BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Well, I'm pretty sure I have published two-week artistic consumption logs before, so it's not like this is without precedent...
Some day, 2012 movie catch-up will end. (Over the past weekend, I turned in one ballot, and I have two more to submit before the year is out—not to mention the year-end wrap-up I'm planning for In Review Online.)
Oh, and if any of you are wondering why I haven't put a recommending star next to Zero Dark Thirty—well, no, I'm not especially enthusiastic about it, in stark contrast to seemingly every critics' group that has bestowed Best Picture honors to Kathryn Bigelow's latest action epic. Are we looking at the next Best Picture Oscar winner? In any case, I'm planning to explain the sources of my resistance over at In Review Online soon.
Until then...well, below is a barebones overview of all the art I've consumed in the past two weeks.
Vamps (2012)
Films
★ Photographic Memory (2011, Ross McElwee), seen on screener in Brooklyn, N.Y.
★ Neighboring Sounds (2012, Kleber Medonça Filho), seen on screener in Brooklyn, N.Y. Zero Dark Thirty (2012, Kathryn Bigelow), seen at Director's Guild Theater in New York
★ I Wish (2011, Hirokazu Kore-eda), seen on screener in New York Lincoln (2012, Steven Spielberg), seen at Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, N.Y.
★ Vamps (2012, Amy Heckerling), seen on screener in Brooklyn, N.Y. Let Fury Have the Hour (2012, Antonino D'Ambrosio), seen on screener in Brooklyn, N.Y. Django Unchained (2012, Quentin Tarantino), seen at Academy Theater at Lighthouse International in New York
The set of the latest Signature Theatre Co. production of The Piano Lesson
Theater
★ Golden Child (1998, David Henry Hwang), seen live at Pershing Square Signature Center in New York
★ The Piano Lesson(1990, August Wilson), seen live at Pershing Square Signature Center in New York
Art
★ the event of a thread (2012, Ann Hamilton), seen at Park Avenue Armory in New York
BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Yesterday was the first day I ventured outside of my parents' home in East Brunswick, N.J., to survey the damage Hurricane Sandy wrought in my town. As expected, there were the usual fallen trees...
...and downed, possibly live wires:
And there was also this:
As a result of Hurricane Sandy, gasoline is running dangerously low at a lot of gas stations in the New York/New Jersey area, leading to long lines of cars waiting to refuel at the precious few gas stations left operating—like the Hess station on Route 18 that I captured during the first part of that video above.
Of course, yesterday I also finally made it back to New York and had to deal with another long line to get back home: a massive line to catch special shuttle buses New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority had set up that would take us past the still-mostly-powerless areas of lower Manhattan and get us into Brooklyn. That's what I captured in the second part of that video.
I figured it would be cool to juxtapose those two lines together: the suburban and urban equivalents of the long lines and general craziness that this superstorm left in its wake. It's both amusing and sad at the same time.
EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Some of your sharper-eyed readers might have noted the dateline in my last post and wondered, "What is he doing back in New Jersey?"
Well, I am back home with my folks in New Jersey to ride out Hurricane Sandy, the major storm that's about to bear down on the mid- to upper part of the East Coast here in the United States and is predicted to cause some devastating damage. I made the choice to rush back home when New York decided to shut down its public-transportation system in anticipation of this massive weather event at 7 p.m. last night; because I was working until 7:30 p.m. yesterday, and because I'm supposed to be on vacation starting today (my trip to Amsterdam has been postponed until Friday night), I decided I might as well head back home, pay a visit to my folks and stay in their company as the so-called "Frankenstorm" increased in strength.
So, after nearly missing what I discovered only when I boarded a Suburban Coach bus at Port Authority Bus Terminal was the last Line 100 bus of the night before they shut down service completely (nice going in giving all of us advance warning, Suburban Coach!), I am now back in East Brunswick. The electricity here at home is still working...for now.
But boy, Sunday morning was already pretty ominous, as this video I shot with my iPhone attests:
The winds started to pick up last night—to the point where I could hear it howling outside while sitting indoors—and it has only gotten worse, as this other video I shot demonstrates:
And, as of now, Hurricane Sandy hasn't even touched down on land yet! This doesn't appear to be yet another Hurricane Irene situation like last year; this looks to be the real deal. So stay safe, everybody!
In the meantime...well, one ought to have a bit of fun even amidst a potential natural disaster like this one, so I've been thinking of some of the best depictions of storms in music. I came up with this playlist of five on Spotify:
I'd love to add more if anyone has other suggestions to offer!
BROOKLYN, N.Y.—One byproduct of having so many easily accessible forms of media at our disposal every day is that we sometimes find ourselves making decisions as to which form is better at capturing a given moment in our daily lives. Or, at least, I do.
