Category: Uncategorized

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

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…]

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?

“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, 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?”]

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.

My bad. If only I’d watched Access Hollywood before posting about Gerry. Michel Marriott has an article in the NYTimes about the convergence between video games and films. Actually, it’s about Enter The Matrix, the video game.

If anybody gets it, it’s the Wachowski brothers, who wrote the game script to intertwine with their upcoming films. (Matrix sequels a-comin’, get on board, li’l chill’n.) The actors and sets carry over, too, into the hour-plus of filmed scenes and cinematics. The Wachowskis are hardcore gamers themselves, and their vision of The Matrix is comprehensive, almost unnervingly so.

It’s expansive enough for assimilated video games, a world large enough for other directors to work freely within it. Animatrix is a collection of animated shorts from six directors (including the creators of Akira, Cowboy Bebop and Aeon Flux). The first of four to be released online is Mahiro Maeda’s touching, cautionary Second Renaissance, Part 1 a/the machine creation myth, complete with circuity goddesses and mecha-Adam and Eve.
By the end of the year, The Matrix will be so pervasive, it’ll give new meaning to the throwaway Hollywood line, “We’ll all be working for you someday.” [images: thematrix.com]

Elmgreen & Dragset, a pair of artist friends, have a show up at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, called Phone Home. Five answering machines on a pentagon-shaped table in one gallery record the conversations from five working phonebooths in another. Another friend‘s very cogent writing puts the piece in context.
They were nominated for the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize, and just won the Hamburger Banhof Prize (from the museum in Hamburg, you see). I included a piece of theirs in a show I curated in 2000-1, but a friend jammed and bought it before I could close the deal.
Update: The artists will talk about their work Thursday evening, 2/20 at 6:30. Author gregPosted on February 19, 2003Categories Uncategorized

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Our street gets relatively little through traffic. The result: it’s usually an oasis of easy parking, and it’s tertiary (at best) on the snowplowing list. After opting for the garage, last night, though, this Mercedes pulled into our favorite spot (the one right in front of our house, duh) as we walked back. (That’s an S-Class buried there, btw; I can’t tell the make of the car being snowblown under across the street.) This morning, I’m free of the twinge of regret that comes with losing a sweet Manhattan parking spot.

Forget Rupert’s minions walking in Foxstep, Code Orange, duct tape, Sadaam-huggers and cheese-eating surrender monkeys. Thanks to this one-day storm, you’re gonna have to pry our SUV’s from our cold, dead hands.

Like the $20 tickets for Rent, you had to get there early if you actually wanted to reach the site of today’s protest rally in NYC. By the time I printed out my sign at Kinko’s (above, made in Powerpoint, thank you), the rally became a march and the march came to us. We never got closer than 3rd Avenue and 55th street, and spent a crowded hour+ getting back to Bloomingdale’s, five blocks away. It was like the Saturday before Christmas shopping-meets-WTO; stores were open everywhere, and full of consuming marchers. The beverage of choice for NYC peacelovers: Diet Coke. I’d have had an easier time finding a roll of duct tape in Arlington.
Our calculation of the crowd size, using Prof. Clark McPhail’s technique: 250-300,000, which turns out to be low.
While exhilarating, no one really got my sign, which is fine. It means I < heart > Old Europe. But when an art world friend saw it, he first thought it meant, “I < heart > Olafur Eliasson.” [Which I do, don’t get me wrong, Olafur…]

Everyone’s busy making giant puppets for this morning’s protests.

Everyone’s in Palm Beach [good explanation of why it’s easy to park on the upper east side, but not why my email volume dropped to zero]

Everyone’s at daVinci or Matisse Picasso [but we took a chance last night and had MoMA QNS practically to ourselves at the opening. Traffic sucked, though.]

I changed my DNS settings, and now my mail forwards in the reverse direction from before.

Highlights from a Clear Channel memo showing how the war will play out on their homogenized network of radio stations (via robotwisdom):

” If War breaks out after 10AM M-F please make sure that we call Joe and Jack to come in and take KSTE into long-form as well.
Our Coverage will be called America’s War with Iraq In writing copy please call our coverage, ‘LIVE In-Depth Team Coverage of America’s War with Iraq.’ ”

“Remember, don’t do local just to do local. This is an international/national story and the nets do a great job…If you are going to make a mistake, do too much network. Especially early. THIS IS WAR.”

“The initial hours of coverage are critical. People who have never listened to our stations will be tuning in out of curiosity, desperation, panic and a hunger for information. RIGHT NOW, convert them to P-1’s, or at least make them a future cumer. [sic]”

” Monitor TV networks and local stations for contacts and leads. If they have good ideas, turn them around and quickly make them our own. Don’t forget, when appropriate use language like ‘a Newstalk 1530 KFBK exclusive’ ‘a story you are only hearing on KFBK’ or ‘a story you heard first on KFBK’. Make sure we own being FIRST.”

“…if we have specialty shows that can’t or won’t talk about the war, we will probably blow them off. Even Dr. Laura. Remember, no fishing shows, gardening shows. We are AT WAR. In the opening minutes of coverage blow off commercials. Contact me immediately.”

It’s time we’re aware
designed by Mary Blair image: bobstaake.com
Which, according to some people, should make it easier for the US to tell it what to do.
Sarah Lyall’s Times article: “A Sense of Fine Qualities Trampled and of Something ‘Terribly Wrong'”

For future reference, Ben Hammersley’s interesting Guardian article about emerging bands like The Grateful Dead, Phish and others who are starting to let concertgoers to make and trade high-quality recordings. etree.org brings them all together, and the Internet Archive has even more. Brewster Kahle mentions it, too, while preaching about the coming paradise of shared human knowledge in this LOC speech. {via boingboing]