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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?