Category: Uncategorized

Paige West, a diehard collector and longtime champion of emerging artists has a weblog named, accurately enough, Art Addict.
Of course, Paige’s other site, Mixed Greens, has “we sell art” as its subtitle.
I guess she wants to reassure readers that she’s not just a pusher but a user, too. So find a vein and jack right in. [via MAN]

According to GreenCine, who reads the trades for you, Terrence Malick’s Che has been shelved “for a year.” The timing makes me wonder if the recent announcement about Malick and Che wasn’t an attempt by the project people to head off his departure. Of course, Malick years are like dog years, so if it’s Che you want, you may have to be satisfied with the three other Che films about to take to the streets.
If it’s Malick you want, however, he’s now working on a Pocahontas bio starring Colin Farrell (as John Smith, not Pocahontas). No IMDb entry yet for this film, scheduled to start shooting in July, titled The New World. That’s actually from Aladdin, not Pocahontas, yo. [C’mon, I was working for The Mouse at the time. I have to know these things.]
Related: Dress your little revolutionary in Che Guevara logo merchandise.

Spalding Gray spoke about Monster in a Box on WNYC, and about preferring to gather his material fly-on-the-wall-style. When Gray went to Los Angeles, his assistant/driver Kao didn’t speak to him the whole trip. A friend told him later she just didn’t want to end up in a monologue. “And here, I just thought she was stupid. No matter what, you’re going to be in it.”
Interviews with Spalding Gray:
WNYC’s Leonard Lopate, from 1990
SG on Fresh Air talking about his monologue, “It’s a Slippery Slope” in 1996
SG on Fresh Air talking about his book, “Morning, Noon & Night” in 1999
Rebroadcast today of a 2001 interview with WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi
Spalding Gray DVD’s:
Amazon for Gray’s Anatomy, directed by Steven Soderbergh
Ebay for Swimming to Cambodia, directed by Jonathan Demme.

Use an only-in-LA pickup line on the Observer‘s Alexandra Jacobs and be prepared to read about yourself after she gets back to NYC. That is, of course, if you even read a paper anymore, which you don’t.
In L.A. Mating Cry: IMDb Me!, Jacobs does her best George Gurley, and gets people to unload their most unwittingly unflattering selves to the media.

A reader is looking for a transcript of Sofia Coppola’s Oscar acceptance speech. Any ideas? Does anyone still have that snoozer of a show on Tivo? Is it even possible to capture the ephemeral essence that is Sofia with mere words?
I remember her thanking Antonioni, and her father, “for telling me never to use video taps,” but I confess, I stopped transcribing her last fall.
Email me at greg at greg dot org with your suggestions. Thanks.

[Update: sheesh, that was fast. The transcript, minus the advice about video taps, is at the Oscars website. Since it’s about as long as her script for LIT, I post it here in its entirety:

Thank you. I can’t believe I’m standing here. Thank you. Thank you to the Academy for giving me this honor. Thank you to my dad for everything he taught me. Thank you to my brother Roman and all my friends who were there for me when I was stuck at 12 pages and encouraged me to keep writing. And the filmmakers whose movies — I have to breathe. The filmmakers whose movies inspired me when I was writing this script, Antonioni and Wong Kar-Wai and Bob Fosse and Godard and all the others. And every writer needs a muse. Mine was Bill Murray. Thanks to my mom for always encouraging us to try to make art, and thank you to Bart and Ross for helping make my script into a movie. And thank you to everyone at Focus. Thank you.

And thanks to my dad for telling me never to use video taps. Ahem.

David F. Gallagher has moved his base of operations for his excellent photo-centric weblog, lightningfield.com, to Paris for a while. He thinks this’ll mean “fewer pictures of trash,” which is cute.

What a post to follow Vincent Gallo. I just started a two-week guestblogging stint at Times and Seasons, a multifaceted group weblog about Mormon doctrine, living, culture and politics. Check it out, brothers and sisters.

After screening at Documenta XI, Chicago’s Renaissance Society, Miami Art Basel, and MoMA Gramercy, Amar Kanwar’s excellent 1997 video, A Season Outside, gets its New York gallery debut–and a review by Jerry Saltz.

