“For Months He Lived Between The Billboards”

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When I saw images of front architecture’s billboard-shaped house-on-a-pole floating about, the first thing I thought of was one of the first sculptures by Michael Ashkin I ever saw.

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It’s title, “For Months He Lived Between The Billboards,” pretty much says it all. It’s from 1993. Like the sculptural work of the mid-to-late 1990’s for which Ashkin first became known, “Between The Billboards” is a table-sized diorama made of model train pieces.
Unlike the later pieces, wasted desert and industrial landscapes which were abstract enough to evoke minimalist paintings, “Between The Billboards” is explicitly narrative. Still, they all feel like they were scenes from the same JG Ballard-by-way-of-Robert Smithson-and-Antonioni movie.
There’s a better reproduction out there somewhere. [It was in Harper’s Magazine, fwiw] this one’s from the collector, Howard Tullman’s site [tullman.com]

Tomorrow Is Another Days of Heaven

For the upcoming release of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, Criterion and Paramount have taken the rather extraordinary step of creating a new interpositive, the definitive, second-generation transfer from a film’s original negative. Lee Kline’s story of color-correcting a masterpiece of golden-hued cinema with Malick and cinematographer John Bailey [who’d been Nestor Almendro’s camera operator] is on Criterion’s blog:

Before he arrived, I wasn’t sure how hands-on he was going to be with the color. As soon as he sat down, though, Terry made it clear that the new transfer needed to feel natural and not too “postcardlike.” We weren’t allowed to use words like golden or warm. The natural beauty of the land needed to be represented, since that was what they were going for when shooting. When we first started to take out the gold and the warmth, it was heading toward a really different place from the previous transfer. Not bad, mind you, just different and definitely more natural. I would sometimes joke in the room that such and such a shot was pretty, and then I would say to Terry, “But not too pretty!” We’d all laugh. DVD producer Kim Hendrickson was also with us one afternoon, and when she started to say out loud how pretty it was, we all turned in our chairs to cut her off and simultaneously say, “Shhh!”After three days of Terry, Billy, and John’s expertise, we were finished. It looked beautiful, but boy, was it different. I told Terry that people were really going to be pretty surprised by this new transfer, since it was such a radical departure from before, but he said it was perfect.

Sounds like stripping centuries of varnish from a Rembrandt. Fascinating stuff.
Striking Gold [criterion blog via coudal]
the new Criterion Collection Days of Heaven comes out Oct. 23 [amazon]

Olafur: The Magazine??

Olafur: The Magazine
This is what I get for not going to the Serpentine Summer Party this year…

Publisher of a new magazine that melds artistic and architectural experimentation, Eliasson is currently involved in numerous architectural projects such as the Icelandic National Concert and Conference Centre in Reykjavik (design of the building envelope).
– Serpentine Gallery Pavilion press release

Magic: Teller Like It Is

At a recent conference talk on magic given in Las Vegas, Teller [the quiet one] gave the most amazing definition of magic I wish I’d heard before writing about Scott Sforza for Cabinet Magazine’s magic issue:

[Magic is] the theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality, but that — in our hearts — ought to.”

I wish he’d have piped up sooner.
Sleights of Mind [NYT]
previously: Cabinet 26: “Perspective Correction

Architects & Games

“the relentless glossiness of contemporary visualisation makes us wonder whether there is an ‘uncanny valley’ for buildings”
– things magazine on architecture and gaming engines
I would ascribe the uneasiness to the different purposes and agendas of architects, developers (real estate, not game), gamers, and critics. Has anyone made a FPS map of Gehry’s Peter Lewis Building at Case Western yet?
previously: SWAT team blames Gehry architecture for delay in trapping Cleveland shooter

Gawker Does Not Make $51 Million/Year

People, please.
So with 30 million page views x 4 units x $30/page ratecard, Gawker Media’s annual ad inventory is priced at $52 million retail.
How much inventory do they sell? 50%? 70%? 40%?
Every time you see a Gawker t-shirt button or a Gawker Artists or a Jalopnik banner, it’s an impression that didn’t sell. How often and when does that happen to you on a GM site?
Consumerist’s editors recently bragged that no one’s ever bought an ad on the site, which turned out to be essentially true.
So for the network as a whole, let’s say it’s 60%. MSRP: $31 million/yr.
A 15% discount for walking in the door: $26 million.
Discounts for buying up the entire page [i.e., the 3 biggest units, leaving the 4th button empty]: 20%? I don’t know. Say it happens half the time, so 10%. $23.4 million.
Do these ads sell themselves? 15% commission, not including the tab at Balthazar: $20 million.
Is $1.5mm/month possible? Sure, why not?
But making $20 million while paying people $3000/month? Less than the chick at the Uniqlo store? Less than Chris Evans pays to have his backyard cleared? I doubt it. Gawker ain’t no…damn, what was the name of Calacanis’s blogging sweatshop again? I can’t even remember. WIN something? Never mind.
A job at Gawker is a regular media job at a regular media company. Far be it from me to grope in the dark and overestimate the size of Denton’s nut, but he’s gotta be spending $5-6 mm a year.
Nick’s right. When done professionally, blogging turns out to be a profitable, efficient media publishing platform, but Gawker is not clearing $51 million/year. You should still totally let him pick up the tab at Balthazar, though. And the real reason they keep hounding that Ferrari douchebag on Crosby street is because he’s parking in Denton’s AMG-spot.

