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From a link from Visible Darkness, an engrossing, intense weblog about a book project to examine documentary photography. (wonderful, but not for the blurb-addicted):
In one week on grad student Alex Golub’s weblog, he writes the good fight, assailing the academically-descredited-yet-still-pop-consciousness-gripping “anthro” brand/icon Margaret Mead; laments the lonely life of the actual Pynchon reader (achingly different from a “fan”), and recognizes the painful poignancy of the Oklahoma! revival in these “September 11”-besotted times. All well-written, but again, don’t think you can just skim the site while you put that conference call on mute.
Golub’s recap of Mead criticism hits home, especially since Mead (and by naive extension, anthro) was one of my first stops on my idealistic foray into filmmaking. Mead’s legacy: “Systematically and symptomatically bad fieldwork in which she gave up what she knew about the people she lived with in order to paint a picture that would fit in with the message she attempted to get across to the public.” (Fortunately, I was early swayed by the Maysles brothers’ “just show what you see” storytelling and their sense of fidelity to the people they lived with. Mead hasn’t really turned up here since.)
His analysis of his Gravity’s Rainbow Problem speaks for itself:

6) What you really want out of this party is not the free martinis or interesting gallery space or recognition that you are one of the people being published in the glossly lit-mag whose latest issue is the raison d’etre of this fete. What you want is to find someone, just someone (preferably an alto, although a strong colatura soprano or even a decent bass-baritone wouldn’t be too bad either) who has also read it and understands what it is you’re trying akwardly to express nine minutes into your five-minute monologue…

As for Oklahoma!, he casts an anthro/cult stud (I made that one up based on “anthro”; I’m sure it’ll bring in some interesting Google searches) eye on the musical’s “condensed symbolic account of the founding impulses of the United States of America.” Homogeneity and pacification figure strongly in his analysis, which isn’t as optimistic about the London revival others have praised for being darker and more ambivalent than you remember it from high school drama club.
While I hope he hasn’t fallen into the pit where he sees Mead (I haven’t seen Oklahoma! ever, even though I’m working on a musical now), his message in the end sounds too good not to be true:

It is not surprising that Oklahoma! should be playing on Broadway at a time when the radical uniqueness of the US’s project is more than ever obscured by a shallow, partisan patriotism. Nor is it surprising that the recuperation of the founding impulses of the United States seems so unlikely.
‘What have you given us?’ a man asked Benjamin Franklin as the delegates of the Constitutional Convention ended their secret meetings. ‘A republic,’ he said simply, ‘if you can keep it.’ We have been given a unique country and a valuable ideal. And we are turning it into Oklahoma!.

Sometimes you don’t find out what you’ve actually written until it turns up unexpectedly in your Google referrer logs.
Describing HotSaints.com in a Utah-themed entry (their motto: “Chase and be chaste!”), I said the target audience–single Mormons–were “thick as fiddlers” there. I’d picked up “thick as fiddlers” from my grandmother, whose birthday we were celebrating. As it turns out, the complete simile is “thick as fiddlers in Hell;” it’s use in the revival-happy, 19th century, rural South betrays a faith-based condemnation of musical instruments in general and the fiddle in particular, which was known as “the Devil’s instrument.”
No matter what you may have seen in Footloose, Mormons don’t share this hillbilly view. Revealing the 19th century roots of “chase and be chaste,” this quote from the prophet Brigham Young helps explain why Mormonism is called the “dancingest denomination” :

Our work, our everyday labor, our whole lives are within the scope of our religion. This is what we believe, and what we try to practice. Recreation and diversion are as necessary to our well-being as the most serious pursuits of life. If you wish to dance, dance, and you are just as prepared for prayer meeting as you were before, if you are [Hot] Saints.

As this Salt Lake Tribune article shows, though, the price of dancing is eternal vigilance.

A fascinating article in ARTNews about the conservation and curating challenges of contemporary art. There are sculptures by Eve Hesse that can’t travel or be shown anymore because they’re deteriorating. Latex hardens, darkens, goes brittle, and disintegrates.
A certain cough drop used in a pile sculpture by Felix Gonzalez-Torres is now manufactured with a different wrapper. One curator decided to approximate the appearance of the old wrappers using a mix of yellow- and blue-wrapped candy. Another decided to use the same brand of cough drop, just with the current wrapper, since the cough drops were important to Felix’s father.
Curators and conservators are interviewing and consulting with artists while they’re still alive, but most of the time LONG before they’ve ever thought about their own mortality or the legacy of their work.
We’ve collected several works that exist only on paper, as a set of instructions and schematics and guidelines and restrictions. They sure store easily, and they give a (false?) comfort that comes from not having to worry about people poking a sculpture or the sun fading the paper. But after reading this article, I can’t feel too confident about fully understanding how to understand and stay true to artists’ intentions.

