Saturday night we went to the Kennedy Center in Washington for the National Symphony Orchestra’s commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, Salute to Apollo: The Kennedy Legacy. It was the wackiest cheesefest of a concert I’ve ever been to.
We tried to puzzle out how a program like this came together. NASA was heavily involved, of course, and there was a mix of the nerdy with the obligatory and the available. But I have to think that the prime directive for the evening was written by NSO conductor Emil de Cou, who might be a gigantic space nerd.
The Playbill mentions de Cou’s multiple NASA colabos, including the smashing success of the NSO’s multimedia performance of Holst’s The Planets at Wolftrap in 2006, with narration written by de Cou and performed by Leonard Nimoy and Nichelle Nichols.
Three of these planets were repeated on Saturday, only instead of Spock and Uhura, the narrators were Scott Altman [commander of the last space shuttle mission] and Buzz Aldrin, who is a giant, if amiable, ham. But also a good sport, since Neil Armstrong apparently doesn’t do parties anymore. In addition to his Presidential Medal of Freedom, Aldrin wore some kind of bulbous, metallic, Airstream bowtie. We had truly excellent orchestra seats, and even the most eagle-eyed among us couldn’t figure out what had landed there around Buzz’s neck.
The Planets [“Mars,” “Saturn,” “Jupiter”] were accompanied by dramatic pans of NASA imagery on the large overhead screen. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The performance started, naturally/bombastically enough, with a gorgeous montage of Apollo 11 from Theo Kamecke’s long-forgotten, recently rediscovered and remastered 1971 feature documentary, Moonwalk One–which was cut to the theme from 2001.
2001, of course, came out in 1968, in the middle of the Apollo program, but before A11. And yet it suddenly felt inextricably linked to it, or conversely, the NASA programmers and audience themselves felt a continuity between the scientific and engineering facts of their missions and the science fictions of the time. Like how members of actual Mafia families began patterning their behavior on The Godfather. This is not some cockamamie theory, as the rest of the NSO program clearly illustrates:
Horst was followed by John Williams’ theme song to–no, not what you’re thinking, not yet–Lost in Space. Introduced on video by June Lockhart, who then made a “surprise” live appearance on stage. She was over the moon with excitement, which I took as a sign that she doesn’t do much onscreen work these days. She was thrilled to be there.
Then there was a medley of Star Trek themes, introduced on video by a funny/kooky Nichelle Nichols. She looked great. Clearly, de Cou has stayed in touch. About ten seconds into the orchestra’s intense rendition of ST:TOS, I realized I should have been recording it on my phone to use as my ringtone. But I didn’t.
Nichols didn’t appear on stage, instead the orchestra headed straight into its John Williams Star Wars medley.
Then Denyce Graves came out to sing a moon-related aria from Dvorak, which was the accompaniment to, was accompanied by–it was hard to tell–a montage of beautiful film footage of astronauts jumping around the moon and driving their moon buggies, scenes which caused the audience to erupt in bursts of laughter. Which was not funny, because the song, from Rusalka, is basically the Czech Little Mermaid singing about trading her voice for love or something.
Anyway, then Jamia came out. Never heard of her, but she’s apparently the black Hannah Montana. Then Chaka Khan came out in a Victorian bordello outfit to sing some NASA-commissioned anthem by a famous jingle composer [“You deserve a break today/ So get up and get away”]. Then the Army chorus sang “America the Beautiful” and John Phillip Sousa. I didn’t even know it had words. And then we left.
God bless America and its grandiose cheese spectacles.
Category: etc.
Signed, Richard Nixon
Left behind on the moon:
This commemorative plaque, attached to the leg of the Lunar Module (LM), Eagle, is engraved with the following words: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July, 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all of mankind.”
It bears the signatures of the Apollo 11 astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, commander; Michael Collins, Command Module (CM) pilot; and Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., Lunar Module (LM) pilot along with the signature of the U.S. President Richard M. Nixon.
[via nasa images]
Do You Know Who I Am?
