greg.org – Page 318 – the making of, by greg allen

On Opera Adapted From Novel

I became familiar with Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, through its horrible film adaptation, a numbingly unsubtle reproductive fascist farce. I guess in 1990, the only totalitarianism that director Volker Schlondorff could get people to accept is the East German kind.
Anyway, on the occasion of its premiere at the English National Opera, Atwood writes in the Guardian about allowing the Danish composer Poul Ruders to make an opera of it in the first place. One challenge turned out to be the lack of contractual precedent for adapting an opera from a living writer’s work.

Then there was the Danish and/or lawyerly cast of mind, an introspective one given to second thoughts, as in Hamlet. (“Whether ’tis prudenter in the contract to offer/ The perks and carrots of outrageous royalties/ Or to strike pen throughout a sea of clauses/ And screw the writer blind?”) But with the help of various agents we managed to cobble something together. I forget who got the T-shirt rights, but it wasn’t me.

That was 2000, and Atwood’s world–a fundamentalist takeover of the US government, a rollback of civil liberties, secret police with the all-seeing eye for a logo controlling the population through credit card surveillance–seemed like a liberal campfire story, best told with a flashlight under your chin. The Danes loved it, though. So did Time, which compared it to the Taliban. You may have to travel to the UK for this one; I don’t imagine it opening in the US for 2 or 6 years.
One upside: at least now we know it doesn’t look like East Germany.

On Art On My Mind

Generally avoiding television “coverage” of the war, but some images inevitably bleed in. Here is some art that’s been on my mind as a result. [Also, gmtPlus9 went black in Japan and posted some war-related art. Thanks, Travelers Diagram.]

Blast, by Naoya Hatakeyama, image: LA Galerie.de

Blast, from a series of photographs
by Naoya Hatakeyama, image: LA Galerie

Nacht 1, II by Thomas Ruff, who began using nightvision after
the technology was popularized in Gulf War I (GWI), image: ZKM.de

Olivier Silva, Foreign Legion 2000-2002, Rineke Dijkstra, image: Galerie Jan Mot

Olivier Silva, Foreign Legion 2000-2002, ongoing, by Rineke Dijkstra,
who is photographing one man through his term of
service in the French Foreign Legion. images: Galerie Jan Mot

Hmm. JP, DE, FR, NL. I just noticed these are all from countries who know war firsthand, on their own soil.

Welcome to the Bloghdad Cafe

Forget 1991, it feels like 1999 around here. That was the last time I made an impulse buy. of a URL.
If anyone has a good idea for what to do with Bloghdad.com, let me know. The clock is ticking.
Some things I’m not considering:

starting a warblog. The world needs another warblog like the portal business needed Go.com (speaking of 1999…)

giving it to Slate‘s William Saletan, although he gets a shoutout for going wide with the term. (an excerpt from the latest “moment of truth”: “But forgive me if in its first hours this doesn’t look like a war of self-defense.”)

getting into either a a WIPO dispute or a Talking Points Memo/Washington Post-style brawl with Microsoft.

giving it to Jeff Jarvis, who’s got the earliest Google mention.
Hmm. But is there anything else?

A Long NYT Article On The Road To Chicago

Rick Lyman writes about the decades-long battles to make a film version of Chicago, including a Chandler Auditorium-ful of cast, director, and writers who were attached to the project through the years. One star is conspicuously absent from the scrum, Bebe Neuwirth, whose Broadway Chicago won her a Tony and transformed the property from a “half-remembered musical from the 1970’s [into] a fresh hit.” Yet somehow, casting “Catherine Zeta-Jones was an easy choice, with her musical comedy experience.”
Lyman leaves more such hints at the bitchy article that could have been, except that “upbeat amnesia” reigns among the “formerly fractious creative team,” the Neuralizer-like effect of a dozen glinting Oscar statuettes (and Harvey “the Hutt” Weinstein’s Academy-muscling for all the film’s nominations).
Well, almost all. Apparently director Rob Marshall’s not feeling the love. He thinks Miramax is not only not doing enough to promote him for Best Director, Harvey’s thrown his full weight behind Marshall’s competition, some flash-in-the-pan named Martin Scorsese. Miramax had Robert Wise “write”* a recommendation for Scorsese and his little film, Gangs of New York, but for Marshall, “to have Mr. Wise, the director of The Sound of Music, [and West Side Story and, oddly, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, – g.] come out in favor of the Gangs director was apparently the final straw.”
I threw together a quick PowerPoint slide on why, seriously, Marshall should be happy to be nominated:

