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The artist is present

This whole concept was too brain-explodingly excellent not to share: 8-bit Marina Abramović. “You can actually make it to the front. I did it yesterday and it took 5 hours. But once you get to the front, you can stare into her eyes for as long as you want.” [via The Awl]

Lawrence "Looker" Levi notices something strange about Willem de Kooning's painting "Carole Lombard," included in MoMA's current show:

In their discussion of de Kooning's game-changing 1950 abstraction Excavation, Stevens and Swan note that, as he was finishing it, he "painted a small rectangle near the bottom of the painting. He described it as a 'door,' a way to leave." In the painting, the door appears to be open. There's a door painted near the bottom of Carole Lombard, too, and it's closed.

I've been an un-fan of de Kooning since seeing a show of his women at, I think, Tate Modern back in 1995. But does anyone else think Zeroville upon learning of this door?

Lawrence named his post "To Be or Not to Be," which is flimsy excuse enough for me to turn to perhaps the most intriguing [to me] snippet from The Daily Notebook's recent festival coverage:

Conference, after starting with its credits running backwards, reveals a two-part film made up of 8mm black and white footage of video clips of actors who've played Hitler in the cinema—over 60 of them. Clarity of mise-en-scène in individual clips avoided in favor of a uniform aesthetic across the short, suppressing the ability, and desire, to identify which clip comes from what movie, thus creating what seems a single film of a multitudinous mass of Hitlers.  It begins (that is, "ends"), at first, with a series of Hitlers walking into rooms and looking at each other, creating both a study of all the iconicity that makes up his photographic figure—the eyes, the hair, the slouch, the moustache, fatigue and mania—and an entirely new meta-cinematic movie which conjures a fantastical gathering of multiple Hitlers.  This cinematic "conference" thus posits an endless series of Hitlers, each subtly different from the other but from the same essence.

The short then transitions to include more comedic interpretations, cleverly moving from Chaplin's dictator to Downey Jr.'s Chaplin's dictator, drawing into the fold Hitler's performative nature and the nature of performing Hitler. The soundtrack throughout is a degraded vocal sample of Chaplin's pseudo-German nonsense langage from The Great Dictator, put into the mouths of all, with constant applause abstracted to static and giving the film a relentless, hall of mirrors rhythm, moving from the paranoid gathering at the beginning of the film (but narratively the end), ending (at the beginning) with a speech, and between finding so many variations as to suggest that Conference is but a fragment of something larger and even more grotesque, morphing but recognizable, elusive yet everywhere, about both Hitler the man and Hitler the cinematic figure.

Doesn't that sound amazing? Gah, I wish I could see it.

Conference's denial of "name that clip" viewing brings me to the curious case of Christian Marclay's "The Clock" and the slept-on news [sorry] of its run at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston through October 11. Three takes from the Boston Globe's "Movie Nation" blog:

My stint lasted from 7 p.m. until midnight, when Geoff Edgers and Wesley took over. I stayed a little longer, though, since no way was I going to leave without seeing what Marclay would do at the stroke of 12. Part of the joy of "The Clock" is how the rigid adherence to chronological time lets it be otherwise unstructured. One of the few recurring patterns is a kind of rhythmic and visual crescendo at each hour -- and midnight got special treatment, climaxing with Welles' extremely unhappy experience with a clock tower, in"The Stranger." That's Welles, at left, with Loretta Young and a somewhat smaller clock earlier in the movie. This is the thing about Marclay's piece and clocks: Once you've watched even a bit of it, you start noticing the damn things everywhere. They're like chronological kudzu. (Feeney)

Of all that Christian Marclay's horological odyssey achieves, the boldest feat is a simple matter of etiquette. If a movie's got you, it's got you. There's nowhere else you'd rather be. If a movie's reallygot you, you don't want it to end. So what do you do when a movie's lost you, when it's never had you, when you simply can't take another minute? You check the time. It's second-hand criticism. (Morris)

I glanced at the artist’s credit. Marclay’s crew was big enough to work the Indy 500. Drat. For me, part of the pleasure was imagining this nutcase surrounded by DVDs and Beta tapes and laser discs in his endless search for time references. I didn’t want to think of him farming out tasks like Bob Timberlake cooking up his latest cabin print. 

