Cute Dog Trapped in Mediocre Indie Film

Filmgoing has been scarce during the past few months, but we recently had a chance to preview Kelly Reichardt's indie film, Wendy & Lucy, starring Michelle Williams, at Film Forum. It was oddly comparable in narrative flow and content to Vittorio DeSica's 1948 gem, The Bicycle Thief. However, the comparison I make is a superficial one.

Both films explore the period of several days for two sorrowful protagonists who face immeasurable misfortune. For Antonio, it is a desperate search for a stolen bicycle, his ticket to a well-paying job that will help him support his family. For Wendy, it is a search for her dog Lucy, which goes missing while she is being arrested for shoplifting at a smalltown grocery store. Both characters make mistakes in their search for what seems to be the one thing that will save them from irretractable hardship. Yet, somehow Antonio's hardships -- far more believable and plagued with post-war doom -- make Wendy's concerns feel empty, superficial, and trite.

To be fair, I watched The Bicycle Thief at Walter Reade for probably the fourth or fifth time only hours before screening Wendy and Lucy. The grainy shots of post-war, decayed Rome and the hollowed expressions of the cast of non-professional actors still lingered in my mind as the pretentiously constructed non-diegetic hum over the opening credits for Wendy and Lucy rolled. (This hum, by the way, would return later in the film to create an equally distracting attempt at employing what I like to refer to as fulfilling a certain indie film trope quota.) And that may have been the film's biggest problem: it searched for ways to appear independent and wouldn't allow itself to identify and settle in its own independent skin. Wide, beautiful shots of empty exterior spaces in "Name Your Town, America" do not qualify. Nor does a protagonist with a hidden past who befriends a nameless security guard at Walgreen's.

I felt unresponsive to the needs of this character and to the turn of events in the narrative. Unlike Antonio's, Wendy's bad decisions didn't keep me interested in following the downward spiral of her tale. I just felt bored by them.

n.

onKawaraUpdate (v2)

This open source site by artist duo MTAA (M. River and T. Whid Art Associates) creates a date page that mimics work of conceptual artist On Kawara's date paintings since 1966, Today Series.

Impermanence

Unnamed Artists has organized and curated another single-evening art event. Impermanence is an exhibition that will feature ten artists' works in the transient La Lutta project space in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

Saturday, September 27, 2008 @ 6 PM
La Lutta Project Space
204 Sackett Street (@ Henry)
Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn

Curated by Tanisha Christie, Natasha Chuk, and Caterina Mallone, the exhibition will include works by:

Rebekah Andersen – photography
Rebecca Conroy – video
Joseph Farbrook –videograph
Valerie Garlick - video
Jessica Levey - photography

Michael Nathaniel Meyer - photography
Hannah Elise Miller - video
Richard O'Sullivan - video
Timothy Wibisono - photography
Kimberly Witham - photography

weChat

Like many things Apple makes, iChat is a godsend.


Particularly in the open office environment, a working configuration that seems to be all the rage these days, privacy is hard to come by. Sneaking a nasty remark to a fellow co-worker is not a simple task. Discussing the nerve your boss had to call you out in that last meeting will lose its impact if you wait too long to report it. The watercooler is no longer a desirable communal area in which tales of the past weekend or the details of juicy office gossip are exchanged. Whispers in the work place are always indicators of nefarious activity, conspiracy, or disgruntled employee anarchy.

Enter iChat.

This simple communication device provides a wealth of relief in an atmosphere that can be teeming with tension and unspoken anxiety. The discussions are trivial but endlessly valuable. Private and relatively untraceable, they are your bitter thoughts put into broken English and incomplete sentences, communicated instantaneously to a trusted recipient.

It's the kind of system that provides reasonable solutions for the sorry characters in pre-IM films like Glengarry Glen Ross and Clockwatchers. Yet, who would have thought it would ever be nice to bring those cubicle walls back?

Meet Mahatma Gandhi

It might seem fairly naive of me to be fascinated with online personas and the virtual world. But, to be clear, I'm fascinated with the byproducts of those entities -- the social impact, our appropriation of technology, and the general effects of anonymous global interaction.

