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“Crichton Taps Out His Books On An Olivetti Word Processor (Price: $13,500)”

November 6, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

Michael Crichton was one of the more unusual entertainers of his time, a pulp-ish storyteller with an elite education who had no taste–or talent?–for the highbrow. He made a lot of people happy, though scientists and anthropologists were not often among them. The following excerpt, from a 1981 People portrait of him by Andrea Chambers, reveals Crichton (unsurprisingly) as an early adopter of personal computing.

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At 38, he has already been educated as an M.D. at Harvard (but never practiced), written 15 books (among them bestsellers like The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man), and directed three moneymaking movies (Westworld, Coma and The Great Train Robbery). He is a devoted paladin of modern painting whose collection, which includes works by Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg, recently toured California museums. In 1977, because the subject intrigued him, Crichton wrote the catalogue for a Jasper Johns retrospective at Manhattan’s Whitney Museum. “Art interviewers tend to be more formal and discuss esthetics—’Why did you put the red here and the blue there?’ ” says Johns. “But Michael was trying to relate me to my work. He is a novelist and he brings that different perspective.”

Crichton’s latest literary enterprise is Congo (Alfred A. Knopf), a technology-packed adventure tale about a computer-led diamond hunt in the wilds of Africa. Accompanied by a friendly gorilla named Amy, Crichton’s characters confront everything from an erupting volcano to ferocious apes bred to destroy anyone who approaches the diamonds. The novel has bobbed onto best-seller lists, despite critical sneers that it is “entertaining trash.” (A New York Times reviewer called it “literarily vapid and scientifically more anthropomorphic than Dumbo.”)

Crichton cheerfully admits that Congo owes more than its exotic locale to Sir Henry Rider Haggard’s classic King Solomon’s Mines. “All the books I’ve written play with preexisting literary forms,” Crichton says. A model for The Andromeda Strain was H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. The Terminal Man was based on Frankenstein’s monster. Crichton’s 1976 novel Eaters of the Dead was inspired by Beowulf. “The challenge is in revitalizing the old forms,” he explains.

Crichton taps out his books on an Olivetti word processor (price: $13,500) and bombards readers with high-density scientific data and jargon, only some of which is real. “I did check on the rapids in the Congo,” he says. “They exist, but not where I put them.” His impressive description of a cannibal tribe is similarly fabricated. “It amused me to make a complete ethnography of a nonexistent tribe,” he notes. “I like to make up something to seem real.”•

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Old Print Article: “Mr. Eisenstein Discusses Hollywood,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1932)

October 29, 2014 in Film, Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Just as talkies were announcing themselves across America, genius Russian silent film director Sergei Eisenstein was dejectedly departing Hollywood, no richer financially or creatively for his failed attempts at pleasing U.S. movie producers. An article in the May 1, 1932 Brooklyn Daily Eagle made clear his disenchantment with the business end of show business and the automaton nature of the burgeoning studio system.

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“We Are Personally And Collectively Complicit In The Recording Of Virtually Everything We Do”

October 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Legislation isn’t going to curb government surveillance nor will prosecutions put a halt to individuals hacking and leaking such information. The tools have become greater than the law–and they will grow even greater still. The other reason we won’t stop snooping is because most of us like it, not just the feeling of protection it gives us in these supposedly scary times, but also the acknowledgement that attends being monitored. We like to watch, and we like being watched. How important we must be. From a David Cole post at The New York Review of Books about Laura Poitras’ Snowden Affair documentary, Citizenfour:

“Snowden’s effort to tame his unruly hair also reveals the self-consciousness that seems to have pervaded every step of his decision to disclose the NSA files. He knows, of course, that he is being videotaped; he invited Poitras in, after all. (In addition to recording his every waking hour in the hotel room, she produced on the spot a twelve-minute film that was released the same week as the first disclosures, which introduced Snowden to the world as the NSA leaker.) Poitras does her best to conceal her presence as the filmmaker, but everyone involved knows they are being filmed, and that someday this will be shown on movie screens around the world. As a result, there are relatively few instances of real candor.

In this respect, Citizenfour unwittingly reflects the tenor of the digital age not just in its subject matter, but in its style. The film’s content concerns the ability of the government in the twenty-first century to monitor all of us at all times. The goal of the NSA’s mass surveillance programs is to ‘collect it all,’ as the agency itself declared in a PowerPoint slide leaked by Snowden. Technology has made that goal possible in ways that could hardly be imagined a decade ago. Snowden’s disclosures have put the world on notice that these are not abstract or speculative dangers.

But as Poitras’s real-time filmmaking itself reminds us, it’s not just the NSA and its sophisticated computers that make dragnet data collection possible. It’s also a defining feature of a world in which we are personally and collectively complicit in the recording of virtually everything we do.”

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Revenge Of The Mekons Opens Today In NYC

October 29, 2014 in Film | Permalink

A reminder that Joe Angio’s documentary opens at Film Forum today. Buy tickets here. Read more about the movie in the New York Times here and here.

 A repost from October 9:

Four years ago, I began telling you about Joe Angio’s Revenge of the Mekons documentary, which was then just in its Kickstarter phase. Now it’s a completed, critically acclaimed movie about the legendary punk band, has played numerous festivals and is ready to begin its run at Film Forum in New York, the city’s best cinema. It’s scheduled for five showings daily from Wednesday, October 29 through Tuesday, November 4. (Buy tickets online at the theater’s site; I’ll leave a link at the top of the front page so that you can get there easily.)

