John Menick | Archive for May, 2006

For whatever reason, Bright Lights film journal decides to publish its online content like a print journal, which means quarterly, and which also means avid fans such as myself only check in a few times a year. (At least give us some weekly content!) Issue 52 is out, and Robert Keser’s article on Godard’s Moments Choisis des Histoire(s) du Cinéma is worth a look. It also jogged a memory of the film’s premier in New York a few years ago.

I saw Moments Choisis des Histoire(s) du Cinéma at the opening of the MoMA’s renovated theater, with a packed, invite-only crowd. In other words, the place was filled with in-the-know arts professions, people, you would assume, who have seen a Godard film, and maybe even a late Godard film. Evidently not. Granted, this was the second screening of the night, and most of the room was roasted on free booze. I also have to say that the film was liberally translated, meaning that the translators, oh, got around to translating every fifth or sixth line of voice-over whenever they felt like it. (I don’t speak French — not even close –but even I could catch random omissions and mistakes in the subtitling.)

The crowd was livid. They booed and hissed to such an extent a Cannes Festival audience would have been embarrassed. People were wailing at the screen and leaving in packs. An entire row of people in the arts sitting in front of me, professionals who, say, curate really dry shows of conceptual art (and who will go unnamed), left after a few minutes. It was not the easiest film in the world to watch, but it was by no means Michael Snow, and by no means torturous. And, I remind you: it was playing at the MoMA.

The point is not to call out the New York art world as a pack of philistines. Nothing could be more obnoxious and out of place. However, I’ve been attending art house screenings in New York for twelve years, and no film has elicited such a reaction from any crowd, let alone one from the art world. (OK, maybe one.) I felt as if I was witnessing a minor version of a Modernist scandal, something akin to Stravinsky’s first performance of Le Sacre du printemps. (Sans fistfights.) If anything, it showed that Godard was on to something, and was able to make a film that actually drew lines through its audience. Needless to add: the theater was mostly empty by the time the film ended.

Related: Bright Lights links to Jonathan Rosenbaum’s review of Moments Choisis des Histoire(s) du Cinéma.

PS: Moments Choisis des Histoire(s) du Cinéma brought up a related question for me: what rights management issues does the film raise? To charge Godard or Thom Anderson for the usage of this appropriated material would be outrageous and unworkable, but as the Times mentioned recently, not totally unthinkable. Both filmmakers’ work easily falls under the heading of ‘criticism,’ and the fair usage of the material would be defensible, but is this kind of work threatened by Hollywood?

No (American) movie buff would be complete without IMDb, and the Times today gives a glimpse of the site’s founder, Col Needham. Although the writer of the article finds Needham’s work situation enviable (he works from home, wow), what is more enviable is that his site is still useful and relatively add-free after more than a decade of existence. Even taking into account the Amazon purchase, the ‘IMDb pro’ version, and the bells and whistles, IMDb still feels like a fan site. Following a pattern that Google also enjoys, IMDb nailed one service really well, and has been trying to add something reasonably as good ever since. What the article fails to mentioned is how exactly the site is maintained, because, after all, it wouldn’t be anything without accurate info.

But how accurate is IMDb? And does its ‘populist’ rating system work? The site has become notorious for its ludicrous flame wars among what seem to be two camps: those that would murder for the movie in question, and those that would murder those people in the first camp. Perhaps it’s a problem of fandom rather than technology, but wouldn’t it be impossible to institute a more accurate karma system at IMDb? After all, look at its parent company, Amazon. Reviews are often informative, and are somewhat objective as well. (Forgetting for a moment that the authors themselves usually write the rest of the rather glowing reviews.)

From sites like IMDb to Alternative Reality Gaming, online fan cultism has created a new, more energized form of audience participation, one severely lacking in the visual arts. It’s probable that the bar has been raised in general, and what, two decades ago, would have inspired a quarterly fanzine, now inspires thousands of hours devoted to puzzle deconstruction or amateur fan films. The gap between the relatively staid world of the arts and the frenzy of truly public culture widens even further.

Fine print: What is the most intriguing part of the article is the insinuation that Amazon might be moving to sell downloadable and burnable DVDs in the near future. Will they beat Apple to the punch and finally make DVD-quality films digitally distributable? (Albeit with some ludicrous, and instantly hackable DRM?)

Since finishing The Disappearance three years ago, I’ve been casually collecting all things related to the city of Nuremberg. Also a fan of Google Earth, two interests intersected today with this bizarre post from Google Earth Hacks. It seems that there is a massive model car racetrack near the rally fields that is so large it’s visible 1373 feet. An essay on architectural scale waiting to happen.

While reviewing the exhibition “Future City” at the Barbican, London, Jonathan Glancey chooses to look at the effect visionary filmmakers have had on how we view the architecture of the future. He argues that although Archigram and Superstudio may have wowed those in the know, it’s designers, f/x artists, and architects like Lawrence G Paul (Blade Runner), Harry Lange (2001), and Eugen Schüfftan (Metropolis) who have given the public its sense of what’s to come.