This past Sunday offered a case in point. The Dominican Day Parade was held here in New York on Sunday, and it proceeded up Sixth Avenue, past my office building. And certainly no one who was working at the News Corp. building that day could avoid hearing the festivities outside; that's how raucous it was. But hearing the din from my indoor aural vantage point was nothing compared to stepping outside my office and experiencing all that noise blasting into my face, as occurred when I went out to grab some lunch.
Here's where the personal decision-making came in. I wanted to capture a sense of this scene and share it with all of my Twitter followers/Facebook friends, so I instinctively took out my iPhone and took a photo. But then I realized that no photograph, however lively or colorful, could do justice to just how loud it was out there. So, after I had grabbed my lunch, I took out my iPhone again and, while walking past the parade on the way back to my office, shot this video:
I think that better captures the moment, don't you? (I didn't keep the photo I took, in the interest of saving space on my iPhone.)
There have been other times, though, where I went the other way and settled for still images rather than videos. Back in June—on June 20, the day of the summer solstice, to be exact—Times Square was transformed into a massive yoga studio of sorts, with four 90-minute sessions scheduled throughout the day for yoga enthusiasts all over the city could participate. I didn't participate, but I did drop by during the last session of the day to see what it was like. Again, I wanted to share what I was observing with friends online. To that end, I snapped these photos:
Then I thought about whether taking some video might further enhance my audience's sense of the scene. I did shoot one, actually, but I wasn't satisfied with the result (I think it was just a matter of me just missing an exciting moment before I turned my iPhone camera on and not finding anything of much interest subsequently). In the end, though, I decided that those photos above were enough to convey at least a measure of the sheer vastness of the scene; there wasn't anything about the event that I thought was special enough to lend itself exclusively to video. (The only thing I wish I had on hand, really, was a panoramic lens that would have done an even better job of capturing the full breadth of the army of yogis doing their thing in Times Square. I could have given even that old French filmmaker/madman Abel Gance—in Napoléonmode, of course—a run for his money in the widescreen-panorama department!)
Even when sticking with one visual medium, however, there are possible choices to be made thanks to phone applications and such. Consider Instagram. Instagram, for those who don't know much about it, is an app that allows users not only to share photographs they take on the go with their smartphones, but also to apply filters to give your photos a special look to them; one could theoretically make your photos look much older than they actually are, for instance. Many friends of mine add a filter to just about every single photo they take. I, however, tend to be more selective. So sure, an image of Sailboat Pond in Central Park on a sunny Saturday afternoon arguably deserves to be enhanced a bit with a filter, as this one was...
...but I'm not so sure even the snazziest filter could turn this trash heap into gold:
Yes, this is the desk of an editor with whom I work at The Wall Street Journal. This is probably not the messiest state in which it's been seen.
In our media-saturated world, and with social media seemingly inspiring all of us to turn our lives into entertainment to share with the masses, the choices which face us all as far as how we engage in this public documentation are seemingly limitless. Have any of you dear readers ever found yourself having these kinds of private debates about the best way to capture a real-life moment in digital amber, so to speak? If so, I'd love to hear your stories in the comments section!
(Of course, one could also simply give all this digital and social media the finger and just, you know, live life in the moment. There's that option, too.)
BROOKLYN, N.Y.—This past Friday, I filled in one more recreational blind spot by taking a trip to Citi Field for the first time ever to watch the New York Mets take on the Atlanta Braves.
From the 7 train to the stadium
Actually, this technically wasn't my first time at Citi Field. On Oct. 30, 2010, I was one of many who went to Citi Field early in the morning to take a bus provided by Arianna Huffington to head over to the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert-hosted "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear" in Washington, D.C.—but I never actually went inside the stadium. On Friday, I finally went inside.
It is indeed quite the beautiful ballpark—not that I have much context when it comes to U.S. ballparks, being that the only previous ballpark I've been in was the old Yankee Stadium maybe 10 years ago to see a regular-season Subway Series (New York Mets vs. New York Yankees, for those of you outside of New York) game. But, I mean, I think these photos speak for themselves:
Our view from the Left Field Landing
The much-maligned Jason Bay. Well, at least he made one or two good defensive plays
The much more celebrated David Wright on the plate. Unfortunately, he hit into an inning-ending double play at this at-bat. It was just one of those nights for the Mets.
Time to stretch!
As for the game itself...well...it was nothing if not brisk (it ended up lasting about 2½ hours). But then, that's because the Mets managed to muster up just about no offense against Braves pitcher Paul Maholm. The Braves ended up shutting out the Mets, 4-0.
If it was me 10 years ago watching this game, I might have cared more. But my days of carefully following professional baseball pretty much ended when the Mets started to suck after the hope they instilled in fans with their World Series appearance back in 2000. Maybe one of these days, I'll actually get back into baseball.
