Ellsworth Kelly on Ground Zero

ellsworth_kelly_ground_zero_nyt.jpg
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.

ando_wtc_proposal.jpg

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.

Gabriel Orozco on PBS

Pi +3, 2002, Gabriel Orozco, image: pbs.org

[via Modern Art Notes] Nice, too brief info about Gabriel Orozco on the site for PBS’ Art:21 series. Tyler said the program segment was “a little too languid,” which sounds just about perfect for Orozco’s work.
The New Yorker entranceth and the New Yorker pisseth one off. The latter came last July, via critic Peter Schjeldahl’s flaccid reading of Orozco’s clay pieces at Documenta. Art:21 has images of a beautiful follow-up show at Chantal Crousel’s gallery in Paris, and I’m still happily entranced, staring at an earlier terra cotta piece sitting on the shelf next to me.

New Yorker on the WTC memorial and rebuilding

I’m a Paul Goldberger fan, and mad praise for his dogged reporting, following Daniel Libeskind around the country, but I’m not getting anything new from the profile in this week’s New Yorker. When I schmoozed him last spring, Goldberger talked with great relish about digging in and laying out the powerful forces shaping the WTC rebuilding process. But this article comes too late to illuminate Libeskind’s POV on the Silverstein-Childs hubbub, and too early to capture his reaction to the alterations and “fixes” that the Memorial finalists will inevitably introduce.
Contrast that with Louis Menand’s excellent profile on Maya Lin from last July, which the New Yorker just put online. Menand interprets some of Lin’s sensibilities a bit broadly, but re-reading this article shows him to be very prescient about (and possibly influential on) her quietly authoritative role in the WTC memorial process.
[Related: Get Maya Lin’s book, Boundaries, where she revisits her own work and inspirations.]

More on HBO Directors

I’m reading and enjoying Steven Soderbergh’s book, Getting Away With It, where he intermixes his self-hating journal entries and deeply interested conversations with Richard Lester, the director credited with “launching” the British New Wave. (He did The Beatles movies, The Three Musketeers, and other stuff. Fascinating, funny guy, though.)
Soderbergh tries on an authorial style, with David Foster Wallace-style, self-conscious footnotes [DFW-lite], but basically, he plays a very well-informed fan. But now that he’s in production on the first episode of K Street (which airs Sunday on HBO, no pressure), these discussions with Lester about how they used to make TV shows and movies in the “old” days seem to be bearing fruit.
[The K Street site has an “online journal” totally spinning the party line, written, I think, by the Ari Fleischer character. It’d be interesting to see if they start leaking things as the show progresses.]
There are only three copies of the book on Amazon right now, and it’s ranked 58,458th. Why not buy it? Turn the high-pressure hose of e-commerce that is greg.org readership on it, and see if we can break 5,000?

Toronto Film Festival: the SportsCenter Version

The National Post has a nice highlights reel, with reports from the field (and locker rooms, apparently) at the Toronto Film Festival. Some of it’s like listening to cricket scores on the BBC, though; you can recognize the language as English, but you can’t understand WTF it means.
One thing I do understand, though is the mention of met-on-the-set couple, Christina Ricci and Adam Goldberg, who are premiering their film I Love Your Work, which was co-produced by Josh & Co at Cyan Pictures. Josh and ILYW are getting some good buzz and press; and they’re posting festival updates on their production company weblog, cyanpictures.com.
Also, from BoingBoing, comes a Festival groupblog from the FilmNerds. Public screenings (and an enthusiastic, thoughtful audience base) are one of Toronto’s greatest strengths, and these four guys apparently have over six years of festival experience…between them. Hmm. If you’re looking for reviews with a sweeping historical context, I suggest not running those numbers. These are fresh, unjaded–and Canadian–perspectives. You’ve been warned.

Ozu in New York

Wim Wenders' Tokyo-ga, image: filmlinc.com

I know Venice is barely over and Toronto’s just getting started, but I’m already getting pumped for the New York Film Festival in October. Is “pumped” the right reaction for an Ozu centennial retrospective? All 36 films by the greatest Japanese filmmaker ever will screen at Lincoln Center.
Also on the schedule: A 2-day symposium on Ozu’s work and influence (Oct. 11 and 12) and, batting cleanup, Wim Wenders’ 1985 Tokyo Picture, his filmed diary exploring Ozu’s world.

