Negotiations have been going on for a few months but it's now offical, a number of my films are going into the MoMA archives. I have to admit it was a head scratcher for me, my stuff isn't well known or great but I didn't put up any arguments. It turns out the museum is collecting films made by filmmakers who were living in and active in the east village in the 80's so I squeaked in despite being kind of peripheral to that scene. Also, the assistant film curator, back before she was at MoMA, was on a selection panel for a film festival I entered Buoy in. She argued unsuccessfully that it should be included in the programming but remained a fan.
Yesterday I shipped a hard drive with the complete elements for Buoy as well as an exhibition copy. I'm going to get my super-8 and 16mm films scanned to the highest resolution possible before shipping the camera originals and negatives because once they have them I will no longer have access to the material.
I'm told that one or two of my early films will be included in this show in October but so far it seems they haven't nailed down the programming so nothing's certain.
Alex, I haven't submitted our collaborations yet but I would like to so let's talk.
Steve Martin did standup for the first time in 35 years, opening for Seinfeld last night at Beacon Theater.
mid-century la
After years of sitting vacant, the iconic TWA terminal at JFK Airport will become a hotel.
the book that inspired scorceses love of film.
Relive the destruction of old Penn Station
just watching this now having never heard of it before seeing it buried in the tcm schedule at 4am last night.
Stuart Cooper’s Overlord doesn’t approach the wartime archive as a homogeneous set of familiar images. In the early 1970s, the director mined the 16mm and 8mm archives of London’s Imperial War Museum and emerged with rare treasures of specific historical occurrences, cinematic pleasures of incredible warplanes at flight, and uncanny records of unfathomable tragedy. What he did with them remains wholly unique in the history of war cinema. Cooper shot his own original 35mm film about a young recruit who suffers loneliness and dread from basic training to his arrival at the shores of Normandy on D-Day. He then combined this footage with the archival materials, creating a hybrid that is never quite a narrative yet never quite a documentary either.
more nyc heading to pdx
Huge news from the cocktail world: Jim Meehan of the legendary NYC cocktail bar PDT is moving to Portland, Oregon with his family next month. Eater spoke with Meehan on the phone this afternoon to find out what this means for his NYC bar, and what Portlanders can expect from him when he gets to town (a bar, maybe?). "If there's ever going to be a good time to leave it's now," he says. Meehan is moving in early August.
A 25,000 square foot French food market called Le District is under construction with an opening slated for later this year. There is space for six new stand-alone restaurants, joining P.J. Clarke's, which is already open in the complex. Parenthetically, the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE) will be relocating its campus to Brookfield Place from the Flatiron District next year, bringing thousands of culinary students to the area.
But first out of the box will be a collection of some of NYC's most celebrated fast casual and street food restaurants, which will share 35,000 square feet of communal space overlooking the Hudson River.
last night for inoteca. building for sale for $12 million.
ear innterview
With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class.
What?HC NYT / TM.US (via support hide/seek face book)
“Katz: Well, we edited in terms of length, not to remove content. We felt the imperative to represent David Wojnarowicz’s work as he designed it. We included every scene that’s in the video, we just truncated the length.”
Why is this acceptable? What gives you the right to determine that a short version of the film–what, one bit of every shot, in order?–is an accurate representation of how it was “designed?” Yes, I know the estate OK’d it, but that doesn’t make it right. Aside from the controversy about its removal, the placement and use of video in this exhibition was abysmal. The touch-screen kiosk holding the Wojnarowicz and Bidgood pieces looked like an information center, not a means of displaying art. Both video monitors were easy to miss and looked tacked-on, to put it mildly. I was not at all surprised to learn of their “inadvertent” omission from the catalog. That the curators did not accord video respect equivalent to the photographs and paintings is evident by the way in which it was displayed. Ironic that these curators are being lionized for something pertaining to the one part of this excellent show that failed completely.