Orson’s Road

Christian McKay

This week two new films are out. One by Rick Linklater, on Orson Welles, or something like that. By title Me and Orson Welles, nicely reviewed by A.O. Scott in the NY Times.  I took a look at the trailer, along with the PR shot in the Times, and my eyes glazed over.  First the lighting, which seems a disease of industrial production, a fraudulent haze that falls on pristine never-used clothes direct from the costume department, from wherein actors, each hair neatly combed into place just before the take, utter, mutter or bark their supposedly witty written lines.  OK, so after seeing the trailer I am more or less sure not to go see the film, and instead ponder how the insidious disease overtakes a weird “indie” director like Rick (whom I met long long ago, an admirer of my own Last Chants for a Slow Dance).  I’ve liked some of the films of his I managed to see – Slacker (except for its flippant film-school ending), Waking Life, Fast Food Nation (sort of), and I didn’t like Scanner Darkly.  A glance at his IMDb shows a long list of films, many on the stove.  One busy guy.   Clearly I haven’t managed to see most his films, and certainly not those that seem to have landed him squarely on a quasi-commercial map.  As an American filmmaker he’s interesting in that he seems to go off and do what he wants, while staying close enough to the Hwd money to land it, plus the necessary actors.   Though playing with Welles in any manner seems like tempting fate.

Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee in “The Road.”

And then, after some long pauses and rumors swirling about the industry regarding “problems,” arrives, just in time for the joyous Christmas season, The Road, based on the grim book by Cormac McCarthy.  In this case I read the book, which was compellingly obsessive, if rather repetitious, and had a near “happy ending” that betrayed everything that had preceded it.   Again, I read the NYTimes review, took a look at the trailer, as well as a little video yack by the director wherein he blathers about researching how things would look, and they worked really really hard to make a convincing end-of-the-world.   Well, excuse me, but bollocks.  A look at the above production still shows that the people who make these films haven’t a clue what dirt, grime, poverty or desperation really look and feel like.   The trailer showed more of the same – again the fraudulent clothes out of costumes, theatrically gritted up but nothing like what a pair of pants worn a week on a farm look like, much less the endless months McCarthy’s book depicts.  And ditto for the burnt out cars, wrecked towns, and the glowingly lit skin of our protagonists.  Fake fake fake.   Orson was right, F is for Fake, and somehow the film business infects nearly anyone who goes near it with the same debility.   So much so that they can fulminate on the hard work to make things look just right when the end result is they look totally wrong. Welcome to tinsel-mind.   Indeed, it is the dream factory, and even the bad dreams come dressed in fraudulence.

But then 99% of their audience wouldn’t know dirt themselves, so these computer generated devastation-scapes and set-department things have all the compelling reality of, well, TV, or Disneyland.  And isn’t that reality?

Grit by Hwd

“Art” work by Susan Dessel

Reading the Times (again)

The official terrorists

The other day, I responded to another NY Times column, entitled A Return to American Justice.  This was about AG Eric Holder’s decision to try 5 of the alleged 9/11 conspirators in New York City, and to commence closing Guantanamo.  What I wrote wasn’t printed.  What was printed was mostly shrieking right-wing cant – of Holder being a traitor, Obama being a traitor or even not being a real American and being a Trojan horse of Islamism, etc.  Along with those were a share of reasoned responses, both pro and con as to bringing the alleged perpetrators of that crime to New York, and to try them under American law.   Those welcoming this move as a return to “law and order” (that good old Republican mantra of yore) were a distinct minority.   But, by and large the tone was heated and angry, the most rabid being scarcely literate, with those taking the “librul” Times to task for supporting this move in their editorial and showing the Times was a traitorous rag of the left.

What I wrote – sorry I lost it – was that justice would begin only when a meaningful investigation of 9/11 was made by a panel of non-Beltway insiders or others high-up in our ruling elite.  A truly independent investigation which would hear engineers and scientists who would explain how the WTC buildings were structured, and how they fell.  Which would explain why WTC Building 7, marginally damaged by flying debris, collapsed into its own foot-print, as if a demolition company had brought it down.  Which would explain why the busiest, most-heavily defended airspace in the US was left unguarded while the Air Force was doing a war game that very day, far to the north, a war-game involving civilian aircraft being used for terrorist attack!   It is said that Vice President Richard Cheney was overseeing this exercise.  And the myriad other highly suspicious elements that conjoined to make 9/11 and then trigger the political actions that followed – actions which have proven disastrous for the country but profitable for some.

Facade of Deutsches Bank Building directly opposite WTC South, which with this damage, did not fall

I was concise in describing this, and said justice for the alleged and much tortured terrorists could only be found when this investigation exposed the complete facts and evidence of that day, and drew some kind of meaningful conclusions, rather than the absurd white-wash of the original investigation – one which the Bush administration did not want at all, stone-walled,  and then evaded testimony under oath when one was forced upon them.  I wrote that until something is done along this line, justice in America is an oxymoron.

But we already knew that.

