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Denby used to write terrible, boring, just-plain-wrong film reviews for New York magazine and now he writes them for the New Yorker. He's an earnest chin-stroking type that always holds movies to some ridiculous (or ridiculously conventional) standard of moral responsibility.* Well, it turns out he's also the Bill Bennett of sober left establishment pontificators--a gamblin' man who pissed all his money away in the stock market Bubble. That's pretty funny, but unfortunately he's now written a self-flagellating book about his experiences. Walter Kirn's sympathetic NY Times review is here. A choice excerpt from the review:
Denby, when young and living in California, had been something of a radical, dancing to the Grateful Dead and defiantly pitting culture against commerce, but he'd mellowed into a propertied intellectual who sneakily admired the system for its ability to supply the good life even to those who held it in partial contempt.Now there's someone I want to read about. And here's another quote, the sheer liberal piety of which might lead one to believe the reviewer is Denby's separated-at-birth twin:
As Denby's [investment] pile fluctuates his exact gains and losses are quoted in the chapter subheads, but the chapters themselves are an eccentric mix of often lacerating confessions about his rocky love life and seminarish meditations on capitalism, conspicuous consumption and the psychological roots of greed. His tone can be pedantic, but his intention -- to freeze and analyze the mental gyrations that allow a deep thinker to become a shallow speculator -- is worthwhile and appropriate. Denby even drops in snippets of movie reviews he wrote at the time to help show us where his head was at, but they don't add much. (bolding of inert words supplied)Excuse me, what was that about deep thinking? It's supposed to be surprising that the same person who can find "the good" in one packaged Hollywood movie after another also bought into the myths of the "Dow 10,000" years? It all sounds of a piece to me. I'll take a pass on his hard lessons on love and investing, thanks; it's bad enough that we're still stuck with his reviews.
* Take, for example, his review of the movie Monster, about a recently executed serial murderer. As always Denby finds something edifying and uplifting to justify our attention: "[Monster] is one instance in which art clearly trumps documentary 'truth.' The real Aileen Wuornos is too will-driven to show us more than one side of herself. In the end, you need a sane person and an artist [Charlize Theron] to bring out the humanity in a crazy person." Oh, we do, do we? If the "truth" is that Wuornos was an irredeemable mad dog killer, isn't "trumping the truth with art" the same as sentimentalizing it? Maybe the filmmakers had noble motives for distorting reality, if in fact that's what they did--to make an anti-death penalty tract or feminist bad-girl fable, say. But is the critic's job just to be a mindless booster for good causes? Based on this assessment I'd rather watch Man Bites Dog again and feel some real conflicted feelings, as its psycho hit man protagonist charms me into as much complicity as I can stand.
| SCRATCH AMBULANCE, ETC. Web-only EP! I made the tracks below using, let's just say, a very old computer (and also a turntable, but only on the second track). The first two, "Scratch Ambulance" and "Phil's Revenge," have funkoid beats, while "Monster Scales" is more of an electronic sound piece. More than this I don't want to say. This is kind of a trial run, so any comments on .mp3 quality, downloadibility, etc. are welcome. As for the content, try not to hurt my feelings too much. The 8-Bit Construction Set LP on the turntable was for demonstration purposes only and not used in any of these compositions. Thanks to Mark Dagley for ripping the MP3s from a cassette. Scratch Ambulance. .mp3 format, about 3.75 MB. Phil's Revenge (TM vs Ectomorph). .mp3 format, about 2.5 MB. Fades up. Monster Scales. .mp3, about 1.3 MB. |
The instant popularity of the first Matrix movie inspired not only a plague of clones (Underworld being the sorry latest) but a land-office rush to retroactively claim precedents from the science fiction genre. Critics often cite Philip K. Dick's body of writing as a progenitor for the "things are not what they seem" aspect of the story, and John Carpenter's Dickian They Live (1988) has also been mentioned for its vision of a consumerist sham earth uncovered by a hapless member of the underclass (this little-seen film was recently rereleased on DVD and should be mandatory viewing). For my money, though, the definitive Matrix forerunner is a novel that appeared 40 years before the Wachowskis' epic: the amazing Wolfbane (1959), by Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth. If "ex-batteries fight in crevices of machine planet" is the pitch, then Pohl & Kornbluth deserve some arbitrated credit.
The action starts on a future Earth that has been hijacked from the solar system and revolves around a tiny sun that barely puts out enough energy to keep the population alive. Believing that Sol has simply lost strength as some form of divine retribution, humans have devolved into a society of Puritanical calorie-counters. Periodically people simply disappear, which keeps superstitious fear running high. Unbeknownst to the humans, their kidnappers are robots--enormous, pyramid-shaped floating beings called Omniverters, who inhabit a dark planet orbiting the same tiny star. The humans who disappear are teleported to this bleak mechanical world and used not as batteries (a ridiculous element of The Matrix considering the meager kilowatts of bio-energy a human could be expected to produce) but rather organic microchips. Eight living brains wired together in series represents substantial analog computing power; when a mind wears out the Omniverters simply harvest another human from Earth.
