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. 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.

    Back to (Art) School Night

    Gee, I wonder if there are any openings this weekend? ?? Did some quick drivebys last night, then actually lingered at a couple of friends’ galleries, highlights as follows:

  • Julia Scher at Andrea Rosen: While I’ve followed (and been followed by) Julia’s work since 1995 (the date of that adaweb link), her last show, left me a little cold, even though it included microwaves. (Yes, it’s going to be that kind of day. You may want to run now.) But this one had me before I knew it, literally.
    Walking along 23rd to the Chelsea Gallery Ghetto, I saw a helicopter, stationary, hovering straight ahead, over…it could have been shooting something downtown. A wreck on the West Side Highway? Another helicopter passed by, a totally unremarkable occurrence, except that it wasn’t now. I walked on, forcing doomsday thoughts out of my head, resisting/refusing to become the kind of media consumer/junkie it’s so banally easy to scorn. Anyway, when I got to the gallery, Andrea was on the sidewalk in front, looking up approvingly. The helicopter had been hired for the opening, to do just what it did to me. The show inside has some easily overlooked but similar elements. It rocks, classic Julia-style.

  • Robert Melee at Andrew Kreps: (who really needs a website. Andrew…) Dystopic domesticana, or something. The show is a full-blown survey of his work: his paintings, film/videos, installation, and…performance. His mother, who figures prominently into his video and photographic work, was there, in a shop window-like booth, drinking a 12-pack and smoking a carton of Marlboros. Robert’s work is as smart as it is disturbing, and believe me, it’s disturbing.
    Speaking earlier in the week about collaborating with his mother, Robert said that she just loved the attention. With this in mind, I felt an odd sense of wanting to be polite and look at her, for her sake. I felt it even more in the moments when no one in the crowded opening was looking her way; ignoring her is rude and mean, so I’ll look, make eye contact, so she doesn’t feel bad. Of course, looking made me feel wrong and dirty and antsy/uncomfortable. These contradictory feelings continued all night.

  • Thomas Scheibitz at Tanya Bonakdar: Sculptures that are closely related to his oddly colored, abstracted paintings. Pretty great, especially when seen together. To be honest, it’s taken me a couple of years to warm to his work, but it’s been worth the wait.
    It’s that time of year, I guess. In Slate, Robert Pinsky has a “Guided Anthology” of poetry. The three works he highlights are all worthwhile examples, but Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s “Souvenir of the Ancient World” resonated beyond just the title. I had re-read the entries from exactly a year ago, which seemed to resonate.

  • Don’t Rebuild. Reimagine.

    Herbert Muschamp “curated” a re-imagining of downtown Manhattan, a process where some of the world’s best-known architects (and a few up-and-comers) collaborated on and thrashed out an overall plan, then divvied up the resulting projects. From the cursory scan I’ve done, the result it energetic, a breath of fresh air, an unequivocal rebuke to any and all of the “thinking” that’s gone into the official process so far, and, in some cases, inspiring. (To be fair, a couple of the broadest strokes–the West Street Promenade, for example–were identified and retained from the LMDC/Port Authority/Australian Mall Developer’s abortive attempts in July.)
    Another question that has “already been settled,” at least in the media’s version of the “New York Street,” is the preservation/reconstitution of the WTC footprints as open space. While I’m not necessarily gung-ho for building where the towers stood, I believe a great deal of the emotional charge the “footprints” carry was generated by early and constant, poorly thought through, artificial arguments in the media. In this city, where everything is built on everything else, it strikes me as odd that people would get so collectively attached to a set of coordinates, especially when the “footprints” didn’t literally exist in the first place, but were comprised of a massive, multilayer subterranean city. [Sorry for the rant. I’ve been getting a little testy these last few days.]
    Anyway, what I’d really meant to say was that one rather significant and almost radical element of the NYTimes’ project is a delay of the memorial decision process, at least as it is currently perceived by the New York Street. I think this is bold, but right. According to an architect friend who is involved in the revamped LMDC planning process, public meetings frequently devolve into “kookville,” where every cockamamie red-white-and-blue-flag-shaped-TRIPLET-towers-this-time scheme is entertained/endured ad nauseum.
    Even going by the title, reimagining takes a lot of the pressure for getting the memorial right off of the entire project. It solves almost all the problems of the holy footprints and most of the rest of Ground Zero and focuses the memorial question there (while calling for a “vigorous public debate” on what to do), thereby allowing all of downtown to heal, to grow, even to thrive. Given the reputed arrogance of rock star architects like those in the project, it’s fascinating, though, that not one wanted to touch the idea of a memorial, even to venture a sketch. Only Maya Lin was finally pressed, pressed into throwing out a few of the roughest ideas. Such is the suasive power of the New York Street, I guess.

    INT – KOREAN DELI, NYC – EARLY MORNING

    An OFFICEWORKER wearing a beige dress and a thin, cream-colored cardigan talks on a phone while she gingerly picks up yogurt and carrot sticks. A MAN with bedhead and cutoff khaki shorts stands nearby, contemplating how many Diet Cokes to buy.


    OFFICEWORKER (on phone)
    …On top of that, a woman quit yesterday.
    (pause)
    No, one you want to stay.
    (pause)
    No, she told them yesterday, you know, gave them her two-weeks notice, and they threw a fit. Then she said, ‘You know what? Just consider this my last day,’ and walked out.
    (pause)
    NO! That’s how they are. And you know the worst part?

    The officeworker moves toward the bagel counter, and the man decides to see how the bananas are and moves absentmindedly-looking in the same direction.


    OFFICEWORKER
    (pause)
    I think I’m becoming one of them.

    Regrets? Had a few? Wonder why I weblog it my way?

    gondolas_venice.jpg
    Kurt Andersen and Andrew Sullivan are writing about weblogs this week on Slate. While leaving most of the smoke/fire debate to others more expert than I, I’ll say that based on their presence and comments, if blogging were the web, it’s now 1997. What caught my eye was this quote from Andersen, who I’ve taken issue with before, on the subject of Documenta, but who I’ve admired for years (except at NYMag. Off topic.):

    Lately, however, thinking about blogs, I have entertained a retrospective fantasy about a kind of endowed blog model that would have been interesting to try with Inside.com: If we had put the capital we raised into Treasury bills, we’d have had $1.5 million a year in income, with which we could’ve employed and published our best dozen reporter-commentators forever.

    KA’s not alone in this notion of “retrospective fantasy,” especially as it relates to the flood of capital and (ultimately ephemeral) wealth of the recent past. How often does he re-spend the money Inside.com burned through? Recently at drinks, a business school classmate I hadn’t seen for a few years talked with assiduous wistfulness about “the day when [his] net worth hit $100 million.” Every once in a while, I cash out near the top, or I go ahead with the heavy hedging strategy a lone adviser suggested after the IPO. It’s like looking at a mark on a wall, which, even years later, shows how high the water was.
    [image: american museum of photography]