On the Directors of HBO Series

I should have mentioned it earlier–maybe when I asked for DVD rental suggestions–but HBO’s Band of Brothers is one of the best series I can think of. (Except that I can also think of Kieslowski’s Decalogue and Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, which are probably the #1 and #2 greatest “mini-series” of all time; that’s not the category we’re dealing with here. Decalogue has been re-released on DVD, by the way. Run, don’t walk.)
Last week, I watched Part 5, the one installment I missed on TV. It was pretty remarkable, easily bearing the strongest directorial stamp. “Crossroads” was what it sounds like, a transitional story, notable for lacking (until the end) any of the “gotta take that ridge” straightforwardness typical of a war film. Instead, the story focused on the challenges Winters faced off the front; incoming mortars replaced by barrages of mundane paperwork and meetings. Even so, a complex mix of recollections and revealing subplots were woven together in a fairly complex structure. It could have been confusing, but it wasn’t.
From the opening scene, the director let you know something was different. The handheld camerawork was unexpected, with an intensity that clearly referenced the D-Day scene in Saving Private Ryan. And in a later battle scene, the handheld camera follows a soldier on a dead run (no pun) across a battlefield. The SPR allusion was no coincidence. Of course, Steven Spielberg was an executive producer of BoB, but Part 5 was the only episode directed by the other exec producer–and veteran of the D-Day scene–Tom Hanks.
The giddy pablum on HBO’s site, actors gushing about how great it was that Tom Hanks was directing them is exactly what “Crossroads” overcomes. Maybe it’s too directed, too edited to blend in with the more conventionally directed installments, but it feels like Hanks had something to prove, and for the most part, he did.

OY! Recommend me some movies! [update: the Mob has spoken]

My DVD rental queue is down to dangerously low levels. GreenCine, by the way, not the big red DVD subscription service Gawker sold it’s soul to (I’m sure they used the money to buy an expanding T-Rex sponge. Chum…p).
Most recently in the machine:

  • Punch-Drunk Love (Ouch. I had to stop, finally. Maybe my stereo settings were wrong, but it was so assaultive… the Bonus Disc is on the way, though.)
  • Soderbergh’s Solaris (underappreciated. re James Cameron’s commentary:he’s deeply, annoyingly, and predictably shallow. ).
  • Ghost World (Didn’t need to watch it since I didn’t end up interviewing Scarlett Johannson),
  • Virgin Suicides (Did need to watch it, because I did end up… wait, I’m getting ahead of my self. But I will say, it’s a little weird to have your mom shoot your Making Of video.)
  • Funeral, Juzo Itami’s dark comedy. (About as subtle as Japanese overacting gets, but the camerawork is bizarrely tight, and the DVD transfer absolutely sucks.)
  • Thirteen Conversations about Something or Other (If you’re gonna make a feature that interweaves several independent episodes together, you probably should watch one, right?)
    Update: Yow, thanks. I should be asking for stuff more often. The results–minus the ones that aren’t available on DVD–like Hearts of Darkness (also shot by Sofia Coppola’s mom) and Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho–ones that weren’t available on DVD–like GVS’s first feature, Mala Noche–and a couple of obviously dumb ideas–Everyone’s seen Pearl Harbor, duh–are below.
    Also, I put them all in an Amazon List, “movies greg.org readers told me to watch #1,” if you feel like watching along. Thanks again, and keep’em coming.
  • Before Night Falls
  • Dog Day Afternoon
  • Dogtown & Z Boys (Avary‘s working on the feature remake with David Fincher)
  • Double Indemnity (a staple)
  • e-dreams (ahh, Kozmo.com)
  • Office Space (always good)
  • Kundun (already on the list, actually)
  • Last Temptation of Christ (how timely)
  • Goncharov (1973) (Scorsese’s complicated but most under-appreciated work)
  • Lumiere
  • One-Hour Photo (someone watched the the VMA, or the Johnny Cash video)
  • Raging Bull (ok, enough with the Scorsese)
  • Secretary
  • The Wind Will Carry Us (actually, the rec. was Abbas Kiarostami, so I picked this one about extremely rural Iran, which led me to…)
  • Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life, a remarkable-sounding 1924 silent film about shepherds in rural Iran, which led me to…
  • The Saltmen of Tibet, and all on my own, I had the idea of rewatching Errol Morris’ Fast, Cheap & Out of Control

Things I want to write about, given world enough (or time)

  • Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycling through the red states. C1‘s playing in Boise, where it was shot (and Barney’s hometown), and C3 has apparently won the Strangest Movie Shown In Nashville Award. (Heads up, bootleggers: The Tennessean’s Kevin Nance has a screener tape!)
  • Gerry reviewed in the Guardian (“If you can imagine Dude, Where’s my Car? by Samuel Beckett”). Casey Affleck writes about working–as an actor, editor, and writer–with Gus Van Sant. Net net, this means the DVD is still years away, I guess…
  • Film, Samuel Beckett’s only screenplay (besides the aforementioned DWMC?), in which a man (Buster Keaton) is pursued by an only occasionally perceived camera. Film at The Modern World. Up to 30 of you can buy it on VCD from the Czech Republic. via Dublog
  • One 9/11 pseudo-docu too many, reviewed and excoriated in the Voice. (Still, it’s a good argument for getting HBO; this horrible-sounding Bushagiography is on Showtime.) Related: Gail Sheehy’s impressive Observer article about the WTC widows who are holding the administration’s obfuscatory feet to the fire over details of the 9/11 AM timeline.
  • The Hirshhorn Museum, reviewed by Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes fame.

