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Even though I got back from London (and decided not to really post more about the art exhibition I went to see. focus.) almost two weeks ago, family and work and travel have largely kept me from my newly resolved screening schedule. Last week was characterized by an ultimately abandoned attempt to register our new car (purchased happily through ebaymotors) at the Virginia DMV, where the confusion, cognitive dissonance and abuse are running high, no doubt due to links to the September 11 hijackers. New York’s DMV proved to be reassuringly back to normal, requiring only an all-afternoon wait and the same sheaf of documents they always did. We comemmorated by ordering New York City plates, but with “Manhattan” instead of the “Bronx.” [note: Props to all Bronx readers. We just don’t live there.] NYC truly rules.

Screening and Logging: While a search on the web for “fierce vignetting” inexplicably came up empty, a similar search of my logging notes produces nearly 10,000 results. The combination of lenses and filters we used to shoot (see August entries), including a wide angle lens, resulted in an effect called “vignetting.” This is where the outer edges of the recorded image pick up black rings, which are cropped from the camera’s viewfinder. The Sony VX-1000 camera is known for this, and I thought we were aware enough before shooting to avoid it. Nope. There are entire scenes-minutes long-where we were shooting a farmer moving a stream of irrigation water that have pretty deep rings around the image. Whether it’s fixable or not or usable or not remains to be determined.

Searching for a fix turned up this set of pointers on 2-pop.com, a great resource for DV info.

Poking around yielded this insane article by Paynie, who shot, edited and screened a feature-length dv docu about this year’s Burning Man festival. Sounds amazing, and on an impressive schedule. “BurnBabyBurn,” is playing December 1 at the New York Independent Film & Video Festival (in LA, somehow). Get tickets here. If only my grandparents hadn’t chosen 2001 to stop attending Burning Man, maybe I could’ve made more progress by now…

Sitting at JFK in the UA/BA lounge, waiting for my flight to London. My pal Andrew left on his full BA flight already, while my schedule is more leisurely (and my United flight barely half full). After birthing this morning’s entry, I read this article in the NY Times by John Tierney, which parallels my post of 28 Sept (see archives) and which plays right into discussions Chad and I have had in the wake. Favorite line from the article: “They want to see history with their own eyes, just like Oprah Winfrey and the other V.I.T.’s.”

National was practically empty; faint scent Cinnabon and National Guardsmen with AK-47’s. No free NYTimes (b/c they weren’t delivered to the airport today, apparently). Absolutely no delays taking off or landing, even into LaGuardia. Our flight’s approach was across Brooklyn, not up the Hudson, which offered a wide (but not straight down) view of downtown Manhattan. Everybody on the plane was staring or craning to see. [ shots of Manhattan from a private plane]

This article from the NY Times about Verizon looking into how to preserve voice mail messages from people who died reminded me of this extended article from the Washington Post this summer, which I’d saved:

“Once, many months after my father had died, we had an electrical storm that knocked out the power in my house,” writes Lisa Valentine of Reston in an e-mail. “The answering machine in my room was blinking furiously when the power finally went back on. I hit the ‘play’ button and heard my father’s voice:
” ‘Lisa, it’s Dad, give me a call.’
“Needless to say, I kind of freaked out until I realized the tape was playing old messages that I thought had been erased forever.
“It was nice to hear from my dad again. But he didn’t leave a number where I could reach him.”

[NYT by Jayson Blair. WP by Joel Garreau]

The Sundance Channel currently has a “Cinema Verite” month, including this documentary history, “Cinema Verite: Defining the Moment,” by the National Film Board of Canada (gotta love those Canadians). Finally, I found this page on Sundance’s site with information on the whole series and some relevant links. Time to call the web usability experts.

More poems, this time from W. H. Auden, whose work also turned up with noted frequency. These lines, set a few blocks from my house, could have been written last week, not in 1940:

The unmentionable odour of death/Offends the September night.

Here is the poem itself, and Eric McHenry’s article on Slate about Auden and poetry during difficult times.

“The Smoke of Thought”: For the third night in a row, at around 10PM, the wind shifted, and the faint but unignorable smell of burning reached the upper east side. Searching on Google for “smoke” and “smell” brought up two interesting poets: AE Housman and Philip Larkin. I’ve seen Larkin quoted several times in the past week. Here’s an excerpt from Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad”:

Today while I am master still,
And flesh and soul, now both are strong,
Shall hale the sullen slaves along,
Before this fire of sense decay,
This smoke of thought blow clean away,
And leave with ancient night alone
The steadfast and enduring bone.

Larkin’s poem, “The Building”, contains a description of people in a hospital waiting room that could just as easily apply to New Yorkers lately: “They’re quiet. To realise/This new thing held in common makes them quiet…”

For the record, I hardly ever read poetry and know basically nothing of poets or poetry. I guess I considered it superfluous–irrelevant, even–to the practical, “real” world I saw. Sometimes it steps up to the plate, though, and nails that same reality more cleanly than 150 hours of continuous media ever could. Economy of expression.

