On “Trolling for Trash”

Scott McClellan may have been more right than he knew yesterday. From the Washington Post:

The White House has been unable to produce peers from Bush’s service in Alabama. But Bill Burkett, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Texas National Guard, said in an interview with The Washington Post this week that he overheard a speakerphone call about Bush’s National Guard file in 1997, when Bush was Texas governor. Burkett said he was in a National Guard office when he overheard Joseph M. Allbaugh, then Bush’s chief of staff, tell an officer in reference to Bush’s military file that he “needed to make sure there was nothing to embarrass the governor.”
Burkett said he later witnessed some items from Bush’s file in the trash. [Emphasis mine, for now]

Calpundit has a lengthy transcript of an interview with Burkett, and corroborating comments from Burkett contemporaries in the Guard.
The domain name, trollingfortrash.com, was registered yesterday. I always thought “trawling for trash” was more correct, but I’m happy to wait a few months for Bill Safire’s column.

On Needing to Come Clean

Colin Farrell as Roland Bozz in Tigerland, image:tigerlandmovie.com

Apparently George Bush’s isn’t the only record being cleansed. Tell me if this story sounds familiar: after transferring to a southern backwater army base at the senseless height of the war, a charismatic Texan bad boy does everything he can to not get shipped off to Vietnam. I know what you’re thinking, but no. It’s from Colin Farrell’s first starring role, a little film called Tigerland.
The Tigerland script came from a couple of first-time writers, and premiered at the 2000 Toronto Film Festival. Shot in a mere 28 days with a handheld 16mm camera, for less than $10 million, Tigerland apparently has a gritty yet unassuming documentary-style feeling of authenticity. On the official website, the director cited both “Danish director Lars von Trier’s Dogma 95 [sic] movement” and Frederic Wiseman’s Titicut Follies as inspiration. Pretty good indie cred so far.
Reviews praised the solid, even powerful, performances, as well as the visceral camerawork of Matthew Labatique (Pi, Requiem for a Dream), and Rotten Tomatoes’ rating is a respectable 71%. Yet distribution for the film was so feeble (5 screens in NY/LA, 2 weeks, $140K US B.O.), reviewers as late as last spring were describing the film as “still unreleased.” [Details are on IMDb, it’s available on DVD, and you can rent it. Maybe they’re lazy reporters.]
Just another worthy indie that unfortunately failed to find an audience, you say? Maybe, except that the distributor who buried it in October 2000–during the height of the presidential election, mind you–was Rupert Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox. And the director? Joel Schumacher.
Now here’s a real scandal that demands immediate investigation: 1) Are these really the same people who made Phone Booth, and 2) did Joel Schumacher really make a decent movie?

“[Strauss] recently signed with William Morris for feature film and television representation.”

[via Gothamist] The Style Section article a few weeks ago where Neil Strauss plays wingman to some David Blaine wannabe named Mystery (Seriously. You think the Times didn’t factcheck something so goofy?) has been optioned by Columbia Pictures (along with a book based on the piece). The price? “In the low six figures.” Strauss will advise, but not adapt.

K Street: Who’s Acting Now?

Cheneyac Mary Matalin under oath in the Plame investigation, image: washingtonpost.com

For the ever-popular Law & Order, the producers mine today’s headlines for new story ideas. HBO’s K Street is just the opposite. Not in the “what, it blew and nobody watched it?” way you’re thinking, in the “life imitates art” way.
In one K Street plotline, the actress and former Cheneyac Mary Matalin worried about being investigated by the Feds for leaking a CIA operative’s identity. At the time, the subject was innocuous or implausible enough to pass the “no substance” filter that actual DC operatives ran their cameo appearances through. But last month, the Washington Post reports, Matalin and several other White House appointees were hauled before a grand jury to testify about who in the administration leaked a CIA operative’s identity. She even wore the same “passes for fashion in Washington” jacket for both gigs. (Hey Mary, I know the IRS now works for you now, but I hope you got a receipt for that thing. Not that HBO wants it back…)
How to tell the truth from the fiction, then? Easy. On K Street, Matalin’s lament rambled on (and on and on) over several episodes. In The Real World, her only line was, “I can’t comment.”

Anne Truitt Week

Since moving Modern Art Notes to Arts Journal, Tyler Green’s been demonstrating his critic-as-advocate chops, sometimes with a degree of acid that’d make even professional bee-atch Charlie Finch blush. He makes nice nice this week, though, by publishing brief excerpts daily from Anne Truitt’s Daybook. On top of simultaneously being a pioneer and stalwart contrarian of Minimalism, Truitt’s published journals are an unsurpassed window into the artistic process. Only Daybook is in print, but you can get the other volumes from ABEbooks.
Related: Truitt and Agnes Martin showing across the street from each other in Jan. 2003.
12/04 update: Mourning the loss of Anne Truitt.

19th Century War Reports from Harper’s

Since relaunching their website, Harper’s has been posting selections from their 140+year archive. For example, “Battle Gossip,” an 1861 column by Charles Nordhoff. In addition to vivid accounts of women in combat, Nordhoff writes about Napoleon III’s use of balloons for battlefield surveillance; correspondence with the enemy; and animals in war:

There are many instances of worn-out cavalry horses, sold out of the army and used in menial employments, remembering and obeying, years after, the sound of a regimental trumpet. At the battle of Waterloo some of the horses, as they lay on the ground, having recovered from the first agony of their wounds, commenced eating the grass about them, thus surrounding themselves with a circle of bare ground, the limited extent of which showed their weakness; others were noticed quietly grazing in the middle of the field, between the two hostile lines, their riders having been shot off their backs.

I Heart The Time Warner Mall

If you need me, I’ll be at the Time Warner Mall, getting in line for the escalator to Whole Foods, where I’ll be bellying up to New York’s only Jamba Juice.
“Whata Juice?” you say? Soon enough, you will be surrounded by seemingly rational people discussing the merits of Power-sized Bounce Back Blasts with Vita Boost. You can join in, or you can take your mall-snobbery and chain store disdain, grind it into a powder, dump it into your (Stick-in-the) Mud Truck coffee, plant your crabby ass on the IND, and slink home to watch Channel J.
Related:
“This is like a piece of Stamford in Midtown…It’s really nice that they brought the suburbs into the city.” [NYT]
Lockhart Steele, too, drinks the Kool-aid Jamba Juice
Felix Salmon worries rightly that this mall foretells the coming of a WTC Mall
Related to that:
“when they came for my greek-lookin’ coffee cups, I said nothing” [greg.org 7/02]

Come Unto “JESUS” (and Bring Me Some Milk Duds)

Jesus the Movie, in Africa, image:jesusfilm.orgIf the story in Mel Gibson’s The Passion sounds vaguely familiar, you won’t be surprised by the revelations in Franklin Foer’s article in the Times today. It apparently comes from a 1979 Warner Bros. movie called Jesus. [o Hollywood, remakes are like manna from heaven.] “JESUS” (the movie) has developed something of a cult following [sic].
Thanks to 300 earnest evangelicals at the Jesus Film Project who have translated it into 848 languages, and thousands of projector-and-generator-toting missionary/exhibitors who circle the globe, “JESUS” has become the centerpiece of a Rocky Horror Picture Show-style filmic conversion experience, albeit one where bread and wine replaces flying toast.
The distributor and original producer, Campus Crusade for Christ, claims that over 3 billion people have seen the movie. For those living in remote Andean and African villages, it was often the first film they’d ever seen. Foer points to Bro. Brian Helstrom’s unsubtly symbolic story of a screening in South Africa:

“‘You could see them physically jump back at the sight of the serpent tempting Jesus,’ he recalled. ‘When soldiers whip Jesus, you could hear grown adults crying.’ After Jesus’s death, but before his resurrection, a black South African missionary told the crowd that they had a chance to pray and to accept Christ. ‘He asked everybody who prayed to walk forward and come into light,’ Mr. Helstrom says. ‘One hundred forty-five people walked out of the darkness into light.'”

And within months, missionaries from the Church of Loew’s set up the bush country’s first multiplex, making it possible for Charlie’s Angels II: Full Throttle to be screened 35 times a day. Hallelujah.
I’m somewhere between troubled and pissed that film experience is so uncritically substituted for (or equated with) religious experience. There’s some serious bill of goods-selling going on here. When I was a missionary (for another demonination) in Japan, I ran across people whose names were on the Church baptism rolls but who had no interest in being Christian at all, any more than eating at a Mongolian BBQ would make them want to be Mongolian. Turns out that ten years earlier, some missionaries with more zeal than sense decided to overcome Japanese teenagers’ general religious apathy by starting a baseball league. After a season or two, they’d help out their cool American friends and climb into that pool there, and…well, what are friends for? Conversion may be embracing and emotionally powerful, but friendship ain’t religion, and neither is a tear-jerking movie.
I wonder, what does the Bible teach us on this subject? There’s the “render unto Caesar those things which are Caesar’s” thing, which should put the kibbosh on selling cheap, emotionally manipulative cinematic hat tricks based on techonological superiority as salvation. [Unrelated: I can totally picture Mel having a “render unto Caesar his points against the gross” clause in his distribution contract, btw.] But I have another verse in mind: “By their fruits ye shall know them,” or as they say in the picture business, “what else has he done?”
Jesus, it turns out, was an adaptation, or as its opening credits describe it, a “documentary taken entirely from the Gospel of Luke.” But Luke lost his story credit [Luke, baby, you need new representation. C-A-L-L M-E. -ed.] to Barnet Bain, who has gone on to produce such dubious religious schlock as The Apocalypse (starring Sandra Bernhard??) and the eternally punishing Robin Williams CG-hellfest, What Dreams May Come. Decidedly not funny.
Co-director Peter Sykes has even more to answer for at judgment day (not to be confused with T2: Judgment Day, which rocks. Somebody say amen!). Before turning to Jesus (The Movie) Sykes made, um, let me get this straight: Tell Me Lies, Demons of the Mind, and, um, Child of Satan. I mean, I know the well need no physician, but what in hell [sic] was the Campus Crusader behind the project thinking to hire this guy? And where exactly did they meet?
So Campus Crusade is the world’s biggest film distributor, the unsung McDonald’s of global evangelism–with over 3 billion saved–and Mel’s set to open his Passion on 2,500 screens. Whatever. As The Man Himself (verily) says (un)to us, “they have their reward.”