* Wise, a former president of the Academy, found Harvey’d pulled him into a controversy.”His” essay pushing Scorsese for the Oscar was actually written by a Miramax publicist. The company had run the whole thing as an ad in Variety and other papers. Previously, the LA Times‘ John Horn busted Sony for inventing reviews from an imaginary critic. Someone embed that man!

On The French And WWII (and WWI)

When Maciej started French Week (“fighting francophobia since wednesday”), Jason linked to the first installment, “Ten Reasons to Love France,” which was a breezy response to the frivolous tone of the fries/toast/kiss gag.
It’s not funny anymore. From day two, “WWII, the Real Story”

…But there’s a more profound, indirect reason for the French defeat [in 1940], which explains why the German armies were able to score this tactical coup in the first place. And that reason is the French experience in World War I.
World War I has almost comical connotations in our own popular culture. American doughboys, kaisers and marshals in funny hats, the Red Baron. But for France, the Great War was the most traumatic event of the twentieth century. No country lost as great a proportion of its population in that war: 1,400,000 men were killed outright, two million were wounded. A million of the wounded had debilitating injuries, and could never work again. They were a lost generation, and a living reminder to others of what war really meant.

Hit Decasia At Anthology, Miss Oscar-Nominated Shorts At Pioneer

Decasia film still, dir Bill Morrison, image: decasia.com

Decasia is Bill Morrison’s fascinating, expressive film composed of beautifully deteriorated nitrate film stock. Last December, Laurence Wechsler wrote about showing it to Errol Morris: “I popped the video into his VCR and proceeded to observe as Morrison’s film once again began casting its spell. Errol sat drop-jawed: at one point, about halfway through, he stammered, ‘This may be the greatest movie ever made.”’
Morrison will be at some Anthology Film Archive screenings. The film’s website has a growing schedule of other screenings, including 26 March at Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum. Read J. Hoberman’s Voice review. Also, buy Decasia on VHS.
Meanwhile, in his short review, the Voice‘s Dennis Lim guts the Oscar-nominated short films like a Hebrew-speaking carp. Lim’s joyless Oscar prediction: “Inja, a pat anti-apartheid parable manipulative enough to enlist a dog and a child.” Yikes. What’s the endgame for making shorts again??

Cannes Not, Cannes II

For the diehard greg.org fan, who’s not related to me and/or not chased away by my recent forays into my perspective on current events which keep relating back to the themes of my first movie, otherwise I’d have just started a 9/11 blog and turned it into a warblog and… ahem:
I’ve been writing the press kit for Souvenir (January 2003), my second short, which has been holding in a sort of DV-to-film transfer limbo. Also, I started dubbing a bunch of screener tapes, because there’s a world of film festivals out there waiting for a reflective look at ironing.

2003-03-17, This Week In The New Yorker

ANNALS OF NATIONAL SECURITY/Seymour M. Hersh/ LUNCH WITH THE CHAIRMAN/ Why was Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Khashoggi?
[just found this on Google, and thought I’d add it to the NYMDb. Normally, I set the post date so the links appear in chronological order, but since this story is so timely, I’ll leave it on top for a few days. – greg]
Related:
Under Attack, Director Says Hollinger’s Black Misled Him [NYT]