Joseph DeLappe's project within and around Second Life aims to illuminate the space where real and virtual worlds collide. My review of The Salt Satyagraha discusses the possibilities of virtual space and personal (and social) identity. The project itself took place in two stages, and just closed on July 19 at Eyebeam.

RECLAIM!

Summer in New York City is steamy and filled with tourists, which is why we escape every weekend to our country abode. The country, however, cuts us off from the art world: participation in openings, parties, dinners, and TV all must be suspended.

However, this weekend we'll be in town -- in fact, off to Brooklyn -- for Art Party 3 in which my good friend Cat Mallone and I have curated a film and video show called RECLAIM: The Visual Space in Between.

Here are the details.

RECLAIM: The Visual Space in Between
A film and video series presented as part of ART PARTY 3
Curated by Caterina Mallone and Natasha Chuk

Saturday, July 19, 2008 @ 7 PM

Supreme Trading
213 North 8th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
718-599-4224
www.supremetradingny.com

In keeping with the transient nature of the space at Supreme Trading, RECLAIM: The Visual Space in Between is a film and video series that encompasses wide-ranging works that depict the areas between and among memory, history, tradition, identity, and spaces of liminality and becoming.

RECLAIM explores visualizations of memory as a representation of personal or collective experiences that interact with and affect the creation or evolution of new identities, concepts, and entities. We believe memory both fosters and limits change, and this series illustrates that duality, showing the many ways we experience, recall, and appropriate memory.

We've selected works that are evocative art forms which mark our time and give it the artistic flair and personality we have come to celebrate. With an emphasis on visual language, these works RECLAIM visual memory, harnessing it literally and conceptually.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Pam Kray
Jessica Lauretti
LoVid
Karl Mendonca
Sharon Mooney
Jessica Peavy
Caroline Polachek
Bec Stupak
Olivia Wyatt

R.I.P.

Thomas Edward
December 1992 - June 23, 2008

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

As we here at Am/Mex avoid grocery store tomatoes, just in case, we learned today that the FDA is closing in on a list of farms in Florida and Mexico that may be to blame for this salmonella mess. If you are wondering what tomatoes are safe to eat, you're not alone. Here's the "safe" list, but if you trust the FDA at this point to protect the U.S. food chain then we have a piece of land next to the airport you may be interested in. Today the FDA's safety chief Dr. David Acheson told the AP:

"A tomato that made somebody sick in Vermont has come a long way. A lot of suppliers and warehouses have potentially handled that tomato. It could be anywhere on that distribution chain where all these tomatoes were together at one point.''

And there is the crux of the problem, which brings us to a still ripe memory - a panel earlier this month at The New School entitled What's For Dinner? The Rise of Food Literacy. It was a night of revelations: the room was packed, the new terminology was impressive (slow food, of course, but porkfolio?) and it occurred to us that food awareness and the local food movement is as close to activism as most people will ever get these days. Forget Obama's Unite for Change mantra for a moment, if you consider yourself a gourmand, a gourmet, or just like to eat tasty, fresh food, it's time to change the way this country grows, distributes and eats food. Edible Communities is doing just that, so check it out.

The long arrows are coming into fashion.

Last night The Times Center hosted a fabulous event organized by The Museum of the Moving Image, a conversation between Jonathan Demme and Werner Herzog and a reception that followed to celebrate the launch of the new crazy cool Moving Image Source, a website and research guide to all things film, television and digital media.

Dennis Lim walked us through the interface of the website, highlighting its features and capabilities. But, naturally, he kept his presentation brief, as he could probably feel the collective anxiety in the room building in anticipation of one of the remaining true (as Herzog describes Roger Ebert) "soldiers of cinema". The real treat last night was Werner Herzog. (The unfortunate endorsement of Roger Ebert wasn't.)

To set the stage for the Demme-Herzog interview -- about growing up in Bavaria, not Germany, never having seen a film until the age of 11, and being able to pick out the man in the room who can milk a cow, among other things -- we got a peek at Herzog's latest film, Encounters at the End of the World, which, from a brief look at it, appears to capture his (forgive me for reducing it to this uninspired-but-for-lack-of-a-better-term) quirky sensibility.

It opens next Wednesday at Film Forum.

Alphabet City

An abecedarium (or abecedary) is an inscription consisting of the letters of the alphabet, almost always listed in order. This clever sorting of letters is a fitting selection for the New York Public Library, host to the online, interactive exhibition co-produced by Lynne Sachs and Susan Agliata, Abecedarium: NYC.

This project explores the above and below ground history, geography, and culture of New York City through 26 words. The words aren't ordinary, everyday words. K is for Kermis, a festival usually held to raise money; P for Pelagic, relating to oceans or seas; N is for Nosogeography, the study of the geographical causes of diseases, and so on.

Visual and aural relationships are formed between these words and specific locations, indicated by maps, throughout New York City's five boroughs through video, animation, photography and sound.

Paul Chan & Close Proximity

Paul Chan's talk, held at Hunter College's Lang Recital Hall last Friday, was an informal event led by his friend and former Bard-mate, Jennifer Hayashida. Though the conversation was marked by open-ended, broad questions that bore almost no relevance to Chan's practice or career, the conversation was tolerable due to his easy manner, openness, and modesty.

He had an easy answer for everything, delivered through carefully chosen words and in a pleasantly soft and unassuming voice. He wasn't pedantic, despite his in-depth references to Henry Darger and Charles Fourier, the collective sources of inspiration for his video installation, Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization.

He spoke very elaborately about his recent trip to New Orleans, where last fall he successfully staged Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, New Orleans style. The project was co-produced by Creative Time and other supporters that guided him along a journey of artistic self-discovery and impromptu production. He meaningfully embraced New Orleans -- its culture and people -- by offering to teach at local colleges, refusing pay and insisting that his classes were open to students enrolled in different schools. He had other stories, too, all better told in his voice over mine.

Today I visited the third floor of the New Museum, where his 7 Lights series is on view. I was effectively blown away.

I'm tempted to outfit our apartment in Chan-inspired projections, though probably couldn't come close to his eloquent use of space -- floor, ceiling, wall edges -- nor his balanced placement of shapes (a softer take on Gorey) and timed movements. In addition to the projections are various works on paper that incorporate charcoal, Styrofoam, and music sheets, all sharing the same shadowy contrast as the projections.

On a separate note, it's feeling very spring-y and art-full in New York City. How do I know this? Two nights in a row, Chuck Close and I attended the same event. Love it!

We're Excited About...

It's hard to avoid the elephant in the room that is our obvious absence/hiatus from blogging here, so we'll just put it out there plainly. Yes, it's been a while since we've posted anything here. We're excited to be back, hoping to have a more regular presence, and feeling the energy of the art world heating up as temperatures similarly increase. Moving forward we plan to draw from all of this activity and translate it here with praise, confusion, disgust or (worse) indifference.

It's a busy week as Paul Chan is giving an artist talk Friday night at Hunter College. His work, The 7 Lights, is currently on view at The New Museum until June 29. This piece explores light, projection, space, and absence through text, audio, and video. It's also viewable online, but it's worth the visit to the Museum for the real thing.

DJ Spooky (aka Paul Miller) has a new book out (!), Sound Unbound. He's calling it a manifesto about sound art, digital media, and contemporary composition. It has essays and interviews from Brian Eno, Pierre Boulez, Moby, Chuck D, Saul Williams, Jaron Lanier, Pauline Oliveros, Naeem Mohaiemen, and others. The audio companion to the book includes rare material from Sub Rosa Records, Allen Ginsberg, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Iggy Pop, Jean Cocteau, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and others. As far as mashups go, this book probably scores a 10.

His book release party is this Friday night, where he'll share the spotlight with famed novelist Jonathan Lethem at the McNally Robinson bookstore in Soho. It will undoubtedly be a crowded affair, making it more likely that we'll attend Paul Chan's talk uptown.

In the coming weeks we will hit MoMA to see LoVid, the New York-based artist duo Tali Hinklis and Kyle Lapidus. They will perform Wire-full, a multimedia performance that involves their Sync Armonica synthesizer. So our cup of tea.

In a rare effort to attend two theater/re performances, we plan to see Stolen Chair Theatre Company's The Accidental Patriot: The Lamentable Tragedy of the Pirate Desmond Connelly, Irish by Birth, English by Blood, and American by Inclination, which runs through May 17 at the Milagro Theater and The Euthanasist, which runs through June 15 at PS122.

Finally, we will squeeze in a trek to Brooklyn to see the work of Japanese pop artist extraordinaire Takashi Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum, which is on view through July 13.

An Ontological-Hysteric Disasterpiece

Counting, screaming, references to time, vogue-ing, vampire teeth, twin video projections, and blindingly flashing bulbs. These are some of the elements of Richard Foreman's current work on view/experience, Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland.

Ben Brantley of The New York Times wrote:

Looking for the travel agent of your dreams, someone to fly you out of the muddy rut of midwinter monotony? Allow me to suggest Richard Foreman, a man whose slogan, spelled out in a ravishing new show called “Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland,” gets right to the point: “Go to other places.” And, boy, does he make sure that you do.

The title of the work, description, and Foreman's reputation were motivation enough for American/Mexican to battle through the City's first annual snow storm to attend on Tuesday night. But with a deep sigh and a mutual look of defeat, we left St. Mark's Church in disappointment.

We expected the promised feeling of being transported to a dream-like world of theatrical exploration, endangerment, and surprise led by a man who answers to no one -- a raw, gritty, more daring version of Tim Burton --with 70 years of age and 40 years of experience, and takes his audience through territory that is feared too gooey and nihilistic by other experimental artists.

Instead we watched projected video of beautiful people from Japan and Britain set against a live cast of beautiful people in mismatched clothing, who took on mannequin-like configurations, while the tension/relationship between the worlds of video and live performance was weak and undeveloped.

The work's greatest achievement was in its elegant stagings of people, props, and costumes, all aligned with perfect timing and delicacy. But the work overall felt dated and crusty, leaving us desperate for something more energetic than the periodic, temporary blindness brought on by the frequent discharge of light emitted by several large flares that were aimed at the audience. This is, like other old tricks in this piece, was simply annoying.

The Future, The City

The fascination with rapidly changing technologies and their ubiquity in our daily lives leaves some of us wondering what the future might look and feel like. Naturally, cities are particularly vulnerable to activities that occur on a massive scale. The lines that separate public and private spaces get blurrier and blurrier, given our fondness for mp3 players, cell phones, PDAs, and other hand-held, personal devices that in some ways cut us off from others, and in other ways provide connections between us and strangers. But the ability to unlock information that is valuable to how we shape our daily lives in cities and create identities within them is also within our reach.

On Friday night, American/Mexican listened intently as Adam Greenfield led an inspiring panel discussion, Nextcity: The Art of the Impossible, as part of the New Silent Series, curated by Lauren Cornell of Rhizome, at New Museum. He invited three other leading experts in the field -- Christian Nold, Meejin Kim, and Eric Rodenbeck -- to weigh in on issues about The City, namely how it is expanding into a netherworld of technology that has the potential to leave us blindingly dependent on connectedness, forcing us to shed the ability to communicate organically and effectively without it.

Greenfield opened with an abysmal portrayal of what systems can and will do. It's an exciting time to be alive, he reminds us, but there is a dismal reality to the politics of technology and society. His three guests addressed different ways of dealing with our tendencies to be utterly impressed with the fading, near-invisibility of the medium -- which brings us dangerously close to mindlessly accepting our connectedness and interpreting it as need -- by showing us examples of their own work, a balance of forward-thinking technologies and creativity.

Nold's emotional mapping brings thoughtfulness to technology while Rodenbeck's Stamen Design firm's work brings a sophisticated version of the ever present fuzz buster of the 90s, and feed aggregators that are specific to user location and interest. Kim's work reflects the combined beauty and simplicity of technology, illustrating that the mind, body, and technologies need not have separate motivations.