The protagonist of the story is, for all intents and purposes, a "snowflake," one of those octabrains slaving away crunching data for the Omniverters. Fully conscious, mingling all the thoughts and personalities of its human subcomponents (representing a range of ages, sexes, classes, and geopolitical origins), the snowflake is a highly evolved genius entity that is nevertheless powerless, because the motor functions of its inert constituent bodies have been dedicated by the Omniverters to typing code all day. Until, that is, the snowflake realizes that one digit of its 80 typing fingers is never used, a kind of built-in margin of error. Below the radar of the Omniverters' attention, the snowflake begins tapping out a rogue line of code with that "spare finger," enough command line instructions, at least, to teleport a crowd of naked humans to the Omniverter planet, put them in an enclosed space, and then begin starving them.
From that point forward, these "mice" behave much like the free humans in the Matrix, scurrying around in the tunnels and heat vents of the Machine planet. Instead of recruiting more batteries, however, the mice start breaking things, under the snowflake's omniscient guidance. The big satirical payoff of the novel is learning what the Omniverters are: essentially labor-saving devices (described in ancient tapes that sound like '50s advertising pitches) that have killed their alien master and then spent untold millennia trying to revive his corpse. Despite such touches of McCarthy-era existential bleakness, the book bursts with ideas: the truly mind-blowing collaboration here isn't the snowflake's but Pohl's and Kornbluth's, whose tale remains a potent intellectual drug decades after its writing. Will the same be said for The Matrix forty years hence, I wonder?
Above: Ross Knight at the Sculpture Center, 44-19 Purves St., Long Island City (Queens), NY. On one level, Knight's work takes us back to a moment of not-so-ancient art history when the aesthetic purity of say, Anthony Caro smacked up against the obdurate factualness of Minimalist slabs and cubes. What makes it "now," as opposed to some '60s throwback, is the rickety, slightly forlorn look of the sculptures (yes, that's intentional, and very wry), masking a kind of stealth investigation not just of found materials but found design--in 80s-speak, a "play of real world signifiers" that would have been anathema to all those '60s guys. To plagiarize myself from an earlier article:
Using a limited but highly versatile repertoire of materials—aluminum pipes, corrugated vinyl sheeting, Velcro, paint—Knight erects flimsy, portable structures that are essentially abstract (like classic Minimalist works, they unfold and change as the viewer moves in and around them) but invoke influences ranging across the socio-economic spectrum, from high-tech trade show architecture to point-of-sale advertising displays to the jury-rigged shelters of the homeless. Highly sensitive to context, these constructions change with their placement and angle of view.Several things have happened with the work since that was written. Knight no longer paints the structures but relies instead on the straight-from-the-factory pigmentation of the cut plastic sheets (and it's tinted Plex now, in lieu of the lighter weight corrugated signboard). Also, he's making forays into outdoor sculpture, so the pieces now tread a delicate line between the light, provisional look that's essential on a content level and the practical realities of withstanding the elements. Thus, he buries concrete to anchor the aluminum tubes, uses bolts rather than velcro, and adds tightly stretched guy wires, incorporating these as new elements to his vocabulary, while still keeping that carefully controlled slapped-together feel. One imagines an enthusiastic (or deranged) carnival barker standing within the black & chartreuse enclosure above, exhorting the viewer to enter the gateway and experience more of that particular exquisite blue. Unlike the egomaniacal Richard Serra, Knight doesn't rudely block ingress and egress to a public building, though. You just walk right on through.
I've revised an earlier post about the recently-deceased writer John Gregory Dunne and his hilarious book Monster: Living Off the Big Screen. I'm re-reading the book now and decided to flesh out the information a bit. One anecdote I'll repeat here, for those that don't feel like backtracking. During the on and off writing of the Up Close and Personal screenplay, Dunne and his wife & writing partner Joan Didion tackled a science fiction script, for a Simpson/Bruckheimer blockbuster (never filmed) called Dharma Blue. The plot concerned UFO-related goings-on at a mysterious research facility called Rhyolite. Written into a corner, they decided they need a lesson in current physics to move the story forward. Science go-to guy Michael Crichton's suggested dialogue about string theory cracks me up:
[Doctor, novelist, filmmaker] Michael Crichton has for years been our authority about matters medical and scientific. [I called him and said] Michael, tell me about string theory. "For a piece, book, or movie?" Michael asked. "Movie," we said. "You want to know what it is," he asked, "or do you need dialogue?" "Dialogue," we said, "and we need to keep it simple." "John," he said patiently, "It's a movie." We explained the circumstances. "I'll check some people and get back to you," Michael said.A few days before our meeting with Simpson and Bruckheimer, Michael called back with the requisite information, and helped us put it in dialogue form:
A. Most people think of the universe as having four dimensions. Height, length, depth, and time. String theorists have constructed a theoretical model of the universe with 26 orthogonal dimensions.B. Orthogonal?
