Category: Uncategorized

John must have his comment settings at +5 or something, because his mass emails are rare-yet-always-awesome. Since he works for the media giant that made both LOTR II and Austin Powers, he was vague/suspicious of Leonard Nimoy’s Hobbit “music video”. I dug around online (well, I just Googled “‘leonard nimoy’ and hobbit”, really). The first result is “Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” on this site. [note: site appears to be in Elvish.]

Reading this article (from Ftrain, like everything else today, I guess) is like watching Errol Morris’ First Person, wherein an interviewee is established as utterly normal/a genius in the first half of the show, and then is allowed to show how that utter normality is belied/that genius is applied in fantastic, frightening, or wildly misguided ways in the second half.

From Adrian Searle’s article on Documenta 11 in the Guardian:

Iranian photo-journalist and cameraman Seifollah Samadian pointed his video camera out of his Tehran window and filmed a woman in a black chador struggling with an umbrella in a vicious snowstorm while waiting for a bus. There is only the blizzard, and waiting, her silhouette and the cawing of crows, bare trees and a menacing, barbed-wire-topped wall beyond. Nothing happens, except more of the same, more waiting. It is one of the current Documenta’s unforgettable moments, of which there are many… [Not coincidentally, Samadian was the cinematographer on Abbas Kiarostami’s ABC Africa.]
There are those who find the present Documenta patronising, or complain that it is like some horror National Geographic tour of a collapsing world. It is nothing of the sort. It is news from elsewhere, and news from home. We are all in it together, however impossible it is to deal with everything. Uneven, at times annoying, upsetting and even uplifting, Documenta 11 isn’t a perfect show. It isn’t a perfect world.

AIRPORT GIFT SHOP – MORNING
A CASHIER at the counter. She does not appear wildly over-qualified for her job. A YOUNG ITALIAN TOURIST COUPLE approach quietly with some postcards. The ITALIAN WOMAN wore her backpack on her stomach, as wary Italians are wont to do.
CASHIER (exclaiming loudly and with glee, but not to anyone in particular): That’s just like Mini-Me!! HAH!!
ITALIAN WOMAN (fright in her eyes, she looks at her husband): ……
CASHIER: You got Mini-Me in there?? HAH!!
The Italians drop the postcards on the counter and rush out of the store without saying a word.

No, it’s not just reciprocal link whoring, I swear: Just came back from the hotel pool, where I became transfixed by the beautiful patterns of reflections and whorls of light on the bottom of the pool, thinking to myself, “This is cool. Where are the artists examining this natural-yet-manmade phenomenon?” Well, they’re on Travelers Diagram for starters, and they’re named Kathleen Johnson, and they’re having their first solo shows this very minute (until Aug. 9, anyway) in New York. And she turns out to have shown last year at Marc Foxx in LA. Hey, Marc!

Mesa , AZ– Just when you think it’s too stupid to go back in the air, Delta.com offers the pleasant surprise of online check-in and home-printed boarding passes. A billboard on the way to the hotel says, “Sweating for free?! Get paid to test deodorants!” A photocopied sign at the check-in desk congratulates Gregory Allen for being selected guest of the day. And rather than redo my network settings in our upgraded room, I surf happily on a wide open wireless network that’ s bleeding in through the window. This is the way to start the week.

The route is so circuitous it bores even me, but I just came across The Essential Vermeer Lover, a scholarly yet very engaging site about, well, Vermeer.
While it’ll embarass him, I have to add a quick story from shooting in France about the cinematographer for Souvenir (November 2001), Jonah Freeman. Each night, we’d review the dailies on a giant monitor in the hotel lobby. On one such evening, a French woman (presumably another hotel guest) stood hovering behind us, watching quietly. When an extended shot of the Somme landscape (fields, with some trees at a distant ridge, with shadows of clouds racing across the fields and a really complicate sky) came on, she suddenly called out, “It’s just like Vermer [sic]!” She startled us, and then it took a while to figure who she was talking about. We figured the Vermer/Vermeer pronounciation thing was like Van Go/Van Gochh, something that, even if it was correct, Americans could never pull off. In any case, after that, any shots with sublime-looking light became known as Vermers. Here is Vermeer’s View of Delft, which then came to mind after the woman’s exclamation.
While Vermeer’s remaining work is known for subtlety and serenity, he painted during a prolonged war and religiously fueled conflict which devastated his home city of Delft. Early in his painting career, in 1654, a munitions depot in the town, which held 90,000 pounds of gunpowder, exploded to devastating effect. The Delft Thunderclap, as the accident came to be known, leveled buildings for hundreds of yards, damaged nearly every building in town, and killed and wounded unknown hundreds of people. [Read Anthony Bailey’s chapter about the Thunderclap, or buy his book, View of Delft.] One artist, Egbert van der Poel, painted over twenty versions of View of Delft After the Explosion in his career. Vermeer’s View of Delft, then, turns out to be a portrait of a partially/newly rebuilt city, one in the midst of and recovering from disaster.
(I’m working on an extended post about Jonah’s art, both his photography and installation work. Stay tuned.)

