Team THINK’s winning WTC design: lattice towers with a, um,
museum? embedded in it image: vinoly.com
Goin’ to hear THINK architect/model Rafael Vinoly at Urban Center tonight (as suggested by Gawker)? Ask him if the reason he was a no-show yesterday on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show was that listener’s early comment, which surprised Lehrer, about how THINK’s towers appear to have an airplane embedded in it? Listen to the exchange is in the “3rd audio clip. [2016 updated link to WNYC archive page currently has no audio.]
[Note: If you watch THINK’s video on The NYT‘s slideshow, the shape of the “airplane” is quite different; it looks more like a giant aluminum cheese straw. For THINK’s sake, I hope that’s closer to their intentions. One team of architects trying to sneak a shudder-inducing memorial past us is more than enough, thanks.]
[2016 update: lmao of course most of these links are dead, I cannot BELIEVE that the realaudio of WNYC’s show from 13 yrs earlier is not there anymore! But I un-hotlinked and updated the image and the Vinoly link. Swimming against the tide of time, also Gawker RIP]
Bill & Nada’s Cafe
Bill & Nada’s Cafe was where I had my first script idea. It’s not that the Salt Lake dance clubs were cooler than the ones in Provo, there were no dance clubs in Provo. (Don’t talk to me about The Palace; that was like a church dance in Orange County). So we’d drive to Salt Lake to go out. Finding a designated driver was never a problem (think about it). Then after the clubs closed, we’d go to Bill & Nada’s. Much cooler than Denny’s. And full of characters, whether at 3AM or 8AM or lunchtime. Clubbies trying to be bad, punks, mothers with home-dyed hair, Willy Lomans, and always a few grizzled friends of Bill at the counter, truckers, probably. Or prospectors.
It was the time warp kind of diner that hadn’t changed since the early sixties. Ancient country music on the jukeboxes (one on each table. There’d always be some jerk who’d order up Patsy Cline’s Crazy ten times, just as he was getting his check. Damn college kids.) The most famous dish was eggs & brains, but I’d always get pancakes (“Breakfast served all day”), which were orange (fertilized eggs, they’d say) and tapioca pudding. Or a patty melt. Every hour, the head waitress’d saunter over and spin the wheel. If your seat number hit, your order was free (there are little stick-on numbers at each spot, it turns out). There’s a vintage Field & Stream-like mural of a mountain lake on one wall, and a portrait of Bill, in full metal jacket and chaps, on his show horse. Just like in the Pioneer Day parade, every July.
There were stories, told on the way home, about why the pictures of Bill & Nada are so old, too. “Go ask where she is,” some smart ass’d say, but no one ever did. Uncovering the urban legend we were sure lurked behind Bill & Nada’s was to be my first documentary, I decided; So many characters! And so quirky! (I was running the International Cinema program at BYU my senior year.) Half-assed research and writing efforts in the following years yielded one problematic result: there was no mystery, nothing lurking behind anything at Bill & Nada’s. What do you do when the reality turns out to be far less sensational than what you’d built it up to be in your mind? In my case, you go to business school, I guess.
I found this meal ticket from Bill & Nada’s today while sorting through some tax receipts. I bought it for the clean design. Despite the slogan, Bill & Nada’s closed at the end of 1999. On their last night in business, I took my DV camera down there and roamed around for a couple of hours, capturing the atmosphere, shooting detail shots, so I could recreate it on a set, when the time came. Looks like longtime patron Bert Singleton did the same thing before they tore the place down last January.
I Mean, Just Look How Happy They Were!
In 1990, just out of school, I was transfixed by a copy of Ansel Adam’s self-published book, Born Free And Equal, at a big antiques show. At $200, it was the most expensive book I’d ever wanted, and I choked. Almost five years of searching later, it was the first thing I bought online, from a collector on a photography newsgroup. [Of course, now you can almost always find a copy on Abebooks.] Adams’ combined his photographs–signature landscapes, portraits and documentary shots–of the Japanese American internment camp in Manzanar, CA with his scathing text to condemn the US government’s (all three branches) stripping of US citizens’ and residents’ civil rights.
Published in 1944, Adams’ book was poorly received, no surprise. Many copies were reportedly burned, and today, it is an exceedingly rare, little known work by a very famous photographer. Since the 1960’s, the Manzanar collection has been at the Library of Congress. Tell Jack Valenti when you want to see his neck twitch: Adams put these pictures into the public domain, to assure their survival. View all 244 images here.
