the making of, by greg allen
“Writing fiction takes me out of time,” he explains. “I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get. I’m scared of sounding pretentious because anyone who writes fiction is saying, ‘Look at this thing I’ve written.'”
from Bill Katovsky’s 1987 profile of University of Arizona Teaching Assistant of the Year, David Foster Wallace, republished by McSweeney’s [via tmn]
Before Jonathan Lethem could call 2666, Roberto Bolano’s novel, recently translated into English, a masterpiece, he referenced a Philip K. Dick story titled “The Preserving Machine,” so we knew he wasn’t taking the term lightly:
Dick’s parable evokes the absurd yearning embedded in our reverence toward art, and the tragicomic paradoxes “masterpieces” embody in the human realm that brings them forth and gives them their only value. If we fear ourselves unworthy of the sublimities glimpsed at the summit of art, what relevance does such exalted stuff have to our grubby lives? Conversely, if on investigation such works, and their makers, are revealed as ordinary, subject to the same provisions and defects as the rest of what we’ve plopped onto the planet — all these cities, nations, languages, histories — then why get worked up in the first place? Perfect or, more likely, imperfect, we may suspect art of being useless in either case.
Both Lethem’s problematic outcomes presuppose a reflectiveness that may not be as widespread as he’d like. Masterpieces are a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, and most reader/viewer/listeners dutifully feel the ecstasy they’ve been pre-programmed to expect by the canonizing culture at large. When I see mobs standing in awe in front of the Mona Lisa or dutifully thronging the Sistine Chapel, the work itself is almost just a catalyst for the experience of consuming Important Culture. I mean, if people were really paying attention, they’d notice what an unpleasant experience it usually is.
Meanwhile, 2666 sounds absolutely engrossing and fantastic. Now if only I could find a way to read a 912-page novel right now. [nyt book review]
Steve Rosen found a 1981 interview with Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray at the flea market. He transcribed a bit onto Airform Archive, starting with an encounter Ray had with the 1913 Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore:
Satyajit Ray: I’ll tell you a story here. In 1928, when I was seven, I went with my mother to Tagore’s university. I had my little autograph book, newly bought, and my mother gave the book to Tagore and said, “My son would like a few lines of verse from you.” And he said, “Leave the book with me.” Next day I went to collect it, and he brought it out and said: “I have written something for you, which you won’t understand now, but when you grow up you will understand it.” It’s one of the best things he ever wrote in a small manner, and what it means is this: “I have travelled all around the world to see the rivers and the mountains, and I’ve spent a lot of money. I have gone to great lengths, I have seen everything, but I have forgotten to see just outside of my house a dewdrop on a little blade of grass, a dewdrop which reflects in its convexity the whole universe around you.”
At first, I thought this sounded incredibly ballsy, but Tagore’s and Ray’s Brahmin families were close.
From the dewdrop, Ray and the interviewer continue in a discussion of the microscopic, but the power of the quote seems to me to be about ignoring the beauty and profundity of the world right in front of us.
Ray would go on to study with Tagore, and in 1961, Nehru commissioned him to direct a documentary of the writer’s life.
…the essence as a dewdrop on a little blade of grass… [airform archives]
Satyajit Ray [wikipedia]
How the hell did The Onion AV Club manage to score an interview with John Hodgman??
AVC: What is the process like on The Daily Show? How do ideas get developed and refined into a bit?
JH: I can only speak to my own experience, which is not unique but specific to the contributors, such as me and Larry Wilmore and Kristen Schaal. We’re not there every day. We come in twice a month and do our bits. The most common iteration is they provide me a topic and I’ll think about that topic for awhile and write up a first draft a couple days before. Then I’ll come in and work with David Javerbaum, the former Onion writer and now executive producer of the show, as well as Jon and some of the other executive producers of the show, to refine the idea. It will often change dramatically and we’ll often all write it from scratch together, basically to fit Jon’s vision of what he wants to do with the piece. And then we’ll go down and rehearse it that day, and then more often than not we’ll all get together in a room right after rehearsal, about an hour or two before the show, and rewrite it again, along with the rest of the show. Jon takes a very active role in shaping every word. We project the script on a wall and he goes through it line by line, makes adjustments, and makes every script sing as a result. It’s really kind of an astonishing process to watch. But for someone who had been primarily used to sitting in his underwear, working on a 2000-word magazine article for a month before anyone else ever read it, that seat-of-pants writing is very nerve-wracking. Very exciting, but I did want to vomit quite a bit.
Oh.
Interviews | John Hodgman [avclub]
I was talking with an artist friend yesterday, and he made a reference to “Krauss’s ‘Sculpture and the Expanded Field’,” and I was all, “huh?” And he was all, “WHAT?” And so I was like, “Don’t know it,” and he was all, “Dude, it’s canon. First handout they give you when you get into art school.” And I was like, “And who reads October unless they’re being graded on it?”
Still, once he explained her postmodernist proposition for sculpture, I was like, “Expanded Field? We’re soaking in it!”
So I read it, and yeah, I knew that; it’s basically the idea that in the late 1960’s, artists challenged and expanded the definition of sculpture, or to flip it around, the logical structure of artists’ practice expanded beyond the finite, inherited modernist definition of sculpture. There’s even a fancy diagram to explain why what Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, Robert Morris, and others of the era were doing is not modernism, but is sculpture.
Anyway, here’s a PDF version of Rosalind Krauss’s “Sculpture and the Expanded Field”. Get an education so you don’t embarrass yourself like I did. [sic and/or heh]
From the i-banking obit the NYT has waiting on the shelf for just such emergencies:
“I hate to use the phrase ‘masters of the universe,’ but they’re not in investment banking anymore, they’re in hedge funds,” Mr. [Tom] Wolfe [who, excuse me, owns that damn phrase and should have it hung around his neck every time the market tanks] said. And “hedge funds don’t need glass office towers. They can run $15 billion with 25 people” in the leafy suburban sanctuaries where their directors live.
