Category: features

Even in the remotest backwater of Japan where we’ve been for the last two weeks, the popularity of tiny, square city-friendly cars is startling. Easily 25-30% of the cars on the road here in Shikoku are what’s known as ‘1-box’ or ‘2-box’ models. 1-boxes have plenty of room for four people, and not much else, while 2-boxes often have decent storage/luggage space in the back. A couple are even minivan-like in their spaciousness.
I started calling these things toasters, but their shape–especially the 2-boxes–is more accurately described as bread-like. Loaves of Japanese bread are unsettlingly perfect cubes, with the heels removed.
The 1-box cincept isn’t new, or even limited to Japan. 20 years ago, the Honda City started a micromini boom in Japan, and the excellent Mercedes A-class has been selling well in Europe for five years or so (and which I’d buy in a second). [The beautiful-to-me all aluminum Audi A2 hasn’t done as well, but I used in my first short film anyway.] And of course, there’s the Smart Car, which Trent Lott mocked on the Senate floor. [There are so many Smart-like cars now, it’d make Lott’s blood run cold, if he had any, that is.
Still, except for the Honda Element and Toyota’s new Scion/b,none of these cars will ever make it to the US, which is too bad. A surprise to me was how well designed the Daihatsu and Suzuki boxes are. Daihatsu’s a 5th tier failure in the US, with their boring, personality-free, cookie cutter compacts, yet they’re apparently pursuing a differentiation-through-design strategy at home. Why not become a quirky-cool alternative brand and leave the me-too Toyota-chasing to the Koreans?
I’ll throw up some more pictures when I can. In the mean time, here’s a quick spotter’s guide, with links to the Japanese manufacturers’ sites:

Continue reading “Now THAT’S a Scion, or The Influence of The Toaster on Japanese Cars”

Thanks to the adoring fans who commented on my article in the NY Times yesterday about video art tape trading. I won’t list them by name (mostly because it’s possible to list them by name, and doing so might crush my carefully crafted illusion of worldwide fame).
I met Chris, the “star” of the piece several months ago, a guy in a small southern town who has become an impassioned expert on, of all things, video art. My working title for it was “The Cremaster Thief,” after Susan Orlean’s article/book, The Orchid Thief, about a guy in a small southern town who became an impassioned expert on, of all things, orchids. He’s a fascinating and very helpful guy.
Related:
Chris Hughes’ online collection of video art (Remember, they’re not for sale. But if you have a copy of Doug Aitken’s multi-channel Electric Earth, Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Love Is A Treasure, or Salla Tykka’s Lasso, I bet he’d do a deal with you.)
My “research,” watching Cremaster 2 (and other works) on my VCR
Christian Marclay, whose experience with unauthorized dubbing of his work didn’t make it in time for the article. (His work rocks, btw.)
Baltimore artist Jon Routson, whose video works also rock, including his edited-for-TV version of Cremaster 4 .
The “I Survived Cremaster 3” T-shirts that were so popular in Basel last year.
The Cremaster Cycle, an exhaustive and lush reference to the symbolism and interpretations of Barney’s films. By chief Koolaid drinker, Neville Wakefield

Well, almost. I consolidated all my posts on The Atomic Revolution, the shockin’ awesome Military Industrial Complex comic that artist Ethan Persoff re-discovered. Now it’s a greg.org feature.
If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out online, Saturday at 3:30.

Finally, for the the half dozen people who are as intrigued by The Atomic Revolution, the Cold War propaganda comic Ethan Persoff put online, here is at least part of the story of its origins.

Mushroom cloud, from The Atomic Revolution, image: www.ep.tc
The comic itself is copyrighted 1957, by Mr. M Philip Copp, an artist nearly subsumed in an Eisenhower-era Establishment. At a time when comic books were being attacked in Congress and the popular media for contributing to juvenile delinquency, in an denigrated-yet-promising medium populated largely by second generation Lower East Side Jews, the Connecticut WASP Copp sold leased his artistic soul to custom-publish public relations comics for the government and major corporations, quaintly remembered as the Military Industrial Complex.
According to a Sept. 1956 profile of “industrial comics,” which annointed Mr Copp as the go-to guy for American Business Interests’ comic needs, TAR, which was “largely devoted to the peacetime uses of the atom,” was designed as a resource for those “interested in learning something about the fundamentals of atomic life.” [emphasis mine.]