Another mood-ruining thought: How on earth did Marclay get such wonderful picture quality if he didn’t license these clips? Those who go legit – and pay millions, in some cases, for licensing – get nice, high-definition tapes supplied. I had figured, coming in, that he was working off standard DVDs. (Edgers)

OK, time's up!

Hey, kids! Let's put on a show!

When the cinetrix was but a wee cinephage, she pored over the tv listings that came with each Sunday's paper. This pursuit found her sneaking down to catch Montgomery Clift in The Big Lift, say, on some grainy UHF channel, long after she was supposed to be in bed.

It was either on UHF or a nascent cable channel like TBS where she first saw one of those "kids getting together to perform" movies. She knew about Judy from her work over the rainbow and may have recognized Mickey from The Black Stallion, but there was also a snooty girl, who was secretly some child star. A barn. You know the drill. For many pre-Internet years afterward she searched for it.

Then this week, the invaluable resource that is Film Fanatic posted about Babes in Arms, and suddenly it was like there was a door to a new room in my house that I had never entered before. 

Babes… — directed by Busby Berkeley — is likely the first film one thinks of when contemplating the “let’s put on a show!” genre, and this one pulls out all the stops, complete with an offensive black-face minstrel piece which will distress any modern viewers not hardened enough to simply regard it as an unfortunate product of its time. The storyline itself is surprisingly hard-hitting at times — most notably in its depiction of strained relations between Rooney and his father (Winninger), who at first is in massive denial about the imminent collapse of vaudeville’s reign, then bitterly angry about the role his son is trying to play in its revitalization; their father-son squalls together are far from representative of typical escapist fare. But, naturally, there’s plenty of levity throughout as well — primarily in the form of Preisser as an “aging” child-actress with tremendous gymnastic talents (check out those back flips!), plenty of money to fling around, and mooning eyes for Rooney; her temporary threat to Rooney’s romance with Garland provides the bulk of the film’s narrative tension.

EUREKA! Said title's been slung on the [contentious] queue, and in celebration I give you Frank S. and Peggy L. above, via Terry.

Disappear here

Two creepy-excellent recent posts from Hilobrow get their mise-en-abime on. Above, every time you look at this image, a pixel is subtracted. Active looking destroys the object of its gaze:

A photograph of 10 Ruston Close, formally 10 Rillington Place, will be both projected within the gallery and is accessible online now. Each time the image is viewed, either online or within the space, a single pixel will be removed from the image. Over the period of the exhibition the image will decompose directly in response to the number of views it receives.

Next, a moment of silence:

While they inevitably shift and sway, we have internalized a notion of borders as critical to the integrity and functioning of our state and our politics. Similarly, while the edges are infinitely mutable, the notion of borders in artwork are of critical both to the functioning of the art market and to the non-commercial production of art. As we move more and more of our cultural output onto the internet, what becomes of our borders? Who patrols them and why, and to what end?

<big snip>

What troubles me most isn’t that there are borders (there always will be), or that they are different (they always change) but that while in the material world removal is manual and leaves evidence of its passage, in the digital it can destroy without leaving a mark. A redacted document shows, in effect, the action of redaction. The infamous Nixon tapes are not zeroed data, but rather contain an 18.5 minute over-dubbed section of physical tape whose contents historians still hope to recover. Aphrodite’s head still exists, even with her nose missing and a cross on her forehead, and even the Taliban have left enough of the Afghan Buddha statues that international organizations hope to rebuild them someday. But as we evolve into a future where almost all of our cultural output is fragile and digital, I wonder what becomes of the content rejected from the canon?

