This Poeme Electronique Was Brought To You By Philips

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Hello, Earth to Le Corbusier archive!
Corbusier conceived Poeme electronique for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Expo in Brussels. It was an 8-minute immersive light, film and sound experience which told mankind’s long, hard slog towards peace.
Don’t forget the architecture. The multi-channel version of Poeme electronique, with a score by Edgard Varese, was projected on the walls of the tensile tent-like pavilion, which was designed by composer/architect Iannis Xenakis, who was working for Le Corbusier’s firm at the time. Xenakis recalled–perhaps wishfully, I don’t know–that the parabolic concrete forms came directly from his graph-based score for his 1954 composition, Metastasis. [The piece was staged last March at the Barbican as part of a Xenakis program, concurrent with the Corbusier exhibition.]
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Here’s Poeme Electronique in its single channel version:

This brief segment produced in 2000 for a virtual reality recreation of the Poeme Electronique experience also includes period footage, photos, and a couple of interesting looking models from the Philips archives:

Le Corbusier; Iannis Xenakis; Edgard Varèse
«Poème électronique: Philips Pavilion»
[mediaartnet.org via things]
previously: E.A.T. and the Pepsi Pavilion, Osaka Expo 70; a lost piece of corporate-sponsored installation art?

Holy Smokes, New Yorker Films Is Closed

I can’t believe it. New Yorker Films is closing after 43 years in the independent and foreign film distribution business. In the business? They were the business for decades.
When I was working the projection booth at International Cinema at BYU, it was New Yorker’s library I was soaking in. When I moved to New York, it was Dan Talbot’s Lincoln Plaza Theater [and the Angelika, which I discovered on its inaugural weekend during a senior year road trip] where I saw most everything since.
New Yorker was sold to Madstone Films in 2002, and that company pledged New Yorker’s library as collateral and then defaulted on the loan. The creditor, which may be Technicolor, initiated foreclosure proceedings last week. For the sake of the 500+ classic title library, at least, I hope it’ll get acquired by someone who knows Ozu from Oshima. For the sake of Dan Talbot and his colleagues, I can only hope for a soft landing and many thanks.
End of the Road for New Yorker Films [indiewire]

Kim’s Video To Reopen In Salemi, Sicilia

The first time I finally dared go into Kim’s video, I thought I was ready, so I asked why Blade Runner wasn’t in the Ridley Scott section. [Yes, son, back when I was a boy, we had to go all the way to St Marks to rent Blade Runner. Uptown both ways.] Anyway, the clerk scoffed, “Because it’s in the Douglas Trumbull section.”
Now the Times has an awesome story about how it came to pass that Kim’s entire collection of 50,000 films, passionately collected from around the world, will become the centerpiece of an art town being organized in an abandoned hilltop village in Sicily.
I count this as a huge win. I will go to Kim’s Salemi ten times before I ever even think of heading to the Village to rent a VHS tape.
La Dolce Video [nyt]

Wait, Where’d Stars Wars A Capella Guy Go?

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Why is Corey Vidal’s YouTube account suspended? The guy who did the lip synch video for Moosebutter’s “Star Wars A Capella” which was seen by over 3 million people, and which was nominated for a People’s Choice Award [it lost to Barack Roll] has had his entire YouTube account suspended. The notices say there was a terms of service violation. The Star Wars A Capella video itself was removed “due to a copyright claim by WARNER MUSIC GROUP.”
On Moosebutter’s blog yesterday, they posted this message:

Star Wars video, how we miss you…
moosebutter has finally gotten attention from a major music company!
Unfortunately, it came in the form of pre-emptive legal action.
Corey Vidal and our Star Wars videos were taken down by Warner Music Company, or Warner Brothers, or Warner INC … all we know is, Warner has gotten picky about ‘their’ content on youtube, and even though there are a dozen other videos on youtube with our Star Wars song, and hundreds of videos that illegally rip footage from Harry Potter DVDs, and fake Batman trailers and etc etc etc Warner has been kind enough to target our stuff.
This means one thing: we’ve finally hit the big time! Maybe.
So, we apologize about the videos being gone, but the youtube powers are looking into it, so we hear.
We also believe that the music will still be sold from our web site, since we think we’ve done everything legally… but we thought the youtube videos were legal, too. So, buy the mp3 now before it gets taken down! Hooray!