M Philip Copp, right, reviews artwork for
The Atomic Revolution with artist Samuel Citron. image: NYTimes, 1956
More than a year in the making, Copp farmed out the creation of the book to “no fewer than eleven free-lance artists and four writers. (The artists and writers are frequently replaced until the combination jells.)” Oliver Townsend, a one-time aide to Gordon Dean (ex-Chairman of The Atomic Energy Commission) is credited with the “basic text,” and Life‘s science editor Warren Young turned in the final script. The only artist mentioned is Samuel Citron, shown reviewing the artwork for page 30, the “spotless” domed Antarctic mining city and “complete control over our environment” that the atom would soon make possible.
But where did the grand vision for TAR come from? Not from Copp, a self-proclaimed “catalyst,” whose real talent seems to be his eye, and whose own “creations” were limited to fawning profiles in the Times of the more accomplished members of his Connecticut shore yacht club. But ships do factor into the story.
TAR was the brainchild of John Hay Hopkins, the chairman of Groton-based Electric Boat, a WWII submarine manufacturer, which, under Hopkins’ leadership, became General Dynamics. According to the corporate history, Hopkins “saw that the need for defense was a permanent need, and not one that could be satisfied by improvisation in a time of crisis. ‘Grow or Die’ were words by which Hopkins lived…”
Hopkins turned General Dynamics from a shipbuilder to a diversified one-stop-shop for the Cold Warrior, and the atom was a major part of GD’s offering. It built the Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine, and launched its General Atomic Division in 1955. Do the math. A year in the making, profile in late ’56, TAR could’ve been conceived on the deck of a vermouth-soaked General Atomic after-party.
Or perhaps it was part of a much more comprehensive media strategy. Hopkins turned to his slipmate M. Philip Copp for a $50,000, 500,000-copy run of an atomic comic, but to make “Grow or Die” the operating principle for military expenditures would require a multimedia lobbying public education campaign. You know, get that Disney fellow on the phone.
Check out Prof. Marc Langer’s amazing AWN article, “Disney’s Atomic Fleet.” After keeping his studio afloat during WWII by making animated training and propaganda films for the US armed forces, Walt Disney was asked to participate in Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program in 1955. The result: a multi-year, multi-channel atomic edutainment extravaganza that reminds us that skilful collaboration between the media’s and military’s big guns didn’t start with embedding Jessica Lynch on MTV.
Disney began producing a live-action/animation program, Disneyland, for the emerging ABC TV network. In turn, ABC was asked to invest, alongside Western Publishing, in the new theme park the show would promote. In 1957, Disney aired My Friend The Atom as a Tomorrowland segment on the show. The program, along with millions of copies of the accompanying book, went into schools. When Tomorrowland actually opened at Disneyland, it featured a fleet of “nuclear powered” submarines. Vice President Richard Nixon accompanied Disney on the sub’s maiden voyage on June 14, 1959; the event was broadcast live on ABC.
My Friend The Atom promised a future where “‘clean’ nuclear reactors will replace grimy coal and oil power plants. Radiation will be used to produce better crops and livestock. People will zoom from place to place in atomic cars, trains, boats and planes. ‘Then, the atom will become truly our friend.'” If that future sounds familiar to you, it’s because it’s almost an exact frame-for-frame description of the contents of The Atomic Revolution.
Like TAR, My Friend, The Atom was produced in collaboration with General Dynamics Corporation. John Hay Hopkins passed away in 1957, and while he never got to visit Disneyland, and it’s unlikely that he saw the completion of MFTA, he surely got to see a final proof of The Atomic Revolution, thanks to the tireless work of Mr M. Philip Copp.
Related links:
from the Eisenhower Library, a 1953 report by the [William Hay] Jackson Committee on international information warfare
Part 2: M. Philip Copp, State Dept. Info-warrior

[via Scrubbles] The Golden Age of corporate comic books coincides nicely with the Golden Age of industrial musicals. Jonathan Ward tells their history.
These lavishly produced sales-and-morale-boosting programs were usually performed only once or twice, at a company’s sales or management conference. Souvenir records were pressed in extremely small numbers and distributed only to the conference participants, making them very rare.