Revenge of the Mekons is a movie that combines rock music, independent filmmaking and journalism, the second, third and fourth worst career choices possible. (Fuck you, Radio Shack clerk!) It’s a profile of a complicated and revolutionary group which refuses to go away after 37 years and continues evolving and making great music. It’s also a testament to maintaining focus on what’s important regardless of changing fashions (and the same can be said of the film itself).

Take a look at the trailer.

In addition to watching an exciting film, you’ll also witness a number of special guests introduce various screenings, including Mekons Jon Langford and Steve Goulding, The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn and the great critic Greil Marcus. Jonathan Franzen, who’s featured in the movie, is not scheduled to introduce a screening because he has Jonathan Franzen money, so fuck you. But one of my favorite writers, Luc Sante, will present a showing because he does not have Jonathan Franzen money. You’ll recognize Sante as he’ll be the one dressed like a Bolshevik, muttering something about an 1890s Bowery barber who severed a customer’s tongue with a straight razor. Nice and normal, Luc.

And I promise that if you go see this movie at Film Forum, I will never, ever mention it again.

Until the home video release.

Thanks, Darren.

We sell Victrolas.

I moonlight at Victrola Hut.

“[He] Hit Bottom With A Noticeable, Almost Cinematic Thud”

October 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

The opening of Kenneth Turan’s 1988 New York Times profile of Robert Towne, one of Hollywood’s all-time greatest screenwriters, who had been suffering through his professional and personal worst, and was angling for a career renaissance:

PACIFIC PALISADES, Calif.— Half a dozen years ago, Robert Towne, the Oscar-winning author of Chinatown, The Last Detail and Shampoo, hit bottom with a noticeable, almost cinematic thud. Alternately battered by ”a hideous custody battle” with his ex-wife, by the death of a dog he was ”shamelessly attached to,” and by a debilitating series of studio battles over his first directorial effort, Personal Best, and his script for Greystoke, he ”walked out on a desolate beach filled with garbage from Santa Monica Bay and felt I had nothing left.”

”There was a guy on the beach with his wife and he came up to me and said, ‘Excuse me, but we made a mistake. We came out here but because of a bus strike, our transfer tickets don’t work and we can’t get back downtown. Can you help us?’ I reached into my pocket and gave him all the money I had.

”I realized that that was the best thing anybody could have done for me. I was feeling completely impotent, and here on this beach was one guy I could do something for. It made me feel that I was not completely useless, that somehow things would be O.K.”

If Mr. Towne’s life were indeed a script, that turnaround would have been effected in an It’s a Wonderful Life twinkling. But its reality is that it has taken him six years to be sitting where he is, newly moved into the cozy den of a rambling Normanesque pile in Ronald Reagan’s old neighborhood in Pacific Palisades. He is remarried, has joint custody of his 10-year-old daughter, two new dogs and a new film that he’s written and directed, Tequila Sunrise, which opens on Friday. Yet not only are echoes from what, he says, ”the Irish would refer to as ‘the troubles’ ” very much with him, they in fact provided one of the underpinnings for his new project.

”Anytime you’re involved in legal matters, as I was with my divorce and Personal Best, you feel like a criminal, which made it particularly easy to identify with McCussick,” Mr. Towne says of Sunrise’s protagonist. Played by Mel Gibson, Dale McCussick is a longtime drug dealer who is desperately trying to get out of the business. His best friend since high school, Nick Frescia (Kurt Russell), also has a more than nodding acquaintance with drugs; he is a cop who’s just been named head of narcotics for Los Angeles County. And both men have the most passionate of interests in Jo Ann Vallenari (Michelle Pfeiffer), the hostess of a trendy South Bay restaurant.

”It’s a movie about the use and abuse of friendship,” Mr. Towne says. ”It’s natural to have occurred to someone who has close friends in Hollywood. People in the movie business don’t hesitate to say: ‘We go back a long way. You owe me one.’ I owe you one what?”

As with Chinatown, Mr. Towne has chosen to make his points within the framework of an elaborately plotted melodrama. ”I think melodrama is always a splendid occasion to entertain an audience and say things you want to say without rubbing their noses in it,” he says. ”With melodrama, as in dreams, you’re always flirting with the disparity between appearance and reality, which is a great deal of fun. And that’s also not unrelated to my perception of my life working in Hollywood, where you’re always wondering, ‘What does that guy really mean?”’

With his close-cropped salt-and-pepper beard, tousled graying hair and soft, almost hypnotic voice, the 53-year-old Mr. Towne could pass for a particularly potent counterculture guru, and, in fact, in an industry starved for wise men, he is often cast in that role. His near-legendary uncredited contributions to scripts other people wrote include restructuring Bonnie and Clyde and creating the Al Pacino-Marlon Brando tomato-garden scene in The Godfather, which Francis Coppola acknowledged in his Oscar acceptance speech.•

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“As Benchley Became A Successful Journalist…His Shark-Watching Continued”

October 21, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Videos | Permalink

In a 1974 People article, Joan Oliver profiled Peter Benchley after his novel Jaws had become a huge bestseller, but before anyone knew that its adaptation would forever change Hollywood. An excerpt:

“The book is the tale of a great white shark which cruises Long Island’s South Shore, gobbling up unwary swimmers, while a resort town’s police chief, civic leaders and citizens battle angrily over which is more important—the safety of the residents or the tourist-based economy of the swank community in its high season.

Jaws grew out of young Benchley’s fascination with sharks, triggered by family swordfishing expeditions off Nantucket. ‘We couldn’t find any swordfish,’ he recalled recently, ‘but the ocean was littered with sharks, so we started catching them.’

As Benchley became a successful journalist—reporter on the Washington Post, free-lancer for such magazines as Life and The New Yorker, an editor of Newsweek—his shark-watching continued. In the 1960s he capitalized
on his interest with two magazine articles, not long after a 4,500-pound great white shark was taken off Long Island’s Montauk Point. A few years later he was assigned to do a piece about Southampton—Long Island’s tony watering place. Benchley remembers thinking, ‘My God, if that kind of thing can happen around the beaches of Long Island, and I know Southampton, why not put the two together.’

The star attraction of Benchley’s book is the marauding monster whose savage attacks Benchley describes with horrifying clarity. On the fate of a child snatched from a raft, he writes: ‘Nearly half the fish had come clear of the water, and it slid forward and down in a belly-flopping motion, grinding the mass of flesh and bone and rubber. The boy’s legs were severed at the hips, and they sank, spinning slowly, to the bottom.'”

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“I wrote a novel about a great white shark”:

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“It’s Only A Matter Of Time Until The Movie Theater Industry Has To Adjust Or Fall Behind”

October 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We don’t go to World’s Fairs anymore, because they come to us, playing on the screens in our shirt pockets. Something is lost in that transition, but a lot is gained, too. While I think movie and TV camera work has suffered severely in our binge-watching, small-screen culture, there’s no denying that the Hollywood distribution paradigm is dated, a dinosaur. It doesn’t resemble at all the way people live now, with the ubiquity of portability, and one way or another it will change. From Kevin Smith (no, not that one) of Elite Daily: 

“Going to the movies has become an expensive outing rather than just a fun past time. Across the country, but especially in New York City, moviegoers (who aren’t budget-conscious) can expect to spend upwards of $30 on just a ticket and snacks.

Long gone are the days when you could go and see a new movie cheaply. The quality and frequency of movies are another issue all together, but they, too, are adding to the many challenges that plague the movie theater industry.

Which explains why both the technology and movie theater industries were completely turned on their heads a few weeks ago after movie-streaming champion Netflix announced plans to release its first-ever original movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Green Legend.

The distribution deal, in partnership with the Weinstein Company, will allow the film to release online at the same time it’s released in theaters on August 28, 2015.

It’s the first of many movies Netflix has planned to premiere both on its site and in theaters. The move is a clear reflection that the ability to stream content on-demand is exactly what consumers want. Netflix’s original movie plans are similar to what it’s already done, taking the traditional model of primetime television with its catalog of original series.

As online-streaming services continue to rise in popularity, it’s only a matter of time until the movie theater industry has to adjust or fall behind.”

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“The Middle Level Has Been Cut Out”

October 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Granted the lower end of Hollywood pay is still relative wealth to most folks, but it’s worth noting that even show business, like much of our economy, has a growing income disparity. At the upper stratosphere, the big money still exists for some (but not all) star actors and directors, but the mid-level creative person has been all but squeezed out of existence. You take what you are offered or it is offered to someone else. From an article on the new normal of movie-industry salaries by the Hollywood Reporter:

“How bad is the decline in actor salaries over the past decade? Despite the huge sums still being raked in by such superstars as Robert Downey Jr. (his $75 million comes from his 7 percent, first-dollar slice of Iron Man 3, as well as his $12 million HTC endorsement deal) and Sandra Bullock (a 15 percent, first-dollar deal on Gravity and about $10 million more for her summer hit The Heat), most actors are feeling a definite squeeze, especially those in the middle.

‘If you’re [a big star], you’re getting well paid,’ says one top agent, ‘but the middle level has been cut out.’ Sometimes with a hacksaw. Leonardo DiCaprio made $25 million (including bonuses) forThe Wolf of Wall Street, while co-star Jonah Hill got paid $60,000. Granted, that’s an extreme example — Hill offered to do the part for scale (and got an Oscar nomination for his trouble). …

‘The middle range doesn’t exist anymore,’ one studio executive says of the current financial landscape for feature film directors. ‘Either you’re paying for a modern master, or you’re paying a lot less. The days of paying $3 million or $4 million, knowing they’re just doing the job, that doesn’t exist.’

The going rate for modern masters? Between $7 million and $10 million for auteurs like Paul Greengrass and Ridley Scott, more if the film is considered a tentpole. Christopher Nolan is said to have made $20 million against 20 percent of gross for Interstellar. Backend is otherwise rare these days for the non-A-list.

On the other end of the scale, emerging directors can expect $250,000 to $500,000 for their first big studio feature, but there are exceptions (one European auteur was said to have recently have been paid $1 million for his first Hollywood blockbuster).”

“When Her Family Joined The Cult, Close Was Removed From Everything She Held Most Dear”

October 16, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Many great actors seem to me like they grew up in a cult, so oddly unique they are. Vanessa Redgrave, Tilda Swinton, F. Murray Abraham, Daniel Day-Lewis and Ben Kingsley? Had to be a cult, right? But Glenn Close actually was raised in a cult, a right-wing, anti-intellectual one to boot. It caused some trust issues, as you might expect, even within herself. An excerpt from Stephen Galloway’s new Hollywood Reporter profile:

“Close was 7 years old when her dad, a Harvard-educated doctor from a long line of New England blue bloods, joined the religious group known as the Moral Re-Armament.

Founded during the late 1930s, the MRA held firmly to what it called ‘the four absolutes’: honesty, purity, unselfishness and love. But these benevolent principles masked the all-consuming, all-controlling traits of any other cult — this particular one led by Rev. Frank Buchman, a violently anti-intellectual and possibly homophobic evangelical fundamentalist from Pennsylvania, who argued that only those with special guidance from God were without sin, and that they had a duty to change others. What began as an anti-war movement gradually turned into a possessive and exclusionary force.

