You Gotta Fight. For The Right. Angle.

The Beastie Boys handed out 50 video cameras to fans at a November 2004 MSG concert, and have edited the footage they shot into a concert documentary called Awesome! I F***ing Shot That!:

The film will cost the Beastie Boys about $1.2 million when the sampling fees are added in; the band returned all the Hi-8 Sony cameras (a step above a typical camcorder) to the stores where they were bought, in some cases for a full refund.

The film debuts Saturday at Sundance and comes out in March. They’re promoting it by playing the Park City launch party for MySpace’s filmmaker community.
This Is Not Spinal Tap: A Concert Film by Fans [nyt]

Music. And. The Spoken. Word.

I’ve heard this recording many times before, but I’ve never seen the video. Let me tell you, this is right up there with Leonard Nimoy’s “Bilbo Baggins for President” music video.
The great thing is, the artist, Shatner, still stands by his work, unfazed by the Priceline-era ironists. His album of spoken-word covers and collaborations, Has Been, produced by Ben Folds is deeply serious. It’s the Shatnerian equivalent of Johnny Cash’s Rick Rubin-produced Cash, with a little Sinatra Duets thrown in for good measure.
That said, I notice there are no Elton John-related tracks on the album; I hope this “Rocketman” performance isn’t the reason why.

“Rocketman,” by William Shatner, c. 1978 [youtube via gawker]

Bernadette Corporation Berlin Film Studio Boondoggle

I’m a fan of Bernadette Corporation, so even though it’s not about results but about process, I’m interested to see what came out of their film gig in Berlin. That’s where they ran Pedestrian Cinema, a temporary production center for DV and any other creative medium they saw fit to trot out. As they put it,

Each day, Pedestrian Cinema will confront the question of fabricating itself. Is it to be based on history, dramatize the everyday, be documentary-like and specific, or metaphoric and abstract? At the same time, the film studio turns to debates internal to the medium, deciding to re-examine everything proper to cinema (shot, sequence, frame, sound, actors’ bodies, time, speaking, space, light, montage, etc.). These could be exercises, investigations, and fragments that result from meeting a new actor, a series of interviews turning into monologues, and so on. The activity presented to the public will not be limited to digital film, there could also be a newsletter, live performances, music, drawings, or sculpture.

While production cost barriers are falling enough to make a year of “shoot whatever, we’ll see” feasible, the distribution bottleneck remains. BC’s chosen the arts institutional channel to screen and exhibit their work. So far, pieces have been shown at Frieze in October, and as part of a BC retrospective [which just closed] at Witte de With artspace in Rotterdam [smart people, nice place]. And Chrissie Iles put PC on two lists she made: a ten best for 2005 list for Artforum–and the Whitney Biennial.
Pedestrian Cinema proposal [bernadettecorporation.com]

When You’re A Nail, Everything Looks Like A Hole

A tabloid summary of Herbert Muschamp’s long essay on 2 Columbus Circle: back in the day
AbEx: straight
Historicism, Pop: gay
Museum of Modern Art: straight
Gallery of Modern Art [aka 2 Columbus]: gay
But didn’t AbEx evangelizer Frank O’Hara and modernist architect Philip Johnson also work at MoMA? And hasn’t Muschamp talked about what a great pickup joint MoMA was in the 70’s?
Maybe it’s not a question of straight and gay, HM, but butch and femme. Or maybe, you know, it’s you, Herb. All I know is, Muschamp’s architecture writing has totally blossomed since he came out of that Times arch. critic closet of his. It’s a lifestyle choice [sic] we should all support.
The Secret History of 2 Columbus Circle [nyt]

Kris or Julie? Which Angel Is John McCain?