The non-comic comic book is often cited as a phenomenon of these troubled times…These garish publications are marked by horror, violence and practically everything but humor. They have evoked nation-wide condemnation.
In recent years a far different kind of “unfunny comic” has made an appearance. It is a publication, drawn in newspaper strip form, prepared for and distributed by American business concerns…These little books are becoming an important tool in industrial public relations. They go to stockholders, employes, schools, civic organizations, and the general public. As a medium of goodwill, they have proved extremely effective.
– New York Times, Sept. 1956

The driving force behind these “industrial comics”? Mr M. Philip Copp, a commercial artist-turned-agent-turned-publisher, a Connecticut sailing man from the Ivy League (well, he attended both Princeton and Yale), who set out, quixotically, to win over the leaders of the American Establishment for the “juvenile delinquency”-inducing medium they were, at that very moment, condemning— comic books.
During the Forties, Copp repped Noel Sickles, whose cinematic chiaroscuro style influenced generations of comic artists. Copp apparently sought to leverage this powerful style for Larger Purposes than just entertainment. He comped up a “Life of Jesus” comic book, but neither the Lord nor his churches provided, and the project was shelved.
Stiffed by God, Copp turned to Caesar, then Mammon: in early 1950, the State Department bought over one million copies of “Eight Great Americans,” in eleven languages, for its worldwide propaganda war against the Soviet Union. Then in September, Copp flipped another million copies of “The Korea Story,” a comic booklet denouncing the communist North Korean June 25th invasion of South Korea. It was distributed in the Mid-East and Asia as part of the State Dept’s “Campaign of Truth.”
1952 was at least as busy for the M. Philip Copp Publishing Company. He made commemorative comics for utility companies, followed by a 50th anniversary book, “Flight,” which was purchased in large runs by the Aircraft Industries Association, Douglas Aircraft, Lockheed, IBM, and GM. Oddly, his probable classic, “Crime, Corruption & Communism,” went unmentioned in the Times puff piece which is the source for many of these details.
Copp took a Company Man view of his comic books, calling himself “a ‘catalyst: [I] furnish the basic idea, bring together artists, writers and researchers, and out comes the finished product.” It may have been an attempt to reconcile the comic art he had an eye for with the highly circumscribed, WASP-y world he lived in. Copp didn’t quite finish school; he ran a job shop, selling the Latest Thing to his classmates, neighbors, and yacht club slipmates; his boat was only a 14’ knockabout, but he was funny and, later on, wrote glowing profiles of his sailing friends for the Times.
Maybe I’m imagining (or projecting), but Copp’s eager desire to please his native tribe has kind of a sadness to it. The Atomic Revolution is remarkable in part because of the incongruity of powerful artwork and the patently hollow Military Industrial message it delivers. But it hints at what might have been, if Copp’d had been less concerned with his standing at the yacht club and more concerned about his place among artists.
Related posts:
Part 1: On M. Philip Copp, The Military Industrial Complex’s Goto Guy For “Unfunny Comics”
Finding The Atomic Revolution: Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a winner

Discovering The Atomic Revolution–a stunningly drawn, cheerleading 1957 comic book for Our Friend, The Atom–and being in an apocalyptic Animated Musical state of mind, I set out to discover its origins, and its elusive creator, Mr. M. Philip Copp, whose only other known (to Google) publication was a 1952 comic book, Crime, Corruption & Communism.

Continue reading “On M. Philip Copp, The Military Industrial Complex’s Goto Guy For “Unfunny Comics””

detail, The Atomic Revolution, image: ep.tc
[Dublog, you rock.] If I could get the artist of The Atomic Revolution to do my Animated Musical, I would. Ausin-based artist Ethan Persoff found the mysterious 1957 comic book at an estate sale, along with “a corporate memo, a vinyl recording discussing Einstein’s theories and a large calendar-sized brochure of modern-art-inspired paintings using a number of atomic weapons companies’ logos.” He scanned it and posted it online.
The caption for the above image reads: “On December 8, 1953, President Eisenhower proposed to the United Nations that the world join together to ‘strip the atom of its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace.’ Even now the United States is building portable atomic power stations that can be shipped by air to any part of the world. These capsules of civilization [??] can be used to produce heat, power, and radioactivity.”
Some of the gorgeous line drawings are based on photographs. They have a stunning combination of clarity, obfuscation, optimism and eerieness. If there was an Government-Issue Version of Detective Story, the noir installment of The Animatrix, this is what it’d look like. Cowboy Bebop director Shinichiro Watanabe did both Detective Story and Kid’s Story, which gives the backstory on Neo;’s exasperating Zion groupie. Free will does not extend to not getting Animatrix. Buy it now. We have quotas to meet.

I, of all people, should like a sponsored roadmovie featuring an Audi, and a Handspring. Go figure.
Another GreenCine find, Wim Wenders has directed a The Other Side of the Road, a 6-minute filmmercial for the introduction of the Audi A3. See it at Audi’s Germany site. Like most Wenders work, plot takes a backseat to scenery (and since the A3 is a hatchback, it’s a very small backseat). Some grungy couple, a sleek couple, a lot of desert driving, cleverly placed signs with the ad agency’s slogans: admire me, push me, love me, etc.

There’s a Making Of montage, too, which I found more engaging. The whole thing’s wordless, with a repetitive porny soundtrack. And there’s an interview with Wenders in German. The film takes a lot of visual cues from Wenders’ photos (above), which he exhibited in 1995-6.

I won’t reveal it here, and I can’t verify it until I see the movie again, but Clark Kent has put out an annotated transcript of The Architect’s explanation to Neo of The Matrix. And before you get into any heady arguments over the philosophy of Matrix Reloaded, read Ken Mondschein’s excellent, spoiler-filled analysis at Corporate MoFo. Enjoy, and keep coming back.

I swear, I wrote this on the train, before seeing Jason’s latest post. If only I’d waited till I got home, perhaps I’d just switch to Movable Type/TypePad and forget the whole thing:

Sometimes, my posts get a bit long. (Usually, I notice this when a reader–invariably not from The New Yorker–asks if I’m auditioning for The New Yorker.)
Sometimes, actual interviewing, research, reporting will yield far more information than will fit in a post.
Sometimes, there may actually be a lot to tell.
Sometimes, a topic or theme stretches across several posts, and it makes sense to group them together.
Sometimes, I’ll start with a simple link, and before you or I realize it, I’ve got an 800-word…something.
It used to bug me when such too-long posts would break up the flow of greg.org. Fortunately, this era of renaming your problems away offers the solution: now, on greg.org, a too-long post is not a bug, it’s a Feature.

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:

“Thanks to the creative family at Vanity Fair and W Hotels (the sponsors). They don’t give traditional gift bags; they make them. Graydon Carter was up late writing poems for each of us.”

“Smile! It’s for my weblog.”

I decided to cut the bit about the after-party being potluck (“Manhattan brings the entree; Brooklyn, a salad; Westchester, the mixers; LA, the herb…” Like last year, LA was the only one who brought what they were assigned.)