Successfully downplaying the apocalyptic possibility of the technological takeover of humankind, Greenfield remains optimistic. His insight into the possibilities of the future, for better or for worse, are admirable, his judgments drawn from the wise words of those who preceded him. More importantly, his delivery of heavyweight information is accessible and reflective of a generation of thinkers who are confident, bright, and technologically savvy yet unspoiled by arrogance and nonchalance.

We look forward to reading Greenfield's book, Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing, and to the release of his upcoming book, The City Is Here For You To Use.

And, on a separate note, we realized that he's married to the visual artist Nurri Kim, whose work explores The City in its own way.

(We want this in our living room.)

Art @ South Street Seaport

South Street Seaport, a tourist destination in Lower Manhattan, is admittedly a Disneyland eyesore, but beyond the scores of family restaurants and retail (chain) clothing shops, visitors can find pockets of art worth seeing.

@SEAPORT, located at 133 Beekman, is formerly the Liz Claiborne store and has recently been transformed into a unique, two-story gallery space. It currently houses Human Resources, a multimedia exhibition held as part of LMCC's Out of Site series. The show features the work of 13 LMCC resident artists who, through their art, reflect on human interactions and respond to working in downtown Manhattan. The pieces range from photography to interactive media and unexpected forms of projected video. A lunchroom table, reminiscent of the kind we all sat on in grade school, sits in the center of the main floor.

New Yorkers should consider making the trek to Lower Manhattan to view this show and help promote art in this sometimes artless area. Tourists who are pressed for time can skip the overpriced Bodies exhibition across the street.

@SEAPORT
133 Beekman Street at Front Street
Through Feb. 3, 2008

Election Results

Jim Rice got robbed today - losing out in the latest Hall of Fame ballot by just 16 votes. 2009 is his last chance before being sent off to the Veterans Committee. For the record, he hit a lot of HR's, here he is hitting his 199th and 200th home runs at Fenway in 1988. Among his many career accomplishments, Rice batted .298 for his career, hit 382 home runs, and grappled with the Green Monster in left field day after day. In the late 70s he almost strung together three straight seasons with 40-plus homers. Plus, he wore a cooler mustache than just about anybody. Next year baseball writers must do the right thing.

Our Place in Cairo

An excited phone call this week from one of our longtime sources in Portland, Maine alerted us to an item in in the latest issue of The New Yorker, which we couldn't miss - a poem entitled Cairo, N.Y. It was a delightful surprise to the Am/Mex team, who owns a house in the said little town located on the northernmost side of the Catskills. Read on...

Cairo, N.Y.

by Cornelius Eady

The town near our house
Isn’t fancy, but it is ripe.
At present, it is still on
The wrong side of
The Hudson River,

But there’s potential.
What happened
In Woodstock,
What happened
In Red Hook,
What’s happening
In Catskill,

Could easily
Happen here.

Our streets are sad
In the way our bodies
Are sad as we
Dream of our
Beautiful selves,

Floating, light,
Light-filled,
Transcendent.

How could anyone
Have missed or
Overlooked us,

Even with our
Bad haircuts,
Our paunchy clothes,
Our gin-mill
Mouths?

One day
Some car drives by
And the rich folk
Who hunt for
Cut-rate rubies
Slow down,

And here we are,
They think,
All ready to be
Scrubbed.

Solidarity Beards?

It was a hirsute late night return for Conan and Dave. The popular wisdom is that Conan, Leno and Kimmel were "forced" back to work by their employers (while Letterman's production company Worldwide Pants inked its own side deal). Am/Mex finds that hard to believe, but if so, why can't the AMPTP force the TV and screenwriters back to work? Stupid question, right? So again, why would the WGA sign a side deal to benefit just a dozen writers? Please comment and for now we'll skip over the serious stuff and instead direct you to the funniest thing "written and produced" so far during the strike - watch Stir Crazy, inspired by the movie The Shining.