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.

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.

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

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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” href=”http://oblivio.com/ahem/bowery.html”>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 ¬

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.

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.”