Love And Music

I’ve been working with a recent episode of WNYC’s Radiolab on in the background. The subject is memory, which also happens to be the subject of my series of short films, The Souvenir Series.
There was a typical brainy [sic] science segment on how memories are created–and blocked–in the brain, then a kind of random story about Joe Andoe’s paintings. The possibility that memory is metaphorically more like creating a work of art than filing a piece of data away is interesting, maybe even persuasive, though our metaphors usually turn out to be more revealing of us at a particular moment in our culture than accurately illuminating of what’s actually going on.
But it was the last story, about Clive and Deborah Wearing and an overwhelming amnesia that just stopped me cold. It started out as one more Oliver Sacks bauble before taking a remarkably poignant turn. Just listen to it, I can’t tell you how it goes.
Radiolab Show #304: Memory and Forgetting [wnyc.org]

Remembering Perv

So for 15/20ths of my time on the elliptical machine yesterday, CNN was, in their words, “Remembering Merv”, all while apparently forgetting his sexual harassment and palimony suits or his closeted, right-wing conservative support of Reagan and his sudden lack of gabbiness when the subject of the then-emerging AIDS epidemic.
Then in the car home, the second story on NPR–after the Tragic Loss of Merv–was one CNN didn’t even put in the crawl. It was a quote from the US’s Important Ally in the War Against Terror, Pervez Musharaff, who acknowledged that the Taliban was getting support from Pakistan’s tribal areas. And then he made all sorts of conciliatory, friendly remarks about helping them out, and bringing their well-meaning constituents to the table.
Seriously. All we need now is to worry a bit more about Lizzie Grubman’s driving and the whereabouts of Chandra Levy, and we’re set.

Philipp Otto Runge’s Farbenkugel

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In 1810, the last year of his young life, painter Philipp Otto Runge devised his Color Sphere, one of the first attempts to depict a comprehensive color system in three dimensions. Runge was a correspondent of Goethe, who was also interested in color theory.
The image above is from Runge’s book, Farbenkugel. It comes from Echo Systems’ Virtual Colour Museum, which was the source for BibliOdyssey’s collection of beautiful images of color systems dating back to Pythagoras.
The History of Colour Systems [BibliOdyssey]

Ten Top Ten Lists Of Video/Films For The 21st Century

The Japanese magazine Art-iT asked ten artists, directors, curators and i-don’t-knows for their top ten “‘artistic’ films of the 21st century”. I was glad but just a little surprised to see Jeremy Blake’s Sodium Fox, which I don’t think was as good as Winchester.

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And I was pleased to see Takehito Koganezawa, whose Untitled (Neon) plays like a documentary Jeremy Blake. I’m surprised that no one put Christian Marclay’s Video Quartet on a list, but not as surprised as I was that they put anything of Bill Viola’s. Ugh. But the most 21st century list of all is probably Ukawa’s, because as you know, if it’s not on YouTube these days, it doesn’t exist.
The Listmakers:
Kataoka Mami
Kurosawa Kiyoshi
Barbara London
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Johan Pijnappel
Sawa Hiraki
Mike Stubbs
Ukawa Naohiro
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Elga Wimmer
10×10 “artistic” films of the 21st century [art-it.jp via jeansnow.net]

That Was Way Harsh, Times

From the NYT review of Bratz: The Movie:

With their tender hearts and lip-gloss dreams, these teenage princesses are direct descendants of Alicia Silverstone’s Cher in “Clueless,” although Sean McNamara’s TV-ready framing and coarse direction lack Amy Heckerling’s snap and style.

As if. Clueless was like the greatest Jane Austen adaptation Hollywood’s ever done. Bratz are a line of skank dolls for whorish toddlers with–oh. Clueless parents.

Profit And/From Pain

Charles Thomas Samuels [“S”] interviewed Michelangelo Antonioni [“A”] in Rome in 1969. I finally figured out the occasional non-sequiturish statements in the transcript were originally photo captions.

S: In an interview I had with him, John Updike said something that fascinated me: “Being an artist is dangerous because it allows one to turn one’s pain too quickly to profit.”
A: I couldn’t use that phrase today-“being an artist”-as if that were something exceptional. And if somebody transmutes his pain into profit, very good. I find that the most wonderful way to kill pain.
S: Why do you say “today”? Could you have used the phrase “being an artist” in some other period?
A: Yes, of course. I think that during the Renaissance everything was influenced by art. Now the world is so much more important than art that I can no longer imagine a future artistic function.
S: But today what is the function?
A: I don’t know.
S: You don’t know?
A: Do you?
S: Yes.
A: Then tell me.
S: You want me to tell you what the function of art is! No, you tell me what you think of Francois Truffaut.
A: I think his films are like a river, lovely to see, to bathe in, extraordinarily refreshing and pleasant. Then the water flows and is gone. Very little of the pleasant feeling remains because I soon feel dirty again and need another bath.

Interview with Michelangelo Antonioni in Rome, July 29, 1969
by Charles Thomas Samuels [zakka.dk via greencine]