Forget Cremaster 3, I Survived Cremaster 1-5

I survived Cremaster 3 T-shirt OK, before I talk about how seeing The Cremaster Cycle straight through changed my understanding of Matthew Barney’s work, let me get a couple of things out of the way:
1) FLW didn’t design those theater chairs to be sat in at all, much less for eight hours in one day Aggressive, non-user-centered architecture should be taken out and shot.
2) Best overheard comment after Cremaster 1, when a guy at a suddenly partially visible urinal complained that the mens room door was being propped open by the line: “We just spent 45 minutes in someone’s ovaries. I’m sure no one cares about seeing you take a piss.”
3) I don’t know what country you’re from, and frankly, I don’t care. On this island, we keep our hands off the freakin’ art, especially when there are signs and guards at every piece. And if you pull the dumb foreigner shtick every time a guard tells you not to touch something, I’ll bust you again.
3.1) I swear, between this show and the MoMA QNS opening, I may never loan anything I own to a museum again.
3.2) What really makes me mad, is that now I’m all jingoistic, when I should just be anti-B&T. Oy, the world we live in…
Net net: Matthew Barney’s films are worth seeing, again, and in order. They’re the strongest expression of what he’s doing. He may call himself a sculptor, but that’s just a numbers game. He clearly exerts phenomenal time/effort/thought on materials, objects and spaces; but the experience of his sculptures pales to that of the films (and the experience of sculpture-in-film). Likewise, his drawings–which are small, precious, slight, almost invisible–get subsumed by their giant sculpted vitrines.
An extremely useful/interesting educational aid is The ~~Gospel~~ Cremaster Cycle (According to Neville Wakefield), an exhaustive catalog/glossary which functions like an encyclopedia of Barney’s universe. It weighs like a hundred pounds, though, so plan be home when it ships; you don’t want to carry it back from the post office (or the Guggenheim, for that matter).
There are a few exceptions: I found the flags and banners interesting, and some metal objects (e.g., the Masonic tools from C3) are exquisite. The mirrored saddle is in a class by itself (yeah, there are at least two, but only one’s on exhibit). [An art market side note: I don’t know, but a significant number of the C3 work is large, institution-sized, and all “courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery,” almost as if it’s a showroom for out-of-town curators. All that’s missing is a “to the trade only” sign in the window.]
As for the photographs, which I’d liked best going in, most feel inexplicably lifeless compared to the films they came from. Barney can create absolutely stunning images, but they’re on film, where stunning often morphs into mesmerizing. It’s telling that while the photos reproduce very well, I could only find one image of a Barney vitrine online–from an auction report; even though they’re display cases, these non-filmic sculptures seem innoculated against reproduction.
The films hold up very well, but as film-as-art, not art-as-film. Consecutive viewing (as opposed to the in order they were made) strengthens both their thematic/narrative and their visual impact. I was surprised to realize how many elements are from Barney’s own life/world/story; it was unexpectedly personal, as opposed to issue/metaphor-driven.
In his review, J. Hoberman says that the press screenings for the whole Cycle were sparsely attended; he (like everyone else, he concludes) prefers the ambient, less demanding mode of watching a few minutes on the gallery flatscreens. “One scarcely staggers from this six-and-a-half-hour magnum opus inclined to proclaim the second coming of David Lynch�or even Julian Schnabel,” he writes, in full “when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail” mode.
Which makes Barney’s claim to be a sculptor, not a filmmaker, relevant. He’s asserting his identity as an artist. Cremaster 2, which Hoberman slammed the hardest as a film, is one of the most haunting and beautiful works of art I’ve seen. Jeremy Blake told me Paul Thomas Anderson had asked him, “Man, why do artists have their heads so far up their asses sometimes?” “They like the smell,” Jeremy deadpanned. “But seriously, it’s introspection. Contemplation. You should try it sometime.”
In my budding filmmaker mode, I had had some of the same complaints as Hoberman (ie., simplistic camera angles, AWOL editing), but his glib dismissal of Cremaster says more about the diminished expectations and limits of film. Sure, movie directors think they’re God, and Barney’s conjured up a complete, system of symbols and myths that’d make the Catholic Church proud. Whether that means he thinks he’s God, Jesus, or the Pope, I can’t say, but at least he isn’t the second coming of Julian Schnabel.