Red Cloud

A friend of mine from Portland, Mark Eifert, wrote me yesterday, and passed along this story:

A few weeks ago on a bright sunny day a Navajo Indian
came up to me and after a brief conversation said,
"Look into the sun and you will see my ancestors".
I did for a moment and looked away.
He said louder,
"Look at the sun can you see my ancestors!"
I stared at the sun long enough for my eyes to water,
then he said "hurts doesn't it".

Millions of points of despair

And it hurts America that it is still not allowed to have an intelligent, believable, factual explanation of what happened on Sept 11, 2001.  And that America’s newspaper of record would be part of the suppression.   Though not really surprising.

PS: new post up on PaginasparaClarinha

Going Up, Going Down

According to our friends the economists, things are looking up.  After all, only 502,000 Americans, newly unemployed, and looking for work, signed up for unemployment benefits this past month. This is 8,000 less than the bean counters had anticipated, so it must be things are getting better. Less less is better than more less, so say the economists.   Keep on a smiling face.

Warhol’s 200 1 dollar bills, knocked down happily by Sotheby’s for $43.7 million

As if to celebrate this uptick in the nation’s fiscal fortunes, someone just payed up 43.7 million dollars for a silkscreen print of 200 $1 bills, signed by Andy Warhol.   If the 200  dollar bills were convertible to actual money, then the “work of art” would be worth two hundred bucks.  I’d say the buyer got shorted by a mere 43.698 million.  But “art” is weird, and this piece of canvas with an easily replicable image of  two hundred one buck bills arranged in a ho-hum grid,  is mystically worth 43 mil because someone a bit dead now, who certainly knew how to play the celebrity world of the 1960’s like a violin, purportedly signed “Andy Warhol” on it.  This is decadence writ large and on silkscreen.

Buyers at Sotheby’s when the low 6 million bid was immediately doubled

Back then, as the world slipped from the seemingly somnambulent 1950’s, the center of gravity of the world’s political, financial and cultural realms seemed to shift to America, and in the latter two instances, to the Big Apple, though Swinging London shared a bit of the spotlight with the Fab Four, Jagger and Twiggy, et al.

So the fabled 60’s, which for many of my older friends glows in the light of nostalgia, began.  JFK, the Beatles, Dylan, hippies and abstract art and then pop.  Things were popping indeed, and the media hyped it all.   But in hindsight the glamor of those times looks a bit shabby, tawdry and provincial.  Of course then  it seemed different – a swirl of energy and activity which seemed to leap across the globe, ignited by waves of film, new arts, literature and theater, political voices, all clamoring for space.

Marilyn, who committed suicide in 1962,  whose lover…

1963

By 1963 the decade was already traumatized, and while there was an avalanche of good stuff to come, the poisoning had already begun.  All you need is love, love, love, except….

Malcolm X, 1963

Che, 1967

Louisville Kentucky, 1968, after Martin Luther King’s Assassination

1968

Abbie Hoffman arrested in Chicago, August 1968

1969

Woodstock, 1969

Altamont, 1969

And what began with a grid of dollar bills and Warholian aesthetics sort of ends with one.  Jumping ahead a bit in the time-track of history we note that Abbie Hoffman subsequently committed suicide, Nixon withdrew from office rather than face certain conviction in impeachment hearings, and other players in these stories evaporated from the planet.   As the decade drew to a close, I was living in Ben Lomond, California, and was invited to go to Altamont and I passed.  I never have liked large groups and mass gatherings and their inherent hysteria.  No “out to the ball park” for me, thanks.  So I missed one of my generation’s milestone events, the one that brought down the curtain on the 1960’s, and foreshadowed the darker world to come.  As if those ten years hadn’t been dark enough.  But strangely they seem remembered by many as a jolt of light, even if they were anything but.

Kent State, May 1970

Today, instead of Warhol we have Jeff Koons:

In the last decade or perhaps a bit more, there’s been a kind of retro-style among young people, perhaps a reflection of post-modernism in which it seems regurgitating bits and pieces of the past, out of context, has become a fashion.  So while we’ve been “at war” now since 2001, in Iraq and Afghanistan, there have been no riots on the streets, no broad and clamoring anti-war movement, and most of the social shifting seems to have happened on the internet.  Twitter, baby.

This is in part because one of the lessons learned from the Vietnam war by our powers-that-be is that the citizenry don’t really have much stomach for it and its costs, albeit they like the pay-off from our imperial domain.   So there is no draft, and instead a sliver of the populace, primarily those most economically deprived, “volunteer” for service, and are kept as best possible out of sight.  Meantime the media, now wholly owned and controlled by the corporations benefiting from war-as-policy, make sure the news covers as little as possible – unless in a rah rah embedded instant victory roll, as in the early days of the so-called Iraq war – and absolutely as little of the mayhem, carnage, etc. which accompanies war.   The dead and wounded are returned in silence and we pretend war is as sterile and surgical as our Predator strikes.   Preferably the corporate media hype distractions, like Michael Jackson’s departure,  rather than mention the unhappy process of war at all.

Further, rather than raise taxes to pay for the Iraq war, a slick used-car sales spiel from its promoters assured one and all it would cost almost nothing and that would all be paid for by the country we invaded and decimated by charging them for it in oil.  This was going to be a freebie war, with everything covered with a nearly infinite Warhol of printed trillions of dollars, and everyone was told to do their patriotic duty and just go shopping.  And they did.  The mall became the social hang-out, shopping became the raison d’etre for being.  The politicians were happy, as were the banks, who punish those who don’t run up credit card negatives and their charges.

Today, as Wall Street once again thumps its chest and talks of renewed profit-making (thanks to umpteen trillion unaccountable dollars printed up and pumped into it by the Feds) but the rest of the country lies flat on its back, with 20%  un- and “under” employment (a real figure is more likely around 30%), mortgage defaults continue along, and no jobs are visible on the horizon, the political anger rises.  Perhaps in some new manner we’ll see something of the 60’s again, slowly burbling up from the suppressed and ripped off populace.   Or perhaps in a 1984 manner, the masses will slumber on, drugged legally and illegally, their anger managed with pharmaceuticals and psywar run by the Department of Defense.

Reading the Times (NY)

Shop that sold the guns that killed at Ft Hood, Killeen, Texas

In the last months I’ve been replying somewhat regularly to the spaces in the NY Times that allow for a reader response, beyond Letters to the Editors, which I’ve also tried to no avail.  Part of this is to wedge a little voice into the cacophony of the news and try to, perhaps, leaven the often shrill and ideologically loaded comment with a little intelligence. This past week I replied to two different things, and found one published, and the other not.

The first was to one item on the Fort Hood, Texas, killings, at the column, Homefires, to which I wrote the following which was published:

In the responses there recur certain themes. One is “prayers for the families,” etc.

Prayer does nothing beyond comfort the person praying with the delusion that they are doing something meaningful for someone or thing outside one’s self. Beyond a self-balm, prayer is meaningless.

Another theme is “the innocent” soldiers who were present. There is no innocence in being a soldier. Soldiers are trained to be killers, and sent out to do this job by their political masters, often for venal or evil reasons. America’s military is usually used to advance US business interests.

Another is the “heroic” soldier as opposed to the “cowardly” killer. Contrary to the politically useful myth that soldiers are a country’s “best” the brutal reality is that in our virtually privatized military, soldiers are a mix of those drawn to the pleasures of violence; those driven there by the cultural envelope in which they live; those driven there by economic necessity – the job of last resort.

It appears Mr Hasan, perceived as an outsider before he entered, did so to certify his being “inside,” an American. Once in the military he found himself again an outsider, subject to the prejudices of a system that among other things is highly “Christianized,” and in a way a caricature of all the prejudices of America in general.

Then there are the various snide comments about “the religion of peace” – Islam. I am sure those using this mode of attack are likely to say they themselves are Christian and hence they are the real religion of peace, albeit one that has left a vast trail of corpses where ever it has gone.

Until America ceases to be a self-deluded bastion of militarism, these things, like 9/11, will continue to occur, and doubtless Americans will continue to be puzzled why their world is so out of whack with the self-perception of themselves as the good guys, the white hats.

America remains politically and culturally infantile.

US troops in Afghanistan

Then, in response to another column on the same topic, Room for Debate, I wrote the following, which was not published:

So long as the United States continues its post-WW2 pursuit of world domination in the interest of corporate wealth, now morphed into a lethal combination of military-corporate-media collusion to this aim, the US will continue to live in constant stress, however much political efforts are made to dampen it. For example, we have virtually privatized the military, eliminating the draft as a matter of social friction; thus the stress of actual military service is shunted onto a very narrow minority of primarily economically deprived persons.

But the cumulative stress of our attempt at maintaining an economic empire enforced with military power seeps into our society every day, whether in the form of ever more invasive governmental control over daily life, or the strident shrieking of fear-mongerers, be they governmental or corporate (Bush>Cheney>Limbaugh>Beck et al) or simply the devastation inflicted on people as they lose their jobs, homes, and sense of life as they are sacrificed by this corporate zombie our society has produced.

Lacking a profound and deep shift in our values, in which we relinquish our imagined right to the world’s wealth and to “guiding” others to our imagined enlightened way of living, there is no reason to think the stress lines of today will not multiply and amplify until we collapse in a fractured catastrophe of our own making.

I find myself wondering what was so threatening in the last one that was so different from the other?  Perhaps the shift from particulars to a more general view?  I find it puzzling.

And here’s a letter to the editor which, of course, was not printed:

America – the United States of America – long ago ceased knowing how to speak to itself, how to be honest with itself, and the consequence is a poisoned politics reflecting the myriad profound problems which infect us.  While I am sympathetic to Obama’s attempts to grapple with this, it seems clear he is, whether consciously or not, a captive of the corporate powers and military-industrial interests which essentially control the economy and political processes in this country.  His effects are ameliorative and not real “change,”  as reflective in the saving of Wall Street at the cost of Main Street, to speak in the willfully limited and cliched language of politics. DOJ rulings on secrecy, etc. all show clearly the hands which govern the game; it is the corporate military state apparatus which is pulling all the strings.   Any attempt to genuinely alter this would doubtless result in some inexplicable one-bullet theory death, or modern buildings collapsing as if by magic (or planned demolition) left unmentioned in official white(wash) papers.

Meanwhile, in Italy, the courts there sentenced a number of American CIA agents to prison (in abstentia) for the kidnapping of a Muslim cleric off the streets of Milan.   President Obama regretted this.  And those involved, now perhaps confined in their vacations to US places of pleasure, were quoted in the following:

In June, Il Giornale, a newspaper owned by the brother of Mr. Berlusconi, published an interview that it said it had conducted via Skype with Mr. Lady, the former C.I.A. base chief in Milan, whose whereabouts are unknown. In the interview, he said of Abu Omar’s abduction: “Of course it was an illegal operation. But that’s our job. We’re at war against terrorism.”

Milan CIA station chief Robert Seldon Lady, who was given the harshest sentence of eight years in prison, was quoted in the Il Giornale newspaper in June 2009 as saying: ‘I am not guilty. I am only responsible for following an order I received from my superiors. It was not a criminal act. It was a state affair.’”

Diego Garcia, one of America’s numerous black sites for military and intelligence ops

US Military around the world, 700+ known bases

In the same pages the new “conservative” opinionator, Ross Douthat, waxes lyrically about the end of history, how American Market Capitalism has triumphed, and all is hunky-dory except that we like having a looming threat so we’re unhappy about our “victory”:

Twenty years later, we still haven’t come to terms with the scope of our deliverance. Francis Fukuyama famously described the post-Communist era as “the end of history.” By this, he didn’t mean the end of events — wars and famines, financial panics and terrorist bombings. He meant the disappearance of any enduring, existential threat to liberal democracy and free-market capitalism.

This thesis has been much contested, but it holds up remarkably well. Even 9/11 didn’t undo the work of ’89. Osama bin Laden is no Hitler, and Islamism isn’t in the same league as the last century’s totalitarianisms. Marxism and fascism seduced the West’s elite; Islamic radicalism seduces men like the Fort Hood shooter. Our enemies resort to terrorism because they’re weak, and because we’re so astonishingly strong.

I’m not sure which happy planet Ross lives on, perhaps the same one as his stockbroker, but his imagined placid world of consumerism and fluid money, and all the world’s problems solved doesn’t seem to be the same one I live on.  As if to underline the schism between those-with-money and those not, today’s Times announced a market leap of some 200+ Dow-Jones points, now levitating a goodly bit above the mystical 10K level.  Why?  Because the dollar has weakened sharply, scrivened the Times.

“A lot of it is sentiment-driven and there the dollar is getting a vote of no confidence,” Mr. Dolan said. “The massive borrowing by the U.S. government is undermining confidence in the longer-term outlook for the dollar.”

…

While the faltering dollar will make imports more expensive for American consumers, it will also make American exports more competitive overseas.

The hitch in this line is that America doesn’t make things to export much anymore.  Uh, except weapons, and food (also used as a weapon), and entertainments.  But then the people in Wall Street, like their money, are transnational and fluid, and if Americans don’t have houses, jobs, or things like that, no skin off their backs.  In fact, in some nice tidy theoretical manner, “it’s all good.”   Some have theorized that a trembling middle-class on the skids are – as statistics prove – in their desperation willing to work more for less, have no unions, and basically surrender everything to their corporate masters in the interests of attempting to maintain their sliding downward life-styles.  Nice submissive worker ants.

Roland Emmerich’s fable for America, only cost half a billion to cheer us up with ….

Spectatoring

Last night, invited by a young (and I mean young – 21 now) friend of ours, Dahcima, a filmmaker, we went to see a dance piece being presented in the context of a larger theater festival here in Seoul.   She had worked with the music composer, who did the score for a short film of hers, Mysteries of Nature (which won first prize in last years New York City Dance Film festival).

Mysteries of Nature, Dahci Ma

So I pulled my head out of computer-editing, missing my self-appointed deadline for getting new film off to Rotterdam, and Marcella and I went to see the piece, Symphoca Princess Bari, (Note: the video clips in the link scarcely hint at the real vitality of the piece) at the Arko Theater located in the heart of Seoul’s theater district.  In a shift from my local neighborhood – working class and funky – those in attendance were clearly the arts crowd, dressed spiffy and including a fair smattering of us foreigners.

Symphoca Princess Bari, Eunme Ahn

Opening with a totally sexualized sequence in which the “dancing” was more a pelvis-forward face-up crawl, first by males, and then by legs-spread women, it broke then into a series of energetic, beautifully danced passages rooted in traditional Korean legends, as well as theater aesthetics, accompanied with music similarly based but breaking far from the traditions, and then leap-frogging to contemporary pop – Michael Jackson type moves.   Shifting back and forth from seemingly (though certainly not really) traditional sequences, to campy and kitschy ones, including a motor-scooter rolling on stage, the whole was a rollicking work, exquisitely danced (often verging on or actually acrobatic) from a troupe that was clearly top-notch, capable of seemingly everything. Speaking from a modest exposure to some of the best in dance, this group was first rate and very physical, as was the dancing asked of them.  Likewise the choreography, staging, lighting, music and costumes and everything were first-rate.   All in all, very impressive, though of course I had a few quibbles about some sequences and thought its descent into a kind of anarchic ending went on a bit too much, though isn’t that what anarchy is about, and when meant to reflect our contemporary world, maybe correct.  In my mind I saw an appropriate exit point about 15 minutes before it ended.  However it was really good and left me exhilarated on leaving.  I told Marcella as we walked to a place for a beer or wine, that it made me want to retire from making, and take up spectatoring.  Except I added that as spectator one had to be ready for 10 or 100 disillusioning experiences for each high.