bananas_darth_angels.jpgBecause it matters FAR more than you know.
You have to be a certain age to remember the shock and confusion of 1977. That was when, just as Farrah postermania had crested, America turned on the TV one Wednesday night, only to find that Jill Munroe had been replaced by her harder, kind of meaner-looking, equally cop [but not, alas, equally hot] cousin Kris. [You cry nepotism? cronyism? family connections? Whatever, Kris did hold down the job longer than Jill ever did.]
It was the most audacious swap out since the whole Two Darrins Affair, and it worked. Once. But the producers got cocky, sloppy, fat and weary, and Charlie’s Angels lost its way. When Leonard Goldberg & Aaron Spelling needed another smart one after Sabrina left, they first tried Tiffany Welles and, inexplicably, Julie Rogers with no success. People had had enough.
It seems totally obvious to me that the incumbency is too valuable an electoral advantage for Karl Rove, the White House’s Aaron Spelling, to pass up. And so the question is not if Dick Cheney will give America another “Waitaminnit, where’s Farrah??” shock, or even when [although it’ll be some time two years-and-a-day from the start of Bush’s second term and the 2008 election, with Plame, torture, spying, impeachment probabilities, and the 2006 election outcome helping a bit.] but who?*
McCain? Rice? Frist [hah]? Graham?
There are two reasons I bring this up now: One was yet another report of Dick Cheney’s health problems. The other was the screening last evening of the most comically bad Bond movie EVER [or at least until the one with Wayne Newton in it] last night on TNT: A View To A Kill, which was notable only for Grace Jones and for proving that, yes, Tanya Roberts could do worse than Sheena and Beastmaster. The last thing America needs right now is a Tanya Roberts presidency.
The Democrats’ big problem is not that, once it gets on the air, a series can almost always manage to push out one viable spinoff: Laverne & Shirley, The Jeffersons, Melrose Place, Frasier. That’s Quayle/Mondale-era thinking. The real problem is if Karl Rove is not Aaron Spelling-evil, but Dick Wolf-evil. As if there wasn’t enough interchangable Law & Orders already.
* well, it ain’t gonna be you, you out-of-touch intellectual seeking to bust me for showin’ my connection with the Amercan people by avoidin’ the use of ‘whom’.

From The Mixed Up Files Of Mr JT LeRoy

Although he IS credited with the screenplay for Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, I confess to not being a fan of JT LeRoy. Not that I’ve ever read the work, mind you. [Hold that thought.]
Recently the authenticity of his identity, his personal story, and the authorship of his works has been called into question, and reporters have started asking if LeRoy is a hoax, a construct, a collaborative, an impostor whose gritty, wrenching, tawdry, and celebrated persona was somehow overshadowing the work itself. Which is funny, because that’s what soured me on his writing right out of the gate–the barrage of hip and celebrity endorsements, most of which came from people who, shall we say, may not be best known for their literary tastes.
Anyway, that doesn’t make Guardian reporter Laura Barton’s deliberately roadtrippy search for the “real” JT LeRoy and her account of her night out with LeRoy’s posse any less interesting. If you like that kind of thing, this is definitely the kind of thing you’ll like.

Who’s that boy/girl? [guardian]
Previously: Van Sant on greg.org
[1/9 update: The jig sounds up to me. In the NYT, Warren St. John identifies the half-sister of one of JT Leroy’s supposed mentor/saviors, Savannah Knoop, [at right] as the real-world stand-in. And then he examines travel expense reports for a JTL story for the Times, which all but confirms that the writing was done by one of these saviors, too: Laura Albert. The Guardian’s Laura Barton thinks that Albert is also Emily, JTL’s friend who took her around LA.]

Syriana: The Screenplay

Warner Bros. has released a PDF version of Stephen Gaghan’s script for Syriana, which we just saw last night. A very intense film, the story is perfectly matched with the fragmented, multi-threaded structure. In another filmmaker’s hands, this movie would have repeatedly ground to a halt for some nonsensical expositional set piece speeches.
Now I’m looking forward to seeing how Gaghan did it.

