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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.