    • WTC Memorial Space to Hold Unidentified Remains

    Not new information, just more of it. From the NYTimes, the unidentified remains of those killed at the World Trade Center will be preserved in the hope that future technology will make identification possible. The remains will be interred at the memorial:

    “Right now I can look up at the sky and talk to him, but I can’t go anywhere and reflect on his life,’ said Lorie Van Auken, 48, whose husband, Kenneth, was on the 105th floor of the north tower on Sept. 11. His birthday is in a few days, and she said she yearns to have a place to visit on that day. “I go outside and I don’t know where to look for him. You feel lost. This would give me somewhere to go.”

    On Writing A Screenplay About A Writer

    In the Guardian, British docu maker John Brownlow tells about the tricky business of writing a screenplay about Sylvia Plath, one of the most fought-over writers of the modern era. With duelling critics, conflicting biographies, testy literary estates controlling the rights to Plath’s and Ted Hughes’ poetry, and an ending even Hollywood can’t spin, it sounds like an impossible task. Oh, and “there had to be humor.” Humor and a head in the oven.
    Brownlow ended up completely re-researching Plath’s and Hughes’ stories to find a bearable story, and, after realizing the couple didn’t “speak in verse” with each other, he says, “[I] cut dialogue and if I couldn’t cut it I made it as banal as I could, while ensuring the situations were dramatic.”
    His writing war story is long, maybe not really of general interest, but if you write, you won’t want to miss it. Two good lessons: 1) Brownlow is a huge fan of treatments and outlines and the discipline they impose on the writer’s story, and 2) he wants to direct.
    Interestingly, I just rewatched Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris on DVD, and in his commentary (with the deeply shallow James Cameron), he talks about cutting and cutting dialogue, too, in order to reveal the characters’ emotional subtexts. From what he says, I think he greatly improved the movie (which I liked better the second time, btw). Soderbergh tells people if they don’t like the pacing of the first ten minutes, they should leave, “because it’s not getting any better.”

    WTC Station’s Master in Slate

    Heritage Square, 1992, Santiago Calatrava, image:Galinsky.com
    BCE Galleria/Heritage Square, Toronto
    1992, Santiago Calatrava, image: Galinsky.com

    On Slate, Christopher Hawthorne writes about Santiago Calatrava, architect of the transportation hub, um, slated for the WTC site. Hawthorne’s got good architectural sensibility, but I think he’s wrong to worry about Calatrava ignoring the context of his projects. True, many of Calatrava’s flashiest designs look like they’re sitting on a giant dining table, like an overwrought centerpiece, but that’s what he’s been asked to do.
    While I haven’t been to the Milwaukee Museum, Calatrava’s pavilion may signal a Bilbaoist nadir; pictures of it make it look both pointless and useless, like the pyramid without the Louvre. But Toronto’s Heritage Square is one of the best public spaces in town. Calatrava carved it out/knitted it together from the interstitial spaces of various downtown buildings, and it’s beautiful. Even if it doesn’t blend in, his Zurich station, too, inhabits its site well.

    Beyond Bruce Schneier’s Beyond Fear

    On BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow calls Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World “one of the most important texts of the decade.” I’m pretty sure he means the decade starting in 2000, (or, say, September 11, 2001), not the last ten years.
    Schneier‘s a/the security expert, and Beyond Fear, Cory says, “utterly demystifies security” for a non-technical audience. My bet is, it guts every Ashcroftian rights-and-power grab in the name of security like a trout on a church griddle. [I know, Ashcroft is so not Catholic, so the fish thing’s not applicable. Work with me here, people.]
    I’m using Schneier’s landmark text, Applied Cryptography, as a reference for my animated musical script, of all things. After all, the video store’s bargain bins are overflowing with tapes of animated musicals that included crypto but couldn’t bother to get it right. Aren’t they?

    WTC Memorial Competition Update

    Newsday reports the WTC Memorial jury will select up to eight finalists, who will receive over $100,000 each to refine their designs more fully (“to develop models and three-dimensional computerized designs”). A winner (from among the finalists) will be announced in October or November.
    Jurors apparently walk around placing dots on the designs they like. Designs without dots are then pulled from subsequent rounds. [No mention of how many dots a juror gets, or if later rounds require multiple dots. If not, a juror may be able to repeatedly dot a favorite design into the final rounds.]
    Via Hugh and Ellyn, who submitted a design from Kansas. At first I was surprised, now I’m really pleased, but I’ve now heard from a couple dozen fellow entrants, most of whom contacted me through the site. The competition’s gag rule has thrown approximately 5,199 of 5,200 people into a weird, cagey limbo; we really want to talk about our entries, but don’t want to get disqualified. Maybe we should form Entrants Anonymous. [“My name’s John, and I designed a spire.” “Hi, John.”]