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?
On Other Issues, Less Pressing, Perhaps
image: ptanderson.com
Other Noteworthy Events (From Different
Other Noteworthy Events (From Different Ends Of The Creative Spectrum)
From the LA Times, Mark Swed’s rather lyrical article about “See Here, A Colloquium on Attention and the Arts,” held at Pomona College. Alumnus James Turrell and others spoke, and works by once-attention-trying composers like Anton Webern were played. [via Peter Johnstone’s Revelator.org]
Something I never thought I’d see – a broadcast version of Paul Verhoeven‘s classic, Showgirls, the first NC-17 film released by a major studio. I kid you not, it’s on VH-1 right now, complete with thoroughly dubbed dialogue and low-budget, digitally inserted bikini tops in the scenes they just couldn’t cut out. [Or settle for the original on DVD.]
What VH-1 should do, is Showgirls: Behind the Music. Space Ghost up some clips from Saved by the Bell, throw in some childhood home-style footage, and interviews with former classmates, and explain to me why Nomi’s so angry.
Big Art Events (Now and
Big Art Events (Now and Upcoming)
Untitled (Boiling Study), 2002, Ricci Albenda, at Momenta Art’s Benefit Auction 3/15
Now
The Armory Show (through Sunday)
–Scope Art Fair (through Sunday, including Bill Previdi’s always-interesting collector panel Saturday afternoon)
Upcoming (Saturday, March 15)
Momenta Benefit Auction and Art Raffle, at White Columns, bid on/buy some great art and support the program of a pioneering Williamsburg gallery.
You Are So (Colorful, Devalued, Looks Like Monopoly) Money
Vince Vaughn, US Marshall (Plan evangelist) image: ecalos.com
My dad is in town for a meeting, and he brought his free USA Today down Via IP: This USAT article about Americans abroad feeling burned by Bush’s wildly unpopular unilateralist “megalomania.” The punchline stars Vince Vaughn:
But one incident really stung.
“Man, it was bad,” says the Rat Pack-y star of Swingers. “These girls saw us and were kind of flirting, and they kept asking us if we were American. Finally we said, ‘Yes,’ and they just took off.
“One girl turns and says, ‘We were hoping you were Canadian.’ Canadian? Since when was it cooler to be Canadian?”
Welcome to the New World Order, baby.
At Least Some Americans Are Doing OK Abroad
A very good, long Guardian interview by with Julianne Moore and Todd Haynes at the National Film Theatre in London.
And I have to say, I look back on Lindsay Law, who was from American Playhouse and was our producer on Safe, and David Aukin, who worked at Channel 4; those guys are so rare, I realise in hindsight how much courage financing producers had to have to stand back and trust you. Now I would look at these dailies from Safe, where Julie was a speck on the screen and the whole film would be played out in a single shot. And he was like, “I don’t get it. I don’t get it.” But he would never talk to me and never say, “Oh, more coverage” or put in his two cents just to make himself feel more creatively esteemed. That’s so unusual, that kind of courage and I just now realise the extent to which that helped me. So we were really lucky and although we had just under a million dollars to make Safe, which isn’t amazing to think of, but it felt like it. It was tough. But I still had the freedom to do what I needed to do.
On Fashion On War
From Guy Trebay’s column in the NY Times:
During the Second World War, Mr. Lacroix went on, his mother was a girl of 16 living in occupied Arles. To signal her own resistance, she incorporated a fragment of color from the forbidden French flag in her clothes every day. “A little bit of blue, red or white in each outfit,” Mr. Lacroix said, adding that if there was anything that decades in the design world had taught him, it was that symbols, however small, can sometimes surprise you with their weight.
Design Selected For Pentagon Memorial
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:
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.]
On Relieving Payne, On Power And Behind-The-Scenes
from r: Jane, David, Nancy, Swoosie
First, the good. Star photographer-to-the-stars Patrick McMullan has posted Billy Farrell’s party pics from the Alexander Payne event last week.
Then, the lame. In a bit they call House of Payne, the Daily News pretends that Alexander Payne was a pain in the ass and that “he should get over himself,” slamming him for his “snippiness” toward good friend and interviewer, UA chief (and legendary indie film producer/distributor) Bingham Ray. But it’s totally not true. Here’s the deal: Rush & Molloy are too afraid of upsetting a studio head by saying he talked too much or sometimes inadvertently cut Alexander off; instead, they’ll take lame shots at an extremely friendly, self-conscious director.
Ray and Payne had gone off earlier in the day to discuss what themes and ideas they’d talk about on stage. During the rehearsal, their back-and-forth conversation was both animated and fascinating. Both are behind-the-camera guys; performing for a crowd doesn’t come naturally to either of them. When the lights went down, Alexander was much more self-conscious, and Bingham was much more talkative.
Many people told me they found the whole conversation very interesting. Some found it interesting, but thought Ray talked too much, at least for an event about Payne. And a couple of people wondered, who was that guy? If that’s you, you’re not in the film industry. But if you know Bingham Ray, you want to work with him, and so you’re probably not going to tell him he talked too much. It’s the paradox of power.