For now, though, I'm at least grateful to have finally gotten a chance to check out Citi Field. I hope it won't be the last time!
Certainly, I hope it won't be the last time I get to do this there:
BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Who would be crazy enough to conceive of a piece of music which is basically one theme repeated all of 840 times? No, not Philip Glass (at least he varies his repetitions). Actually, French composer Erik Satie came up with it in 1893 with Vexations. (For those who don't think they've heard anything by Satie: Remember the ethereal piano music playing during Philippe Petit's awe-inspiring walk in between two World Trade Center towers in Man on Wire? That's Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1.)
Now, then: Who would be crazy enough to actually perform such a work in its entirety? These folks—on Thursday, from 6 a.m. to midnight, on the corner of Wall Street and Broad Street, right outside the New York Stock Exchange in lower Manhattan:
These musicians—two of whom I know personally (one of them is in the video above, performing the first four repetitions)—are hardly the first to do it. Leave it to none other than that mild-mannered revolutionary John Cage himself to blaze the trail for marathon performances of Vexations, organizing the first of its kind back in 1963.
I decided to check out the last two hours of this feat of musical performance. Satie's original theme is one of the most harmonically complex things I've ever heard, yet played on the vibraphone at night outdoors in that particular milieu, it felt oddly soothing. Additionally, I also found it rather amusing to see the different kinds of reactions from people wandering past these musicians: some minded their own business; others briefly took note of it, stayed for one or two repetitions and then went on their merry ways; and still others stuck around for extended period of times, doing little more than just relaxing to the music.
A couple of random passersby wondered—jokingly, I assume—if this was yet another outgrowth of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Actually, it was part of two different events: a) "Make Music New York," a day-long, city-wide festival of music-making that has been staged for the past six years on the first day of summer; and b) "A Worldwide Day of Vexations," in which musicians from all over the world staged their own 18-hour performances of Satie's piece, all of them streamed online.
It was fun—and the sense of epic finality to the final chord of the 840th and final repetition (played by Amy Garapic, who was the main force behind this massive global musical event) was truly breathtaking to experience in person. Hopefully I was able to capture some of that feeling in the video I shot.
If any of you are interested in seeing some of the rest of the lengthy (to put it mildly!) performance, much of it has been archived at UStream here (but my video looks better, haha).
BROOKLYN, N.Y.—This week turned out to be dominated more by music, both live and recorded. Believe me, I still love movies! It's just that I don't only love movies.
tUnE-yArDs doing "Bizness" live at Terminal 5
Films
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry(2012, Alison Klayman), seen at Walter Reade Theater in New York
Another week, another artist-centered documentary that I liked well enough but didn't completely love. A review of this for The House Next Door is forthcoming.
The Mercenary(1968, Sergio Corbucci), seen at Film Forum in New York
I was originally going to spend my Saturday afternoon catching up with Joachim Trier's much-praised sophomore feature Oslo, August 31st after having regrettably missed it at New Directors/New Films...but the lure of seeing a young Franco Nero in a spaghetti Western—as opposed to the bearded, grizzled villain that I know and love best from Die Hard 2—was ultimately too great to resist.
Ultimately, I don't think The Mercenary is a great film; to my mind, a lot of the narrative threads and stylistic tics feel more like imitation Sergio Leone than anything else, right down to its guitar-twang- and whistle-heavy Ennio Morricone score (though certainly no one did that kind of operatic thing better than Morricone himself). It's still a pretty entertaining time, though, thanks to its cynical, pitch-black sense of humor and some exciting action sequences. Plus, it was cool to discover the source of the music Quentin Tarantino used to underscore David Carradine's death in Kill Bill, Vol. 2.
Prometheus (2012, Ridley Scott), seen at Walter Reade Theater in New York
I'll perhaps save my thoughts on this—which I saw at a preview screening for members of the Film Society of Lincoln Center (it comes out in wide release this Friday)—for a later post, because, as much of a failure as I think it ultimately is, it's actually a pretty interesting one, offering a surprising amount of intellectual food for thought to go along with its sometimes formidable visual and visceral thrills. If anything, this supposed "prequel" to Scott's 1979 classic Alien is a failure of ambition more than anything else—not a bad thing, for sure, though alas this film seems to think it's smarter and more profound than it actually is. Anyway, more later...maybe.
Music
★ Wagner: Die Walküre(1966, Sir Georg Solti/Wiener Philharmoniker)
I have little to say about this except that both this recording and the work itself are awesome in just about every way.
★ "Memorial Birthday Recess Rock-a-thon" with Education Reform, Madam Macadam, Fahey, Wilder Maker, and Dru Cutler and the Heart and Hand Band, seen live at Cameo Gallery in Brooklyn, N.Y.
