For a couple of years before I left the corporate world, I had a film in my head: I’d interview my grandfathers–two men who lived within a couple of miles of each other yet who led rather different lives– seeking advice on whether I should get married and, if I did, whether I’d get divorced someday. I’d explore the extent to which our families affects us, the ways in which we are likely/prone/destined to become like our parents.
But there was an IPO, a huge gig in Europe, etc, etc, I kept putting it off. Make a little more money, I thought, and making films’ll be that much easier. I got engaged, so one question of the movie was already answered, but some big ones remained. Then in 2000, one grandfather passed away; followed, within a couple of months, by the other. I’d waited too long.
After my grandfathers’ deaths, completing their film became an imperative, a way of dealing with (our/my) their loss. I started shooting, not quite sure how it’d turn out. I figured it’d become clear, eventually. That was August 2001.
All through the Fall of 2001, I could barely bring myself to screen the tapes I’d shot. Indirect explorations of personal loss seemed a little, well, it seemed like there were bigger issues to deal with at the time. Souvenir November 2001 was, in part, a way to make sense of things; SJ03 is a first attempt at returning my attention to my earlier questions: how do our family and our past influence us? How do we deal day-to-day with someone’s absence?
With a little more mental bandwidth this summer, I started re-viewing the earliest footage we shot for my grandfathers documentary. A little time has helped, and I think I can see a way to cut some of it into a Souvenir-length short. In the mean time, however, I’ve had to revisit the whole idea of timing.
It seems the Andrew Marvell phrase, “world enough, and time” is popular among those who find themselves on the short end of the time stick. This week, I and my family have suddenly joined that crowd. And all the “understanding” I thought I’d gained gets wiped clean, and again, I feel the raw imperative that I have to do something. For a time, I feel like I have to focus, not on memory, but on living, before it is, again, too late.
On regime change I CAN support
Last week, I stopped by a party to celebrate the first issue of Artforum under its new editor, Tim Griffin, who I’ve known and admired for years, ever since he was edited the late Artbyte with ICA Philadelphia’s Bennett Simpson. (For some of their collaboration that stayed online, check out the great show they curated at Apex Art in 1999, too).
Combined with Eric Banks‘ impending relaunch of Bookforum, I think there’s some good art readin’ to be had. [Subscribe here or here.]
How can I be sure? Well, Tim started by putting a photo by my boy, Roe Ethridge, on the cover. Roe’s work rocks; I’m a huge fan, even though, in the headshot he did for my Souvenir press kit, I don’t look anything like Beck, Andrew W.K., or Fischerspooner.
WTC Plan Revisions revisited
Felix Salmon posted an admirable, in-depth, and probably a bit too optimistic review of the revised WTC site master plan. LMDC’s offering Libeskind’s whole 35Mb Powerpoint deck for download, so knock yourself out.
Then today, Felix tried to envision what the rebuilt site would look like from the ground rather than from the god-like aerial views we’re accustomed to seeing (Libeskind’s as susceptible to the god complex as any architect). Again, Felix seems a little optimistic. He rightly points out the difference between a master plan and an actual site plan.
But I still think Rafael Vinoly’s criticism of Libeskind’s proposal as “graphic design posing as architecture,” holds sway. I frankly fear the quality of the WTC site visitor’s experience is about as well planned as the peace in Iraq.
Meanwhile, over at TMN, Clay Risen elucidates some of the fundamental flaws and threats of the LMDC/PATH/Silverstein process. The primacy of maximum rentable square footage over city planning and architecture is not unique to New York. (As the mind-numbing sameness of Risen’s–and my, I should say–Washington DC’s built environment demonstrates.) But maybe it’s just understood that Real Estate rules in New York; Real Estate and Pataki. It’d take more than a terrorist attack to unseat that regime.
On Wacky Mormons
The Observer‘s Tim Cooper apparently gets to fly out to LA, hang with a gang of lapsed Mormon Utah filmmakers who’ve crossed the line from sketchy to audacious by sneaking their no-budget film’s press kit into studio executives’ offices, and call it work.