It is unclear how many adherents the MRA had, though about 30,000 people gathered to hear Buchman speak at the Hollywood Bowl in the late 1930s, and the group was widely discussed in the press during and after World War II. Its post-war conferences were attended by several high-level diplomats and politicians — despite allegations that Buchman had been a Hitler supporter — and its cultlike nature appears to have emerged only slowly.

‘I haven’t made a study of groups like these,’ says Close, ‘but in order to have something like this coalesce, you have to have a leader. You have to have a leader who has some sort of ability to bring people together, and that’s interesting to me because my memory of the man who founded it was this wizened old man with little glasses and a hooked nose, in a wheelchair.’

When her family joined the cult, Close was removed from everything she held most dear — above all, life in the ivy-covered, stone cottage on her grandfather’s Connecticut estate, where she ran wild over the rugged land with her Shetland pony, Brownie. While Dr. Close went to Congo as a surgeon, she lived with her brother and two sisters at the group’s headquarters in Caux, Switzerland.”

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“The Outcome Of Evolution–I Find It Impossible To Think That Such A Slime-Based Machine Would Be Preserved”

October 16, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

A pair of videos related to Finnish philosopher, technologist, roboticist and electronic music pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi. The first, about the next evolution, is from Mika Taanila’s 2002 documentary about the theorist, The Future Is Not What It Used to Be; the second is Kurenniemi’s own 1964 short, “Electronics in the World of Tomorrow.”

“Psychotropics Should Be Available To Any ADULTS With Psychiatrist Spirit Guide To Help Them”

October 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Holy fuck, Wavy Gravy is still alive. Known as Hugh Nanton Romney (Romney 2016!) before adopting his meat-sauce moniker, he was the Woodstock Era’s psychedelic drum major, and he has some amazing stories to tell, none of which he can remember. WG just did an AMA at Reddit, in which he dosed the entire Internet. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Do you think the pranksters changed culture? What are your thoughts on the medical uses of psychedelics?

Wavy Gravy:

Absolutely. The Prankster changed the culture by driving ac across the country in these painted buses. That was something no one had ever seen before. It was like the universe on wheels.

I think that psychotropics should be available to any ADULTS with psychiatrist spirit guide to help them over the rough patches on the quest to enlightenment.

back in the day this was applicable for Henry Luce, the publisher of Life magazine, as he was pictured conducting an orchestra of daffodils in his garden, Psychiatric at the ready.

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Question:

Were you ever a fan of the group Pink Floyd? And have you heard of their new album coming out in a month? What are your thoughts on the group and what do you remember about them during their times in the late 60s/70s?

Wavy Gravy:

In 1970 we did what Warner Brothers hoped would be a sequel to the movie Woodstock. It involved a caravan of painted buses driving across America putting on shows. Sound familiar? Except this time Warner Brother would fly in their stable of amazing artists like BB King, Jethro Tull or Alice cooper, on tiny stages, or Joni Mitchel strumming around our camp fire. The tour ended with us flying Air India to England, where we did a concert outdoors with Pink Floyd. It was drop dead uber awesome and amazing.

Question:

Why hasn’t this been released?

Wavy Gravy:

It was released. It was called Medicine Ball Caravan with the sub title “We have come for your daughters.”

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Question:

Hi Wavy. I live in Sunland/Tujunga, California. There is a piece of property for sale on a hilltop here that is said to be the original home of the Hog Farm Hippie Commune in the 1960’s. Can you tell us any stories of the old days on the hog farm? Do you have any pictures you can share? Some people claim that Charles Manson was there. I find it hard to believe that you and Manson were ever friends. Can you clear that up? Thanks.

Wavy Gravy:

Absolutely! We were given this mountaintop rent free if we would tend to 50 hogs the size of a davenport. One of which we later ran for president. She was the first female black and white candidate for that high office. On Saturday nights, we would go to the shrine auditorium and do light shows for all the great bands of the 60s. On Sundays, we would have a free show on our mountaintop with different themes. Kite Sunday, no wind until night time. Mud Sunday, it poured..who could slide in the mud the furthest! The hog rodeo where we painted these giant pigs with temper paint and rode around on them, we showed film of this to Salvador Dali in Paris. He loved the hog rodeo. Many pictures and stories are in my first book The Hog Farm and Friends and beautifully documented in Avant Garde magazine back in the day.

Oh yes, Charlie Manson was no friend of mine and was asked to leave which he did. Thank heavens!

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Question:

Just firstly would like to say thank you for sharing love. Secondly, I love being warm and social with everyone but I really want to make things better like you did; any idea why protests now a days aren’t being taken as serious?

Wavy Gravy:

Some are more seriously taken than others. A lot of demonstrations have gone electronic. I am amazed at how powerful a tool the computer has become and I am a self confessed luddite.•

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“He’s An Unabashed L.A. Partisan Who Bristles At Any Perceived Anti–Los Angeles Sentiment”

October 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

At Grantland, Steven Hyden has a smart article about Los Angeles Plays Itself, one of my favorite movies. A documentary about the role of the “most photographed city in the world” in film and on television during the twentieth century, Thom Andersen’s long-form survey is brilliant, insightful and fierce. An excerpt from Hyden:

“An exhaustive, exhausting, funny, trenchant, and frequently cantankerous work of film criticism and social commentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself was envisioned as a double feature, Andersen said. When viewed this way, the first half plays as a witty observational comedy and the second half as an impassioned political docudrama. Andersen starts off by griping about L.A. movies the way only a longtime Angeleno would: He nitpicks Alfred Hitchcock for setting several films in the San Francisco area and none in Los Angeles, and Sylvester Stallone for taking undue ‘geographic license’ with local streets for the car chases in Cobra. It’s not just a matter of realism — though Andersen is a stickler for realism. He’s an unabashed L.A. partisan who bristles at any perceived anti–Los Angeles sentiment, starting with the nickname ‘L.A.,’ which he finds diminishing.