Like other friends who regularly add to their websites, I’ve been reticent to post during the week. From the standpoint of this site, it was a fairly easy decision; this journal is meant to document a film project I re-started in July. From a personal standpoint, it’s been more difficult. After the quest to find out whether people you know are alright or not, the events of the last few days gave me pause, causing me to question the value or importance or priority of the things that occupied my time and attention. An architect friend wrote of being told architects weren’t needed right now; Fran Liebowitz just mentioned on NPR that she’s a “luxury item,” unneeded in a situation like this. How needed is a documentary about farmers and rural small businessmen? Finally, the reality of the last few days made the question of posting moot; any idea of watching my footage was displaced by watching the news. Any attempt to think about the film was thwarted by thoughts of more immediate surroundings, people, and things.

That said, architecture, writing, filmmaking, art–these are inextricable elements of the culture and civilization we live in; the desire to participate in this culture, to contribute to it, to create something that will connect with others and extend/live beyond us doesn’t change in a day. In the Times this week, more than one image of the rescue operation reminded me of the work of photographer, Andreas Gursky. The ephemeral work of Gabriel Orozco also came to mind, specifically this photo of the NY skyline. [Note: read the review linked there, too. interesting] The types of activities that may momentarily seem superfluous may also be the ones that gauge the health of the civilization we enjoy and (now) defend.

The primacy of family, friendships, inter-human relationships also survived the events this week. Exploring these ties and what shapes and forms personal relationships take both subject and object of the film project I’m working on. If anything, the experience of searching out friends and colleagues, of responding to messages and emails from concerned people around the world, and the unexpected generosity and awareness New Yorkers show each other on the streets all steel my resolve to continue the film project. Stay tuned, and thank you again for your concern, feedback, interest and questions.

11:00AM (EST) I’m fine, family in NYC are fine. my wife’s stepmother was at work on Broad Street, and is fine, temporarily out of contact.

Email now set to download every minute. the last people we had on our first list from church- the ones who live in Battery Park City and work at the WTC- turned up in New Jersey. Most of the afternoon spent coordinating blood donors and helping set up a shelter at the church gym; it seems under-used, as most people have found a way home or a place to stay. I’ve read it in other places, but AIM was the lifeline for us to find out who was alright and to let people know we’re alright, too.

Other than that, the thing I don’t hear or read is how odd it was that everyone was walking all over the city today. Few cars, and every street looked like a concert or major event had just let out down the block. Very civil, yet somehow very unsettling; something was definitely not right.

While on vacation, we took a weekend trip to Venice to see the Biennale, a sprawling exhibition of contemporary art. With some exceptions, the art was a tremendous disappointment. Chicken & egg, I don’t know, but most of the work either strained to stand out and provide some immediate, breakout, experience right then and there; or else it required time, consideration, and contemplation which the festival format inexorably discourages. In this oppressively large exhibition, the apparent subtlety and understatement of two installations appealed to us greatly: Robert Gober’s installation in the American Pavilion and a cafe project/installation credited to the artists Olafur Eliasson, Tobias Rehberger and Rikrit Tiravanija. Understatement is problematic, though, and in ways that concern me as I try to make a documentary that is, itself, unpretentious yet affecting and lasting. Also, these works made me even more aware of how important/complicating are the expectations/experience a viewer brings with him. Let me explain a bit:

In each room of the Jefferson-esque pavilion, Gober carefully places a few objects or assemblages that appear to be found or flotsam, but which turn out to be meticulously hand-crafted re-creations: styrofoam blocks, plywood, an empty liquor bottle. In the corner of each room, there was a white, plastic-looking chair. Were they part of the piece? Gober’s certainly done chairs before. [see an image] [read an essay] We debated, looked for evidence of the chairs’ handmade-ness (which we found), but decided they weren’t. (Clue: they weren’t lit like the other objects. Sure enough, they were for the guards.)

After walking ALL over the two main exhibition venues in Venice’s August heat, we took refuge in the “Refreshing Cafe,” which was credited to the three artists above. The cafe was a series of tables, some white lacquer columns/stools, and a counter/bar under an overturned swimming pool-like form propped up by pistons. It was a rare and welcome retreat from the heat and from the overwrought video art of the show. It wasn’t really clear what the contribution of the artists was, but an improvised cafe with a few mod-looking furniture pieces certainly seemed in keeping with the other works of these artists. Just last night, though, I ran into one of the three and complimented him on having made one of the few pieces we liked in the whole show. Turns out that not only did the three of them not really do anything with the piece, what they did do had been completely altered by the exhibition authorities, calling the existence of the “work” into question.

This is kind of unnerving; when understatement is the goal or medium of a work, how do you differentiate it from (or not mistake it for) the “non-art” around it? Do you?

What does this mean for the artist and the creation process?

When looking at/for art, do we readily give artists we like/know more latitude, more time, the benefit of the doubt? Does this blind us to other experiences or discoveries? Is it a sign of dulling of critical approach or increasing orthodoxy?