Brand on the Brain.

Tonight, I saw Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain. As the rappers say, I’m going to break it down because it was perhaps the most coherent and gorgeous aesthetic spectacle I’ve ever seen.

I describe it, yes.

Brand Upon the Brain was performed tonight as part of the annual New Music Festival here at the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra here in Manitoba. The primary visual focus consisted of a huge screen of Maddin’s visual narrative of a guy named Guy who lives in a lighthouse and pines after his sister’s lesbian friend, despite the fact that that friend plays a man, who goes by the name of Chance and who is not as lovely but is more loving than the sister of Guy the character. Chance, who seems miscast at first (and this is my only criticism of the entire event), turns out to be a key figure in the distraught, anxious, and very unhappy young life of the orphan Guy who, as we watch all 12 chapters begin and end, comes back to visit his once and future home, that being this island with a lighthouse not far from the mainland and which feels very, very isolated. The mother, through various kinds of sexual and verbal escape, becomes old and young again while the father goes back to work, even as an old man, a naked resurrected corpse, and a young torturer, not in that order. Meawhile, the pining third-wheel Guy is a romantic witness to the unfolding story, occasionally surrounded by imprisoned orphans of numerous races dressed in white. But the story is the easiest part to tell and, despite the above, it makes sense and holds its own visual logic throughout every Oedipal twist and lesbian turn.

The beauty of the piece came with the three live satellite features of the event. The inimitable, gorgeous, and understated Isabella Rossellini narrated the entire drama. Introduced by the charming and gentle Guy Maddin, Rosselini wore a sleek, black, Italian suit which matched her slicked down, curled-out hair, looking as engaged with the drama as she could possibly be, smiling and then scoffing, waving and then yelling. In front of her, she watched the drama unfold on the monitor and her lines were flawlessly read, nay, formed around the drama. At one point, she screamed and my elation reached new heights.

To her right was a ten-piece orchestra, pulled from the fantastic WSO. Their synchronicity with the silent film poised above them was exacting and lent the entire affair an emotionality that could never be felt via soundtrack, despite the fact the score, by Jason Staczek, was masterful. The conductor, Rei Hotoda, was so fully on, so completely engaged with the towering images that the music, when it wasn’t soaring, blended, perfectly, lovingly, joyfully, and tearfully.

To the very right of the orchestra were the Foley artists; three musician-cum-sound-effect-artists, they played their buckets of water, slamming doors, creaking stairs, screaming babies, rubber chickens, popping bubble wrap, chopped cabbage, crushed celery, electronic horn, smashed cantaloupes, silent clockers, barking foghorns, lapping paper waves, and painted books with panache and sweat-filled attention. Imagine the Blue Man Group quietly orchestrating a return as normal people who loved the symphony, fresh vegetables, and German Expressionism.

This brings me to the next full-on ramble, which is Maddin’s glorious imagery. I’m sitting here in jealous, loving rage at the director because the dude’s captured many of the critical images and moments that I, in my profound hope, would pull into a film that I would make. These include:

• Lighthouses and rotating periscopic chairs
• RCA-brand Victor Talking Machine-era voice-scopes
• Major Tom men, as beautifully rendered as they are evil
• David Bowiesque Pierrot figures, walking amidst lapping waves
• Laboratory instruments, framed against a window as continual darkness

Aesthetically, Maddin pulled together the very best yet disparate strands of one hundred and twenty years of cinema into one, single 94-minute film. Black and white throughout, with touches of harrowing and strangled color, the film calls upon every Surrealist, Expressionist, Soviet, and American Avant-Garde visual trope in the very best of ways. It does so with gallows humor and an inherent sorrow for the loss of those forms. The shapes and shades and shorts throughout make more than a nod to the beauty of simplicity and directness of emotional content - they resurrect the innocence of the times when films were made to directly impact, and not just manipulate, our very real feelings for the characters and the scenery in which they thrive and deny and dream.

The scratched and deprecated medium is present throughout, as it is in most of Maddin’s work. It’s as if the visual impoverishment of the film stock helps Maddin enrich our connection with our love for the medium. Interestingly, at certain points during the film, strange digital rectangles flickered across the screen, remnants of the modern medium being broadcast above our heads. I don’t know if these are modern-day effects intended by the artist or they’re reminders of our own media’s mortality.

I do know what it was when Wagner coined Gesamtkunstwerk , the total artwork that fulfills every sense and fills every space. The 1980s saw many fake versions of this in the contemporary art world, what with electronic lights and voices and bright imagery. But Maddin is the true heir to the form and I can only wish that he’ll continue onward.

My thanks to my friends D.C. and L.D. for organizing the evening. After the event, we noted that it will never be the same, this Brand Upon the Brain construction that is now memory. Despite, or rather because of it being a massively historical aesthetic event, it can never be repeated for better or worse. The monstrosity of the entire endeavor moved me terribly.

Cloverfield.

Holy cow. I saw Cloverfield on Sunday night with a my friend, D.C. Basically, it scared the hell out of me. I realize that the director was using all of the Blair Witch and You Tube tropes available to him: handheld camera, first-person narrative, minor sightings of major monsters, screams and hysteria, and lots of good, all-purpose suspense, plus a little true romance to drive the story forward. It had all of those things in spades.

But what really scared me was its ability to tap deep into my primitive consciousness, pushing around memories of my experiences of 9/11 in lower Manhattan and mixing the imagery up with modern nightmares. At a certain point, perhaps 20 minutes in, I couldn’t quite breathe and I had a minor epiphany along the lines of “Andy needs to take better care of himself. Going to a replay of 9/11, even if fictive, is not a good mental health break.”

What more? Well, another friend, V.S., has started a fantastic new blog with his friend A.D. dedicated to the cinema and, well, movies and films and reviews of films. It’s called Cineblog and I urge you to give it a read. You might start with the review of Cloverfield.

Branches

I hadn’t quite realized that Dunder Mifflin had quite so many branches all over the United States and Canada. It’s a good list of places.

Punched.

This was funny for the first one point five minutes. Andy Sanberg is quite brilliant, in the vein of othe American Jewish schtick actors starting from Moe Howard, Curly Howard, and Larry Fine. My prediction is that he’s on to very big things soon.

Importantly, I can’t figure out how Andy’s fist connects so well with these willing participants. There must be a bit of filmic transitioning going on in the editing room.

% ! $.

I’m back.

I’ve been really enjoying the new ABC series Dirty Sexy Money. The show, about a fictional Darling family living (or perhaps residing) on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, have all of the flavor of cardboard flavored with cheese, cinnamon, and good dialogue. It’s as if the writers decided to have animated people speak great lines around a semi-fascinating torrid story about sex, lies, and videotape.

In fact, it’s completely pleasurable watching a group of spoiled characters screw each other into oblivion while the main character, a straight man strawman named Nick George (played by Peter Krause), tries to keep it all together at the price of a $10 million salary. The priest is positively awful and impossibly secular. The twin brother and sister act like lovers working out their petty jealousies and love lives in semi-public. The patriarch, played lovingly by Donald Sutherland, acts like menschy schmuck, bent on compassionate (moral) conservatism.

Underlying everything is a mystery about the untimely death of Nick George’s father that is slowly unraveled, a la Twin Peaks, a series that is almost as comparatively funny, dark, and sinister.

1-18-08.

I'm super-excited about the supposed movie supposedly called "1-18-08" by JJ Abrams. The trailer scared the sh*t out of me. In fact, it brought back such strong 9/11 memories that I'm not sure I can delve too deeply into the imagery. My hunch: Godzilla.

I Saw A Mighty Heart.

Despite its not very good title, the new Angelina Jolie vehicle, A Mighty Heart is a surprisingly good movie. I received an advanced screening of it last night and, though I wanted to write up my quick thoughts then, I felt a need to wait one day to let the physical processes crawl into something coherent, which, it turns out, didn't happen:

• I didn't quite grok all of the visuals because the theatre (note Canadian spelling) was so crowded that we had to sit in the second row. I don't think I've had to do this since I was 14, watching The Jerk.
• Angelina Jolie, no matter what anyone will say, plays a (pretty) believable wife of Daniel Pearl. We, in the witness chairs, view her slow but brave collapse as her husband is first missing, then hostaged, then murdered.
• I worried at the start that A Mighty Heart would play up the huge cultural differences between Pakistanis and foreign nationals and, in particular, Americans. It did and, despite its somewhat hamhanded approach (the country is shown as one completely overpopulated hellhole), it succeeds in defining the phenomenal differences in privilege Pearl and his family have over nearly the entire world.
• The last little point: The depiction of massive use of cell phones, email, and just-in-time news throughout the movie truly made the movie. It's hard to imagine what the entire harrowing experience would have been like without trace-back routes, IP detection schemes, photo interpretation, intelligence sharing and interpolation, and lost cellphone calls. Were it a kidnapping depicted in 1947, we would have had 90 minutes of conversation and the reading of daily news.
Posted by Andrew at 8:33 PM

Toogling Deckchairs.

I don't think it's art, but it sure is pretty.

What is it? It's a colorized text version of an image found on Google that represents the search phrase "deckchairs" rendered from many hundreds of repeated search phrases.

Love is nice, too.

Prairie, Prayer.

I just wrote up a five paragraph review of tonight's Prairie Theatre Exchange's Carol Shields Festival of New Works. Then, somehow, with my MFA-artist-trained hand-eye coordination, I hit a the Refresh button and deleted the whole damn thing.

Jesus Christ, what a dope. Here's what I wanted to say:

1. Tonight was a phenomenal introduction to some of the best theatrical, dance, and performance talent in Winnipeg. I loved watching these performers. Every one of them.
2. The entirety was inspired. The directors threaded the multiple performances with overt, and sometimes covert, little narrative threads.
3. I saw ballet dancers perform three song-stories that I think I actually understood. One, the very first one, was about a young man witnessing his life construct his own failure through love. Maybe I didn't understand it at all. But I liked it.
4. My friend, Donna Lewis, performed her Leotard Cohen piece, wherein the long lost (and lost) sister of Leonard Cohen comes out of her darkly lit shell. It was hilarious.
5. I missed a lot of references to Canadian culture. But, as an outsider going on two years, I recognize that Canadian artists, to a large extent, have the luxury of not being burdened with the turgid, violent history that American artists do. It's not that Canadian history is one of clean hands and squeaky feet; rather, the utter racial and economic pain that many American artists bear does not, thankfully, affect most artists here, nor should it. I may be utterly wrong about this and I'm willing to be raked over the coals, if I have to be, on this one. But my point is that the unstraining humility and self-conscious humor that Canadian artists tend to show is perhaps derived from a less contaminated historical narrative and a less tortured personal aesthetic.
6. Winnipeg is a small big place. During intermission, I ran into two performing artists I actually know. This is, to me, still shocking.
7. Coming back to the first point, I consciously realized tonight that I quite literally fall in love with those performing on the stage. I mean, I really, truly start to love the performer. It's a fleeting love, thankfully.
Posted by Andrew at 10:58 PM

Strike Struck.

Last night I had a chance to see Strike! - The Musical at The Burton Cummings Theatre here.

Disclaimer: I'm not a usually a big fan of musicals. Most professional musicals that I've seen (which probably amount to less than two dozen in my lifetime), are either simply treacly or trite and unconvincing. The music of musicals typically sounds like cats (pardon the reference) thrown in a bag. And the storylines usually remind me of children's literature by failed writers. Further, musicals, to me, falsely try to equate emotional musical content with disconnected fictive worlds. They fall flat because they try to heighten the senses while hiding their subject matter.

Not so with Strike! I went into the performance, as I always try to do, open minded and excited to see what composer Danny Schur has been working feverishly to accomplish. Strike!, in my mind, succeeds because it's a fundamentally moving story of a fictive group of people in 1919 who accidentally and unintentionally changed the way things work in the world. These people, despite the sheer diversity of their backgrounds and experiences and beliefs, sing their way to a kind of freedom.

As my wife said last night, the people portrayed in the performance worked 60 hour weeks, six days a week and made next to nothing doing it. The delight in the actors' voices, the solemnity of the characters' desires, and the lovely and lovingly written score combined to make a powerful statement about being alive and being free.

Strike.

My friend Danny Schur, an award-winning musician and playright, is rapidly preparing for the next stage of his Strike - The Musical about the Winnipeg General Strike and the riots and deportations that took place here in May of 1919. (A CBC Radio Concert Special will be recorded on May 15th, the 88th anniversary of the event.) The music is, well, striking—and powerful. O'Reilly's Song is shown below.

Joshua Bell in Life.

I couldn't stop reading this (long, beautiful, sad, articulate) Washington Post article about a most amazing violinist playing in a lonely subway in a fast-moving city, at the center of everything. [Sent to me by friend, V.S.]

Children of Men II.

I'm sitting here, post-watching Children of Men, watching the CBC and all I can see is mayhem. The news is on and I see houses with a man and woman walking peacefully and destruction is everywhere. There's another woman being interviewed; she's holding a child and I can't believe there's a kid on the tube. A documentary on environmental building looks like a special feature of Homeland Security. The sky on the tube is 60% grey, the color of nothing and fire and endless pollution and chaos. It almost looks like the next television series is on safe houses, tucked amidst giant wind turbines and barren land, the near future part of the next future. [Written on 3/15/07.]

300 For Some (Reason).

I don't know why exactly but I really want to see 300, the super-crazy, Spartan Frank Miller flick by Zack Snyder. From the previews I've seen online, the movie comes closer to a moving painting than any film I can recall, including those by Terrence Malick. Everything about 300 smells of the sweat of Géricault, the pain of David, and the solemnity of Rembrandt. I love how, at least in the trialers, the shapes and forms looked burned and blurred around the edges and the colors drip gothic lust. The sepia and pale blue colors, the harsh contrasts, the glorious backlighting are, to me, simply stunning.

Leisure on Leisure, Work on Work.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to ever note this observation, but here goes.

When we are spending our leisure time, we do so by observing others' spending their non-working time. And when we are working, we spend our time unable to witness others' leisure time.

The converse of this is interesting to me as well. Who would want to spend two hours at the movies watching people at an office typing? Only a few of us. And who among us would want to spend our paid work time watching others enjoy themselves? Very few of us.

So, we go to the movies, watch television or read a novel about people living their lives and not working. These characters go on vacation, get in fights, make love, and cry tears of joy and sadness.

And when we go to work, we disallow ourselves the ability to watch people go on vacation, get in fights, make love, and cry tears of joy and sadness.

Children of Men-y.

For some forsaken reason, the movie Children of Men wasn't on my radar screen. It looks quite incredible, just having read the synopsis. It's exactly how I kind of imagined 2027 - nuclear terrorism, totalitarianism, environmental degradation, and a secret sect of scientists seeking to keep humanity on life support.

In fact, my theory is that there are four inescapable reasons that I was not told about this movie beforehand:

1. The government has built, between my ears, a wire cage made of invisible bolts, powered by dark matter and managed by ISK10.
2. My long-time fascination with and adoration of Julianne Moore has destablized my relationship with the newspapers that I acquaint myself with each day.
3. My college honors thesis, written about William Blake in 1989, is now controlled by Universal Pictures, who is distributing this film. Blake's lyrics are featured in the original film score by John Tavener.
4. The word "bummer," which I used randomly when I was 8 years old, is now considered a legitimate term of art by New York Times writers like Manohia Dargis, who wrote of this movie, "Children of Men may be something of a bummer, but it's the kind of glorious bummer that lifts you to the rafters, transporting you with the greatness of its filmmaking."

Borat Good.

I just got back from seeing Borat's Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan with my friend D.C. Man, it was fun.

We got to the theatre right on time and, funnily, there was no one there to sell us tickets. Instead, we went straight to these machines and we had to touch their screens to buy tickets. We each bought one ticket, which cost $7.95. You had to swipe your credit card through the machine and get your ticket that way. Then the ticket came out. A receipt came out, too, which was weird.

We walked into the theatre and there were six teenage attendants standing around the concession stand, talking and looking at candy. No one was there to take our tickets but that was okay. I made it straight to the Twizzler Nibs and bought a pack for $5.13. (I actually wanted Sno-Caps but they don't have those in Canada.) The bag was huge! I paid with a $20.00 bill and got back $14.87.

Then we sat down in the theatre. D.C. had seen the film before and it was packed but tonight there were maybe 15 people scattered around. We chose seats toward the front, probably in the sixth row, towards the center right, making sure not to block our fellow moviegoers' views. There were no really good previews unless you count the upcoming Night at the Museum, but we did watch ads for Toyota Camry (it was pretty good) and a couple of other products that I don't remember. I remember when they didn't have ads in theatres and now they do.

When we got out, I was still laughing and we got back in the car and drove home. When I got inside, I ran the tap for about 30 seconds because all of the water in the house had been warmed and the water standing in the pipes outside is really cold. I had two glasses. Man, those were good.

Borat as Conflict.

I haven't seen Borat yet but I've read over a dozen reviews of the movie, which makes me superbly appropriate to post a few comments about it.

1. The movie's website is a work of genius. The site looks exactly like what you might expect from the Ministry of Information of Kazakhstan but, moreover, it looks like the best of what I've called, for a few years now, "dirty design." The site, with its poorly rendered typefaces, flying flag, discombulated "controls" on the movie, flashing blue text, missing images, non-matching photos, bad grammar, and poor line breaks is a case study in web design done in the 1996 year of internet. Further, the HTML code sitting behind the site is equally bad and wonderful.

2. While I appreciate that no venal stone is left unturned and the film is non-stop funny-funny, I'm not sure what the true underlying politics are. (My semiotic theory studies are old and rotten at this point.) On the one hand, Borat could be seen as a tall-tale deriviative of Mr. Bush and his friends and colleagues. A confident boor and a collegial misanthropist, Borat could be said to represent the worst tendencies of the current Administration, the fierce inanity that directed the country to go to war because of hyped pretenses. Here, the sendup is aligned with the left, as Borat dismantles the monopoly of stupidity we have witnessed. On the other hand, Borat could be seen as a highly reactionary impulse, a schmuck who can be likened to someone in contemporary blackface that seems to think that insulting minorities (and everyone is a minority) is a right. By taking on the disguise of a less recognized Caucasian (and therefore legitimate) culture, Borat can smile at the inherent divisions created by our clouded social vision. In this case, he could be seen as a manly return of the repressed, a social revulsion by those in power who largely enjoy the class, religious, and ethnic divisions we experience daily.

3. The movie has received some criticism by various reviewers because news anchors and journalists have succombed to interviewing Borat in character. I tend to agree that news producers have no excuse for perpetuating free entertainment on their news programs. Their responsibility, unfortunately for them, is to present the news, the reality behind the screen, to the public. By interviewing "Borat," they do a disservice to the field of journalism.

And so ends review of movie-film Borat in blog by man not seeing yet movie-film.

Noah's Arc.

A lot of folks have pointed their blogs towards the Noah Kalina's striking Noah takes a photo of himself everyday for 6 years video. It's quite a work. Kalina literally maps out the trajectory of his ovoid face (actually, the same shape as mine) by linking together thousands of still photographs that document his appearance every day for six years.

The entirety of the video, over the course of 5 minutes, runs quickly on YouTube but not so fast that you can't tell how his surroundings changed during that time. The music, a beautiful though derivative score by Carly Comando, is also mesmerizing and moving and the video takes you down the slow-fast road of a single person's life over quite a few years. You can see his hairline recede, his eyes sinking into his skull, his skin becoming more sallow, his cheeks losing their elasticity. You can see the rapid growth of hair and the solidity of his forehead but it is his eyes that, centered, lay claim to one's imagination. His eyes stare at you, forming a relationship with you that is at once pleading and callow.

When I was at Brown, a guy named Jay Stuckey photographed himself for a year and put up the resulting Polaroids on the wall for a big show. It's not a big deal to shoot yourself over the course of six years and make a nice video. But, in an age of publicly accessible obscurity and at a time of erased identities, I found Mr. Kalina's work very unassuring and depressive in outlook, not unlike the 21 Up series that continues to captivate.

My hope: that Mr. Kalina continues with his project for another 44 years and that, 44 years from now, I would have the honor of watching 50 years of his life disappear on a screen.

12.

I spent the year 1994-1995 in Poland. It was one of the most transformative experiences of my life. In fact, I look back on the days I spent there, mostly in Krakow, as ones of incredible pleasure, tremendous learning, and unmitigated complexity. While I was there, I did a lot of drawing and painting, most of which I brought back to the States and which now resides with me in Canada. This is an odd thing for a former painter. You spend an enormous amount of time collecting the tools of production to make works that you often feel don't work or only partly work or resemble something you don't want to remember and then, for the rest of your life, you're burdened with these monsters that sit around you and your dark memories, sending you frightening messages of lost possibility, threatening you with anonymity and welcoming you with inordinate despair. You look at these old paintings, work that was literally the sweat of one's brow, and they only resemble memories, like poor facsimilies of old thoughts. It's very hard to capture exactly what was in my brain at the time, but I get gleanings and I can kind of limn my way to understanding. Sometimes, there is peace. Most often, these paintings sit in mocking repose. And yet, like old friends, I love them.

I left a few drawings and paintings in Poland with friends I lovingly made there. I'm in touch with some of these folks, including Ewa, who has recently used a drawing of mine for the publication of a new book by the well-known Polish poet Marcin Świetlicki, entitled Dwanaście, meaning 12. (Dwa - pronounced "di-vah" - is a really sweet number in Polish. Well, any language, no?) I wish I could actually read 12, as, from his online bio, he seems right up my alley and his poems are grand.

Neu-York.

I used to be a bit of an art critic. I wrote for a few periodicals in upstate New York, for a number of international art periodicals, and for my own little art zine back in the early 1990s. My last stint was for a magazine called Atlantica, a really sweet and thick magazine that was had its roots in late 1990s Madrid. I wrote a number of pieces on many different artists, fancying myself as bit of an aesthete, a committed art enthusiast and a socially sensitive critic of "post-industrial visual production." I wrote those works honestly but under the slanted gaze of someone who felt he knew something. A critic necessarily takes on this view because they're being paid (in funds or fans) for supposed knowledge.

The unfortunate reality is that most critics, and especially those of the art kind, know far too little about visual production and its consumption, practices, markets, and audiences. Art critics, by and large, are glorified college-educated bouncers. They're paid little to attract attention but they're not actually part of the party.

I write this not as a confessional but because I recently read a really harsh, ad hominem review of my friend and colleague's fantastic piece Neu-York by a "critic" that takes the entire piece to task for not making the artwork that she herself would have wanted to make. If you read between the many lines devoted to this harsh, very personal critique, it's possible to feel the trembling envy that the writer holds while typing. Here's a quote:

And yet she didn't bother to do the first leetle bit of research on German (especially Nazi) and American street and place-naming conventions. She didn't bother to use her damned imagination, either. Can you say "wasted effort"?

This trips all of my wires, seriously. Street renaming is my thing -- it's the systematic and massive renaming of streets in Berlin while I was living there in the nineties that first got all my geographic juices flowing. I spent a semester doing a project on it, and in 2001 I did a street renaming performance in San Francisco. To rename four streets I did decades of hours of research. And alternate history is seriously my thing.

Pathetic and sad. The writer, whose name is not even clearly articulated on the site (it could be Claire Light though clarity and light are not entirely integral to her blog posts), unwittingly fits herself into the self-absorbed, forlorn trope of "if you can't do, criticize." I found a little about the critic here.

Almost makes me want to make art again.

The Art of Ads

I've always loved the way advertisements are used to create interstitial spaces between segments of larger productions. And I've always been fascinated with the ways in which ad producers are able to switch our emotional witnesses from a semi-serious fiction such as a murder drama to a laugh-track laden demonstration of laundry detergent's whitening power. And then, just as quickly, the ad disappears and the drama picks up and it's all sad and scary.

Last night I attended a fest called Garbage Hill sponsored by The Winnipeg Film Group, which is a low-cost association of seemingly interesting folks dedicated to showing the oddities and beauties of the filmic world. I was impressed by the video documentary I saw last night that showcased cable television ads from the 1980s. It was craftily put together by an artist here and the ads featured curly, loose-haired women and slick-haired men with large glasses selling cars, restaurants, Winnebagos, and houses.

It was a cheese-fest and I was amazed at how distant the 1980s (and how tremendously innocent) are. One talk-show host underhandedly berated a budding film Winnipeg film star for her likely having to sleep her way to the top in Hollywood. Apparently, he shot himself in the head two days later. In another clip, single folks are shown being introduced to each other in fast loops in order to sell dating services. And in one of the finest segments of the film, outtakes of a mobile home salesman is seen giving the best cursing performance I've ever seen on film outside of Scorsese.

It became more clear to me how Guy Maddin lifted his actors to their lowest heights and how the odd history of Winnipeg has generated some beautiful wipe-outs.

Throwing

I have an MFA in Painting. One of the great things about getting an MFA in Painting is that you get to paint (a lot) for 2 to 2.5 years in a studio and spend a tremendous amount of time with paints, canvas, tools, sanders, wood, gesso, frames, pencils, crayons and other colorful ephemera. You also get to produce a ton of artwork, most of which is total garbage and the rest of it will only see the light of day for perhaps a few days during your thesis show. That's when a selected body of your artwork gets displayed in a gallery or museum for the "world" to see. Mostly, the world is your mom and dad, your professors, friends and family and your MFA student colleagues. It goes without say that it's a momentous day for you to display your works in a space with other like-handled works and that day does go quickly.

Today, I chucked almost all of that work. It's been sitting at the very top of the storage closet in the yellow hallway of the apartment. Sitting, mostly rolled up, high above the ground on wood planks, wrapped in plastic and labeled carefully. With strong intention, this morning I went up there like some crazy hunter and took those bodies down out of their dark lair and bundled them into large black plastic Hefty bags and tied them up and put them out front. It was weird. The entirety took three hours total.

In the pile of bags outside sits "Empire," a huge painting (perhaps 10 x 12 feet) of a world ensconsed by a cross. The painting was created on a huge tarp which I hand-grommetted and sewed on a sewing machine so that the whole thing could be stretched taut against the wall with nails or screws. Mostly screws. "Empire" is no longer.

The reality is that this work and about 10 others like it were no longer as soon as my MFA was gotten. I went on to make some more beautiful, persuasive, and technically competent artworks aftewards up until about 2000 when it all fell away. These I have and I won't let them easily depart from me. If I do, the paintings will end up with friends who knew me then or know me now and who want a piece of that painting-dedicated life I led in the late 1990s.

Born

There's something beautiful about this visual poem at Born Magazine. Stunning, actually. The music winds like the night highway. Deeply romantic, it reminds me of Winnipeg, where we're moving soon.

Skittle Love

I never liked Skittles. They’re basically just colored pieces of corn syrup in an ugly red bag.

But I love the new ads. This week, Slate posted an ad report card that dismissed this kind of advertising, lumping these with those for Burger King and Quiznos.

But the Skittles ones are different. Having just seen a few Dali movies at the Philadelphia Art Museum, I’ve come to re-value the visual absurdity and beauty that comes with odd juxtaposition, inexplicable events, and faked sexuality. Dali, in good and terrible ways, exploited our capacity to believe in the unbelievable. Un chien andalou it’s not but these Skittles ads at least attempt to question the bad sincerity of advertising reality.

Basquiat

Last week I saw the Basquiat show at the fine new Brooklyn Museum of Art in Brooklyn, New York. Man, it was a good show.

I haven’t painted in probably five years. I’m not proud of it, nor am I somehow self-satisfied that “design” or the “Web” or “bloggin” is more than the sum of the many parts of “art.” (Nor do I think that words in “quotation marks” is helpful in explaining personal presumptions but I’ve deployed them here nonetheless.) I’m not one of those folks who (always) thinks that design has now reached the critical point of inflection in its gamesmanship with contemporary art and won. And I don’t think that the making and exhibiting of art is only for the spiritually bereft wealthy among us. Finally, I’m definitley not one of those Web designers who refuse to go to Chelsea for lack of interest in aesthetic questioning and critical thinking.

The plain fact is that I’m swamped between work and family and art has been squeezed out. Probably for the better, for my sake.

Anyway, this is not about me. Or, rather it’s about my training as a painter back in college in the mid- and late 1980s when many people were set on fire (myself included) by the incredible volume of really interesting paintings being made by folks in and around New York City. As a student, I and many others ate the paint and the glossy magazines that depicted the art of the time and I actively fantasized (out loud no less) about becoming a master painter like Mr. Schnabel, Mr. Salle, Mr. Baecheler, or even Mr. Clemente . I did admire and enjoy a good Jean-Michel Basquiat painting, but these always seemed like playboy paintings for the heroin set. I knew Basquiat developed great iconography (the crowns, the skulls) and good handwriting (the scrawl and fine print on his drawings) and that he was some kind of buddy of Andy Warhol.

But what I only learned last week was that Basquiat was the true genius of the 1980s painter set. Granted, the notion of genius is fraught and was proven so by too many books in the 1980s. But he was. Basquiat was a phenomenally talented painter. In almost any modern painting I see, from a Pollock to a Currin, it’s obvious to find how the painter went wrong — where the left turn should have been right and where the top stroke should have been stronger. Not with Basquiat. I may be too far removed from the production of art but my eye is still pretty sharp: every single painting at the show at the BMA was of perfection. Not a single element felt wrong, not a single element out of place. For all of their criticality and questioning and personaliztion of popular iconography, Basquiat had a hand that could do no wrong before the canvas. I am endlessly impressed with his unforced strength of hand matched with his intense care for line and space and his ability to make disparate motions and movements cohere and coalesce. Formally, Basquiat did no wrong. I’m disappointed that I didn’t know him (or that) better in the 1980s.

The Stepford Lives

My buddy V.S. went to Beijing a few months ago and brought me back some DVDs he purchased in that fair city. When he sent The Stepford Wives to me, the official studio version of it wasn't even out yet (I think) and I saw it at the video store a few times wondering if about the movie.

I finally had a chance to review the video and it was what I expected. It was filmed at some late-night theatrical center somewhere probably in Los Angeles (I figure that a projectionist was paid $100.00 to get out of bed at 2:00 a.m. to project), then piped to China over the information superhighway and recorded to look like a real DVD with its poorly rendered "buttons" reading "Play, "Chapters," and "Trailer." I expected the sounds to be terrible and it was and I expected anything fast moving to be slightly blurred because of the video capture rate.

More interestingly, my expectations were also set by the promotional quotation on the packaging, which brilliantly said, and I quote: "An empty comedy that takes hac-kneyed [sic] potshots at consumerism." It's true. The film was as flat and disorganized as any I've seen in recent memory. Nicole Kidman puts in a great performance, particularly in the beginning, as an executive in the television industry -- a role she has mastered in previous movies. But the story, in which aging men manipulate their better halfs such that they in turn become better, has no rubber and rides on no road. The men in the film rely upon complicated Microsoft and AOL technologies to modify their wives behaviors, turning them into robots so that their country club fantasies could be lived.

It struck me that the conceit of the movie is fundamentally flawed: wealthy men never have had a need for those complex technologies to run their fantasy lives -- the system was set up by them long ago for them and is still mastered by them. [Note: I'm a capitalist at heart and don't deny the beauty of capital which alone can make beauty.] If I was a semiotician, I guess I'd ask if the movie seriously questions the substance of the system that created mastery over women and industry. Or does it more subtly demand us to look at the rather frail mechanisms upon which capital is raised and nurtured? Or, furthermore, does the film simply reproduce our fantasy about wealth and privilege and power?

Those Orange Gates

I had the privilege of being able to tour the The Gates for a brief period this morning. It was a cold, rainy morning and there were not many people out but I loved the experience of walking underneath orange fabric and metal gates beneath the gray skies and the yawning chasm of Central Park near scraping residential buildings, ant-like tourists, and watchful watchers. For those outside NYC, a few great photos and some contextual ones can be seen.

I won't repeat what has already been well noted about this project but I do have a few personal thoughts:

• Before walking through, under, and beneath The Gates, I was looking for a reason not to like them. The money, the press, the privilege, the resources, the color orange -- none of these fit the bill and so I don't not like them.
• One little mentioned note is that The Gates are actually of different heights and widths depending on the narrowness of the particular path or the way the trees or landscape or physical architecture lay. This lends itself to a bit to a feeling of disorientation as you walk beneath the structures and they change on you, irregularly.
• I walked East to West. This seemed to be the way that Manifest Destiny works and I wanted to follow the multitude of paths that pushed me forward.
• One sublime moment was experienced in looking up at The Gates as I was walking through them. I was focusing on the small squares that make up the tapestries and as I'd pass each draped one, I'd see the sky and the blurred orange of the next one, and so on. The tapestries bled together like streaming orange hair and I felt whole.
• There were nice people posted every few thousand feet. Gates helpers armed with a long metal pole and a bright green tennis ball attached to the end. These helpers were gently keeping the tapestries flying.
• The Park will feel empty when the minimalist heraldry is gone. But I visit it so rarely that it already feels that way.
• Walking beneath The Gates in the rain, I felt somehow protected by them, held by them. At one point I was walking near Tavern on the Green and strayed from the "course" and was outside of the path lit by the tapestries. I felt exposed and walked back under The Gates. In the end, The Gates are a mild shelter from the storm of spectacles that encroach upon our commercial and political lives. They very temporarily gave me a respite from the mersh, the mess, and the madness.

Lost but Found

Looking back at the past few days of posts, I've thought about how critical I have been about various odd facets of the world inhabited, from art, advertising, disaster relief, and Microsoft (in that order). I don't take any of it back but it's good sometimes to find something slightly new and unexpurgated, even if it's slightly exploitative: Look at Me is a website featuring photos "lost, forgotten, or thrown away." The images contain the mostly happy faces of people in love, people embracing, people posing. The photos have been found all over the world and are posted by a lone ranger who seemingly cares about these quiet, still moments of captured time of faces forgotten in places known and unknown. Each image is a curiosity, a sinkhole, a lost nest, a mild conundrum.

You might like this one of glee, or this one of women who look masked, or this one of a lady who (as always) looks like her pet, or this one of five teen girls formally smoking, or this sad one of a woman nowhere, or this one of two girls in a wash basin eclipsed by a house's shadow.

It's sobering to realize that most of these people are dead. They lived and perhaps their only shells are on one of these pages.

This is not the first time someone has committed to restoring the dignity of photographic relics. (Susan Sontag would have enjoyed this site.) But I think there's something restorative about looking at these images, somehow placed and replaced again.

P.S. If you want to cry, look at all of them together.

Art of Art

Disclaimer: This post is self-promotional in nature. Today, my company MANOVERBOARD launched the State University of New York, University at Albany Art Department website. I'm happy with the results, much thanks to my coder friend and colleague M.B.

Having spent so much time building this site, I'm still interested in understanding why art-related websites are so often poorly crafted and hold such impoverished content. The companies, organizations, and institutions funding these sites have resolve, taste, and dedicated donors and stakeholders; somehow, somewhere along the way, their translation on the Web missed the mark. It's been this way for as long as I can remember a Web. Just a few examples that run the gamut from the low to the high and back again:

• art.com
• The Met
• National Gallery of Art
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art
• Sandra Gering Gallery
• Ronald Feldman Gallery
• Art + Auction
• ARTnews Magazine

The Site

Way back in 1998, I started a little project called The Site at MANOVERBOARD. It was a combination of desires to show new artists' work, to run a publication that was relevant to the new medium called the Internet, and to publish artwork that would not necessarily get seen unless a dollar was being made.

I truly enjoyed the six years of designing and developing the website and, today, I've called it quits. At least, temporarily.

The final artist, for now, on The Site is my old time favorite artist, Ruth Root. I've only had her slides on my desktop for the past 10 months. And it was upon posting her work that I realized a few things:

1. Even six years later, there are very, very few good artist-driven websites out there. Galleries themselves have poorly designed and updated sites; and artists, for whatever reason, have trouble showcasing their work online. This is a lacunae that will eventually need to be filled but it also helps validate my original aspirations for The Site.
2. I've not participated much lately in the world of contemporary art in New York or elsewhere but I also don't believe I'm missing much. The same names are recycled for the most part and young artists seem to all be using pencil and ballpoint pen. This is not such a bad thing, mind you.
3. Allowing a site to go dormant, willfully or not, is sad -- kind of like asking your dog to not eat for a while so that you can work longer hours for less pay.

Notre Musique

This evening, I had the distinct pleasure of seeing Jean-Luc Godard's latest luminous rant, Notre Musique. The film is a panoply of feelings and conflicted politics but is mostly an elegy, a one-way visual poem set to the saddened tune of our times.

The movie is broken up into three parts. The first part, Hell, is a montage of Hollywood and documentary war footage so well melded together that it's hard to distinguish fact from fiction and fiction from fact. In this section, Godard both pokes fun at our inability to differentiate and describe the sheer horrors of war and gleefully relishes the chaos of images that emanate from the silver screen. The beauty is in the juxtaposition, which like any American Avant-Garde production, relishes the sheer cacophony of a given topic's sights and sounds; this one happens to be about war and human death. I'm sure that Godard had Goya's (pun intended?) Disasters of War in mind.

The second part, Purgatory, is a narrative of (I think) numerous intellectuals meeting up in contemporary Sarajevo to talk about and think about the samesaid horrors of war and the dread that comes along thereafter. It's also a meditation on our pre-occupation with death in life as the characters ask questions of each other that can't be answered. In one scene, a character asks Godard himself whether digital video will save "cinema" and he only stares back, no answer forthcoming, as if the focus on technology is really just a staving off of death. In fact, I always believed that our focus on technology is really just a staving off of death. One line of this part of the film struck me as particularly beautiful and overwhelming in it's insight. In thinking about death, the narrator says something like "There are two ways to think about [it]: One is that death is the impossibility of the possible. The other is that death is the possibility of the impossible." But this is not profound. This was: "Death is when the word 'I' gets to be said by someone else".

This last sentence struck my bones hard and chilled them to the marrow.

The final part of Notre Musique, Heaven, is an ironic take on the unreality and unknowable climax of existence. In this short, one of the protagonists is seen traipsing through gorgeous forests guarded by American marines and militia as in a dream. People in heaven are reading, are nice to each other, and seem immune to the vagaries and vapidity of modern life. Yet they are clearly moderns. It's a gorgeous set of scenes set on the edge of an island that feels phenomenally claustrophobic and severe in its limited real estate yet someone Heaven appears free.

(I take some umbrage with Godard's inane political opportunism. During much of the second part, for some reason he places Native Americans in the mise en scene like some bad 1970s advertisement. The scene takes place in war-ravaged Sarajevo and Native Americans (sometimes in tribal dress) are so completely out of place that their placement there as a foil is patronizing at best. Similarly, the two female protagonists in this section are female Jews, who are essentially (and delightfully watchable) cardboard characters that think and talk about the Israeli/Palestinian dilemma. Why does Godard need these particular characters in Sarajevo to talk about the tragedies of war? In his attempt to link footage of the the United States with newspaper headlines on the current Iraq war with Israel and the Palestinian crisis to Sarajevo, it seems that he's attributing the fall of Sarajevo to the Americans, which is a lie and a conceit. I don't know why French intellectuals can't take blame for the genocides on their own continent. Jews and Native Americans have about as much to do with Yugoslavia as Godard does with Justin Timberlake.)

Garden's State

I took part of the afternoon off today to see some flawed, but very good, entertainment: Garden State, directed by Scrubs lead funny-guy Zach Braff.

Mr. Braff has a very good ear for dialogue, which is the usually the first thing I look for (well, listen for) in a new writer/director. He understands how people communicate with eyebrows and raised lips and teeth as well and, in that respect, his filming of Natalie Portman was so very right on. Ms. Portman, I've always held, is every 27 year-old's dream of a girlfriend and Mr. Braff, well, shagged her. I mean snagged.

The film, with a beautiful Flash website, falls apart in a number of crucial places like the middle and the end. This is mostly because Mr. Braff created a visually stunning but derivative beginning that sets up the rest of the drama and fails on its own terms. A few characters are also misplaced (or miscast): teh father, played by Ian Holm, is a cipher. Method Man, playing a bell hop, is too much himself and not, well, a bell hop. But Peter Sarsgaard almost steals the show as a burn-out grave robber; he reminded me so much of a young John Malkovich in Dangerous Liasons that he may have been playing an homage.

Mr. Braff puts the lie to the Hitchcockian "actors are sheep" and the film, a bit like New Jersey suburban filmic traumas American Beauty or Boiler Room or, perhaps most appropriately Happiness, tries too hard. But there was a tremendously heartfelt sadness trying to emanate from the film and I appreciated being wrapped up in it.

P.S. How could I forget? The film has a very good soundtrack that features faves The Shins, Nick Drake, Iron and Wine and Remy Zero. Perhaps the most beautiful image of the film is when Ms. Portman smiles gorgeously at Mr. Braff as she introduces him to The Shins' "New Slang," which is what I would have listened to had Natalie Portman introduced me to The Shins.

Zelig

When I saw the film Zelig in 1983, I saw myself. And probably so did everyone else who watched it. It was shown again late the other night on PBS and I caught the last and most outrageous 15 minutes. The movie struck me as more rich than ever.

In the movie, Woody Allen becomes a chameleon-like figure who traipses through 1920s and 1930s American and European "society" while contemporary commentators like Susan Sontag speak on his changeability and historical relevance. The movie, pre-Forest Gump, pre-Truman Show and pre-FX, was a fake documentary that I predict will be of import in the near future as we look back on a presidency and a culture that feel unreal, mocked up, and yet strangely insulated from the exigencies of "modern" living.

Documentaries, like F 9/11 and the host of others, are key components of a culture in crisis. Mockumentaries like Zelig, This is Spinal Tap, and The Blair Witch Project seem to come at a time of cultural stasis, when the most riotous times are forgiven and life is better lived than feared. P.S. Friend V.S. rightly adds Being There to the list; there are of course many other appropriately apolitical (except for the brilliant Bob Roberts) mockumentaries.

Man

The following was written through a Tylenol-induced haze:

I gained entry to the latest installment of The Oblivio Series at the Bowery Poetry Club this afternoon. Michael Barrish, punctual host and writer of sexual feats and gravitas, gave a fine reading. Paul Ford, influential Web popstar, provided laughs through not-so-distant boarding school stories. And Choire Sicha, Gawker extraordinaire, jilted California in a way that only New Yorkers can.

There was some pleasure gained in hearing others read my own life material out of completely different contexts and backgrounds. These were the common eccentricities of beleaguered, well-read white men. Stories of family trauma, geographic dispersal, mistaken identity, cruelty, and penis jokes were shared themes.

I came home to microwaved manly quiche, Kipper the Dog, and the relief that my daughter was not a boy.

But that's not the review. I've always wanted to write about unique characters with unique characters; thus, this is the actual review:

Barrish: § ‡ ƒ æ Œ ˆ … Î ° ¨ † Ÿ ’ ‰ Æ ø ¬ ± ¥ ´ ˜

Ford: Ÿ ’ ‰ Æ ø § ‡ ƒ Æ ø ¬ ± ¨ † Ÿ ’ ¨ † Ÿ ’ ‰ ç ‘ Ÿ ‰ Æ

Sicha: ± ¨ † Ÿ ’ ‰ ƒ æ Œ ˆ ˜ ¬ ç ‘ ¨ Ø ‹ „ ¿ Æ ø ¬

Saddest Music in the World

I had the privilege of seeing Guy Maddin's Saddest Music in the World last night. Set in the Great Depression in Winnipeg, Manitoba (that's Canada), the movie forges odd familial relationships among odd characters who are witness to the oddest pairings of national musics. In her seach for the saddest music of the countries of the world, Isabella Rosselini, a beer baronness, plays the beautiful Lady Port-Huntley and looks 20 years younger thanks to the tremendously fat grains of the film's raw, physical texture.

This is the most linear of Maddin's films, perhaps because it's based on a story by Kazuo Ishiguro and not by Maddin and his Winterpeg knights in white armor. The film gets away with a huge amount of conceit because it's both funny and sad and takes itself only serious enough to convince you that this is a movie of beauty. The funniest part of the film is the loud gong heard during the musical match-offs between countries like Siam and Mexico or Canada and the United States. (Canada is eliminated early on.) The gong sounds like it was clipped from a WWF procession, taped on top of the soundtrack, and the volume then turned to "11."

Maddin's one of my favorite directors in the world.

Envy of the World

It's not hard to believe that the new movie, Envy, has received a D+ from critics and a C from visitors on Yahoo! I recall, when living in Poland, that films like these were often very, very popular there because, perhaps, they appeal to an audience that likes to see the futility of modern life without experiencing the full inanity of American life. At the time, Jim Carrey's useless Głupi i głupszy (Dumb & Dumber) was a huge hit throughout the country.

It's easy to imagine that Envy, with it's title translated easily throughout the world, the hit of the summer for movie-goers overseas. In Poland, it's gonna be "Zawiść."

Tomorrow Now Sans Art

After putting the book down a while ago, I just completed reading sci-fi author Bruce Sterling's quite excellent Tomorrow Now : Envisioning the Next Fifty Years. It's a very smart read about how the future could look for all of us. Alternating between a dystopia where governments are consistently challenged by terror and crime and the planet wastes away under its noxious gasses and a utopia in which medicine provides strange life-changing elixirs to the common man, Sterling hits many great futurist notes.

Interestingly as well, within its pages, Sterling praises doctors, lawyers, scientists, writers, industrial designers, corporate technocrats, government policy wonks, and political activists. But the book gives pretty short shrift to art, makers of culture, and the visionary potential of aesthetics. I don't want to agree with him but I can't help but wonder if his ellision is all too true. Perhaps art (e.g. film, painting, music, etc.), in the most traditional Western and Eastern senses of the word, can only envision a future of one (viewer, participant, extremist) at this point -- it can no longer participate in true social patterns or partake in the biggest issues of our days. I don't think Sterling is explicitly saying this. But I do wonder if this is what the book, by its omissions, implies.

Dawn

I generally don't dig horror films a lot anymore, but I am very curious about this little wonder called Dawn of the Dead.

It seems to me that the film's premise, in which the "dead walk the earth" and destroy the living in modern day America, is really just an awkward, video-taped wish fantasy on the part of Hollywood and our collective conscious. I wouldn't go so far as others to say that we wish our own demise, but I do believe that within all of our desires for life and continuity there are kernals of death wishes and that our current fears of plague, terror, and mayhem inhere tenaciously within.

Anger

Netflix has been calling, unconsciously, for some time now as the DVD rental company represents itself as having nearly very film title that you'd ever want to see. There are so many films I'd like to have the opportunity to see and re-see, including many from the American Avant Garde, who I used to dote over. In a search of works by Maya Deren on Netflix, they do have one title that would satisfy my urges. But if you look up someone like Kenneth Anger, probably my most favorite film auteur of the genre, you get zilch.

A search for him on Amazon shows why -- Anger's work, though prime candidates for the supposed lushness of DVD, are still on VHS. Which brings up the question: Are film aesthetes a dying breed? Or do they prefer tape the way some audiophiles still prefer vinyl over CD?

Blood Art

It's gotten little coverage, but a few days ago the Israeli ambassador to Sweden literally pulled the plug on a piece of artwork called "Snow White and The Madness of Truth." The piece was shown in Stockholm and featured an oddly rendered image of a female suicide-bomber floating on a white boat in a sea of blood.

The work almost sounds kind of powerful but the context of the work, as provided by the artist, mockingly glorifies innocent death. It was wrong of the ambassador to deface the artwork, despite its pretenses. But it's also a sad commentary of contemporary art that this is all we get anymore. Needless to say, I'm pretty down on art this year.

(In writing this, I realize critics may point out that my last post makes comparisons between films and the Holocaust. But in "The Women," or in "The Wizard of Oz," the texts of the films were not subject-specific and each devised its own language to speak about the world's complexities, including issues of race and violence. In the "Snow White" piece, artist Dror Feller does the opposite.)

The Women

The 1939 comedy, The Women, whose tagline is "It's all about men!" was on last night on PBS. I watched almost all of it with a feeling of morosity throughout. Before knowing the date of the film, I recognized that the black and white film, with its stylish color footage of a fashion show, was much like The Wizard of Oz, in that it also showed a fictional world utterly at peace while the world was preparing for self-immolation.

The film was achingly well-acted by Joan Crawford and Norman Shearer, who played women in the world of supreme wealth and huge class and race transitions. But what I felt while watching the film was not the American social politics behind it but the weight of Europe, a few thousand miles away, preparing for the deaths of millions. The fine clothes, the light switches, the telephones, the sense of privilege throughout, were not unlike what much of Europe had experienced before they were wrenched under war's grip and when some were thrown in gas chambers. Some of the folks who watched that movie in 1939 died only a few years later despite its charms, or perhaps, because of them.

Tomorrow, on MLK day, The Aerial Reconnaissance Archives (TARA) at Keele University, England, will be releasing hundreds of aerial photos on the Web that were taken during World War II, including those of Auschwitz, in which smoke can be seen flying up from the chimneys.

Apple's Garage

Although Apple is advertising its new iLife media package as "Microsoft Office for the rest of your life," thus both giving the nod to the importance of Microsoft and marketing its own non-office-like products, I'm very excited about the new iLife package called GarageBand.

For years, SoundEdit 16, named after its 16-bit audio, was a great and inexpensive application for creating complex audio. It allowed for multiple tracks and effects and it had a great interface but Macromedia dropped support of it years ago. I wrote about 12 songs on it about 5 years ago and, sadly, I can no longer find them.

GarageBand looks even better as Apple figured out a way to allow Joe Schmoes like me to make original music from sampled tracks, microphone input, and other audio recordings. I have both the app and a new microphone on order. Apple's mind-reading capabilities have become very sharp.

P.S. I like the metaphor of the Garage, where music and software are mythically developed, though a garage is mostly where its alliterative cousin garbage sits.

Cushmeme

I did not realize that Jake at Gothamist posted a better-written piece about Cushman on the last day of the year 2003.

I still hold that Spondizo "found" this site "first" as he emailed me about it in early December. The real question is how do memes truly work such that cultural knowledge is transferred over semi-hidden pathways?

I'm a strong believer in ethnic memory, for instance, which, according to me, states that the as a descendent of Eastern European Jewry, my ability to speak Yiddish fluently is more innate than, say, a native Cambodian's. It's not Lamarckian theory here -- rather, I believe that the context and syntax of language passed down from my grandparents to my parents to me was consistent with the way my great-grandparents spoke in the old country. I thus have a kind of proclivity to speak Yiddish, which I daresay I don't really. Is this akin to memes? Probably.

Oh, this is cool: Deckchairs made blog of the day today.

Cushman Archives

I was introduced recently to a phenomenal historical collection of photographs by Charles W. Cushman (thanks to the upcoming Spondizo blog). Hours could easily be spent perusing this site, which contains the diverse, difficult, and romantic imagery of a man who witnessed what the website describes as "a dying landscape" -- America before the technology years, before the suburban residential expansions and before the mass integration of commercial life into our daily habits. Strangely, or not so strangely perhaps, his work is mainly in COLOR, a rich color that is separate from our digitally rendered world yet looks oddly good rendered by it.

Cushman is apparently up there with the likes of other great photographers like Walker Evans, and his vision, sensibility, and techniques are truly unique. Cushman traveled this country shooting small towns and large cities. But because of the color (o, the color!), the inhabitants in these photographs look as if they still walking among us, dressed in their workclothes and Sunday finest and ready to go to work. And the landscapes sing.

Look at this one of a woman and child, this one of Fulton Market in 1941, this one on the Lower East Side of New York in 1941, this photo of the Rockies melts my heart.

Chicago?

I watched the first part of the movie-musical Chicago last night. After reading so many reviews of how wonderful, smart, and sexy this film was, I was ready to be pleased.

Instead, Chicago was turgid, simple, silly and dull. It was hard to project Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renée Zellweger onto characters that sexily sing and dance -- and the music was full of adolescent Disneyesque features. I wanted to like Queen Latifah playing Mama but she seemed old and cute. The collaged scenes and the extravagent lighting was ridiculous and was better suited for the stage production. I fell asleep watching it while reading Utne (albeit, this says little good about Utne as well).

Full disclosure: I detest musicals but I thought I'd give this piece a chance.

Signs in NYC

14 to 42: New York City Signs features about five dozen photos of those beautiful, hand-painted and now decaying commercial signs that used to be found throughout Manhattan. These ads for hotels, clothing, restaurants and warehouses are symbols of an era gone but they continue to peek out from beneath their blankets of grime and worn paint and remind us of our pre-lapsarian past.

While the signs speak for themselves, the author, Walter Grutchfield, has researched many of these fading images, providing commentary and context to this visual archive. I especially like the the all-over signage on the Endicott Express building at 555 W. 33rd Street.

Lost

About every six months or so, I have an opportunity to see a real film, which is appalling on the face of it, but if it's one like Lost in Translation, I'm quite fulfilled.

This is one beautiful, elegant, and carefully scripted film, full of a lushness that Americans seem to have abandoned to the French since 1975. Bill Murray, of Groundhog Day, puts in a performance that is somewhere between earthshaking and mindblowing, fulfilling the sad fantasty of every middle-aged American man as he futilely adores with his eyes the strength of youth and privilege in Scarlett Johansson. The two eat up the screen, their eyes do all the talking, and the superbly natural dialogue is a credit to director Sofia Coppola.

The naturalism of the film, and the screen presences of the actors, make for a very uneasy and sad experience throughout, but the beautiful stagesets and music (see previous post) make for utter joy as we witness the unfolding of love in all the wrong places. What struck a small chord in me, as well, was the slow panning of two shots as the two actors look out, about 100 floors above the Tokyo skyline, from their respective hotel rooms. I'm sure that Ms. Coppola intended us to think of the World Trade Center. The last time I was at the WTC I was on the 92nd floor, where I stood for a while looking at Brooklyn, New Jersey, and midtown. The shots in LiT truly approximate that witnessing and I can't help but think that the director was showing us the space of tragedy, of a different order, taking place in the sky.

Moreover

I have a head-cold. I thought that these sites were funny-sad, the latter of which I've seen many times. Note that these are fat, Flash-loaded sites, best watched with a cold, and they may be disturbing to young, healthy eyes:

the meatrix (thanks, cynthia!)

end of the world

skip intro

A Day

It's not everyday that a friend gets to make the grade in the photo-journal A Day in the Life, which is an ambitious name for an ambitious project. Nice work, Jake.