Entertaining read, at once inspiring and distasteful. And yes, I know what BRT means; it’s why Nu-Skin is based in Provo, Utah.
Advice for Shooting Authentically in New York City
Directors: If you are concerned when your writer proposes to populate your circa 2003 New York City streetscape with the following characters, please rest assured that these are not fantastical or implausible, but just the opposite. They are as real as real gets.
1) An older man in a yellowing undershirt and trousers carrying a large zither many blocks from the nearest zither repair shop or flea market.
2) A younger woman in an ever-so-slightly too-small Chanel tanktop and slacks, with large (Chanel, obviously) sunglasses on her needs-a-touchup blonde hair, Jimmy Choo shopping bags in the crook of her tanned arm, screaming into a tiny cell phone nestled gingerly between her french manicured nails and her made up face, “Well then I AM a bad dog mommy, because I still have to go to Barney’s!”
On Two Things in Texas
But not the two things I’ve heard are in Texas: Austin Chronicle Editor Louis Black talks with Tim McCanlies, the man behind the smartly written, wonderfully animated and woefully underrated The Iron Giant and the just-opened-in-Austin Secondhand Lions.
And Marc Savlov talks with Elizabeth Avellan, the quiet sane-sounding producer behind Robert Rodriguez’ films, including the recent Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Note: she’s also his wife. [via GreenCine]
Looking at The Sun
You know how, on a cloudless afternoon, when you’re working in your orange grove, or driving your airboat in search of alligators, or maybe settling into lounge chair with a just-before-five cocktail on your unusually prominent, screened-in veranda–which the gal over in the developer’s office calls an “outdoor room,” but which, to the unindoctrinated northern eye, really looks like the marmoset habitat at the zoo, just minus the trees–and, for a fleeting instant, the glint of the sun reflecting off the belly of a jet flying north at 41,000 feet catches your eye and causes you to look up?
To a man on that plane, for a few minutes, anyway–at least three, but not more than five, it’s really hard to say when it began, since staring out the window is a somewhat novice, absentminded activity to which the man, a very frequent flier, rarely resorts, unless it’s a flight going into LaGuardia around magic hour, in which case he hopes the approach is across Brooklyn if he’s in A/C and up the Hudson if he’s in D/F (and yes, in addition to the Delta Shuttle, which offers but one class of service, there are planes where the first class seats are lettered A/C and D/F, so you can’t jump to the conclusion that the guy’s always flying coach, poor bastard, even if this particular plane is operated by an airline called Song, which is Deltan for “Southwest,” and which eschews a first class section for all leather seats in colors–plums, pumpkins, chartreuses and AOL blues–that signal “edgy” and “hip” and “out of the box” in the suburban Atlanta corridors of brand management power, corridors where the same self-defeating imperative to prove one’s corporate coolness explains locals’ fervor for “Hotlanta, which is a lot like New York. Really.” and the commissioning of flight crew uniforms from their daughters’ must-have bag designer Kate Spade, which are, with an enthusiastic lack of awareness, bespangled with Office Space-style “flair”), not that either side will offer a view this trip, what with his plane flying either over, around, through, or into a hurricane, a phenomenon which looks stunning from the international space station but which is turns the plane’s rows of windows into more than enough lightboxes to preview simultaneously every slide of every grandchild of every tanned, facelifted, tennis-braceleted busybody on this plane–that glint is revealed to be a perfectly round, white reflection of the sun itself, which pans across the dark green Evergladian landscape 41,000 feet below, like a helicopter searchlight on Cops, only much faster and wider and in daylight (by definition, duh), or like the moon, hanging low enough on the horizon when you drive along the unlit freeway at night that it ducks behind trees, warehouses, and billboards.