We passed (and then were aggressively re-passed by) an Expedition with this license plate tonight as we drove back to NYC. My mind goes back, oh, about a year. I still relive the horror of that day, those days, trying to register our new car with the VA DMV Where Everything Has Changed After They Issued Driver’s Licenses To Some Of The Terrorists. Now they’re wearing their facile graphic design on their rear bumpers, if not their sleeves.
There is currently no New York license plate commemorating September 11th or the WTC, but we ended up getting the designed-long-before-9/11 Manhattan license plate after giving up on VA. It looks like this:

An American in Paris, which we got in preparation for the digital Dolby release of Singin’ in the Rain coming to Film Forum.
Starship Troopers, Paul Verhoeven’s all-too-prescient masterpiece, which seems smarter and smarter every time I see it. It’s definitely his best work since the immortal Showgirls. Interesting piece of trivia: Starship Troopers is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art.

The cadence of the names read out this morning reminded me of On Kawara’s moving piece at Documenta, One Million Years (Past and Future) which I wrote about here. It is currently on exhibit/being performed at the Akira Ikeda Gallery in Berlin (through Nov. 23). The way the names formed a cross-section of the New York region, as if they could have been read from a New York phone book, reminded me of Chris Burden’s 1991 work, The Other Vietnam Memorial [It’s the first image on the page], where names from Vietnamese phone books were recombined to generate three million names, representing civilians who died in anonymity and chaos.

On the way to an early morning swim, I saw this piece of cardboard propped between the mailbox and the garbage can. After the time-honored New York tradition of taking stuff from the trash home flashed through my mind, I opted to go home and get my camera instead. I found it rather beautiful, in the vein of Islamic calligraphy or the early 90’s paintings of Brice Marden. Of course, I have no idea what is says:

“I went to Burning Man and all I got was this scrap of cardboard inscribed in a made-up language.”

“Klingon Imperial Diplomatic Corps – Forest Hills Conclave Minutes, Stardate 90502. Item One: Dispatch envoy to Komputer Repair Guild to get font package working in MSWord.”

“When you reach the river Hudson, turn the cropduster to the left. Keep your mind clear of any rational thought. Follow the river to the city of the Great Satan. The blasphemous skyscrapers will come into view, but wait to disburse the gas until you are over the island itself.”
Unsurprisingly, it was gone by the time I got home. (Yikes. It didn’t take much longer for a kind reader to email and point out that it is definitely not Klingon, as anyone familiar with Lawrence M. Schoen’s Comments on [Klingon] Orthography will immediately recognize. Also, the font is available at the Merchant’s page of The Klingon Language Institute. Thanks for reining in my reckless speculation. But why don’t comments on film or art posts come that quickly?)

Religious discussion is breaking out all over, in some of the least expected places. A Slashdot interview with Perl (a programming language with a ‘religious’ following) creator Larry Wall mushroomed as only a Slashdot thread can into an intense discussion on the existence of God, reconciling scientific and faith-related worldviews, and programming. What started it? “the nerdiest expression of theology I’ve [boingboing contributor Cory Doctorow, that is] ever encountered — and I mean that in a good way.”
In addition, I’ve been exchanging email with David Weinberger, who asked for believers’ perspectives (“a phenomenology, not a theodicy”) on September 11. He got responses from AKMA as well. Humorously, they’ve dubbed this The Topic that Drove Away Our Readers. Maybe they all went to Slashdot.)

Last week, I wondered about Kurt Andersen’s slightly wistful re-visit/re-spending of his pile of Inside.com scratch (and confessed to similar ruminations myself from time to time). This week, Fortune checks in with some former “40 Richest Under 40” to see how they’re seeking closure regarding the great tragedy that befell this entrepreneurial nation in 2000.
Of course, the ones who have traded the web for film and art: Josh “pseudo.com, where all the pot is free” Harris, Stephen “what were we smoking at theglobe.com?” Paternot, and Ernst “will trade boo.com film rights for Cristal” Malmsten, are arguably the most embarrasing of the whole lot. I’m in great company. Of course, Marc Ewing, a RedHat co-founder, is starting a mountainclimbing magazine, so it’s not a total wash.