Vidal’s video brought a massive new audience to Moosebutter’s song–and recording–after YouTube featured it on their front page, but the song itself is almost ten years old, and Moosebutter have been recording and performing it since at least 2000.
And it’s more than a bit confusing what their actual claim is. One of the six John Williams soundtrack melodies in the composition, Superman, is from a Warner Brothers movie, though Warner Music is making the claim, so maybe they distributed this or some of the other soundtracks. But “Star Wars A Capella” seems like a classic example of transformative, not derivative use, exactly the kind of thing that should be allowed under fair use as a parody.
If the sampling industry’s current practice is applied, however, Moosebutter’s use of the core melodies of each song–the whole point/genius of their Williams tribute composition is that the sources are all instantly recognizable to moviegoers–the song is an infringement from beginning to end. Only they didn’t use recordings, but compositions [and dialogue, which almost all comes from Star Wars episodes.]
Whatever the claim, this court finds Warner to have made a dickheaded move.

“An Unannounced Preview At The Coronet” Of Pasolini’s Teorema

From Vincent Canby’s April 22, 1969 review in the New York Times:

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Teorema,” which opened yesterday at the Coronet, is the kind of movie that should be seen at least twice, but I’m afraid that a lot of people will have difficulty sitting through it even once. At least there were some who had that problem Friday night when the film was given an unannounced preview at the Coronet, supplementing the regular program, headed by “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.”
It was a disastrous combination. “Baby Love” is a straightforward, skin-deep narrative movie that elicits conventional responses to familiar stimuli. “Teorema” (theorem) is a parable, a movie of realistic images photographed and arranged with a mathematical precision that drains them of comforting emotional meaning. For the moviegoer whose sensibilities have been preset to receive “Baby Love”–or just about any other movie now in first run here–“Teorema” is likely to be a calamitous and ridiculous experience.

There is very little dialogue in the movie–923 words, say the ads (but I’m not sure whether this refers to the Italian dialogue or the English subtitles). Even though Pasolini is a talented novelist and poet, the film is almost completely visual. The actors don’t act, but simply exist to be photographed. The movie itself is the message, a series of cool, beautiful, often enigmatic scenes that flow one into another with the rhythm of blank verse.
This rhythm–one of the legacies of the silent film, especially of silent film comedy–was impossible for the Coronet audience to accept. The seductions are ticked off one after the other with absolutely no thought of emotional continuity. So are the individual defeats, which are punctuated by recurring shots of a desolate, volcanic landscape swept by sulphurous mists.
There is also a kind of rhythm within the images. Someone seen in right profile is immediately repeated in left profile. An action that proceeds to the left across the screen may be switched 90 degrees, directly away from the camera, or into the camera. Early scenes are in black and white. Later scenes are so muted they almost look like the old Cinecolor process, only to go monochromatic again at the end.

Can you imagine a theater today showing an unannounced preview after the feature? Or showing Pasolini at all? I still have a raincheck ticket in my wallet from the Coronet [aka the Baronet Coronet, aka the Coronet I & II, which was demolished to make way for an Urban Outfitters] to go back and see Dancer In The Dark. I went to a noon showing, only to realize I was crazy and had a call at like 2pm, so I left before the trailers ended. Oh wait, I just pulled it out. The ticket was from the Cinema 1,2,3,4 up the street. Never mind. The Pasolini thing’s still crazy, though.
Theorem (1968) The Screen: A Parable by Pasolini: Teorema’ in Premiere at the Coronet Terence Stamp in Role of a Visiting God [nyt, via sal mineo’s ghost, thanks ready for the house]