It’s Cremaster Friday, Demonlover Saturday

I’m watching the entire Cremaster Cycle today, a Friday feature of the Guggenheim show. In the mean time, Matthew Barney’s site, Cremaster.net, is up and running. Check out the trailer; it’s beautiful. And it doesn’t take all day (unless you’re on a dialup).
In the mean time, brace yourself and go see Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover tomorrow at Lincoln Center’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series (or, if you insist, Rendez-vous with Freedom Cinema series. Assayas will be at the screeningNow who’s all PC?) Read about it in Film Comment, where Gavin Smith saw it at Cannes. Smith called it the best undistributed film of 2002. Assayas’ll be there. Order tickets online, if you can. Yesterday’s screening sold out++. Assayas was there yesterday, too, and we talked a bit about collaborating with anime studios, CG’ers, and Sonic Youth.

On Remembering Or Repeating History

History shows that a war which follows on the heels of a Serbian assassination doesn’t go well for anyone involved.
As I’ve written before, one reason I chose a WWI battlefield as an object of my first film, Souvenir (November 2001), was because it had been “forgotten.” Practically speaking, there is no one left alive who has direct experience or memory of WWI in general and the Battle of the Somme in particular. At best, it’s taught, analyzed, considered, memorialized, but it is not remembered.
Generally, in the US, if WWI’s known at all, it’s as dim, dusty, unfortunate history, where “history” translates as “has nothing to do with what’s going on right now.” In this absence of memory, attempts to liken the current political/military situation to WWI are countered with pious promises to “never let such a horror happen again.” But those promises are almost never accompanied by an understanding of why or how WWI unfolded, or even what such a horror actually comprised.
Thiepval Memorial, image:firstworldwar.com Such benign ignorance afflicts the New Yorker protagonist in S(N01), whose “search” for The Memorial to The Missing at Thiepval is driven by his own involvement in the “most horrible violence ever.” He ambles in a naive daze across the modern era’s first “most horrible violence ever,” and finds not just one memorial, but hundreds: countless markers and cemeteries; fields still yielding up remains; razed and rebuilt towns; and rare, preserved sections of battlefied What’s more, though, as he drives his German car across France, he finds people–French locals and British caretakers–who show the 80-years-on effects of the war, which–they’re painfully aware–are nigh-unbearable, even when your side “wins.” They also show the New Yorker a welcoming-but-pained sympathy, as if he’s rushed home with bad news, only to find a passel of neighbors and friends waiting to tell him something even worse.
Lochnagar Crater, image:firstworldwar.com Lutyens’ Memorial to The Missing of The Somme is powerful; visiting can be an overwhelming experience. But its power pales in comparison to the concerted efforts to teach about WWI that take place in every school in the UK. The Lochnagar Crater now sits alone as a souvenir in the landscape, a scar that–according to those who visit it or live around it–still aches, recalling them of old wounds. But its influence pales compared to the effect of a lifetime where every errand you run in your entirely-post-war village takes you past half a dozen cemeteries, and where, spring after spring, you turn up mortars and rotted boots when you plant your flowers.
When I made S(N01) exactly a year ago, I was nervous about drawing false parallels between the attacks on New York and an “actual” war. Tragedy was tragedy, loss was loss, but a terrorist attack was not The Somme. 2001 wasn’t 1914, I mean, how could it be, when the civilized world was united? I expected the need for S(N01)‘s solace would pass: we’d learn to deal with the loss of September 11th, and move gingerly toward a safer, more peaceful future. The movie’d become a time capsule, a sad-but-nostalgic reminder of the moments of our resolve. Instead, I wonder if I’ve unintentionally remade someone’s film, Souvenir (July 1914).