A friend of mine fronts the band that calls itself Education Reform (not the most appetizing of band names, I must say), so I can't pretend full objectivity or anything like that. So I'll just say this: It's the first live band I've seen that actively had me counting beats in my head while listening just to figure out the meter of one of its songs, so rhythmically complex it was. The rest of the bands weren't bad, either; Madam Macadam especially brought down the house with their hard-rocking set. This turned out to actually be a pretty good week for my discovering new-to-me indie bands via live performances (see below for more).
I reheard both of these albums in preparation for seeing Merrill Garbus & co. live in concert Friday night (see below). BiRd-BrAiNs remains a strikingly lo-fi, wholly original debut (I had forgotten that, in "Jamaican," she includes a child's cough as part of a recorded loop); her follow-up is more polished but no less fascinatingly idiosyncratic.
★ tUnE-yArDs, Micachu & The Shapes and Delicate Steve, seen live at Terminal 5 in New York
As I hoped, Merrill Garbus & co. put on a rousing show, the highlight being a rendition of "Bizness" that included an extended bit of saxophone improvisations in the middle; see the video towards the top of this post for the complete performance.
I came for the opening acts, too, knowing nothing about either of them beforehand. Micachu & the Shapes is, I learned afterwards, an English band led by guitarist/lead vocalist Mica Levi; their songs were punchy and almost defiantly strange, rejecting conventional melodies and structures in favor of repetitive rhythms/bass lines and musical ideas thrown at you in short bursts. It's the kind of music that demands that an audience meet it halfway; thankfully, it helps that they often hit upon infectious beats. I found myself intrigued, if nothing else.
Delicate Steve—a band fronted by New Jersey native Steve Marion—has, to my ears, an easier sound to immediately embrace, with their unabashedly retro, psychedelic instrumentals and colorful range of sonorities.
Both turned out to be excellent curtain-raisers for tUnE-yArDs's own brand of musical madness (mostly of the W H O K I L L variety rather than the BiRd-BrAiNs style, though Garbus did offer up "Sunlight," the one hit single from her debut album, as an encore). Maybe I'll eventually get around to checking out their respective extant albums.
Another full-disclosure disclaimer: Aysegul Durakoglu, the pianist who organized this musical tour on the legendary European passenger train, is the mother of a friend I met in my Rutgers days, so again, I can't pretend to be a wholly objective party. Nevertheless, I admit to finding this a conceptually alluring but wildly uneven program, with a second half that verged on the sleepy. The concert still offered its share of fireworks, though, courtesy not only of Durakoglu herself (especially in a thrilling performance of Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 11), but also clarinettist Ismail Lumanovski—putting on quite the virtuosic display in Bela Kovaks's Homage to Manuel de Falla—and cellist Adrian Daurov, so intense in Astor Piazzolla's Le Grand Tango that he nearly knocked his sheet music over at one point.
BROOKLYN, N.Y.—If nothing else, the work of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan—whose work was recently the subject of a near-complete retrospective, titled Maurizio Cattelan: All, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, one which ended Sunday (yes, as with the Museum of Modern Art's Willem de Kooning retrospective, I waited until the last minute to see this)—more often than not provokes us into an internal conversation as to how serious this guy actually is.
The "layout" of the exhibit itself clues you in as to Cattelan's sensibility:
Instead of the usual stately art-hanging-on-walls approach, Cattelan decided to "hang" all of his art from the Guggenheim's ceiling. A mere gesture of "look-at-me" irreverence, or something more deeply subversive? Considering that much of Cattelan's art has been site-specific in nature, his approach to All suggests an attempt to radically decontextualize his work and allow the viewer to determine how his work stands up by itself.
Perhaps this accounts for the extreme unevenness of the art on display. Works of bracing surreal creepiness—much of his taxidermy, for instance (are there other modern artists who have worked so extensively with taxidermy? I ask as an art novice, mostly)—and even occasional beauty alternate between other, thinner visual conceits that smack of an artist having a private joke of our expense. But perhaps some of the latter works resonated more within their original surroundings?
Still, there is something to be said for the kind of exuberant bomb-throwing spirit that was on display at the Guggenheim in this exhibit. At the very least, give me this kind of provocation over yet another boring still life any day!
I'll let these photos speak for themselves, from here on in (hardly an exhaustive selection, but some of the most memorable pieces, to my mind:
Untitled (2009)
La Nona Ora (1999)
Ave Maria (2007)
L.O.V.E. (2010)
Untitled (1995)/Not Afraid of Love (2000)
Stephanie (2003)
Mother (1999) [left]/Charlie Don't Surf (1997) [center]/Frau C. [right]
Him (2001)
And finally, some video of the experience! Two shots: one of Untitled (2001), which is not much more than a miniature elevator; the other taken at the top of the Guggenheim looking down into the morass of Cattelan art.