Today Wired.com released formerly sealed documents “detailing aspects of AT&T’s alleged participation in the National Security Agency’s warrantless domestic wiretap operation.” AT&T claimed the documents were sealed because the corporation somehow construed them to be “proprietary.” Wired.com thought differently (how they got the documents is unclear), and decided to publish them.

Also published are several photos showing the alleged “secret room,” which looks marginal, but not really all that “secret.” The banality of the photos — impeccable corporate drab — adds somewhat to their allure.

As part of it’s special issue on architecture, the New York Times Magazine has a short article on the designers Constantin and Laurene Leon Boym’s “Buildings of Disaster” series. “Buildings of Disaster”…

…is a line of tiny replicas of buildings that have become symbols through association with catastrophe, tragedy or scandal — like the Unabomber’s cabin, the Federal Building in Oklahoma City and a Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Each is just a few inches high and made of bonded nickel, in editions of 500; the retail price is $95… The idea, Boym says, was both an “alternative history of architecture” (buildings famous by way of emotional involvement, not aesthetics) and an examination of what souvenirs are all about. While he clearly anticipated a certain amount of controversy, he does not seem to have anticipated the series’ durability. But that can be explained in a straightforward way: market demand.

Also mentioned in the article is a group that belongs on any list of obscure interest societies: the Souvenir Building Collectors Society.

Launched several months ago by Adam Simon and Art in General, the Fine Art Adoption Network allows artists to put up their works for “adoption,” i.e. give their artworks, for free, to individuals who make a case that they will take the best care of the pieces. Ideally, the Web site would:

…Engage people who may never have thought of themselves as art collectors. By putting more art into more homes, we hope to increase and diversify the population of art owners, re-imagining the ways in which art can be experienced and shared.

Currently, artists can sign up by invitation only, but possible collectors (meaning you) can sign up for free.

Friend and video artist Shelly Silver just launched her new project, desiredescape.net. As the site explains:

Do you need to escape? Your house, family, relationship, job, city, country, universe? This is a website where we can share our strategies about why we need to escape, how we plan to escape and where we hope to escape to. Have you successfully escaped? We’d really like to hear about that too. To submit a story go to login to register and get a user name. Or go directly to submit and just start typing.

(Image from desiredescape.net, submitted by “Sarah.” )

Kevin Kelly’s article in the Times spends a refreshingly long time considering the epistemological consequences of Google Book Search before skidding headlong into the inevitable brick wall of US copyright laws. Yes, as Brewster Kahle exclaims, “This is our chance to one-up the Greeks!” But, as Kahle would be the first to admit, the Greeks didn’t have our copyright laws, and they definitely didn’t have our multinational corporations.

Google isn’t the library of Alexandria either. It’s a massive, publicly-trade corporation, and, depending on how one looks at it, Google is at heart a tech workshop, but at pocket an advertising company. Despite the mountains of money, Google’s business philosophy continues to be confused with that of a non-profit corporation. For some reason, journalists have taken its unofficial-official slogan, “Don’t be evil,” seriously, and projects like Google Book Search are gauged by their ethical, not economical, merits. Whether it was intended or not by Google execs, this pared-down ethical mantra is perhaps the greatest marketing move of the last decade. Journalists of all backgrounds genuinely seem to believe that the simplistic ethical intentions of a few highly educated executives will drive a company away from, say, censoring its search engine in China, or blackballing the journalists at CNET. Google? Evil? But they said they wouldn’t be…

Everything makes sense though when one accepts the basic fact that Google is a for-profit, publicly traded corporation. Google is not mission driven. It’s profit driven. Avoiding profit for the sake of the tastes of a few individuals would most likely be illegal, just as in the case of a non-profit making a profit from a means outside its mission statement would threaten its existence. That’s not to say that Google has adopted the rapacious practices of its predecessor Microsoft. But it sure looks poised to do so. And although the intentions of publishers who have taken Google to court can also be questioned, even the most extreme fair use advocates can’t help but see their point. If one understands that Google is out to make money, why should it then have a right to scan another corporation’s books, even if those books are ‘orphaned?’ Similarly, the relation becomes troublesome even if one takes into account the proposal by Google to only use a ‘snippet’ of a text. The entire book still sits scanned, indexed and ready to use on hard drives in some vast server farmer, and could potential be used or misused at any time in the future, regardless of what this year’s contract says.

A similar argument can be made concerning the information Google stores on each of its millions of users. No mission statement will prevent the Google privacy statement from being changed (all can be), or the data from being stolen, sold, or secretly slipped to the authorities. Many commentators believed that Google’s denying of their search stats to Congress had more to do with protecting the secret formula than their user’s privacy. And that’s if you trust Google. If they are anything like the airline companies, they could be telling their customers one thing, and the authorities something very different.

After decades of non-existence, NSA is finally getting the attention it deserves, and while I’m not sure if, as Julia Meltzer told me, NSA doesn’t have a public fax, they do have a public Web site. So, while writing a short entry on the NSA wiretapping scandal, I kept getting sidetracked by the site’s copious FAQs and IP telephony security guides (!), until I came across what is has to be the digital gem in their tarnished crown.

PS. More info from this morning’s On The Media. (Concerning the NSA, not Cryptokids, alas.)