American/Mexican

Postmodern Perfect, Or How to Make an American Quilt

2010-05-06T22:20:00.004-04:00

A double feature of Kick-Ass and Hot Tub Time Machine at a drive-in movie theater a couple of weekends ago got me thinking about postmodernity -- again.

Both films are a reminder that these days creativity is about compiling previously imagined and executed texts, fulfilling the now ever-present postmodern expectation that any media text can be part of the creative toolbox. This can easily hinge on an over-the-top, relentless cut-and-paste storytelling style favored by the likes of Tarantino, but I was pleasantly surprised by these films' use of intertextuality and appropriation. Maybe we're just getting better at it and Tarantino was the unlucky guinea pig in the 90s, unable to shed his unfortunate style in the present day.

Hot Tub Time Machine (dir. Steve Pink), a comedy about time travel back to sometime in the 80s, relies on cultural references of the past to support its narrative but ventures into the realm of contemplating the time-space continuum through the casting of John Cusack, a man who (through no effort of his own) is a walking reference to 80s cool. He nearly single-handedly connotes an entire index of pop culture references: Peter Gabriel's In Your Eyes, the boombox, "I want my two dollars", fingerless gloves and kickboxing, pre-SNS romantic sentimentality among teenagers, and so much more. His aging gracefully only helps solidify these allusions.

Kick-Ass (dir. Matthew Vaughn), a film based on a comic book series of the same name, celebrates its intertextuality differently. Riffing off the comic book genre, it playfully references Batman (Big Daddy's costume and demeanor), Spider-man (was Aaron Johnson cast in the role of Dave Lizewski/Kick-Ass because his voice uncannily resembles that of Tobey Maguire's?), and most comically and perhaps unintentionally, Hamburglar, the fictional burger thief imagined by a long-gone McDonald's campaign. This is made possible by the film's biggest hero, Hit Girl, a potty mouthed eleven year-old who dons a cloak, mask, and purple wig while acrobatically assassinating her father's enemies.

Her costume, size, and sneakiness are a subtle reminder of this bygone era of McDonald's advertising history. Interestingly, Hamburglar himself seems to be a bastardization of the protagonist Arsole Fantüme from the French novel Arsole Fantüme, Gentleman Immoralist by Marcel Maurice and Pierre, originally published in 1901 and recently republished last year. Fantüme, like Hamburglar, wears a wide-brimmed hat, a mask, and cloak.

While none of these bear the mark of direct inspiration, their similarities are nonetheless part of an on-going creative process of constructing culture through building on the past, most likely without being conscious of it. The riffing and intermingling of styles and cultural references and the absence of a fixed center create somewhat of a feedback loop of meaning. Meanwhile, the context in which these two films were viewed -- from the private sphere of our '87 BMW and the atmosphere of the drive-in, a relic of film spectatorship -- contributes to this.

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The Thrill Isn't Gone

2010-03-05T14:24:00.013-05:00

I might have said some bad things about Martin Scorsese sometime in the late 90s, probably after I saw Bringing Out the Dead. I wanted so badly to enjoy that film -- to re-experience some version of Taxi Driver -- but it just didn't happen. Soon after, he directed Gangs of New York, a film that felt unnecessarily long and theatrical. (Maybe turn-of-the-century New York was too distant a subject to his preferred backdrop of the Lower East Side circa 1970?) The Aviator forced me to question Leonardo DiCaprio's sense of good taste and whether or not Scorsese was still capable of delivering a daring, no-nonsense, unforgiving, meaningful film ever again. I wondered if he had been Spielberged in some way: had he given up on the visual style that graced his early work, defining for generations of filmmakers to come a unique way to play with perspective, conventions of editing, and audience's expectations? The Rolling Stones aside, what happened to his good taste?

Then in 2005 he directed No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, a D.A. Pennebaker-esque journey into the living legend's life. Here suddenly was a film that didn't feel like Hollywood. It felt like vintage Scorsese.

Even some of his recent mainstream films have revealed a return to a cinematic style worthy of acclaim. The Departed, a film with an all-star cast, dripping with Hollywood energy, was surprisingly unlike some of the hyped but predictable and ultimately disappointing Boston-based, troubled cop melodramas that were released roughly around the same time (Gone Baby Gone, Mystic River).

Shutter Island wasn't groundbreaking, but it wasn't disappointing either. It held my attention, looked amazing, and showed aspects of Scorsese's daring side. He had made psychological horrors before, but not like this one. This film had a beautiful ugliness that few are capable of orchestrating on this scale. Music never takes a backseat in his films, and this film particularly relied on sound to envelope audiences, using works by masters of sonic invention like John Cage, Gyorgy Ligeti, and others, favoring dissonance over harmony. Shutter also proved his fearless and ongoing approach to getting inside a tortured character's head and visually illustrating its contents, as well as which stories are worth translating cinematically. The New York Times fittingly described this film as Scorsese's "something else."

But what has really restored my faith in Martin Scorsese's directorial genius and good taste is his current line-up of films that are in pre-production: an untitled George Harrison documentary (a film about the most overlooked but possibly most complicated and interesting Beatle), The Invention of Hugo Cabret (based on Brian Selznick's brilliantly crafted cinema-meets-Georges-Mélies-meets-graphic-novel), and Sinatra (no description necessary).

There will never be another Mean Streets, but there will be more journeys into the complicated mind and behavior of well developed characters and real people, carefully constructed snapshots of a certain time and place, and the creation of visually inventive experiences for audiences.

Martin Scorsese is back.

Anatomy of an Accusation

2009-11-13T10:50:00.013-05:00

I recently had a chance to view Peter Greenaway's latest film, Rembrandt's J'Accuse, an experiment in documentary filmmaking, historical research, and academic lecture, at Film Forum. It embodies all of the cinematic elements that I usually regard with extreme aversion: historical reenactment, numerically defined vignettes, video layers and their subsequent animated entrances and exits through the frame, and shadowed text. And even though this film is laden with these normally distracting attributes, I couldn't help but fall for it completely.

I'm aware that Greenaway's style largely relies on the heavy use of the visual techniques that can sometimes seem cumbersome, even corny, but he also manages to use them stylistically and meaningfully, giving each frame a lush, robust quality that relies on this excess to achieve its impact. In the case of J'Accuse, I grew to enjoy, perhaps admire, his disembodied presence, delivering a professorial, wordy analysis of the famous painting in question, The Night Watch, painted by Rembrandt in 1642. Reconstructions of the events leading up to the creation of this painting are cleverly enacted within elaborately detailed settings.

The film takes an Errol Morris-style investigation into this richly textured painting to which I've never given much thought. The persuasive nature of Greenaway's well-researched findings brings the painting and its history to life, filling its audience with a sense of wonder, mystery, and accusation. And the manner in which he uses the normally distracting intersecting and overlapping imagery give this film a forensics-based credibility, exposing its every detail, proved painterly intention, and logic.

Though I wouldn't recommend this film to the easily distracted or the impatient spectator, Rembrandt's J'Accuse is among the most vibrant of Peter Greenaway's films, excellently combining art, technology, and documentary.

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Serving Up a Fashion Statement

2009-08-28T21:44:00.008-04:00

Gearing up for the upcoming U.S. Open, The Times featured a short piece on the sometimes eccentric fashion choices displayed by tennis players over the years. My two favorites are pictured here: Bill Tilden (1930) and Suzanne Lenglen (1919).

I admire these athletes' ability to perform in unbreathable and excessive (though stylish) clothing. And we haven't exactly come a long way from this: Anne White's Lycra bodysuit (1985) fits the same description, while Rafa Nadal's recently retired clamdiggers always seemed distractingly snug.

Tennis players contend with more than their opponents; they are exposed to the elements (heat, wind, sun) and react to them (through sweat, blisters, tears), while warding off potential disasters (wardrobe malfunctions, injury, a cursed serve) that may interrupt their game.

Still, utility isn't the primary function of most tennis players' wardrobes. Personal style tends to be the goal, displayed through ornamentation, embellishment, and an eye for fashion. We've basically seen a little bit of everything on the court: headbands of all shapes and sizes, jewelry that dangles and catches the sun's glare, blindingly bright colors, and tennis dresses that are fit for a night on the town.