‘People who hate Los Angeles love Point Blank,’ he says of John Boorman’s 1967 psychedelic noir, though he does express sardonic appreciation for Boorman’s taste in garish decor, which ‘managed to make the city look both bland and insidious.’ He’s less forgiving of how filmmakers always put their villains in the city’s modernist architectural masterworks. The work of John Lautner has been especially exploited in this regard, finding favor among Bond villains in Diamonds Are Forever and Jackie Treehorn in The Big Lebowski.

If Andersen were just a provincial crank, Los Angeles Plays Itself would peter out well before the second act. But his eccentric narration also sticks some weirdly insightful landings, like when he compares the bare-knuckled fascism of Jack Webb’s Dragnet TV series to the austerity of Ozu and Bresson, or marvels at how the supposed dystopia of Blade Runner is actually ‘a city planner’s dream’ of bustling streets, bright neon, and easily traversable aerial highways. ‘Only a Unabomber could find this totally repellent,’ he observes.”

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“What Does It Mean For Us As People To See The Traditional Town Square Go Digital?”

October 14, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Google does many great things, but its corporate leaders want you to trust them with your private information–because they are the good guys–and you should never trust any corporation with such material. The thing is, it’s increasingly difficult to opt out of the modern arrangement, algorithms snaking their way into all corners of our lives. The excellent documentarian Eugene Jarecki has penned a Time essay about Google and Wikileaks and what the two say about the future. An excerpt follows.

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I interviewed notorious Wikileaks founder Julian Assange by hologram, beamed in from his place of asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. News coverage the next day focused in one way or another on the spectacular and mischievous angle that Assange had, in effect, managed to escape his quarantine and laugh in the face of those who wish to extradite him by appearing full-bodied in Nantucket before a packed house of exhilarated conference attendees.

Beyond the spectacle, though, what got less attention was what the interview was actually about, namely the future of our civilization in an increasingly digital world. What does it mean for us as people to see the traditional town square go digital, with online banking displacing bricks and mortar, just as email did snail mail, Wikipedia did the local library, and eBay the mom and pop shop? The subject of our ever-digitizing lives is one that has been gaining currency over the past year, fueled by news stories about Google Glasses, self-driving cars, sky-rocketing rates of online addiction and, most recently, the scandal of NSA abuse. But the need to better understand the implications of our digital transformation was further underscored in the days preceding the event with the publication of two books: one by Assange and the other by Google Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt.

Assange’s book, When Google Met Wikileaks, is the transcript (with commentary by Assange) of a secret meeting between the two that took place on June 23, 2011, when Schmidt visited Assange in England. In his commentary, Assange explores the troubling implications of Google’s vast reach, including its relationships with international authorities, particularly in the U.S., of which the public is largely unaware. Schmidt’s book, How Google Works, is a broader, sunnier look at how technology has presumably shifted the balance of power from companies to people. It tells the story of how Google rose from a nerdy young tech startup to become a nerdy behemoth astride the globe. Read together, the two books offer an unsettling portrait both of our unpreparedness for what lies ahead and of the utopian spin with which Google (and others in the digital world) package tomorrow. While Assange’s book accuses Google of operating as a kind of “‘Don’t Be Evil’ empire,” Schmidt’s book fulfills Assange’s worst fears, presenting pseudo-irreverent business maxims in an “aw shucks” tone that seems willfully ignorant of the inevitable implications of any company coming to so sweepingly dominate our lives in unprecedented and often legally uncharted ways.•

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Revenge Of The Mekons Plays At Film Forum

October 9, 2014 in Film, Videos | Permalink

Four years ago, I began telling you about Joe Angio’s Revenge of the Mekons documentary, which was then just in its Kickstarter phase. Now it’s a completed, critically acclaimed movie about the legendary punk band, has played numerous festivals and is ready to begin its run at Film Forum in New York, the city’s best cinema. It’s scheduled for five showings daily from Wednesday, October 29 through Tuesday, November 4. (Buy tickets online at the theater’s site; I’ll leave a link at the top of the front page so that you can get there easily.)

Revenge of the Mekons is a movie that combines rock music, independent filmmaking and journalism, the second, third and fourth worst career choices possible. (Fuck you, Radio Shack clerk!) It’s a profile of a complicated and revolutionary group which refuses to go away after 37 years and continues evolving and making great music. It’s also a testament to maintaining focus on what’s important regardless of changing fashions (and the same can be said of the film itself).

Take a look at the trailer.

In addition to watching an exciting film, you’ll also witness a number of special guests introduce various screenings, including Mekons Jon Langford and Steve Goulding, The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn and the great critic Greil Marcus. Jonathan Franzen, who’s featured in the movie, is not scheduled to introduce a screening because he has Jonathan Franzen money, so fuck you. But one of my favorite writers, Luc Sante, will present a showing because he does not have Jonathan Franzen money. You’ll recognize Sante as he’ll be the one dressed like a Bolshevik, muttering something about an 1890s Bowery barber who severed a customer’s tongue with a straight razor. Nice and normal, Luc.

And I promise that if you go see this movie at Film Forum, I will never, ever mention it again.

Until the home video release.

Thanks, Darren.

We sell Victrolas.

Might I interest you in a Victrola?

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“Things Were Not Very Good…I Was Crazy”

October 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Jesus H. Christ, F. Murray Abraham is one of the best actors on the planet.

I never knew much about his background until reading Alex Suskind’s Guardian piece about the performer. He was a gang member as a youth–somehow I’m not surprised–but had within him a brilliant actor waiting to be born, the way some people mysteriously have something sewn inside them that’s greater than their circumstances. An excerpt:

Abraham grew up in El Paso, two blocks from the Rio Grande. The son of an Italian mother and Syrian father, Abraham learned how to fix things at a young age: cars, toilets, electrical systems. His father, Frederick (Abraham’s inspiration for putting the ‘F’ in his name), was a mechanic. Although the skills he learned were valuable, they didn’t get him far. By the time Abraham was 14 he had joined a gang.

‘Things were not very good,’ he says. ‘I was crazy.’

Abraham would spend his free time over the border, in Juarez, doing “stupid things, stealing cars and wrecking them.’

This was a tumultuous period for Abraham – he was fighting, stealing, getting arrested, even sleeping with prostitutes. ‘How we came away without any diseases is astounding,’ he says.

But then a teacher named Lucia P. Hutchens stepped in and introduced him to acting. His first play, The Old Lady Shows Her Medals, by JM Barrie, won him a scholarship to college. He ended up failing every class except for theater, so he packed his bags, stuck his thumb out, and hitchhiked to Los Angeles to pursue his newfound dream.•

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“They Neither Reap Nor Sow Nor Perform Any Useful Social Function”

October 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

People has published a reimagining of the cover of its very first issue from March 4, 1974, with Taylor Swift standing in for Mia Farrow. In the inaugural 1974 edition of People, novelist William Peter Blatty responded to the firestorm over the screen adaptation of The Exorcist. An excerpt in which he hit back at the critical elite, that quaint thing that used to exist before the fans stormed the gates:

Question:

How do you feel about some of the most negative reviewers of your film?

William Peter Blatty:

I would like to introduce Pauline Kael of The New Yorker to Father Woods and Father Cortes. They hate the movie because they say it is doing the church no good. Pauline Kael hates the movie because she says it is ‘the biggest recruiting poster the Catholic Church has had since the sunnier days of Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s.’ I would like to put these people in a room together.

Vincent Canby of the New York Times said the film was not made without intelligence or talent. He said this only further infuriated him—that we should have wasted the intelligence, talent, money and budget of a lavish production on what he called elegant claptrap.

Question:

Why are they so negative?

William Peter Blatty:

They belong to a very small, elitist set of reviewers who have been trapped so long in the squirrel cage of their egos that the world of reality outside their cage is a blur. They neither reap nor sow nor perform any useful social function. They are malignant Miles of the field.•

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“So Many Important Decisions In The World Are Connected With The Sexual Appetites Of Important Men”

October 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

The director and artist Steve McQueen is a dizzying, demanding, daring talent, doing a rare thing in these times: making films from an adult perspective. Two excerpts follow from a new Financial Times profile by Peter Aspden, one about his allegedly irritable personality, and the other about his depiction of male sexuality in Shame.

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The best way to describe the relationship between the two means of expression, he says, in a comparison he has made before, is that “the movie is the novel, and art is poetry. Not a lot of people appreciate poetry, and it is the same with art. It is a more specialised form. That’s the difference.”

But the two impulses are forever “expanding and contracting” in his mind, he says. I ask if it is difficult to shift between genres. It is the rarest of things for a video artist to convert to Hollywood film-making. “Not at all. It is not as if I am jumping into different states of mind. It is all about finding what you want to say, and then how you want to say it.” Is that very clear to him straightaway? “Oh yes. But these things are incubating in my mind for a long time. I am in 2007 right now.” I look for a hint of a smile as he says this but he appears deadly serious.

McQueen, who turns 45 this week, is routinely described as a prickly man who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, but I wonder if that is confusing his seriousness and unrelenting intensity for a kind of social awkwardness. He gives every impression to me of enjoying the interview process, watchful and concentrated while he is listening to the question, like a batsman steadying himself during a bowler’s run-up. When Kirsty Young brought up the same subject in a recent edition of the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, asking why he was so unfairly portrayed, he replied simply: “I am a black man. I’m used to that. If I walk into a room people make a judgment. I don’t care.

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He seems to relish plunging into controversial subjects, I say. Shame, his second feature film, was an extraordinarily candid view of the unheralded extremes of male sexuality. “That’s still not sorted,” he says quickly. “That is unfinished business. I really want to come back to that.” Why was that? “It is an extremely fascinating subject. But no one talks about it. Let’s get real! So many important decisions in the world are connected with the sexual appetites of important men. Whether it is JFK, or Clinton, or Martin Luther King. That is what we are. That is part of us. But sometimes people are embarrassed by their pleasures.

‘It is a huge subject. So many people came out after that film and sent me anonymous letters, a lot of thank-yous, and some crazy stuff too.’ What did women think of it, I ask? ‘I don’t know how much women know, or want to know, about men’s sexual appetites. A friend of mine went to see it with his wife, and she asked him, ‘Do those things really happen?’ And he was, like, ‘No, no, it is just a fantasy, it is just the movies.’” McQueen’s laugh suggests otherwise.•

 

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Old Print Articles: Walt Disney Items, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1938/54)

October 5, 2014 in Film, Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Rust never sleeps, and Walt Disney, even with all his great success and grand imagination, wasn’t immune to the quiet terrors of life any more than the rest of us. Almost two decades before he built his first safe and secure family theme park in California, the Hollywood house he’d purchased for his parents was invaded by a silent killer. Two articles follow from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

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From the November 27, 1938 edition:

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From the May 16, 1954 edition:

 

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“The Streaming Service Continues Its Empire-Building And Moves Into Producing Original Movies That Bypass The Usual Theatrical Release”

October 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

A follow-up on yesterday’s post about films being released on all screens, not just theater ones: Netflix is continuing to transform itself into a studio that streams, inking a four-picture deal with the inexplicably popular Adam Sandler. (The first three are rumored to be a trilogy about a golfer who has violent diarrhea competing against another golfer who has violent diarrhea.) From Pamela McClintock at the Hollywood Reporter:

“Netflix has signed a deal to make four feature films with Adam Sandler as the streaming service continues its empire-building and moves into producing original movies that bypass the usual theatrical release.

Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions will work alongside Netflix in developing the yet-to-be announced titles, which will premiere exclusively in the nearly 50 countries where Netflix operates. It’s a significant move for Sandler, a longtime denizen of the Hollywood studio system — a system wedded to playing films first in theaters, not in the home. He’ll both star in and produce the Netflix projects.

‘When these fine people came to me with an offer to make four movies for them, I immediately said yes for one reason and one reason only … Netflix rhymes with Wet Chicks,’ Sandler said in a statement. ‘Let the streaming begin!!!!'”

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“Does The Computer Know Everything?”

October 1, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

You know that famous 1967 clip of a woman shopping online? Here’s a 21-minute segment of the film it’s from, “Year: 1999 A.D.” The Philco-Ford featurette follows the fictional Shaw family, led by the astrophysicist/botanist dad (played by game-show host Wink Martindale), who is employed on a Mars colonization project. Life tomorrow was to be computerized, monitored, networked, automated, centralized and quantified. It was supposed to be a bountiful technotopia “full of leisure.” If the Internet isn’t lying to me, McCabe & Mrs. Miller cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond shot it.

Wink recalls the film:

“Could This Truly Be The Beginning Of The Much-Foretold End Of The Moviegoing Experience?”

October 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I just want an apology from the geniuses who mocked me for predicting at the start of the aughts (in a published article that’s no longer online) that films would eventually be released on all screens simultaneously, large theater ones as well as on TVs and computers. It hasn’t happened yet, but it may. Actually, it will, almost definitely. The opening of “Is Netflix Trying to Kill the Theater For Once and All?” by Grantland’s John Lopez:

“Next time you’re in Los Angeles, check out the historicBroadway theater district downtown: At the turn of the century, before the studios and theater chains were split apart, the stretch of Broadway between Third and Olympic boasted the highest concentration of cinemas in the word, the jeweled crown of L.A.’s burgeoning film industry. On any given night, studios premiered their latest films at sumptuous movie palaces like the Orpheum and the Million Dollar Theater. More recently, these temples of cinema, which wouldn’t look out of place at Versailles, have hosted Sunday revival churches and Spanish-language swap meets. Now they’re mostly ghosts of a bygone era when the theatrical experience was the undisputed king of American mass culture. It’s that ghost that streaked through modern-day multiplex owners’ nightmares Monday when Netflix (aided by the prince of darkness himself, Harvey Weinstein) announced that for the first time it would stream a major feature film,Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Green Legend, simultaneous to its IMAX theater release next summer.

Predictably, by Tuesday morning a film business already battered by the worst box office summer since 1997 went apeshit. In fact, that nightmare freaked out theater owners so bad that Regal, Cinemark, and AMC — the nation’s three biggest theater chains — dropped the popcorn gauntlet Tuesday and announced they would refuse to carry the Crouching Tiger sequel at their theaters.1 In other words, as Netflix was announcing a historic new era when on-demand truly means on-demand, the nation’s theaters collectively said, “Over our swap-meet-hosting dead bodies.” Obviously, your local cineplex isn’t going to shut down after next summer, but let’s answer some questions about what’s going on here before the revolution arrives.

Could this truly be the beginning of the much-foretold end of the moviegoing experience? And should you even care?

Yes. And yes.”

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“We Live In A Financial And Capitalistic Age. We Do Not Live In A Scientific Or Technological Age.”

September 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, who refuses to do interviews unless someone asks, just sounded off to the Wall Street Journal about the technophobia he feels is pervasive in America and Europe. More likely, people enjoy technology’s benefits but have concerns about the downsides (privacy issues, environmental concerns, unemployment, etc.), although there certainly is tension between the old Dream Factory (Hollywood) and the new one (Silicon Valley). An excerpt:

“Forget all the buzz over driverless cars; the days spent waiting in line for the latest iPhone; the drones delivering medicine. Tech investor Peter Thiel says that, fundamentally, our society hates tech.

‘We live in a financial and capitalistic age,’ he said. ‘We do not live in a scientific or technological age. We live in an age that’s dominated by hostility and unfriendliness towards all things technological.” …

Silicon Valley, he said, has people who believe in technology and scientific innovation, while much of the rest of the U.S. doesn’t.

‘The easiest way to see this is you just look at all the movies Hollywood makes,’ he said. ‘They all show technology that doesn’t work; that kills people; that’s destroying the world, and you can choose between Avatar, or The Matrix, or Terminator films.’ (Mr. Thiel has previously lashed out at Hollywood, including criticizing how Silicon Valley was portrayed in the movie, The Social Network–which documents Facebook’s creation and Mr. Thiel’s part in it.) “

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“The Studios Have Two Niches, And The Problem Is That You Don’t Fit In Either One Of Them”

September 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

If a Hollywood producer is looking for a niche market to exploit, I would suggest he or she target America. In a globalized world, the U.S. is but another player on the stage, and films that target a specifically American sensibility aren’t really the point anymore. Want to make a movie about baseball or Boise? Not so likely now.