Supply Side Jesus
[via BoingBoing] Al Franken’s book includes a comic strip of Supply Side Jesus, which is now online at Buzzflash. It’s pretty hilarious, but, in the grand SNL tradition, it peters out toward the end (and I don’t mean St Peter, either).
I’ve heard Franken shilling for the book on the radio; sometimes, he’s hilarious, sometimes, he’s only nominally funny. He’s certainly funnier than James Woods, but the left still needs some better humor to break out of its little pity party. Less O’Reilly idiot-bashing, more of the geniuses who gave John Ashcroft his own soundtrack.
When you really want to write
Last weekend, at the Newport wedding of some art world friends, almost everyone at our table turned out to be a writer of something: novels, non-fiction books, plays, screenplays articles (PowerPoint doesn’t count). Other writers:
Clare Morrall, whose fifth novel was the first one published (by a tiny press, in a first run of 2,000), has just been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Louisa Young tells how she gave up her journalism career to become a novelist after an inspiring encounter with Johnny Cash. “”You have to be what you are,” Cash told her. “Whatever you are, you gotta be it.”
The New Yorker Festival is this weekend, about which Roger Angell states, “Writers should not sit alone and tremble in the dark.” The Festival, of course, features writers sitting together, on stages, trembling in the dark, and guiltily enjoying their sojourn in fandom.
When four Soderbergh links in a week are not enough:
Get the greg.org e-commerce fire hose ready*. I’m wrapping up Soderbergh’s book, Getting Away With It, and I’ve rather liked it. Makes me want to see Schizopolis, one of the movies he angsts over in his journal entries. Trouble is, it’s only been available on VHS, until now. According to Amazon, Criterion will release Schizopolis on Region 1 DVD October 14.
* Just an update on the pressure the greg.org e-commerce fire hose exerts: Amazon showed three copies of Soderbergh’s book when I called “dogpile!” Now they show four. My endorsement appears to have caused someone to return the book. Now let’s see if we can strangle this DVD in its crib.
K Street: Pushing the Metrosexualist Agenda
A friend showed me a website for a DC spa that was so hilariously and transparently metrosexual, I almost posted it here last week (at the risk of either reigniting the whole tired metrosexual discussion, or, far more likely, being woefully behind the curve). But I resisted.
Until I saw the Grooming Lounge make a huge, sponsor-like appearance on tonight’s premiere episode of K Street. [F’rinstance, the Lounge pitches a manicure with this butched up rationale: “After all, your mitts are the first thing you offer a prospective boss or wife.”] Then within minutes, the character appears in Thomas Pink, the source of dandy’s shirts now that Britches is no more.
Forget all my speculation about Trent Lott’s cynical opposition to K Street: he’s just shoring up his rough-handed, unibrow-sporting anti-metrosexual base.
K Street: A Man with a Camera
HBO’s K Street is shot in DV and makes the most of the saturated blues (outdoor) or yellows (indoor) that come from shooting with available light. Even though the processes are very different, the photography is reminiscent of Traffic. That’s because director Steven Soderbergh used the same cinematographer–one Peter Andrews–on both projects.
On the Traffic DVD, Soderbergh criticizes Andrews’ work, wondering aloud why someone didn’t fire him. Still, Andrews is credited with the camera work on every Soderbergh film since then. Surprising? Hardly. Peter Andrews is Soderbergh. [FYI, Mary Ann Bernard, who edited of Solaris, is Soderbergh, too.]
This nameplaying is amusing but pales in comparison to Robert Rodriguez, who does (and credits himself with) seemingly every above- and below-the-line job on his films. But it takes on added significance for K Street. When Trent Lott warns ominously of “chaos if we have film crews setting up all over the place [aka Capitol Hill],” he’s essentially banning a man with a camera.
[The Times‘ Allessandra Stanley is unimpressed with the show. She tries to pre-spin it into irrelevance with a too-studied, too-jaded disdain for spin and fictionalizing that sounds about as believable as some of the show’s one-take, improvised dialogue.]