On Bar Codes And Profiling

Creating an army of shopping clones, one Safeway Club Card at a time, image: cockeyed.com A NYT article about Cockeyed‘s great barcode hack, written by David F. Gallagher (the Lightning Field one, not the shirtless one. “F.” must stand for “fully clothed.” David, you have my sympathies. At least you’re going up against a real person. I’m still being out-Googled by an ad-agency caricature, an off-the-air bunny puppet, and a friend of Dharma, two if you count Greg Louganis.)
Rob Cockerham is distributing clones of his Safeway card online, thereby commenting on/thwarting the supermarket’s tracking him and and “his” purchases (which “he” now makes in stores all over the country, as far as Safeway knows, anyway).
Interesting that this article appears in the Times. Whenever I’m traveling and airdrop into a netcafe, or login to nytimes.com from someone else’s computer, I’ve always saved my login info on that machine. Over the years, I’ve wondered what the Times thought of my appearing in dozens of places at once. (They had enough, I guess; a few months ago, they started expiring their cookies after 30 days.)
Other barcode links: Peter Coffin’s Free Biennial art project, Scott Blake’s Barcode Art site [both via Wooster Collective] And in the view of many End Time pundits, barcodes are the “mark of the beast.” Left Behind’s 8th book was called The Mark, as this Australian

…And I Feel Fine (Except For This Gnawing Sense Of Dread)

Yes, I was glad to see you, and that was a Bible in my pocket. As I tee up to write what appears below, I just realized my schedule yesterday (aka the Sabbath)–church in the morning to the Armory Show (similarities to Gilligan’s Island: began as 3-hour tour, saves self with pleasantly endless supply of special guest stars) to a friend’s dinner for a visiting artist–and my increasing revulsion at politicians’ Christian justification for war, left me toting the Good (but not tiny) Book around all day, and unselfconsciously reading on the train about “blessed are the peacemakers,” “wars and rumours of wars,” and the end of the world as we know it.
I remember being advised, soon after moving to NYC in 1990, that reading the NY Times or the WSJ on the train was a surefire invitation to be mugged. And The Wall St. Journal? Forget about it. The only way to protect yourself, I was told, is to be a less attractive target than other passengers: you can either talk loudly to yourself (i.e., act insane, and thus, unpredictable, possibly dangerous, not worth the hassle) or read the Bible. It’s the pickpocketing equivalent of The Club, self-centered public religiosity that really says, “mug my neighbor.” What would Jesus do, indeed.
WWJD? How about WWGWBD? Bob Woodward in Hendrik Hertzberg‘s New Yorker commentary: “‘[Bush’s] instincts are almost his second religion.’ And if the commandment of his first religion is peace, that of his second, it seems clearer than ever, is war.” Not so fast. Bush’s flavor of Christianity has little to do with the Bible (King James Study Bible , Amazon sales rank: 3,598), and everything to do with Left Behind (Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle of the Ages vol. 11, Amazon sales rank: 67).
With over 50 million copies in print, the Left Behind series is the Harry Potter of the Apocalypse, (If God doesn’t call the authors home soon, there’ll be 12 books total; never seen onr on the subway, though). It the end of the world as its authors (Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins, evangelical ministers/ex-political aides/anointers of John Ashcroft) know it. After millions of True Believers are suddenly caught up in The Rapture, the world stops slouching toward Gomorrah and starts lurching toward Armageddon. Plagues and war ravage the unbelieving earth. After a feckless Democratic president sells the US out to international organizations (it’s not one of heaven’s mysteries that the series began during Clinton’s tenure), the Anti-Christ steps in, seduces shocked citizens with pleas of global tolerance, uses the UN to establish world government, and settles down to rule and reign. From Bahghdad. Oh, and before the world ends, Israel gets all the land it wants. Oh, and the Jews convert to Christianity, etc. etc.
Articles appeared last year (in Salon and the Guardian, for example) after Left Behind took over the NYTimes bestseller list, causing lamentation in the mainstream publishing houses, and Infidels.org (you have been warned) got ready for Y2K with a veritable Baskin-Robbins (31+ flavors) of End Time culture. But as Zachary Karabell writes in last week’s LA Times, “The response of some in the U.S. government to the crises of the last year and a half feels ripped from the pages of the Left Behind books.” If Bush were a straphanger, he’d be doubled down, flaunting the Bible and acting insane, thinking he’s safe (yet somehow unaware that all the other passengers are nervously switching cars).
Frankly, Left Behind strikes me as gratuitous vengeance porn, designed to feed the smugness and self-satisfaction of “Christian” readers, who want to have their cake (their own seat on the Rapture train) and eat it, too (the details of their critics’ impending, gruesome suffering). Is Bush taking his war script from the Gospel according to Left Behind? Is he gonna have a lot more to answer for than he thinks? Is the Pope Catholic?

