For the writer for whom a $20 Faber Blackwing pencil is just not stressful enough may I suggest Carbon Copies, “pencils made from the carbon produced during cremation. A lifetime supply of pencils can be made from one body of ash.
“The sharpenings create a secondary ash and displace the pencils as they are used, transforming the pencil case over time, into an urn.”
Of course, having your notebooks bound in your dearly departed’s skin simultaneously decreases the pencil supply by several years and increases the pressure to write Importantly.
Carbon Copies, by Nadine Jarvis, exhibited at the 2006 Goldsmith College BA Design & Eco Design show in London [nadinejarvis.com via treehugger]
Go For The Cornell, Stay For The Brancusi
Nickyskye on Metafilter:
Joseph wrote me love letters in which he couched his sexual interest in metaphors. I was told he used the image of a bird for penis and nest for vagina. His letters were full of birds and nests.
Just when you think there are no stones left to unturn in one woman’s firsthand account of being used–as a child, by her mother–to procure art from the pedophilic Joseph Cornell, there’s one more eye-popping anecdote. She took her only remaining Cornell to the art dealer, Richard Feigen, to sell, in order to finance a trip to India:
Mr. Feigen said that he too had been in India, to meet with the Maharaja of Indore who owned several sculptures by Brancusi, including the elegantly simple, bronze one called Bird in Space. The Indian government would not allow the Maharaja to export this valuable piece of art, so Mr. Feigen took a risk and decided to package the sculpture as a brass lampstand so it could exit India, which it did. He said that it was his first major art deal and that the sculpture sold for one million dollars.
The perfectly symmetrical irony, of course, is that Brancusi’s Bird In Space was the subject of a famous court case when it was first exhibited in the US in 1926. Customs agents, not believing the work was art, had attempted to charge import duty on the machined metal object.
In 2004, The Art Newspaper wrote about the Maharajah’s Bird In Space:
What happened to the Maharajah of Indore’s Brancusi birds?
In 1973 the Tate wanted to buy Brancusi’s black marble “Bird in space” through dealer Richard Feigen. The sale fell through because the trustees believed the work had been “smuggled” out of India.
Seems like the trustees were right. The National Gallery of Australia had no such qualms, because it bought two of the Maharajah’s three versions of Bird In Space, even though “the original limestone bases had been destroyed in India.” Brancusi, of course, considered the bases as integral to the works themselves.
That brass lampstand, by the way, ended up at the Norton Simon Museum, a 1972 purchase.
Flights of Fancy: Joseph Cornell and his muses [metafilter via tmn]
Tyranny Of The Beam Counters At WTC Memorial
What kind of tool do you use for value engineering a half billion dollars out of your terrorist attack memorial project? Well, if you’re Kevin Rampe, you use a Sciame. [rimshot]
The way Miss Representation sees it, Frank Sciame’s busy doing a “leave no trace” rub-out on the key components of Michael Arad’s original WTC memorial design. Naturally, the details, the process, and any sense of public accountability were the first casualties. But alas, it’s a familiar tale:
In reality, it is exactly what it looks like: the latest in a series of putative decision makers, people accustomed to conniving and obstruction to get their way when not in charge and who then morph into tinpot dictators when they are (because, like, they are so much more talented the those other pretenders) but fail miserably because everyone else is being as obstructionist and conniving as they can be, in hopes that they are given a shot to be the biggest idiot in the room.
Meet Frank Sciame, architect of the WTC Memorial. [missrepresentation.com via curbed]
Zarqawi Portrait Sets Record Price For Photography
Wow, if there was any doubt about where the contemporary art market is going, they were dispelled this morning at Christie’s Baghdad, where the US Government paid a record-setting $286 billion–plus $240 for framing–for this portrait of the dead Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. [Note: Sale price also does not include KBR’s premium of 17.5% on the first $200 billion and 10% thereafter or the 2,485 US soldiers killed as of press time.]
Congratulations, even though it’s gotta suck a little bit; the Administration had been offered the portrait multiple times in 2002 at much lower cost [estimated in the low eight figures], but turned it down. Of course, at the time, the market was more interested in Al Qaeda portraits, and Zarqawi was not connected to Al Qaeda. [thanks to matt for the pic]
Your Photoshared Experience: Olafur Eliasson On Flickr
It’s funny, I’ve never really found the worlds of art and flickr to have that much overlap. Just look at the number of photos posted after the Maker Faire 2006 [4,055] compared to those posted after, say, Art Basel [295].