In this blog entry that I posted while I was in San Francisco, I mentioned that I had visited the Mission Dolores, a historic religious settlement that was not only the city's oldest surviving structure, but was also one of many sites in the city featured in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Well, I couldn't resist shooting some video while I was wandering around the Mission Dolores graveyard...and then later overlaying a bit of the Vertigo soundtrack onto it: the strangely ethereal music Bernard Herrmann wrote for the moment Scottie spies on the woman he knows as Madeleine Elster visiting the Mission Dolores graveyard and laying a flower on the grave of a Carlotta Valdés. You can hear those gorgeous strings steal into the video about a minute and 25 seconds into it.
Oh...and I realize I never did get around to posting more pictures from my San Francisco trip after my third full day there...so those of you who don't follow me on Twitter and/or Facebook haven't seen photos of my bike trek across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito, or of my visit to the famous Castro Theatre (well, other than the photo I included of its exterior in this artistic consumption log), or even of my day at the races in Berkeley! Perhaps I'll get around to posting some of those eventually here at this blog...once I find the time for it.
Just know that I had a grand time there, and would love to go back one day to explore some more!
BROOKLYN, N.Y.—This past Saturday, I was wandering around in Chinatown (the Manhattan one) with a friend, and we both wandered into Columbus Park. I had never been to this park before; in fact, I don't I had ever even heard of Columbus Park before that day.
But, what with the elderly Asian men playing chess, others doing tai chi, still others singing and playing instruments, and most of them speaking Chinese of some sort...well, the hardcore Asian in me was satisfied—so satisfied that, of course, I took out my iPhone and took some video.
Finally, last night, I edited that video into this form and posted it on YouTube, naturally:
Side note: With all the videos I've been shooting and posting recently, I'm starting to wonder whether I should consider documentary filmmaking in the future, or something along those lines...
NEW YORK—I shot more video and posted it for all to see on YouTube!
Yesterday's New York City Marathon was the first I got to see up close and personal...so naturally, I decided to commemorate this personal landmark by capturing some of it on video.
It was actually rather inspiring to be part of the crowd, cheering on these millions of runners. Hell, it was so infectious that I even got into the running spirit, however briefly (I ran a few blocks from the Atlantic Avenue MTA station in Brooklyn down 4th Avenue to around Satter Street in Brooklyn in order to try to meet up with a couple of friends and spot another friend of mine actually running the marathon; then I ran back up to the Atlantic Avenue station in order to try to rush to work).
Amidst the cheering, I briefly flirted with the idea of maybe running this marathon one of these years. We'll see if that ever becomes a reality...
In any case, congratulations to all the intrepid people who ran, and successfully finished, the marathon yesterday. You all are more awesome than I will probably ever be!
BROOKLYN, N.Y.—As a result of a couple of leftover writing obligations (one of which I highlighted on this blog yesterday, another which I admittedly have not started yet), I haven't gotten around to sifting through the many photos and videos I took while vacationing in San Francisco last week. So I'm not sure when I'll post something further about the trip here at My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second.
To tide you all over until that happens, though...I posted this video:
Here are two shots I took while a few friends and I were walking along the Ocean Beach shore on Sunday, Oct. 30, as the sun set in the distance.
I don't know if it comes across at all, but I did have in mind Abbas Kiarostami's Five Dedicated to Ozu when I took these shots on my iPhone—particularly its opening shot following a piece of driftwood floating along the shore. To wit:
There are no drifting objects in my shot, though—just waves crashing and water falling back, creating patterns of their own. And, in my recollection (which should be relatively fresh, because I just saw this film recently for the first time—and wrote about it here, by the way), none of Kiarostami's five long takes take place as the sun sets.
So, uh, take that, Abbas Kiarostami! (Your film is still gorgeous, though.)
BROOKLYN, N.Y.—There's one more thing I want to post here on my blog before my Bay Area vacation begins for real.
It's this:
Those of you who follow me on Twitter and Facebook already know a little bit about Razor, the Siberian husky that resides in the Brooklyn apartment in which I and three others live. For the rest of you, though...well, here he is, in a particularly excitable mood one evening last week after I came home from work. (I don't consider Razor my dog, by the way; one of my roommates bought him last year and generally takes care of him. But, after some initial resistance, I've come to embrace the big ol' bugger...especially when he acts like that.)
Oh, and Razor was recently featured on Gothamist! See here!
NEW YORK—On Saturday, I finally got a chance to go to lower Manhattan and visit Zuccotti Park, site of the very first Occupy Wall Street demonstration in what has become a world-wide movement.
