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John Gregory Dunne, novelist, journalist, husband of Joan Didion, died yesterday. I highly recommend his book Monster: Living Off the Big Screen. Lucidly written, incredibly dry, it describes the process by which he and Didion adapted the story of TV anchor Jessica Savitch, which eventually became the dumb movie Up Close and Personal. If you want to know exactly why Hollywood offerings, and especially those produced by Scott Rudin and/or starring Robert Redford, are bland and suck, read this book. In real life Savitch's Svengali husband (played by Redford) was a wifebeater with a sick psychological hold over Savitch; barely a glimmer of this survives in the movie. Chapter by chapter, Dunne takes you through the process whereby reality, and a script, is transformed into uplifting, conventional treacle.
During the on and off writing of the Savitch screenplay, Dunne and Didion tackle a science fiction script, for a Simpson/Bruckheimer blockbuster (never filmed) called Dharma Blue. The plot concerns UFO-related goings-on at a mysterious research facility called Rhyolite. Written into a corner, they decide they need a lesson in current physics to move the story forward. Science go-to guy Michael Crichton's suggested dialogue about string theory cracked 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.Dunne and Didion also start an action movie script, and feel considerable pressure to come up with "whammies"--an industry term for "special effects that kill a lot of people, usually bad people, but occasionally, for motivational impact, a good person, the star's girlfriend, say, or that old standby, the star's partner, a detective with a week left before retirement." After they submit a story outline filled with what they think is the requisite mayhem, director Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2) rejects it, and describes his ideal scenario: "'First act, better whammies,' he said. 'Second act, whammies mount up. Third act, all whammies.'"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.
Shinshi and Ohta at Narita Airport (with a few unscheduled takeoffs). From Patlabor: The Mobile Police. This file is at 109K [UPDATE: I corrected some of of the wobbliness in the framing]. In the comments to this post is a cleaner (330K) version of the file, which is truer to the source DVD. There is probably some easier way to convert DVD clips to animated .GIFs than the frame by frame reconstruction and compression I did. Let's just say I learned a lot about this 1 and 1/20 second of video.
Still frame from You Only Live Twice, 1967. The guy in the picture uses the keypunch equipment to move a surveillance camera around. If you haven't seen this Bond movie lately, check it out. It's set entirely in Japan, and the '60s Zen moderne interiors are amazing. Great dated tech stuff like this Burroughs machine. An electromagnet dangled from a helicopter picks up a car full of bad guys and dumps them in the ocean, demonstrating "the efficiency of Japanese technology." Assuming you can laugh at period sexism, the movie's practically a love letter to the Patriarchy ("In Japan, men come first, women come second," observes a Japanese agent as he introduces Bond's personal retinue of scantily-clad masseuses). John Barry's sumptuous, starkly emotional score is way better than this entertaining trifle deserves, however.
Amusing photos of error messages appearing on public screens (Macy's, the subway, bank ATMs) are here. Most are Windows, what a surprise. A sample photo can be found in the comments to this post. [via]
In the earlier thread on whether Ron Mueck is really still a Muppeteer, Sally gave some examples of things we'd miss out on with a narrowly drawn definition of "artist." One is "guitar solos as art performance," referring to a certain Cory Arcangel piece. But the art wasn't really the guitar solo, it was a mock power point lecture about hyperspecialized internet communities, in this case electric guitar nerds who devote whole sites and chatboards to legendary guitarists and famous solos. Arcangel took many of the technical details in the lecture from such sites, and then surprised the audience, at the end of the performance, with his prowess in playing Van Halen's "Eruption" solo note for note. The event combined visuals, talk, and music. Is the art world big enough to embrace this? I'd say yes. But what if Whitney curator Larry Rinder went to Williamsburg, heard a guitarist he liked, and invited him to play his instrument at the museum, as art?
Rinder is actually one of the worst offenders in the "I have the power to make you an artist" game. The 2001 Biennial included Samuel Mockbee's Rural Studio, which applied cutting edge design and economizing principles to housing for the disadvantaged in rural Alabama. The designs (captured in photos and models) were nice, but wouldn't this have been more meaningful in an architectural context? Also, could the NY museum audience ever really "get" the work without directly experiencing it? Rinder also bestowed Chris Ware's comix with the magic art aura, mounting the individual pages on the walls, behind glass, as drawings. But who's going to read all those pages in a museum gallery? There's an ideal form for viewing that kind of material--it's called the "comic book." The inclusion of Ware and Mockbee meant two less slots for validating folks who have been working away as visual artists, and who are possibly even expert at projects meant to be experienced in a gallery-type space.
Sally also mentions Damien Hirst's cut-up cow as something that perhaps took a wrong turn on the way to the natural history museum (my phrasing). Should it be banned from the art arena? No, because it's very self-consciously aware of how it fits in the chain of postwar art movements, referencing Minimalist seriality, the (Robert) Smithsonian critique of 19th Century museological and taxonomic principles, even animal gore a la the Viennese actionists...much of which ground (round) had already been covered in the '60s with Paul Thek's "meat in a vitrine" pieces, only not so literally. That's Hirst. But again, if a curator had a fishtank shipped over from an aquarium because he thought the tank-designer was an artist...
UPDATE: Some may remember my "revised BitStreams" roster included all kinds of folks outside the art world, which may seem like a contradiction. My point there was that in the case of emerging "digital culture," which is so new and undefined, you have to look elsewhere to find a technical yardstick and context. Rinder did that a bit in "BitStreams," he just picked crappy examples. Does that mean people who make title sequences for movies are artists? No, just that you ought to take them into account when evaluating whether, say, Jeremy Blake is any good.
My Christmas Dream (I know I promised these recitations would be sporadic; I lied)
I was working manual labor, with a crew of guys' guys I had to get along with. We walked down a long dirt road to the work site. The bosses fed us a kind of "meat roll" of pork and scrambled eggs with pieces of shrimp hanging out of it--not on plates; you picked it up off the ground and ate it with your hands. The job consisted of leveling a vast patch of slushy ice, which had formed ridges and mounds and had to be smoothed out. Its texture was more like ice cream--it came in supercold, viscous clumps. I had to get down on my knees to push the slush off a big central mound; from my vantage point there, I surveyed the work site. In addition to men, my co-workers included giant oxen covered with ice crystals, and "rock demons"--blond colored featureless humanoids resembling something out of a Jack Kirby comic. I looked up and was shocked to see that the work site sat at the base of an immense tube reaching up hundreds of feet, with walls of smoothly polished wood. Instead of sky overhead, there was a ceiling of loose, dripping ice. I couldn't fathom why it didn't fall on us; it was very ominous.