While this sport requires a great degree of athleticism, physical and mental strength and endurance, and an unflinching ability to focus, it's refreshing to know that, with the exception of the all-white attire required of Wimbledon participants, tennis players' apparel is, as we've seen, relatively unrestricted. Many players display the attitude that what they wear is clothing, not a uniform, and individuality is essential. This doesn't take anything away from the game; it gives spectators something more to wow about.

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Get Smart

2009-08-06T13:18:00.005-04:00

It's been a while since either of us has posted. To be honest, we've been spending most of our free time Upstate. It's been a summer of gardening, cooking, reading, relaxing, and enjoying a pleasant life of disconnect. Without a television set, media exposure is based on our weekly Netflix movies, Hulu, and Wimbledon.org. However, the remaining weekends of the summer will likely be very different because this past week we bought iPhones.

This was a bold move for us because we resisted the pull of media technology and managed to survive, for the most part, without cell phones until they became absolutely necessary. (Working in television production in NYC without one just can't happen.) Even then we got by with the bare minimum: we bought clunky devices that allowed us to make and receive phone calls but weren't capable of much more.

Then a while back, I was forced to upgrade after my phone was stolen. My replacement wasn't a smart phone, but it was a step in a more useful direction. Suddenly I could take pictures, but I couldn't download or e-mail them, so my blurry images sat trapped in my phone by way of its limited memory. Though I rarely used text to communicate, the numbers and letters on my keypad were starting to fade. And more recently my battery began to show signs of wear, possibly terminal illness. My power button required a good two or three long pushes to execute the command. This, coupled with work demands that require prompt and frequent two-way communication, meant it was time for another upgrade. And this time it needed to be more adventurous.

As happy Mac users, we knew it was only a matter of time before we made the iPhone purchase. Our reluctance was a result of our not wanting to be connected all the time. Our antiquated phones gave us an excuse to disappear. To not have to answer right away. To not have to answer at all. So this purchase came with a condition: these phones will not change our lives.

But it's hard to deny the inevitable. It turns out they are as handy and fun to use as they are advertised. Their design is intuitive and effortless. Their applications are genius, making simple tasks like reading the New York Times online even simpler. It's clear that we're starting to show signs of healthy dependence.

The life change that we feared involved getting sucked into meaningless texting, downloading absurd applications (the virtual fart, the filled beer glass that clinks, etc.), and developing an inability to choose live company over an incoming message.

The life change we're experiencing so far has assuaged our doubts. Now we just need to buy our phones protective skins -- it could be a while before the next upgrade.

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Welcome to the Dollhouse

2009-05-14T12:04:00.011-04:00

Science fiction is the link between popular culture and modernity. Through it we can engage in fantasies that allow us to imagine ourselves in situations that seem too radical to realistically adopt but offer desirable alternatives to everyday life, at least in small, manageable doses.

Perhaps the most popular of these alternatives are the myriad approaches to artificial life in film, television, and other media. The Jetsons lived in a ubiquitously computed house, which was managed by a robot housekeeper. Likewise, Small Wonder offered a convenient alternative to both hiring a housekeeper and raising a real child. These relationships erase class and social hierarchies, removing things like animosity, disgruntled workmanship, and feelings in general.

Of course, the threat of takeover by these artificially intelligent companions has also been considered. Film classics like Metropolis and Bladerunner offer complex stories that mix elements of the future, the government, and the Underground with trust being a common theme of exploration. (Can we trust machines? Can human-machines be considered beings simply because they were designed in the likeness of humans? Is it unethical to kill one, for example?)

Manga/film combo Ghost in the Shell and The Matrix created additional blur to the distinction between human and machine, suggesting a soul is present in these manufactured objects, capable of feeling and constructing thoughts beyond logical computation. With these and many other varieties, it seems that every possibility has been entertained. What more can we add to the fictional amplified human?

Not much, but luckily the fun isn't over. Dollhouse, a Joss Whedon creation that debuted on Fox this season, gives the human-machine a new setting, operation, and mode of technological function, and leaves viewers with entertaining fodder for surveying the postmodern condition. It combines the ass-kicking vitality of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, clever dialogue, and just enough bite to maintain a sense of humor, despite the heavy theme of human-as-vessel and all of the other areas mentioned above.

Last week marked the season's finale, but all episodes are viewable on Hulu.com and Fox.com.

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Shared Spaces

2009-04-22T21:51:00.012-04:00

Today, my latest curatorial project, an online exhibition that features the work of six artists, launched.

Shared Spaces is on view through May 6, 2009 at No Commercial Value, an online exhibition space created and managed by Amir Husak and Prem Sooriyakumar.

Shared Spaces
Curated by Natasha Chuk
On view at No Commercial Value
April 22 through May 6, 2009

Blu
Burak Arikan
Char Davies
Erin Gleeson
Melissa Grey
Yasmine Soiffer

Shared Spaces, presents work by six artists who investigate the expanse of human experiences by considering the boundlessness and overlap of real and imaginary thresholds through media. These artists unite curiosity and fantasy with captured and mediated realities, confronting material and immaterial networks of space.

The imagination knows no boundaries in the private sphere: conflicts can be disabled, scientific mysteries entertained, and time collapsed. Sensations are heightened, space is fabricated, and memory is restored through the discoveries afforded by media technologies. In this public sphere, these conceptual designs invite guests to consider a different way of considering time, memory, personal space, public space, and the relationships that bridge these concepts, valuing the realization of impossibility over reality.

****
NoCommercialValue.org is a showcase of six original works and hyperlinks curated by a variety of international contributors. Featuring artists,journalists, activists, photographers, social scientists, writers, filmmakers and musicians who want to share their creative perspective on the world. NoCommercialValue.org provides a space between user generated content and a traditional art gallery. Moving away from the widespread and often convoluted format of present-day media sharing sites, our objective is to provide a "clutter-free" platform for content that can challenge, entertain, provoke, and inform.

2009-04-02T17:59:00.007-04:00

The New York Times: I.B.M. Said to Be Near Deal for Sun at Lower Price

(Hostile Takeover of Moon Could Be Next)

Paik on My Mind

2009-03-17T21:11:00.004-04:00

Perhaps the most striking component of The Third Mind exhibition currently on view at the Guggenheim is titled Buddhism and the Neo-Avant-Garde, showcasing some of the most influential work of Nam June Paik, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Allen Ginsberg.

I single out Paik, in particular, for exploring the many dimensions of process, duration, nonintention, and even the fullness of absence. The latter is most relevant in the work Zen for Film, a live projection of an empty film leader from 1964.

Zen for Film, also viewable on YouTube, is a fluxus film that introduces an emphasis on visual (spatial and aural) rhythms produced through film projection, creating content out of emptiness, and foregrounding light and the rectangular object that lightly flickers on a wall, over convention and expectation. It dethrones the medium and pursues the technology. This is oddly prescient, given our current trend toward creating with data instead of objects.

It's hard to imagine some of the performance artworks of his fluxus days: documentary photographs of these events don't translate the complexity of his work. Eventually this would lead to the birth of video art and the increasing importance of experimenting with TVs and video projections, a Duchampian gesture that would change film and video forever.

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Short on a Sweet Deal

2009-02-15T09:10:00.002-05:00

Bailout is a new wine from Crushpad out in San Francisco.
Am/Mex bought a bottle last week because we believe in the wine and because of a unique sales pitch that grabbed us by the grapes. They're letting short sellers like ourselves bet that the Dow will go to hell in the next 6 months, and if it does, we get a rebate on the cost of the wine. Here's the rub... on the day we bought our bottle of Bailout, the Dow closed at 7936.75. For every 100 points the Dow falls between last week's purchase date and August 14, 2009 -- when it is bottled -- Crushpad will send us $2. That may not sound like a lot but wait... in these dire times who would bet on the Dow? This gives us a chance to balance our 401K losses with a gain on a nice bottle of wine. Am/Mex will drink to those small victories. We'll keep you posted on how it all turns out.

Sparks Plug

2009-02-11T10:48:00.006-05:00

I once declined the offer to replace my second-generation iPod when its motherboard was damaged and instead asked for whatever surgical requirements were necessary to restore it. To the genius's chagrin, I preferred my tattered and now outdated mp3 player to the newer model he waved in his hand, complete with video capabilities and double the storage capacity.

This affinity we have for media and the technologies that animate them is the subject of Sparks, a smart web-based serial by Annie Howell and Lisa Robinson about humans and their sometimes irrational relationship to technology.