My take: Ray said several times that night he’d never spoken in a one-on-one format like that, and he’d be mortified to think he messed up Payne’s evening in some way. So if he talked over Alexander’s answer, or told some story of his own, it was with the best of intentions. But hold a position of power and be sought out for your vision, for a long time, and you can become accustomed to being listened to. Bill Clinton was the same way. And Payne was a combination of polite, nervous and self-effacing; he’s not gonna call a friend on something in front of a crowd, and his own reluctance to analyze his work beat out any fleeting desire to spoon-feed the crowd.
As these two brilliant behind-the-camera guys gamely put on their best show, the producer sitting next to me had quickly figured it out. She leaned over to me at one point and whispered, “I want to hear the DVD commentary track for this.”
Chelsea Gallery Shortlist
Untitled (Republican Years), Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 1992
currently in “Stacked” at D’Amelio Terras
If you are boycotting the French right now, you’re a loser. They’re putting on some of the best shows in town. Additions to an incomplete list:
On A Big Art Thursday
Last night at a friend’s house, Jeremy Blake showed us some recent work and talked about it.
The New Museum previewed a strong group show, “Living Inside the Grid,” where Dan Cameron exercises his international muscles in advance of the Istanbul Biennial. There are some obvious (and thus, intentional) omissions, but many nice pieces, including a creepy-sleek prison door by Elmgreen & Dragset.
And finally, while I didn’t make the opening, the after-party came to us at dinner: The Whitney opens a show about Diller + Scofidio, architects who have PR-muscled their way to the front of the technology/media stage. Eager to make amends for the dustup caused by his baldly partisan, king-making articles about the WTC redesign, the NYTimes‘ Herbert Muschamp returns to clear-eyed, of-the-people objectivity in his review. Here’s the first paragraph:
The search for intelligent life in architecture is artfully rewarded at the Whitney Museum’s retrospective of the work of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, New York’s brainiest architectural team. But intelligent visitors will have to pick their way through a few unwelcome booby traps: curatorial winks and nods designed to dumb things down for the chimerical unsophisticates to whom far too many museum shows today are needlessly pitched.
Mr Rogers Was A Person In My Neighborhood
I was too young to get worked up about moving from New York to Indianapolis, but I remember being very nervous about moving from Indianapolis to Raleigh. One day, my 1st-grade teacher took me to Dairy Queen after school to talk about it.
“Well, I don’t know anyone,” I complained, “and there aren’t any famous people from North Carolina.” (New York already had its hooks into me, it turns out.)
“Like who?” Mrs Hershenson asked.
“Like Cowboy Bob.”
Although, at the time I didn’t realize the golden era of locally produced kids’ shows was ending, I had a point.
Deftly skirting a potentially ugly Cowboy Bob-Andy Griffith shootout, Mrs Hershenson asked, “Is that important to you?”
Proto-New Yorker answer: “um, yeah.”
“Well, what about Mister Rogers?”
“But he’s not from Indianapolis.”
“No, you’re right. He’s from Pittsburgh. But his show is on a network, which means it’ll be on in North Carolina, just like it is here. So when you get to Raleigh, you’ll already know someone. And then you’ll make a lot of other friends, too, in no time.”
Thus, in addition to explaining the differences between affiliate and network programming, Mister Rogers (and Mrs Hershenson) helped me to see that my neighborhood extended far beyond my street, and they guided me into to a lifetime of seeking out the friendship of famous people.
Mister Rogers passed away today, after a recent diagnosis of cancer. View a timeline of Fred Rogers’ achievements, including a behind the scenes clip from the first show, and his 1969 Senate testimony where he passionately argued for the creation of PBS, at pbskids.org.
Architectural Survivor 3: See Who Gets Voted Off The Island
It’s architectural reality TV, with so many last-minute campaigns, twists and turns, you’d think Fox was running it, not the Port Authority. The final two bachelors, er architect groups in the design “competition” for the WTC site have been workin’ it hard, according to design reporter Julie Iovine’s NYTimes article, even turning up on Oprah. Herbert Muschamp weighs in, too, slightly chastened. Meanwhile, Edward Wyatt’s report of a LMDC committee’s surprise recommendation of THINK over (the Pataki/Bloomberg-favored) Libeskind sounds like a promo for the finale of Joe Millionaire. And just as “surprising,” or “real,” for that matter. Whether angling to arrive at a lecture with a victim family member or throwing shade on each other’s designs, these architects ingenuously perform for the camera.
Night Of A Thousand Film Geeks
clockwise from top R: UA’s Bingham Ray and honoree Alexander Payne
David O. Russell, last year’s honoree, still in a euphoric daze
“special friend”/screenwriter Jim Taylor, freezing on way to afterparty
John Waters and sycophantic fan, photo: David Russell
crowd shot, which captured the supposedly elusive cracked-me-up international man of mystery
Last night at MoMA, Alexander Payne and Bingham Ray talked about Payne’s career and films (including Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt). The Museum’s Film & Media Department gave Payne its Work In Progress Award, to honor filmmakers as they transition from “promising” to “proven.” Ray, who’s an independent film legend himself, and who heads United Artists (which picked up Pieces of April at Sundance), studio headed the conversation.
In my secret socialite life, I co-chaired the benefit. I’m working up my notes from Alexander’s discussion (and will try to score some audio clips, too) and will post a page of pictures soon. In the mean time, here is a composite pic, and the highlights of my speech: