The Lo Down

2010-12-23T13:18:00.000-08:00

"Then I decided that this disorder and this dilemma, revealed by my desire to write on Photography, corresponded to a discomfort I had always suffered from: the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical; and at the heart of this critical language, between several discourses, those of sociology, of semiology, and of psychoanalysis--but that, by ultimate dissatisfaction with all of them, I was bearing witness to the only sure thing that was in me (however naïve it might be): a desperate resistance to any reductive system." - Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981): 8.

2010-12-19T11:22:00.000-08:00

"Is a verbal vision possible? Do not words, written or oral, interpose their opacity between readers and their visual experience of the world? Can language be effaced as such to the point where it become transparent to things, and can it from that point on display the thing itself in its truth even as it offers to the dazzled eye its simulacrum and its presence?" - Louis Marin, "Mimesis and Description," On Representation, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001): 64-84, 78-79.

How Now?

2010-09-23T10:37:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I set myself the task of reading Donald Kelley's "Intellectual History in a Global Age" a fine assessment of the tension between inside and out. And, more to the point, a bit of banner-waving for the linguistic turn. There were two moments that most intrigued me. To Kelley's mind, Ian Hacking, one of history of scien ce's most beloved philosophers of science, offers a lucid, cogent description of the inside-out problem in the following quote:

"External history is a matter of politics, economics, the funding of institutes, the circulation of journals, and all the social circumstances that are external to knowledge itself. Internal history is the history of individual items of knowledge, conjectures, experiments, refutations, perhaps. [...] We have no good account of the relationship between external and internal history." Hacking, "How Should we Do the History of Statistics?" The Foucault Effect, ed. Graham Burchell et al. (Chicago, 1991), 191.

Then, Kelley goes on to rescue Hacking's cliff-hanger:

"The one accessible place where internalist and externalist concerns seem to interact is language, which is internalized in individuals but which is also the object of science and which can be analyzed in terms both of both [sic] maker's knowledge and of social construction. [...] In these days of the linguistic and textualist turns one should substitute 'writing' for 'ideas,' 'sentiments' and 'thinking'; for it is in the effort of writing in particular that the subject -- philosopher, scientist, literary artist -- ventures out into the surrounding cultural space and perhaps historical notice. The author's thought is already a cultural construction, no doubt, but communication and dialogue gives it external form subject to interpretation and criticism." Kelley, "Intellectual History in a Global Age," Journal of the History of Ideas 66.2 (2005): 155-165, 164.

The questions that these snippets prompted in me might seem far too obvious. The first was, Where are pictures, even cultural practices writ large, in this schema? I think they, too, can be subject to the same sorts of analyses that Kelley applies to language. And the second was more of an observation, inspired by Kelley's upholding of language as the site of internal and external interaction. I began to think about how the dialectic that defines knowledge is the required interaction of the internal with the external, how the internal shapes the external and vice versa. Additionally, I'm wondering if it would be fair to say that ideas become knowledge once they move from one person to another. And if knowledge is social, it can't be made without individuals contributing to the circulation of ideas, generating new ideas to be swept into the tide. There will always be something necessarily cultural - or, at the very least, external to the thinker her/himself -- in the material with which each thinker works. But there is something mystifying about how each person synthesizes this social matter, and synthesizes it so differently.

I'm thinking about this on a pretty local level -- especially as I'm confronted with what strange alchemy writing is. I imagine there are multiple arguments that might be made for how peer-reviewed neuroscience papers suffer a different fate, and are much more social because they are subject to a stricter set of professional rules. Perhaps there are some practices that lean more towards the external end of the spectrum than the internal. And vice versa. My point is that I don't think we have entirely thrown out all that is internal. The reason why historians of science still have jobs is that we assess the manifold ways in which science - and knowledge, writ large - has come into being. This means we have a responsibility to both external and internal approaches. It means that we have to grapple with how thinkers secure the agency to build on each other's thoughts, and, just as important, we have to understand the institutional and cultural codes that define and refine their thinking. It's not just that new ideas change the way people think. They change social interaction. And what's more, social interaction changes the way people think, and the ideas they come up with, the ideas they distribute to one another. Whether we see this in pictures, turns of phrase, or other kinds of cultural practices (the organizing of information, etc.), the interaction of the external and internal is constantly at play. And it would be regrettable if we didn't think about this wondrous circuitry even harder. I think we have moved beyond the question of what material we might want to use in order to make this clear. Rather, the question that does linger is Hacking's: How can we best illuminate this exchange of inside-out, this mutually dependent shaping of knowledge?

2010-09-19T22:27:00.000-07:00

For a few weeks now, I've been mulling the idea of reviving this blog. It's been a while since I put thoughts online in earnest. But I've come to the conclusion that writing a few times a week in a forum I know to be public (although frequented by few) would be a good way of keeping me honest and somewhat productive. I don't plan to do anything terribly radical with the space, as the aim isn't so different from what other bloggers do -- that is, collect things and thoughts that make enough of an impression on me that I have to tell someone else about them. My hope is that they will help me track some of my going interests, but, also, and more importantly, that they may be of some interest to people who stop by.

So, without further ado, the first in a little series of things that stir my admiration --

In early June 1962, while aboard the Queen Elizabeth, Nabakov granted an interview to a handful of journalists. He couldn't remember who asked what. But he remembered the questions and answers (and seems to have done some editing of both). I put an exclamation point next to this one:

"Still there must be things that move you--likes and dislikes.
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting."

- Nabakov, Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill International, 1973): 3.

Images for Reviving the Weary

2010-08-07T07:20:00.000-07:00

still from Hannah Schwarz, I Love the Body (2009)

Val Kilmer taking a photo of Ginny in front of Alice Neel's Ginny (1984)

Derek Fisher (and Kobe Bryant) at the White House on January 25th, 2010.

2008-06-03T18:09:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama is the leader we can believe in. I cannot think of a political candidate I've ever wanted in office more; a person whose integrity stands heads and shoulders above the rest; and a man whose choice of words reflects not only a thoughtful individual but one who understands the ripple effects of his choices, both large and small.

I have always been proud of my country. But I am prouder tonight than I've been in a long while.

Undiscovered Country

2007-01-04T11:02:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite end-of-year/beginning-of-year features anywhere is Slate's Annual Movie Club. Although writing under the auspices of a well-trafficked web magazine can always be hedged by the knowledge of (critical) readers, SAMC seems to have a freshness, a gentle banter that always helps put movie-going in perspective. (This being said, though I heartily empathize with Dana Stevens's kick-off "war movies conundrum," I found it less enticing than subsequent discussions the group has had over the past few days. Also, even though he shuffled over to New York Magazine last year, where is my beloved Edelstein?!) With Slate's round-up of critics, there's always a sense, too, that optimism is at stake. The hope of seeing a great movie is precisely that which makes us go back to the blackbox theater, or even slush through piles of VHS tapes in the one dollar bin. To find a great movie, we must bear through the rest, or at least have critics tell us which things films worth shelling out greenbacks for. Let it also be noted that there's always the occasional critic whose ideas about movie-making are the complete and total opposite of one's own that we know to love a movie when he/she has slaughtered it.

My point is that there are few great movies of yore (and present) that we encounter nowadays that we haven't had some previous exposure to, or at least some semi-consciousness about. There are so many movies on my list of must-sees -- derived from the lists of hard-core cinephiles -- that I hardly know where to begin. But my parents aren't as bedraggled by the lists of others, and are much more the cinematic risk-takers than I am: so much so that they will walk to our local public library every week to borrow three DVDs, all dependent on what's on the shelves and, they admit, the cover sleeve. Now that I'm on vacation and much of my entertainment is theirs, I was delighted when they came back recently with "Two For the Road". Though a self-proclaimed Audrey Hepburn fan, I had no idea what the movie was or what I was in for. (Then again, how could I pride myself on my personal movie watching cred? I only just saw -- and certainly enjoyed -- the first Indiana Jones this past year!)

But "Two for the Road" is the one movie I watched in 2006 with which I thoroughly fell in love. And not the kind of whimpering, self-effacing love of adolescence, but, rather, the adult version. This year was not so amorous in terms of movie-going for me: I was riveted by "The Queen" and I have yet to see "Children of Men." But traipsing -- and sometimes plundering -- down memory lane with the Wallaces was the best time I'd had since "Eternal Sunshine," not least because of its similar jogs of memory and candor about love. The framework for the film is the French country roads that Joanna (Hepburn) and Mark Wallace (Albert Finney) have traveled together--and the movie is lively and full enough that we can suspend our disbelief about their having taken the same route every time--but their scattered memories of being on the road are interwoven, quite seamlessly. First we see the couple on contemporary, embattled terms, in a plane, about to touch down on France. Then we have the pleasure of seeing them attempt to start their sad sloppy junk of a roadster; and later we see the two, fresh and naive, as they first meet, de-boarding a boat. All the while, we see moments of what was, what is, and an object lesson in how the past can never predict the future, even when the future is already here. (Indeed, such is the case for William Daniels, the man who plays efficiency consultant Howard Manchester, and then later turned out performances every week as Principle Feeny on "Boy Meets World.")

The running gag between them is also the cause of their first meeting -- when Mark loses his passport, Joanna finds it. But what makes this lost-and-found scenario symbolize bumpily married life all too well -- even better than the distraught, mute couples found so often in restaurants (and also refered toby Joel Barish in "Eternal Sunshine" as "the dining dead") -- is the trickery Joanna deploys and Mark's willing forgetfulness. On the plane or in the car Joanna will ask Mark if he has her passport, he'll search frantically when he can't find it, and, a few beats later, Joanna will fish it out of her bag or the glove compartment and hand it to him. Perhaps she does know him better than he knows himself -- such is the moral conveyed -- but it all feels like a set-up in which they both knowingly participate with each other, for each other. She waits just long enough and he is just forgetful enough to make this central metaphor for their relationship so central: she's seriously playful and he absent-mindedly bullish, but they somehow, together, form a unit. They can't live without each other. Perhaps this would be the case of Henry Mancini developed the soundtrack for all of our lives...

The tagline for "Two for the Road," as I discovered from watching the special feature trailers and IMDB, is "They make something wonderful out of being alive!" (as opposed to the imperative of the movie poster above.) It's sad to see the genuine joys of the film be so woefully, so exuberantly mischaracterized. It's not that the Wallaces don't have high highs and adorable affection for one another; it's that all these come in realistic doses wrought by their situations and not, apparently, by the script. Their wonderfulness is not a pre-determined deal, and that's what makes the film so electric -- we do wonder honestly about the couple for there are moments when it seems it just won't work out. Frederic Raphael, who also adapted "Eyes Wide Shut," seems to know something about relationships. He won't let their most precious, most silly moments be drenched in sap. And he seems to understand something that many others do not: there is a difference between living and making, and, in convincing us of love, the former outdoes the latter every time.

Kelis, "Bossy" - Correction

2006-08-24T11:59:00.000-07:00

A close and trusty informant just told me that the line in Bossy isn't "I told John Sterling he should switch debate." In fact, the lyrics are: "I told young stunna he should switch to Bape," Bape being the Japanese fashion label "A Bathing Ape." I like the idea that Kelis bosses people around, telling them what clothes to wear. I wish I could collapse my former interpretation with this corrected one so that the line would be "I told John Sterling he should switch to Bape", which would mean that he would be a blinged out 58 year old sports guy, all the while enjoying numerous Broadway shows!

2006-08-23T19:55:00.000-07:00

Here is another LA Weekly piece I wrote. It's about this homeless man named Robert who sells water on the corner of Fairfax and 3rd. He was fantastic to speak with, and he had lots and lots to say in our seven minutes together!

Elliott Hundley @ The Hammer

2006-08-21T23:19:00.000-07:00

He had been a press darling, and such an astounding up-and-comer that galleries were warring over the right to claim him as their own. But earlier this year, I saw a group show at Peres Projects in which Elliott Hundley failed to live up to the hype. (Truth be told, I felt as though he contributed somethign that looked like a high school stoner's arts and crafts project.) But I'm happy to report that my feelings have changed. Gallery or no gallery, Elliott Hundley's sculptures/installations at the Hammer Museum look mighty incredible. From afar, they swirl with psychadelic yet learned formal gumption, popping the gallery space in and out of itself with an elegance that is relentless, organic, and delicate. In detail, they prick with the tiny pins that keep choice magazine cut-outs in their rightful, fully edited place, and illuminate miniature, mythological maps full of people, places, things culled from the real world. The Rauschenbergian lineage is clear, but there's something of Sarah Sze, Matthew Ritchie, and maybe even some Frank Stella crazy cut-out paintings/Elizabeth Murray 3D paintings; and, better than all of that, Hundley has a massive store of material and whimsy all his own. Sometimes, it's just fantastic to be proved wrong.

Hammer Projects: Elliott Hundley; through September 3rd at the UCLA Hammer Museum.

She's the Boss

2006-08-21T00:40:00.000-07:00

Music Video Review
Artist: Kelis
Song: "Bossy"
Album: Kelis Was Here
Director: Chris Robinson

Kelis came into my life one lazy night during my senior year of college. One of my roommates was hanging around our living room, scanning the annals of pop culture, and, shocked, exclaimed, "This is what America is listening to!" He turned up the volume on Windows Media Player, and out poured "Milkshake." Kelis's voice had a tone that embodied shrill adolescence, and the song's content reinforced as much. At the time, I couldn't much stand "Milkshake." Slashed jeans, suggestive lollipops, and rhythmic breast-shaking make not for a lady prim and proper.

But thanks to the real world, my prudish days are over, and Kelis, now a married woman, a bit better coiffed and more stylishly refined, will be releasing her new album, "Kelis Was Here," tomorrow. "Bossy" is the first single, and it's nothing short of fantastic. The synthetic keyboard -- over which Kelis initially reasons for her dear listeners, "You don't even have to like me, but you will respect me" -- taps a morse code of sinister cool, and the promise of more narcissistic pronouncements to come.

And the video makes the case that Kelis isn't just out to conquer those who fell under the spell of "Milkshake", but that she's fit to be a queen of pop cool. The first scene features Kelis cutting her kinky curls, and we find out very quickly that she's traded them in for a sleek bob, several pairs of wrap-around shades, diamond-studded grills, an electric blue-dyed poodle, and a hot red Ferrari. It's not as though she does all of this in a vacuum either. Blinged out during the whole of the video, we track Kelis from her outdoor boudoir to a pool party ripped with (male) hotties; from which we get the opportunity to oogle as she splays out on a diamond-and-ruby-encrusted floor. Soon, she's less scantily clothed and sporting sunglasses while driving through late-night Downtown Los Angeles. And it's not long before she's alternately partying and rolling around the floor of a lush carpeted bar, replete with Veuve Cliquot, oysters and a unicorn ice sculpture, and, later, spotlit in front of a concrete wall. Ridiculous, excessive, and unruly as this all may sound, every single cut contributes to Kelis's uncanny now-ness.

To help, Chris Robinson takes care to put Kelis in tantalizing situations, ones in which it is not necessarily Kelis's sexuality that does the enticing, but those which underline the sway she holds over her domain. While there's something down to earth about Kelis -- we see her hanging out with friends, drinking, getting into a one-person food fight, doing a modified bridge pose in fancy silk clothes -- she's clearly the center of attention, and she holds court wherever she goes, her limp, apathetic hands ready to snap into a middle finger at any moment. At one point, Kelis even has the gall to push her boobs up at the bar, as though to assert her ubiquitous title from just a few years ago. And the gesture couldn't be hotter.

But the genius mark of the video is its knowingly hipsterly look. There's bling aplenty in Kelis's world, but she also wears clothes and inhabits spaces that are best described as indie and vintage; certainly not your typical rap/R&B ghetto fabulous feel. It's refreshing, as though Kelis isn't just looking to conquer her Jive demographic, but Pitchforkers and their curmudgeon critics too. Nothing's too exclusive for Kelis; she'll undoubtedly win her way in because she's knowingly, intelligently pan-cool (she even centers her chorus on how she made John Sterling -- presumably the Yankees sportscaster -- "switch debate"). And it's this dead-on confluence of hip that makes "Bossy" one of the best videos in months.

Dramatic Taste

2006-07-21T18:32:00.000-07:00

When Malan Breton was kicked off of "Project Runway" this past week, it was a blow to bear. His creepy, burbly laugh had grown on me. His optimism was refreshingly innocent. He also had a mission -- to right a wrong. As you might recall from the "Casting" pre-premiere special, Malan was the one who had actually rejected PR before its second season, and who had come back, tail between his legs, to the Season 3 auditions. Thus, the expectations were quite high for our strange friend.

Alas, the trusty PR editors/producers could have thought of no better way at tugging our heartstrings than by featuring Malan recalling the paler moments of his youth. He recounted that he was still in single digits when he showed his mother his first fashion drawings. She promptly threw them on the floor and reprimanded, "You should never do this again!" Of course, my Project Runway compatriots proceeded to ask the obvious question: Was it the drawings Malan's mom hated, or the fact that he was doing them?... But, no matter. How the history resonated this week!

And such storytelling coupled with the kick-off reinforced for us what Project Runway is: awesomely high tension television. Let's recount some facts: Angela didn't even make a proposal sketch for Miss USA's dress. Instead, she used drawing time to convince her way into Kayne's puissantly pageant-y hands. Angela and Vincent didn't work well together at all--though, granted, Vincent has a bit of the flighty megalomaniac about him. But, was there any way Angela could have actually helped? Could her heated criticisms -- par example, "this looks like something I made in college" -- have been more constructive? I think it's entirely possible. (And, for the record, I agreed with Nina Garcia -- the back of Vincent's dress was beautiful; however, Miss USA, you hit the nail when you described the weird shoulder-ribbons as a bit "space cadet.")

Unfortunately, while Angela fell so far short of all initial challenge requirements and so far from grace in her dealings with Vincent, Malan sketched out the dress, crafted it poorly, and did the gentlemanly thing of taking responsibility for its poor craftesmanship and strange execution. Is Project Runway telling us that they -- or fashion? or TV?! -- are more willing to keep contestants who wittle the nerves, whose strategy is to connive their way onto the better projects, and who refuse to do any work over contestants who do their work, mess up once, and take responsibility for it? I hope Tim Gunn is as disappointed as I am!

For some reason, my friends paused their DVR after the show on the PR disclaimer. In real time, the fine print speeds by, and we never really give the show's regulations a second thought. But in frozen form, there was a sentence that caught my eye: The producers and Bravo are before contestants are Klum-ed "Out!" I've always been tickled by what good television PR is, but this was the first time that I'd noticed that it was a television show that depends on ratings. Drama, in other words, consists of more than designers executing elegant creations within 24 or 48 hours; the insane personalities have forged their way into America's hearts. I guess, that's just reality.

====
By the way: Malan fans, take heart! As you can read on his Project Runway bio, Malan's world is certainly not over. He was named by Women's Wear Daily as one of 12 new designers to watch on the New York runway (in Feb. `06), and we can expect to welcome him into our living rooms again, as he does voiceover work for ABC and ESPN. Additionally, here's a follow-up interview with Malan in all his dignity, care of the fabulously addictive Blogging Project Runway.

2006-07-20T11:09:00.000-07:00

My pick!

B&S and The Bowl

2006-07-16T22:19:00.000-07:00

Here's my latest LA Weekly piece!

Yay!

2006-07-07T12:42:00.000-07:00

Here's a piece I recently wrote for the LA Weekly!

How and Why Television’s Best Drama Got Gypped

2006-07-07T12:41:00.000-07:00

Scanning over the 58th Primetime Emmy nominations list last Thursday morning (and delighting in the nod to Steve Carrel), it seemed curious to me that the most engaging drama on television was not recognized in the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ “Best Drama Series” category or in any other major category. The show in question was named “Best Show of 2005” by Time Magazine and recently won a Peabody, the highbrow statuette previously bestowed to celebrated series like “The Wire”, “Deadwood”, and “The Sopranos.” And for weeks, this best-of-the-best show’s logo was plastered all over heavily industry-trafficked defamer.com, accompanied by those familiar words “For Your Consideration.” What seemingly scoffed, highly suspenseful, utterly fascinating, purely addicting series could I possibly be speaking of? Why, only Sci-Fi’s “Battlestar Galactica.”

Based on the late `70s series of the same name, “Battlestar” has updated the terms of what sci-fi can be—indeed it’s upped the ante on just what can constitute televised drama. It is every Trekkie’s answer to the socially acceptable sci-fi opera, and every uninitiated, only-saw-“The Matrix” layman’s and laywoman’s introduction to the joys of the geekier genre. The appeal comes from “Battlestar”’s courage to answer every televisual desire and go far beyond it, to confront sex and violence, spirituality and abortion, terrorism and robotics without so much as a single flinch. Whereas “Lost” has failed--especially during their tiresome sophomore season--by over-attenuating the island’s many mysteries (i.e. the hatch and the button, the they-were-there-before-we-were Others, and special effect smoke bats), and whereas “Invasion”, “Surface” and “Threshold” were as second-helping “Lost”s as their one-name titles might imply, “Battlestar Galactica” has pumped up the action-adventure heat and suspended fans’ disbelief from day one. And surprisingly, it continues to do so with some of the most rip-roaring, unthinkable and imaginative storytelling that has graced the small screen. This show’s got it all: a sizzling former Victoria’s Secret model, special effect violence that rages on the apocalyptic, super-high production value, a fun and friendly substitute for the f-word (i.e. “frack”), rich, engaging characters who make confused decisions, and, what so many shows aspire to have but never achieve: a certain sense of urgency. It’s the kind of urgency we might feel, say, if, as in the series, the human race was on its last 97,750 legs (that is 47,875 men, women and children).

Admittedly, palpable endangerment of the species takes a little bit of time to digest. “Battlestar” and its bounty of rewards can only be reaped – and fully understood – if the patient couch potato starts from the beginning. One must devote two hours to the kick-starting mini-series, and, seeing as it’s sci-fi on Sci-Fi, delve right into a universe where you believe that robots are extinguishing the human race. See, Cylons, robots that were long ago engineered by humans, have now molded their robotic bodies into human form and declared full-out war on their Frankensteins’ offspring. Programmed with blood, sweat and emotion, they’ve taken to infesting human-inhabited spaceships, finding ways of planting themselves indispensably in everyday, seriously-space-age human life. And then the episodes spin out from a universe-changing event: Cylons have blasted the human planet of Caprica and its neighbors, and only about 50,000 survivors remain – and they’re all on spaceships, which now form a kind of colony led by the Battlestar Galactica.

While the stakes seem high and inconceivable, they climb even higher as we get to know superb veteran actor Edward James Olmos’s Captain Adama, helmer of the Galactica, and the Secretary of Education-turned-President Laura Rosalyn, played by the seriously endearing Mary McDonnell. (For the record, I’ve never seen two lead characters who parlayed so well, and never, for a second, do Olmos or McDonnell betray the integrity of their characters.) The government and the military have their work cut out for them in their attempt to save the human race. In this endeavor, they are assisted by firecracker Captain Kara Thrace (Katie Sackhoff) and dutiful-but-reserved Commander Adama, Captain Adama’s son, but there are other obstacles to bear: power hungry scientist-politician Gaius Baltar and his Cylon lover, Number Six (controlled and scintillating supermodel Tricia Helfer). The Cylons continuously strike blows in order to crush the remaining, not-so-lucky refugees. The only human option -- now that their home planet’s been blown up – is to look for a much-mythologized orb called Earth.

This is already probably confusing you and we’re not even up to Boomer’s actual identity, ever-loveable Chief, Kobol and The Scriptures, Colonel Tigh and his annoying wife, and the retrieval of Apollo’s arrow! Each episode is thick with “Holy Shit!”-inducing plot, and none in the series’ two-season run disappoints. The writers recognize that smart, labyrinthine storylines can pay off only when unwieldy troubles arise and are dealt with, instead of being cloaked in stale mystery. All the while, of course, BG’s characters and their universe are constantly gilt by a lingering, overarching sense of desperation. For our heroes, this consists of no permanent home, and the series shows us how they dignify their lives with a sense of a normalcy and, most poignantly, how they’re learning to cope.

Now, by awaiting Season Three, we fans are learning how to cope too. BG Followers are so rabid that Ron Moore, formerly of “Star Trek” and “Carnivale,” mans a Sci-Fi.com blog and podcasts about the show and the writers’ room. Sometimes, for personal inflection, he’ll even include his wife, who herself has been known to answer questions on the official website bulletin board. And those boards will attest with their hundreds upon thousands of postings, the community of “Battlestar” watchers is sprawling, inquisitive, and hungering for more.

I imagine that the sole reason why “Battlestar” got shut out in the Emmys is an initial sense of science fiction skepticism. The show was campaigning like crazy – by sending the entire Season Two DVD set in sleek, black packaging to all Academy members – but to no avail. Though every episode begins with a quick run-down of what’s going on in and outside of the Galactica, it’s all a bit overwhelming and clubby for the BG neophyte—and, dare I say it, a bit nerdy. Without knowing what happened in Season One, Season Two can seem like a bunch of nonsense – and more like fare solely for the science fiction fanatic. This is a most unfortunate reversion to type, symptomatic of the running complaint that good television doesn’t exist. When so many bemoan reality-television’s infestation of our boob tubes, and when many good dramas have deflated and lost their steam, the show with the most explosive imagination doesn’t even get a fair high-profile nomination-shake. Are we really supposed to be happy with just a Special Effects nod? Take it from me, one of those laywomen who had never seen a single “X-Files” in her life: this is the show that you didn’t know you’d hoped for when you bought your television set, and it’s the one show you’ll want to keep paying your cable bills for this fall.

a note on moving

2006-06-26T22:39:00.000-07:00

There is never a time when moving is not a huge ordeal. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about it is packing up your stuff, putting years of accumulated junk into boxes (or, the flimsier alternative: brown paper bags from the grocery store -- and then feeling like a dopey old bag lady!), and, upon assessing all that you've done, believing you still haven't accomplished very much. That's how I feel today, even though my dresser drawers and cabinets are empty, even though my kitchen has been cleaned out, even though my clothes for the rest of the week are in yet another flimsy paper bag on my floor. Only my computer, the wireless internet, and my cell phone charger are plugged in, and everything is much quieter than usual in my neighborhood. It must mean my departure is near.

My walls aren't bare yet, though. I couldn't stand the thought of completely giving up my apartment before the official end-date, so these gray and white cartoons from some televised animated detective story are still hanging in their frames. They make the place look less frightening, less not-mine.

It's strange that this place has been the site of so many of my own memories, and that I will think of my early twenties as being anchored to this place. But, of course, I'm not the only one who has lived here and called this place home; many others had before me. And, soon, it will be someone else's, and the walls will be bare again for whoever that person is and his/her new beginning. My cartoons and I will be somewhere else. And hopefully by then I will have recycled these wretched paper bags.

Declassified: The Menace and Madness of "Art School Confidential"

2006-06-19T19:40:00.000-07:00

Film: "Art School Confidential"
Written By: Daniel Clowes
Directed By: Terry Zwigoff

From its first frame, Terry Zwigoff's latest offering, "Art School Confidential," is a portrait of the artist as a pre-adolescent loser, then as a relative adolescent loser, and, in the Strathmore Art Institute, as an officially sanctioned an art school loser. Max Minghella's loveable Jerome Platz has an early passion for Picasso's art -- not just his fine art, but the art of his loins, or, rather, the artful territories Picasso's loins famously traversed. We can believe from the very first scenes at Jerome's expense -- those of traumatic elementary school bully beat-ups to moderately pretty girls passing him up for jockier beefcakes -- that this young man has some amount of depth to him. And it's true. To a point. That point of no return is, of course, where the film faulters into disappointment.

Jerome goes to art school and he's radiant with hope, as do we with him. He wants to be the world's greatest artist (!) and he wants to get girls, finally! His virginity is to do with taste, he tells his new roommates, an egomaniacal, index-toting director (played gruffly by Ethan Suplee "My Name is Earl" fame), and a fashion design student who will soon discover his homosexuality even though the audience already has. All the while, a scary strangler has been on the loose on the Strathmore campus; pretty gory stuff, from the likes of headlines. But Jerome, encumbered with a skilled hand, a longing heart, keeps his eye on the prize: a model from the Strathmore brochure. But before he gets to set his eyes on her porcelain skin, Jerome must be schooled in all that is not-so-confidential about art school. And that's where, I suspect, Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff had some fun. They leave the task to Bardo (brought to life by Joel Moore), a guy who's dropped out several times and come back to Strathmore, is our art archetype tourguide. He points out the holier-than-though vegan, the conceptualist, the butch lesbians, the suck-ups who've endlessly Googled their professors, the overly emotional Beatnik girls, the stuffed animal swaddling girls, the baby mamas who are still out looking for a good time, and the empty-nest moms who discover that their true calling is art. There's the failed professor, played excellently by John Malkovich, who's been perfecting triangles all of his life, and the Japanese ceramics teacher who just doesn't care. We get the art history professor -- in the form of the sizzling Angelica Houston -- who asks, pointedly, what is art during her first lecture; we discover a bastian of mediocre and sub-mediocre creativity. All these characters and characteristics populate Jerome's first days -- and Jerome, even with all the pre-fabricated possibilities, is difficult for Bardo to pin down. That is, we suspect, precisely why Bardo befriends him, and why we have too.

Jerome is initially difficult to pin down because there's an earnestness and interest about him that is soon to be corrupted. After meeting the down-and-out artist Jimmy (played rather miraculously by Jim Broadbent), he starts his descent into art world avarice. He meets the brochure model, Audrey (the beautiful Sophia Myles), befriends her, and almost gets with her until a frat-dude guy gets in the way -- with a really hip, pop, minimalist painting of an outline of a car on white, emanating from a flat yellow color field. The fascination with the painting is its now-ness and the fact that it conveys the artistic sensibility of a "guy who's never seen a painting in his life"! This gets Jerome's goat because he thinks that his figurative painting is eons better and that frat-boy's pulling the wool over everyone's eyes.

And here's the problem with the film: of course it's all parody and farce (beyond farce, even), but the art is all so bad! It seems almost inane to make this criticism in a film that's for a relatively popular audience, but it is because the art is bad that the culture can't be taken seriously enough. What adds fuel to this slow-burning, needlessly vindictive film is that it gives so little dignity to the art-making process that it willfully erases any kind of cultural import art has in our world. "Art School Confidential" gives us the most cynical maxim of them all: that art corrupts and that famous art corrupts famously.

To be sure, many have been turned off and torn down by the conceptually-addled art school curricula of our day, but taken to this extreme the notoriety of art school goes from being funny and well-observed to bitter. It's an object lesson in light-hearted revenge gone sour, and extremism in its most annoying, sardonic, and perfectly self-righteous form. Even a couple of appearances by the incomparable Steve Buscemi can't make this thing levitate. Unfortunately, by the time he shows up, everything's been disclosed, and all the things that could have gone wrong have been declassified.

===
Others on "Art School Confidential": Roger Ebert, Scott Foundas, Carina Chocano, A.O. Scott, and the always-venerated David Edelstein.

Lately

2006-06-07T09:28:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the books I've been reading:
- Liars and Saints by Maile Meloy
- A Family Daughter by Maile Meloy
- Here at the New Yorker by Brendan Gill
- And Now You Can Go by Vendela Vida

Here are some of the things I've been watching
- Magnolia
- Battlestar Galactica: Season 2 (SO GOOD!)

I've also been eating a lot of Indian food and ice cream. And once I get over my cold, I hope to have something intelligent to say!

2006-05-01T16:29:00.000-07:00

A very wonderful place.

The Medicine of Matthew Barney

2006-04-28T12:33:00.000-07:00

Drawing Restraint 9
IFC Films
Written and Directed by Matthew Barney
Music by Bjork
Producers: Barbara Gladstone and Matthew Barney

Attention: Spoiler alert!

Last night, Linda and I saw Drawing Restraint 9, the first feature film release arrival of Matthew Barney, art world auteur, Cremaster craftsman, and boyfriend-collaborator of Bjork. Barney's Cremaster series is a strange world, and a willful call to sexual convulsion, the palpability of the aesthetic, prosthetics on the loose, and utter spectacle. We -- the lucky "we" who aspire to an engaged and elegant cultured-ness, who purport to look for instances of beauty whether at Amoeba Music or Rivington Arms or in the everyday shuffle of our cities' sidewalks-- came of age during the Cremaster cycle, patiently awaited and anticipated Cremaster 3, refrained from giggles when the ancient Richard Serra harvested petroleum jelly along the sprial of the Guggenheim. We privileged artful excess; we delighted in Barney's pig eared, tartan-tailored satyrs (and self). There was a jovial sensibility in the air. And even after 9/11, the idea that Cremaster 3 could come out just meant we were moving on, that we had things to do, places, things, and people to see; there was a degree of relief that Cremaster could still be Cremaster and that we could indulge in it because there was actually something to indulge in.

But these days are different. We live in a world whose realities of war and national division are difficult to confront, but they always linger, enough so that they impress their urgency on us daily. And especially we, as cultured individuals, feel a certain sense of responsibility for these trying times, and a certain necessity to finding productive solutions for them. And into this torrential political climate and these sky-high gas prices comes Barney's film, a love story deep in the sea-hardy seas of Japan that puts Barney and Bjork in fine kimonos and shark-jaw shoes, that sees them precise and perfunctory in a traditional Japanese tea ceremony (I think this is where the purported Shinto wedding comes in), and, after they seem to start licking and gnawing at each other's faces, unites them in self-destructive, knife-happy, gory glory. And then they really eat each other. And then they turn into whales. This is the sped-up version that you could only get for two pennies. The storyboards, I imagine, must have aspired to a novel-worthy page count because the movie is almost three hours of aesthetic control, preciousness, waiting, wanting, near-satisfaction, and the kind of agony that we love to hate but still kind of love anyway. My patience notwithstanding, I will try to do the film more descriptive justice in the next couple of paragraphs.

The first scene sets the elegant pace of the film: a woman wraps two gifts -- rocks that ooze clear, viscous liquid -- with the kind of precision that could probably garner her human national treasure status in Japan. She folds, cuts and bisects with near-mechanical care, showing us that wrapping paper need not just wrap, but, rather, has its own angular, unaligned and off-center/minimalistly elegant purposes. The presents done, and sitting quietly but pondorously next to each other, a quick cut delivers us to a happy band of Japanese festival dancers and workers parades through the turbines of some dock, reveling and fanning themselves, and after much delay finally starting the process of Baney's signature petroleum and what Carina Chocano acutely called the "bisected Vaseline suppository." And thus begins the strange symbol that will lurk throughout the whole movie. We also get glimpses of Barney and Bjork -- who never become more than Barney and Bjork -- as they leave their own territories to converge on the Nisshin Maru, a fatefully commissioned whaling ship, with many workers and ship-ish things to do, and lots of attention to, yes, the bisected suppository.

As I've hinted at earlier, when they get to the ship, Bjork and Barney are initially groomed and clothed separately, and, heavily and ridiculously garbed, they plop down on a small little bench at the edge of the hull of the narrow ship. They wait, and wait, and a sliding door opens, revealing a ceremonial tea room, covered in tatami mats, and spidery tendrils of oceanic life--oh, and a column of barnacles. The master of the ship, an old man with a kind, intent face, serves them tea and every move is excruciatingly detailed. They are left to their own devices, and they start in on each other, the physical union only complete with the ship's petroleum stores start overflowing, and the couple can then go ahead and cut viciously into each other and eat each other to reveal - -TA DA! -- that they're both human-torsoed whales!

This is the main narrative thread of the film. It's fine, I suppose, but nothing revelatory, nothing meaningful. New York Times's Stephen Holden insisted that this was Barney's "Moby Dick." Bullshit--and this is also the painfully obvious analogy. Just because it involves whales and sea-things does not make it as extensive or as legitimately epic as Melville's masterpiece. Sure, I'll give it an A for obsession and micromanagement in the same way as the tale of the great whale, but to liken the two seems an ignorant jab at Melville.

Holden also insists that there are those who have been "initiated" into the Barney-fest simply by having seen his other films and maybe rambled around the Guggenheim a couple of years ago. But the fact of Matthew Barney is that you're never part of the club. And the finest difference between Melville and Barney is that Melville has a sense of emotional texture and empathy, both of which are just not Barney's expertise or aims. Barney never illustrates character; in fact, he denies it because of his highly aestheticized aesthetics. He places himself in the films because he is who he is, but developing three-dimensional voices, feelings, and life seems never to be an afterhtought. That is what makes the film so aggravating to watch because it becomes simply spectacle, relying on aesthetic tension to be its emotional crutch. But it's something that we have to admit makes Barney who he is; it's the subtle reason for buying the ticket. It's this suspended depth that makes Barney compelling as an artist, academically and theoretically speaking, but perhaps not one's favorite artist, not one for whom you can feel passionate emotion for, as it's all surface, it's all sheen.

Character having never been found in Drawing Restraint 9, there is other footage to delight us in the meanwhile: cute Japanese female pearl divers; vertebrae-like Vaseline sculptures; a startling clown that really makes no sense to the plot; cute kids who throw up goo and others who mesh that goo with shrimp shells to start making some kind of sculpture; the gigantic, bright aqua cleaning pipe sculpture during the first ceremonial march; and a big long rock formation that clearly looks like the world's biggest gray turd. But these make for signature instances of randomness and Barney's insistence on connectedness, even something of a narrative. He hides so many easter eggs that it's impossible to keep track that even though we wanted to at first, there comes a point when the Easter Bunny no longer exists and we no longer care. And the only part of the film that is self-consciously light is the part when denim-on-denim outfitted Barney's thick hair and eyebrows are shaved while he's sleeping. But that's where the problem lies: the only kind of hilarity--the only release that we get from the purported seriousness of the film--that can take place is when Barney is still in control, when he is aware of and lets the joke operate and perform. That's when one's breathing room is frustrated, that's when we want very badly to take our eyes off the screen and go home already.

But we don't. We sit still, for some reason, because somehow we feel compelled to see these incredibly long films that make no sense!

That sense of knowing you'll just be exasperated or frustrated or unhealed, but doing it anyway is what I think makes Barney's work like expired Tylenol Rapid Release Gels. [Indeed, Chicano's suppository must be taken further!] The expired Tylenol gel cap can still maintain its sturdy, molded form; it still gleams with its shiny colors, still glistens with its gelled surface. Inside are tiny fragments, these little balls of chemicals that are all similar in composition and encapsulated in the same space, all overseen by the same machines (the machines, in the case of Barney being his assistants and underlings). The expired Tylenol Rapid Release Gel is very attractive. And when you have a headache, you might not really be pay attention to the expiration date because you just want to get rid of the headache, or even if you are looking at the fact that the bottle says 09/2004, you don't really mind because how harmful can it be? So you just swallow the damn thing. It goes down pretty easily, being so pretty and all, but after fifteen minutes, then half an hour, then an hour, you realize it's not working. And you feel disappointed. But it was harmless. It was a little bit of your time. It was a little bit of money. And for a small instance, it gave you hope that you'd feel better. But you know better than that.

In fact, you did even before you went and saw the movie.

miscellany + "Ghost World"

2006-04-21T11:45:00.000-07:00

David Remnick is such a lucid writer, and what an interesting -- and humbling -- figure Al Gore has come to be:

"There is no substitute for Presidential power, but Gore is now playing a unique role in public life. He is a symbol of what might have been, who insists that we focus on what likely will be an uninhabitable planet if we fail to pay attention to the folly we are committing, and take the steps necessary to end it."

==
I haven't been much in the way of writing these days. It's been difficult to find a topic that really grabs me, or something that makes me want to write as passionately as I would like to. I wish I had something intelligent to say about young, bright art stars and the so-called backlash at galleries such as Gavin Brown's Enterprise, but I really... I don't know. There's something boring about the debate to me. In the end, it will all come down to whether or not the work is good. No matter if the artist is mid-career or emerging, if the work produced is compelling, we will celebrate it now and later. If it isn't, perhaps it will denigrated or tossed aside, or held up as an example of what not to do with art, how not to make it. What is of interest to me is the contingent of artists who get some attention but aren't Koons-ified, but who are then reassessed and brought heavily to bear. The Gutai artists come to mind, or even comic book artists as a whole. There's something refreshing about the world changing, and shifting just enough to reevaluate, and to find something new in that which was old.

Speaking of comic book artists (and I suppose art in general), I watched "Ghost World" last night for the first time. I had a great time watching it, and particularly liked that, stylistically, it was so clearly derived from a comic book. Well done, Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff! It also pulled off strange -- yet seemingly true and genuine -- moments (unlike Garden State), and helped suspend my disbelief about things that were completely surreal. It was like there was enough weirdness as a whole to make the weirder things (i.e. the old man waiting for the bus, in particular) seem plausible in these character's world.

I've always professed to being a Steve Buscemi fan, but his attention to detail as Seymour -- and being Seymour -- is just superb. It even made him objectively attractive, well, at least for the sympathetic. As a collector, Seymour hordes so many objects, so many pieces of the past, and those unseen acts of reverence and obsession make him as delicate a character as he was. One is utterly rapt with agreement when Enid, played by the mesmerizing Thora Birch, says, "I just can't stand a world where you [Seymour] can't find someone to be with." I fear I'm getting the exact quote wrong, but I hope that what I've cobbled together taps into the same vein of kindness, gentleness --and the discovery by high school outsiders that dorks are kind of awesome.

The movie is certainly not Buscemi's alone; it's even more Thora Birch's. She is simply mesmerizing, and completely reminds me of a more extreme version of what I could have been in high school and straight after -- although, I never really dabbled in the world of punk, nor did I ever really draw the conclusion that strange looking people in diners were devil-worshippers. In fact, I never really went to art classes outside of school; but hers is one that genuinely takes the cake. I guess it's more of her character Enid's harsh, sophomoric judgmental nature that I can relate to all too well, and those days, long past, when I hadn't joined something resembling a yuppie-like generation.

And, how do these last few paragraphs tie together? Well, all of it has led me to believe that "Art School Confidential" will be insanely delicious to watch...

huff and puff

2006-04-14T14:44:00.000-07:00

Things have finally returned to something akin to a steady state after lots of huffing and puffing around the country last week. Chicago was super-fun; got to hang out with old friends, one of whom took me to the Art Institute for the first time. I was especially taken with the miniature room which was soon and coincidentally supplemented by Stephen Millhauser's latest offering, "In the Reign of Harad the IV". Boston turned out to be sunny and warm and quite favorable, and San Francisco was gloomy and drizzly, fraught with too many slippery hills. Coming back to Los Angeles was made more pleasant because I had finally caught up on all the magazines that I'd let sit and pile up in my apartment, and felt allowed to (finally!) start reading Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler.

I started the book last night, and I'm already 10 pages away from the end (it's a short 109 pager!). It's a delightful treat to hear about something so wonderful and so strange written about with such care and excitement. It also doesn't hurt that the book is actually about one of my favorite haunts in Los Angeles, and makes reference to delicious India Sweets and Spices. (Here are some more kind words about Weschler.)

But here is part of a paragraph that particularly struck me, though they were not Weschler's words:

[A]ccording to James Gleick in his introduction to Richard Feynman's recently reissued Character of Physical Law, "Physicists had hands-on experience with uncertainty and they learned how to manage it. And to treasure it--for the alternative to doubt is authority, against which science fought for centuries. 'Great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance,' Feynman jotted on a piece of notepaper on day, 'teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed.' This became his credo: he believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know but as the essence of our knowing."

the difficulties of invention

2006-04-05T00:37:00.000-07:00

On the drive up to Monterey, we listened to a Malcolm Gladwell lecture (a New Yorker Festival talk available via ITunes) about the American obsession with precocity. In the talk, Gladwell dabbles in different cultural arenas: prize-winning runners (and how they burn out, or shine late, with Gladwell's personal anecdotes included!); the mechanics of musicianship and how young star musicians can be made through intense practice, but musical innovators -- people who change the very nature of music and how we listen to it (whether composers or musicians) -- tend to have passions and investment that drive them in distinctly non-mechanical, non-technical ways; the obsession with IQ tests that evidence youthful genius; and experimentally 'innovative' schools that challenge the best and the brightest which, in fact, produce happy and contented upper-middle-class citizens (doctors, lawyers, bankers and the like), but not necessarily Field Medal winners. Gladwell argues that, in fact, many of those who are known as geniuses flourished later in life. Not necessarily in the sunset years, but well beyond their early twenties, after finding their passions, and investing time, energy, willpower, and then sacrificing creature comforts -- personal and otherwise -- for their art.

But the Mozart part of his talk -- the part about Mozart being this violinist-product of his father's slavedriving and how wee Wolfgang Amadeus had practiced so much by the time he was 6 that he was as good as a professional orchestral violinist today -- tapped into two interests of mine (which I got to discuss with my friend Liz tonight): invention, and the fatigue of invention. I'm interested in the idea that it takes X amount of hours to become a concert violinist (on average), and that the amount of hours or skill to becoming a virtuoso is absolutely different. Perhaps not necessarily a matter of skill, changing a medium or inventing something entirely new is not a matter of technical mastery, but a different kind of understanding of the medium entirely; a reworking of vision. And even then, there is a point -- a "just so" point -- when it can be deemed 'inventive' but not necessarily insane or useless or far-gone. I'm fascinated by what invention is because it implies that someone has created something very original and very different. Yet this difference -- the object or idea of such striking qualities -- still fits perfectly in the world. Sure, it sometimes requires the approval of more progressive thinkers and doeres, but usually, like the IPod, an inventive thing will start popping up all over the place. The IPod is perhaps a typical example: it's something that at one time never seemed needed--i.e. when CDs and their randomizers first arrived on the market and, by golly, there were walkmen into which we could put hand-picked mix tapes. But the cogs of those inventive individuals turned, and then, suddenly, digital whizzes enlightened us about the IPod's small screen, its portability, its ingeniousness. Its usefulness and innovations were hailed; it picked up momentum among the techies; and then became a widespread, unmistakable phenomenon. This, of course, is a Gladwellian trend (oh, how you haunt me, you fan-addled `fro!), the kind he illustrated in The Tipping Point. But perhaps it is also worth considering that now, sometimes, we have to remember to not take the idea of "shuffle" for granted, and how there are so many previous inventions that are just taken for granted. Indeed, on a larger scale, phones, planes, autmobiles, subways, radios--all these, we already deem ubiquitous, useful, normal. Thus, due to new inventions themselves, and the way we adapt to them as a society, old inventions become wrapped in and up with the everyday. It is not a matter of nostalgia, but a matter of course, a matter of how society continues to evolve.

In painting, Julie and I used to call the best paintings inevitable. The oft-cited painter example was Laura Owens. She came out of RISD, then Skowhegan, and then CalArts just doing her paintings and whammo!, consistently crafted inventive, inevitable paintings that are initially playful, and then lodge themselves in one's mind fully, completely, purposefully. They have all the manners of the typical painting -- canvas, stretcher, paint -- but they take hold in a different way. They're gentle and unpretentious in their pastels, yet bold and patterned in their weaving of gobs of paint and confident brushstrokes. And when one has toddled out of the gallery, and thinks back to and about a Laura Owens painting, the world doesn't seem right without her eyeglass-wearing monkeys and her fanciful, painterly unicorns, because they've already become part of the world. Their invention captivates, and then becomes part of a catalogue of invented things (i.e. the inevitable), and it is not that they're forgotten, but they are ultimately part of a past and mark a specific moment in history. They lose that initial burst of freshness. I suppose this has more to do with the fad-ism of the art world, but also a great deal to do with cultural moments, and their palpability. Some things stick, while others don't; some things are meant to continue to mesmerize, others are better left in the collection warehouse, waiting to be reappropriated--or rediscovered--later on.

And there are some things that can no longer be reappropriated. I was thinking of that strange 'joke' that used to be in movies (probably most notably "L.A. Story") about an agent or executive who was talking on his gigantic cell phone. He would be speeding through Los Angeles, and then suddenly start hugging a canyon (Laurel, Beachwood, or what have you), at which point his cell phone would start breaking up. The call would crackle, and the line of communication would be chopped and dropped. The joke was that one could use this excuse to stop talking to some exasperating twit. But with fake pine-tree mobile towers going up all over the place, and Motorola coming out with flat, sleek vessels of connectivity, can a person still use the excuse? Indeed, isn't the joke tired because cell phones are no longer subjects of exclusivity, but, rather near omni-presence? What would my friends and I have done if we hadn't had our cell phones handy to tell each other where to meet? What would contractors do if they couldn't ring up their favorite painters or worksmen at a moment's notice? How would one deal with a car broken down on a misty, uninhabited highway? What, I wonder, is the new, technologically exclusive joke now?

(more to come...)

an assortment of tastes

2006-03-31T11:28:00.000-08:00

Or, things I've been looking at recently (and previously):

1. I'm trying to make my mind a bit more supple again. So, lots of reading at the moment. Right now, one of the books I'm reading is Things That Talk, edited by the incomparable Lorraine Datson. It's a volume dedicated to the way "things" and "objects" become charged with meaning, how they are inculcated with and announce their meanings, and several historians' endeavors to unpacking objects layered with dense cultural/historical significance. One of the essays in the book, which I haven't gotten to quite yet, is all about the glass flowers at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, officially called the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants, and how they were received (and I believe frowned upon) by the scientific community. The first academic ideas that might come to mind when I think about them are mimicry and 'faking it'-- or maybe even idolatry -- and the the object(ionable) attempt to stop time.

But before I take a turn for the wholly incoherent, I might as well admit that what makes the glass flowers resonate for me is that they made me understand, for the first time, that it wasn't just girls who appreciated delicate beauty. I was 9 years old and at the height of my hatred for pizza when we went to visit the HNHM, at the insistence of my uncle, whom I'd always thought of as a dutiful, quiet man who enjoyed fishing and the occasional beer. My mom and I seemed to be simply tagging along. As we walked among the Echeveria, I would go quickly from object to object, but my uncle would summon me over to peer down into the vitrines. At each display case, his eyes were intent and his face wrinkled with appreciation. It was rare that I saw someone so engaged, and that was, in and of itself, something to behold. The flowers instantly become auratic, lustrous with the ability to transfix. I wondered who else they had changed, or who else they had helped see differently, if only for a few moments.

2. This, of course, made me start thinking of the greatness that is the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which has a similar feel as the glass flowers exhibit, plus an added creepiness due to low-lighting and "Tell the Bees." Thus, the next book on the list is Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder.

3. And the title of the book made me start wondering if there are any blogs that are veritable "cabinets of curiosities"...?

4. Lastly, for more profane amusement: I found, by looking at Google News ealier this morning, Kurt Loder's entirely ineffectual review of "Basic Instict 2: Risk Addiction." If only Loder had found a way to make a slick, literary transition between Sharon Stone's hoo-hoo and what he describes as Daniel Johnston's "adenoidal voice", I would nominate him for a Pulitzer. Also, to quench any curiosity (and blind you from thinking about my question of blogs that are cabinets of curiosities), here is the super-smutty trailer for BI2 that was (oops!) released a couple of months back. It showcases Stone's boobies in all their raisin-smuggling glory. I still can't believe this exists!

2006-03-24T17:01:00.000-08:00

I suppose this blog is becoming but a chronicle of how and when something moved me to tears, but this small paragraph is undeniably worth posting for its tenderness.

"But I never stopped trying to match that evening--not just trying to entertain her but trying to impress her. Decades later--after we had been married for more than thirty-five years, after our girls were grown--I still wanted to impress her. I still knew that if I ever disappointed her in some fundamental way--if I ever caused her to conclude that, after all was said and done, she should have said no when, at the end of that desperate comedy routine, I ased her if we could have dinner sometime--I would have been devastated."

Calvin Trillin, "Alice, Off the Page," The New Yorker, March 27, 2006, 47.

Music Video Review: This Boy Be Bad

2006-03-23T22:21:00.000-08:00

L.L. Cool J featuring Jennifer Lopez
"Control Myself"
Todd Smith
Director: Hype Williams

When he was born in 1968, he was given the name James Todd Smith. Then, at the brink of bursting onto the hip-hop scene in 1984, he became LL Cool J. And now, for the title of an album and the name of a clothing line, he has taken up the monniker Todd Smith. We might think of this new, more mature LL as someone a little less warmhearted than the character who delightfully stuffed his face in "Last Holiday." And the difference between LL and Todd Smith is that Todd dons sunglasses or slings his baseball caps low, never revealing his eyes. He has something to hide, or, maybe he doesn't want you to catch him looking at you. And ladies, he's out to convince you that he's a fiend with a fire in his pants.

I have nothing but respect for the man who brought us "I Can't Live Without My Radio" and "I Need Love." He's ripped as fuck, a co-founder of that `90s label FUBU, and a moderately successful actor. Truth be told, LL's got a lot to recommend himself. But with "Control Myself," newly minted Todd Smith's first offering is best described as an amateur mash-up of "Baby Got Back" and samples of Fergie titillating her humps. In a failed attempt to stoke the fire of the song, he's brought in reinforcements in the form of Jennifer Lopez. One would think that this would be a smart move for the video too, but not even the JLo who once dazzled in "Out of Sight," and who continues to make pretty cute high heel wedges with her clothing-cum-accessories line and slightly danceable songs, can save the musical and visual disaster that is "Control Myself."

Lyrics like "It's hard to control myself / you've got, you've got, you've got / what it takes to make this boy be bad" are far from hot. They're tepid, at best. They would have been best served in a straight-forward, "unimaginative" music video. But because the lyrics are so bad, we wish for something of sustinence to cling to, and that is surely not found in this overly, idiotically complicated video. Using a device that's begun to be employed for short musical adverts, there's a widescreen in the middle, flanked, top and bottom, by two halves of another scene. NE-YO's video for "So Sick" uses the device well, but "Control Myself" highlights to evils of going crazy for filmic novelties. For example, in the middle widescreen panel, we see LL's rapping about how hard it is to control himself, but framing this panel is a group of showgirls strutting their stuff. Their scene with the showgirls, however, is split into two, such that the girls' heads are on a top panel, and their legs and butts on the bottom. The effect is disorienting and requires more concentration than this horrendously overproduced video deserves. The split-screen device defines overzealousness when the top and bottom panels are populated by one single person: LL's head and arms flail on the top in crucified style, but because the rest of his body is on the bottom panel, it gives the illusion that he's been Gumb-ified. In the middle, cutting into LL's elongated torso, is a close-up of J.Lo's face.

As this snippet might lead you to believe, there's too much going on this video, and to make matters worse, none of it is interesting. It's the same typical hip-hop fare: hot dancers, hot bods, lots of alcohol, all rife with vanity. At one point, it almost seems that LL's imploring us to take his sexiness seriously when he flexes his muscles as though he were competing for Mr. Universe. Possibly impressive, but not impressive enough. JLo, almost as though she senses how much this video lags, gets in on the act, wanting to convince us that she's hot when she lilts, "The afterparty is at my body / come meet me you're invited." Sorry, I'll be at R. Kelly's hotel lobby.

Towards the end of the video, Todd Smith (whom I can no longer bear to call LL because of this travesty of a video) and JLo convene, trying to woo us with the phrase "Zuh-zuh." The meaningless noise is repeated again and again, at first with erogenous intentions and then more playfully, but every time to ill effect. In the end, the boring "Zuh-zuh"-ing coagulates into a parody of the entire three minute video that they've just made us sit through. And all I could wonder was how such an utterly ridiculous video could have been made.

===
More coverage: Gary Sussman is all too kind to the undynamic duo.

On a tangential note: what is with the Pussycat Dolls's song "Beep," the even more whorish girl's version of "Humps" -- and why on earth would Will.I.Am agree to be featured in it?!

2006-03-20T11:31:00.000-08:00

The art of fake UFO photographs: a practice shaped by a history of devices and deceit. I smell an interesting exhibition...

Kelly Clarkson's Karaoke Revolution

2006-03-15T18:21:00.000-08:00

Music Video Review
Kelly Clarkson
"Walk Away"
Director: Joseph Kahn

In David Raposa's Pitchfork review of "Since U Been Gone," he described the hit track -- and its writer, Max Martin -- as having given Kelly Clarkson an image makoever. The song recasts her as a woman who's "diffident, defiant, and mad as hell." And it was an utterly catchy, innovative pop confection. But the video for "Since U Been Gone" was not nearly as inspired. In those one-note three minutes, Clarkson is supposed to be in her ex-boyfriend's apartment tearing up his and his new girlfriend's shit while they're away, acting as the agent dispensing bad karma to the boy who did her wrong. Not only was it difficult to figure out how she got into the apartment (if you had even figured out that that's where she was), but, more importantly, it didn't have the subtlety of the song itself. It was too bad-ass for its own good. Thus, as Clarkson tore open down pillows and snipped clothes into rags with a pair of scissors I'd ignore the video, but kept MTV Hits on just so I could hear that lyric of falling "for that stupid love song." My preferred method for listening -- and, let's face it, rocking -- to "Since U Been Gone" was and is to turn my iPod up and sing the fuck along.

And singing the fuck along is the very premise of "Walk Away." When we enter "Walk"'s video-time, it's 8:30 in the morning. A radio DJ announces that Kelly Clarkson is going to perform her hit single "Walk Away" for listeners all across "Radioland" (the announcer's description of his radiowaves). As one experiences every weekday, 8:30 is populated by those who are just getting ready for the day, and those who are already in the thick of morning. Throughout the course of the video, we catch glimpses of a girl who's getting up, a guy who's stuck in traffic, a mousy woman at work slipping her earbuds into her ears, a guy vacuuming his living room, a cop giving a fancy woman a ticket, a guy showering, shaggy-haired twins cleaning their kitchen, a busboy, a hairdresser, a waitress, a guy singing into the mirror of a public bathroom, and football jocks all hanging out in their locker room. The thing these individuals have in common is that they are all infected with the song, so much that they themselves break into song. And the pleasure in the video is seeing their diverse versions of getting down.