Gee, I wonder if there are any openings this weekend? ?? Did some quick drivebys last night, then actually lingered at a couple of friends’ galleries, highlights as follows:

Julia Scher at Andrea Rosen: While I’ve followed (and been followed by) Julia’s work since 1995 (the date of that adaweb link), her last show, left me a little cold, even though it included microwaves. (Yes, it’s going to be that kind of day. You may want to run now.) But this one had me before I knew it, literally.
Walking along 23rd to the Chelsea Gallery Ghetto, I saw a helicopter, stationary, hovering straight ahead, over…it could have been shooting something downtown. A wreck on the West Side Highway? Another helicopter passed by, a totally unremarkable occurrence, except that it wasn’t now. I walked on, forcing doomsday thoughts out of my head, resisting/refusing to become the kind of media consumer/junkie it’s so banally easy to scorn. Anyway, when I got to the gallery, Andrea was on the sidewalk in front, looking up approvingly. The helicopter had been hired for the opening, to do just what it did to me. The show inside has some easily overlooked but similar elements. It rocks, classic Julia-style.

Robert Melee at Andrew Kreps: (who really needs a website. Andrew…) Dystopic domesticana, or something. The show is a full-blown survey of his work: his paintings, film/videos, installation, and…performance. His mother, who figures prominently into his video and photographic work, was there, in a shop window-like booth, drinking a 12-pack and smoking a carton of Marlboros. Robert’s work is as smart as it is disturbing, and believe me, it’s disturbing.
Speaking earlier in the week about collaborating with his mother, Robert said that she just loved the attention. With this in mind, I felt an odd sense of wanting to be polite and look at her, for her sake. I felt it even more in the moments when no one in the crowded opening was looking her way; ignoring her is rude and mean, so I’ll look, make eye contact, so she doesn’t feel bad. Of course, looking made me feel wrong and dirty and antsy/uncomfortable. These contradictory feelings continued all night.

Thomas Scheibitz at Tanya Bonakdar: Sculptures that are closely related to his oddly colored, abstracted paintings. Pretty great, especially when seen together. To be honest, it’s taken me a couple of years to warm to his work, but it’s been worth the wait.
It’s that time of year, I guess. In Slate, Robert Pinsky has a “Guided Anthology” of poetry. The three works he highlights are all worthwhile examples, but Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s “Souvenir of the Ancient World” resonated beyond just the title. I had re-read the entries from exactly a year ago, which seemed to resonate.

Kurt Andersen and Andrew Sullivan are writing about weblogs this week on Slate. While leaving most of the smoke/fire debate to others more expert than I, I’ll say that based on their presence and comments, if blogging were the web, it’s now 1997. What caught my eye was this quote from Andersen, who I’ve taken issue with before, on the subject of Documenta, but who I’ve admired for years (except at NYMag. Off topic.):

Lately, however, thinking about blogs, I have entertained a retrospective fantasy about a kind of endowed blog model that would have been interesting to try with Inside.com: If we had put the capital we raised into Treasury bills, we’d have had $1.5 million a year in income, with which we could’ve employed and published our best dozen reporter-commentators forever.

KA’s not alone in this notion of “retrospective fantasy,” especially as it relates to the flood of capital and (ultimately ephemeral) wealth of the recent past. How often does he re-spend the money Inside.com burned through? Recently at drinks, a business school classmate I hadn’t seen for a few years talked with assiduous wistfulness about “the day when [his] net worth hit $100 million.” Every once in a while, I cash out near the top, or I go ahead with the heavy hedging strategy a lone adviser suggested after the IPO. It’s like looking at a mark on a wall, which, even years later, shows how high the water was.
[image: american museum of photography]

I got back this morning, with a broken toe and a completed script for an ultra-short, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Here are the things I posted in my head while on vacation:

Hawaiian Grafitti. The drive from Kona to our hotel crosses a basically 20-mile lava field, an otherworldly (read, Icelandic) landscape devoid of humanity. Except, of course for the ubiquitous/distracting/engrossing white-coral-on-black-lava grafitti. There’s surprisingly little online, so I took a picture. There are some petroglyph-style examples, and a few hearts, but most tags are just head-on text (including a few in Japanese and Korean). Maybe it was tagging along at an astronomy conference, but I thought making constellation grafitti (foreshortened, so it can be read from a speeding car) would be truer to the medium.

