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That United Flight 93 movie is upon us and getting hyped. This is the preReview (which means I haven't seen it): "Don't Go!"
Some people believe that plane was shot out of the sky by a (belated) US missile.
The extreme fringe thinks the passengers were flown to the Cleveland airport and shot.
Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer's wife says his words on the plane "Let's Roll" are what he always said to the kids when he was ready to drive them to soccer practice or whatever.
"Let's Roll" became a patriotic song in the "Let's Get Some Payback--Any Muslim Country Will Do" phase of our nation's history.
Then the cockpit recordings came out and--whoops, looks like Mrs. Beamer was wrong and "rolling" possibly referred to a bunch of passengers rolling a dinner cart down the aisle in a last-ditch assault on the hijackers.
It's great if there was heroism--we'd all like to believe people rose to the occasion in this doomed scenario and that we'd do the same if we were there. Certainly the hijacking was villainy. But the cockpit utterances are spotty at best--a lot of the movie's narrative is speculation.
Are you ready for a work of semi-fiction that passes itself as fact when the bigger questions of 9/11 haven't been answered?
Questions like, were our leaders, or elements within the government, complicit in this thing on any level? Criminally negligent? We may never know, because the commissions were whitewashes and no one in the government got fired.
Is it right that the US has 700 military bases around the world, 17 years after the end of the Cold War? That we continue to prop up bad regimes long after the Cold War excuse has gone away?
Is it understandable that some might hate us for that, however heinous their methods of reprisal?
Are Americans responsible for the actions of their government?
The movie is voyeurism and jingoism without acknowledgement that there's a bigger story and that the film is fiction. The truth is we still don't know what happened that day.
"Ninja Elements" [16 MB .mp4]
Audio only: [.mp3 removed]
Recently added to the Young Turds tribute page: Two Howard S.M. Wuelfing reviews from back in the day, that is, ca. 1979-80. Pinched from :30 under DC. PMRagan says there, about the Turds: "I always thought it was ballsy as hell for them to go on with their Bonzo Dog Band image. In 1979 it was quite uncool to have a beard and long hair...and a button down shirt ..." Wuelfing says "[T]he Turds ain't power pop, art fascists, or nutty punks. They're better-than-smart nouveau greaseballs--intense earthshaking idiot fun and that is not what most straight [as in square --tm] clubs want to deal with, or even the art-dens (d.c. space, f'rinstance). The Turds capture something too dangerous for their taste--the essence of early rockin' rebellion."
From Curbed, a post captioned On Puke and Class War in the Central Village:
"This isn't relevant to anything or even remotely newsworthy, but I thought you'd enjoy these photos of my wealthy neighbor cleaning up the vomit that appeared on his East 11th Street stoop on Friday night at 11 o'clock, courtesy of a normal-looking, non-homeless person. The man had about 10 choices of places to puke in the immediate vicinity, including a tree and the back door of Jack's Bistro, and he chose the front door of a multimillion-dollar townhouse."
"Dance of the Nematodes/Calypsum (John Parker Mix)" [mp3 removed]. John Parker remix of a couple of my Mac SE tune(s). Work in process--Parker says this will change. Some interesting textures and a nice backwards bit I've been humming. Meme for the day: visual artists invade the province of musicians using new tech; work is not a substitute or facsimile but employs different skill sets in addition to the existing ones. It is nonetheless music--personally I'd rather listen to it than what's already known.
related: artists writing their own music hybridized with video.
More YouTube:
Haruomi Hosono, "Xevious BGM" (Video Game Music--disco version). I mentioned Hosono when I first wrote about Cory and BEIGE back in aught-2.
Naruto AMV (String Quartet). Found this looking for video mashup material to go with my string quartet piece. I have to do a public performance of my music in a few weeks and think I'd rather have videos playing than stand there picking my nose while the CD runs. I'm thinking about further cutting up this one, that got me thinking about Rose Hobart, etc...