In 2009, artist and musician Adam Lore posted what purported to be an audio recording of John Cage’s 4’33” (a famous piece in which Cage sits silently in front of a piano for the duration named in the title). The video contains a red box generated from YouTube indicating that “the video contains third party content and the audio has been disabled.”

It's too delicious. Or would be, if it weren't also totally fucked up.

Heard.

First up, the neutering of a pop song's oomph:

Considering the awkward and absurd plot trying to pass for humor in The Hangover 2, I wasn’t surprised to see  the monkey was a drug dealer. I was struck, however, by one of the monkey’s scenes where he completes a drug transaction. Sitting atop a light pole, a buyer signals for the monkey’s attention. The monkey struts across the wire and completes the transaction. After taking the buyer’s money, the monkey drops it off to his masters (two French men), eats an apple, goes back to his post, and lights a cigarette. The dope boy, er, monkey worked to the sonic backdrop of Curtis Mayfield’s “Pusher Man.”  My husband laughed. I cocked my head to the side.

One of the most recognizable tracks from Mayfield’s extensive body of work, “Pusher Man” (which is street slang for “drug dealer”) was on the Super Fly soundtrack released in 1971. In its original context, “Pusher Man” provided insight into the purpose and agency of drug dealing in the inner city. However, inThe Hangover 2 “Pusher Man” is subverted for comic relief and consumption by a multicultural audience. The result is that the film neutralizes “Pusher Man” and overrides  the cultural significance behind the song  for the film’s comedic purposes.

It's only gonna get worse, warns a sonic semiotician:

To understand how this might actually work, consider the possibility of guessing the title of a song from a snippet. Now, even more amazing, recall how a mere sliver of sound can evoke an emotional response. Anger, Love, Sadness, Joy. It quickly becomes evident that even a button-sized musical solution has the power to fulfill a marketing objective. And because branded sonic assets are often wordless, they become especially advantageous assets across a multinational customer base.

Sorry, didn't mean to be such a bummer. Here, watch this dubbed clip! Chk chkahhhh!

Force-fed

How do you solve a problem like George Lucas? The card-carrying Boomer gets my generation to act all Boomeresque -- pissing and moaning, rending garments; lamentations about how things were better back in the day -- every time he fucks with his Star Wars series. What to do?

Give up? Publicly? And pitch a piece to your editor to that effect? (Which, frankly, comes off about as convincing as threats to move to Canada if one's candidate does not prevail at the polls.)

Repurpose memorable Star Wars dialogue as an opportunity for comics and actors -- Bill Hader does a helluva dying Tauntaun -- to goof on them to "stand up to cancer," which I guess would be the dark side of the Force, then?

Got me. But I suspect one good place to start might be with J.D. Connor's recent Post45 piece about another instance of stomping-all-over-my-childhood-classics travesty, the film version of Where the Wild Things Are. The whole of "We'll Eat You Up We Love You So" is just tremendous, and you should read it all. But also let me include an excerpt here that begins to get at what I think this latest Blu-haha has unleashed. Check it:

There are, famously, ten sentences comprising 338 words in the original book, and none of them are in this trailer. Those sentences are definitive, and what they define is the experience of having this story read to you. Over and over. Which is to say, those words are the words of a mother, or a father, or a grandmother; those are some of the words by which you come to language in safety.

So the experience of this trailer is the experience of the absence of that voice. The voice of your grownup, your protector, your absolver. This is the voice that gave you a world: “and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max” (Sendak). Every time you had that book read to you, or you read it to someone else, that voice—ultimately your voice—became that private boat.

However, until you have actually had the experience of losing that sheltering voice, the trailer does not strike you with the force of a cataclysm. Seated among children watching it with their parents or grandparents or trusted older brothers or sisters, I saw them not get it, and they didn’t get it because the cure for unprotected silence was in easy reach. They nuzzled up; they reached into a lap for popcorn; they breathed in deep and smelled their way back into a sort of shelter. This is, of course, how Sendak brought Max back from the land of the wild things—not with a touch, or a voice that would compete with the voice that was reading the story right then, but with the smell, and warmth, of dinner: “and it was still hot” (Sendak).