Alternate Side Parking just got easier
NEWS FLASH: At least it’s news to me. Just a few minutes ago, this guy changed the alternate side parking sign outside my window. Turns out the no parking period has been cut from three hours to 1.5, which, frankly, rocks.
According to 311, the Dept. of Sanitation is in charge of Street Cleaning Regulations, and last month, they started rolling out 90 minute streetcleaning. So now, they’re in place in Canarsie and the upper east side. Go figure.
“The Real World: Washington” hits a snag
Apparently, only real lobbyists have unfettered access to the halls of power.
TMN points to a Roll Call story that the Trent Lott, chairman of the Senate Rules Committee has deemed shooting of Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney’s new HBO series K Street a “commercial or profit-making purpose” and banned them from using any Capitol locations.
One solution: get the crew–and the talent– some press passes and slap some CNN logos on those cameras. The show’s on-the-run, “shoot and air it” schedule is designed to make it an influential voice in the real world’s political debates. If things go according to HBO’s plan, DC’s power elite would start spending their Sundays parked with George Clooney instead of George Stephanopoulos.
Or maybe the solution’s so obvious, it takes the subtlety-free Lott to point it out. After all, K Street is about lobbying, that dark hotel bar of an industry* where “politics as usual” chats up “commercial and profit-making” before they head off to bed together.
K Street features cameos from real politicians, including–according to the report–John McCain, Hilary Clinton, and Orrin Hatch–senators who were, coincidentally, the #1, 2, and 5 recipients of cable TV industry campaign contributions in the 2000 election year. McCain and Clinton each got well over $100k, and continue to get mad money from cable. Lott was #9, with $20,500, and he hasn’t gotten a dime since. You do the math.
Rather than a challenge unique to shooting in Washington, Lott’s disruption tactics are business as usual. If anything, they’re similar to problems the LA film industry’s already familiar with: extortion artists who follow film crews around with leaf blowers, angling for a few hundred bucks to go away. How’d they address that problem? By getting the Calif. state senator from Warners and Disney Burbank to introduce a bill that bans the disruption of location filming. I have a feeling this’ll work out just fine.
* The seduction scene between George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in Soderbergh’s Out of Sight is one of the greatest sex scenes ever. Read my posts about it here and here.
Ellsworth Kelly on Ground Zero
Ground Zero, Ellsworth Kelly, 2003, collage. image:nytimes.com
The reconstructed text of a letter from Ellsworth Kelly to the Times‘ architecture critic, Herbert Muschamp:
“On October 19, 2001, I wrote a letter to you (that I never sent) in response to an article in The New York Times which discussed the controversy of what was to be planned for the `Ground Zero’ space, asking artists and others for their opinions. (Two artists, Joel Shapiro and John Baldessari urged that no building be erected at the site,and the architect Tadao Ando made a similar proposition.)
“At that time, my idea for the World Trade Center site was a large green mound of grass. (When I saw the aerial photograph of the site on the cover of the Aug. 31 Arts & Leisure section of the Times, [which accompanied art critic Michael Kimmelman’s article, not Muschamp’s. Go figure. -greg.org]) I was excited to see the site from this vantage point. I was inspired to make a collage of my idea for the space, which I am sending you.
“I feel strongly that what is needed is a ‘visual experience,’ not additional buildings, a museum, a list of names or proposals for a freedom monument. (These are) distractions from a spiritual vision for the site: a vision for the future.”
The collage will go on view at the Whitney, which has a show through November titled “Ellsworth Kelly: Red, Green, Blue,” of work from 1959-65.
Tadao Ando’s proposal, meanwhile, was inspired by a Japanese burial mound.
John Baldessari (via NYTimes, 9/30/01):
“I don’t think anything should be built. The site should be a park. It’s an insane idea because the site is going to be an office, because the business of America is business.”
I can’t find Joel Shapiro’s idea online, but this year, Joel Shapiro collaborated with Vinci Hamp Architects on a WTC Memorial proposal.