the revolution will be due Friday and counts for 35% of your grade

alex_golub.jpg
From a link from Visible Darkness, an engrossing, intense weblog about a book project to examine documentary photography. (wonderful, but not for the blurb-addicted):
In one week on grad student Alex Golub’s weblog, he writes the good fight, assailing the academically-descredited-yet-still-pop-consciousness-gripping “anthro” brand/icon Margaret Mead; laments the lonely life of the actual Pynchon reader (achingly different from a “fan”), and recognizes the painful poignancy of the Oklahoma! revival in these “September 11”-besotted times. All well-written, but again, don’t think you can just skim the site while you put that conference call on mute.
Golub’s recap of Mead criticism hits home, especially since Mead (and by naive extension, anthro) was one of my first stops on my idealistic foray into filmmaking. Mead’s legacy: “Systematically and symptomatically bad fieldwork in which she gave up what she knew about the people she lived with in order to paint a picture that would fit in with the message she attempted to get across to the public.” (Fortunately, I was early swayed by the Maysles brothers’ “just show what you see” storytelling and their sense of fidelity to the people they lived with. Mead hasn’t really turned up here since.)
His analysis of his Gravity’s Rainbow Problem speaks for itself:

6) What you really want out of this party is not the free martinis or interesting gallery space or recognition that you are one of the people being published in the glossly lit-mag whose latest issue is the raison d’etre of this fete. What you want is to find someone, just someone (preferably an alto, although a strong colatura soprano or even a decent bass-baritone wouldn’t be too bad either) who has also read it and understands what it is you’re trying akwardly to express nine minutes into your five-minute monologue…

As for Oklahoma!, he casts an anthro/cult stud (I made that one up based on “anthro”; I’m sure it’ll bring in some interesting Google searches) eye on the musical’s “condensed symbolic account of the founding impulses of the United States of America.” Homogeneity and pacification figure strongly in his analysis, which isn’t as optimistic about the London revival others have praised for being darker and more ambivalent than you remember it from high school drama club.
While I hope he hasn’t fallen into the pit where he sees Mead (I haven’t seen Oklahoma! ever, even though I’m working on a musical now), his message in the end sounds too good not to be true:

It is not surprising that Oklahoma! should be playing on Broadway at a time when the radical uniqueness of the US’s project is more than ever obscured by a shallow, partisan patriotism. Nor is it surprising that the recuperation of the founding impulses of the United States seems so unlikely.
‘What have you given us?’ a man asked Benjamin Franklin as the delegates of the Constitutional Convention ended their secret meetings. ‘A republic,’ he said simply, ‘if you can keep it.’ We have been given a unique country and a valuable ideal. And we are turning it into Oklahoma!.

Jonah Freeman, Artist. Cinematographer. Geeenius. Tonight. On “In the Artist’s Studio”

jonah_freeman_nature_scene_apr.jpgJonah Freeman, Making the Nature Scene, 2000, c-print, images: edw mitt
For a while, Ive been meaning to post some information and images of Jonah Freeman’s work. He was the DP and editor for my short film, Souvenir November 2001, but his main gig is visual art: he makes photography, video, and sculpture/installation art. He exhibits all over the place, and he shows regularly at the Andrew Kreps Gallery in NYC. This past spring, while he was editing 24/7, he was also working 24h on designing and building a stunning installation for the Public Art Fund in NYC, his largest project to date. Here are more images of his work.
The NY Times says of his work: “Occasionally voyeurism takes spectacular form…as in [his] funny, alarming surveillance video of a Manhattan hotel.” Right before he did Souvenir, he shot a beautiful film for the New York designer Tess Giberson. His interest in the subtleties of light (including explorations of its spatial characteristics and translucency) his spare, distant/intimate narrative style, and his up-to-date handling of classicist forms and symmetry made him my first and earliest choice to shoot the film. Plus, he knew how to work the lights and the camera.
Much of whatever beauty and visual power Souvenir has is because of Jonah. Reading back over the location diary, he caught some truly sublime shots; some tight, emotional/energetic shots; and some really crucial shots we would have been screwed if we’d missed. Don’t think this weblog stroke job is to pay him off; I couldn’t pay him enough (andI’m sure he’ll agree). I’ve been working on the electronic press kit lately, and I’m in an effusive mood.

Thick as Fiddlers (in Hell)

Sometimes you don’t find out what you’ve actually written until it turns up unexpectedly in your Google referrer logs.
Describing HotSaints.com in a Utah-themed entry (their motto: “Chase and be chaste!”), I said the target audience–single Mormons–were “thick as fiddlers” there. I’d picked up “thick as fiddlers” from my grandmother, whose birthday we were celebrating. As it turns out, the complete simile is “thick as fiddlers in Hell;” it’s use in the revival-happy, 19th century, rural South betrays a faith-based condemnation of musical instruments in general and the fiddle in particular, which was known as “the Devil’s instrument.”
No matter what you may have seen in Footloose, Mormons don’t share this hillbilly view. Revealing the 19th century roots of “chase and be chaste,” this quote from the prophet Brigham Young helps explain why Mormonism is called the “dancingest denomination” :

Our work, our everyday labor, our whole lives are within the scope of our religion. This is what we believe, and what we try to practice. Recreation and diversion are as necessary to our well-being as the most serious pursuits of life. If you wish to dance, dance, and you are just as prepared for prayer meeting as you were before, if you are [Hot] Saints.

As this Salt Lake Tribune article shows, though, the price of dancing is eternal vigilance.

what you get is what you see

A fascinating article in ARTNews about the conservation and curating challenges of contemporary art. There are sculptures by Eve Hesse that can’t travel or be shown anymore because they’re deteriorating. Latex hardens, darkens, goes brittle, and disintegrates.
A certain cough drop used in a pile sculpture by Felix Gonzalez-Torres is now manufactured with a different wrapper. One curator decided to approximate the appearance of the old wrappers using a mix of yellow- and blue-wrapped candy. Another decided to use the same brand of cough drop, just with the current wrapper, since the cough drops were important to Felix’s father.
Curators and conservators are interviewing and consulting with artists while they’re still alive, but most of the time LONG before they’ve ever thought about their own mortality or the legacy of their work.
We’ve collected several works that exist only on paper, as a set of instructions and schematics and guidelines and restrictions. They sure store easily, and they give a (false?) comfort that comes from not having to worry about people poking a sculpture or the sun fading the paper. But after reading this article, I can’t feel too confident about fully understanding how to understand and stay true to artists’ intentions.

think about what you’re remembering

Martin Filler would have been better off writing for a weblog. The too-long lead time/publication date on his New Republic article about the inherently dismal, unworkable rebuilding “process” forced him to write in a no-man’s-land, timing-wise. Writing ahead of its release, he can only hint snidely and dismissively at last week’s NY Times Magazine project that challenges the rules of what should/could be done downtown. And his thrashing of the first six stillborn proposals is right, but late. Still, he writes passionately about the “redevelopment debacle” unfolding before our eyes and correctly fingers George Pataki as the one individual who holds near-total control over the site and whatever is done downtown. Pataki’s deafening silence on the subject is utterly intentional; right now, all he has to do is keep quiet to coast to re-election. Only then will his utter lack of inspiration as the primary client of Manhattan’s downtown redevelopment bear its bland fruit.

Leon Wieseltier, in the same issue, hits the contradictions and problems with “September 11,” as he calls it, dead on. The thirty minutes of CNN drivel I saw had Paula Zahn and Aaron Brown and Wolf Blitzer out-emoting each other and blatantly casting as wide a tragedy-net as possible, egging everyone into sanctioned grief. Wieseltier castigates Tom Brokaw et al, both for promising “an emotional bath” and for delivering it.
Above all, he protests “the transformation of September 11 into ‘September 11,’ which was in large part a dissociation of the event’s political and strategic aspects from the event’s social and emotional aspects, so that what remained was a holy day and a homily about heroism. This concentrated the American spirit, but it dispersed the American will. What we will be commemorating on September 11, after all, is the beginning of a war.”
The memorial sought by the protagonist in Souvenir November 2001 wasn’t begun until 1928, ten years after WWI ended. While it has the shape of a triumphal arch, its actual program was just the opposite: only after a long, unprotected approach across empty land once the site of a peaceful village (and three years of horrific trench warfare) does the smooth-seeming surface of the arch reveal its tens of thousands of names, and only after climbing the plateau of the arch does the march’s “reward”–a cemetery– come into view. It’s a didactic yet undeniably powerful experience, but it was one that arose out of a devastated and shell-shocked country (England) and battlefield (the Somme).
In the same way, “What rises from the abyss of Ground Zero will become the most revealing American urban expression of our times.” Frankly, with the country’s fingers getting all pruny from emotional bathing, and with significant numbers of our leadership needing a time-out, this is probably not the best time to build our memories around.

Things have changed forever (at the Virginia DMV, anyway)

va_terror_plate.jpg
We passed (and then were aggressively re-passed by) an Expedition with this license plate tonight as we drove back to NYC. My mind goes back, oh, about a year. I still relive the horror of that day, those days, trying to register our new car with the VA DMV Where Everything Has Changed After They Issued Driver’s Licenses To Some Of The Terrorists. Now they’re wearing their facile graphic design on their rear bumpers, if not their sleeves.
There is currently no New York license plate commemorating September 11th or the WTC, but we ended up getting the designed-long-before-9/11 Manhattan license plate after giving up on VA. It looks like this:
nyc_wtc_plate.gif

Returning 9/11 rentals to the video store

An American in Paris, which we got in preparation for the digital Dolby release of Singin’ in the Rain coming to Film Forum.
Starship Troopers, Paul Verhoeven’s all-too-prescient masterpiece, which seems smarter and smarter every time I see it. It’s definitely his best work since the immortal Showgirls. Interesting piece of trivia: Starship Troopers is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art.

Intonation

The cadence of the names read out this morning reminded me of On Kawara’s moving piece at Documenta, One Million Years (Past and Future) which I wrote about here. It is currently on exhibit/being performed at the Akira Ikeda Gallery in Berlin (through Nov. 23). The way the names formed a cross-section of the New York region, as if they could have been read from a New York phone book, reminded me of Chris Burden’s 1991 work, The Other Vietnam Memorial [It’s the first image on the page], where names from Vietnamese phone books were recombined to generate three million names, representing civilians who died in anonymity and chaos.

I Will Not Pick Up Items From The Trash, or The Story of a New Year’s Resolution Kept


unknown found writing, NYC 9/10/02


On the way to an early morning swim, I saw this piece of cardboard propped between the mailbox and the garbage can. After the time-honored New York tradition of taking stuff from the trash home flashed through my mind, I opted to go home and get my camera instead. I found it rather beautiful, in the vein of Islamic calligraphy or the early 90’s paintings of Brice Marden. Of course, I have no idea what is says:

  • “I went to Burning Man and all I got was this scrap of cardboard inscribed in a made-up language.”
  • “Klingon Imperial Diplomatic Corps – Forest Hills Conclave Minutes, Stardate 90502. Item One: Dispatch envoy to Komputer Repair Guild to get font package working in MSWord.”
  • “When you reach the river Hudson, turn the cropduster to the left. Keep your mind clear of any rational thought. Follow the river to the city of the Great Satan. The blasphemous skyscrapers will come into view, but wait to disburse the gas until you are over the island itself.”
    Unsurprisingly, it was gone by the time I got home. (Yikes. It didn’t take much longer for a kind reader to email and point out that it is definitely not Klingon, as anyone familiar with Lawrence M. Schoen’s Comments on [Klingon] Orthography will immediately recognize. Also, the font is available at the Merchant’s page of The Klingon Language Institute. Thanks for reining in my reckless speculation. But why don’t comments on film or art posts come that quickly?)

    • WWJC? (What Would Jesus Code?)

    Religious discussion is breaking out all over, in some of the least expected places. A Slashdot interview with Perl (a programming language with a ‘religious’ following) creator Larry Wall mushroomed as only a Slashdot thread can into an intense discussion on the existence of God, reconciling scientific and faith-related worldviews, and programming. What started it? “the nerdiest expression of theology I’ve [boingboing contributor Cory Doctorow, that is] ever encountered — and I mean that in a good way.”
    In addition, I’ve been exchanging email with David Weinberger, who asked for believers’ perspectives (“a phenomenology, not a theodicy”) on September 11. He got responses from AKMA as well. Humorously, they’ve dubbed this The Topic that Drove Away Our Readers. Maybe they all went to Slashdot.)

    It’s Memento meets Brewster’s Millions, ON THE WEB!

    Last week, I wondered about Kurt Andersen’s slightly wistful re-visit/re-spending of his pile of Inside.com scratch (and confessed to similar ruminations myself from time to time). This week, Fortune checks in with some former “40 Richest Under 40” to see how they’re seeking closure regarding the great tragedy that befell this entrepreneurial nation in 2000.
    Of course, the ones who have traded the web for film and art: Josh “pseudo.com, where all the pot is free” Harris, Stephen “what were we smoking at theglobe.com?” Paternot, and Ernst “will trade boo.com film rights for Cristal” Malmsten, are arguably the most embarrasing of the whole lot. I’m in great company. Of course, Marc Ewing, a RedHat co-founder, is starting a mountainclimbing magazine, so it’s not a total wash.

    What you really want to do is direct??

    Dateline, Malibu: Directin’ ain’t easy, even for Stephen Gaghan, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Traffic, a man who has Steven Soderbergh on his Buddy List (and IM’s him for advice on “Super-35 blown up to anamorphic” or not). He writes about his unblinking-but-not-too-pity-inducing directorial debut in the NYTimes. Gaghan also tells a good story (ahem, surprised? He’s an O-winning screenwriter.) on the Criterion DVD for Traffic.

    MemeFeeder online film project

    And speaking of composite films by collections of directors, MemeFeeder is a collaborative online movie I am participating in. Based somewhere in the aether (the use of the phrase “first in best dressed” makes me think at least one Australian is involved), MemeFeeder has invited ten directors (and other contributors) to each create a one-minute silent film based on a scene from the storyboard they’ve provided. The ten completed minutes will be runtogethertomake a ten-minute short, which will screen online in mid-October. Author gregPosted on Categories projects

    If only we’d ALL been at the Toronto Film Festival LAST year…

    Of course, I don’t mean the whole world; just all New Yorkers. The terrorists’ message would have gotten an auto-reply saying, “Sorry, you missed us. We’re all in Toronto, eh?” Alas, it was not to be.
    This year, however, everyone DOES seem to be in Toronto. And they’re all making short films dealing with September 11th. Just look at the list of directors participating in 11’09″01, a collection of 11 shorts put together by a French director, Alain Brigand: Ken Loach, Claude Lelouch, Danis Tanovic, Sean Penn, Amos Gita�, Shohei Imamura, Samira Makhmalbaf, Youssef Chahine, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Mira Nair, and Alejandro Gonz�lez Iҷrritu.
    Each film is 11 minutes, 9 seconds and 1 frame long, as if the date were a timecode. Check this description of Sean Penn’s short in a Guardian (UK) review from Venice:

    Some avoid the politics completely. Sean Penn’s beautiful and moving short film shows the ordinary early morning of an elderly New York widower. He shaves, he dresses, he talks constantly to his dead wife, tells her the apartment is just too dark. When he wakes up from a mid-morning nap, the room is flooded with sunlight and the dead flowers on the windowsill are blooming: the towers that had blocked out their light have crumbled to nothing.

    The loft where we shot the New York scenes of Souvenir November 2001 was actually such a place (minus Ernest Borgnine, of course). The friends who let us shoot there had to cover their 14′ high windows with butcher paper; with the World Trade Center gone, sunlight poured in from the suddenly empty southern view and threatened to damage their art. The films screen in Toronto on Sept. 11 and 12. Since originally writing this entry, an excellent article showed up in the NYTimes.