Artforum’s William Pym covering the extremely non-chalant X-Initiative opening this week:
Jordan Wolfson, hovering by Barcelona’s Latitudes, took several prods before he could even remember that he was participating in a group show with healthy buzz opening at I-20 Gallery round the corner later in the week. Eventually waking up to the idea that he was a professional artist talking to a writer, Wolfson pointed at a nearby projector. “I lent that to them,” he volunteered with a goofy puff of pride. “That’s my claim to fame.”
International Association of Art Critics cardholder Tyler Green twittering his way through the museums of New England:
So much attitude from admissions staff. MFA needs to train them on AICA members. Geez.
10:04 AM Jun 22nd from UberTwitter
…
At Worcester Art Museum, where admissions person tried to keep me out. Train the staff on accredited press, WAM…
10:00 AM Jun 21st from UberTwitter
Me at Larry’s, for John’s late Picasso show last month:
Me: I wonder if you can tell me about the documentary screening in the corner gallery?
Gallery attendant: No.
Me [flummoxed]: I mean, is there any information ab–
Attendant: No, there isn’t.
Me, [baffled]: Is there someone who does know who I can ask, I’m just interested to find out who prod–
Attendant: No, there isn’t anyone.
Me [weighing whether to ask for people at 24th street by name, or whether to just do the cold, “Do you know who I am?” and then deciding against it, since she clearly doesn’t give a flying $#% who I might be, and why should she, there’s only like three of these paintings for sale, and my question isn’t even remotely on the trajectory for someone who might want to buy one, and can’t I just go dig up the early 70’s Picasso filmography online anyway?]: Ooo Kaay. Thanks.
It occurs to me that we invariably bring a cartload of subjective baggage along with us when we see art, and often we’re only vaguely aware the extent to which that subjectivity and expectation colors–no, it’s more than that, it shapes and molds and transforms–our experience.
Whether we see as an artist or a collector, a curator or a trustee, a flaneur, a writer/critic/journalist, a complete civilian, if such a thing is possible anymore, makes a difference.
And when I couldn’t find it online, I made a quick call, and some very helpful folks at Gagosian told me the film was Picasso: War, Peace, Love, (1970), by the artist’s long-time friend, photographer Lucien Clergue, and that it was originally produced in 1968 for Condor Films, in Zurich, as Picasso: Krieg, Frieden und Liebe.
I’ve got to remember to add it to IMDb.
Beat It
“They’ll kick you, then beat you,
Then tell you it’s fair”
Spectacular video from Michael Jackson, Iranian Freedom Fighter. [via the awl]
Le début du point de vue Google Mappienne
On June 19, 1885 Gaston Tissandier and Jacques Ducom set off in across Paris in a balloon. They were on a photo expedition, and managed to get seven shots. This one, of the pont Louis-Phillippe, at the western tip of the Ile St-Louis, was the most successful, in that it was nearly straight down. Though it was not the first aerial photo of Paris, it caused a sensation and was exhibited and reproduced widely for many years.
The photo historian Thierry Gervais wrote about it in a 2001 article in Etudes Photographique, “Un basculement du regard, Les débuts de la photographie aérienne 1855-1914”:
In 1885, Gaston Tissandier and Jacques Ducom know the objectives and results of aerial photographs obtained by Nadar. When they fly over the capital on June 19, their goal is clear: “After many attempts, it still needs to be demonstrated that the proofs obtained in a balloon may be as sharp as those taken on land in the ordinary conditions and resolve in a word completely the problem of free balloon photography.”
Beginning at the Auteuil aeronautical workshop, the 13 x 18 camera, known as a touriste, is set on the edge of the platform, with the lens oriented to the ground. The crossing of Paris is done from Porte d’Auteuil to Ménilmontant via a light wind from south-west which takes them up to Meaux. Seven photographs are made, five of the capital and two of the banlieue. If “all are good enough to be reported,” that of the Ile Saint-Louis holds particular attention, taken at 600 meters, this photograph is of a perpendicular sharpness that “leaves nothing to be desired.”