The Surgery, Bris soap commercial directed by Ingmar Bergman
See, if you stick with it long enough, recognition will come. When his commercials for Bris soap were shown in 1951, Ingmar Bergman seemed to be living the admaker’s dream: “He had final cut, he had free hands, he could do whatever he wanted,” says director Anders Roennqvist. Inexplicably, though, the promising young director soon vanished into ad-biz obscurity; I searched Adwik Svenska‘s 80-year archives using my mobile phone, but found nothing.
Well, thanks to Mr. Rosennqvist, you can see all these forgotten classics in Bergman’s Commercials Preceding the Play, a documentary which provides an “aha-feeling of why and how Ingmar Bergman made soap commercials” (and without that annoying abba-ring around the tub!) The collection is screening this weekend at London’s National Film Theatre, along with a bunch of other Bergman-related junk. (At least it is according to the Guardian; I can’t find it on the NFT schedule. Why don’t you all stop texting for a minute and figure out what the hell’s going on?)
In addition to the aha-feeling, seeing it will “make you feel free, well and fresh,” just like the Bris brand itself. (Frankly, those were not the qualities I had previously associated with bris, but then I live in New York.)

Had a man been always in one of the stars, or confined to the body of the flaming sun, or surrounded with nothing but pure ether, at vast and prodigious distances from the Earth, acquainted with nothing but the azure sky and face of heaven, little could he dream of any treasures hidden in that azure veil afar off.
– Thomas Traherne, The Celestial Stranger, mid 17-th c.

Effusively compared in this Guardian article to the Apollo astronauts’ first views of the earth from space, Christian mystic Thomas Traherne’s writing “can turn your understanding inside out, thrill, surprise and exhaust you” with his revelatory view of the world.
This is a review of Ronald Weber’s 1986 book, Seeing Space: Literary Responses to Space Exploration (Amazon Sales Rank: 2.2 million. Let’s help the guy out.) which wonderfully uses the last line of Thoreau’s Walden to identify the greatest impact of space travel: ” ‘Our voyaging is only greatcircle sailing.’ This is to say that the most important aspect of our travels, whether inward or outward, is that they bring us back to our point of departure with a new appreciation of that beginning place.”
Norman Mailer begins with a complaint that the whole space thing is closed to him: since he can’t talk the techno talk or get inside those astronauts’ heads, all he can do is watch dumbly “from the visitors’ bleachers.” He has an epiphany at the crassly commercialized Plymouth Rock (where only “an immense quadrangle of motel” marks the hallowed spot), and sees the Moon Rock anew. The whole adventure represents “the…reawakening of an older and non- mechanical view of life, one in which we are brought to ‘regard the world once again as poets, behold it as savages.”‘
These ecstasy-riven testimonies– utterly self-contained, yet reaching out to (potentially) affect us all, something we must accept in imperfect transmitted form (unless you’re John Glenn or Lance Bass. Actually, being Lance Bass doesn’t do any good, either.)–may help in understanding Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle.
This seriously ecstatic Guardian review (What IS in that tea, fellas?) attempts to affix Barney’s work in the heavens. It is an omniscient, mysterious creation myth, ultimately incomprehensible to mere mortals. It is at once “dense,” “rich yet fragile,” “of our time,” and “aspiring to be eternal.”
Like the “great American novels” (Moby Dick and Gravity’s Rainbow are mentioned), Cremaster embodies the “desire to reawaken the language and imagery of ancient, organic patterns of thought [which is] central to modern American art and literature.” Heady stuff. And there’s Norman Mailer again, right in the thick of things, starring as Harry Houdini in Cremaster 2 (the most successful of the series, IMHO). But for all the praise and allusion heaped on it, does Cremaster take us “greatcircle sailing?” What does it say about the place we return to after seeing it?
In Artforum, Daniel Birnbaum argues that “no one makes a stronger case than Matthew Barney for visual art today.”
All that the world most needs today is combined in the most seductive way in his art: Barney’s work is brutal and highly artificial, as Nietzsche came to think Wagner’s was, yet it also offers up the pure joy of the beautiful–which is, I think, not unrelated to what Nietzsche meant by “innocence.”
Whatever Barney’s goal, his achievement is notable. But at what price? Buzz Aldrin wrote candidly of his most significant challenge: dealing with life after returning from the moon. His goal accomplished, his life suddenly lacking direction, his marriage unravelling, he grew frustrated that “there is no experience to match that of walking on the Moon.” For Barney’s sake, I hope he doesn’t mimic Aldrin too closely, cursing his own hairy moon on the screen, “You son of a bitch, you’re the one that got me in all this trouble.”