Design Selected For Pentagon Memorial

model for Kaseman Beckman Pentagon Memorial design, image: defenselink.mil

And the winner is: A proposal by Keith Kaseman and Julie Beckman, two recent Columbia grads, to build 184 “memorial units” in a grove of maple trees. Interesting details: All benches are aligned with the flight path of AA77. Memorial units for those who died on the plane cantilever away from the building, while units for those who died in the Pentagon cantilever away toward it.
Read the Wash. Post article, including comments by the designers and jury chief/MoMA architecture curator Terence Riley. Read Post critic Benjamin Forgey’s generally positive review. Read my greg.org posts about my frustration with the hyper-individualization of memorials, follow competition links, and see my rash design response.

On Collecting Art, On Collecting Taxes

US Attorney/curator with posters of Rothko, Bacon, deKooning and either Twombly or Clemente,
purchased by Sam Waksal with an 8.25% discount, at least.
In the grand tradition of deposed CEO’s, but with downtown sensibility (and far better taste), Sam Waksal pleaded guilty to evading sales tax on $15 million in paintings he purchased through a major New York dealer. It was the old, “send it to my factory in NJ, nah, just fax the invoice there” ploy, which has been tripping up art world naifs since the 80’s, at least. (Clearly, it’s worth it to work it and get your 10% discount from the dealer instead.) Waksal’s lawyer tells the Washington Post that his client was “not the architect of the scheme.” Yow.
Since no report names all nine works involved, here it is, a greg.org exclusive:

Mark Rothko, Untitled – Plum and Brown – $3.5m. Didn’t reach $2-3m estimate at Sotheby’s last May. Pic above, or buy a painted copy of it online for $275 [!!?].

Francis Bacon, Study from the Human Body – $3m. Also unsold at Sotheby’s, against a $2.5-3.5m estimate. City Review has the war story of the failed sales.

Franz Kline, Mahoning II – $3m (via the Posts. Mahoning is in the Whitney.)

Willem deKooning Untitled V – $2.4m (via NYNewsday and AP/ABC).

Roy Lichtenstein, Landscape with Seated Figure – $900k. (via AP/ABC)

Cy Twombly, Untitled (Rome) and Solar Barge of Sesostris – $1.3m and $800k. (via Boston Globe. The first was exhibited at Knoedler in 2000, and the second was shown in 2001 by the Dealer.

Francesco Clemente, Lovers – $60k. (via The Post.) Eh. For a Clemente, you risk jail? A definite Koslowski moment.
That adds up to $14,960,000. Any guess what the last, $40,000 work could be? According to the Times, it’s Richard Serra. His sculptures can go for more than $1m, but $40k for a painting is doable. What’s more, these last three artists show with the Dealer. Waksal can brag about the sweet deal he got on them, all while paying the Dealer super-retail for what amounts to personal shopping.
[Update: The NYPost pegs Waksal’s total at $15.31 million, which means the Serra was $350,000. That sounds like Sam didn’t even get a discount on the in-house stuff. No wonder he’s fingering The Dealer. Update #2: Turns out the Serra was titled, The American flag is not an object of worship. Don’t let FoxNews get wind of that sale.]