Author: greg

Oh, and over the last week, a film idea I’d had (and sketched out a couple of weeks ago) is rapidly taking shape. While I’d planned to keep it quiet until I worked it through more clearly, I blurted it out to a veteran producer-turned-major entrepreneur at dinner, then to a couple of very film-minded people, all of whom were very interested. And this morning, I woke up with a few lucid, brilliant flashes (brilliant as in intense, not necessarily as in genius, yet, anyway) about how it could work. So, this week, there’s going to be a concerted effort to develop it. No details online just yet, though. Stay tuned.

MoMA QNS: I should’ve written yesterday about the Thursday night opening party for MoMA’s new building in Queens, but I didn’t get around to it. Except for the part where about 1,500 people had to stand in the middle of the street in a tremendous downpour, only to (eventually) be told by the Fire Marshall that there’s no way they’re getting in, it was great. (We led a group of 30-35 people under the elevated train until we reached a Romanian restaurant to sit out the rain. After 10:30, the party was not only great, it actually rocked.)
Went back again today, the first day it’s open to the public. There were 1.5 hour lines, trailing all the way down a block that probably had never seen such a crowd. Naturally, we walked right in the front door [a rare case of where my sense of entitlement is not wildly misplaced). The two standout features: Michael Maltzan’s work here is really great. Videos projected on the walls; both functional and ornamental ramps (perfect for parties and the ADA), and a very smart experience at the entrance to the galleries. So, of the last $90 million spent on contemporary architecture in NYC, $50 million was spent successfully (MoMA QNS) and $40 million was, well, whatever (Prada SoHo). [here is a little book published by MoMA about the new bldg.]

The other amazing thing: The literal frenzy of people picking up Felix Gonzalez-Torres posters. This stack sculpture by Gonzalez-Torres from the Walker Art Center collection has a rich, large black&white image of water. As is typical when his work is exhibited, your first encounter is long before you see the actual piece; you notice people walking around with giant posters rolled up and tucked under their arms. (I’d seen this in the pouring rain at the Thursday opening, and it didn’t register at first; if you’re going out for the evening, do you want to carry a giant poster around with you all night?)
In the gallery with the stack, there was bedlam. Seriously. You’d have thought people stood in line just for the poster. There was frantic activity everywhere as people sought out a wide enough space to roll up their poster. Some people teamed up–as if they were folding sheets together–to roll them up smoothly. The stack itself was in total disarray; people were standing on a stray sheet next to it. By the time we walked through the adjacent galleries and back, the stack was gone; only the wall label and two tape corners on the floor betrayed its presence. And, of course, the hundreds of people walking around with giant posters.
On the way out, an older woman (sort of an outer borough Sonia Rykiel) with a disheveled roll of several posters was hustling toward the door, while an irritated middle aged woman in a tank top called after her, “Do you have any posters?” Do you have an extra one?” “Do you have more than one?”

Watching CNBC like it was 1999: Actually, it was nothing like 1999, which is why I’m mentioning it. CNBC had been the VIP room at the analyst’s club for the entire boom of the 1990’s. But in an utterly transfixing burst of reporting, reporter Mike Huckman caught Jack Grubman, a top Salomon analyst of Worldcom, on tape [scroll down for the video] by waiting outside his townhouse yesterday morning. Nothing new about that, right? Except that the video they got was so completely different from anything else I’d seen on CNBC (or from any other reporting on this type of story, for that matter).
Mr Grubman (who, apparently, is a neighbor) was definitely caught off guard by the reporter and his polite persistence. His answers were unremarkably shocking (“What can I say? I’m not part of the company?” “I’m no different than anyone else on Wall Street.”), especially given his nearly god-like stature in the telecom industry. [Anecdote: When he was earning only $3.5 million in 1997, it was so much that younger analysts at Salomon began pricing things in $3.5m “Grubman units.” He made as much as $25 million/year since then, though, presumably requiring all sorts of G.U. recalculations.]
But what was most gripping was the man’s palpable sense of loss of control, of a seemingly unprecedented sense of unpreparedness as the world he knew (and so dominated) was collapsing around him personally (and on live TV). In between pleas of privacy, ignorance, and harassment, he still answers questions, cagily and painfully; he clearly wants to be left alone, but also wants to make sense of things. At the end of the clip, Grubman attempts to flee the wrong way up Fifth Avenue, when he abruptly turns and gives one final answer (“So this caught you completely by surprise?” “Yes. Yes.”) He then walks into an empty Fifth Avenue to get away. No waiting car.

Earlier, I was writing on a new project, which reminded me of the Bohr story, which I posted. Then I found Wall Street on Bravo and kind of got into it for a bit. Then it got on my nerves, because they kept saying, “sure thing” and “easy money.” Even in what may be Oliver Stone‘s only truly good movie, he can’t resist beating the viewer over the head. Went swimming instead. Then came back to an incredible scene in a truly, truly good movie: the hookup scene in Out of Sight.
I hadn’t really noticed it before, but Steven Soderbergh and Anne Coates wove two intensely related scenes with Jennifer Lopez & George Clooney together: A) their slightly awkward small talk in the hotel bar, and B) their subsequent playful foreplay in Lopez’s room. The sound and dialogue throughout is from the bar, and the overlay of their mutual flirting with its payoff makes their lines doubly charged. Coates uses very brief freeze frames, too, and the combined scene closes on a still of the two actors just about to kiss. The whole scene plays with expectation, anticipation, fulfillment. We know these two stars are gonna hook up, so there’d be little suspense in their flirting. This way, both scenes–and the pacing of the movie–benefit. It’s been almost a month since I’ve had a paean to Soderbergh, and it’s overdue. Coates should get major props, too, though; after all, she won an Oscar for editing Lawrence of Arabia. Here’s an article on Coates from the Editor’s Guild.
Also found these helpful quotes from a this Guardian interview with Soderbergh:

“As soon as an actor takes their clothes off in a movie, you’re watching a documentary, not a feature film. I feel like it breaks the spell that you’ve created for the characters, that it’s not Karen taking her clothes off, it’s Jennifer Lopez. In a movie, I sort of check out when people start to slather on each other.” And on Coates: “I had to shut her up. If I had to hear one more David Lean story, I’d belt her.”

[Buy Wall Street, Out of Sight, or Lawrence of Arabia on DVD.]

I usually find The Art Newspaper a little too smart for its own good, no doubt an attempt to appease/appeal to its too-smart target readers, who don’t need something as mundane as a newspaper to tell them anything about art, thank you very much. But this article about Documenta 11 (the current sub-theme of this site, apparently) is pretty good, despite its annoying “A is for Africa…Z is for Zero, Ground” conceit.

There’s something refreshing about a sudden downpour, especially when you’re not trapped in it. Thunderclaps that set off car alarms on your street, Flickers that–save for a surge protector–would fry your laptop. Suddenly bright sunlight (“the devil is kissing his wife”). This is, like, the third or fourth in the last few weeks, though (“The Storm of the Century of the Week”). Can it be a sign of global warming? Yes. Unless you’re a right-wing environmentalist group.

At first, I thought this guy was a weblog stalker, considering we’d been to several of the same exhibits and openings, but it turns out that the “reading over your shoulder,” “they’re right behind you!”character of Modern Art Notes is a benign sign of how small the DC art world is.

My favorite astrophysicist and I loved this great story from Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which I found on kottke.org over the weekend:
Exporting gold from Denmark was “nearly a capital offense” under the Nazi occupation of 1940 on. Entrusted with the gold Nobel prize medals of Max von Laue and James Franck (two German Jewish physicists who had fled first to Copenhagen), George de Hevesy and Niels Bohr dissolved the medals in acid to avoid their confiscation (and any complications that would arise from sheltering Jewish refugees). The resulting solution, known as aqua regia, remained undetected in the Niels Bohr Institute and was delivered to the Swedish Academy in 1950 so that they could be recast. [A search for primary source material turned up this page on the Nobel site, which (unromantically and unfortunately) says the Academy decided to recreate the medals with new gold, not the carefully saved original metal. Still, it’s a great story.]