It’s architectural reality TV, with so many last-minute campaigns, twists and turns, you’d think Fox was running it, not the Port Authority. The final two bachelors, er architect groups in the design “competition” for the WTC site have been workin’ it hard, according to design reporter Julie Iovine’s NYTimes article, even turning up on Oprah. Herbert Muschamp weighs in, too, slightly chastened. Meanwhile, Edward Wyatt’s report of a LMDC committee’s surprise recommendation of THINK over (the Pataki/Bloomberg-favored) Libeskind sounds like a promo for the finale of Joe Millionaire. And just as “surprising,” or “real,” for that matter. Whether angling to arrive at a lecture with a victim family member or throwing shade on each other’s designs, these architects ingenuously perform for the camera.
Author: greg
Night Of A Thousand Film Geeks
clockwise from top R: UA’s Bingham Ray and honoree Alexander Payne
David O. Russell, last year’s honoree, still in a euphoric daze
“special friend”/screenwriter Jim Taylor, freezing on way to afterparty
John Waters and sycophantic fan, photo: David Russell
crowd shot, which captured the supposedly elusive cracked-me-up international man of mystery
Last night at MoMA, Alexander Payne and Bingham Ray talked about Payne’s career and films (including Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt). The Museum’s Film & Media Department gave Payne its Work In Progress Award, to honor filmmakers as they transition from “promising” to “proven.” Ray, who’s an independent film legend himself, and who heads United Artists (which picked up Pieces of April at Sundance), studio headed the conversation.
In my secret socialite life, I co-chaired the benefit. I’m working up my notes from Alexander’s discussion (and will try to score some audio clips, too) and will post a page of pictures soon. In the mean time, here is a composite pic, and the highlights of my speech:
Movie Idea, v. 1million
It takes the village paper, the Guardian, to report this story from Urbana, IL:
“The mother who convinced everyone her child had leukemia”
Terri [Mom] fed Hannah [seven-year old daughter] sleeping pills, then took her on long, aimless drives among the strip-malls and cornfields of Ohio until she fell asleep. Afterwards, she would tell her they had been to the hospital, and that she had slept through her treatment again…
Within weeks, [the head of the Mother’s Club at Hannah’s school] had the pupils holding cookie sales and donating the aluminium ring-pulls from fizzy drink cans, which they sold for recycling. “They even had a Hannah Hat Day,” the Urbana Daily Citizen newspaper noted in a report last June, under the headline Community Reaches Out To Little Girl. “Everyone wore a hat, because Milbrandt must wear a hat since she had the chemotherapy and lost her hair.”
Canadian Flag On Backback — The Cremaster Version
Cremaster 2 Patch, click to order at the Gugg store
Now there’s a Canadian flag patch for all your globehopping needs. Use the Maple Leaf to show your Can-x street cred, or to avoid taking the heat for shameful US administrations.
Or kick it old-school with the until-1965 version, the Red Ensign. With this Cremaster patch (1 of 5, each sold separately) on your, um, backpack, the velvet ropes at biennial VIP lounges will part for you; you’ll waltz right in to Matisse Picasso, no waiting; and suddenly-fawning art dealers will give you an extra 10% off. [thanks to the eagle-eyed Fimoculous]
[Face facts: the backpack’s a dealbreaker, dude, especially in Venice. Put it on a sash, maybe with a pink kilt.]
[Sadly, the “I Survived Cremaster 3” T-shirts, which were a hit in Basel, aren’t available. Get a cap instead.]
update: the patches are no longer at the Guggenheim online store, but Well Wisher has images of them on flickr
On Loving Their Work
Josh Newman and Colin Spoelman, the budding moguls at Cyan Pictures should be celebrating, if they weren’t working so much. Their short film, Coming Down the Mountain, has just played at a couple of film festivals.
And, shooting recently wrapped on their first feature, actor Adam Goldberg’s directorial debut, I Love Your Work. Naturally, there is a behind-the-scenes weblog.
With just six days worth of posts from the twenty-plus day shoot, the weblog’s kind of slight, but it makes for good readin.’ Figuring (rightly) that posting in real-time and producing would suck, Josh brought in Helen Jane, a blogger pro, so to speak. HJ knows refreshingly/annoyingly little about filmmaking, giving the weblog an amusingly wide-eyed, “I can’t believe I’m getting paid for hanging out with Franke Potente!” tone. No news here, but I’d rather see a weblog from the POV of a principal player (producer, director, actor) rather than a friendly groupie. Of course, that’s why I’m here.
[Update from the “Going out in a blaze of glory” department: writing about the ILYW weblog may be the new way to cease publication, if Shift and Salon are any indication. If I’m not around next week, you’ll know why…]
More On Punch-Drunk Love and Jeremy Blake
Been making arrangements for a private preview of a new work by Jeremy Blake, who I’ve been friendly with for many years, since his first NY show. While putting together an email of links and background for people, I went back to the official site for Paul Anderson’s film, Punch-Drunk Love [DVD, someday]. Under “movies”, there is a collection of 14 haiku-like clips, which use liberal doses of Jeremy’s abstracted work and Jon Brion’s film music, often without any dialogue, or even ambient sound. They’re really great, like a bowl of film candy.
A search of the web for any discussion of them turned up nothing, but ptanderson.com, the blow-away best “unofficial” filmmaker fansite around, comes to the rescue, sort of. In addition to a section on Jeremy and his work (including a what/where inventory of his work in PDL), there’s a list of deleted scenes which maps pretty closely onto the website movies. PDL is the most overlooked movie of the award season. And not just acting/directing/writing, but the whole gamut of editing, production design, sound, lighting, music, I mean, come on.
