with this supposedly secretive administration, there’s actually plenty to see. It’s not that no one cares. It’s just that the White House makes it so easy to not report it.

I [Heart] New York T-Shirt, by Maurizio Cattelan

I [Heart] New York, in Arabic, Maurizio Cattelan, image:printedmatter.org

I probably shouldn’t post this until I get mine, but the artist Maurizio Cattelan created this shirt in a limited edition of 48. It’s for sale at Printed Matter, the cool-since-a-long-time-ago artists’ bookstore in Chelsea.
Update: Jeff Jarvis wondered, rightly, if the shirt actually said “I” and “New York” (the heart, I can read). An interesting question, and not. It wouldn’t be beyond Maurizio to use illegible/nonsensical script. As it turns out, at Social Design Notes, John recreated a flyer he saw in the EV around Sept. 11. To this unaccustomed eye, the scripts are, indeed, different. But whether it reads “New York,” “NY,” “Now Yak,” or “Newark,” I can’t say. FWIW, Japlish or Engrish, the Japanese mangling of English is a more powerful phenomenon than the corollary, Americans randomly tattooing themselves with Japanese characters they don’t understand.

One Million Years (Future), on MP3

Last year, I wrote about the utterly moving experience of On Kawara’s work, One Million Years (Past) at Documenta XI. Now, I find the brilliant art site, ubu has put out a 73-minute excerpt of One Million Years (Future) in mp3. (Heads up: it’s 105Mb.)

On Kawara exhibition, image:diacenter.org

On Kawara @ Dia, 1993, photo: Cathy Carver, image: diacenter.org
Originally intoned for the first time in an exhibition at Dia in 1993, “with the CD the amount of time is limited, 74 minutes [sic], and contains a set number of years (1994 AD to 2613 AD), thus transforming the infinite time of the exhibition into the finite time of the CD.”
From their About page:

UbuWeb posts much of its content without permission; we rip full-length CDs into sound files; we scan as many books as we can get our hands on; we post essays as fast as we can OCR them. And not once have we been issued a cease and desist order. Instead, we receive glowing e-mails from artists, publishers and record labels finding their work on UbuWeb thanking us for taking an interest in what they do; in fact, most times they offer UbuWeb additional materials. We happily acquiesce and tell them that UbuWeb is an unlimited resource with unlimited space for them to fill.

On Kawara bonus: Dia: Beacon opens this weekend.

Ground Zero muralist doesn’t wait for the competition results

A Brooklyn artist, James Peterson, has created a mural in Tribeca that has some people upset. See it at Gothamist.

Aum2: Electromagnetic Boogaloo — A Look at Pana Wave

I’m busy with some offline writing (just wait and see), but in the mean time, I felt the gaijin‘s obligation to provide some context for the recent one-eyebrow-raising >> reach-for-the-doorlocks reports of that road-trippin’ Japanese cult, Pana Wave Laboratory. Their site is only in Japanese
First the bad news: despite the promising name, the cult makes its money from herbal supplements and water purifiers. So no trip-hop CD is in the works.
Now that that’s out of the way, the world will end tomorrow. “[Armageddon] will be caused when electromagnetic waves strike the Japanese archipelago and the delicate gravitational balance between the Andromeda nebula and other nebulas is altered,” warns Chino, Pana Wave’s leader. (from a great Mainichi Daily News article, with pictures. SMH has another caravan pic. Cult critic Rick Ross has a Panawave news page. This message board is for people waiting for Zeta Planet X to arrive and reverse the earth’s poles. It’s due tomorrow, too. Busy day.)
Did I say tomorrow? Japan’s 12 hours ahead of the east coast right now, so it may end by lunch. Chino didn’t say what timezone she’s calculating from.
In neighboring Yamanashi, Pana Wave built a complex of Armageddon-proofed Fuller domes (Erecta, the manufacturer, issued an online disclaimer.) and filled them with animals (13 dogs, 70 cats, crows, a mini-pig, and an iguana). But then they went on the road, MDN reports, to save Chino from deadly EM waves. These aren’t normal EM waves, though, they’re called scalar waves, theorized by Nikolai Tesla. They’re produced by power lines, which Pana Wave has painstakingly sketched out. In grand Japanese tradition, Pana Wave also created a simple, explanatory cartoon of friendly EM waves combining into evil scalar waves (the mean red one says, “I’m a scalar wave!”). Interestingly, at the April 2000 INET-Congress in Bregenz, Austria, one Prof. Konstantin Meyl announced he’d actually produced scalar waves using Tesla’s methods. (See a critique here.)