Don't worry, Wall Street Journal, I didn't go there to either support or condemn the protesters! I was just there to observe and discuss. And observe I did, as this video attests:
As you can see, Zuccotti Park has become something of a virtual community, complete with food bank and library. It's actually rather impressive; I never thought I would see Rutgers University's annual Tent State University movement spread into the outside world in this way!
Whatever you think of the movement's ideas and beliefs, though, I still find it heartening to see regular people (the so-called "99%," as per this movement's characterization of middle-to-lower-class folk) being this passionate and engaged in American political discourse. Who says us young folks are all self-absorbed and apathetic???
Here are some more photos I took from Saturday's tour through Zuccotti Park:
Later that day, some of the demonstrators took the cause up to Times Square for a more conventional kind of rally. I checked out the scene there, too:
As you can see and hear, these demonstrators have hit upon a fairly inventive way of spreading their message across a wide area so everyone can hear: "human microphones" in which everyone in the crowd passes the words of a speaker along, round-robin style. Maybe this has been done in rallies before, but it was the first time I experienced it in person.
And even later, the Times Square demonstrators gathered in Washington Square Park to continue the rally. I checked this out briefly, but didn't stick around too long; all I got from this nightcap was this photo...
...which reminded me somewhat of that famous Eugène Delacroix painting "Liberty Leading the People":
NEW YORK—Amidst all the New York Film Festival coverage I've done in the past month or so, I wasn't able to put up this video I took of Yonge-Dundas Square while I was at the Toronto International Film Festival in September...until today.
It's not much: just a slow 360° shot (a signature of mine as an amateur videographer, if I was to exalt myself to the level of amateur auteur or something pretentious like that). But this footage was taken at around 8:30 in the morning...and unlike New York's Times Square, apparently Yonge-Dundas Square that early in the morning looks and feels like a dead zone of sorts. Not a whole lot of people, few cars on the roads—frankly, it almost looked as if the apocalypse had already hit, that's how barren it looked!
But hey, what a sunny, beautiful apocalypse, am I right?
Tonight, the Cleveland Orchestra comes into town with their music director, Franz Welser-Möst, for a series of four concerts juxtaposing four symphonies by the Austrian late-Romantic composer Anton Bruckner with works by American 20th-century composer John Adams. Apparently, Welser-Möst, at least based on a short video interview I saw with the maestro on this site, sees a progression from Bruckner's penchant for symphonic patterns and repetition to Adams's brand of dynamic minimalism. It's an interesting premise, and I'm looking forward to hearing some more of John Adams's music through these concerts, if only to figure out where exactly I stand on the composer's music (I admire On the Transmigration of Souls—his Pulitzer Prize-winning evocation of Sept. 11—and absolutely love the music of his featured in the soundtrack of the film I Am Love; his score for the opera Nixon in China, on the other hand, struck me as chilly, inexpressive and unworthy of Alice Goodman's brilliantly poetic libretto). But the main draw for me is the chance to finally hear the music of one of my favorite composers, Anton Bruckner, performed live.
To mark the occasion, I wrote up this brief preview of these concerts for The House Next Door...although, really, I just wanted to write about Bruckner, and also take an opportunity to express one of the thoughts I've had in my head regarding Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life: that, in some ways, Malick's latest near-masterpiece is perhaps the closest I've come to experiencing the feeling of a Brucknerian adagio—in both its sense of lyricism and in its epic length—in cinematic form.
Enjoy...and then go find some recordings and listen to some Bruckner! You may well have a life-changing experience with them. (Herbert von Karajan's various recordings of Bruckner's symphonies are generally a sure bet, if you're looking for record recommendations.)
***
On a completely unrelated note...I have a new video up on YouTube! It's kind of a strange one, too, actually.
Let me explain...
A few weeks ago, while sitting at my desk here on the sixth floor in the News Corp. building, I and everyone else in the immediate vicinity started hearing what sounded like drilling noises above us. It seems some construction crew didn't get the memo that there were still people in the office after 5 p.m.? In any case, I and others around me found it incredibly annoying...but hey, what were we going to do? We all had stories to edit. (Well, the others had stories to edit, at least.)
After a while of hearing this buzzing noise, though, I started to allow my mind to free-associate a bit and found my mental wanderings gravitating toward a really random collection of sounds/noises: a scene in Pulp Fiction, some of the electronic soundscapes of Japanese composer Ryoji Ikeda that I had been listening to recently, and the famous opening of Richard Strauss's tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra (you know, the majestic music that opens and closes Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey).
I decided to turn all of these, plus a few appropriate noises courtesy of iMovie, into a video that's meant to be a playful representation of said free-associational mental wanderings.