The photograph of Île Saint-Louis gained real notoriety. Mentioned in the columns of le Bulletin de la Société française de photographie, it was noted that “now that any party was able to shoot the Geography, Topography and Military Arts,” it will be reproduced on many occasions. It is published in an article in la Nature describing the expedition. In 1886, Gauthier Villars printed rotogravure and photoglyptie in the book of Tissandier titled, La Photographie en ballon. Two years later, Albert Londe chooses to illustrate his chapter on aerial photography in La Photographie moderne. In 1889, it appears alongside the tribute of Paul Nadar at the Exposition universelle.
But the diffusion also means that the photograph of the Ile Saint-Louis is one-of-a-kind in the late 1880s. Tissandier and Ducom’s experimentation was not followed by an intensive production of aerial photographs. Commandant Freiburg made several attempts to shoot from a balloon, but the military are confronted with a problem context. To be out of reach of projectiles, the balloon must be at least 5000 meters. Accordingly, the camera needed to be equipped with a telephoto lens to produce legible images. Having noticed, during the Exposition of 1889, the value of aerial photography for the strategy, the military focuses its attention on getting results with long lenses.
What strikes me is how little has changed in over 100 years, at least from this perspective.
Here’s the same shot today on Google Maps:
Items I Didn’t Win At Christie’s
Lot 706: A PAIR OF SILVER LEATHER BEAN BAGS,
LABELED ‘MARC JACOBS’, est. $300-500, “from the runway fashion show”. No reserve. Winning bid: $550, plus premium.
For future reference, having a lot open in your browser tabs for two weeks and willing the items into your house does not work, even for no reserve items. You must actually bid. [christies.com, apologies to reference library]
Verner Panton Vilbert Chair For Ikea
The dates for Verner Panton’s Vilbert Chair run the gamut, but they cluster around 1993.
He created the chair for Ikea, and it didn’t sell for very long–I’ve seen “six months,” “a season,” and “a year”–and apparently, it didn’t sell very well, either.
As you’d expect from Ikea, it’s made out of melamine-coated MDF. I’m not a huge fan, but I find it very amusing to see how Panton fans and modernist furniture aficionados spin a famous designer’s commercial failure on the cusp of his resurgence.
One hack design site gets just about everything about the chair wrong in one, short sentence: “IKEA began a Panton revival when they reproduced his Vilbert Chair in 1994.”
One Dutch dealer says, “Only shortly Sold as Ikea made the Chair from different Materials as Verner Panton Required.”
But the most frequently repeated explanation, is “The design was perhaps too radical for IKEA shoppers and not that many were sold, making them rare to find today.”
and
This chair proved to be too abstract for the mindset of the Ikea clientele…”
Oddly, the Vilbert is not faring much better in its afterlife as a rare, connoisseur’s collectible, either. At auction, one sold for $450 in 2002; an unopened Vilbert didn’t sell in 2003; six sold for EUR 266 apiece in 2006, two didn’t sell for 400 pounds in 2007. Examples for sale online range from EUR275 to EUR450, while the most sensible prices are still in the thrift shop/garage sale range: EUR25 and “Sure, whatever, just take it.”
Wait, What? Mrs Jeff Lubin Closed Mrs John L. Strong?
I was a bit skeptical when Nannette Brown and her husband Jeff Lubin bought Mrs John L. Strong, the venerable Madison Avenue stationer in 2002. But if Mrs Lewis, who’d been seeking to retire, was willing to sell to them, what could one do but trust her?
And for sure, the expansion opportunities–the readymade papers, stationery, and related gift products–that the Lubin-Browns saw as the brand’s low-hanging fruit seemed plausible, even though the company didn’t consider itself something as crass as a brand. [We gave the little desk calendars as Christmas gifts, and they were always exceptional, right down to the packaging.]
Once one overcame the conceptual hurdle that Mrs Strong was a brand, a business, it seemed possible, maybe even not undesirable, that it could be grown and evolved into, say, an American Smythson. But it didn’t seem necessary, more like renovating an ancient house to triple mint.
As Mrs Brown told Forbes just last November, “Although the company turned a small profit at best, I thought it was a great opportunity to build a much bigger brand and to introduce it to a larger audience.” That audience, she figured, would order frequently if Mrs Strong’s products were more closely linked to the fashion world:
“For example, if Marc Jacobs is using a certain coloration, or Lanvin a certain beadwork, that might translate into company designs,” she says. “Two seasons ago, Zac Posen did a caramel-colored croc that I loved, and I used that for envelope linings.”
Well that didn’t turn out so well. One has a right to be surprised and more than a bit dismayed to learn that a couple of weeks ago, Mrs Brown abruptly pulled the plug on Mrs John L. Strong and announced the death of luxury:
Eighty-year-old luxury stationer Mrs. John L. Strong is closing due to the economic downturn, according to a press release CEO Nannette Brown sent out today. “This is a sad day for Mrs. John L. Strong and a sad day for luxury as the world has become increasingly bereft of unique, hand-finished products,” Brown says in the release. The brand’s Madison Avenue atelier and Barneys boutique will both close, as well as its finishing facility in the garment district and outpost in Beverly Hills. The company built a following of A-list clients over the years, from Oprah Winfrey and Bruce Springsteen to Tommy Hilfiger and Anna Wintour.
Let’s just acknowledge upfront that one problem might be targetting, the perception of who constitutes an A-list clientele. Wintour’s obviously a special case, but I can’t imagine a single, solitary customer of Mrs. John L. Strong who would be swayed or encouraged by an association with Oprah, Bruce, or Tommy. [When we were ordering baby announcements post-Brown buyout, one of the samples in Mrs. Lewis’s stack was for Francis Bean Cobain, and another for a Matt Lauer kid. I didn’t blink at the latter, but I’ve always wondered whether the Cobain thing was a plant, a prop.]
Which wasn’t even my point. My point was that Mrs Strong was a profitable, if small, business as it was. NY Mag didn’t include it, but Mrs Brown’s press release had two other quotes with which one must take issue. First, from Tom Kalenderian, EVP GMM, Men’s and Chelsea Passage Barneys New York: “Upon assuming the stewardship of Mrs. Strong, Nannette Brown restored the luster to the brand infusing her exquisite taste and infinite dedication…” Not to impugn Mrs. Brown’s fashion sense or dedication in any way, but the fact is, she was basking in a luster, not restoring it.
Then there was this other, somewhat oddly tensed quote from Mrs Brown herself:
“…investor’s failure to finance the business’ expansion plans combined with a challenging retail and economic environment, left the company with no alternative but to close its doors. Further efforts to capitalize or sell the business had failed.”
It is always awkward to talk about one’s own money. The investor in Mrs Strong was, of course, Mrs Brown and her husband, Mr. Lubin, who, it was just announced Monday, was leaving his post as managing partner of the European operations of Cerberus Capital Advisors, the private equity firm whose controlling equity stake in Chrysler was just wiped out by the company’s bankruptcy and acquisition by Fiat. [As an aside, soon after Lubin joined Cerberus, the company named former Bush treasury secretary John Snow as its Chairman. Mr. Lubin’s nominal former boss, the head of Cerberus’ International Advisory Board, is Dan Quayle. Another partner is indicted Bernard Madoff associate Ezra Merkin.]
Which is not my point, either, except that the “challenging economic environment” Mrs Strong faced can be particularized to some degree to the reversals facing Mrs Brown and Mr. Lubin. And to the customer segment who looked to Oprah for luxury and fashion inspiration.
Which is to say that there exists at least the possibility that Mrs John L. Strong might be able to find a new life, not as a global luxury brand, but as the small, largely invisible, extremely specialized business it once was. At the very least, Mrs Strong’s archives and inventory of dies and papers should be brought back into service, and not just as a side business of Kate’s Paperie or whatever.
I would expect that an old guard clientele of Mrs Strong would show sufficient goodwill toward a talented, slightly obsessive, self-effacing, stationery connoisseur–a Jonathan Hoefler of paper with a passion for understated service–to sustain a small, efficiently run business. Then let the brides have their thing, properly guided, and when the status quo ante is stabilized, the new steward can explore thoughtful, appropriate, organic product growth–or not.