Now We’re Gettin’ Somewhere, Gerry
The compelling/amusing Super Mario Brothers: A Literary Criticism (thanks, Jason!), which puts paid to my (non-)critique of the connections between Gerry, its filmic antecedents, and SimCity-style video games.
The People In Your Neighborhood v5
Q: When your cable modem drops its DNS settings, and your wireless network connection goes out while you’re away for a few days, how many voicemails requesting you call your damn ISP can your neighbor leave before committing a breach of wi-fi netiquette? Does this number vary by coast?
Or is this the karmic price for your own use of the wi-fi connection you find blazing through your window when you’re away?
And Also From The Guardian,
“When I snap my fingers, the box office will magically increase… image:guardian.co.uk
This interview with a philosophical Steven Soderbergh. Seems Full Frontal didn’t even open in the UK, even though Miramax covered their own butts, cost-wise, by pre-selling the foreign rights.
First, Let Me Say, Daniel, We Loved Your Idea
And (according to the Guardian), we’d really like to move forward with it. We made just a couple of notes, ‘Kay?
On Museums On eBay
This AP story [via the cool Scrubbles.net] from Indianapolis sounds like the tip of the iceberg: museum curators using ebay to add to their collections.
My conversations about eBay with various curator friends all follow a predictable a trajectory: surprise that we’re both eBay whores; polite envy over what the other scored; caginess over what we’re looking for now; relief when we find out we’re looking for different stuff; quick detente and an exchange of usernames when we find out we’re buying the same stuff.
Of course, now eBay’s gonna turn my butt in to the Feds, as the EFF reports they’re all too eager to do.
On Wooster Collective
As I arrived at Gawker’s launch party last week, I ran into some friends from my old consulting days. (I guess it’s Nick’s job to know everybody, and he does.) Anyway, their shoutout just before the elevator door closed, “we have a weblog, Wooster Collective” should be nominated for Undersell Of The Year.
Wooster Collective is a hoppin’ arena of grafitti, stickers, stencil art and other street art, with updates coming more frequently than the 4-5-6 train at rush hour. In a remarkably short time, they’ve tapped into a sprawling network of artists and fans who contribute great stuff from far beyond Wooster.
Some highlights: Posters of sidewalks by Gucci, et al; Peter Coffin’s barcode stickers [Peter, you gotta tell me about this stuff…]; and Dan Witz interview, whose trompe l’oeil graf works are stunning.
As If greg.org Needed Another Matthew Barney Reference…
Yeah, I want a Cremaster belt buckle, but not if it means
getting executed in a salt arena… image: guggenheim.org
‘cuz it’s gonna be all we talk and hear about for months (at least until Matrix Reloaded comes out). We’re just suckers for an entirely fabricated, all-encompassing, and disturbing worldview. (What, the imagined world of Wolfowitz ain’t scary enough?)
Anyway, in the Times, Michael Kimmelman gets all sticky for the Cremaster show, which opens today at the Guggenheim. Note to all: Fridays through June 6, are hereby set aside for watching the entire 5-film Cycle, in order. You will be graded on this.
Note to MB: If Prada teaches the world anything, it’s to actually have a site up when you go wide with a marquee URL.
Uh-Oh, Canada
First, sorry I couldn’t get this story out in time for Canadian Flag Day (Feb. 15, if you didn’t know, and chances are, you didn’t.) As every Canadian unlucky enough to cross my path the last couple of weeks can attest, I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of the well-known but underexamined “Canadian Flag On Backpack” (CFOB) technique of terror preparedness. It’s Canadian Common Sense: when you travel abroad, sew a Canadian Flag on your backpack, and everywhere you go, everyone will treat you with friendly kindness. And let you sleep in their barn.
To this embattled American, the explanations I’ve gotten range from the naively implausible (“It’s gratitude for all our peacekeepers.”) to the blindingly obvious (“It’s so we’re not mistaken for Americans.”) to what I thought was the same thing (“It’s just Canadian Pride.”).
Yeah but how’d it start? Look at the built-in assumptions: 1. You travel with a backpack 2. You travel with a backpack. My guess: It’s a generational thing. The Maple Leaf flag was only adopted in 1965; Gen-X are the first to grow up with it. When they go abroad junior year, they take the flag with them. Douglas Coupland should be able to clear this up in no time.
Interesting in peace-ier times, but only as much as it sheds light on the sudden surge of references I’ve found– from far-flung media sources– to Americans abroad using the CFOB technique to protect themselves from terrorists (or argumentative Old Europeans). As this MetaFilter thread shows, these “Canadians” are not a new phenom, either. Hell, when Americans could care less, like, say during the Kosovo crisis, big-time experts casually recommended Canadian drag, or at least avoiding American symbols (both clothing and TGIFriday’s, I guess.)
But the US administration seems to have set its sights on Canada now, which may bring an end to the benefits of posing as OR being Canadian. BoingBoing points to a story about a Canadian who had her passport shredded by the INS and who got shipped to India. Danny O’Brien writes about a Canadian they shipped to Syria, where he sits, uncharged, in jail. There’s nothing on Ready.gov about CFOB, either. And since the insidious PATRIOT II act being proposed sets a far lower threshhold for stripping an American of his citizenship, who knows if sporting a Maple Leaf is enough to classify you as an “enemy of the US.” My advice, if you’re gonna be “Canadian” while you’re abroad, fine. Behave yourself, make our northern neighbors proud. Just ditch the patch before you come back.
[A heady read: Sean Maloney’s Dec 2001 paper, “Canadian Values and National Security Policy: Who Decides?”]
Style Guides
Matt Webb posted a nice collection of style guides.
An addition, while not a style guide, per se: having Netscape crash and take your in-progress post with it can help you pare down later drafts to the bare essentials.