I guess you could call this my attempt at an experimental short film? Maybe? Feel free to let me know if the experiment was a success or just a stupid waste of my time and yours.
NEW YORK—Last night marked the first time I got a chance to see the Macy's annual Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular show up close...and so I took some video on my iPhone to mark this milestone (or, at least, it's a milestone to me):
I know, I know: Independence Day is over. But surely America's independence is something that ought to be celebrated all year round, right?
NEW YORK—The closing film of this year's Ebertfest, Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel's documentary Louder than a Bomb, is now getting a theatrical release here in New York at IFC Center. To my mind, the film misses greatness by sticking so closely to its conventional sports-movie structure that it generally crowds out any number of deeper topics that the broader subject matter—inner-city youths finding a powerful means of expression through slam poetry, cast against the backdrop of the largest slam-poetry competition in the U.S., held right in Chicago—suggests. Thankfully, the film is chock full of superb slam-poetry performances, and even when Jacobs and Siskel (the latter of whom is the nephew of the late film critic Gene Siskel) curtail some of those performances to move on to their next plot point or interview, the brilliance of even the foreshortened performances are enough to carry the film along. If nothing else, Louder than a Bomb induces in a viewer the excitement of seeing real young budding artists expressing themselves with abandon; they really are something to see.
How electric is the slam poetry in the film? This might give you an idea:
A few of the students featured in the film performed their poetry after a Q&A session, so I figured it'd be worth capturing on video. Rest assured, though, there is plenty more to witness and stand in awe of in Louder than a Bomb. (See here for IFC Center screening info.)
BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Okay, the idea behind the next few posts on this blog is this: Because I didn't get to update much during my recent Ebertfest experience, and because so far none of the editors of The Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog have seen it fit to publish that first dispatch I sent them on Friday—I guess news events like the Royal Wedding (really?) and the death of Osama bin Laden (all right, I concede that is a bona-fide Big Deal) will naturally trump a mere festival dispatch like mine—I will go ahead and try to recap the experience, reasonably complete and uncut, here on this blog.
This will take a few days, I suspect...so let's dive right into it, shall we?
PRELUDE
There was no doubt in my mind on Tuesday, April 26, that I would eventually get to Champaign, Ill., for Roger Ebert's Film Festival, the five-day film-appreciation extravaganza also known as Ebertfest (this is its 13th year). It just ended up taking far longer than expected.
As I was walking to a restroom after having gotten past the usual security checkpoints at LaGuardia Airport in New York, I overheard someone saying something about a bunch of flights being delayed as a result of brewing inclement weather in the Chicago area—Chicago's O'Hare International Airport being my destination for a connecting flight to Champaign. Uh-oh. My concerns were not ameliorated when I received a text-message alert via American Airlines at around 11:45 a.m. suggesting that the departure time of my scheduled 1:35 p.m. flight was now pushed back by 10 minutes. Then, at around 12:55 p.m., I got another alert saying that departure time was now 1:55 p.m.
At around 1:40 p.m. or so, all of the passengers were finally allowed to board the plane; eventually the plane started pulling out of its gate and slowly made its progress toward takeoff. And then it stopped...and proceeded to stay still. Then, an announcement: This flight was going to be delayed for 15 minutes until they got word from air-traffic controllers in Chicago that it was safe to take off. We waited for about that length of time...and then we got another announcement saying that they needed to wait another 30 minutes for said word!
Well, I said to myself after all this waiting, it sure doesn't look like I'll be making my 4 p.m. connecting flight to Champaign at this rate. And so it came to pass. The plane finally took off at around 3 p.m. and landed in Chicago at around 5:15 p.m.; when I landed in Chicago, I immediately booked a seat on a flight scheduled to leave at 6:15 p.m. Okay, fine, I thought, these things happen (though this was the first time, in my memory at least, that I had had to deal with a delayed flight). But then that connecting flight got delayed! The reason? Apparently, they were waiting for the crew to arrive from a previous flight. So this time, no weather-related delays—just a missing crew!
This was taken by Ali Arikan on his BlackBerry
A silver lining to this particular cloud arrived, though, in the form of Ali Arikan, a friend, fellow film critic/writer and one of Roger Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents; it turned out we were on the same flight from Chicago to Champaign! Funny how things just seem to work out that way in life. So I didn't have to be lonely while waiting for the delayed flight; instead, I ended up having drinks with him and chatting before we were finally allowed to board the plane at around 7:40 p.m.
The trip from Chicago to Champaign took a mere 30 minutes once in the air, so we landed at Champaign's Willard Airport at around 8:50 p.m....but my extended-length voyage to Ebertfest wasn't quite done yet! When Willard's one baggage-claim carousel (it's a tiny airport) had gone around a couple of times, I realized that I didn't see my checked bag anywhere! When I checked with an employee there, he looked up my information on a computer and discovered that my bag was on theChicago-to-Champaign flight after the one I was just on! Seriously??? (In talking to a couple of random people at the airport, I discovered that this kind of thing is not a rare occurrence at that airport.)
I was given the option of either waiting for that next flight to land in order to look for my bag, or to have it delivered to the place at which I was staying. All right, I figured, if it's just one more flight, and if that next flight is coming within the next hour, I can wait. So, after Ali was forced to part ways with me as he was rushing to get to a Q&A session for Ebertfest's pre-festival screening of Chris Smith's 1999 documentary American Movie(which I would have loved to have seen—given that I haven't seen it yet—if those blasted delays hadn't prevented me from being able to make it in time for the beginning of the film), I sat around until 10 p.m. or so, when the next Chicago-to-Champaign flight landed. When I stood around the baggage-claim area and looked closely for my bag, lo and behold, there it was!
My luggage having finally been procured, I took a cab and noticed the general emptiness of the Urbana streets. (Hey Fever Ray, this might have been just as fitting a venue for your haunting "Keep the Streets Empty for Me" video as...Sweden, I'm guessing?) I was warned that this was mostly a pretty dead town, and so it appeared to be. I really did feel like I was driving through a ghost town; it was eerie...and rather seductive, in its own way. (There is one lively stretch in the town, though, of which I will explain in a future post.)
Through these empty streets, I headed toward the home of my host, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign literature professor whose place I had discovered thanks to the site Airbnb.com—kind of a variation on couchsurfing.com, except people actually get paid for offering up a room for travelers like myself. It was a nice place, and the room I had was comfortably spacious (not that that made a huge difference, in the end, considering how little time I spent at the home). But there was something even more special about this place than I had realized, something I didn't know about until a week before this trip: Apparently, the house was recently designated a historic landmark because none other than former American president Abraham Lincoln slept in one of its rooms! Read this article if you don't believe me!
Oh, and George (whose wife and daughter were away in Toronto during my stay there) also had this dog:
Thanks for your hospitality, George! It was very much appreciated! Maybe we could do this again next year?
Coming up on this epic, multi-part Ebertfest recap:The festival kicks off in grand fashion with the near-complete Metropolis with a live performance of an original score by the Alloy Orchestra. Plus...Natural Selection again? Will I warm to it more the second time than I did the first at South by Southwest in March?
NEW YORK—Despite having my one umbrella destroyed by the heavy winds yesterday afternoon, leaving me vulnerable to getting heavily rained on by Mother Nature last night, I had an excellent weekend.
But the highlight of my weekend was not the spate of Japanese films I saw for the first time on Friday and Saturday at Film Forum: two black-and-white masterpieces—Mikio Naruse's Floating Clouds (1955) and Kenji Mizoguchi's final film Street of Shame (1956)—and one fairly amusing color musical-comedy, Keisuke Kinoshita's Carmen Comes Home (1951), featuring Hideko Takamine in an exuberant singing-and-dancing role—as a stripper, to make things that much hotter—that is as far as possible from the quietly suffering heroines she played for Naruse in her collaborations with him. And no, it wasn't even Jacques Tourneur's fascinatingly dense 1946 Technicolor Western Canyon Passage, seen at Anthology Film Archives—though that experience was marred by a supposedly restored print that was plagued by terribly flawed audio, making some of the dialogue barely comprehensible.
No, the highlight of my weekend was this:
A co-worker of mine at The Wall Street Journal fronts this punk-rock band on the side; the group recently released their first album and celebrated that release on Friday at Fontana's Bar in New York's Lower East Side. Afterwards, Fontana's hosted a session of "Punk Rock Heavy Metal Karaoke," with a live band providing the musical accompaniment as people got up to sing a song of their choice—or, at least, of their choice based on a long list of selections. I decided to take a stab at it with The Clash's "I Fought the Law"...and what you see above is the result of that experiment.(Believe it or not, I was not feeling drunk at all before doing this, despite the one-and-a-half pint of beers I had consumed; over the years, I've developed a pretty good tolerance for beer, at least.)
I'll leave it to you all to be the judge of how successful I was at this endeavor. All I can report is that, against all odds, I actually left the stage feeling like an honest-to-God rock star—for the moment, at least. And isn't that what karaoke is at least partly about?
P.S. As I was getting my ears blown to bits as a spectator and as a performer at Fontana's, many of my fellow cinephile friends and acquaintances were apparently getting their minds blown at Walter Reade Theater by this old film by some French dude I've never heard of. Maybe some of those cinephile friends/acquaintances can tell me if I truly missed something special. I, for one, regret nothing. (Not yet, anyway.)