The Fog of War Re-enactors

Robert McNamara, Prof. Mark Danner, and Errol Morris at Berkeley, image: berkeley.edu

[via NYT] They’re putting the band back together, Elroy.
For the first time since The Fog of War was nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award, Robert McNamara and Errol Morris took their show on the road. They spoke at Berkeley Wednesday, the first time McNamara appeared at the school that led the anti-war movement in the Sixties. It’s also his and Morris’s alma mater.
The webcast is available on Berkeley’s site. [The discussion starts about 11 minutes into the stream.] Whatever else he does, McNamara demonstrates a frustrating but entertaining mastery of the art of answering the question he wants to, not the one he was asked.
Of course, it’s more frustrating when reports of the event miss the big story, perhaps because it involves another paper. The Times claimed that McNamara strenuously refused to comment on the current administration and its policies. That’s not news; he has refused 172 (by his count) journalists’ requests to comment on Bush and Iraq. But the climax of the evening’s discussion was about #173, an interview McNamara gave the Toronto Globe and Mail in Jan. where he revealed his mind in unambiguous terms.
McNamara told a Canadian audience that the lessons he learned in Vietnam (and wrote about in his 1995 memoir, In Retrospect) being ignored and directly contradicted in the present situation. But he told the Berkeley crowd, “What you want me to do is apply them to Bush. I’m not going to do it. You apply them to Bush” [much applause ensues]. Somewhere there’s a headline, “Architect of Vietnam War Condemns Bush’s War in Iraq” searching for a story.
Anyhoo, Errol Morris does very little talking, true to form. What would you ask him? Thta’s not a rhetorical question; I Author gregPosted on Categories interviews

My Worlds Collide: Scott Sforza Discovers Shipping Containers

Scott Sforza parking a Coast Guard cutter for Bush's speech, image: whitehouse.gov

No run-of-the-mill PowerPoint banners in South Carolina. No, the money shot of White House Productions’ primary mitigation show was clearly the Coast Guard cutter, positioned behind Bush’s podium.
GWB in Charleston in front of shipping containers, image: whitehouse.gov

Forget the boat, though, and go wide. Bush is addressing his crowd of extras in a mini-amphitheater made from shipping containers. This set is my pick for Sforzian Backdrop of The Week.
Related: posts about how I [inexplicably heart] shipping containers

Dust

Xu Bing, a Chinese artist whose frequently subtle engagement with opacity I admire, has installed a piece at Artes Mundi, an exhibition at the National Museum in Wales, made of dust the artist collected on September 11th in lower Manhattan.
Xu scattered the dust across the gallery floor and wrote a Zen poem in it with his finger,
“As there is nothing from the first,
Where does the dust collect itself?”
Several years ago at P.S. 1, Xu placed a giant vase of mulberry branches in the lobby, which were eaten by silkworms, whose cocoons gradually replaced the leaves.
Artes Mundi opens Saturday, (as) if you’re in Cardiff. They’re giving a big prize in order to get press coverage. Read Maev Kennedy’s profile of Xu in the Guardian .

To Be Filed Under “G” for “Good Ol’ Days”

Dramatis Personae: Blacktable, a website of a certain age; Gawker, who witnessed the event.
Setting: Writers hilariously mourn the recent decline of the New York Times‘ Monday write-in feature, Metropolitan Diary by imagining cute crosstown bus encounters that didn’t make it past the Diary’s new editors. [note: any similarities of to these anecdotes last year’s “Adam Gopnik’s Metropolitan Diary“ are purely due to the utter predictability of the MD format.]
The anecdotes I submitted to MD (both of which were published–Choire take note–for a fee of zero dollars per word) were written to highlight my own sophistication and cultural superiority in a suitably oblique way (e.g., “…As the exasperated waiter came out of the Carlyle dining room…” and “…where I overheard two Italians conversing about…”). The one time I recognized myself in someone else’s submission, I was making smartass comments on Canal about buying street turtles.