It's almost as though one day, Clarkson and/or Joseph Kahn were looking at the 10 East on a Wednesday morning and saw a number of commuters (myself included!) get down when I heard "Since U Been Gone" on the radio. Maybe Clarkson was thinking of her pre-American Idol days with aching nostalgia; like, say, if, like all girls who grew up in the `80s, she would sing to, say, "Like a Prayer" with abandon. And, speaking of Madonna, the video for "Walk Away" is, in a major way, the karaoke/lip-synching version of the video for Madonna's "Hung Up." Both videos have the elements of people rocking out to a diva, and cuts to the diva herself singing and shaking it. But what differentiates "Walk Away" is the line that Clarkson draws between her viewers and herself. While Madonna converges with her grooving audience, a kind of joint club circuit/Dance Dance Revolution/do-the-Hustle convention, Clarkson is officially a pop diva who brushes the sleepdust out of her fans' eyes, but stands apart from them. I suppose it's because there would be something admittedly weird if all the people featured in Clarkson's latest video met up with Clarkson and started singing along with her and a Karaoke Revolution revolution of her song.

Given its variation-on-a-theme quality, "Walk Away" is simply a super-fun video to watch. And it was well worth the risk of possibly being called a copy-cat. Perhaps one of the weirder emulations featured in the video is Kelly Clarkson-as-sex symbol. With midriff bare, sexy, lace-up boots hugging her calves, Clarkson swivels her hips, stands contrapasto, plays sassy, and even, towards the end of the video, gets upset at the director because he's being too difficult to work with. But it still feels weird to see America's most popular American Idol -- no, American Idol's sweetheart -- with the aim to scald. We've seen this side of Clarkson before, in leotard form, singing "Behind These Hazel Eyes." This side's got the same tight, ripped, shocking fashion statements (of which I am no fan), but it doesn't seem to have been emphasized in choreography before. And while it might fit the lyrics that Clarkson is singing, she doesn't yet feel comfortable in the role. But the delightful thing about the video, though, is that everyone else in it -- everyone who's singing along -- totally does. And the truth of it is, wouldn't we all agree that Madonna looks pretty ridiculous in "Lucky Star"?

2006-03-15T10:36:00.000-08:00

The best picture I've seen all week!

Making It New?

2006-03-14T18:14:00.000-08:00

After enjoying Annie Proulx's gentle evisceration of the Academy Awards in the Guardian, I hopped over to the Arts section and found this feature on Tom Hunter, a hip and institutionally validated British photographer, and his recent exhibition, "Living in Hell and Other Stories" at the National Gallery--the first exhibit at the venerable gallery ever to be devoted to a photographer. The Guardian slideshow gives us a glimpse and an earful of how Hunter composed his photographs, and his thoughts on the paintings (and only paintings) that inspired the photographs most recently on display.

Looking through Hunter's photographs, I wanted to only be captivated by their British ordinariness. But my overwhelming instinct was to wonder if the artist was getting so much attention for being so art historical. It was not just that the work reminded me of Sam Taylor-Wood, laced with a good bit of Richard Billingsworth, and maybe some Nan Goldin for good measure (in the group scenes), it was that Hunter had perpetrated a direct usurption of art history and its canonical images and artists. This made me suspicious. But, then again, perhaps usurption is too cruel a word; a better phrase would be excessive veneration. So, to get it right: Hunter is engaged with an excessive love for the old masters -- not that I blame him -- but one that requires his practice to be intimately, almost dealthly close, to theirs. It also means that Hunter can be celebrated straight-off with art historical panache... but does that mean that art history is, for him, a crutch?

There was something that broke with tradition when I looked up Hunter's CV. The photographs from "Living in Hell...", unlike the original masterpieces (at the time when they were first revealed and as they hang now), were displayed, in tact, in series, all around the globe at the same time (or around the same time between the end of 2005 and the beginning of 2006); in London, Sheffield, New York and Durham, NC. Perhaps this infectious spread is not particular to Hunter's oeuvre, but it is certainly a sign of our times: the ease of display -- really, the immediacy and duplication of display -- is something artists must contend with fiercely, and with some degree of awareness. But his work still left me wondering: Where exactly will he go from there? Is he really so avant-garde or innovative? How can he break new ground with his photography--for his own sake in art history, and for the sake of art history as a whole?

The larger question of how one can make things new has been heavy on my mind lately. I don't simply mean twists and turns of the aesthetic language that's established and persists, or short detours from one art historical style to the next. Rather, how can -- or can -- one make something as startling, disruptive, and insane as "Mademoiselles d'Avignon" or "Le Dejeuner sur l'Herb" now, in the 21st century? Taking the question to task, Daniel Birnbaum, in February's Artforum, writes about Michel Majerus, whom he describes as "the key contribution--to what one might call painting in the expanded field." Majerus goes on: "His art had a specific kind of newness--not the lofty, if contested, 'originality of the avant-garde,' but the prepackaged newness of the latest cell-phone graphic or just-released sneaker from Nike." And he weaves a supple trio of final sentences: "The temporality of Majerus's work, I claimed a decade ago, is that of a floating, all-encompassing now, analogous perhaps to that of the World Wide Web. Both phenomena--Majerus's art and the Internet--were new to me then. Now, that now seems a long time ago."

Majerus, before his tragically early end, was undoubtedly making new things that included a new 21st century stylistic language, one that was steeped in an entirely new set of references--the Internet, cell phones, anime, sleek sneakers from Nike, etc. But--yes, but--even in Birnbaum's insistence on Majerus's newness (in all its many forms beyond painting), he includes a paragraph stuffed with artists who had clearly influenced Majerus--Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, Polke, Koons, Kippenberger--and the visual references were certainly not hard to guess. The contents of Majerus's combinations are themselves signs of our times, and they rendered exquistely, but the idea of such combination is not entirely Majerus's alone. It seems to rely on the work of the past. It is informed and set up by what past artists have pioneered and left wide open for play and use.

Both Majerus and Hunter's work is primarily in traditional media, photography and painting, where the invisible hand of art history is rampant, overpowering, nearly inescapable. Thus, the questions both artists' work leave me with are these: Can an entirely new artform, or way of seeing, be made within these traditional forms? And can we, as viewers, be shocked and startled by a contemporary art object that the way we see the world changes? Or is it best to leave this to increments, and slow-going change? How has the art market changed the way art is made? How have art schools altered it too? Indeed, not just art schools, but how does the contemporary culture of visual inundation effect the way art is processed? And, on a more personal note, when was the last time a work of art simply floored you?

----
Tom Hunter at Yancey Richardson Gallery; James Lomax on "Living in Hell and Other Stories." More Michel Majerus at Manifesta 2; on Wikipedia; and at Deichtorhallen Hamburg.

2006-03-13T14:52:00.000-08:00

I just got spam with the subject line "stupid moron." I promptly deleted it, but then regret set in. Was the hook of the subject that the contents of the email would point out an exemplary "stupid moron" or would I open the email and realize, "Yes! I am a 'stupid moron'!" ? I will never know.

Mark Bradford at the Hammer

2006-03-10T18:29:00.000-08:00

Mark Bradford's lecture at the Hammer Museum was fantastic! I didn't really know that much about his work (other than seeing it in photographs and brochures), but after Linda enlightened me, I started getting excited about some of the ideas he was working with -- Los Angeles, city maps, rough cartography -- and, of course, the fact that he used to be a hairdresser. So, last night I got to see a little more of his work (although not in person), which was nice, and I discovered that he certainly doesn't disappoint as a lecturer. He looms over the microphone at 6'8" with his slender limbs and velvety voice, talking about abstraction, urbanism, local communities, and the concept of borders with evident passion. And it's so infectious that you see where he's coming from; you hunger for more.

The initial wonderfulness -- even before he even started talking -- was the aesthetic pleasure of seeing this man talk about art to a ton of art-folks and art students (something that I hadn't done in so long!). But it was the broad scope of his talk that captivated me--and the fact that he really knows his art history. He understands not only his place within the confines of 'art history' as such, Bradford zeroes in on the issues with which he's grappling, both historical and contemporary. Here are just some of the words and phrases he turned, and some of the stuff he's been thinking about: palimpsests; the psycho-geographical; "no dependable subject to trace"; interruptions of the grid; barricades as parisitic; the inherent desire to map one's self in a space and to figure out where you fit in when looking at a map; and himself as a post-modern flaneur. And while all these sound like catchphrases and Bradford just spewing theoretical speech -- especially now that I've compacted it into a semi-colon-separated sentence! -- it's just Bradford talking about his work in abstract terms. The work itself is so tactile and hand-made, but there are elements of the work that Bradford acknowledges need to be addressed -- like the fact that he strips barricades of their posters, or the fact that he's mapping Baldwin Hills.

My favorite part of the lecture was when he was describing his collage/painting of the Jungle -- the low income housing-heavy community right at the bottom of Baldwin Hills. With some of his maps of houses, he will sometimes insert little narratives, simply indicated by the word "Haters." He described this impulse to give the community a completely fantastical narrative as born of the same impulse that one has when you see a person across the street and say, "I know what he's doing." And those kinds of imagined narratives -- those miniature short stories -- are what made me instantly fall in love with Bradford's work and his explanation about it.

There was also an interesting undercurrent to Bradford's lecture about the political and racial not necessarily being one in the same; obviously not being mutually exclusive, but not necessarily always falling into the same camp, one leading to the other. I was very interested in "Maleteros" for inSite_05. An artistic intervention into a under-the-radar community, Bradford set up towers at which Maleteros could access brightly colored shopping carts between and across the Mexican-American border near Tijuana. The question, of course, was what this does for that community of people. It certainly acknowledges them, but it becomes a program that dissolves a bit, or one that Bradford can't patrol all the time. So what happens to it? Where does it go? Has the art effected change?

There was a point during the Q&A session when he specifically stated that there should be a move away from simple political correctness, that it seemed like a tepid critique. And I definitely agree with Bradford. The thought of tiptoe-ing through difficult issues -- especially those regarding race -- because it's uncouth to talk about them feels like a quiet blow to discussions where race and the possibly political (or possibly not) implications of race occur. The question is how we can move the conversation forward after being confrontational, and how we can identify solutions to acknowledge that stereotypes come from patterning, but that not necessarily all things revert to type or fall into place into a pattern. Indeed, as Bradford shows, not everything can sit easily on the grid.

Needless to say, I can't wait to see more of Mark Bradford's work. I'm so glad that he spoke, so glad that he commented on "not worrying about shows" to the UCLA MFA grad students (just like Chuck Close!), so tickled that he showed an amazing video of his playing basketball in a makeshift hoopskirt fabricated with Lakers colors, and so pleased to hear this intelligent person with a desire to grapple with difficult, everpresent 'conversations' and observe them with such creative verve, such delight, and so much grace.

----
Also see: New York Magazine's "Ready to Watch" profile of Bradford; Bradford's profile on the InSite_05 website; and an interview with Eugenie Joo.

2006-03-08T16:25:00.000-08:00

Last night, I watched "In the Mood for Love," which I've been meaning to see for sometime. After bawling my eyes out at the end, I Wikipedia'd the film, only to find out that Wong Kar-Wai had meant for the English version to be called "Secrets." Thank goodness they'd convinced Wong otherwise because the film is so gorgeous and so elegant that such a paltry title -- edging on the side of nauseating horror flick -- would have done this magnificent film wrong.

"In the Mood for Love" is lush. It is so rich in its reds, and so accurate and so subtle in its portrayal of the evolution and heartache of forbidden relationships that watching it is absolutely delicious. Set in the `60s, the main thrust of the story is about a man rents a room in one apartment, and a woman who rents a room in the apartment next door. Their spouses have late shifts that leave the two lonely, but serendipitously running into each other in the hallways of their apartment building and noodle shops. They soon discover that their spouses are, in fact, cheating on them. In further fact, the cheating spouses are cheating with each other. And so, the abandoned spouses strike up a friendship, slowly and then longingly.

What makes the film zip during the first half is its humor. The laughs track a nice gradient: the slight humor of accident when Chow's (Tony Leung's character) furniture keeps getting mixed up with Su's (that's Maggie Cheung); the slightly more obvious humor of boisterous families obsessed with mahjong and cooking; and the overt humor of a bald, horny man trying to get into Su's pants. And who wouldn't want to get into Su's pants? Or, rather, who wouldn't want to slip off one of her elegant -- and eclectic -- cheongsams. It has been argued that they are supposed to mark different points in time, but they are also just beautiful dresses, strange for their stiffness, and, not surprisingly, unbelievably sexy. They reveal the exquisiteness of Su's character; her put-togetherness. And they leave the rest of the work -- the bottled emotion and the desperate loving -- to Cheung. And she pulls both off beautifully.

Su is equal parts feminine for Tony Leung's austere, belabored Chow. Leung (called "Short Tony" in the East) is enigmatic, calm, restrained. His composure and tightness hold the film together; and when something so small as a hair goes astray, one wonders what has happened to Chow and, simultaneously, why one is so enchanted and drawn to Leung. While, as a result of Leung's superb acting (and Wong's romantic sensibility), there is plenty of lingering over each scene, each cigarette smoked, each fraught gesture, there is a sense that the film itself moves at an unstrained, rather quick pace. Though the characters themselves ache, the cuts and fades-to-black are simple and easy. They keep going even if the characters aren't ready.

And it is this unreadiness that makes "In the Mood for Love" so poetic. When I watched "2046" (my first Wong Kar-Wai experience), I felt defeated and robbed by the tight spaces, and the tightness of Wong's camera shots. I thought it was born of interest for the sake of "interesting"; but, of course, that assumption was too easy. But while watching "In the Mood," I began to understand the strained quality of Wong's filmmaking. I realized that the tight spaces are devices committed to the characters; these awkward physical situations, and our peering into them, telegraph the characters' strained states. And they simply left me wanting more; not only just to see more, but to know these stories intimately, to know them well. I scoured my memory for pointers from "2046," but couldn't dig up anything of use. Some things are not meant fold up neatly and others, I suppose, are meant to be kept secret.

---
Also see reviews by Stephen Teo (who points to Su's cheongsams as indications of the passage of time), Stephanie Zacharek (for Salon), Elvis Mitchell (for the NYTimes), Peter Rainer (for New York), David Walsh (writing vociferously for the World Socialist Website), Michael Thomson (of the BBC), and a refresher on the critically acclaimed (and bemoaned) movies of 2001 (from the Village Voice).

2006-03-06T18:42:00.000-08:00

About the Oscars: Kenneth Turan got it right.

2006-03-06T18:37:00.000-08:00

John Helmer is even better than their advertised $10 European berets.

A testimonial:

<>"Please take me off your mailing list. I now live with a handsome, wonderful "gent", who is now also on your mailing list. Was it divine providence or the gift of your Argyle socks that brought me such good fortune?" Giovanna K. Friday Harbor, WA

Art Wunderkids and the Art World System

2006-02-27T16:47:00.000-08:00

Sorry about the absence of posts. Busy, busy week in Lo-Land-- work is hectic right now and I've been helping out with a gallery catalogue in my off-hours.

But, sparked by the ever-brilliant Julie Sara Wecsler, I've also been thinking a lot about art wunderkids and their position in the gallery world. I've been trying to figure out how to describe this phenomenon -- as exemplified by "School Days", whose opening was described bouyantly by Calvin Tomkins in the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" pages. We have a group of incredibly motivated, ambitious, young artists who have equal hands in their own practices, art history, the market, and saavy connection-building. They end up wow-ing the art world heavies and rocketing to stardom. (Dana Schutz, Elliott Hundley, and Iris Nemecek are recent examples, and Nemecek, though an international example, is still a student in Vienna.) Is this lightning-quick success similar to the motivation that drives the SAT-tutored (elite) youth of America into the right colleges? Are these artists more ambitious than those of the past? Is it that art schools have professionalized so much and so quickly that they can pump out artists and just plop them into galleries? Or, is it just that the market has driven youthful artists into factory-like making -- i.e. producing for collectors, but not pushing the boundaries?

There are also broader issues of which one must take note. In assessing the art world and its hunger for youth, we have to acknowledge that we are only talking about a handful of artists, coming from a handful of schools (Yale, Columbia, UCLA, Art Center, sometimes the Art Institute, etc.), for a very select audience of movers, shakers and observers. But, that being said, there are other factors involved too; like how art schools have changed in the past twenty years. Chuck Close had some things to say in Tompkin's piece:

A lot of artists in the tottering stages of forty-and-over might be horrified by the show. Chuck Close, who graduated from Yale’s School of Art in 1964, said the other day that none of his classmates would have dreamed of showing the work they did in art school; the freedom to experiment, to try new approaches without fear of failing, was essential to finding their own way, he felt. But Deborah Kass, a visiting artist-teacher at Yale, did not seem concerned. “A lot of these people are really good artists, and you just get out of their way,” she said.

And perhaps one gets out of the way because of the speediness of information--the quick exchange of email, and the ease with which one can use the Internet to distribute images and CVs to a broad network of people--that has contributed to this culture of fast success in the art world. Not only galleries have this access, but the artists themselves have access to a bevy of information instantaneously.

The art world that gets talked about, and that thrives because of collectors, is the result of a network of select people. While I imagine that there are some MFA students who don't get snatched up as quickly at Yale or UCLA, Art Center or Columbia -- whether by choice or by ill-fated chance or pre-maturity in their careers-- there are a ton of MFA students out there who don't even get acknowledged as cutting edge because they're not enrolled in the right schools in the right major metropolitan areas. And, the questions linger: What are they making? And who will go out there and get them? (At the very least, we have New American Paintings, which can bring some of them to us in glossy form.)

Another factor to take note of: trends, in general, can be accessed, taken in, and distributed more quickly now. And it makes sense that the art world--charging ahead of that curve as far as aesthetics--would be subject to the same pace. But, here's the kicker that applies to trends: in the recent Los Angeles Times article, "Fads Are So Yesterday," it almost seems that evidence from (and analysts of) contemporary culture debunks the notion of fads in general, predicting that individuals will find what they like and wear or acquire it, instead of looking to contemporary currents to tell them what to do. However, the art world and the gallery system is a world based on trends, albeit of high quality. Newness and surprise is valued almost as much as astoundingly groundbreaking work, and the current explosion of MFA success is particularly suited to these obsessions.

But the real question, I think, tends beyond biography and pedigree: it is whether the work itself is sustainabile; whether it's universal; whether it has the ability to stupify and invent, and challenge traditions and norms of already-formulated ideas about art. And the answer to that, of course, is no a measure of youth. Those questions take time to answer.

** An interesting and connected piece of news is that Rob Storr has been named Dean at Yale School of Art. Not only does Yale already have an arsenal of super-fine professors and a reputation mythical enough to send gallerists swooning, Storr has an acknowledgedly critical and fascinated eye. It will be interesting to see how -- or if -- he will address the meteoric rise of MFA students and shake things up.

2006-02-23T11:52:00.000-08:00

A few more links to stir the critical pot:

Why science critics are crucial to science.
William Hazlitt's "On Criticism."
William Pope's poem, "An Essay on Criticism."
H.L. Mencken's "Criticism of Criticism of Criticism."

...with more forthcoming.

Karl Haendel: The Idea and the Object

2006-02-22T11:01:00.000-08:00

K arl Haendel is the kind of artist who should have a slick appeal for those who closely follow the art world circuit. He does meticulous (i.e., transparency projections-to-paper), big drawings of everything from a single, blown-up penny to New Yorker cartoons, scraggly doodles to Escalades. My love for Ed Ruscha goes without saying, and clean figurative drawing always manages to seduce me. But I remember wandering haphazardly into Haendel's solo show at Anna Helwing last year and initially thinking that his output was impressive; but as I kept looking, seeing the mega-sized Harper's Indices on the walls, Haendel's elbow nudges of cleverness seemed just a little too clever.