Heat The fine officers on Hawaii Five-0 did all that great detective work while wearing suits. Even with a childhood in the South and more than a little fashion victimhood, I could barely put on a t-shirt. (Fellow salad bar diners, don’t worry; I did put it on.)

Crime. The pervasive “pay before pumping” signs made me think gas-n-go is the most common crime on Hawaii. Not a Triad or a jade smuggler in sight. Where did McGarrett & co. (and Magnum, too, for that matter) find all these criminals?

Christian Hip-Hop. While we were driving through the vast ranchland and lava fields, we found Urban Filez, hosted by DJ Sizzle; favorite lyric excerpt: “after three days and nights He popped up like a toaster.” Righteous living=righteous music + righteous gear. Fosheezy is the clothing line named after a non-swear word I’d previously only heard on trips to Utah (where it dominates other f-words like “flippin’,” “friggin’, ” and “fetch”). Maybe the proliferation of ChristAltRock cleaned up the crime; it’s certainly influenced the taggers.

On the road: On the sea, actually. I guess it’s reassuring to get complaints about this site, at least when they’re about the recent paucity of postings. We’re in Hawaii, a conference/vacation at an insane resort. Like Ben Stiller’s Mel in Flirting With Disaster, we’re not not “B&B people.” Somewhat unsurprisingly, we’re not “Take-a-monorail-to-swim-with-the-dolphins-before-the-authentic-luau-Resort people,” either. [Here is a live webcam. I can attest that it looks just like that right now.] While we’re actually sleeping at a slightly lower-key part of the complex, the conference (and the wireless networks) are all at the veritable Ka’aba of leisure.
Anyway, there’s much writing to be done, but screen technology being what it is, that’d mean staying indoors most of the time, so we’ll see. So if you’re upset at the infrequency of my posts, this week may be a good time to browse the archives, explore the projects, look up some references to films or artists, or to get away from the computer altogether and kill a little time outside. Mahalo

Souvenirs from Utah: (NOTE: These are some finds from a weekend in Utah. Not related to any current film project, they’re bonuses, the equivalent of a tub of CoolWhip for the bowl of fruit salad that is the rest of the site.)

hotsaints.com (“Chase and be chaste.”), an online personals site for (hot) single members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, who are thick as fiddlers around these here parts.

3coins.com (“not legal in BC Canada. . .but – not illegal ?”): “A polygamy plural relationship website for women seeking a ‘Sisterwife.'” Best piece of advice, especially for those polygamy-minded newbies out there: “Don’t mail letters to a polygamy site from the computer at your work place. You will be caught.”

“Modest Bridal, Modest Proms, Modest Prices”: For after your successful foray onto one of the preceding sites. On a billboard near Provo.

A lot of weblog-related stuff. I’ve been working on a website project for a Museum friend of mine, which feels good and potentially very interesting. With some new projects emerging (total=5, for those playing at home), the armchair IA in me thinks greg.org’s a bit unwieldy these days. Look for a redesign soon. Also, I’ve been exploring Movable Type (Can I write that on my Blogger Pro server?), which I set up on another server, gregallen.com.
[There’s nothing there that isn’t here; far less, in fact. Though it was originally the main way for people to find me, greg.org has long since taken over the vanity Google searches. As a result, gregallen.com is now like some increasingly invisible sculpture in Central Park, which makes greg.org the web equivalent of the Balto statue: frequently visited, and sporting an explanatory plaque and–most importantly– a movie tie-in.]
Serendipitous mis-click: From Evhead, I accidentally clicked on Heath Row’s weblog, and I’m glad I did. It’s called Media Diet, but Heath’s clearly eating for two. At least. One delicacy: Andy McCaskey, Sr.’s weblog, Topic. Mr. McCaskey’s 86 years old, and writes what he knows. His seems to be the case of a lived life, well worth examining. (Heath compares him to Paul Harvey or Garrison Keillor; I wouldn’t. Harvey’s authentic but annoyingly glib. Keillor’s phony and just annoying. McCaskey’s both authentic and thoughtful.)