“The new Wall Street,” he said, “is Greenwich, Conn.”
Next he’ll say he hates wearing white suits.
Yes, they went there: Dim LIghts, Big City [nyt]
Holy crap, David Foster Wallace died Friday night. [1] I thought we had a deal [2] we were going to grow old together…. dammit
[1] hanged.
[2] the deal: he writes, I read.
“This is the place that matters.” And this just gets better and better. Walter Reed Middle School served as the backdrop for the presidential candidacy of Democratic congressman Matt Santos–as played by Jimmy Smits on West Wing.
West Wing producer-writer Eli Attie told the Guardian in February that the Santos character was based on Barack Obama:
“I drew inspiration from him in drawing this character,” West Wing writer and producer Eli Attie told the Guardian. “When I had to write, Obama was just appearing on the national scene. He had done a great speech at the convention [which nominated John Kerry] and people were beginning to talk about him.”
Attie, who served as chief speechwriter to Al Gore during the ill-fated 2000 campaign and who wrote many of the key Santos episodes of the West Wing, put in a call to Obama aide David Axelrod.
“I said, ‘Tell me about this guy Barack Obama.'”
Axelrod is, of course, Obama’s chief strategist for the campaign.
Watch Santos’ hope-themed speech [youtube via tpm]
From West Wing to the real thing | Scriptwriters modelled TV’s ethnic minority candidate on young Barack Obama
[guardian.co.uk]
“The guys from The Politico brought her [my mom, Cindy McCain] flowers, which I still think is the most adorable thing ever, so thank you. I thought it was so cute that they decided to bring my mom flowers, because it’s rare; they are journalists. [laughs]”
That’s my favorite line from Meghan McCain’s video of the Memorial Day weekend BBQ her parents hosted for the DC press corps at their ranch in Sedona. The first time I heard it, I thought Meghan was being a snob about how poor journalists’ manners are.
But after seeing how she’s so kind towards the help–the family’s chef is a “longtime friend” and the caretaker couple at the ranch are “our other really good friend[s]”–I realized she wasn’t being snobby or mean, just the opposite.
The wheels of Washington journalism are greased by a vast supply of hostess gifts, but many news outlets refuse to reimburse reporters who buy their hostess gifts instead of using something from the company’s official hostess gift closet.
Of course, it would have been equally adorable and cute if they had made Cindy something themselves; a loaf of banana bread, perhaps, or a mosaicked flower pot in the colors of the Southwestern desert?
-From the otherwise excellent Observer profile of recent NYC returnee Steve Guttenberg, which inexplicably leaves out one of his best New York projects, the Village People vehicle Can’t Stop The Music:
“I am a seducer, I’m a salesman,” [The Goot] said. “I’m trying to get people to buy my message. I do have a message. I’m as corny as Kansas in August. I’m as high as a kite on the Fourth of July. That’s from South Pacific, but yeah, I do have a message …”
Interesting. The script for one of my favorite Scorsese films, his dark, odd 1985 After Hours, appears to have been heavily lifted from a 1982 performance by Joe Frank, one of my favorite dark, odd radio dramatists. Andrew Hearst has connected the dots, apparently for the first time in print.
Joseph Minion’s script for After Hours began as a screenwriting class project at Columbia. His original title was reportedly Lies, which is the same name as Joe Frank’s piece. The film’s story, the arc, and a whole host of details significant and minor are identical to Frank’s play. According to Hearst and a Salon article on Frank, the writer received a large settlement from the producers, which is certainly the least they could do.
Even more intriguing, though, are Frank’s own references to the plagiarism scandal in a 1986 show titled, “No Show,” which has been performed, aired, or released in 2-hr, 90-min, and 1-hr versions. [There’s mention of a torrent version of the show, but I haven’t been able to find it online.]
In “No Show,” Frank apparently performs phone conversations with Minion, wherein the young screenwriter begs for leniency and help saving his career. Hearst thinks that Minion’s IMDB profile after After Hours is thin, a consequence of being frozen out by the industry. But he still made films with Nicolas Cage and Kathleen Turner, and his current project has Lisa Kudrow attached and producing, so he hasn’t been too blackballed.
Though I’d like it to be true because it’s a perfect, Frank-ian twist, I don’t believe the speculation on the Joe Frank mailing lists that Minion is actually Frank. Though frankly [sic], does Frank-as-Minion actually writing After Hours seem any more implausible today than a SoHo populated by artists and weirdos, yet without cars or ATM’s or more than one place to go at night?
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?
Shotgun! Does anyone know who wrote about visiting a gun show and the NRA convention for Spy? The caption under the photo of Charlton Heston was “Guns ‘n Moses.” The title of the magazine got everyone they talked to to open right up. To a guy whose idea of humorous magazine writing had been limited to Mad, it was a life-changing article.
[update: I guess it really is a joke that writes itself. ]
Wow. It feels like there’s an entire novel just waiting to forth this, the most solipsistic headline Cory’s ever put on boingboing.
Remixable German documentary about me and Internet freedom [bb]
This is funny:
Not The Daily Show, With Some Writer
But this is funnier:
From the Colbert Report writers: hungvp158: “Very successful entertainment executive, who is also quite young for his position, on why scribes’ strike is asinine. Not tooting own horn or anything but he is very connected– squash, Iger– has inside dope. And ‘hung’ not an exaggeration.”
Round 1 goes to The Colbert Report writers. Back to you, John.