With Haendel, we have a really smart guy--no less than a Brown semiotics acolyte--who knows what these symbols mean, where they exist in our contemporary world, and, more pointedly, that a certain set of images will give a certain amount of pleasure to a contemporary bourgeois audience. Indeed, Haendel iconizes precisely that which we consume--either because we buy them or because we see them constantly--from air conditioning units to President Bush's bouncy face. And though it is executed with crafty expertise, there's something pleasurable missing in what Haendel does... Cheesy as this sounds, it feels like Haendel is all head and no heart.

I'm sure the argument against such criticism is that Ed Ruscha's images appear just as aseptic, seem to avoid the hand, and, to add another artist to the mix, Richard Prince is the perfect example of someone who has simply appropriated and presented us low parts of culture. But what sets these two contemporary heavyweights apart is that it never seems like they take positions of distance. The way the images are executed always leads me to believe that they're interested and fascinated by the images they choose, not necessarily just the culutrally-infiltrated idea of blowing up the Marlborough Man (in the case of Prince) or gas stations dotting California (in the case of Ruscha). These guys know that their practicing within the realm of irony, but it's irony that comes a split-second after the fact; it's irony on the edge. There's the object and then the world that contextualizes the object. And the audience gets the pleasure in figuring where the object fits in the world, how it's been transformed by the artists in order to recontextualize it.

Haendel's object is irony, and what seems to me to be his motivation is the idea of the object, not necessarily the object itself. The fact that display is such a major component of Haendel's process belies the fact that he sees his drawings working in tandem with one another -- that the ideas of the objects bounce off of one another -- in order to create a message, not unlike advertising. He connects the works in order to wink at his audience. And this is not to say that the images aren't interesting when construed together because clearly they are.

But Haendel seems to create an uncomfortable viewing experience because it's almost as though he wants to be smarter than his viewers, rather than endowing them with their own sense of his work and, almost, with their own work to do to engage with it. It almost revels in the idea that he thought of this before we did. Indeed, Haendel knows his work better than we do (as all artists do), but there is no sense that he wants to leave things up to the chance of looking; he seems to have strict strategies for how his images should be received, and how they should be interpreted. It's all interesting, but not much more, really, than the word itself.

===
More on Haendel: Thanks to Linda for the heads-up on David Pagel's review of Karl Haendel's MOCA Focus show. A Heather's view on Haendel's 2005 show at Anna Helwing over at art.blogging.la. And old UCLA Bruin article about Haendel's work in an MFA show.

Critical States

2006-02-21T14:48:00.000-08:00

This seems like a good short week for a pithy topic, so I thought I'd try to come up with some interesting stuff related to the state of criticism today. By no means do I mean to be comprehensive, but I think the goal is to post links and thoughts in response to the question: Does criticism matter?

Paul Goldberger lucidly answers the question.
The Art Institute of Chicago held a symposium on the state of it last October.
George Cotkin on the democratization of criticism.
A podcast by Matt and Matt, acknowledging that even though they hadn't seen "Rent," they'd ranted about it, prompting this question: What is criticism?
Comprehensive Wikipedia entries on Literary Criticism and on Film Criticism.

So, I hope that will kick-start me into the question, and be sure to stay tuned for more thoughts in the next couple of days.

And, if there are any curious by-passers out there, I'm still working on Art-Heavy Weekend, Part 3b, but have yet to post anything because I haven't really figured out how I'm thinking about Karl Haendel. But when I do, I'll be sure to drop a post...

2006-02-17T19:49:00.000-08:00

Dodo revival, even though there are a suprising number of Dodos.

Being Blunt

2006-02-17T13:41:00.000-08:00

Little Music Video Review
James Blunt
"You're Beautiful"
Director: Sam Brown

I check Slate.com pretty obsessively everyday, and when the year started I felt shocked and hurt when Jody Rosen took the helm of all things music at that most respectable of web magazines. I wondered why the so-loveable Hua Hsu had been excised, and I longed for more diatribes such as his "Notes on 'Humps'" and more praise like "The Insanity Plea." But with his latest review-ette of James Blunt's album, Rosen has won my following. I suppose we like critics because we agree with them (or, rather, because they agree with us), but Rosen's notes on Blunt's "unassuming" smarminess are great and on the mark--and, as a result, deliciously worth the read.

After reveling in Rosen's review, I just couldn't resist adding my two cents about the way Blunt came onto my radar. A month or so ago, I had been watching MTV Hits for about half an hour when I first caught sight of the video for "You're Beautiful." Blunt stares out at the camera, quietly, calmly sitting in a cross-legged zen-ish pose--and this is how he starts begging for some attention. His puppy dog eyes stare out at the camera; it's raining; he croons about how I, being his audience, am really pretty; how he saw me in the subway; how I was with someone else; how he kind of has a plan to catch me anyway. It's a lost cause, he knows, but he still thinks I'm hot. So, the strategy is that he's peering out at me from his humble, bare-bones platform, and I'm supposed to want to get it on with him?

I don't think so.

Beyond staring out and singing in the rain (and not even in the great Gene Kelly way of, ahem, singing in the rain), there's not much going on in the video. He wants to beseige his audience with his looks and his hot bod. But as I kept watching, I couldn't really understand how, by emptying his pockets and taking off his shoes and shirt, Blunt was disarming himself for me. When he finally mannishly swan dives into a stormy ocean at the end, it actually feels -- after every object removed, every raindrop drizzled on his head -- like he's enacted a ritual for himself. It becomes solely an advertisement for Blunt, which is the inherent idea behind music videos, but so unearnest an ad because it's clearly trying to do something by doing the exact opposite. In other words, the video makes James Blunt the center of attention when the song and his intent staring signals that the goal is for his audience to be the center of attention. And for all his weepy, staring pleas into the camera, he just can't cut it. He's just pretty self-absorbed.

"You're Beautiful" the video sure will woo his already-wooed fans, but it has absolutely no relevance to the song and it certainly won't win any skeptics into the Blunt fold. I thought about the song too. It's not that bad and I devised a test: despite the video, do I like the song anyway? Well, when I hear it on the radio, I keep mixing it up with the Lifehouse song "You and Me." And after I realize it's "You're Beautiful," I just wish it were "You and Me" because, for all it intents and purposes, "You and Me" just reminds me of Jason and L.C. getting it on in "Laguna Beach." Now that's beautiful.

2006-02-17T12:12:00.000-08:00

Save up your bucks! Space travel is becoming a reality!

Art-Heavy Weekend, Pt. 3a

2006-02-16T10:33:00.000-08:00

Sunday: MOCA, MOCA, MOCA!

MOCA is currently bursting at its seams--and that's just the Grand Avenue location. Not only do we have the second and slightly more contemporary part of "Masters of American Comics," you've got "Painting in Tongues," a solo space for Karl Haendl, and the fantastic selections from the permanent collections in "After Cezanne". Added to this, MOCA's showing some works by William Kentridge at their Pacific Design Center space, and, of course, "Ecstasy" takes up the entirety of the Geffen warehouse. What's more, these are all high, high quality shows that make me feel lucky I live in Los Angeles. Here are some thoughts on what's currently on at Grand Ave., with more to come about Karl Haendel and "After Cezanne" in a part 3B!

Masters of American Comics, Part 2
I'm not an avid reader of comic books. I'm in fact so un-avid that I still have yet to read Art Spiegelman's "Maus" and the only comics artists I'd heard of before the two-part exhibition were the aforementioned Spiegelman, Charles Schultz, R. Crumb, and Chris Ware. I'd also been familiar with Daniel Clowes because of his script, "Art School Confidential" (which I think will be fantastic fun to watch), and I was recently introduced to Winsor McCay when I went to completely surreal and unfamiliar territory, ComiCon 2005. And even though I'd had to the opportunity to sample comics at last year's behemoth comic book convention, I could only claim to be a tourist.

So, Master of American Comics was supposed to make me a novice. I got to see Part 1 of the show a few weeks ago, and what amazed me was how much Winsor McCay's stuff continues to push the boundaries of comics. His work continues to feel fresh and innovative, trippy and strange, and utterly fantastical, especially in the face of Will Eisner's hoodlums or E.C. Segar's Popeye. Especially when at the Hammer, I couldn't help comparing everyone else to McCay! What Became interesting about the experience of walking through the exhibit was that, as someone completely unaccustomed to pregnant panels of drawings and text, I was utterly exhausted just looking. At first, I was prodigous about looking and reading (i.e. when I stood before "Krazy Kat"), but as I dawdled around, I realized that my patience was being tried by the time I arrived at "Dick Tracy." And I couldn't help imagine that being able to be in bed and lazily flip through the pages of any of these comic books would the ideal way to "see" the exhibition and trace the history of comics.

Thus the question of how one is supposed to read comics -- at least, as far as the comic book artist's intent -- resonates. The idea of giving comics and their artists the proper acknowledgement has much merit; and for all their output -- and intelligent storytelling -- the goal of spotlighting this cultural phenomenon is important. But I keep coming back to a couple of basic questions that one might encounter in an art historical displays and collecting course: how does the museum -- and not just MOCA, but any museum -- and its vitrines change the context of the comics? How does it change how we have to read them? How does the museum negotiate between high and low culture? Also, how does, say, an original Winsor McCay proof alter the value of the original newspaper print itself?

It seems like the answer points to one general thing: elevation. Elevating for the sake of acknowledging and, thus, the move towards inclusion rather than exclusion. I think, in part, the including happens because artists like Raymond Pettibon wouldn't exist if it weren't for comic book artists. And graphic novelists -- to use the upscale term -- such as Chris Ware completely turn the medium upside on its head, turning the sad and melancholy into graphic-cum-literary epics, which inherently change the way one perceives of the medium. Chris Ware also makes really interesting objects, and he one foot drenched in the McSweeney's world of literary culture. Additionally, R. Crumb was at first considered an outcast, but then recast as a comic genius who was then showing in high-class galleries in Chelsea (around 2002-ish). I think the categories for inclusion here are interesting: history -- i.e. "Krazy Kat" and "Peanuts" -- and relationship to high culture -- i.e. Art Spiegelman's covers for The New Yorker.

So we find comics in a both precarious and enviable situation: not only are they read by teenage boys the world over, they have now become an earmarked, museum-approved bastion of underground -- but potentially high -- visual culture. Maybe this has always been the case. But what became such a slight in the modern art movement was if artists were just illustrators. Norman Rockwell is the archetype for this conundrum--how can you be great at rendering charming, narrative scenes and still be accepted by the Art World? What Masters of American Comics does is recast the question: how does the museum include previously excluded media? And Masters has a particular strategy: the show is an incredibly comprehensive look at the pantheon of those who would probably considered forerunners and practioners of graphic novels. It begs the question of where the medium will go and how it will continue to skirt high art, or whether it will recast itself exclusively to the nerdy masses. Perhaps, now, there's no turning back.

"Painting in Tongues"
Oh how false the `80s-coined pronouncement "the death of painting" really was. There has been endless evidence since that, like it or not -- and even in that just-linked Jed Perl TNR piece, we still see that Richter is using painting-- there is something about painting that fascinates and seduces; that still keeps calling for more minds, hands and brushes. Apparently, conquering painting has not been won. Jed Perl's article on Richter comes to mind here... the idea of Richter as "a bullshit artist masquerading as a painter" might seem appropriate and all too relevant for MOCA's latest show, "Painting in Tongues." I think Perl is interested in investigating Richter as a "calculating" artist who just uses imagery that exists in the hard-easy region--in other words, he paints the kinds of objects and moments that seem difficult to excavate from life, but then, on second thought, seem all too easy, and all too easy to manipulate its audience.

I happen to disagree with Perl, and I think what attracts me to Richter's work is not only his technical prowess but a mysterious track record. Richter is the ultimate stylistic chameleon; he has gone through phases of mock-Ab-Ex to blurry realism, glass panels to tiny collages. It's almost unnerving that despite his shifts, one still sees Richter come through in all of his work. The question of what unifies Richter's work is always at the forefront of his admirers -- and his detractors. Though Perl would cry "manipulation," I think it's something different. I believe Richter practices something more like a knowledge of how history is portrayed and how artists fashion images of history--either by referencing them (as Richter seems to have done with his Bader-Meinhoff paintings) or using portrayals of history as an actual strategy for making (one might say that Richter's elegant toilet paper painting is toilet paper constructed to look historical).

The concern is certainly related to Arthur Danto's position of art having become self-referential. And this is quite obviously the case for those artists curated into "Painting in Tongues." Lucy McKenzie paints sexually charged scenes as though they've been painted on brick walls; she merges historically low culture imagery with high culture mentality. Kai Althoff morphs his images, but seems to have a thing for Victorian frocks and either very thin or very thick paint. Rodney McMillan likes to deflate massive symbols like the Parthenon and slap them on the wall, their canvas flapping into the white cube space. Even Anselm Reyle whose work I loved for its hot-ness -- its extravagant but keen use of neon -- takes minimalism and Dan Flavin and heats it up. I'm still interested in figuring out the deals with Ivan Morley and Mark Grotjahn. Both are painterly in their own ways -- Morley taking on painting in many guises (weaving abstraction and then grappling with botanical imagery) while Grotjahn goes thick paint-crazy with primative-looking faces and line and perspectival abstraction. But I'm still trying to work them out in my head. I have always loved Gillian Carnegie and to be able to see her thick-thick again was quite welcome. She makes me believe that there are still ways of abstracting landscapes and still lives that can be incredibly sumptuous; and, even better, sumptuous with gobs of paint.

The show, good and comforting as it was, wasn't necessarily mind-blowing in any startling, stop-your-heart way. It was a really nice show about painting. And, in a sense, it made me question how much we can expect from painting. Anselm's Reyl's work definitely floored me, especially his neon sculpture. But that almost seemed like it would be primarily defined as a painter-ly sculpture, rather than a painting in space. So the question that lingered in my mind was this: How much can painting surprise us now? What can it do to astound? And--the key question--who will step up to the plate and do it? Though it sounds like I'm conceding with the `80s adage of death, I don't think my questions are a matter of painting's being dead. Painting is certainly alive and kicking. I think these painters Michael Darling presents are up to the task of astounding. It's a matter of how these power-morphers of paint can change the terms by which we think of painting--and, even better, how they'll be able to do it convincingly, so much so that it just might boggle the mind.

Art-Heavy Weekend, Pt. 2

2006-02-15T14:53:00.000-08:00

Part 2 of 3 of my art obsessed weekend!

Saturday: Openings at 6150

I didn't get to see as much as I'd hoped, as I mistakenly thought that the openings took place from 6-9pm. But I did get to catch Chris Finley at ACME before the whole complex closed down for the weekend.

Chris Finley
"Friggin' Curve"
ACME
February 11 - March 11

Here, Chris Finley presents us with a strange combination of dynamic tan and fatigues-colored paintings and mixed-media sculptures, inflected with hints of Tatlin, Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase," Julie Mehretu and Matthew Ritchie--but poised on ellipses. Though I love Ritchie's work a great deal, what's pleasant about Finley's latest show at ACME is that he isn't urging us to to buy into any kind of mythology; it's as though he's doing these techno-sexy shape-shifting paintings for the pure joy and intricacies of invented forms. And thus he makes the act of looking a fun and engaged experience.

Finley seems to be particularly attuned to invention and innovation when he attaches to the paintings delicate lines connected to wooden hanging sculptures (i.e. line drawings in space). It is in these moments--when the wood punctures or touches the surface of a painting--that we see Finley attempting to negotiate the boundaries of painterly and sculptural space. It's difficult to pull off, but this artist does it with visual intelligence. And it's actually quite fun to get the chance to go underneath the wires and sculptures, just to get to the paintings. Almost like a minimal and mini obstacle course, but with all the obstacles hanging from the ceiling...

The best part of the show is in the smaller gallery space where there's a device in the middle of the room that's attached to all the paintings on the walls. When I went, a guy was standing in the middle of the room hanging out and then he suddenly said, "Oh, I have to do this thing!" So when he pulled down the device, the paintings were raised to reveal other paintings underneath. I'm trying to figure out what its 18th-to-19th century equivalent is, and I keep wanting to say that it's like a cabinet of wonders but that doesn't really have the same performative quality as this does; and it's not necessarily the same as a science display where you open a box to reveal some sort of answer. (When I think of something appropriate, I'll certainly add it here!) Anyway, I love any kind of mechanical devices in artwork--even if it comes in bare-bones form--and Finley's device feels especial in its revelatory qualities. The exhibition definitely makes me curious about his turn from figurative work to abstraction. But it makes me wonder even more what other tricks Finley might have up his sleeve.

Art-Heavy Weekend, Pt. 1

2006-02-13T10:43:00.000-08:00

With Munitz's resignation lingering in the Los Angeles smog, I took it as a sign that I should see a glorious gloop of art during the weekend--and indeed I did. I'm happy to report that all of it kept me interested and engaged, and it was certainly a testament to Los Angeles's prominence on the international contemporary arts scene. Here's part one of three...

FRIDAY: UCLA MFA Open Studios
Though I went to the UCLA MFA Open Studios on Friday night [hat tip, Caryn, for the heads-up], I was utterly exhausted from a long week of work, so I just bandied about, popping in and out of various spaces, looking for the pleasure of looking and not really paying attention to names. For me, it was more of a trip to investigate this mythic thing that is UCLA's MFA program, particularly its painting program, and a nice thing to help ease into a Friday night. The space was surprisingly large; I didn't expect that the program had quite so many students. As I was walking through, I was suffering from a bit of an end-of-the-week slump, so I'm not sure how informative this post will be. But, I will say that the work--on the whole--was definitely solid, and much of it market-ready.

I was really impressed by how diverse all the work was. There were painterly paintings, some elegant performance (which I wasn't able to see because I arrived too late), quiet and compelling sculpture, and even some good photographs. Here are some highlights that stuck out: I really loved the arrows that punctured the hallways, which were the prelude to a ceramic horse stabbed with dozens of arrows, all arrayed as a kind of invisible globe around the horse (sadly, I didn't catch the artist's name). Along the same "prelude" lines, in the main gallery, there was a strange zoetrope that seemed completely incomprehensible, totally blank and uninteresting, but as you wandered around the studios, you realized that one of the studios was showing this animation-looking video of a camera going round and round a hallway. The question, of course, was how these artists could install this in a less labrynthine space--i.e. how does it fit into the context of the gallery.

In the main screening room, jokester Brian Bress's video about sporks was hilarious and engaging; it looks like he's having lots of fun. And in the maze of studios, I was also very interested in first-year Juliana Romano's portraits -- they have an Alice Neel sensibility inflected with a Julie Mehretu intuition for color. (Full disclosure: she and I went to middle school together for a little bit.) And just around the bend from Romano's cubicle, I was impressed by Jun Ho Kwon's Sarah Sze-like sculptures (which the artist referred to as paintings) that used tripods, globes, even ladders as devices for making some rather explosive 3D collages. There was also a photographer whose pictures featured band geeks and firefighters. The firefighting pictures were excellent--really beautiful, and weirdly peaceable moments in the face of disaster.

All of these -- and the overall feel of the studios -- gave me a better idea of how one goes from being a so-called student to being Elliott Hundley. Brenna Youngblood (whose name is undeniably awesome) is already on the rise, so it begs the question of who might be heir apparent...

2006-02-12T22:51:00.000-08:00

Great United Nations design post at Design Observer!

The Snow and the Flurry

2006-02-12T21:19:00.000-08:00

I have always loved the Winter Olympic Games. They give me an excuse to hum the John Williams theme music and they provide endless hours of televised entertainment (as long as they're not airing long-course speed skating). During Lillehammer (`94) and the early days of the internet, I looked up the United States Luge Association on the web and sent them an SASE for a USLA decal. I believed that upon sticking the decal on the family car I would become the fastest, most aerodynamic female luger the world had ever seen. But I never did put the bumper sticker on my mom's Volvo. So, letting bygones be bygones, I have since watched powdery Olympic glory from afar, usually wrapped in a wool blanket with a cup of hot cocoa. As it turns out, this has been a quite satisfactory situation.