A. At right angles...
B. But what does it mean that they're doing string theory at Rhyolite?
A. I think it means they're not doing theory any more.
(a beat) It means that...whatever they're out there to study...may appear to exist in more than four dimensions.
(another beat) It means they could be out there to see what 26 orthogonal dimensions looks like when it hits the real world.
Joe McKay, "Audio Pong" game. The volume level, not the degree of dopiness of the noises coming out of players' mouths, determines the height of the paddles. Some people don't realize this, believing instead that an algorithmic spazz-out evaluator controls the ascent and descent of the rectangles (and whether the ball stays on the court). The players above were real pros, however. Five rounds determines a winner. At Vertexlist in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Below: another McKay piece. The recording light rotates, simulating blinking in real space.
A non-clinical definition of paranoia: you go right past the simplest explanation and look for one that's the most dangerous. In the case of John Woo's film Paycheck, the simple reason why 89 out of 115 critics hated it could be that it's bad. But let's explore the paranoid one. (Spoilers, but this is the type of movie where they don't matter, right?) Paycheck has a point, and the point is this: Pre-emptive war leads to more war, the nasty kinds where A-bombs explode in US cities. This goes squarely against the party line espoused by our chowderhead-in-chief and his gang. And since the majority of the 89 naysaying critics are media whores, they protect and promote the conventional wisdom, aka the party line (such as "everything changed after 9/11/01"). So they want to make sure you don't see Woo's film, that it dies ignobly at the box office, and only a handful rent it on DVD. Whatever their motives, they're wrong: the movie is much tighter than the chase-padded Face/Off (and the pretentious, incoherent Minority Report). Affleck and Thurman are good, the movie keeps you constantly thinking and guessing. And it's fun. Another reason for the critical slam, I think, is that mainstream critics hate "sci fi," as they call it. Until it succeeds at the box office: then they start analyzing it for political portents. I say, both paranoically and simplistically, see the movie, embrace its wisdom, stop Bush.
Afterthought: the film also shows a couple of "good feds" hiding evidence to prevent the Guantanamo-like incarceration of a man they know is innocent. Deep-six that movie!
My recent post on Artforum's bestowing of "new artist" status twice to the same person (in 1992 and again 12 years later) led to some unfortunate bashing of the magazine out in bloggerland. One writer told me in an email that he hadn't read anything good in AF since its September 2002 piece on Robert Ryman. This challenged me to look through a stack of 'forums since that date and find good, or at least provocative, articles. What follows is the first in an on-again off-again series discussing what I found. The posts won't always be "positive" (the one below isn't) but the idea is to have a discussion as opposed to just popping off.
January 2003 issue. (Yes, I know this was a year ago.) Philip Nobel's cover story on a Pierre Huyghe-curated exhibition gives the reader much to react to, even though the piece isn't critical enough by half. Huyghe and collaborator Phillipe Parreno purchased the rights to the Japanimation character Annlee (below, left) from "Kworks, a Japanese clearinghouse" for such things, and then a group of artist friends riffed on this piece of readily-available intellectual property. Nobel accurately describes the little girl Annlee as "sad," but then takes a critical kamikaze dive and declares her a metaphor for the Japanese themselves, citing Takashi Murakami's morose thesis: "Behind the flashy titillation of anime lies the shadow of Japan's defeat in the Pacific war. The world of anime is the world of impotence." Right, as we see in the enterprising Japanese space program in Wings of Honneamise, the bickering-but-always-successful robot-pilot cops in Patlabor, the ebullient gender comedy in Ranma 1/2... Anime isn't just Grave of the Fireflies but tell that to an American critic looking for a hook. (For the record, Huyghe thinks Nobel's interpretation of the project overromanticizes it. "We bought a virgin," Huyghe says, sounding like one of those cold, cold Euro-operators in Olivier Assayas' Demonlover.)
According to Nobel, Huyghe "slightly redrew" the character (see two computer images above right), which is true if "slightly redrawing" means removing her pupils, tilting her eyes the opposite way, giving her a perm, stripping off her clothes, and turning her into a robot ET. Huyghe then asked 14 artists to interpret this "open source Annlee" for a group show that traveled to major museums. Once he created the "freeware" prototype, the artists were stuck drawing her that way, that is, like his digital puppet and not the Kworks original (Nobel refers to the show's "many identical video avatars"). So what's the purpose of buying the brand, bringing the "empty sign" to life through multiple interpretations, and then transferring the copyright back to the character, as Huyghe supposedly did, if you're going to make the brand unrecognizable before the interpretation process even starts? The work has a superficial frisson of commodity art but fails as a meme-propagating business model, parodistic or otherwise. It's the sort of high-concept exercise that gives museum curators goosebumps, but based on the reproductions and Nobel's description I'd say it flopped. And now Huyghe "owns" the idea in the copyright office of artist opinion so no one else can ever do it again, not that they should.
This abstract "Annlee" wallpaper by M/M Paris, sorry for the grainy scan, is great, though: