July 31, 2002
From Adrian Searle's article on Documenta 11 in the Guardian: Iranian photo-journalist and cameraman Seifollah Samadian pointed his video camera out of his Tehran window and filmed a woman in a black chador struggling with an umbrella in a vicious...
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11:47 AM
AIRPORT GIFT SHOP - MORNING A CASHIER at the counter. She does not appear wildly over-qualified for her job. A YOUNG ITALIAN TOURIST COUPLE approach quietly with some postcards. The ITALIAN WOMAN wore her backpack on her stomach, as wary...
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11:00 AM
July 29, 2002
No, it's not just reciprocal link whoring, I swear: Just came back from the hotel pool, where I became transfixed by the beautiful patterns of reflections and whorls of light on the bottom of the pool, thinking to myself, "This...
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8:44 AM
Mesa , AZ- Just when you think it's too stupid to go back in the air, Delta.com offers the pleasant surprise of online check-in and home-printed boarding passes. A billboard on the way to the hotel says, "Sweating for free?!...
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5:18 AM
July 27, 2002
Submitted to Slamdance. We're traveling to UT and AZ for the weekend, location scouting for the Sundance/Slamdance season. Yeah, that's it, location scouting....
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6:35 AM
July 25, 2002
The route is so circuitous it bores even me, but I just came across The Essential Vermeer Lover, a scholarly yet very engaging site about, well, Vermeer. While it'll embarass him, I have to add a quick story from shooting...
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11:59 AM
July 23, 2002
As if the Prelinger Collection isnít remarkable enough, it turns out almost the whole thing is available online. Itís a collection of educational, industrial, military and propaganda films, as well as newsreels and commercials. (via boingboing) Truly transfixing. I wasted...
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11:50 AM
Rewatching Souvenir (November 2001) a dozen+ times in the last 24 hours, I'd begun to wonder what it can actually contribute to the increasing volume of the WTC memorial/rebuilding debate. There was 4,000-participant offsite Saturday (with a 200-participant makeup session...
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11:23 AM
Whew!: After a few weeks of fits and starts, a full day of editing followed by a full week of output-to-video frustration, I finally got the "finished" version of Souvenir (November 2001) on tape tonight. It's not drastically different; in...
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1:19 AM
July 22, 2002
"The advantage of [shooting on digital video] is that nobody knows, or at least cares, that you're making a movie; the disadvantage...is that the end product appears to have been filmed through a triple layer of bubble wrap." - from...
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4:22 AM
A nice passage from artist Anne Truitt's journal. Easily find and replace "notebooks" and "weblog": I once watched a snake shed his skin. Discomfort apparently alternating with relief, he stretched and contracted, stretched and contracted, and slowly, slowly pushed himself...
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3:22 AM
July 19, 2002
An artist friend loaned me his copy of the 1968 underground classic film, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One. I'd seen clips of the film before, and it played at Sundance one year when I was partying there. But this William Greaves landmark...
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1:54 AM
July 17, 2002
Music: Spent most of the morning following up on clearing music for Souvenir (November 2001). The process is moving along well. One thing I realized, though: I pointed a couple of the record company folks to this site to find...
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9:22 AM
July 16, 2002
Today the LMDC released its six concepts for rebuilding the World Trade Center. Visit the LMDC concepts website for details. One thing that strikes me immediately is how they're all titled "Memorial _____" (fill in the blank with Square, Promenade,...
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5:44 AM
July 15, 2002
Yesterday on Studio 360, host Kurt Andersen lamented on the lack of risk-taking and originality in "art and entertainment," and he tarred the television networks, Hollywood, and the artists at Documenta with the same brush. [Listen to his commentary here;...
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2:44 AM
July 14, 2002
I may be the newest proponent of home schooling, home film schooling, anyway. Spent the afternoon watching the Criterion Collection edition of Traffic, which--in addition to three complete commentary tracks (dir./writer; producers, consultant/composer)--has a supplemental DVD with 25 deleted scenes,...
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11:03 AM
July 13, 2002
Here's a link about rights and a song that I'm thinking of using, a possible replacement for Zabriskie Point. http://www.loc.gov/folklife/cg.html I've collated all Documenta 11-related entries in one page, which I'll keep updated. There's been a steady/increasing number of Google...
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4:20 AM
Rights, On: I've been digging into rights issues for both the new project (which will get a highlights list soon) and for Souvenir, getting ready to meet with a lawyer referred by a good friend at Universal (until he just...
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3:07 AM
July 12, 2002
Poking around Slamdance's website to get my submission stuff ready. It's HI-larious, obviously made by someone who pokes around dry film festival websites for a living. That led me to Bitter Films, where Don Hertzfeldt flogs and writes about his...
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2:12 AM
July 11, 2002
Not only did I finish all the tweak editing I mentioned earlier, the momentum picked up. I worked on the pacing of some dialogue scenes, changing some breaths/gaps and taking out a few tiny lines here and there. It makes...
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11:59 AM
July 10, 2002
Back in March when we were editing Souvenir November 2001, we spent some grim days dealing with sound. We'd recorded audio on the DV camera and on Mini-Disc (not DAT), using slate (not timecodes) to sync the sound. Then at...
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10:05 AM
Hmm. At the end of this Salon interview with independent director Tom diCillo, he says, "The greatest luxury is being able to get on the set. I would do it for no money. I love doing it. I love it."...
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9:29 AM
New Project: Did I mention it's animated? Actually, yeah, I did. Indirectly, anyway. Did I mention it's a musical? Umm, yeah. Well, I've been researching anime, animation production, CG, and techniques today. Here are some interesting links I've assembled so...
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7:43 AM
Contrary to one writer's opinion, Gabriel Orozco is a Mexican who can make pottery. After seeing Peter Schjeldahl's misguided critique of Orozco's work at Documenta 11 cited on ArtKrush to support an even broad(er)side on the state of contemporary art,...
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1:43 AM
July 9, 2002
Editing: After a couple of false starts, we're finally set to make the editing tweaks on Souvenir November 2001 this week. (Since I only have FCP 1.0 loaded, and the project got saved in 3.0, I couldn't open it without...
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12:18 PM
July 7, 2002
Kevin Smith's irreverent but brilliant Dogma just ended on Comedy Central (albeit in highly edited form). I sat behind Smith and his posse when it premiered at the 1999 NY Film Festival, but I haven't seen it since. It really...
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10:16 AM
When I posted on kottke.org about "Fifty Nifty United States," I gave a link with the lyrics and a Real Audio file. here is that link....
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9:25 AM
July 6, 2002
Apropos of nothing other than the weekend: Create a South Park version of yourself We did....
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11:23 AM
There's an interesting article by Louis Menand in this week's New Yorker about Maya Lin called "The Reluctant Memorialist." He talks about her early rejection of any WTC Memorial-related requests and about her recent informal advisory work for the decisionmakers...
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8:00 AM
July 4, 2002
For the new project (comments to follow): Everyone Says I Love You(Woody Allen) - An utterly joyless, excruciating experience. I just wanted his characters to shut up for even one second. Everyone seemed to be doing a frantic, bad Woody...
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11:16 AM
July 3, 2002
Last night was a rerun of Buffy: The Musical, Joss Whedon's annual stunt episode of the show (two seasons ago, there was the silent episode, then the "no background noise" episode. In 2001, it was the "background singer" episode, I...
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1:59 AM
To paraphrase Max Fischer: I've applied for early admission to the Edinburgh Film Festival and Cannes. Sundance is my safety. [wesanderson.org is a good source for active fans.]...
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1:18 AM
July 2, 2002
It may be a little overwrought ("So let's receive this Documenta as the proclamation of a state of emergency."), but Kim Levin's Village Voice review of Documenta 11 is pretty right on. I mean, she generally agrees with me, reinforcing...
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4:41 AM
This morning, I did a driveby at the Iwo Jima Memorial (there had been a big formation of Marines there earlier in the day). Whatever Americans know of Iwo Jima today, it's almost certain they recognize the statue. It was...
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4:11 AM
July 1, 2002
Usually, when you get googled for "I went to high school with Ben Affleck" or "red vines and hidden meaning," you're left to wonder who the hell that was, and what's going on in those folks' heads? So imagine...
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2:36 AM