The Olympics are the only time when I get to see Bob Costas's sportscaster's glow, and it couldn't be more welcome. This time around, Costas has had plenty of news to report: Michelle Kwan withdrawing, possibly hinting at retirement (i.e. "skating will always be in my heart"); the adorable, loveable 19 year-old Shaun White asking Sasha Cohen out on a date during his post-gold medal press conference; the so-close efforts of Tony Benshoof; and Apolo Ohno's heartbreaking fall. All this (and more) has been covered quite well by both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. Other things that have been charming about the games: Neve and Gliz; the uninteresting interesting debate between calling the city "Torino" or "Turin"; re-learning what the sport Skeleton is; and the low hopes for this being America's dream Winter Olympic team. It's also been awesome that NBC can superimpose downhill skiing runs on top of one another. Oh, the wonders of technology!

My personal experience of the Olympics is always embarassingly emotional. I'll basically cry at any profile provided that there are either cute baby photos or personal obstacles overcome -- and the NBC producers never fail to add these into every spotlight segment. Then, additionally, I'll shed a tear whenever an American sheds a tear while standing at the podium and singing "The Star-Spangled Banner." This, I claim, is evidence of my patriotism, not necessarily my emotional susceptbility. And, with these games so far--even though Michelle Kwan seemed to have secured her spot on the figure skating team in a sneaky sort of way--I even teared up during shots of her farewell conference.

Kwan's withdrawal marks the end of an era -- the era of my sad attempts to imitate her camel spins (indeed, my parents can attest to my incapacity for such grace). But beyond that, I have always felt a kinship toward Kwan, she being an Asian-American from Southern California with a flat nose, born in the early `80s. And I always hoped to be as humble and good-spirited, driven and determined as she. It now feels strange that an ambassadorial someone from my generation has become 'too old' for that in which she excels. Sports, acting, and rock and roll -- and sometimes even art and literature-- are almost inherently, by virtue of contemporary currents and next-big-thing-itis, agist. And sports, above all, test the mortality of their practitioners and the spring-iness of their tendons. But seeing Kwan in her black cowl-neck almost seemed to signal a shroud of mortality. It made me pause for a second... twenty, more like. I suppose our most innocent days are behind us. Then came Bode Miller on the downhill slopes...

Later, I let Bob Costas ease me back in to Apolo's short-course semi-final. I caught a glimpse at the slopes beyond French flag-colored wigs and the seas of Italian flags. And I reacclimated to my giddy anticipation of the 20th Winter Olympics. I think that's what Neve and Gliz want from me. And I suppose, for now, I'll think of it as something like a return to innocence.

A Very Belated Praise-Be! for "Project Runway"

2006-02-09T13:23:00.000-08:00

This is a post and admission that's long overdue: I can't get enough of "Project Runway." Every time we hit the end of the TiVo bar and the machine reverts to live TV, I ache for the next episode. I love Santino's mad (i.e. insane) skills. I love that Daniel Vosovic is full of kindness and compassion and that his talents dazzle, that he was a competitive gymnast for 12 years (!), and that he still manages to seem cool even though he totally derailed by putting Chloe in a 40 year-old hostess-bar-costume. (I also love that Daniel V. looks exactly like Andy Samberg.) And Heidi Klum sparkles with every "You're Out!" while simultaneously embodying the definition of preggers-sexy.

I am a relatively new convert to PR. I didn't watch the first season and Emmett was one episode shy of being kicked off when I began to watch this one. But what totally hooked me was Tim Gunn, that invisible glue that holds the show together. One obvious reason why Tim Gunn has become a favorite with me and my friends is that all of our friends can do dead-on impressions of his voice. (I think we have a couple of impersonators who could take Santino to task...) He's also, first and foremost, the mother hen who pecks to make sure his kiddies are on top of their hems, he assigns their tasks with a fairness and level-headedness you could only wish for in your school-marm, and he has shown stellar moments of counsel (like when Zulema pulled a fast one and switched models with Nick!). And isn't it really only appropriate that an awesomely power-gay dresser chairs the fashion department at Parsons?

Even though I'm always excited to see Heidi in the most fashionable maternity-wear ever, and American jet-set king Michael Kors, internationally fabulous Elle fashion editor Nina Garcia and the guest judges, there are two reasons why I keep watching: the clothes, and Tim Gunn's muted enthusiasm. The designs seem easy to explain--I'm really excited to see what these people will come up with on a limited budget and tight time constraints. That part seems obviously fascinating, and the reason why the show was born.

But wry Tim's enthusiasm for PR--and how it's veiled in his visage of authority--is priceless. It even seems to come not on-screen, but on the web. Not only does he have a blog on the PR website, he also records a podcast which explains what's going on, answers viewer-submitted questions, and has given the endeavor space in his chic Greenwich Village institute. He's taking this gig seriously and "joyously" (to slightly quote judge Kors) -- and it shows every time he eyeballs the designers' bullshit over his wire-rimmed specs, every time he dishes out a leveling critique, and, really, just about every time we see him waltz into the workstation room in his clean-cut, mostly-navy suits. He most certainly is in.

Stress

2006-02-08T14:36:00.000-08:00

When I looked up the word "stress", here are the definitions/references that I found:

In the OED: 1st definition: Hardship, straits, adversity, affliction; and interesting usage: 1830 CARLYLE Richter Again Ess. 1840 II. 326 "The *stress-memorials and siege-medals of Poverty."

First Google hit: the American Institute of Stress

First Google Image hit: on the left (c/o the BBC)

First working Google Blogsearch link: "Duh of the Week"

First JSTOR hit: Robert W. Wilkinson, "A Homonymy-Avoiding Transderivational Constraint in Terena," International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 42, No. 2 (April 1976), pp. 158-162.

First Arnet.com artwork: "Tending the Children in Medina."

2006-02-07T13:12:00.000-08:00

I'm really being a horrible blogger, and not really keeping up to speed here. But once this week is over, I think things should settle down a bit in Lo-Land! And, at least the world keeps providing us with links to whet our whistles...

Two great things c/o The Morning News: Double-Tongued Word Wrester Dictionary and a "Lost World." Plus, more lost world pics via the Los Angeles Times.
From Things Magazine: an aircraft graveyard.
A very amenable pair of recipes, via DailyCandy.
And, Style.com keeps me up-to-date and boredom-free, especially during Fashion Week...

2006-02-06T13:46:00.000-08:00

I'm on an academic article kick as of late, and found this wonderful paragraph in Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's article, "The Image of Objectivity" (Representations, No. 40. "Seeing Science", 81-128):

What unites the negative and positive sides of mechanical objectivity is a heroic self-discipline: on the one side, the honesty and self-restraint required to foreswear judgment, interpretation, and even the testimony of one's own senses; on the other, the taut concentration required for precise observation and measurement, endlessly repeated around the clock. It is a vision of scientific work that glorifies the plodding reliability of the bourgeois rather than the moody brilliance of the genius. It is also a profoundly moralized vision, of self-command triumphing over the temptations and frailties of flesh and spirit. Like almost all forms of moral virtuoisity, it preaches asceticism, albeit of a highly specialized sort. The temptations and frailties had less to do with envy, lust, gluttony, and other standard sins than with seeing as rather than seeing that; with witting and unwitting tampering with the "facts." But in the view of late nineteenth-century scientists, these professional sins were almost as difficult to combat as the seven deadly ones, and required a stern and vigilant conscience.

2006-02-06T10:40:00.000-08:00

Super Bowl XL wasn't so exciting. The pass to end all passes was awesome, but, the game on the whole sadly lacked that extra oomph. I remember before watching last year, our friend sent out an email whose subject was "Let's get XXXIXited!" which, indeed, got me very excited. (Not to mention the fact that the Patriots were playing and, though I rarely admit it, I do have some allegiance to my college town...) Since no email went out this year, I started thinking of what the emails could have been...

Get XL-irated!
Super Bowl XL!
Let's Get this XL Party Started!

None of these really compare with last year's, and that's why I conclude this year's Super Bowl was not as exciting.

Perhaps even more disappointingly, even the ads were downers... especially that awful GoDaddy.com ad that referenced last year's terrible strappy tank top ad. And, as much as I am for the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, when did it become a good idea to air that during the Super Bowl? However, I will say that the "Oh, The Places You'll Go!" teaser (can we call it that?! and if not, what is it to be called?!) was absolutely hilarious for its utter mismatch-edness. I can truly say that I've never seen anything quite like it!

2006-02-02T14:10:00.000-08:00

Another Lo had the same idea!

2006-02-02T11:32:00.000-08:00

A busy week calls for more links, and today, there are plenty of good ones!

Kurt Vonnegut on teaching creative writing (via MaudNewton.com).
Doug Harvey visits two Southern California monuments: the new Getty Villa and the Regan Library.
Dana Stevens reviews "The Tenants" with surprising seroiusness.
The BHL backlash continues... (via TheMorningNews.org)
Nikki Finke, going in for the nasty (and unimportant) punches. (Thanks, Defamer!)
Reflections on The Ambassador Hotel, recent victim to the wrecking ball.
And, Bush's favorite SOTU words.

2006-02-01T13:12:00.000-08:00

Links for Wednesday

Though I am still curious about what breeds insanity in the postal service working environment, this was too cute not to link (via MaudNewton.com).
Speaking of "par avion", a gallery of Vintage Travel Labels. (via ThingsMagazine.net)
An interview with Shea Zellwegger, outsider logician.
Harry the Brave. (via DrudgeReport.com)
Hot Mama (on Swapatorium)
And if you haven't read Garrison Keillor's wonderful invective, "On the Road Avec H. Levy", scooch on over there now! Justified bashing also available at the Boston Globe. Both c/o Arts and Letters Daily.

Grappling with Hirschhorn

2006-01-31T13:15:00.000-08:00

Jerry Salz recently wrote about Thomas Hirschhorn's new show at Barbara Gladstone. Since I live in L.A., I don't think I'll get the chance to see it any time soon, but I did get to visit "Utopia, Utopia = One World, One War, One Army, One Dress" while I was in Boston over new year's. The show, comprehensive as the examples of camoflauge were, was tiring. Hirschhorn brings up a good point in the show's introductory video, though: isn't it weird that camoflauge is both militant uniform and a sometimes-trendy fabric. And that's what sets the tone for the rest of your tour. I really loved the video, and the dollhouses, and the Barbie dolls doing splits in those dollhouses. And I love it when he tries to tape over un-tape-able places and inserts those cancerous-looking protrusions. They're really interesting aesthetic cues that clue us into the open-ness of his work; that great, fresh, unfinished quality about it, and his interest in the abject. But, I still hunger for something as enveloping as "Cavemanman".

And I'm beginning to believe that he'll never really top "Cavemanman". (Michael Kimmelman's review certainly does justice to the show.) It was the perfect forum for him to be excessive with aluminum foil, with flourescent lights, with gobs of packing tape and cardboard. It was so great because the entire environment was transformed such that you believed the world he was describing--its endlessness, its hopelessness--and you wanted to get a better sense of what a dude in an aluminum cave would want to start thinking about in his isolation. Plus, the different caves were so much fun to wander around in and out of. When I went, there were kids playing in the little alcoves, really delighting in this strange amusement -- and it proved that great contemporary art can be entertaining for everyone, and especially fruitful if you wanted to figure out how foil-covered mannequins and gigantic replicas of volumes of Heidegger and Foucault could coexist in the same space. It changed the way I looked at art entirely, for all its subversiveness, and for all its ridiculous yet well-thought out aesthetics.

Hirschhorn's most recent taxonomies are interesting, but they don't have that same jolt. It's not so much because we've seen what he's done before (because we certainly haven't), but rather something else: these current jabs at the real world don't feel quite so successful for me because he's confronting a present condition, not extracting us from it. What I loved most about Cavemanman was the fact that Hirschhorn created an environment/work/tiny amusement park that was historical, transformative, gritty, and slapdash. It was basically the ultimate art funland, even though it was deviously serious. It raised my expectations for what installation could be. I suppose, in a way, you could say that Hirschhorn made his own bed, and the beds for all the other people who try to create environments in their work, and try to make them smart and interesting and fun all at the same time. And even though it makes it harder, for that, he's got to be one of the most pivotal figures of art in the early 21st century.

The Noms

2006-01-31T09:16:00.000-08:00

Oh, George Clooney! You rascal!

Mr. Clooney added humorously that he was surprised that these were his first
nominations: "I was a little disappointed I didn't win for best actor in a
batsuit with nipples," he said referring to his much-mocked performance in
"Batman & Robin." " But I needed a specific category." (via NYTimes.com)

I really do think Clooney's a hugely strange dork with one of the most handsome faces in the world...

Here is the full list of nominations and some commentary from Tim O'Neil via TheEnvelope.com. I'm interested in how things in the animated motion picture category will shake down (Miyazaki is up against Wallace and Gromit), and am hoping -- very much -- that we'll get to see Ang Lee be adorable and grateful on the Oscar podium. Also, thank goodness "The Squid and the Whale" got the nomination for original screenplay. But too bad Jeff Daniels* didn't get a nod; he was so deliciously pretentious and awful in it... More thoughts to come...

*Thanks, Liz!

The Right-iest Day of My Life. (Plus, Links)

2006-01-30T11:44:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, friends and I trekked over to the Crystal Cathedral (home to "The Hour of Power") and the Nixon Library and Birthplace. This amounted to the most conservative day of my life, but it was really interesting to see the business of religion in full form (we went to a service!), as well as the full story of the tainted legacy that is Richard Nixon's.

I find it absolutely fascinating that a man who is preaching to people through the cathode rays of a television set can justify spending money on architectural monuments by great architects. The first indication that Schuller had a palatable taste for architecture was Richard Neutra's Drive-In Church in 1962. The entirely original concept was that some parishioners would sit in pews inside the church walls, and some would drive their cars up to the parking lot, and Schuller would stroll and preach between the indoor podium and the outdoor balcony. [Sylvia Lavin's article "Richard Neutra and the Psychology of the American Spectator" does this much more justice than I ever could here...] He also employed Neutra to build the Tower of Hope, campanile and offices, which, in person, has a quality of regal simplicity. Then, later on, in 1980, Philip Johnson lent his expertise to build the Crystal Cathedral. And in 2004, Richard Meier's elaborate, Getty-esque Center for Possibility Thinking was unveiled. Pretty amazing. Also, as I was informed this weekend, the legacy of the televised Schullers continued with a new generation on MTV's "Laguna Beach: The Real O.C." (Season 1).

The Nixon Library and Birthplace was also really interesting. Weirdly, the grounds have a full-scale replica of the White House East Room, in addition to the main museum and the original kit-model house in which Nixon was born. While there is a great deal of bias (especially the Watergate exhibit), to be sure, but it was really interesting to see evidence of the different parts of Nixon's life -- from his and Pat Nixon's only wedding picture to his failed California gubernatorial bid; from the first presidential visit to China to the speech he would have given if Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had found themselves stranded on the moon. And, of course, Pat's gowns are a treat too, no matter if you side red or blue.

----

On a completely unrelated note (and back in my religious and political comfort zones), here are some links for a lazy Monday:

The Bear is a perpetual favorite.
Things Magazine links to an interesting deal: Buy the house, and they'll throw in the Ferari for free!
I've been thinking a lot about Victoria Morton recently.
And, more seriously: John Carey's book on the personal experience of art, and why literature is art's most supreme form. (Thank you, Arts and Letters Daily.)

2006-01-27T10:25:00.000-08:00

Amended: Frightening children! (via TheMorningNews.com) And still more feats of pictoral weirdness at We Could be Heroes!

Notes from the Highway

2006-01-27T09:23:00.000-08:00

Usually, my drive morning down the 10 East is not very interesting. It's besotted by routine -- NPR and Morning Edition's daily reportage on Iraq, my frustration with Marketplace's cutesy introductory tagline, and, when I'm feeling more frivolous and very tired, a medium sized English Breakfast Tea Latte from the Coffee Bean. Today was no different. But then I got onto the interchange for the 110, and in front of me was this great burgundy Toyota pick-up with the bumper sticker "Art Warrior." And above that, on the tailgate, there was a worn bumper sticker for "brushbymiho.com".

So, I was compelled to visit the site because the quiet publicity of her bumper stickers made me really interested in seeing what the deal with this person was. And I think her promotional strategy is perfect for Los Angeles. The line between publicizing yourself by getting the word out and overdoing it is a little difficult to tread, and even though I'm usually wary of bumper sticker websites, I think it was her awesome, no-bones truck that made me surf toher URL. After visiting, it also made me wonder why more people -- i.e. artists (besides Dennis Woodruff, I suppose) -- here in L.A. don't use this strategy deftly and quietly. I think, if done tastefully, it could do wonders...

Ashlee Simpson and the Suburbs

2006-01-26T19:00:00.000-08:00

Music Video Review
Artist: Ashlee Simpson
Song: "Lala" (Scroll down for "Lala" and its many streams)
Album: "Autobiography"
Director: Joseph Kahn

"Lala" begins with a standard suburban grid, some quick shots of girls hanging out, and then a closer view of a section of the grid. Soon, the camera closes in on Ashlee Simpson lazing about, and then takes in the shopworn symbols of the suburbs: a one-story house, power lines, trucks and minivans. To emphasize the terrain's superficiality, mirrors, glass, and chrome are glintz-ified. And after these quick-shot cliches, there comes a reward: there's a really beautiful shot of a slightly coiled, green water hose. It's simple and understated--almost obvious, but not quite. The hose is what made me think this video had potential to find the strange beauty of banality. I wanted to say that the colors sort of reminded me of Dan Graham's "Homes for America" and I kind of wanted it to have the sharp observation characteristic of a Stephen Shore photograph.

But that quickly seemed an inept comparison. The video has the fundamental flaw of not really know what it's doing. What ensues is Simpson hanging out with her girls, doing suburban teenage rebel-type stuff. They stomp on the roofs of minivans, they kick down garbage cans, and loiter in the parking lots of donut shops. They laugh at skaters who fall flat on their tricks. And Ashlee throws her soft drinks at annoying boys. While this felt a wee bit sophomoric, as these images flickered by, I decided I really liked the fact that Simpson isn't really trying to get the attention of a boy. And, it's pretty cool that she doesn't use the video to make herself out to be a foresaken victim. I like that she's hanging with her girls playing videogames, that after a party gets broken up by the cops, she leads her friends to the laundromat. That's all fine and good until you listen to the lyrics: she's singing a song that seems to imply that she's hanging out with someone she wants to--you know--"lala" (an Ashlee-coined phrase, I believe). And, as one might suspect, this strange inconsistency reveals that neither Simpson nor Kahn are really thinking through the concept of the video -- and how it relates to the song.

With the video, Ashlee Simpson is trying to prove that she's really fun to hang out with because she's mean to other people who, she deems, suck. But, in one short take, even the concept of her being a cool friend to hang out with is slightly lost on us. Remember how she threw soft drink cups at annoying boys? It's not so black and white: in fact, while her friends are pushing her in a shopping cart, she even throws her soft drink cups in the air and they hit her friends. This--and the posture of putting down people who fall down--didn't make me want to hang out with Ashlee Simpson.