A nice passage from artist Anne Truitt’s journal. Easily find and replace “notebooks” and “weblog”:

I once watched a snake shed his skin. Discomfort apparently alternating with relief, he stretched and contracted, stretched and contracted, and slowly, slowly pushed himself out the front end of himself. His skin lay behind him, transparent. The writing of these notebooks has been like that for me.

An artist friend loaned me his copy of the 1968 underground classic film, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One. I’d seen clips of the film before, and it played at Sundance one year when I was partying there. But this William Greaves landmark is pretty amazing to watch. The film is a combination of “screen tests” or early scenes of a feature film and the “behind the camera” documentary of the making of the feature. As those familiar with Souvenir (November 2001) can appreciate, the contrast between scripted&unscripted, the use of documentary tools to tell a story, etc. are ideas the film explores. Well, in Symbio, Greaves doesn’t just explore these ideas, he riffs on them with amazing fluency (Miles Davis soundtrack >> obligatory jazz metaphor).
Earlier, Olafur (another artist friend) and I grabbed some milkshakes during his whirlwind US tour. He’s reaching an amazing level in his work, with a sustained fluency and engagement over a daunting number of complex projects, almost all at once. Even as I focus intently on Souvenir and almost everything about it (finetuning, critical reception, marketing and promotion, the potential impact on the WTC Memorial debate), he made a really good point that it’s the process, the continuous production that’s actually more important. A first project is a trial/test; the second is a reaction/correction; the third is the first real coherent/comprehensive attempt; it’s really the fourth project that has the greatest potential/expectation. A very useful perspective to be reminded of. And one that hits home these days when I’m regularly statuschecking myself and my longer term prospects/plans.

Yesterday on Studio 360, host Kurt Andersen lamented on the lack of risk-taking and originality in “art and entertainment,” and he tarred the television networks, Hollywood, and the artists at Documenta with the same brush. [Listen to his commentary here; it’s the 7/13/02 show.] While I’m a fan of both Studio 360 and Andersen, I can’t help but think he’s wrong, at least about Documenta. (He gets full credit on the other two fish in the barrel, though.)
On questions of “staggeringly similar” of art in the exhibit (“serious, photo-journalistic, documentary”) the curators should be identified (either credited or blamed, depending on your POV) as a moving force. Even if Alan Sekula’s photographs grow tiresome after the tenth gallery or so (which it does), the show cannot be dismissed as “grim, unchallenging images full of conventional horrors and the standard villains,” as Andersen tries to do. He despairs, I despaired. As I’ve posted before, Documenta certainly wasn’t the feelgood show of the year. There was a lot to be depressed about. Or to be moved by. Documenta had plenty, including work and ideas that were both challenging and beautiful.
Andersen yearns for the reemergence of the “contrarian genius, dreamers of odball beauty”-style artists, who he imagines are the true “risktakers” of our culture. But having been heavily involved (and invested) in the contemporary art world all through the last economic boom, I’d have to say Andersen may be the dreamer; the “art establishment” has been plenty safe, corporate- and collector-friendly for a loong time.

Back in March when we were editing Souvenir November 2001, we spent some grim days dealing with sound. We’d recorded audio on the DV camera and on Mini-Disc (not DAT), using slate (not timecodes) to sync the sound. Then at the last minute we had problems loading the MD’s into Final Cut Pro and had to transfer them to CD. Sync’ing the audio was supposed to be easy, but it was a huge pain. Why mention this now?
In the newest issue of Filmmaker Magazine, there’s a roundtable with Steven Soderbergh’s team from Full Frontal where they talk shop. Here’s what Susan Littenberg (1st asst. ed.) says they did (note: they had two Final Cut Pro systems, which sounds luxe.):

Digitize DV in 45-60 minute chunks.

Digitize each DAT take separately

Create a FCP sequence with a starting time code set to first digitized frame of the DV.

Line up each DAT sound file in the sequence.

Create a new DV tape (“a clone with better sound”) with timecodes using a Sony DSR2000 deck.

Then don’t redigitize the clones. Edit from the sync’ed subclips; unlink and relink the files when they get screwed up; “tax the system and cause more crashes than it might have had we done it the other way.”
In the last paragraph: “Is there anything that you can think of that filmmakers should avoid? Any advice you can give filmmakers before they get started on a project like Full Frontal?”
“Don’t sync audio to video in Final Cut! Take the extra time up front to do the sync dailies and reload them.”
Two takeaways: 1) We’re doin’ it more Soderbergh-style than we’d imagined (or wanted to, frankly), and 2) Finish the article before you start typing your weblog entry.

Hmm. At the end of this Salon interview with independent director Tom diCillo, he says, “The greatest luxury is being able to get on the set. I would do it for no money. I love doing it. I love it.” Right below it is a link to an older interview with diCillo “on the ‘tedious, boring, painful experience’ of making an independent film.”

Apropos of nothing other than the weekend: Create a South Park version of yourself We did.

Oh, and over the last week, a film idea I’d had (and sketched out a couple of weeks ago) is rapidly taking shape. While I’d planned to keep it quiet until I worked it through more clearly, I blurted it out to a veteran producer-turned-major entrepreneur at dinner, then to a couple of very film-minded people, all of whom were very interested. And this morning, I woke up with a few lucid, brilliant flashes (brilliant as in intense, not necessarily as in genius, yet, anyway) about how it could work. So, this week, there’s going to be a concerted effort to develop it. No details online just yet, though. Stay tuned.

MoMA QNS: I should’ve written yesterday about the Thursday night opening party for MoMA’s new building in Queens, but I didn’t get around to it. Except for the part where about 1,500 people had to stand in the middle of the street in a tremendous downpour, only to (eventually) be told by the Fire Marshall that there’s no way they’re getting in, it was great. (We led a group of 30-35 people under the elevated train until we reached a Romanian restaurant to sit out the rain. After 10:30, the party was not only great, it actually rocked.)
Went back again today, the first day it’s open to the public. There were 1.5 hour lines, trailing all the way down a block that probably had never seen such a crowd. Naturally, we walked right in the front door [a rare case of where my sense of entitlement is not wildly misplaced). The two standout features: Michael Maltzan’s work here is really great. Videos projected on the walls; both functional and ornamental ramps (perfect for parties and the ADA), and a very smart experience at the entrance to the galleries. So, of the last $90 million spent on contemporary architecture in NYC, $50 million was spent successfully (MoMA QNS) and $40 million was, well, whatever (Prada SoHo). [here is a little book published by MoMA about the new bldg.]

The other amazing thing: The literal frenzy of people picking up Felix Gonzalez-Torres posters. This stack sculpture by Gonzalez-Torres from the Walker Art Center collection has a rich, large black&white image of water. As is typical when his work is exhibited, your first encounter is long before you see the actual piece; you notice people walking around with giant posters rolled up and tucked under their arms. (I’d seen this in the pouring rain at the Thursday opening, and it didn’t register at first; if you’re going out for the evening, do you want to carry a giant poster around with you all night?)
In the gallery with the stack, there was bedlam. Seriously. You’d have thought people stood in line just for the poster. There was frantic activity everywhere as people sought out a wide enough space to roll up their poster. Some people teamed up–as if they were folding sheets together–to roll them up smoothly. The stack itself was in total disarray; people were standing on a stray sheet next to it. By the time we walked through the adjacent galleries and back, the stack was gone; only the wall label and two tape corners on the floor betrayed its presence. And, of course, the hundreds of people walking around with giant posters.
On the way out, an older woman (sort of an outer borough Sonia Rykiel) with a disheveled roll of several posters was hustling toward the door, while an irritated middle aged woman in a tank top called after her, “Do you have any posters?” Do you have an extra one?” “Do you have more than one?”