Why do I post this now? Well, I have contemplated ideas for a film based in the camps. And a John Ashcroft deputy has suggested such camps for Arab Americans would not be illegal. But now, a Congressman from North Carolina (home state, thanks), the Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Domestic Security, has defended the camps, proclaiming them “appropriate” and “for their [the Japanese’] own safety.” Two branches down, one to go.
[2024 update: I actually used to hotlink images, that is how idealistic I was about the permanent informational utopia we were building on the world wide web and the direction copyright and fair use was heading in 2003. lol]
On WTC Site Designs
What I hope doesn’t carry through from the plans the LMDC selected from Daniel Libeskind and THINK Team:
What I hope does carry through:
What Filler calls such a concept, which I personally favor: “unquestionably the most provocative.” [I think he’s talking about the latticework as Ban’s, not the memorial. I like both.]
Despite a lot of overwrought reaction, Filler wins the greg.org “smartest critic” award for agreeing with me on so many points: this memorial idea, the 1,776′ tower, and (finally!) the Eisenman-as-ruin-as-memorial-instigator analysis.
Washington, DC Is The Kind Of Movie Town Where
So Then Who Blew (Whom) At Sundance?
From yesterday’s NYTimes:
Editors’ Note, Sunday Styles
The Age of Dissonance column last Sunday, about cozying up to celebrities, mentioned a report in The Daily News that guests at the Sundance film festival “had their shoes spattered” when the actor Tobey Maguire was taken ill. But the day the Times column appeared, The News quoted the actor’s publicist as saying that although Mr. Maguire doubled over at one point, it was not he who vomited.”
Because You Keep Asking…
Search queries answered this edition:
Q: “The best This American Life”
Q: “Buy Carambar online”
Q: “Simpsons conservative fansites”
Q: “David Gallagher Shirtless Pictures”
I give you the 2nd edition of greg.org answers, wherein I provide the information you thought you’d find on this site, but didn’t.
Q “The best This American Life“ (greg.org Googlerank: 3rd of 4 results)
A I did answer that, last April (Conventions, with John Perry Barlow). But my weasely, equivocating prose (“perhaps the best TAL episode in my memory”) is about as slippery as, well, let’s just say “the case still needs to be made.”
Still, “the best” is tricky. The TAL Staff give their favorites, which hasn’t been added to since 11/01, so we’re missing about 15 months of judgment calls.
When TAL won the Univ. of Georgia’s Peabody Award in 1996, the jurors cited three episodes from that year: The cruelty of children, When you talk about music, and From a distance. Ostensibly chosen to show TAL‘s range, these episodes–which include stories of gay teen anguish, a Tom Jones impersonator, and obsession with celebrity–actually reflect the “we’re the center of the universe!” ecstasy that overtook Georgia in 1996, when hometown girl, Ru-Paul, ruled the world.
You could always buy the CD. Lies, Sissies, and Fiascoes: The Best of This American Life has 12 stories on 2 discs. Until Ira Glass starts taking my calls again, that’s the best I can do.
Q “Buy Carambar online”(Googlerank: 2 of 12)
A “Always popular, Carambar is a chewy caramel baton-shaped candy,” the French cash register equivalent of chocolatey Ice Cubes and crack pipes with little roses in them. Sure, Donald Rumsfeld dismisses Carambar as “Old Europe,” but isn’t that what you’d expect the ringleader of the global aspartame conspiracy to say?
Buy Carambar online from the excellent French Feast:
box of 200 (1750g) – $25.00
individual (8g) $0.15
Q “Simpsons conservative fansites” (Googlerank: 5th of 9 results)
A Since “Blessed Ned of Springfield” graced the cover of Christianity Today, the story practically wrote itself: Conservatives actually love The Simpsons. Clearly the article’s author, Mark Pinsky, is a fan; he wrote The Gospel According to The Simpsons. But he’s also a reporter for the Orlando Sentinel; are there any non-journalist fans?
Simplistically equating conservative and religious, I found Noah Gradofsky’s The Simpsons Talmud and JVibe’s “Hey man, don’t have a leavened bread!” site for Passover ritual, The Homer Counter.
Of course religious and conservative are not synonyms, unless you’re a godless communist. The #1 conservative Simpsons fan has to be National Review editor-at-large, Jonah Goldberg, who’s May 2000 article, “Homer Never Nods: The Importance of The Simpsons,” sets a thoughtful, hi-larious high bar for contemporary conservative writing. And UVA Professor Paul Cantor’s essay, The Simpsons: Atomistic Politics and the Nuclear Family” in Political Theory, provides the intellectual foundation for conservative Simpsons appreciation. Still, I’d have to count these as professional fans.
Q “David Gallagher Shirtless Pictures” (Googlerank: 106th of 376 results)
A Dude. Do you know who this is? I had to look it up. It’s the kid from 7th Heaven. Cold comfort that he turns 18 in less than two weeks; any shirtless pictures are from when he’s a kid.
I don’t know which is more disturbing, that you were looking for these pics in the first place, that you trawled through eleven increasingly irrelevant screens of Google search results before clicking on my site, or that what probably caught your attention on Google was the phrase, “shirtless Aryans,” (which I used in a discussion of contemporary art’s influence on film to describe the Bruce Weber-y American History X.)
I’ve had enough for now. Two other answers must wait, I’m afraid:
Q “eyeing each inert mien and artificial plan” (hint: it’s a quote from the Herbert Muschamp/Showgirls parody. I’m still looking.)
Q “Matthew Barney Cremaster on DVD” this is by far the most-asked search that goes unfound here at greg.org. But don’t despair. I’m working on a very interesting answer for this one. Stay tuned.
Strictly (Sundance) Business
First, rather than just say, “Called it!” (which I did, thank you), let me congratulate director Stewart Hendler and company (including DP John Ealer) for winning Sundance’s Online Film Festival with their short, One.
Second, third and fourth, check out the following roundups of Sundance deal-making and film performance. The takeaway (sorry, Holly Hunter): Wo unto those who maketh their films for buzz, for verily, they have their reward.
Mary Glucksman takes a thorough and incisive look at indie film and distributor performance in 2002 in Filmmaker Magazine. Last year, only eight festival-bought independent films grossed more than $1 million. (The population of acquisition execs who passed on the non-festival My Big Fat Greek Wedding is enough to fill Park City. In fact, it just did…)
Glucksman picks apart seven 2002 Sundance deals to uncover the winners and losers, finding three-time Sundance vet Miguel Arteta’s The Good Girl to be the win-win deal of the year for all involved. Interestingly, Gary “win-win” Winnick’s Tadpole results in sweet deals for everyone but Miramax, who bought the film in a classic Sundance frenzy for $5 million (it only made $2.8 at the box office). [Harvey, if you’re overpayin’, I’m playin’. Give me a call.]
Filmmaker also has a handy Sundance Box Office 2002 Chart, which you can cut out and put next to your editing station, to remind you of the financial folly you’re undertaking.
In the Voice, Anthony Kaufman casts a (now understandably) sober eye at this year’s deals, calling bulls**t on both the supposed value of festival buzz and the overheated acquisitions it spawns. Or, in the words of Sony Pictures Classics prexy Michael Barker, “We’ve been burned before by the Sundance frenzy. In fact, we’ve had more success with films that we’ve revisited after the festival outside the context of sleep deprivation. And that’s what we’re going to do in the coming weeks.”
Herbert Muschamp: Think THINK!
Herbert Muschamp, the Professor Emile Flostre of architectural empathicalism, gives his blessing to the THINK team’s proposal to build a World Cultural Center at the former WTC site.
There are several things to like about the proposal, not the least of which is to turn the emphasis from the overwhelming commercial interests on the site, which the market can take care of just fine, thanks. Think’s proposal most closely ressembles Paul Goldberger’s call for an “Eiffel Tower for the 21st century,” which would place greater importance on technological and symbolic marvel than on purely functional architecture (go ahead, tell me how many rentable square feet is the Eiffel Tower?). And I thought the WTC-WCC connection struck a powerful chord.
Enough with the turn-ons, now the hang-ups: the awkward relation to the oh-so-holy footprints; the lattices’ form, too-close-to-the-originals evocation of the towers which, I think, will age poorly; skepticism of such a project’s survival in the pathetic, poisonous political environment of the rebuilding process.
For my part, such open towers would make my own idea for a memorial possible: large, quiet halls in space (x,y,z space) near the points of impact on the original towers.
Can’t Wait To See It
Anthony Lane on Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s documentary, Lost in La Mancha: “For anyone who suffers from the wish to make movies, or who fears that this terrible condition may strike at any time, here is the cure.”
See Christian Marclay’s Video Quartet at Paula Cooper By Saturday
Last night I heard the artist Christian Marclay talk about Video Quartet, his enchanting, mind-boggling music/film work at Paula Cooper Gallery. It’s a 13-minute musical composition of nearly 600 separate film clips, on four simultaneous channels, projected onto a 40′-long screen. It was commissioned by a friend, Benjamin Weil, a curator at SFMOMA, where it was shown last summer to wide acclaim. [Naturally, Jason Kottke wrote about it then; so did Wired.com.] Rather than parrot or try to outdo other reviews, or gush about my own experience (I’ve now seen Quartet ten+ times), I think it’s worthwhile to look at how Marclay actually made the piece.
Video Quartet owes its existence to the recent emergence of real desktop editing software, and the artist’s highly unconventional use of it. Amazingly, Marclay learned and used Final Cut Pro: “I sat in front of a computer for almost a full year,” he said. With the concept and an abstracted narrative structure in mind and starting with the films he knew, Marclay gathered scenes with music, performance, or sounds. He made bins for various categories (e.g., piano playing, singing, gongs, violins, tapdancing), hand-building a database of clips to work from.
Then he started constructing passages or scenes and built “bridges” between them. (One thing he said he’d wished he’d done differently: start at the beginning and build it sequentially. Hey, no complaints from me.) Along the way, Marclay would search out additional films and pull from them “the right combination of music and image.” (Musical strike two for Richard Gere: Marclay wanted to use Gere playing trumpet from The Cotton Club, but the combo just didn’t work.)
But how can you edit four video+audio channels in FCP, which plays multiple audio channels, (but only one video channel) at a time? By ear, apparently. He’d layer the four video+audio channels, set sound levels, and then adjust the timing of edits by outputting tiny animated versions, side by side. The result is exquisitely composed sound throughout, with absorbing images choreographed across four screens, flecked with just a touch of visual chance.
Knowing the basics of Marclay’s method adds a layer of complexity to Quartet, a layer that deepens with even a little hands-on experience in Final Cut. The last time I watched it, I began seeing the clips on a timeline, picturing a. What had seemed impossible or magic before was now revealing itself as a complex creation, the product of arduous, inspired effort.
About Chicago: One Man’s Sad Journey
Act II: Action
I went to see Chicago last night at the Ziegfeld (now a Pepsi theater, so no small sacrifice)
Act III: Resolution
IT SUCKED. Catherine Zeta-Jones’ (aka, my phone pimp) was alive, and Queen Latifah had one good song (ok, great). But the film was emotionally and narrative…ly? flat. Feeling nothing, not caring what happens to any character, and not getting any sense at all from the film of where we were in the story, I almost left several times.
Embarassingly, it was media hype of Richard Gere’s earnestly-studied tapdancing that kept me there, until I realized I may have already missed it (I hadn’t, and it wasn’t worth it). After the surprising turns by Ewan MacGregor, Nicole Kidman and Jim Broadbent in Moulin Rouge, the bar has been raised; “Wow! [Insert unlikely star name here] is singing!” just isn’t enough anymore. [Of course, Woody Allen proved it wasn’t enough before, either.]
Lastly, the editing. If Moulin Rouge‘s occasional 100-120 cpm (cuts per minute) were too much for some people, at least they held up as a creative choice. Some of Chicago‘s musical numbers reached at least 70-80 cpm, but to disjointed, not frenetic effect. A barrage of nearly indecipherable cuts might fit an orgiastic mob dance scene, but rapidfire cuts of two women dancing on stage seems just like a cheap attempt to liven things up (or, more likely, feeble cover for an actress’s less-than-sharp dancing).
Quick Sundance Notes
From Indiewire.com’s excellent Sundance coverage comes the story of the screening of Open Hearts, by Danish director and Dogme groupie Susanne Bier:
In the middle of this witty, winning Dogme 95-sanctioned melodrama about infidelity and mourning, the Park City projectionist accidentally screened the film in the wrong order: after the mistake was determined, the audience voted passionately to continue watching and piece together the narrative in their heads. One happy viewer was rumored to comment, “It’s just like watching Memento.” [One hopeful filmmaker was rumored to comment, “Then offer me what you should’ve paid Chris Nolan, dude.”]