I suppose the odds of my potential friendship with Ashlee Simpson were against us from the start. I don't really like her voice. She's got the Frankensteinian jauntiness of Shakira without the awesome ab-rolling capabilities and, let's admit, she can't really dance as well as Shakira anyway. While I was a high school nerd who is still a nerd and doesn't like drinking soda, she has crowned herself the queen of teenage rebellion with her extra-large soft drink in hand. If your friends are supposed to relate to you, it's incumbent upon me to hint that I probably wouldn't relate to Ashlee Simpson. But I do find her kind of fascinating. The interest lies in the fact that she's so steeped in cliches that she fumbles in her attempts to execute them. She's the younger sister who dyed her hair black because she wanted to be different, but she still wants to be a pop star. She starts feuds with other starlets (i.e. Lindsay Lohan) because she starts hooking up with their boyfriends, but then wants their friendship back. There's something almost comforting about the fact that she is a kind of cultural figure that won't go away.

"Lala" solidifies Simpson's rather unenviable position. It's a shopworn look at the suburbs and that's precisely why it renews one's interest in the suburbs. It's almost as though "Lala" is the last straw to the suburban boredom of "Madame Bovary" and the popular "American Beauty"dictum that the suburbs aren't what they seem. I realize these are large works to compare a silly music video to -- obviously. But I think the comparison is emblematic of just how flat the rebellion against the suburbs is. It's now a really easy topic to dismantle, and its symbols have become almost anaesthetic. So we have to find different ways of observing it. What makes "Lala" as interesting to me is that Simpson is the perfect pop star to end the suburbia debate with a whimper. For no one attempts to rebel with more un-self-conscious self-consciousness than Ashlee Simpson. And that is precisely the problem with the argument against the suburbs: it doesn't acknowledge how cliche its position has become.

Paradise Lost

2006-01-26T09:17:00.000-08:00

What's happened to LOST? Formerly the show that brought you the reinvention of television narration, it's fallen flat, and borderline comatose-inducing this season. What happened to the great storytelling of "Walkabout" or the energy of the insanely wonderful second season opener "Man of Science, Man of Faith"? Last night's episode, "Fire and Water," another rehashing of Charlie's drug obsession, was just another example of how boring Charlie's addiction story is and has become. I used to giggle every time I heard the refrain "Come on, everybody!" but after seeing DriveShaft in all their infantile/junkie glory, I just wanted to start watching "Project Runway" and Heidi Klum and her bump instead.

Every time LOST attempts to do one of these Charlie addiction episodes, something always falls flat. Even during the first season when we were introduced to Charlie's habits in "The Moth," the schtick felt a bit weathered and already overused. But it's become a go-to theme for the island to which all our characters were brought "for a reason" (Locke's infamous quote). One of the brilliant points that was brought up during our friend-filled screening last night was that the characters seem to not focus on what happened on the episode before, as though they can put action-filled stuff on hold. In last week's show, Michael went after Walt, Jack made Locke go after Michael (and Sawyer hopped on the bandwagon), and then Kate went after the triple threat. The Others captured Kate, pointed a gun at her head, and threatened to kill her if Jack, Locke and Sawyer didn't hand over their guns and go back to camp.

As "Survivor"-esque as the magical torch-lighting might have seemed for that scene, there was some interesting tension. But it's all been forgotten in Charlie's "crazy" episode. Kate is trying to protect Claire from Charlie's misbehavior, but there is no sign that she's traumatized or bedraggled by the experience. She's only concerned about Jack's budding friendship with Ana-Lucia? That seems a little thin to me. Speaking of Ana-Lucia, what happened to the awesome army that she and Jack were going to build together, using Michelle Rodriguez bad-girl expertise? Also, where's Rousseau? And perhaps more importantly, where is Michael?! Has he found Walt? What has Walt been up to? Who are these Others? Why don't we get to see what the deal is with them? A fantastic analogy to this phenomenon was also made last night: LOST has become some sort of boardgame. Instead of dealing with and juggling the stories efficiently and engagingly, we pause simply to see how one person is dealing with their flaw. This is LOST not Sorry! The approach seems lethal for a television show that's based on character-driven action. Where has all the action gone? And a Charlie-concocted fire doesn't count.

Oh, LOST! I only ask these questions because I know you can do better. There are so many strands that the show can start tying together, so many storylines to further. But hitting us over the head with faith seems like a strange strategy for putting it all into place. There's more on the island. You can have the faith, but let us see the adventure too.

The Cock and Bull Story

2006-01-25T10:10:00.000-08:00

Last night, I had the pleasure of going to a preview of "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story," courtesy of KCRW. I thought it was a delightful romp of a film. The premise is that we see Steve Coogan during a couple days of the shoot of "Tristram Shandy," a movie that all proclaim cannot be made because the book is so fraught with strangeness and such wealth of material. (Apparently, the first scene of the book, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, is Tristram-as-homunculus traveling between his father and mother!) So, instead, this film shows the cogs of filming an impossible movie, bits of the movie itself, and focuses on "Steve Coogan's" life while on set. It has, obviously, the same flavor as "Adaptation," particularly the scene when Charlie Kaufman is on the set of "Being John Malkovich." But, as zany as it is, I would say "Tristram" was a little bit more tucked in than its predecessor, a little less insane (which I think serves it well), and very funny. It features wicked humor and a nice, palatable voyeuristic quality that is delightful to watch. But something, I thought, was missing.

The film is chock-full of exacting moments, ones that I fear giving away because they're too delectable to have spoiled. The first scene will hook you with its wit, and, as far as the other parts, I'll say this: watch for insane 'introductory' battle, young Tristram, babies, wombs, references to Fassbinder, Steve Coogan and his agents, and stay for the bookend Coogan-Rob Brydon exchange during the credits. This is a very smart movie that tickles in most of the right places. But what I found interesting was that it puts Steve Coogan in a similar position to Charlie Kaufman of "Adaptation," but here we have a star with a bit of a star complex, but still personable. While I truly adore Steve Coogan, I didn't root for him in the way I rooted for Charlie Kaufman. Maybe it's because I've only recently been introduced to "Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge," but I think it's something else. Because Coogan's not as pathetic a figure, my emotions weren't as caught up with seeing him succeed or prevail. There is emotion -- I repeat, babies -- but Coogan just doesn't warrant as much sympathy from me as a sweaty, balding guy who has problems with his family and with getting girls.

It's only right that I should emphasize again that I haven't read the novel, so I think part of the insanity of the film is lost on me. But the general conception of everyday life getting in the way of telling a story rings true here. And my interest in watching the film was perpetuated by this sense of the everyday: I loved seeing the castle they were filming in, the costume racks, and the sometimes strained relationships between the people who worked on the film. This, I believe, is the major point.

On a small critical note, I kept looking for Michael Winterbottom, but was a little disappointed when it held itself apart from being super-meta by employing Jeremy Northam to play "Mark" the director of this fake "Tristram Shandy" film instead of Winterbottom playing himself. I think that would have added an interesting and more consistent touch. But I almost feel criminal saying such things without having read "Tristram Shandy" the novel. And, added to this, I'll admit to expecting almost divine things of Winterbottom, as the film is already impressive for its seamlessness and its ability to shuttle its audience off from the making of the film to the film itself so effortlessly.

For all my nitpickiness, the film is a pleasurable experience. It's not only a period piece -- poorly, hilariously made -- but an interesting look into what film-making is. And it's doubly refreshing because it makes movie-making into a tiresome business. For all its triumphs and its minor flaws, I heartily recommend it. And it's done what few adaptations can do: it's compelled me to read the book.

Bleh on "Entourage"

2006-01-23T11:39:00.000-08:00

Even though it would behoove me most to be watching seasons 1 through 5 of "The Sopranos" right now, I'm thinking about how much I loathe "Entourage". The show, now on hiatus and poised for its third season, was acclaimed by Alessandra Stanley as the best TV show of 2004 and thoughtfully dismissed by Dana Stevens for its "four callow jerks." And, although this is an opinion typed a year behind schedule, I am in hearty agreement with Ms. Stevens.

First, a concession: The ur-Ari Gold--Ari Emanuel, interminable king of Endeavor--is amazing to watch work. Seeing him the few times I did in real-time, in the flesh, and in action, yours truly-- as a mailroom neophyte--was bowled over by his infinitely various renditions of the word "fuck", and how he attacked his phone calls with the vengeance and tenacity of a raging rodeo bull. My stories don't do the mythic Ari-ness justice because his legendariness is courtesy of Defamer, who poke the best kind of fun at Emanuel and his goat-ish glee. (Quite simply, it warms my heart that they expedite his HuffPo rants onto its pages in nano-seconds.) Their charming updates help restore, even in me, post-Hollywood amateur critic, Emanuel's insanely lavish, cut-throat-lined mythology. And Jeremy Piven takes the beast head on, portraying Emanuel's quick wit and knife-sharp tactics with precision. His scenes make up the icing that holds "Entourage"'s chalky, cakey substance together.

What gets me about the rest of "Entourage" is its vapid vacancy. I get that Vince is a hot star; I get that he has a posse; I'm even slightly interested in the fact that this has some backstory in Mark Wahlberg's life. But I find it frustrating that it reinforces every male stereotype that makes Hollywood--and men in general--as undreamy and repulsive as it sometimes is/they sometimes are. The poaching wars are wonderfully delectable to watch, but how many times do we have to linger over Vince having banged some hot one night-stand girl? And how can his erratic behavior with Mandy Moore (in those dreadful "Aqauman" episodes) be counterpoint to his mindless witlessness? Who cares if Turtle smokes up all the time? Do I really want Vince's brother to get an acting job? Is Eric's loyalty to Vince the only evidence of his bland mind-cum-heart of gold? Why should I care why these "fame... with friends" people stay together as a clan? And when, exactly, will these characters be dignified with a depth that hits you in the heart?

Some say, particularly those polled in Stevens's article, that the male-bonding is what keeps them watching. What's the deal with all this bonding-resonance in "Entourage"? Perhaps the best question: Is this the same phenomenon as "Sex and the City" but with Y chromosomes? Honestly, I don't know. For me, as an XX, "Sex and the City" always seemed to show relatable flaws, even if they were at the cash register at Manolos. There is something universally terrifying about romantic relationships that I think spoke to women who were watching the well-coiffed quartet; there also seemed to be dimensionality to the characters, a certain sense of honest failure that kept them somewhat human. Heartwarming, though sometimes sappy, I was repulsed -- even by its worst episodes -- so much less by the quartet of New York-ettes than I have been by HBO's Hollywood hoodlums. "Entourage," while showing the sins of temptation and the flaws that capitulate to them, features those temptations in the most simultaneously wonderful and inane of places (Hollywood) with characters whose existence lies solely on superficial overdrive. And it's tiresome.

I used to know some dudes who absolutely loved "Entourage." I would venture to guess, though, that it was because the show is an onanistic meditation on what they hoped to become -- i.e. agents and studio execs with hot, button-nosed accessories on their arms. And because it's the kind of thing Hollywood insiders love to pride themselves on having gone through, or being a part of. But the humor of all of this was redundant to me--and, I would guess, completely unrelatable for the people watching who don't know who Jim Wiatt is. So, here are my final two questions: Why couldn't this entourage be something more interesting than that? And why can't the writers take Dana Stevens's advice and aim for surprise, instead of rote Hollywood one night stands?

Fun for a Friday

2006-01-20T14:08:00.000-08:00

This book has just gone on my to-read list (along with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, On Beauty, the first On Beauty, and The Immediate Experience).
Amazing things off the coast of Japan; pretty awesome thing in London!
The L.A. Weekly's website is shiny, new, and finally navigable.
Two pieces on dating: this suspiciously resonates with this.
And, I know I have a permanent link to it, but CuteOverload.com just keeps getting better and better!

Money Where Your Mouth Is

2006-01-20T00:53:00.000-08:00

Music Video Review
Song: “Grillz”
Artist: Nelly, featuring Paul Wall, Ali & Gipp
Album: Sweatsuit
Director: Fat Cats

When I was in seventh grade, I really wanted a retainer. It wasn't the result of oral fixation, but rather a fascination with the retainer's removability and its decorative possibilities. I thought of the retainer as an accessory after seeing people popping them out with their tongues (and without hands!) and storing them in their bright green plastic cases. I also imagined that a retainer was -- and I suppose still is -- something that you could embellish as long as your orthodontist had the ability to emblazon the plastic with Batman’s logo or color it neon pink with sparkles. After I thought about retainers a little more, and especially after having to endure one myself, I realized it was a little bit of a hassle. It was annoying to clean, sometimes it would cut the inside of my lip, it looked funny, and it slurred my speech in all the wrong places. At least it was helping my teeth stay straight.

Grills, though not functional per se, are not such a different proposition. Sometimes called fronts--and most likely an embellishment on the lone gold toothcap of yore--they have come into prominence in the past 10 years. And, for me, they have the kind of allure that reminds me of retainers. They stay in your mouth, gird your teeth (but don't straighten them), and, if you’re lucky enough to get them diamond-encrusted, can make you look pretty flashy. Nelly’s latest MTV Hits offering, “Grillz”, is an audio-visual tribute to this most voluntary of orthodontics. The premise of the video is simple: Nelly and his friends are hanging out at the most pimped out grill-molding place on the planet and sometimes they’re on a stage-like platform rapping. But above all they're just reveling in their grills.

This is your standard issue hip-hop video. It looks cool and then withers away in the usual abundance of bling-age and boob-age. But, there are two wonderful things that make watching the video a second, even a third time, worthwhile. The first is that the first thing you see is a really cute kid dressed up in a foam-constructed Superman costume. He jumps enthusiastically out of the grills parlor with a huge grin and his new gold grill. This has got to be one of the most adorable interludes in hip-hop video history.

More prominent is the second reason to watch this video again: Paul Wall. Paul Wall -- pronounced as closely to "Pow Wow" as anyone's name ever has been or will be -- is a devilish-looking fellow with a slightly husky build. He goes with the flow of his homeys, raps like molasses, and is, of course, king of all things grill. At age 17, this man (whose sub-monniker is "The People's Champ") started handing out flyers for a jewelry store in Houston. That was seven years ago. Now, that same store, TV Jewelery, to which he has risen to spokesman and possibly ownership prominence has become one of the most notable custom-made grill-producers in the country, fronting such stars as Slick Rick, Kanye West, Master P, Lil Jon, and, indeed, Nelly. In other words, its commodoties are hot.

And this is why Paul Wall's addition to the video is interesting: his very presence shifts the video from being a simple advertisement for a song about grills to being an advertisement for Paul Wall's grills within an advertisement for a song about grills. It is with specificity that we are only dealing with Paul Wall's goods. The People's Champ adroitly--almost stealthily--peddles his custom-made accessories within the context of the video, but he doesn't even need to display them in vitrines. Nelly seems to have created a song in praise of how awesome PW's grills are. Multiple times, he flashes a grinning mouthful of Wall-fashioned diamonds in response to the infectious lines "Smile fo' me, daddy / Let me see ya grill."

If I were Paul Wall, here's how I'd imagine this scenario: "Here is a pretty sizeable rap star featuring me and my products in his video and it doesn't even seem like I paid him to write the song that attaches my name to this timely fashion statement. This is pure, hands-off marketing genius!" To be fair, Paul himself only slips into the frame every now and then, in rap and in person. However, his presence is plastered all over the tape because everyone invovled in the video is presumably wearing or toting grills that he has produced. By virtue of all the grill-flashing, the video attempts to assert that grills are a widespread accessorizing phenomenon, especially among the ice-interested. The grill is something that everyone, including seven year-old boys, would likely possess. And not just any grill; it has to be one hand-crafted by Paul Wall. It's the only kind that has been Nelly, Ali and Gip-approved. And let's not forget the implication that he has hot babes milling around his grill-factory.

I suppose some might be tempted by other delights in the video. Ali lets himself flounce around the amusing line: "Gotta Bill in my mouth like I'm Hillary Rodham." We get to see Nelly's abs. There's some body-bouncing and ass-shaking. But, for me, nothing compares to the idea that Paul Wall is holding court in the middle of Nelly's video to rap, "Call me George Foreman cuz I'm sellin' everybody grillz." I just wonder how long it will take for orthodontists and their twelve year-old patients to catch on.

Synthetic "Ecstasy"

2006-01-17T09:50:00.000-08:00

When I went to visit "Ecstasy" in November of last year, the line to get in snaked out of the Geffen Contemporary's doors and onto the sidewalk. The smell of pot wafted through the open-air courtyard. And, of course, there was a guy handing out flyers regarding the legalization of all kinds of drug use. These seemed like features to be expected upon visiting the show since, one could say, "Ecstasy" is the institutionalized version of the counter-culture that it focuses on. Its appeal is broad-ranging enough that high falutin collectors can think of it as an academic exercise in altered perception and psychadelics can believe it is the artistic justification for their favorite activities. I'm just excited to see that a contemporary museum is luring so many visitors into its den of iniquities -- and at only $8 a pop!

But what of drugs? And what of drug use -- an illegal practice that could be seen as lauded and encouraged by a major museum exhibition? I'm about as straight-edge as they come, so the exhibit didn't really offer up an excuse for me to pop a pill before checking out some art. And though the exhibit might be interpreted as fast and loose, I don't think that it hands out licenses for its viewers to shoot up right before walking through the doors. I think it gives people a picture into abnormal visions of the world and, more politically-charged, gives artists a license and premise upon which they can use drugs in the name of their art. The caveat and the expectation, though, is that they do it in an interesting way. And because drugs are inherently a hot-button issue, it becomes harder to pull off their use as artistic rather than just-because-you'll-get-high. If one decides, say, to dissolve a tab of acid and record that experience, it should serve some informed creative goal, and it is incumbent that that goal connects/disrupts/toys with art history and culture. This person would also ideally have a working knowledge of Thomas de Quincey and Rodney Graham.

The question of how one incorporates contentious issues into art might best be framed by thinking about forays in the realm of conceptual art. In Chris Burden's "Shoot", the artist had someone shoot him in the arm. The idea behind the performance was putting one's self at risk, and pushing its boundaries. The wrong way to read it would have been to think that he was purporting that everyone should go around with guns shooting people's arms. Instead, the act of having someone shoot him in the arm was a tool that was used in order to further a conceptual framework that, in turn, pushed the avenues by which one can think about art. It changed the way one could think about performance, and--as I see it--begged the question of how mortal bodies seem to be ignored by the transcendence of the performative act. In a creepier vein, once could also think about Vito Acconci's "Seedbed," that insanely strange and seemingly lecherous work featuring him masturbating underneath gallery floorboards and projecting his moaning and groaning throughout the gallery via loudspeakers. It's one way of approaching the widespread practice of mastrubation. But it doesn't necessarily mean that everyone is going to mastrubate in the name of art, and it doesn't mean that those who do will be featured in a museum show. It meant that Acconci was crazy enough to set-up a situation of complete discomfort and the strangeness of strangers, blurring drastically the lines between public and private, and pushing his own body to its limits in the name of pushing art to its limits.

The reason why I bring "Shoot" and "Seedbed" up is because they have been accepted into the canon of performance art. Canons, for better or for worse, are working boundaries for quality, as well as artistic and conceptual standards. And this brings me to the editorial way of thinking about all of this--and what helps the exhibit walk the fine line between pandering and popular: curatorial choice. Paul Schimmel, as Michael Kimmelman puts so elegantly, is trying to make a case for art as a connective tool--one that gives people an experience that takes you outside of yourself and gently pushes you into different ways of seeing. That's the reason why "Ecstasy" works. In this great feature by Christopher Miles for the L.A. Weekly, Miles emphasizes Schimmel's idealistic vision, one that is compelled by getting people interested in what art can do--and hopefully, win over some new eyeballs for the banner of "art-going public". The difference is that Schimmel isn't curating a show that promotes drug use as a recreational activity after an artist makes his/her paintings. Instead, it's a show that dabbles in widespread symbols of drug culture and threads them through the general theme of weird, altered states of consciousness, and artwork that changes one's perception. It's a sexy title for a rather unsexy, naive-sounding concept. What's more, it's one that holds its works to high standards. As far as meeting those goals, I can say that "Ecstasy" certainly proffers some interesting cases. Even if there is a bit of mushroom overkill, it's definitely worth checking out.