But it turns out some artists have a fairly deep presence on flickr–and by some artists, I mean Olafur Eliasson. There are over 600 photos referencing Olafur in either the tags or the text. [At Tropolism, Olafur posse member Chad posted about a particularly sweet photoset [above] from republish.org, which was taken at an opening last week in Berlin at Galery Aedes.]
[An aside on the one-name thing: people drop single last names all the time in the art world, “Oh, I have some Gursky, some Richter, Demand…” But there are a few artists who get the first-name treatment–Maurizio, Olafur, and Felix come to mind–and it’s funny how different the implications of intimacy make it sound. Whether it’s actually there or not, there’s a hint of friendship/confidance, like saying ‘Marty’ instead of ‘Scorsese’ or babbling about Bob at Sundance. This can obviously be both good and embarassingly tacky.]
Anyway, it makes a certain sense that Olafur’s work turns up as frequently as it does. First, it’s pretty sexy, and it looks hard to take a bad picture of it. Second, the elements of spectacle he explores make people want to take pictures of it. But most importantly, I think, is the self-conscious experiential nature of the work itself: it is art about the experience of perceiving and seeing, not just art, but everything. And that’s the sweet confluence with flickr, a site where people who pay attention to seeing–and photographing–the world as they experience it meet and mingle.
Taken even further, you could look at how Eliasson’s own taxonomy/typology/experiential photography resonates with the tag-friendly world of flickr, as if flickr-ites’ collective efforts are generating their own Eliasson-style photogrids of Icelandic landscapes, or waterfalls or geodesic domes. I love this one, for example, “F— Off, Olafur Eliasson,” [left] with the caption, “I was taking snaps of Icelandic Lighthouses long before that twat,” which both hits and totally misses the point. [There are tools now for creating photogrids from flickr images, pal, so have at it.]
Olafur himself seems to be adapting his work to account for this collective/collaborative element, and not just by making less photographic work [although that does seem to be the case, which bugs, because I still want me some, and it’s getting harder and more expensive to come by]. At least three times, including in the 2004 The cubic structural evolution project , [on flickr here, of course] and his work in the 2005 Tirana Biennial, the artist put hundreds of pounds of white Lego blocks into the hands of the audience, who built utopian fantasy cityscapes with them.
With flickr, then, it’s Olafur Eliasson’s world; we just live in it. And vice versa.
Olafur Eliasson: Mediating Space – A Laboratory runs through July 20 at Aedes am Pfefferberg, Christinenstr.18/19, 10119 Berlin.
Bloghdad.com/The_War_Tapes
Deborah Scranton got embedded reporter credentials, but her documentary, The War Tapes was largely shot by US soldiers in Iraq using camera equipment she provided. She did much of her directing remotely via IM and email reviews of Quicktime dailies. Here’s ‘s a portion of ‘s discussion of a typical scene, where the troops guard a convoy of supplies being operated by Halliburton subsidiary KBR. The scene provides an indelible insight into the day-to-day situation the troops face, and the complexities that underlie every passing mention in the news about “IED’s” and “convoys”:
KBR sells the swag to the government (meals, haircuts, styrofoam plates for $20+ bucks a pop) and to the troops. There’s a great scene of soldiers packed into KBR’s amply stocked commissary after a hard day of escorting. They’re there to buy DVDs, Pringles, Becks beer, and soft drinks from KBR. Suddenly, you realize that every copy of “Armageddon” and every bottle of Mountain Dew was trucked in through the same hellish corridor as the cheese.
“The War Tapes” doesn’t tell us how the war is going, or speculate about the probability of success. Instead, it shows us how much blood and treasure is spent to deliver a single convoy of cheese to an American camp just a few miles outside of Baghdad. The implication is clear but unspoken: The Americans don’t control the main roads around key bases. The fight to keep Camp Anaconda supplied is a war unto itself.
Citizen soldiers, citizen media: The War Tapes [majikthise via robotwisdom]
Two of the soldiers, Sgts Jack Bazzi and Stephen Pink, were on Fresh Air last Thursday [whyy.org]
Dude Learned To Draw Manga-Style In Two Years?
Now I like me some Japanese animation, and it’s been a central element to the AYUAM [As Yet Unannounced Animated Musical} screenplay I’ve got kicking around. But when I first approached a couple of anime studios was shocked–but not, alas, surprised–at their kind of hidebound, orthodox view of the medium. There was not much interest, it seemed, in hybridization or redeployment of an anime aesthetic or even production process that didn’t “fit” [I hate to use that word in this context] within the anime worldview.
Maybe as a gaijin, even one who spoke Japanese, it was already a fait accompli that I was a consumer at best.
So it’s interesting to read about the experience of Gez Fry, a Japanese/British illustrator who, the legend goes, taught himself to draw in Japanese manga/anime style in “just” two years. Obviously, there’s more to that miraculous achievement than comes out in the hagiographic interviews in Ping Mag and Pixelsurgeon.
But the essentials are all there: the guy’s very talented, and he didn’t come up within the rigid, apprentice-y Japanese animation/illustration industry. AND, relatedly, he’s viewed as something of an outsider who tends to work with companies and clients from outside the anime world, too.
GezFry.com [gezfry.com]
How Japanese style Illustration works [pingmag via coudal]
Gez Fry interview [pixelsurgeon.com]
On Making Music For Prairie Home Companion
On WETA, the DC public radio station, Sunday night, Mary Tripp, the reporter for a program called Out and About, interviewed some of the musicians who performed in Robert Altman’s upcoming Prairie Home Companion.
The band members are used to live performance and to studio recording, so their perspective is at once professional and distinct. And given the subject of the film, it’s a relevant and interesting window Altman’s work process and life on his set. Garrison Keillor actively bugs, but the rest of the cast–and Altman and PT Anderson–are enough for me to overcome my PHC antipathy and be stoked about the film.
And even though they also wrongly bullied Rex over his Prairie Ho Companion t-shirts.
You can listen to the June 4 episode of Out and About for at least this week at weta.org [weta.org]
Through The YouTube Darkly
Has anyone ever asked Richard Linklater about the role A-Ha played in the development of Waking Life and Scanner Darkly. Just wonderin’
A-Ha: Take On Me [youtube]
update: I mean, I never thought I was very original to begin with, but still… And anyway, this is closer to Waking Life stylistically.
So maybe the better question is, has anyone ever asked the Beastie Boys about the role of A-Ha in the development of “Shadrach”?
Long Days Journey Into A Movie Theater
Like many people who join cults, my route to Kieslowski fandom and membership in the Church of the Dekalog looks a little goofy in retrospect. I was clearly seduced by the romanticism of La Double Vie de Veronique, not just within the movie itself, though there’s plenty there–but by the whole cinema-going experience:
I’d stayed an extra day on a sudden, unexpected business trip to Paris, moving from my work hotel to a dumpy 2-star, the St. Andre, in St. Germain. La Double Vie, it turned out, was screening in a little theater on the corner, and so I went that night, blind [so to speak.] Of course, I got more from the first, Polish half of the film, because I could read the French subtitles, while the second half blew by me. I had to wait a year or more for the US release to find out why Veronique was talking to that kitschy puppeteer.
But by then, I was hooked, and I joined the ranks of people who waited for Kieslowski’s true masterpiece, the largely unseen, 10-hour Dekalog to turn up at some festival or college cinematheque or wherever. Comprised of 10 1-hour-or-so episodes, it’s an easier moviewatching experience in some ways than the several-marathons-length films of Bela Tarr or Jacques Rivette, but it still meant reordering a couple of days’ schedules around the screenings.
Up until the back-to-back screening of The Cremaster Cycle at the Guggenheim, the longest films I’d watched were Sidney Lumet’s classic Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which I finally saw through twice after catching parts of it all week as I was running the projection booth at BYU. And that was only three hours [bah]…
…and Jacques Rivette’s 1991 La Belle Noiseuse, which clocked in at four hours. Of course, a good portion of that four hours involved the nude artist’s modelling talents of Emmanuelle Béart, so not as much watchchecking as the runtime might lead you to expect.
Anyway, this is all by way of setup for a link to Dennis Lim’s report of seeing the even more mythical Rivette film, the original 12.5-hr version of Out 1: Noli Me Tangere, which has only screened a handful of times since its 1971 debut. [the 4.5-hr cut, titled Out 1: Spectre, gets a little more play.] Save the date(s), because it’s coming to the AMMI’s Rivette retrospective in November.
An Elusive All-Day Film and the Bug-Eyed Few Who Have Seen It [nyt]
The World Trade Center According To Garp
“D.C. at Low Risk of Attack, Federal Agency Says”
– headline on the front page of today’s print edition of the Washington Post, an article about why cutting DHS funds to DC and NYC by 40% is just fine.
Meanwhile, Brett Ratner’s Going, “Dude, I Could SO Kick Michael Bay’s Ass.”
I already added X3 to the pile of sequel-sequels that I won’t see [lessee, there’s Matrix 3, Star Wars 3, Godfather 3, Police Academy 3…], but that doesn’t mean I don’t love reading the reviews.
Take Walter Chaw’s review, for example, at Film Freak Central: “…an example of what can happen when a homophobic, misogynistic, misanthropic moron wildly overcompensates…
…It’s Michael Bay’s Schindler’s List…”
X-Men: The Last Stand review by Walter Chaw [filmfreakcentral.net via goldenfiddle]
if you’re reading this, my server migration went ok
there are still some bugs to be squashed, but in the mean time, please let me know if anything looks wildly out of whack…
thanks,
greg
oh yeah, where are all the pictures?? brb
Script Notes From WHP
What we need in this scene is a very dramatic showdown over separation of powers. Perhaps we could all pretend to argue amongst ourselves over some picayune case, preferably one that involves a corrupt Louisiana Democrat. That way, not only do we get to look concerned over separation, Hastert gets to look separate, and Gonzales gets to look principled [maybe he could even threaten to resign.]
Then while that’s going, we can get provide cover for getting Hayden–who was behind the big executive branch abrogation of co-equal government in the first season–confirmed and still not have him have to answer to Congress for anything about it. AND we still get to hype a Democratic corruption investigation through the long weekend.
Smithsonian Sells Archive To CBS For $6 Million
Why is that not the headline for any of the stories about the Smithsonian’s exclusive TV programming deal with Showtime?
Smithsonian officials signed a 30-year contract with CBS Corporation’s Showtime division giving them rights of first refusal to any “commercial” films produced using the Smithsonian’s collection, archives or experts in any more than an “incidental” way.
Look back 30 years and ask yourself what changes have been wrought in the cable TV market, the Internet, and film production. How many of them did you foresee? How many of them did you write into your contracts in 1976?
Then ask yourself what changes might occur in the next 30 years. Look what’s happened to the distribution of independent and user-created video with YouTube and Google Video in just the last year, for example, the same year it took for Showtime and Smithsonian to negotiate their secret deal. And since the Smithsonian sale came to light in March, AOL has also announced its own video competitor to YouTube.
From Robert Rodriguez’ home studio operation and Soderbergh’s HD Bubble to Jonathan Caouette’s DV/iMovie Tarnation to Rocketboom to liveblogging to Matt Haughey’s Star Wars Kid remake, we’re in the early days of an independently-created video content revolution. How many tens of thousands of potential documentaries, features, and shorts and who-knows-what-kinds of programs could be created in the next three years, never mind the next thirty, if the national patrimony held by the Smithsonian were made available in the way that, say, the BBC is planning to do? They’re opening their entire archive for remixing and reuse by the people who paid for it–the citizens and residents of the UK.
Instead, the Smithsonian has locked its holdings up for thirty years with a single company–CBS/Showtime–and for what? The right to make six programs per year outside the agreement, a 10% stake in the Smithsonian On Demand service, and guaranteed payments of $500,000 a year, plus some unknown percentage of future profits or revenues.
At even the most conservative calculations, the present value of those $500,000 payments is around $7.9 million. At a more typical discount rate (the historical risk-free rate of 8%), Showtime sews up 30 years of exclusive use of the Smithsonian’s resources for a freakin’ $6 million.
So not only did Smithsonian executives sell out America’s patrimony to a single, giant media corporation, they sold it for practically nothing.
Is there no other way for the Smithsonian to bring in $500k/year? Did they look at any other options at all? Did they consider at all the benefits and costs beyond guaranteed annual payments? For screenplays it helps develop that get turned into actual films, The Sundance Institute asks for a donation of a fraction of a percent of the film’s production budget, and 1% net profit participation.
What would be result if the Smithsonian charged a 0.5% fee for each program it cooperates with? It signed an average of 180 media contracts/year between 2000 and 2005. With an average budget of even $250,000, that’s already $225,000/year. Now imagine thousands or tens of thousands of filmmakers using the Institute’s collections to make tiny-budget–but commercially viable–content in the near future we’re already beginning to imagine.
The Smithsonian executives’ dogged insistence that only a very few filmmakers are affected demonstrates an inexcusable lack of some combination of vision, integrity, or sense of responsibility, and it shortchanges both the Institute and the country to the exclusive benefit of CBS. From the standpoint of what we got–and more importantly, of what we lost–we, the American people, have been thoroughly ripped off.
Smithsonian Hands Over TV Contract [wapo]