Star Wars Toasted, With Extra Cheese

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I know there’s really no other way for Lucas & co to justify the existence of a Darth Vader Toaster than to just embrace the idiocy and hang on for dear life, but still. Holy smokes:

If there’s something every Sith Lord knows how to do it’s make a balanced breakfast. While the Jedi have to live off of Jawa juice and fried nerfsteak, the Dark Lord of the Sith prefers to have a reminder of his fiery Mustafar defeat at his breakfast table. Every morning he burns that moment into a slice of bread with the Darth Vader Toaster. This black, ominous kitchen appliance easily leaves the mark of Vader’s helmet in every yummy piece of toast. Slather some Bantha butter on top, or make two pieces for an extra-Sithy BLT. Force power not required to operate toaster.

I imagine the $48/toaster gross margin helps ease the conscience as well.
Darth Vader Toaster, $54.99, pre-order for Jan. 2009 delivery [starwars.com via c-monster]

Bruce Willis Type For President?

Two essays, each interesting and thoughtful on its own, crossed my desk this morning. I think they’re inter-related.
First from the always spatially aware Geoff Managh on the seemingly irrational landscapes of presidential campaigning:

…President Bush had stopped off this morning to speak about the credit crisis “with consumers and business people at Olmos Pharmacy, an old-fashioned soda shop and lunch counter” [1] in San Antonio, Texas.
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The idea here – the spatial implication – is that Bush has somehow stopped off in a landscape of down-home American democracy. This is everyday life, we’re meant to believe – a geographic stand-in for the true heart and center of the United States.
But it increasingly feels to me that presidential politics now deliberately take place in a landscape that the modern world has left behind. It’s a landscape of nostalgia, the golden age in landscape form: Joe Biden visits Pam’s Pancakes outside Pittsburgh, Bush visits a soda shop, Sarah Palin watches ice hockey in a town that doesn’t have cell phone coverage, Obama goes to a tractor pull.
It’s as if presidential campaigns and their pursuing tagcloud of media pundits are actually a kind of landscape detection society – a rival Center for Land Use Interpretation – seeking out obsolete spatial versions of the United States, outdated geographies most of us no longer live within or encounter.

All along they pretend that these landscapes are politically relevant.

Then there was Matthew Dessem’s perceptive and awesome explication of The Criterion Collection’s seemingly inexplicable inclusion if Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay’s 1998 oil-drillers [!] turned-astronauts-save-the-world disaster epic, Armageddon–which quotes the much-missed David Foster Wallace:

Critics who thought Armageddon was a sort of terminal end point for filmmaking (which is to say, all of them except David Edelstein, as far as I can tell) missed the point. Janet Maslin, for example, wrote, “Armageddon tries to tell a coherent story of guts, young love and space travel.” But I don’t think it does try; it’s not really interested. You wouldn’t criticize Star Tours or Batman: The Ride for shoddy characterization or wooden acting, and it doesn’t seem fair to me to treat movies like Armageddon as though their writers and directors had the same goals as, say, Tarkovsky. David Foster Wallace put it best (in “David Lynch Keeps His Head”):

Art film is essentially teleological; it tries in various ways to “wake the audience up” or render us more “conscious.” (This kind of agenda can easily degenerate into pretentiousness and self-righteousness and condescending horsetwaddle, but the agenda itself is large-hearted and fine.) Commercial film doesn’t seem like it cares much about the audience’s instruction or enlightenment. Commercial film’s goal is to “entertain,” which usually means enabling various fantasies that allow the moviegoer to pretend he’s somebody else and that life is somehow bigger and more coherent and more compelling and attractive and in general just way more entertaining than a moviegoer’s life really is…