Terry Gilliam has pretty much had it with Hollywood. While the visionary director never had a niche geographically, he was the director who made the mid-budget film that was dazzling and adventurous and often brilliant, though sometimes it fell apart. From an interview the filmmaker did with Andrew O’Hehir at Salon:

“Question:

Well, and then there’s your relationship with the film industry, which was maybe never so terribly warm and fuzzy. Is that that you have changed or that the nature of the mainstream film industry has changed? Or have the two of you just sort of drifted further apart?

Terry Gilliam:

I think we’ve both changed and probably drifted apart for that reason, even more. In Hollywood, at least when I was making films there, there were people in the studios that actually had personalities. You could distinguish one from the other. And now, I don’t see that at all. It’s just gray, frightened people holding on without any sense of “let’s try something here, let’s do something different.” But to be fair, I haven’t been talking to anybody from the studios in the last few years. But the films that Hollywood is making now, it’s clear what’s going on. The big tent-pole pictures are just like the last tent-pole pictures. Hopefully one of them will work and keep the studio going. It’s become … it’s a reflection of the real world, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the middle class get squeezed out completely. So the kind of films I make need more money than the very simple films. Hollywood doesn’t deal with those budgets anymore; they don’t exist.

Question:

You can’t make the film in your house for $50,000. But they’re also not going to give you $100 million. You’re in a mid-budget area they don’t like, right?

Terry Gilliam:

Yeah. It’s terrible. I’m not alone in the mid-budget area that’s being pushed out of work. It’s a great sadness because there are many small films that can be wonderful, or you get huge $100 million-plus budgets and they’re all the same film, basically, or very similar. It’s just not as interesting as it used to be. The choice out there is less interesting. The real problem now is that when you make a small film, to get the money to promote it is almost impossible. You can’t complete with a $70-80 million budget the studios have. So it becomes less and less interesting. That’s why, in a sense, the most interesting work at the moment, as any creative person, knows is coming out of television in America now, not coming out of the studios.

Question:

The studios have two niches, and the problem is that you don’t fit in either one of them. You’re not going to do a Transformers movie for $250 million. And they think you’re not the right person to do the movie that maybe costs $40 million and is aimed at the Oscars, or is a prestige literary adaptation or something. They don’t trust you with those, right?

Terry Gilliam:

I wouldn’t trust me with them either. [Laughs.] I just want to do what I do. And I don’t even get scripts from Hollywood. I don’t even ask for scripts anymore because I kind of know what they’re going to be. They don’t interest me, so I’ve chosen to wander in the wilderness for another 40 years. We’ll see how it goes.”

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“They Treated Me Like Royalty”

September 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

For Mark Landis, one of the world’s most prolific art forgers, it wasn’t business, just personal. He would duplicate and then donate, posing as a philanthropist or some such thing. Museums ate it up, and Landis received the love he was looking for, the thrill not coming from deception but affection. But he was spit back out after being exposed in 2008 as a fake. He did an AMA at Reddit as a new film about him, Art and Craft, is being released. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

What made you become a forger and how did you realize forgery was a skill you had ?

Mark Landis:

Oh, okay! Way back, I had an impulse, I guess, it was around 1985, I had an impulse to – I guess I was watching things on TV, and you know, I was always seeing things on TV or in movies or about philanthropists giving things, and of course when you’re in a museum you see “Donated by” next to pictures – it was an impulse to give away a picture in Oakland while I was there on another business. And everybody was so nice to me, they treated me with so much deference and respect and friendship-they treated me like royalty. When I first found out I was in trouble, I was led to a Guardian article, and that’s a UK paper, and it said I had been treated like royalty – I had never been treated like royalty before. I liked it so much, I got addicted, and that’s how it all happened.

And what did royalty ever do to deserve to be treated like royalty, anyway?

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Question:

Do you believe that forgery is the true art? Could you transfer your skills to copying from real-life images or photos?

Mark Landis:

As far as the other things, it’s something I Never really thought of. Actually, I still don’t really think of myself as much of an artist, you know? I’m not much of an artist, and I haven’t got any great talent or anything, I do have a facility for arts & crafts, and the rest of it, I kind of lost track of it. I never thought of myself as really a “forger” either. As I said, it was an impulse and I got addicted to it. Everybody likes being treated like royalty, or having people treat them with deference and respect, that sort of thing. VIP treatment, that’s it. Everybody wants to get treated like a VIP, don’t they?

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Question:

What is your opinion on the monetary value of art & the massive prices paid for some artworks?

Mark Landis:

What’s my opinion? Gee… I hadn’t really thought about it… I guess it’s like any kind of commodity, or it’s more like fashion or something, you know, it’s very speculative… because pictures don’t have an intrinsic value, really, so you know, it’s determined by all kinds of things. I guess the best analogy would be the fashion world, you know, if somebody takes something up and then prices will rise and that sort of thing. That’s the best I can do. I’ve never answered that one before! No one ever valued my opinion or asked me that. So that’s the best I can do.•

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“It Really Wasn’t A Horror Film, But It Was”

September 14, 2014 in Film, Videos | Permalink

While Roman Polanski is obviously far from perfect, his 1968 film, Rosemary’s Baby, is essentially flawless. Here’s the Criterion Collection video about the making of that masterpiece, courtesy of Vice. The movie caused a permanent rift between producer Robert Evans and Frank Sinatra. It was worth it.

The subtext: I know you don’t confuse the artist and the art, but it seems hypocritical that Mia Farrow speaks so glowingly of Polanski given her outspokenness about Woody Allen.

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