There's a Sara Sparks in all of us: a twinkle of emotion and a connection we feel toward our personal gadgets. We spend so much time with them that they really do become extensions of our bodies, helping us remember phone numbers and birthdays, storing our favorite songs so the ride on the subway doesn't feel so long, and facilitating our work tasks, to name a few. We buy them expensive protective cases, take them on vacations, and, I don't do this, but some people name them.

Sparks is a perfect balance of McLuhanesque humor and contemplation in a well-written, accessible form. At just three episodes into the series, I look forward to the course that our heroine technologist will take in the episodes that follow. A posthumous digital McLuhan cameo would be a fitting next move.

You can also subscribe and take the series with you (if your generation of gadget allows).

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Follow Those Videos

2009-02-08T12:53:00.010-05:00

As The New York Times reported today, Mr. Kim of Kim's Video -- former home of over 55,000 titles -- conducted a scrupulous search for the perfect inheritor of a film and media collection that had been steadily growing since 1987. He settled on a proposal made on behalf of Salemi, a Sicilian town founded sometime around the fourth century B.C.

For those of us who had the patience to thumb through the vast collection of rare films and music, saying good-bye to Kim's Video suddenly feels pretty good. This covetable collection's successor is a small town that, after a history of crushing blows, is undergoing a unique and impressive change by allowing "prominent artists and intellectuals to assume control of the government". Art critics, photographers, performance artists, and others are taking command of the town, and turning it into an artists-run mecca.

We can only imagine the possibilities: Italian sensibility and cinema have always been a good combination. Add to that a restored 17th-century Jesuit college as this collection's base, a glass of Limoncello, and a planned relationship with the Venice Biennale to make Salemi the perfect destination spot. On the other hand, tourism is only one way of savoring its creative by-products. In an effort to appeal to outsiders and promote the development of this town-in-progress, Salemi houses are available for purchase for one Euro. There are some stipulations to this too-good-to-be-true offer, but it makes nomads like us strongly consider a relocation plan.

Tutto va bene!

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The New Industrial Revolution

2009-01-30T15:31:00.012-05:00

The line between work and play -- profession and leisure activity -- is blurry. Sitting in front of a screen doesn't necessarily mean we are laboring away at our jobs. We can easily toggle through the day, switching between putting the finishing touches on a work-related document and updating our online profiles on our social networking site of choice. Most of us are okay with that, not really recognizing a problem with fitting both worlds into a given day. However, we can't deny that the blurry divide between these supposedly disparate sides is only blurry because the labor involved in achieving both is the same.

As Lev Manovich suggests in The Language of New Media, "Today, the subject of the information society is engaged in even more activities during a typical day: inputting and analyzing data, running simulations, searching the Internet, playing computer games, watching streaming video, listening to music online, trading stocks, and so on."

Being a part of the Information Age means keeping up with information flows. No longer bearing the one-way flows of yore, this means our work has significantly increased. Our web footprint alone is evidence of our erratic effort to maintain this lifestyle, one that isn't always a choice. We seem to have crossed the line that divides utility from excess. Our tools no longer help us do more with less effort, they create needs that never existed in the first place. While the work required is simple -- most children today have enviable hacker mentalities -- the amount of work required has brought us back to something that feels more like the Industrial Revolution, when technology was primarily an investment in increased production (electricity extended daylight, the clock regulated efficiency, etc.) We engage in work days that begin early in the morning and spill into our evenings without much of a break in between. We're always plugged in, connected in some way, unable (or unwilling) to unplug.

It takes work to keep up with our leisure activities. And those tools and methods are the same ones I use to draft a lesson plan (generating text-based documents, searching the Internet, pulling images and video, tagging data, posting my findings online) and to stay in contact with friends and family (checking multiple e-mail accounts, generating text-based communication, pulling images and video, posting content online). These shared activities make them easier to do simultaneously, but harder to set limits.

This sharing of work space, tools, and time make it difficult to differentiate between work and play, making us slaves to the activities themselves, not their by-products. Mobility creates or, in most cases, extends the desk job. We are experiencing a revolution in its own right, but without the ability to recognize and practice the possibility of limitation, we are on the brink of fatigue, and there is no concrete reason for it. As Jean Baudrillard affectingly put it, "To become an end in itself, every system must dispel the question of its real teleology... In other words, there are only needs because the system needs them."

Sustainability comes through the perfect balance of tolerance (even celebration) of this life and the pursuit of it with caution.

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The Way We Were

2009-01-28T09:43:00.016-05:00

Having the history of new media on my mind these days forces me to confront old texts from great thinkers introduced to me during my jejune (but ultimately fruitful) early years as an undergrad.

Every time I present Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, it is met with hostility and dismissiveness. His Marxist leanings can't be ignored for the sake of his edifying, albeit overly intolerant and slightly smug and moralistic, identification of soulless art. First, I must emphasize the importance of his attributing (certain) art with the notion of a soul -- defined only by a works of art's quality of true originality and non-reproducibility -- as being undeniably illuminating!

Walter Benjamin dared to attack the irreversible rise of technology, not because he was an aging ludite with a chip on his shoulder, though it can be argued that he knew very little about the rogue world of film and photography, except to suggest that its impact could be revolutionary and political in its very inability to resemble works of art that embodied an aura. His arguments in this essay presciently suggest that reproduction itself will take ownership over a work of art. He at once feared and celebrated the idea and metatext of it all: that a work can be stripped of its novelty in the process of reproduction. It changes the way we make, exchange, and define art. It changes the role of the artist, and blurs the clarity behind the creation of the work: its source undefined, all of its parts borrowed or hacked, manipulated beyond recognition, and recycled to infinity.

Perhaps when I first read this text -- before artist and technology became inseparable partners in creation -- these ideas were digestibly unoffensive. And even though I can't imagine a world without photography and film as works of art with recognizable auras, I also can't imagine a world without such mindful antagonists as he. Recognizing the potential and, in his mind, the setbacks of reproduction, Benjamin unknowingly set the groundwork for dialogues about virtuality, space and interactivity, and simulation, all of which rely on technologies of reproduction (data transfer, for example); however their resulting spaces of in-betweenness are the very definition of the soul-defining quality of aura he argued makes a work of art a true work of art, something that only those engaged in exclusive rituals could take part.

Rather than support his claim that art can be distinguished by its nature of non-reproduciblity, I recognize a compromise that allows for a certain porousness in his arguments. Finding the aura -- a definition that has changed since Benjamin penned it in this context -- has become a personal goal to at once cement (or, in some some cases, revive) his ideas and to prove him wrong, both good reasons to keep this text in circulation.

Plus, check out that moustache.

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Cute Dog Trapped in Mediocre Indie Film

2008-11-14T11:22:00.010-05:00

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.

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onKawaraUpdate (v2)

2008-09-22T22:57:00.003-04:00

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

2008-09-13T19:03:00.009-04:00

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

2008-08-06T20:13:00.004-04:00

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

2008-07-25T09:36:00.006-04:00

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!

2008-06-29T19:15:00.012-04:00

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.

2008-06-25T00:21:00.004-04:00

Thomas Edward
December 1992 - June 23, 2008

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

2008-06-20T21:55:00.015-04:00

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.

2008-06-06T10:06:00.007-04:00

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

2008-06-04T08:16:00.004-04:00

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

2008-05-09T15:02:00.004-04:00

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...

2008-04-30T12:36:00.012-04:00

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

2008-02-12T22:41:00.010-05:00

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

2008-02-09T19:37:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-11T11:43:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-08T22:25:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-04T13:35:00.000-05:00

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?

2008-01-03T19:07:00.001-05:00

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.

¿Which Came First? On Broken Noses

2007-12-20T22:38:00.001-05:00

We seem to be obsessed with the wounded male, temporarily damaged by the hand of another, resulting in a broken nose.

Bandaged or unbandaged, the broken nose has taken residence on the face of a youngish male actor, often not necessarily the most attractive, but certainly an endearing sort with a charm of his own. In 1974, there were two bandaged/broken noses of note in cinema, Elliott Gould in California Split and Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. (There is debate as to which director, Robert Altman or Roman Polanski, came up with the gimmick first. Altman fans, Am/Mex included, would say California Split was in production first, thus making his Charlie Waters character, played by Gould, the original.)

It's hard to miss the obvious revisitation of the same visual quirk on Wes Anderson's Owen Wilson character in this year's The Darjeeling Limited. (The first thing to strike Am/Ex was this visual similarity to the two previous films in 1974. No attempt was made to downplay this particular broken nose, as this image and others splash the pages of most every promotional st still of this film.)

Snow Blow

2007-12-20T21:49:00.000-05:00

The city of Boston has a snow removal problem.

Am/Mex has just discovered that the city basically surrenders to the snow from December through April. Plowing happens on main thoroughfares, but that's about it and there are no alternate-side-of-the-street parking schemes to clear the streets after snow storms. Meanwhile, residents of Boston and Cambridge hunker down and A., leave their cars until Spring or B., shovel them out and claim their clean spots for the long winter (with the help of orange cones, etc.). The moral: leave your car at home, or just move back to New York City.

More on Super SUVs

2007-12-10T15:23:00.001-05:00

The New York Times is writing about the pair of Fox News "Election Link" SUV's that are on the ground in Iowa and New Hampshire. Loyal Am/Mex readers will remember seeing those live internet streaming SUV's somewhere... a blog perhaps?... oh yeah, right here, last week. Anyway, they seem to be here to stay because A., they're cheaper than satellite trucks and B., tech toys are hard to resist in the news business. Expect major newspapers to be jumping on the bandwagon soon.

Still Speechless

2007-12-09T12:08:00.001-05:00

United Hollywood's "Speechless" campaign silently plods along on the Internet and now Woody Allen has gotten into the act. For more clever fare by striking screenwriters, read on. First bookmark Ken Levine's blog. Then check out the writing team of Jonathan Green and Gabe Miller. They're trying to stick it to the AMPTP (the producers and movie studio muckety-mucks) with a daily log of all the brilliant projects they are not writing, including "Witchbot" and "A Bucketful of Forever" (a janitor finds the Fountain of Youth in the bottom of his mop bucket). Finally, for a more New York-centric view of the strike read The Adventures of Strikey courtesy of the bored and restless writers over at the Late Show with David Letterman. Speaking of dark humor, it appears the strike has no end in sight. On Friday reps for the studios broke off talks.

Is This Front Page News?

2007-12-06T11:16:00.001-05:00

The Daily Item in Sunbury, PA published this photo on Page One this week. Editor Len Ingrassia said it "wasn't too graphic" because it didn't have any "blood or guts". He then called it "the most compelling photo... to run anything else would not seem to be serving the reader." Really? Two cows escaped from a trailer and police shot them dead (the owner gave them permission because the cows were on their way to be auctioned for slaughter). Sounds less like a big story and more like suicide by cop - and the poor cows weren't on a major highway or anything; they were just wading around in a creek. So the need to run a story with this horrible photo seems sleazy.

Anyway, in a weird life-imitating-art moment, Am/Mex realized the above picture had a familiar feeling about it. And that's because it reminded us of this photograph:

This picture was made by Amy Stein as part of her Domesticated series. And that's her husband John in the lumberjack coat faking aim. Unlike the image above, no animal was threatened in the staging of this photo, despite their uneasy similarities. It's a fantastic photo on many levels, obviously eerily prescient.

Without context, these images could easily be mistaken as having the same dreadful conclusion, both capturing the moment just before an animal's imminent death. Amy Stein's image, conceived of and produced long before this week's top story in Sunbury, PA, is only more powerful in this new context, an imagined narrative unknowingly anticipating a future, actual event.

The SUV Makes Nice

2007-12-04T15:54:00.001-05:00

This is The Star Car - the pride and joy of The Star newspaper in Cleveland Co., North Carolina. A Wi-Fi cloud surrounds the SUV at all times enabling their reporters to report live from the scene of the action. They can stream a live written report or use the dashcam video camera. It's really a virtual TV live truck for much less (the cost of the technology and the SUV add up to around $60k). The mighty news networks are taking advantage of this new technology as well - Fox News Channel has one tooling around Iowa. And today they stuck GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee in the Election Link for a live chat while he was being driven down I80. How long will it take for this Wi-Fi cloud technology to hit the U.S. car market?

Is This Man the Devil?

2007-11-27T19:01:00.001-05:00

NBC's "Last Call with Carson Daly" plans to resume taping tomorrow, according to Reuters. A spokeswoman says Daly wants to "support his staffers" while becoming the first late-night TV talk show host to cross the WGA picket line. Good luck getting A-list guests - or any guests at all - to come on the show.

Meanwhile, a WGA insider in L.A. tells American/Mexican that he thinks an agreement over "basic guidelines" has been made (in a meeting between the Guild and the CEO's for Disney and Fox) and that there is "room for optimism." An inked deal could still take a month to produce, but what better Christmas stocking stuffer for TV viewers? Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily reported similar insider-speak yesterday.

Left Speechless

2007-11-25T14:05:00.000-05:00

United Hollywood's "Speechless" campaign, first promoted here Wednesday, is now online but the results so far are mixed. Videos featuring "A-list Screen Actors Guild talent" like Sean Penn, Nicolette Sheridan and Eva Longoria, and Harvey Keitel all disappoint. Making matters worse, the videos take too long to upload and play out in a choppy manner. Up to five people are listed as part of the creative team that envisioned the videos. It appears the world really does need writers, but also directors, editors and (shudder) producers to say yea or nay to an idea. The only compelling one up to this point - Sunday afternoon - is by Andre 3000, pictured above. Still eagerly awaiting Tina Fey's video, but if she can't write, then how good can it really be?

WGA Talks Turkey

2007-11-21T19:44:00.000-05:00

As the long holiday weekend gets underway, the WGA says it will head back to the negotiating table on Monday. Until a new contract is signed, the Guild is encouraging fans of specific network shows to send a pencil to the AMPTP or to TV studios in support of writers and their craft. Tomorrow, Sean Penn, Tina Fey, Patricia Arquette and other actors begin starring in the "Speechless" campaign broadcast exclusively on the Internet.

Going West

2007-11-18T13:46:00.000-05:00

Broadway's still dark, but who cares. Ode to the Man Who Kneels, now playing at the Performing Garage on Wooster Street, is written, directed and composed by Richard Maxwell. The musical is just the latest sign that the western genre is alive and well in American theater and film. Like 3:10 to Yuma (2007) - one of several recent examples - the familiar western themes are touched upon - impending death, bleak landscapes, lawlessness, and drought (of several kinds). But what sets "Ode" apart are the catchy songs. One in particular - maybe titled "Endure" - leaves one feeling oddly hopeful and humming along. Here's Ben Brantley's NY Times review.

Theatergoer beware. Maxwell has a cult following of sorts and based on last night's performance, the squeezed-in crowd can be annoying. Watch out for adult twins dressed exactly alike, sleeping and wheezing older couples and cackling young ladies. If this means you, take a moment to brush up on your theater etiquette.

A Fistful of Pennies

2007-11-15T23:15:00.000-05:00

Told with (Frank) Capra-like conviction and stylistically modeled after his famous World War II “promotional” film of the same name, Why We Fight covers the issues behind the WGA strike. Viewers get a glimpse of how television studios haven’t and still don’t properly compensate writers for their work, the details of which are explained in a straightforward and effective manner.

Though the delivery of this information could be interpreted as propagandistic, one-sided, and perhaps misleading, there is no denying that a four-cent increase is not too much to ask. Sometimes a strike is the only way to get anyone’s attention, and that means ours, too.

Psychodrama Meets Sugar

2007-11-02T21:42:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday, October 30, 2007, composer Melissa Grey held a preview screening of her work, Psychodrama, an experiment of sound, narrative, perception, and investigation of horror film score at Sugar Bar/Lounge in NYC's Tribeca. Over a hundred guests gathered -- some in Hitchcock inspired Halloween costumes -- to watch the well-known shower sequence in his 1960 film Psycho, set to the eerie but contemplative sounds of Grey's sonic compositions.

Many audience members believed the sequence -- pulled directly from the film and left intact -- was actually re-edited by Grey to accompany her scores, when, in fact, viewer perception is slightly thwarted when watching this popular scene to a score that registers reactions at different moments than the original score by Bernard Herrmann.

While this work is not a criticism of Herrmann's brilliant score, it intends to play with the manner in which we read film and sound as viewers/listeners. It deliberately works with and against our expectations, both those formed through having previously viewed this film, in some cases multiple times, and as long-time audiences of other horror films.

Variations No. 9 and 11 were featured from a total of thirteen variations, which will be performed by a live chamber orchestra in winter 2008 in NYC.