The level of personal wish fulfilment in Armageddon is pretty easy to pick out; it’s worth noting that Michael Bay also sells a kind of national wish fulfilment. Armageddon has a serious hard-on for the early days of the space program, specifically for the sense of national purpose it gave the country. In fact, the movie suggests that that America, that national conception of ourselves, is still pretty much what we are, as you can see below.
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In case you miss it, this shot is immediately followed by one of the astronauts saying “Kennedy, we see you. And you never looked so good!” Of course, he’s talking about the Kennedy Space Center…or is he? The point is, these sections are shamelessly manipulative and there’s nothing delicate about them. Nevertheless, they have an elegiac tone that’s more moving than anything else in the movie. And they seem motivated by a genuine longing for a national purpose, and national heroes, for a more innocent version of America. Of course, that America never really existed, and Armageddon offers Bruce Willis as just the sort of national hero we’re looking for, but hey, you take your pleasures where you find them…

Which makes me think that complaining about the irrelevance of political space is like critiquing the incoherence and narrative of Armageddon. The landscapes of the American political blockbuster are designed to provide wish fulfillment and a sense–however fictional or misguided–of “national purpose”–and ultimately, of a “national hero.”
As this remarkable montage of the US president [2] addressing the world shows, the common landscape of Armageddon‘s politics is the flat, square–and as Dessem points out, time zone-free–space of the television screen:

Minor Landscapes and the Geography of American Political Campaigns [bldgblog via city of sound]
#40: Armageddon [criterioncollection via goldenfiddle]
[1] as the photo shows and a bldgblog commenter points out, Olmos Pharmacy has actually been reinvented as Olmos Bharmacy, “a combination soda fountain counter and wine bar.”
[2] For a second I was worried, but then I realized that it was the other 1998 space-object-destroys-the-earth movie, Deep Impact that had the black president.

“OH Yeah, Cocteau. My Main Man.”


Wes Anderson and Jason Schwartzman, “Live at 01”
“Recorded entirely on location at
Borders Store 01
Ann Arbor, Michigan”
I was almost too busy rolling my eyes at these two smug knuckleheads doing a promotional prowl of the CD and DVD aisle to notice the real eyeroller: the corporate reverence for “01” as if a giant, shitty, homogenized bookstore can somehow be unique because it’s the one they’ve cloned everywhere else. [via fimoculous]

The Post-Apocalyptic Open-Pit Mines Are Alive With The Sound Of Music

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Alright, so last night I made some wisecrack about a scene from Kevin Costner’s 1997 film The Postman, where a mutant general pacifies his slave army by showing The Sound of Music on a floating theater on a lake at the bottom of an open-pit mine, might be a mashup of a couple of Robert Smithson’s unrealized installations. Little did I know.
I rewatched the scene just now, and it’s positively Smithsonian. I remembered some things incorrectly. [I hadn’t seen the movie since Christmas Night, 1997, when I had a private screening–on what turned out to be opening night, whoops–at a desolate multiplex in Salt Lake City.] Like I’d forgotten how spectacular it is, really well-crafted and poetic, even, for what amounts to a single note in the film [hats off to cinematographer Stephen Windon and the wonderfully named production designer Ida Random].
And the slave soldier army isn’t floating around, watching; they’re perched on the tiers of the open pit mine; I got that mixed up with the harborside cinema scene in Cinema Paradiso: in The Postman, only the projectionist is floating, in his little booth that looks like the offspring of Smithson’s Floating Island and his Partially Collapsed Shed.
I’d also forgotten completely about Dolph Lundgren. As the scene opens, and the ersatz movie theater is revealed, the screen first fills with explosions, the opening credits of Dolph Lundgren’s Universal Soldier. But–unexpectedly!–the crowd of soldiers revolts and starts raining rocks down on the poor projectionist in his floating booth. He quickly changes the movie [beat] to The Sound of Music, and the mob is subdued.
In his Cinema Cavern, Smithson wanted to show only one film, Film On The Making [of] Cinema Cavern. But after a long day of killing in the mines, the “ultimate film-goers” in The Postman reject their own “making of” film, preferring instead the escapist fantasy of Julie Andrews, the singing, Nazi-thwarting nun.
Anyway, there are a bunch of tasty screencaps on flickr and after the jump. Enjoy.
previously: “truly ‘underground’ cinema”

Continue reading “The Post-Apocalyptic Open-Pit Mines Are Alive With The Sound Of Music”

“Truly ‘Underground’ Cinema”

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I loved Cabinet before I wrote for them, and I love them after. In the latest issue, #30 The Underground, Colby Chamberlain looks at an awesome 1971 drawing by Robert Smithson titled, Toward the development of a Cinema Cavern or the movie goer as spelunker. [Colby’s piece is not online, but Smithson’s complete drawing is at the Estate site.]
According to a contemporaneous Artforum essay titled “A Cinematic Atopia,” Smithson described the project:

What I would like to do is build a cinema in a cave or an abandoned mine, and film the process of its construction. That film would be the only film shown in the cave. The projection booth would be made out of crude timbers, the screen carved out of a rock wall and painted white, the seats could be boulders. It would be a truly “underground” cinema….

Smithson’s interest in cinema was phenomenological: the idea that you sit there, motionless in the dark, experiencing a continuous stream of light and sound patterns. The Cinema Cavern’s closed, self-referential loop devolves into an abstract, multi-colored blur, with the “sluggish,” sloth-like movie goer none the wiser.
Colby puts Smithson’s cinema into context with the Underground-brand cinema of the day, as embodied by Stan VanDerBeek, Jonas Mekas, and friends. Which is fine and all; meanwhile, I’ve added the Cinema Cavern to the list of sketchy Smithson ideas I’d love to see realized here and now.
Part of me–the part who, admittedly, has not delved into the Smithson archives, and thus doesn’t know more than the single sketches–sees the Cavern Cinema as just as fully developed and thus, valid for realization, as, say, Floating Island. And part of me is still smarting for not getting to Les Arennes de Chaillot, the subterranean theater and couscous boite built in Paris by la Mexicaine de Perforation, a group of explorateurs urbains. [read my 2004 LMDP interview here.] And
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Also on the list: the 1973 Bingham Copper Mining Pit – Utah Reclamation Project. Smithson called for a giant, revolving viewing platform at the bottom of Kennecott Copper’s mountain-sized hole on the western side of Salt Lake Valley, all the better “to survey nature’s gradual and inevitable reclamation of man’s invasive enterprise” with, my dear.
[Every time I fly into Salt Lake, I’m reminded of this drawing/collage, which I rather impulsively bid on–and lost–when it came up for auction in 1993. I later met and became friends with the winning bidder, but I suspect I lost my chance at the drawing; its next stop will most likely be a museum.]
But what if Smithson’s visions already have been realized, and I just didn’t realize it? What if the Cinema Cavern and the Bingham Copper Mining Pit were combined and installed in the post-civilizational, entropic future, offering a front-row seat to nature’s reclamation?
I don’t know if it’s in David Brin’s original mid-80’s sci-fi novel, but in the 1997 film version of The Postman, the dopey title character, played by Kevin Costner, has a showdown with a “hypersurvivalist militia leader named General Bethlehem [played by Will Patton.] In one of the funniest scenes in the unintentionally hilarious fiasco, Bethlehem pacifies his troops–scraggly, murderous slaves who float around on rafts and inner tubes in a giant, water-filled, open-pit mine–with movies. As the battered projector whirs to life, the a battleworn print of The Sound of Music
PDF of “A Cinematic Atopia” in portuguese and english [sescsp.org.br]
Cinema Cavern, 1971 – Robert Smithson Estate – Drawings [robertsmithson.com]

I See Dead Careers

I haven’t watched an M. Night Shyamalan film since I made the mistake of watching The Sixth Sense twice. So every time one comes out, I have to wait for someone to reveal the gimmick. That one with Joaquin Phoenix took forever. [They live in the present! Deal with it!]
Finally, someone is catching on, though I worry it comes too late, just as Shyamalan’s career is committing elaborately choreographed, ominously lit suicide. Christopher Orr’s review of The Happening is exactly what I want: a giant list of ridiculous spoilers so people don’t have to see the crappy movie. One of many best lines:

It’s like the climax of Twister, without the twister.

[via jason]

Yeah, Bubby!

“Sex, for Zohan, is like hummus: there is an endless supply, and no occasion on which it could be judged inappropriate.”
– Anachronistic taste, hedonism, international man of mystery, yet AO Scott’s review makes no mention of Austin Powers at all. Is it a Jewish conspiracy, what?

Janet Jackson, Paula Abdul. Herbert Muschamp Is What The World Trade Center Is All About!

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Choire’s interview with Elizabeth Berkley reminded me of some unfinished Showgirls business here on greg.org.
Back in 2002, right after Beyer Blinder Belle released the first, banal master plans for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site, a parody critique circulated in the style of Herbert Muschamp, then the architecture critic for the NY Times. Finally, here it is:

A Critical Appraisal
Special to The New York Times
Striding down the row of design proposals for the World Trade Center site, balefully eyeing each inert mien and artificially enhanced plan, I was reminded of the scene in Showgirls where the choreographer grimly surveys his topless charges. Flicking a feather across their assembled nipples, he scolds, “Girls, if you are not erect, I’m not erect.”
Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve seen the master plan proposals from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, and, to put it mildly, I’m not erect.
My heart sank as I watched John Beyer of the architectural firm Beyer Blinder Belle attempt to describe these hapless proposals. I was painfully reminded of another much more casual presentation one glorious autumn on Capri. The visionary Rem Koolhaas was holding forth on urban planning, shopping, life, and the smell of fresh basil. Wearing beautifully tailored trousers and a tight, cropped black top (need I add it was by Prada?) he gestured energetically as he spoke. With each gesture, his shirt rode up ever so slightly, revealing a tantalizing sliver of tan, taut tummy.
It is this kind of energetic gesture that those of us who care about contemporary architecture hunger for so desperately. Beyer Blinder Belle’s work is occasionally competent: certainly their by-the-numbers renovation of Grand Central Terminal pleases the hordes of moronic commuters who stream through it each day, but it will come as no surprise that this recidivist pile of marble is of little interest to the infinitely more important audience of attractive young European architectural students who make pilgrimages to our city each year and can barely choke back their tears of disappointment. John Beyer, whose exposed torso would be unpleasant for even the more adventuresome New Yorker to contemplate, must shoulder the blame for this catastrophic failure.
It is now time to list these names: Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Elizabeth Diller and Ric Scofidio, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, Steven Holl, and, of course, Rem Koolhaas. There.
Is a little daring, a little excitement, a little sexiness too much to ask for on this sacred site? Lower Manhattan Development Corporation chairman John Whitehead and New York governor George Pataki would do well to rent a videotape of “All About Eve” and examine Bette Davis’s behavior before the big party scene. Her character Margo Channing reaches into a candy dish and hesitates again and again before finally popping a candy into her mouth. This tantalizing motif “impulse, surrender, gratification” is the central one of the twenty-first century. It alone must provide the ideological blueprint for all architectural work being done anywhere in the world, including lower Manhattan. If this fails to make sense to the theme-park obsessed corporate apologists for big business, so be it.
In the interest of full disclosure, my proposal for the site will be revealed at a time and place of my choosing. Fasten your seatbelts, New York.

Ignore, if you can, the glaring error that Muschamp would never have made: the choreographer used ice cubes, not a feather. The irony is that not only did Muschamp’s writing the last few years before his too-early death seem to cut loose, as if to meet his parodists in the sky, the fake WTC critique turned out too true by half: thanks to a sycophantic 1776 minstrel show from Daniel Libeskind and a chorus line of starchitects flashing their tits, the Port Authority’s original proposal is right on track.
[via mouthfulsfood]
Previously: Surely, Hordes of Showgirls-Googling Architects Can’t Be Wrong?