Syriana-Screenplay.pdf [warnerbros.com via bb]

2005 In A Norwegian Wood, 2005, dur. 3’40”

eirikso_year.jpg

All through 2005, Eirikso shot photographs out of his window in Norway at random times and on random days. Then he merged them into a single, 3.5 minute or so movie using Photoshop and Sony Vegas Video.
See the film, download the film [which he also output to 720p HD, for television viewing], and read about how he made the film at eirikso.com.

The Video Of The Seasons In Norway [eirikso.com via boingboing]

I Guess It Depends On What You’re Searching For

Back in the day (Feb. 2002, that is), I requested clearance to use “Google” as a verb and to show search results screenshots in my first short. The head of Google’s marketing sent me an email saying it was a-ok, and wishing me good luck.
Now it turns out Google’s founders Larry and Sergey bankrolled half the sub-$1mm budget for Stanford friend and Dreamworks CG animator Reid Gershbein’s first live-action feature film, Broken Arrows. The fils is described as “the story of a man who loses his pregnant wife in a terrorist attack and then takes a job as a hit man.” [Clearly, I was searching Google for the wrong thing. From now on, please formulate your requests appropriately.]
According to Gershbein’s production blog, they just screened a rough cut for team members last week, and they’re starting audio, effects, and music editing next month.
Google team sets sights on big screen [sfgate via defamer]
Broken Arrows production blog [brokenarrowsthemovie.com]

First You Get The Money, Then You Get The Power

As the year winds to an end, I think I can officially say it: the art world is whack. It’s all about the Benjamins, and I don’t mean Walter.
I was going to post a diatribe, but instead, I’ll just point out what I’ve already said in print: the small comparison I made between the ravenous fixation on Richard Prince’s appropriations and the parodic, poll-driven works of Komar & Melamid; my calling into question the credibility of a system [i.e., price] that persists in systematically discounting the influence, importance, and value of half the culture; a pair of artists’ self-serving embrace of that same system to overinflate the importance of their work; and the apparently unstoppable influence of the market on the conceptual underpinnings of an artist’s work after he’s gone.
Jerry Saltz hits on a lot of it in his great, biting end-of-year essay in the Voice this week. [I’m glad someone else will call BS on that hilariously embarassing Wizard of Oz photospread in Vogue last month. The idea that someone with a straight [sic] face asked the famously closeted Jasper Johns to be the Cowardly Lion? If I didn’t know how deadly serious the Vogue people took it, I’d say it was the awesomest slam ever of the whole artist-as-vapid-celebrity schtick since Francesco Vezzoli.]
Here’s hoping that in 2006, somehow the bubble will pop, the winds will change, and not too many of my friends’ livelihoods will suffer too much as a result; because I’m looking forward to seeing the art that comes out of it.

I Went To St George, Utah, And All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt

twu_tshirt.jpg
I was out of town for the holidays [anything big happen while I was gone?] Anyway, for one dollar, less than the price of a subway token, I scored this sweet Transit Workers Union commemmorative t-shirt at the D.I. [aka Deseret Industries, the Mormon-run version of Goodwill] in St. George, Utah.
Not sure if anyone’s ever even heard of the TWU, but I thought it’d be a real kick in the pants to wear this around town.

Have Yourself A Maysles Little Christmas

As I type this, the Maysles Brothers classic Grey Gardens is playing at MoMA. Unfortunately, I’m in the wrong time zone to see it, but watching those Crazy Edies suddenly seems like an excellent Christmas Eve tradition.
Meanwhile, I will be back in time for what would have been an awesome triple feature, if only they weren’t overlapping: sandwiched between the Maysles’s incredible documentary, Salesman [a business school in-class screening of which, for better or worse, set me on my filmmaking path] and Albert’s docu about the making of the Getty Center [worth watching just to see Richard Meier get so pissed at Robert Irwin] is Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, which was programmed, surprisingly, by Stephen Sondheim.
Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it, and to the rest of you, enjoy your Chinese food.
MoMA Film & Media screening schedule 16-31 Dec 2005 [moma.org]