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Before The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou*, before Sealab 2021 (or even Sealab 2020), there was:
From the Onion's Films That Time Forgot: "Is it really better down where it's wetter, as animated crabs suggest? That's what Tony Randall intends to find out when he signs his family up to live in his experimental underwater house, in an attempt to convince his skeptical boss Jim Backus that the model is feasible. Randall's wife Janet Leigh is terrified of water (which, after Psycho, is understandable), but concedes anyway. So do the shaggy ruffians in Harold And The Hang-Ups, an anonymous, faintly hippie-ish pop-rock outfit that includes Randall and Leigh's fresh-faced progeny, plus a young Richard Dreyfuss. The gang soon learns that the life aquatic can also be la vida loca, thanks to sharks, technical malfunctions, professional competition, dancing sea creatures, cheap animated sequences, and a wacky comic-relief seal. Even worse, a hurricane threatens to end Randall's experiment prematurely. But everything works out in time for the band's big closing underwater performance on The Merv Griffin Show." More from the Onion review of this terrible Ivan Tors film from 1969:
Can easily be distinguished by:
It's virtually alone in the underwater-house rock 'n' roll family-comedy subgenre.
Timeless message:
Placing one's family in mortal danger is a great way to cultivate teamwork and togetherness.
Memorable quotes:
Griffin introduces Harold And The Hang-Ups by assuring the audience that the band's manager is "stoned on these shouters," finding them to be "mellow yellow, turned-on, and groovy!"
*Zissou: tied for best film of 2004 with I Heart Huckabees, Oscars notwithstanding. From imdb's memorable quotes: Steve Zissou: "Anne-Marie, do all the interns get Glocks?" Anne-Marie Sakowitz: "No, they have to share one."
"Reggae Scratchin'" (Swedish Deathmetal Version) [mp3 removed]. As threatened, an (incredibly distorted) "lead" has been added and the scratching pared back to accommodate the new chops. Somewhat inspired by Faust, my musical gods from the '70s, except scratching wasn't invented then.
Some good photos from the ART@><*WORK show* taken by Chris Ashley, who was in town from the West Coast to be on the Blogging & the Arts Panel at the New Museum. Top to bottom: (1) dude working hard in foreground cubicle with details from Erika Somogyi/Evan Greenfield cube behind, (2) Elana Langer's work area, (3) Douglas Repetto/LoVid's cube, (4) Langer deals with falling Irene Moons, (5) Brian Alfred--the whole array including the tools is made out of Color Aid paper, (6) Cat Mazza's cube. I like the way Ashley just plunged in there with his digital camera, nailed the spirit of the show, and had it all up on his weblog the next day (with accompanying text). This should be the model for art writing/reportage: artist with camera and clue documents on the fly as opposed to waiting around for some old-media wizard to dignify your show in print months after the fact. (A concomitant aspect being that you would then link to said reportage on your "hompy"--what they call homepages in Korea--as opposed to whining that you never get ink, which would have the side benefit of increasing the standing of the artist/documenter and eventuallly breaking the deadly cult of stultified expertise that ruled art in the last century.)
*Update, 2011: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://rhizome.org/editorial/2005/may/18/how-to-succeed-in-the-arts-by-really-trying/
Rhizome.org's Net Art News has a nice writeup on the ART@><*WORK show. Lauren Cornell begins her piece with the following hackle-raising anecdote:
A New York gallerist once took the wind out of my sails by telling me "If you're not trying to make it to the top in this town, then GET OUT OF THE WAY!" Umm, what top? What way?Let's briefly answer those questions. The top: Gagosian, Matthew Marks, PaceWildenstein. The way: art school with influential 70s/80s figure on faculty, show with Connelly or Reich, inclusion in the Whitney, move to the Boesky/Rosen stratum and if you survive midcareer hell thence to canonization and high-level commerce at the aforementioned "top" galleries. That's it, folks!
Speaking of alternatives, Joy Garnett has a report on the second Blogging & the Arts panel here. Fun event but too sparsely attended! I guess everyone was busy making it to the top. Thanks to Francis Hwang for organizing these events (there'll be more), also under the auspices of Rhizome.org at the New Museum.
Update, 2011: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://rhizome.org/editorial/2005/may/18/how-to-succeed-in-the-arts-by-really-trying/
Lucas Samaras' Hands, animated GIF, 2005. I posted this animated .GIF a couple of weeks ago and am reposting it with the explanation that it's not a piece by Lucas Samaras, it's a piece by me--a "remix" of one of his quicktime movies. I had shot a bunch of stills in the gallery trying to get "the single shot where his hands looked the strangest" for the blog, then realized the "proof shots" could be cropped, animated, and scrunched down to 16 colors to make this animation. It's meant a bit as a criticism--it is more dynamic than his current work and the pallette is in the spirit of his *very* dynamic early work. A friend thought this GIF was his piece and others may have thought that too, hence the repost and gaseous explanation.
Portrait of the late Steven Parrino, based on an artnet photo by Nancy Smith. Drawn in my cubicle Sunday and Tuesday.
The audio of the speech by George Galloway, British member of Parliament, dressing down the shysters in the US Senate who enabled Bush's Iraq invasion (i.e., almost all of them, but his words are aimed at Norm Coleman), has to be heard. (1 MB .mp3.) His voice never wavers, his grammar and diction are a perfect sledgehammer beating those fools. Apparently the solons were squirming in their chairs "unused to such stark language in their polite chambers" or however the papers phrased it. The salient part of his speech is below:
"Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life's blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.
“I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.
"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.
"If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth.
"Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq's wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Halliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq's money, but the money of the American taxpayer.
"Have a look at the oil that you didn't even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.
"Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government."
"Reggae Scratchin'" [6.6 MB .mp3 removed--see update below]
Bonus b-side: "Slowsteppin'" [mp3 removed]
(genius "scratch school" photo by anthony pidgeon, east bay express, via google images; bob marley graphic from fill in the blank fan site)
I will probably do a more complex version of "Reggae Scratchin'"; this is the bare bones "street" version, ha ha. Obviously the scratching could be varied more throughout the piece, some more instrumental voices could be added, blah blah good songwriting values blah blah.
Update, March 19, 2008: "Reggaedrome II" [4.3 MB .mp3] replaces the "street" version, which I took down.