Oh, and if you go, be sure to visit Erwin Redl's green lights. They'll surely alter your perception.

Three for Design

2006-01-16T10:34:00.000-08:00

Imagineer George McGinnis on the making of Space Mountain. Some thoughts on slow design and The New Yorker. And Jonathan Ives: the man behind your IPod.

Performing Literature

2006-01-13T09:23:00.000-08:00

One excuse Laura Albert, Geoffrey Knoop, Savannah Albert, JoAnna Albert and, by proxy, Carolyn F. Albert -- i.e. JT Leroy -- could come up with is that they've been working in the same medium as Maurizio Cattelan. As some might remember, for some time, Cattelan would refuse to appear in public, having a friend stand-in for him at news conferences and the like to be being "the face"/"the voice" of Maurizio Cattelan. (Sonja Wessel's question in this interview slightly touches on this aspect of his work.) Thus, Leroy and Co. could say they've perpetrated one of the most amazing performance art collectives of all time.

Now if we could only figure out an excuse for James Frey.

Mies is Murder

2006-01-12T13:55:00.000-08:00

Modern architecture is killing birds!

The Wonderful World of Blogs

2006-01-12T11:50:00.000-08:00

I've decided to replace my obsession with Sudoku with another equally fascinating activity: blog-surfing. Yesterday, I started clicking on the "Next Blog" button on the Blogger toolbar and have already come across some happy discoveries: Swamptorium, full of found photographs and other odds and ends; Operation Blue Jay, devoted to pictures of a naval tour of Scandanavia; Adrian Laino shows y video, a tribute to Adrian Laino, who seems to be a minor salsa superstar; and Cordayology and Mark Greene, MD, ER fan fiction blogs!

The Puzzling Aesthetics of Elizabeth Murray

2006-01-11T15:58:00.000-08:00

Those who know me would probably agree that I'm a minimalist at heart, no matter how messy my room is. The first painter I fell in love with was Barnett Newman. Then came Agnes Martin. Then Brice Marden. Then Sue Williams, especially the squiggles-on-white stuff. You get the picture. I have a love for line and open spaces, rich color and aching simplicity.

So it was no wonder that, when I went to Elizabeth Murray's mid-career retrospective at MoMA this winter, I would fall in love with "Pink Spiral Leap" (1975). But the rest, of course, puzzled me entirely. I decided that I didn't like looking at her work. I decided I could appreciate the art historical references -- Cubism, still lives in general, Frank Stella, maybe even... dare I say it?... Keith Haring. I also liked -- even loved -- that she was humorous. But I still felt like I was left with something that is just too Martin Lawrence Gallery for me to handle!

And that triggered a different kind of interest: I started to get excited about her work because it punctures my personal notions of visual propriety.

Reading Carroll Dunham's article, "Shapes of Things to Come," today was enlightening (it's from Artforum's October 2004 issue). It was nice to look at the paintings again and be confused because I think confusion is precisely the nerve that Murray is trying to hit. What her work reveals is an energetic courage that completely changes the boundaries of what a painting or a sculpture can be. She does that Duchampian thing of saying "Look at art this way" without using products from the real world, just her own representations of them. She likes cups. She likes paint brushes. So she paints them and then blows them up, sucks them in, puts them through any number of wacky run-arounds to get to strange, jolting forms. Put a different way, she's collaging together different notions of art history within her art-making and expressing them in strictly formal ways. I suppose that's how I'm looking at Murray's work at the moment. I think that's what makes it difficult. I think that's why I'm starting to warm up to it.

Why Madonna Can Get Away with Faux-Humping a Stereo

2006-01-11T12:17:00.000-08:00

Music Video Review
Artist: Madonna
Video: "Hung Up"
Album: Confessions on a Dance Floor
Director: Johan Renck

Madonna, now a 47 year-old mother of two, looks pretty fucking amazing. In this latest video, Madonna's slight transformation into a `70s disco diva registers complete. For most of it, she's clad in a shimmery pink wrap, magenta leotard, practice tights, dainty heels, and a sequined belt. And as she kicks and pirouettes--and even when she pulses her crotch while sitting propped up on the floor--there's not a wrinkle or fat-flab in sight. Though I wonder whether or not Kabballah water really is the source of youth, what makes this 5 minutes and 31 seconds of pure pleasure is not simply Madonna's age-defying anatomy. It is the age-defying pulse of the video itself. It deftly maneuvers the simple, undeniable fact that dancing is fun and that, as "Flashdance" as it might sound, dancing well is a sure sign of a youthful kind of cool.

The video begins with Madonna strolling into a darkened studio, flipping on the lights, taking off her sweats, and turning on a hefty, black, light-blinking boombox. She and her pink leotard warm up and sway to the first beats of "Hung Up." And then the tempo picks up and the momentum begins to churn. Interspersed with well-timed cuts of Madonna practicing her twinkle-toes repertoire, the supporting content of the video is a series of four energetic vignettes of other dancers -- all over the world -- who are gettin' down. And what links them together, of course, is this big, black boombox blaring Madonna's addictive single and, even more palpable in the video, the infectious power of dance.

The first is a crowd of break-dancer like dudes hanging out on the roof and stairs of a concrete housing project. These guys bounce from wall to wall, walk down steps in backbends, fashion backflips, and do all manner of impressive, urban, break-dancer-y things. They set the fast, quick-cut pace for the video. The second group is a couple of kids in South Central Los Angeles waiting at a bus stop. The blinking stereo makes its way to the bench, and ghetto-fabulous dancing commences. One young upstart pushes everyone motionless and starts strutting her stuff, down to a split. As she dances her little heart out, everyone else piles into a cab and--in a witty move-- she's left behind in disappointment. Then there's the scene with a Chinese fishmonger hanging out behind the counter. He suddenly hears the music, slaps the fish around his shoulder like a prop, and starts gettin' down. Others join, including a Catholic schoolgirl, and they, too, start synching up with the beat.

Halfway through, night begins to fall and we see our friends from South Central getting out of a typical black London taxi cab, much to their surprise. We then catch a glimpse of them South Central friends riding a crowded car of the Tube, where a gyrating guy sparks a dance-off. When his puffed chest doesn't do the trick, a zaftig woman shows him down. Out on the streets, Madonna, now in a leather jacket and jeans, walks down an alley, paying homage to John Travolta's first scene in "Saturday Night Fever." And then we arrive at the club. Madonna and fellow club-goers lean across and over each other in slow motion, indulging in artsier Martha Grahm-style pile-ups. But then a new wave of fun washes over the video: we not only get cut to scenes of Madonna fake-humping her light-tastic stereo, we also get to see her making Dance Dance Revolution look legitimately cool. The video culminates with other clubbers surrounding DDR in all its glory, dancing collectively and then breaking out into the hustle. And everyone keeps dancing the night away.

I realize that I've now spent three paragraphs simply summarizing the content of the video, but the feats of bodily contortion and quick, short cuts kept my foot tapping all the way through; thus, doing precisely what the video aims to inject in its viewers. Even though it might be slightly creepy to think of her kids seeing the video, Madonna comes out on top not only because of her divine fitness, but because she is a lead star with restraint. The idea of self-promotion is one that taints videomaking in general, and Madonna certainly does become the primary, most-viewed icon for all that is "Hung Up." But what becomes the captivating feature of these 5.2 minutes is that she doesn't over-do it and she sticks to something that is both contemporary and spans the ages (or, at least the last 30 years).

I started thinking about whether or not I could imagine a younger pop star at the helm of the video. Pre-preggers Britney Spears was the obvious substitute. But Britney is too flashy for something this surprisingly down-to-earth, such a seemingly low-concept of a production. This is purely Madonna, but Madonna-as-sage-purveyor of youth. She and Renck strike a universal appeal by tapping into the low-key, everyman coolness of people hanging out and dancing. What's great is that it's not apparent that these individuals are members of any company; they just like dancing. This hang-out quality of the video even allows humor to make cameo appearances: the show-off getting left behind, the fishmonger using a slimy cod as a prop, and that large woman showing up a slight, overconfident homey. These quick moments certainly don't reek of Madonna's self-importance; they're just general, dorkily cute anecdotes. And along with this, Madonna throws Dance Dance Revolution and the hustle in for good measure. The fact that she can cobble together all of these seemingly disparate elements, faux-hump a stereo, and still manage to look cool indicates her mastery -- and Renck's -- of the popular appeal of the music video medium.

When I first watched "Hung Up" with my friend Genevieve, we were actually compelled to rewind the DVR back to the beginning. We wanted to see it again and imitate Madonna's many moves. She fared far better than I did; my kick-ball-change suffers from little aptitude. But it was proof-positive that this is the kind of video that makes you want to kick up your heels, perfect your Moonwalk, and watch the video all over again. It might even trick you into believing that Madonna is fifteen years younger because the video plugs into something larger than even she is. It ultimately proves that Madonna is as inventive, hip, and on top of her game as any diva could hope to be.

George Saunders

2006-01-10T21:11:00.000-08:00

Here are two great George Saunders things:

"Bohemians" - a story published almost two years ago. I just rediscovered it in my back issues a couple weeks ago. It was noted as Saunders's move from hyperrealism to realism, but all I could think as I read it was: This is America!
An interview with Robert Birnbaum. My favorite part is after the mid-way point and Saunders talks about how great it was to see Tobias Wolf as "a nice person. A loving and loved person" instead of the tortured, manic, insane artist-writer that so pervades public imagination of what characterizes brilliant writers.

2006-01-09T11:52:00.000-08:00

Arthur Lubow's Times article, "The New Leipzig School," is fantastic. Not only do we get a biographical view of the highly inventive, strange-named superstar Neo Rauch, but we get this great nugget:

"[Christian references and Greek myths] were used in a very intelligent way and could be read by people who were intelligent and had a higher level of education," Rink says. "Nobody paints a Sisyphus or Icarus anymore. Artists are free to interpret the world without enigmatic tools."

Rink, Neo Rauch's painting professor at the Leipzig academy, sees freedom in the open-ended possibilities of making art. What makes this interesting is that this turn -- from iconography to open-field -- changed the entire way in which spectators approach modern/contemporary art. In my opinion, the act of someone else looking is what turns art from being 'useless' to being meaningful. (But more on that, Foucault, and Barthes in a longer post...) Because art has taken such different forms in the past forty years, from conceptual art to video art, looking at contemporary art has become a slightly demanding proposition. Around the beginning of the 20th century, engaged viewers of contemporary art were expected to shift away from traditional Icaruses to a working knowledge of Duchamp's "Fountain."

Thus, an artist's art historical interests and the viewers' knowledge about them can tip the scales of looking at art from a simple exercise in browsing to thinking in visual terms. Surely art history was useful for looking at art for viweers in the past, but especially today it seems that a little knowledge can help viewers suspend their disbelief about conceptual and abstracted forms. Artists are creating their ideas in visual forms for us to think about; and, as I see it, looking intelligently is what gives dignity to the whole enterprise.

2006-01-06T16:46:00.000-08:00

Two little, unrelated things before the weekend:

How could I not have known that Lisa Loeb is going have her very own E! reality TV show?!
Why does the happy face in the logo for HappyNews.com look disappointed? And why do I want to make fun of this picture so badly when I know it's celebrating such a good cause?

2006-01-05T16:17:00.000-08:00

I've been spending most of my time today eagerly awaiting the latest from David Edelstein, formerly of Slate.com and now, since 01/01/06, film critic-in-residence at New York Magazine. I first got hooked on Edelstein after he got it completely right about "Eternal Sunshine" while Elvis Mitchell entirely failed to see or understand the film's emotional depths. I had Edelstein on the brain today anyway because right after I got to work I looked up his review of "Revenge of the Sith", which I saw for the first time last night (pretty awesome--I'm a sucker for anything epic and seamlessly CGI'd). In his review, subtitled "I Dream of Jedi," I was delighted to find that he quotes one of the more memorably saccharine, undoctored lines--"Hold me like you did by the lake on Naboo"--really the pinnacle of priceless, cringe-worthy moments. Poor Portman!

Until Edelstein's return--or at least until I find the link to his latest review--there's this fantastic interview with the man himself from July 2005 at RockCritics.com. Oh, what a personable looking gent!

2006-01-04T15:49:00.000-08:00

This has got to be the strangest story of last year...

2006-01-03T13:02:00.000-08:00

Lindsay Lohan
"Confessions of a Broken Heart (Daughter to Father)"
Director: Lindsay Lohan
--------

"A few can touch the magic string,
And noisy Fame is proud to win them;
Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!"
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Voiceless.

Lindsay Lohan’s foray into the public spotlight as the infectious reprise of Hallie Parker/Annie James in Disney’s remake of “The Parent Trap” defied expectations (i.e. my mom’s) that Hayley Mills’s original double-billing could be matched with someone of equally adorable British-ness and scrappy American-ness. The 1998 good-natured, family-oriented confection gave Lohan the opportunity to strut her young, mass-market potential and radiant red locks, and was a springboard that catapulted her into the wide, deep pool of celebrity-dom. Since 1998, Lohan has blossomed and shrunk and almost-normalized; been linked to the arms of Wilmer Valderrama, Aaron Carter, Johnny Knoxville, Jared Leto, and purportedly Bruce Willis; been accused of using cocaine, has admitted to smoking pot, and, somewhat notoriously fell victim to paparazzi-directed road rage on the streets of L.A. (one street, Robertson Blvd., to be exact). And during Lohan’s trials and tribulations, every step of the way and with tooth and nail, fame has caught and clung to the young starlet’s life with a vengeance. It was interesting, then, that just as the first onslaught of fame was mounting, her career beginning to flourish, she bit her metaphorical thumb by singing in her ampless, self-centered 2002 pop ditty “Rumors” (off of “Speak”): “Why can't they back up off me? Why can't they let me live? / I'm gonna do it my way, take this for just what it is.”

Aspiring to Sinatra, she has been doing it her way and, lately, doing it Lindsay’s way not only includes singing and acting, but, as evidenced in one of her latest music videos, “Confessions of a Broken Heart (Daughter to Father),” it also includes what every Holly-would wishes she could do too: directing. Of course, “Confessions,” a single off of her sophomore effort “A Little More Personal (Raw)” and named a little too closely after her 2004 movie, “Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen,” comes from a personal place—-the estrangement of her father. Thus, it seemed to make sense that this child star has the knowingness and intimacy of experience to let the song and its moving-image companions unfurl. The jaded look and gravitas of the video led me to believe that Lohan wanted her video to be art with a message, so, I continued to watch as, in accordance with her sad song, she stacked her directorial deck with the storyline of her childhood. Cast in shabby chic, brooding, almost tint-colored production, we see the scenes of a broken home: in the living room, a careless, banker-y father argues with the mother threatening to take the kids, in an apparently dilapidated bathroom (with a bathtub full of water) Lohan cries and lies in wait for the results, and, in a seemingly charmed bedroom, her sister bangs against the door, tears streaming down the face. But here’s the kicker: the action’s happening in a set of department store windows, fodder for the world to see.

Even with the torment of fatherly abandonment apparently taking center stage, it doesn’t feel like that’s Lohan’s point. With frayed minimalism and arty filters, the point instead—-and made a bit obviously-—is that Lohan is always being watched, that her life is theater, and that her privacy is always withheld; a point that reinforces the idea that Lohan’s musical career has only one trick up its sleeve. With high production value, and a good dose of extras doing their best to be curious, Lohan overlays the concept and makes it even more unappealing, even less subtle with metaphors and symbols that she pushes into overtime. It’s a little like a bad version of Nan Goldin doing a Tina Barney-esque household portrait. The device of putting Lohan in a down-and-out, shop window loo feels indulgent and tired, even as it hopes to have some claim to invention. Lohan, her mother and her sister (the latter two played by actresses) cling to their rosaries in desperate yet out-of-place wishes for salvation, which feels almost super-religious. And then we see Lohan dressed up as a disappointed princess in three different poofy outfits that allow her and her alone to navigate the different store windows—because the spotlight’s on her. There’s the sense that Lohan is trying to telegraph her audience with her outfits, trying to say, Look, I have all these pretty clothes, but, in light of a neglectful father, they don’t really mean anything. But, of course, they do. It seems that Lohan wants to convey the idea that no matter how famous you might be, broken homes still put you in a bad situation. But what eeks me about their placement is that their lavish materials, bejeweled extravagance, and yards of tulle automatically claim that there’s something about this girl singing—she’s charmed somehow, she’s special.

Eventually, Lohan’s special-ness becomes the fulcrum for the video. Because only she has the power to sashay into these different rooms, she has purposely directed herself into isolation, where she can’t or won’t connect with any of the other players in the video, not even when her sister clings to her leg for consolation. Toward the end of the video, we see Lohan belting it out in her bathroom as pictures of the family-that-was magically float to the windows, and then--the climax--the windows shatter with defiance. Instead of this moment being powerful and paradigm-shifting, it confuses the question of Lohan’s ever-watched-ness; there’s not enough ambiguity in the subsequent scenes to make it an ambiguously useful turn. Instead, they provide more evidence for the feeling that Lohan has used the video as a means of demonstrating her own acting abilities – crying on cue, having emotive fits. Lohan has hoped to make something interesting, something arty, that could have displayed her artistic depth and as an opportunity to have us take her more seriously as a musical artist.

But, for Lohan’s music, the point isn’t depth; it’s about star-power. And, it’s true, Lohan’s star-power is absolutely undeniable and, like it or not, unavoidable. It is from this hypnotic quality that Lohan keeps attracting fans and gossip-mongers, which has in turn also provided a fruitful terrain for Lohan herself to put to work. She does want to get a little more personal, doesn’t she? What has become most interesting about Lindsay Lohan-as-chanteuse is that she sings about microscopic experiences enjoyed by a miniscule portion of the population. The topics for Lohan’s music, especially her singles, all have something to do with her fame, her attempts to repel the uglier parts of fame, but her obvious desire to share her experience of fame. Here’s the rub: if she doesn’t want people to be obsessed with her fame, why doesn’t she stop obsessing about it? She targets tabloids and their readers as the people who add an extra dimension of misery to her life, but by trying to trump this devil’s bargain with fame by using gossip and star-gazing as a subject to sing about, Lohan ultimately can never stray from it.

Lohan’s talents as an actress are broad-ranged and like the rest of the world, I know her acting career is going somewhere. I was enthralled by her dead-on performance of high school/girl confusion in “Mean Girls” and I’m eager to see how she fares in “Bobby,” “Fashonistas” and “A Prairie Home Companion.” But Lohan’s career as a singer-songwriter gets short shrift as a result; it feels like an add-on that pumps more money into the LL Rocks empire. Indeed, the domain name of her official website gives us a clue as to what precisely her favorite subject is. In her musical endeavors, she never connects her subjects to a larger swath of what’s generally human, and she isn’t able to give voice to the voiceless or inject a bit of normalness to her lyrical and visual content. Currently, and especially as evidenced through “Confessions” the video, Lohan’s music career reeks of self-indulgence, self-flattery and self-congratulation and in this video is she taking herself—and directing herself—too seriously. But there’s a place for her in our audio-visual culture because she already has all the fame in the world, and she most certainly has the means with which to sing about it.