While at this performance we ran into my fellow Yonsei colleague Seo Hyun Suk, who manages to get to a lot of such things.  He told me the choreographer, Eunme Ahn was the most well-known and best avant-garde choreographer in Korea, and from what I saw I’d say her troupe would be very hard to beat.  And I told him about a gallery exhibition which David Hall, another Yonsei colleague (from Liverpool originally and teaching design in computerese) had told me about, an exhibition by Olafur Eliasson.  Having seen the Eliasson installation at the Tate Modern some years back, I suggested to Hyun Suk that it might be worth a look, and in fact I was off the next day to see it.   I’d report back.

Olafur Eliasson, Tate Modern’s Turbine Gallery

Unfortunately what was on display at the PK Trinity gallery in posh Gangnam did not remotely measure up to the Tate installation, which perhaps owed most of its grandeur to pure scale, and not to Eliasson’s artistry, or perhaps his lack of thereof.   On display were 3 “paintings” which were color spectrum wheels, with spokes of poorly painted color radiation from an empty circle, one was just the color, one had little white spaces between the colors, and one black spaces.  The painting was sloppy for a geometric-style item, lending nothing to it (unlike say Frank Stella), lacking the precision of a Bridget Riley or other such painters.   Beside these three dull exercises was something similar done with lights running the spectrum and making shadows cast by a semi-circle shape mounted perpendicularly to the wall.  Less than interesting.   In an adjacent room a large mirrored sheet of metal rotated, casting reflections and shadows to no interesting effect.

Wall Eclipse

In another room a sculpture in sharp angular shapes done in mirrored glass sat, inviting inspection which showed rather careless workmanship in something demanding perfection.  Not.   Three less than scintillating photographs of landscapes hung on one wall, and a circular ring hung from the ceiling, penetrated by a little color arrow-like rod.   Snore.

Downstairs were two more pieces, to which the staff gave directions – sit here and…

a prism was mounted before a shallow pool of water and light bounced off a mirrored strip on the floor, through the prism and at a shallow angle into the pool.  You sat before a screen, told to touch a pedal, and make waves, causing the colored spectrum of the prism to wobble a bit.   The attendant burbled, “Make your own rainbow.”

In a final room was a light installation of a vertical row of neon lights on each opposing wall, one red, one green, and between a heavily fogged space.  Entering induced coughing and the assurance of gallery personnel that it wasn’t toxic.  From either end of the room, the far wall faded into a haze of light, which when approached cleared and revealed the stripes of neon lights.  In the center both ends showed their lighting, and a mixture occurred (vaguely visible)  but of little consequence.   The ceiling tiling was visible, and an “exit” sign was readable at one end through the haze.

So Olafur works in light, but unlike James Turrell, his work seems mechanical and dead instead of having some spiritual reverberations.  He seems more like a guy with a fat budget and a kit full of nice toys – to say there’s no sense of depth beyond the immediate gimmick.  And further, his apparent interest in crafting these things – most of which are clinical matters – is indifferent and sloppy in instances for which exactitude is being begged.   Here’s some further examples:

Falling Water

More Falling Water

Chromo something

As my friend David commented, this isn’t really art, but rather design – and there is a difference, however difficult it can be at times to find the dividing line.   Working in a similar realm to Turrell, or for another example, Anish Kapoor, Eliasson seems a poor relative in almost all respects.  Where Turrell and Kapoor both edge to the sublime in many works Eliasson seems only to clump along in a workman-like fashion, cranking out toys for the arts industry.  And where their sense of craft echoes their artistic seriousness, Olafur’s indifference betrays his absence of it.   It is probably this very no-threat quality which makes him a darling of the curatorship, like Jeff Koons.

In hindsight I sense I was tricked by the Turbine Hall piece, letting the pure scale of it delude me into thinking the actual piece itself was grand.   The exhibition at the PK gallery convinces me this was an accident, and that Eliasson’s basic idea there was as tepid as the work here, and was given its grandeur sheerly by the size of the Tate’s hall.   I will give it to him that he is one of the few who given the hall as their playground managed to successfully occupy it so that the work was not dwarfed by the space. [The other person to do so to my experience was Kapoor, with his massive red form filling the entire space.]

As spectatoring goes though, it was a good week – one really wonderful work, and one disillusionment.  At that rate I’d venture out a lot more than my rule-of-thumb minimum 10 turkeys for each wonder.

Shepard tones spectrum logorithm

TRINITY (up at ZKM)

Finding out indirectly, via a letter to my blog by someone in Karlsruhe who saw it, I find out the Zentrum fur Kunst und Media has a show up now, in which my 7 screen installation work Trinity is up.   I wrote to inquire how long it’ll be there, and for some pictures of whatever form they’ve put it up.  A little odd to do so without letting me know, but…   Here’s some pictures from it:

Otherwise a near-final version of Swimming in Nebraska goes off in the post tomorrow, along with a few other things, for the Rotterdam festival to consider.  Looking pretty good, I think.  Now on to Piccoli Miracoli for the coming month.

And planning winter break which looks to be perhaps hyper-busy – maybe two festivals, shoot a film in Italy in HD, get some transfers to digital of older films (Last Chants for a Slow Dance, perhaps The Bed You Sleep In and Frameup, both of which desperately need some kind of decent version as those made by Complex Corp are utterly horrible), and maybe a jaunt to Jerusalem for some screenings and a workshop.  Rather a lot in my book.

Of course it could all fall through.  Tomorrow a visit to a gallery here with some Olafur Eliasson works.  Maybe something to write about.

Indie Scam

Ciprianis Wall St., NYC

I don’t recall quite how long the word “independent” has been hung like an albatross across the neck of a certain realm of filmmaking, but somewhere long ago this became the all-purpose label to cover everything from wild (dull boring academic “taught”) avant-garde/experimental to anything not funded by a Hollywood studio, to something with (uh oh) subtitles from some furrin place far away. I do recall back in the late 1970’s (!) attending what became the founding conference of the Independent Feature Project, one called by a cluster of ex-New Lefties in NYC. Centered around Sandra Schulberg (related to Bud Schulberg, depending on your tastes one of the snitches of the McCarthy era – boy are we going back to prehistoric times) and her then boyfriend John Hanson (Northern Lights) and his then side-kick Rob Nillson, this orchestrated week-long meeting gave a fraudulent birth to the IFP. I say fraudulent because on the closing day, a conference manipulated with heavy neo-Stalinist hands emanating from those New Lefties organizers, was in such revolt that they were unable to get any consent from the souls gathered to establish any organization, or if so, who might run it. However, like any Stalinist rubber-stamp congress, the decision had already been made by the organizers, and hence, on the next Monday they held a press conference – location unannounced and from which, among others, I was excluded – and falsely claimed that their conference had unanimously voted to set up an organization, the IFP, to represent the interests of “independent” filmmakers, and had chosen none other than themselves to run it. And the IFP, soon to tentacle out to many cities, was off and running, the spawn of a totally illegitimate birthing. As I predicted at the time, in a mailing sent out to their own mailing list, the kinds of hard-knuckle poli-biz folks running it would doubtless show up later in the boardrooms of Hollywood. And indeed, not long afterward some did. And now, some 30 years later the IFP chugs on, with branches in NY, LA and a few other places I think. A look at the NYC branch website, currently touting their upcoming Gotham awards shows a cheezy and cheap graphics interface, with NY Times lead film critic A.O. Scott announcing their picks for awards for “independent” filmmaking. The list includes Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest, Katheryn Bigalow’s The Hurt Locker and similar such films, including the obligatory subtitled one. None of these films wanders remotely from standard by-the-numbers filmmaking – actor-oriented plot-driven theatrical filmmaking of the standard sort that is business-as-usual.   But, in New York, at a fancy place on Wall Street, Ciprianis, these films will be celebrated as being “independent.”  From what, I don’t know, but certainly not from the basic premise that films are made to make money first, and hence must hew to strict formal guidelines dictated by film-as-business thinking.

Beverly Hills Hotel, Beverly Hills, Ca.

For me this is all “deja vu all over again” as Yogi Berra famously once said. Back in 1991, I think it was, I was invited to the IFP (West)’s first such ceremony, to receive the first (and perhaps last) John Cassavetes’ Lifetime Achievement award at the tender age of whatever I was back then, late 40’s something.  Along with me getting this placard was Ed Pressman, producer of this list of films

* Thank You for Smoking * The Beautiful Country * Owning Mahowny * The Cooler * Judge Dredd
* Year of the Gun * Reversal of Fortune * Talk Radio * Conan the Barbarian * Das Boot (executive producer, director’s cut) * Phantom of the Paradise * The Crow * Wall Street * Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps * American Psycho * Street Fighter * The Revolutionary

[I note that missing from this list is a Charles Burnett film which Pressman also produced.]

The place for this, demonstrating the IFP’s one decade social ascent, was the Beverly Hills Hotel, and in attendance were luminaries such as Kevin “Dancing with Wolves” Costner, and his agent, at the time known as Hollywood’s “most powerful man” Michael Ovitz.  Ovitz since has tumbled to earth, and Costner seems to have been cut down some notches. Costner immediately preceded me on the rostrum, giving the keynote speech, extolling the wonders of tinsel town, and stating that the secret to making “a good film” was to have a “good script” and that “any good script got made.”  Like Dancing with Wolves.  I followed, an unknown, and said in my modest little thanks (for nothing) that I had to differ with Mr Costner, and that one of the problems with Hollywood and the film business in general was the thought that everything comes out of a script, and that in my view (and practice) it was perfectly possible to make a film – even perhaps a “good one” – with no script at all, as I had with the film, All the Vermeers in New York, which had catapulted me momentarily into the realm of the Hollywood mighty.   Prior to receiving my award I had been assured by the potentates of the IFP that surely studios would come knocking at my door in consequence of their anointing me my 15 minutes of fame.   Need I say, no studios ever sent a word, and just as well.

It was clear those decades ago that the trajectory of our special word “independent” was already corrupt, like the culture which coughed it up.  The herd was stampeding (again) for the big bucks.  Along the way any real sense of creativity in the film world was shunted aside, and now these decades later the “art houses” are shriveled to almost none, and those that still exist  mostly show commercial films with subtitles or so-called “American Independent Cinema” which might run from last years Gotham candidate, Frozen River or Ballast, both fine utterly conventional films done outside the fiscal, if not the aesthetic, box of humdrum film-as-business.  Or the Coen brothers latest.

What you won’t find are the scattering of films you might find at a more adventurous film festival, or that once would have been found at an art house – films like Alain Resnais’ Muriel, or an early Godard (or a later one), or anything showing a flicker of creative spark that hasn’t been worn to death in lame imitations and now celebrated as really going out on an aesthetic limb.   That kind of cinema has been bludgeoned fiscally to death – no big money in it hence no money in it at all.   So what we get is a corpse of cinema, usually state supported, the odd European or Asian film, floating free of the financial demands (ah, but the reality is another story, a small pile of corruption masquerading as an alleged artistic concern of the State to support an indigenous film industry) that govern our dear Hollywood.

And what we get are costly parties celebrating celebrity, thrown at Ciprianis and the Beverly Hills Hotel (or where ever the IFP West branch throws their just-bef0re-the-Oscars so-called Indie Awards thing).   From some people’s viewpoint it’s a demonstration of  just how far “indie” has come;  from my jaded one it shows just how corrupted our culture has become such that we honor cinematic necrophilia in the name of Mammon.

Loose Ends

Deficit Hits $1.4 Trillion, Complicating Stimulus Plans

Published: October 16, 2009

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Friday the deficit for the fiscal year just ended was $1.4 trillion, the largest relative to the size of the economy since 1945, underscoring the challenge to shrink the fiscal gap even as the White House and Congress consider further steps to stimulate a slow recovery.

Adam Storch, 29, formerly of  Goldman Sachs, appointed director of “watchdog” agency of SEC

Dow 10,000, Goldman $3 Billion

For Goldman employees, it is almost as if the financial crisis never happened. Only months after paying back billions of taxpayer dollars, Goldman Sachs is on pace to pay annual bonuses that will rival the record payouts that it made in 2007, at the height of the bubble. In the last nine months, the bank set aside about $16.7 billion for compensation — on track to pay each of its 31,700 employees close to $700,000 this year. Top producers are expecting multimillion-dollar paydays.

Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs CEO, giving Wall Street a good name

JPMorgan Chase Reports Strong Profit of $3.6 Billion
October 14, 2009

A year after accepting a bailout from Washington, a resurgent JPMorgan Chase reported a second consecutive quarter of surprisingly strong profit on Wednesday, solidifying its position at the pinnacle of American finance.

Dismal Foreclosure Numbers Could Be the Tip of the Iceberg

October 16, 2009 12:34 PM ET

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

As the U.S. economy collapsed last fall, due in no small part to bad home loans made in the subprime market, the Democrats and the Republicans both made a lot of noise about the need to shore up the housing market to prevent further foreclosures.

Unfortunately, all the talk has produced little positive result. Figures released Thursday show that nearly 1 million properties went into foreclosure in the third quarter of 2009. That’s an increase of 5 percent from the previous quarter and nearly 23 percent from just one year ago.

So while Wall Street celebrates, and economists talk about having hit bottom, the recession is over, the hoi polloi lose their jobs, homes, and minds:

The above, Ms Kirby Brown, having shelled out $9,600 for some New Age enlightenment, was de-oxygenated to death, along with two others, in an ersatz native-American sweat lodge in ever trendy and rich Sedona, Arizona.  The sweat lodge was covered with plastic, and crammed with 50 (paying [9600 x 50 = 480,000]) clients.  Three died, and 20 others required hospitalization.  Nirvana is not cheap….  Ah, but James Arthur Ray, guiding guru at the Spiritual Warrior Course, had promised “harmonic wealth” – on a financial, mental, physical and spiritual level.  Hmmm… the old American snake oil salesman shtick is alive and well, in Sedona and on Wall Street.   It’s just that some of the clients aren’t.

Ben Bernanke, Chief Officer of the Fed, Harvard classmate of Lloyd Blankfein

God Bless America.