Mrs John L Strong perfected a certain rareified tradition of personal paper as a direct embodiment of personal identity. Unfortunately, Mrs Brown’s fashion-focused strategy was dependent on people whose identity stood solely on their Zac Posen crocs. One hopes that Mrs Brown will take her stewardship seriously enough to pass Mrs Strong into appreciative, if humbler, hands. Because I’ve got two boxes of stationery left, and I will be needing to reorder in a year or so.
Richard Prints: Untitled (300 x 404)
I just got my first edition of Untitled (300 x 404, after Untitled (Cowboy), 2003 by Richard Prince) from the printer. It’s a 1px = 1mm version, which came out to be 12 x 16 inches, inkjet printed on aluminum.
Though it’s crazy to feel any sense of accomplishment for an image I appropriated whose fabrication I outsourced, I’m actually kind of stoked. The print looks fantastic, with a graininess that doesn’t map to the supposed pixel dimensions.
When you zoom in on a screen, a pixel is so nice and tidy and square. But unless you’re a mosaicist or a North Korean cardflipping stadium extravaganza director, physical pixels are probably not going to be square. Who knew?
Anyway, since it cost the same to make one as a dozen, there’s an edition of ten, with a couple of proofs. If I had a dealer, a gallery, an artist career, or an idea to have any of the above, I’d probably sell them. I’m sure they’d be cheaper than the Richard Prince.
Previously: West Trademark @)#(*$ed Up
Untitled (300 x 404): the making of
update: Just found out via Joerg’s post that the original photographer was not Jim Krantz, but Sam Abell, the great National Geographic photographer. He shot it in 1996 for Leo Burnett, Marlboro/Philip Morris’s agency. PDN had an interview with Abell about it last year, on the occasion of Untitled (Cowboy)‘s prominence in Prince’s Guggenheim retrospective.
This. Is. Sewious.
I’d never much thought of it before, even when I was reading Mondo 2000, and I don’t know enough to say whether splitting blocks and products will help. But for the record, I too want to register my concern “about people using nanocomputers to brute-force AI without knowing what they are doing, and ending up with a recursively self-improving human-indifferent superintelligence.”
“Bucky Life” Chandelier With Token Swarovski By Ben Jakober
Hmm, looks a little familiar?
Ben Jakober created “Bucky Life” for the Swarovski exhibit at the 2004 Milan furniture fair, where it was overshadowed by Ron Arad’s LED crystal news ticker lamp, the Lolita. Says the press release:
Renowned sculptor Jakober coalesced fibre optics and geometries to create light from air. The chandelier’s geodesic shape was inspired by a Buckminster Fuller work from the sixties. Using 270 polycarbonate hollow transparent tubes, 36 Swarovski optical fibres and 72 Swarovski crystals this retro shape was realised using modern materials and technology.
Hmm, even if I didn’t despise Swarovski for their rampant colabo-whoring–everything does not look better with your friend’s family’s rhinestones on it, hipster designers–I don’t think I’d be all that into this.
The prisms set light in play across the whole thing, not just pinpoints at the corners. Plus, it’s just hard to beat a futuristic chandelier, hand-tied and with no actual lights with anything, but plastic straws? Uh-uh. Jakober should’ve gotten ahold of a batch of Fortress of Solitude-style Swarovski prisms, then we could talk.
Still, it gets an A for inspiration. [press release in pdf, image via mocoloco]
Enzo Mari x Ikea Mashup, Ch. 6: Ikeaness
The tile in the guest bathroom in North Carolina was handmade and sun-dried in Mexico, as you can tell by the single square with the artful flaw, a footprint from a wandering dog.
Woodworking aficionados get off on things like grain patterns and joinery, the more intricate the better. So it’s at once surprising and totally not that after spending so much time finishing this wood, I’m starting to dig its industrial qualities, its intrinsic Ikeaness.
Ikea’s IVAR shelving system is made from unfinished pine, but that’s barely half the story. When you start looking closely, you see that even the simplest board is actually made up of several pieces of wood, spliced together.
It’s never the same, either. Each identical-seeming 72-in. post is unique. It’s almost like they piece all these scraps together with this insane, zig-zag scarf joint, into a single, endless piece of wood, which gets extruded, drilled, and cut to length on the other end.