So a better title for this post might well have been "His Master's Voice," perhaps.

But why should you trust me? I lost Princess Leia's gun in the woods behind the house the same day I got her (donut 'do and white cape model. Nerds!). After that, I gave up on the "action figures." Too many little bits to keep track of, which were always going astray. Kind of like the movies. But that's OK.

Which reminds me. I came across a bit from an Umberto Eco essay on the Internets today or yesterday that I've assigned my students in the past. The quoted text read, "Two cliches make us laugh but a hundred cliches move us because we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion." Eco goes on to say something more apt for the moment we find ourselves in:

Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime.

Nobody would have been able to achieve such a cosmic result intentionally. [emphasis mine] Nature has spoken in place of men. This, alone, is a phenomenon worthy of veneration.

Threading

Friday afternoon. First stack of papers landed yesterday, the majority of them on Frank O'Hara's "Ave Maria." Clearly I need to fortify myself with a link frenzy before doing any grading.

• Foolish friends of foolish Facebook friends are to blame for the clip above, in which the Heather Chandler [SPOILER ALERT] drinks the Dran-o cocktail prepared by Veronia and J.D. scene is reenacted with puppets. And why not? Let the rest of the world have its Hey, girl!
• Ed Champion chats with Miranda July. Subjects Discussed: People in their mid-thirties who are crippled by their own self-judgment, empathy and resentment, workaholicism, feeling paralyzed, kidults and grups, pursuing a project without seeking a larger sociological reach, hats and gloves, the number of characters in The Future that operate as failed artists, July’s theory that most artists are in a constant state of crisis, moments in life when you don’t know what to do with yourself, entering the space of not knowing, outside forces that compel artists, talking moons and crawling T-shirts, nudges from your own security blanket, the relationship between art and commerce, the dry-erase marketing campaign for No One Belongs Here More Than You, the Internet as a commercial medium, Google+, art springing from boredom, anger and addiction, T-shirt puppeteers, screaming out windows, Howard Beale in Network, yelling out windows in real life, girls who bury themselves in the ground, self-enforced endurance rituals, vital methods that emerge from voicing a talking cat, playing multiple roles, sticking with initial intentions, accidental slips, whether July feels any obligation to speak to her generation or a cultivated audience, and the liberation of writing, directing, and performing in your own sex scene.

 

• "Teenage is an unconventional historical film about the invention of teenagers. Bringing to life fascinating youth from the early 20th century—from party-crazed Flappers and hipster Swing Kids to brainwashed Nazi Youth and frenzied Sub-Debs—the film reveals the pre-history of modern teenagers and the struggle between adults and adolescents to define youth."
• Speaking of teens, Jonathan Rosenbaum on Foxfire: "What justifies this stylization isn’t a tit-for-tat settling of feminist scores but the dreamy adolescent subjectivity that informs the entire movie, including the mottled lighting. Since the film is about the bonding of teenage girls, I suppose it has something to do with feminist empowerment, but Foxfire is a lot closer to a lyrical poem than a tract: it’s much too far inside its subject to come across as preachy. As in much of Joyce Carol Oates’s fiction — or so I’ve been told by a friend — the action is organized around the appearance of a mysterious stranger. Usually this stranger is male, as in the Oates story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” the basis for the movie Smooth Talk. But in this case the stranger is a teenage female drifter named Legs, memorably played by Angelina Jolie (Jon Voight’s daughter), who is the catalyst for Maddy and three of her classmates to become friends and fellow rebels." Or so I've been told by a friend.
• Hilobrow reposts Josh Glenn on Richard Linklater in 2006: "It’s tricky to portray the slacker’s qualities as progressive ones, as Dick was all too aware. And here in our own repoliticized era, when even a Hollywood broadsheet like Variety complains that Linklater’s Scanner “misses the boat by not linking its themes more explicitly to the political realities of the present, particularly when issues of unlawful surveillance have rarely been more relevant,” convincing American audiences of the virtues of what we might call slacktivism — if we could rid the term of its pejorative connotations — appears impossible. But this is what Linklater has tried to do from the start."

• Home movie day! Lyrical and mesmerizing movies of the stars shot by Roddy McDowell now live on the YouTubes, mit out sound.
• His directive may have changed from querying every Sarah on the service, but I am still chuckling over T-800's Twitter feed @111001001101010. RELATED: This Distracted Globe on "The Terminator, a down and dirty science fiction action thriller about Adam and Eve on the run from a killer cyborg played by the future governor of California."
• Critic Nick Pinkerton skewers his critics. "As anyone who has perused the Comments section of virtually any YouTube posting can tell you, these forums function principally as a clearing house for semiliterate jeremiads and jaw-dropping racism. The average film review is not much better favored by the plebes. Unfortunately, as the great personal wealth that I’ve accrued through a life in letters means that my leisure time is increasingly occupied by ceaseless yachting, I have found it difficult to set aside the time to scroll through the Comments left by my dear readers. Most responses might best be limited to the classical Mad Magazine sendoff (“Fa fa fa!”) or Joan Didion’s rejoinder to a reader’s overheated response to her criticism of Woody Allen’s Manhattan in the New York Review of Books (“Oh, wow.”) I have, however, sorted through my fan mail often enough to have detected certain recurring themes in Comments section leavings, which I would like to address below, as I have not in the past had occasion to."
• Noted in passing, in n + 1 via The Awl: "Christina Ricci. She once read slush for Open City, the magazine I edited, many years ago; her father was a Reichian therapist who practiced scream therapy and never realized that his otherwise soundproofed basement office had an air vent that led directly into her room."

• "The story of Lynch’s career can be told in large part through his various collaborations—think Kyle MacLachlan’s brilliant-naif detectives, Jack Nance’s furrowed-brow weirdos, or Angelo Badalamenti’s soundtracks, pitching back and forth between pop smooches and synths of doom—but Dern’s contribution to his career is as unequaled as it is unsung. She not only gets him, she’s helped him get why he cares about the non-painterly aspects of moviemaking, like story and character. Though she appears in only three of his features, Dern has worked in every decade of Lynch’s activity but one (the '70s), and at every stage of his career (save film school). At the same time, Dern has offered Lynch a dramatic range that no other actor in his company can touch."
• Masha Tupitsyn extends an argument my pal Stephen explored in the 90s when he gave a Cambridge Center for Adult Ed. class on star theory, using John Cusack as his subject. "Over the past 20 years, John Cusack has profited from his iconic double by exploiting the cultural and romantic agitprop of Say Anything’s Lloyd Dobler. The character has become Cusack’s idealized cinematic male alias; informing every movie role he’s done since, and 'draw[ing] the spectator into a specific path of intertextuality,' to quote film historian Richard DeCordova, 'that extends outside of the text as formal system.' ... So what is Cusack selling? If God is in the details, so is Cusack, who is accused of playing himself onscreen. But who came up with the idea that the onscreen Cusack is the real Cusack? How does an actor, who by definition plays people he isn’t, get branded for playing himself (what critics and fans have dubbed 'Cusackian,' a correlative of 'Doblerism'), a self viewers don’t actually know; and how can Cusack be playing Cusack if the person he plays onscreen is reportedly nothing like him?"
• Finishing with Friday fun: "Why, yes, I am missing 'school' for New York Fashion Week. All they were 'teaching' was colors, and I’ve known my eggshell from my ivory since before I could walk. This is where I am meant to be." Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's Suri's Burn Book.