James Benning Boogie Woogie

James Benning

Quite some time ago – must have been 10 years, maybe 11 – I had the dubious self-appointed responsibility to let James Benning know that his lab fresh new print of El Valley Centro* screening at the Rotterdam Film Festival had already been ruined after a whole 2 projections.  I’d gone to the first one with my daughter Clara, then only 2 or so, and she’d been a bit noisy so I left.  James’ films are often pretty quiet, and ask for concentration, not children’s cries.  A day or two later I went back to see the second projection, and now, running almost smack down the middle, was a through-the-emulsion scratch through the whole film.  His films would take such a scratch even worse that a child’s cry.  I found him later in the day and let him know the bad and pressed him to get the festival to replace the print, which he did and they did.  But I also pressed him to consider shifting to DV, which I’d been using since 1996.  I thought it would be suitable visually, though I had thought for some time it was a pity he couldn’t shoot in 35mm, though that was economically utterly absurdble and impossi.  But I thought 16mm was as well – spending $10,000 in lab fees for films that would never sell to anyone, and could get ruined on one showing.  Some years later on seeing 13 Lakes I genuinely thought that my Sony PD10-Pal version (native wide-screen) would look as sharp as his film did, and shooting on DV would drive the costs (excluding his travels) down to $10 or so.  And no scratches, dirt, gate wobble, or change-overs as well.  And much much better sound.

10 Skies

A year and some ago, at the JeonJu film festival here in Korea where he was presenting RR and Casting a Glance, I saw him again, and he said he’d made his last celluloid film and would be shifting to the new SONY XDcam HD camera.  I was glad to hear that he’d finally made the shift, in part for the economics, but also for the aesthetics – this camera is equal to 35mm and better, and perfect for Jame’s pristine type of imagery.  Naturally I was curious what this new format would do in his hands, and whether it would change things for him in some way.  While I occasionally write him, his responses are New England terse, nevermind he comes from Milwaukee originally.  He told me he’d gotten the camera and shot something in Germany with it.   So I was interested to find this on the internet, with him talking about shooting with the XD in HD:

I began filming on November 3, 2008 in a wooded area adjacent to the Dusseldorf International Airport. There was no wind. It was absolutely still, not one leaf was moving. The high definition captured every tiny twig, while the 16 x 9 aspect ratio allowed for a broader field of vision (lessening the need for a wider angle lens) meaning less distortion. I found the frame and pushed the start button filling two SxS cards with one take – a 114 minute shot. During that time 40 planes landed. The frame remained absolutely still, no registration movement, no dancing grain – a bit like projected slides (if you can recall slide projectors). I wasn’t sure this stillness would be acceptable, but then a plane passed through the frame providing momentary movement. Ten seconds later a wind vortex produced by the passing plane sang through the frame and disturbed one loose branch hanging from a nearby tree. It wavered slightly, and then a bit later a roaring wind followed. The frame exploded with movement. All of the trees swayed raining down their leaves. Then the wind passed and the frame slowly returned to stillness. When the next plane landed it started all over again. Each plane brought varying amounts of movement depending on its size and distance from the camera. When I looked at the footage on my computer that night I realized I had recorded an action that would have been impossible to capture on film.

– James Benning, “Knit & Purl”, Val Verde, August 2009, Cinema Scope 40, p. 39.

13 Lakes

Leave it to James to opt for a near two hour take (he could get 32 gig cards and run it to 4 I think), and I suspect in due time he will (especially after I tell him how to make much cheaper SxS cards than Sony offers).   Here he says his shot would have been impossible to do on film, which isn’t quite true, though one would have to make a special magazine to hold all the footage and bargain with Kodak to make a piece of film X thousands of feet long.  But of course one wouldn’t go through all that hassle.  But then my query for James regarding his shot above – even giving that it would be impossible to capture on film – is, why would you do it?  Or, assuming it wasn’t just for his amusement, would you really ask someone to sit for 2 hours to watch it?   I suspect his answer will be “yes”.      [For a glimpse to another aspect of Benning, see this.]
Well, I wait to see his first film in HD, both to see what he does with the imagery, and hear what he does with the quantum leap in sound quality.  I kinda know what he’ll do with the duration possibilities…..  Whatever he does, I hope it turns up at JeanJu this year.  I have heard a rumor (?) that it is – or something of his is – an homage to Ernie Gehr which I’d be eager to see.  Also would like to see Ernie’s work of the last, um, whatever it’s been since he shifted to DV some years back.

Ernie Gehr, SideWalkShuttle

Meantime for anyone near New York City there’s still a handful of days to run down to 179 East Broadway to see Leighton Pierce’s Agency of Time at the ViolaBankGallery.  Worth a big detour.

In Passing

Irving Penn, fashion photographer, but also something else, has died at 92 years of age.  Elegant, fashionable – and hence acquainted with many of the famous figures of his time, and chronicler of same – his images often provide a concise collectively held impression of those he’s portrayed, however true or not:

Jean Cocteau

Francis Bacon

Pablo Picasso

Measured against his peer, fashion photographer Richard Avedon (died 2004), Penn wages an even battle.  Penn’s austere minimalism – the near omnipresent white background, the careful graphic orchestration, make for striking images.  Avedon’s less clinical approach seems a bit messier, if at the same time more lively.  Though it was when he branched away from fashionable things that he hit his best mark:  In the American West.  Here he provides a sequence of portraits of real westerners, but isolated against a flat white studio backdrop.  Somehow he manages to distill these people down to elemental truths:

From In the American West

To Irving Penn, the last cigar butt

Aaron Siskind