Buffalo on the Montana Plains, Albert Bierstadt
from the Collection of Ted Turner image:tfaoi.com
Just two things about emerging filmmaker Richard Linklater’s short film, Live from Shiva’s Dancefloor, about that megalomaniacal kook from that double-decker tour bus movie: If you want to put buffalo on Ground Zero, check with that far more impressive megalomaniac, Ted Turner; he’s got the biggest herd of in the world.
According to the National Bison Association, you’d probably max out at a rather sparse 2.2 head/acre, or 35 buffalo total, on the 16-acre WTC site. Not quite the inspiring herds we’ve been promised. Not that returning land to the wild is too far-fetched: the Buffalo Commons concept has been floating around the Great Plains since at least 1987.
In any case, if you’re gonna go there, try Michael Ableman’s farm idea, which he floated last month in the NY Times
Ted Turner bonus quote: “Just because you don’t hear him doesn’t mean he isn’t screaming,” says author Richard Hack.
Art Worth Crossing The Street For
Installation view, Anne Truitt, Danese Gallery (image:artnet.com)
Two shows of evocative new work by unrepentant minimalists are on 57th street at the moment, a moment when a pair of artists over 80 demonstrate the power and relevance of the minimalist mode, as well as the potential benefits of being in it for the long haul.
Yeah, Capitalism, or In Defense Of A Collector
Also at Slate Joshua Clover writes a clever essay (very or too, depending on if those are exhibition posters or actual paintings on your wall) about Richter 858, a luxuriantly produced ode– in book form, with specially commissioned poems and a CD (of Richtermusik, I guess) — to a suite of Gerhard Richter squeegee paintings. Retailing at $125 and co-published by SFMOMA (who have been promised the paintings from an anonymous donor), Richter 858 is a “classic fetish item, beautiful enough that everyone might want it but priced beyond the reach of the great unfunded.” And that’s not the worst of it.
Clover reveals that 858‘s editor, David Breskin, is an SFMOMA Trustee and “almost certainly” the donor of the paintings, facts which–despite a year of SEC reforms and disclosure scandals–go unmentioned in the book. “Whatever a given Richter painting, or a particular poem, might be about, Richter 858 is about checkbooks and culture–that is, it’s a book perfect for decadent modernism, where the art of consumption has replaced the art of production; it’s a book, finally, about collecting, that individualist art overseen by the twin muses ‘Dollars’ and ‘Indulge.'”
“Dollar”: Last time I checked, what a Richter painting’s about, is $400,000 – 1 million, depending on the size and the date. A suite of eight, then, is about, well, you do the math. By making the paintings a “fractional and promised gift” to the museum, our benefactor (let’s call him “DB”) gives a percentage of the title each year for a fixed term ( ex. 10%/year, 10 years), until they belong 100% to the museum. Why do this, O Muse?. “DB” spreads a large tax deduction out over several years, which is useful if his gifts exceed 30% of his adjusted gross income. “Indulge”: “DB” is able to keep the art for a period of time each year in proportion to his percentage ownership.
But there’s another muse’s fingerprints on this one. 858‘s not a catalog, it’s an experience Compared to the essay- and information-packed Richter exhibition catalog written by “The Brain,” (aka, former MoMA curator Robert Storr), Richter 858‘s multimedia melange is a work of the Heart.
“Heart”: SFMOMA says Breskin was “compelled by these works” to create this book. Talking about the project and his interactions with Richter, Breskin’s giddiness (“As a sequence, these hung together and swung in a musical sense,” “I wanted to create an alternative way of engaging with pictures.”) sounds less like a trustee and more like a groupie.
Trust me, that’s what some of the most passionate collectors are, art groupies. Going to concerts (openings), getting backstage (in the studio), obsessing over some lyric (work) and asking arcane questions that betray how powerfully a it inhabits your mind. Groupie? Check out Breskin’s 2-day interview with the Richter of 1987 rock-n-roll, Bono, for Rolling Stone. Breskin seems like the kind of guy–indulgent, clearly, but in a necessary way–who’s trying to live an art-centered life, not just an “art-owning” one. And by placing the Richters at SFMOMA, “DB” seems like the kind of donor who believes that indulgent art experience should always be available to the public (but who agonizes over letting the paintings go too soon).
And besides, 858‘s 30% off at Amazon. A serious collector looks for a discount.