Pana Wavers wear all white and drape white cloth all around them, deflecting scalar waves with mirrors. Chino et al are seeking a place, any place, where they can escape what they see as an ecologically disastrous paved, wired grid. Right now, they’re draped out in Hachiman, a tiny rural town in Gifu, an area of central Japan where I happened to live (another story). Here is an official Powers of Ten-style map of Gifu, which, coincidentally, places Hachiman at the center of the world.
[The mountainous regions of Gifu have some of the last, best examples of classical Japanese farmhouses, known as minka. The greatest architecture photo book I know is Nihon no Minka, by GA’s Yukio Futagawa. Around 440 pages of gorgeous 1950’s B&W photos of traditional Japanese architecture, 99% of it gone by now. Remarkable images of unpaved roads, thatched roofs, and nearly power-line-free vistas. Published in 1962, and reworked in 1980 into Traditional Japanese Houses. I bought the only original I ever saw, at Roth Horowitz. When it was still on Thompson, Perimeter had the reissue. If anyone has the original, it’d be Book Cellar Amus in Osaka. That guy has everything. If the world doesn’t end, I’ll scan some images.]
Tama-chan, from the Guardian

Of course, no apocalyptic cult story would be complete without a media-darling seal. Tama-chan wandered into a polluted Tokyo river last August, and became a cuddly symbol of Japan’s need to face its environmental problems. Pana Wave revealed they were behind controversial failed attempts to capture Tama-chan, who, Chino warns, is the only one who can save us now. [hmm Leia wore white, too. Coincidence?]
Wave UFO, Mariko Mori, image: kunsthaus-bregenz.at

Wave UFO, Mariko Mori, image: kunsthaus-bregenz.at

In the mean time, the art world’s own Tesla Girl, the heiress Mariko Mori, just opened Wave UFO at 56th & Madison. She’s collecting brainwaves and projecting a mind control video inside this pod. From the brochure: “Wave UFO seamlessly unites actual individual physical experiences with Mori’s singular vision of a cosmic dream world.” It was first exhibited at the Kunsthaus…in Bregenz.
On a different (?) note: For an absolutely riveting collection of interviews with both survivors and attackers of the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo subway gassing, read Haruki Murakami’s Underground. One reviewer says, “Unlike a journalist, Murakami doesn’t force these searing narratives into tidy equations of cause and effect, good and evil, but rather allows contradictions and ambiguity to stand, thus presenting unadorned the shocking truth of the diabolical and brutal manner in which ordinary lives were derailed or destroyed.”

WTC Memorial competition charette/discussion update

I’ve held off for a few days, waiting to finalize the list of participants, but in the mean time, I created a separate page where I’ll post charette-related items. Tentative date: Wed., May 28, one day before the competition registration deadline.
There is still space for another person (or maybe two), to join, so if you’re going to submit a proposal to the WTC Memorial competition, you may want to join our discussion.

Bloghdad.com/Books_&_Barrels

On his ever-interesting Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall has some good book recommendations for people trying to figure out what just happened–and what’s still to come–war-wise. Of note: The Iraq War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions, compiled and edited by Micah Sifry and Christopher Cerf. (Click through and give Josh, not me, the Amazon fees for these.)
Also, lest you were distracted by the man in the plane over there, grave things are still happening in Iraq. Josh excerpts a Newsweek article about missing radioactive material, due to the US’s utter failure to secure Iraq’s known-to-Hans-Blix-at-least nuclear sites. Fortunately, the uranium and other material can’t be used to create a nuclear bomb, it’s only useful for making “plenty” of some totally far-fetched, obscure, never-happen device called a “dirty bomb.” Why are people wasting time on such implausible terrorist scenarios??

SWAT team blames Gehry architecture for delay in trapping Cleveland shooter

It took police more than seven hours to shoot and capture the gunman who opened fire in the newly opened Peter B. Lewis Building for Case Western’s business school. It was “almost a cat and mouse game,” said Cleveland Police Chief Edward Lohn. Why so long? “As the SWAT team entered the building, they were constantly under fire,” Lohn said. “They couldn’t return fire because of the design of the building. They didn’t have a clear shot.”
The design, of course, is by Frank Gehry, an architect whose work has never been described as “SWAT-team-friendly.” [Since when is “designed to give a clear shot” considered a desirable building feature?! -ed.] Gehry was brought in by Lewis, Cleveland’s biggest philanthropist (except when he’s cutting off all the cultural organizations in the city and calling for the replacement of CWRU’s entire board. Another story.), to work a little of that Bilbao magic, to create an instantly recognizable architectural signature, an icon, his (Gehry’s? or Lewis’s?) own Fallingwater. [Insert Falling Ice joke here.]
In a moment of Any Publicity is Good Publicity, perhaps, Cleveland’s mayor gloated of the city’s newest signature architecture: “This building now becomes a homicide site,” a backhanded reference to Bilbao, Spain, where Basque terrorists failed to blow up Gehry’s Guggenheim building (with grenades in flower pots in Jeff Koons’ Puppy actually. Bilbao still wins on style. Another digression.)

Quake programmers take note: Floor plans are available. Unfortunately, the video walkthrough (boldly titled, “Risk, Learn, Grow”) is currently ~~offline~~ back up! controversy’s over.

On Getting Gawker Stalked

Wave UFO, Mariko Mori, image: Tom Powel, nytimes.com

Wave UFO, Mariko Mori for the Public Art Fund
image: Tom Powel, nytimes.com
INT – DAY, IBM BAMBOO GARDEN, 56th & MADISON
A promising DIRECTOR wanders into the atrium to examine Mariko Mori’s Wave UFO, a large, shiny pod-looking art object nestled among the towering thickets of bamboo. A YOUNG ARTIST mills about, hesitant to approach him.
YOUNG ARTIST
Um, Excuse me.
DIRECTOR
Huh?
YOUNG ARTIST
Did you have a film in the MoMA Documentary Festival?
DIRECTOR
(shocked, confused, with a hesitant inflection)
Umm….yes.
YOUNG ARTIST
I saw it. You spoke after, too. It was really nice.
DIRECTOR
Thanks. (stammer) Thank you.
The two chat briefly, then the ARTIST leaves. Suddenly, from out of a clump of bamboo, CELEBRITY, THE CRUEL MISTRESS appears, looking a lot like the Black Queen in X-Men5: The Hellfire Club. She has been observing the scene, unnoticed. She approaches the DIRECTOR and places her black-gloved hand on his tensed-up shoulder. Startled, the DIRECTOR turns around.
CELEBRITY, THE CRUEL MISTRESS
So, the tables have turned.
DIRECTOR
Huh?
CELEBRITY, THE CRUEL MISTRESS
The gawker is now the gawked.
But remember, only the first one is free.
CELEBRITY, THE CRUEL MISTRESS disappears behind the shiny pod, and the DIRECTOR looks around, appearing nonplussed, but secretly high, and already (zeta-)jonesing for another hit.

On X2, briefly

Good movie. Nice bones tossed to the comic book readers. Just a suggestion: maybe if their hair wasn’t so uniformly weird, people wouldn’t hate the mutants as much.

Bloghdad.com/War_is_Peace

Skoal. For the third time, Norway merits an entry in Bloghdad.com. First, it was for an examination of non-violent resistance to the Nazi occupation. A few days later, it was for an underground WWII protest song. Now, keeping the Orwell thread alive, it’s a Norwegian parliamentarian’s nomination of Bush and Blair for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Pity the deadline’s passed for 2003 nominations. If they’d been eligible for this year, and won, they could’ve showed up Carter, who won last year “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts” blah blah blah. Fast wars, fast peace prizes, eh, Jimmy?