Once you notice these joints–this one is the highest-contrast of the whole pile–your eyes are drawn to them, like learning a new word and suddenly hearing it everywhere.
The shelves are glued up from pine strips, that’s obvious. But was I really so focused on selecting the “right” color ranges that I didn’t notice this string of lozenge-shaped plugs which filled a massive gap in one of the the shelves? I think that will be the table’s dog footprint.
June 4th: June 5th, 5th Man
Incredible updates to the Tank Man photographs story from yesterday’s NY Times Lens blog.
After twenty years of just telling friends about it, Terril Jones, a former AP reporter who had been covering the Tienanmen Square demonstrations for several weeks, came forward in the Times with his own photograph of Tank Man.
Jones was shooting on the ground in front of the Beijing Hotel, and his photo captures the chaos of people running and ducking for cover–while Tank Man waits calmly in the middle of the street, prepared to confront the oncoming column of tanks alone.
Meanwhile, in the comments, Robert Dannin, a former director at Magnum Photos who says he’s the one who sent Stuart Franklin to Beijing, reveals that Franklin’s original slide, which was provided to Time [he’d been put on assignment to the magazine], disappeared before it could be returned. Time hastily settled with Franklin and Magnum, which had made good duplicates, but the original, 1st generation slide has apparently never surfaced.
Behind the Scenes: A New Angle on History [lens blog]
Four Men With Cameras And An Elephant
The NY Times’ Lens blog has absolutely riveting accounts of the four journalists who shot photos of Tank Man, the still-unidentified man with two shopping bags who confronted a column of People’s Liberation Army tanks rolling into Tienanmen Square on June 5th, 1989.
Because he was shooting for AP, Jeff Widener’s version got the greatest immediate distribution, but it’s arguably the lowest quality photo of the bunch. Magnum photographer Stuart Franklin’s wide shot [above] with the burned out bus has a more powerful composition. Newsweek’s Charlie Cole and Reuters photographer Arthur Tsang Hin Wah were both new to me.
Tsang’s editors actually didn’t release his facedown photo until twelve hours later; instead, they went with his “action shot” of Tank Man climbing up onto the tank and confronting the driver. Tsang’s is the only account of the four which mentions this detail, even though they all remember People’s Security Bureau agents apprehending the man after he climbed back down.
Which unfortunately supports Cole’s point:
In my opinion, it is regretful that this image alone has become the iconic “mother” of the Tiananmen tragedy. This tends to overshadow all the other tremendous work that other photographers did up to and during the crackdown. Some journalists were killed during this coverage and almost all risked being shot at one time or another. Jacques Langevin, Peter and David Turnley, Peter Charlesworth, Robin Moyer, David Berkwitz, Rei Ohara, Alon Reininger, Ken Jarecke and a host of others contributed to the fuller historical record of what occurred during this tragedy and we should not be lured into a simplistic, one-shot view of this amazingly complex event.
As remarkable as these stories are–and the lengths these photographers went to to not have their film confiscated is truly mindblowing–they all ignore an important fact: the most memorable and widely seen image of Tank Man and his whole brave dance with the tank was actually TV footage.
Behind the Scenes: Tank Man of Tiananmen [nyt lens blog]
PBS Frontline overproduced a Tank Man documentary in 2006. The confrontation footage begins about five minutes in. [pbs.org, where I took the climbing images above]
Bought A Bing
And in other “laughable corporate attempts to build brand equity through campaigns designed to intentionally genericize trademarked-but-tangential phrases that rhyme with ding-a-ling” news:
Microsoft’s marketing gurus hope that Bing will evoke neither a type of cherry nor a strip club on “The Sopranos” but rather a sound — the ringing of a bell that signals the “aha” moment when a search leads to an answer.
The name is meant to conjure “the sound of found” as Bing helps people with complex tasks like shopping for a camera, said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online audience business group.
And if Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.” Plus, he said, “it works globally, and doesn’t have negative, unusual connotations.”
Mhmm. “Verb up.” I wanted to Twitter about leaving a Zing! on Bing, but the URL just redirects to decisionengine.com.
Microsoft’s Search for a Name Ends With a Bing [nyt]
two’s a trend?: Miracle Whip: The App