Read Art Fag City's review of Art School Confidential, the latest Terry Zwigoff/Daniel Clowes offering. Her comparison of stills from the film with a Clowes drawing (above) does not bode well.
We make fun of the art world on a this page, things like the recent out-of-control phenomenon of collectors chasing student tail ("'I bent him over a desk and mentored him till dawn,' says a noted venture capitalist..."), but we're insiders. As AFC points out, Clowes has been out of the game a while, apparently no longer comprehends the difference between Soho and Chelsea, and has dealers offering shows to freshmen in a Brooklyn art school (Pratt?)...filmed in California.
Prereviewing the film (what, I need to see it?)--This might be the latest in a distinguished line of Hollywood movies making artists and the art world look ridiculous. As in, Darryl Hannah as a perfomance artist in Legal Eagles, Demi Moore as a "touch sculptor" in The Juror, Paul Newman's AbEx painting machine painter in What a Way to Go, and of course, Maude Lebowsky. The only film that ever got it close to right was Altman's sublime Vincent and Theo. OK, and Pecker.
Ghost World understood the one art world concept it needed to understand--the Found Object. The film's use of the "Coon's Chicken" poster and surrounding rhetoric was exactly right. But I'm sorry, dealers don't scour the freshman class at Pratt for talent, they just don't.
Not a big fan of Joseph Cornell's boxes--too much about the romance of old stuff scrounged in swap meets, too in love with their own delicacy, too frequently visually inert--but he deserves his place in history as the Father of the Remix. From Senses of Cinema:
Rose Hobart (1936) consists almost entirely of footage taken from East of Borneo, a 1931 jungle B-film starring the nearly forgotten actress Rose Hobart. Cornell condensed the 77-minute feature into a 20-minute short, removing virtually every shot that didn't feature Hobart, as well as all of the action sequences. In so doing, he utterly transforms the images, stripping away the awkward construction and stilted drama of the original to reveal the wonderful sense of mystery that saturates the greatest early genre films.Yes! That sequence is amazing, I wish it was in this Quicktime clip from the Walker Art Center. The Cornells of today are lurking on YouTube and/or being busted by the intellectual property police. Too damn bad.
While East of Borneo is a sound film, Rose Hobart must be projected at silent speed, accompanied by a tape of "Forte Allegre" and "Belem Bayonne" from Nestor Amaral's Holiday in Brazil, a kitschy record Cornell found in a Manhattan junk store. As a result, the characters move with a peculiar, lugubrious lassitude, as if mired deep in a dream. In addition, the film should be projected through a deep blue filter, unless the print is already tinted blue. The rich blue tint it imparts is the same hue universally used in the silent era to signify night.
Rose Hobart was only one of several mythologized actresses who populated Cornell's hermetic world. Many of his boxes were homages to the actresses that formed his pantheon: Lauren Bacall, Hedy Lamarr, Greta Garbo and Deanna Durbin, among others. (Yawn. --tm) In Rose Hobart, Cornell holds Hobart in a state of semi-suspension, turning the film itself into a sort of box. She moves her hands, shifts her gaze, gestures briefly, smiles enigmatically, perhaps steps slightly to the side, and little more. The world appears as a sort of strange theatre, staged for her alone.
But the root of Cornell's genius as a filmmaker is his singular version of montage. Cornell's version of continuity is the continuity of the dream. He does not juxtapose images so much as suggest unlikely — but still vaguely plausible — connections between them. Hobart's clothing may change suddenly between shots, but her gesture is continued or she remains at a similar point in the frame. Unlike most collage filmmakers, Cornell does not rely on cheap irony or non sequitur. His films are unsettling because their inexplicable strings of images are like reflections from the deep well of the subconscious. In fact, one of the most arresting images in Rose Hobart comes when a solar or lunar eclipse is paired with the image of an object falling into a circular pool of water. Hobart simply gazes bemusedly at this spectacle, as if it were little more than a parlour trick.