Guy Maddin takes his own sweet time publishing Part II of his production diary for The Saddest Music in the World, which opens at MoMA Gramercy on March 4. Tomorrow! Like with Jersey Girls, Full Frontal, and I Love Your Work, when production diaries go up against Hollywood publicists trying to control info in a film, the publicists still win. [Where’s Jeff Jarvis when you need him?]

It’s like ur-machinima. The Citizen Kane of 8-bit filmmaking. Little movies set in Marioland, but made in Flash, that combine classic cinematic devices like flashbacks, dramatic pullbacks and closeups with authentic 8-bit graphics. Oh, and a melodramatic score that incorporates game sounds. And atmospheric perspective. And DVD-esque chapter menus.
The 3-part story (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) is by AlexanderLeon.
You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. And if you play it in the same room with a sleeping baby, she’ll cry. [via boingboing]
Related from May 2003: Buddy Icon Cinema, and comparing Donkey Kong to Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3.
Related links: NY artist Cory Arcangel‘s 80’s video-game-inspired works at Filmmaker Magazine’s blog and at the upcoming Whitney Biennial [shabby website, Whit]

Lynda Obst gives Slate‘s David Edelstein a juicy piece of Lost in Translation gossip, that Sofia’s father gave her three pages of notes on the film, which she stuffed. Edelstein calls the movie “Chekhovian,” which is high praise in his book. Sofia, you’ve come a long way, baby. Good luck.
Meanwhile, at Edelstein’s other gig, Fresh Air, Terry Gross ran a 1999 interview with LIT star Bill Murray, while the site promises an upcoming interview with Ms Coppola herself.
March 30 or so, MoMA’s Film Department is giving Sofia Coppola its Work In Progress Award. They called it early last year, by the way, no dogpiling there. Stay tuned for more greg.org coverage.
My favorite Bill Murray story goes like this: when somebody recognized him on the street in NYC, Murray walked up to him and popped him on the forehead. Then he bent over to the stunned man and whispered, “no one’ll ever believe you,” and walked away. Maybe that’s what happened to Scarlett Johansson’s character at the end of LIT.
At this house Saturday, we’ll be watching the IFP Independent Spirit Awards, which are a lot more fun. Assuming we’re not sacked out from exhaustion, that is. Oh, and no sooner did I post about Cassavetes’ Shadows, that it turned up in my mailbox, a forgotten gift to myself from my DVD rental queue.
related: my interview with Sofia. My hanging with Alexander Payne and David O. Russell, previous MoMA honorees. My own Edelstein-inspired Chekhov reference. Me me me me me.

Barbara London, Associate Curator of Film and Media at the Museum of Modern Art, will screen some seminal works of video art and talk about the ins and outs of showing and collecting. Among the artists she’ll be showing: Nam June Paik, Bill Wegman, Joan Jonas, Woody and Steina Vasulka, Peter Campus, Gary Hill, Laurie Anderson, Wang Jianwei and others.
The discussion will be Monday evening at 6:30 in midtown. It’s not open to the public, but Author gregPosted on February 20, 2004Categories Uncategorized

I find Tom Vanderbilt’s Slate story about the State Department’s dropping Courier New 12 in favor of Times New Roman 14 as its official typeface timely for two reasons.
1) Courier’s appearance in The Fog of War is evidence of the font’s status as both “the herald of all stripes of dignified officialdom,” and FOIA-driven government conspiracy. [He credits Rob Poynor, of Design Observer. All of a sudden, these guys are everywhere.]
2) I just spent several hours last weekend researching the history and modern use of typewriter typefaces for a new website I’m working on. After growing tired of the clogged upX-files-style fonts that are an empty cliche of “edginess,” I turned to the mechano-corporate precision of the IBM Selectric-era fonts: serifs like Courier, Prestige Elite, and my favorites, the sleek sans-serif Letter Gothic and Script, the “handwriting” of the can-do-no-wrong IBM of the 60’s and 70’s.

Warren St. John wrote with some air of complaint about oblivious iPodders who clog our streets and queues while lost in their own musical worlds. This may be annoying, true, but it’s much better than the opposite situation: music that is piped into the street by retailers and/or Real Estate Experience developers. It’s particularly bad on faux-urban streetscapes, like the Market Commons at Clarendon, a “retail mecca” just outside DC. Nestled among the landscaped bushes are little mushroom-shaped speakers that pump out a chain-store-friendly soundtrack all day and night. It’s freakin’ annoying.