Blog About Photography

The New York Times has two arti­cles about the future of movies, specif­i­cally of the down­load­able vari­ety, in the Arts sec­tion today. Here and Here. Are they just find­ing out about this?

So check this out because this is some­thing Cos­mic in its impli­ca­tions. Are you pay­ing attention?

At this moment, I am sit­ting in the But­ler Library on the Amer­i­can Uni­ver­sity cam­pus, writ­ing my midterm for a class I’m in on con­tem­po­rary art. Or rather, I should say that I’m sit­ting here with my midterm open and books on the desk and read­ing pho­tog­ra­phy blogs. That’s not what’s impor­tant though. What’s impor­tant is this.

My art his­tory pro­fes­sor made a note on the top of the midterm that we are to use Arial (or Hel­vetica) at 11 point to take the midterm. Who knows why she stip­u­lated this, prob­a­bly because peo­ple write shit really small some­times when they don’t know what they’re talk­ing about. In any case, as you may have noticed, that’s my type­face of choice, and I, like the New York Met­ro­pol­i­tan Tran­sit Author­ity and man count­less oth­ers, con­dense the let­ters. So, not want­ing to be marked down for this, I made a lit­tle note on the top of my paper.

A small note before begin­ning. The con­densed font is a com­mon aes­thetic choice regard­ing this type­face, not one made to save space on this par­tic­u­lar assign­ment. I can’t stand look­ing at some­thing I’ve writ­ten with mas­sive gaps between the char­ac­ters. Why, after craft­ing an argu­ment, would I present it full of holes?

Yeah, ok, so I know that’s kind of weird, maybe a lit­tle pre­ten­tious or some­thing to write this kind of thing a prof, but it’s what I do any­way and I didn’t want to be marked down for it. Plus I’m pretty sure she’d think it’s funny and maybe a lit­tle endear­ing. So that’s about as far as I’ve got­ten in writ­ing this paper, but then I found this, and I wasn’t even look­ing for it. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m writ­ing this later paper on Maya Deren’s 1943 exper­i­men­tal film, “Meshes of the After­noon,” and I thought I’d post it here for any­one who hasn’t see it or would like to see it again. It’s unfor­tu­nately in two parts and the pic­ture isn’t quite true to the orig­i­nal 16mm. But you’ll still get the idea.

I’ll come right out and say it: I sort of idol­ize Andy Warhol. And yeah, that’s def­i­nitely a pretty easy thing to right now, since the eight­ies came back around again and all that, but I really do think that Warhol was to the sec­ond half of the 20^th cen­tury what Picasso was to the first. I have all the research papers to back it up, too; I’ve writ­ten three.

So, this movie com­ing out about Edie Sedg­wick, “Fac­tory Girl,” has two main prob­lems that become appar­ent just from the trailer. Namely, they are Guy Peirce and Hay­den Chris­ten­son, the dream­boats cast to play Warhol and Dylan, respec­tively (though Dylan has been fic­tion­al­ized in this movie — the character’s name is Billy Quinn, which is lame.) I think one thing we can say about both Warhol and Dylan is that nei­ther of them were, even when they were young, extra­or­di­nar­ily attrac­tive peo­ple, so like, what the fuck. Cast­ing these two dudes may give us some indi­ca­tion of what I’m afraid this movie is going to be: sort of stupid.

I really hope not. Warhol and Dylan’s bat­tle over Edie Sedg­wick is sort of an alle­gory for the forces that were shap­ing the Amer­i­can cul­tural con­scious­ness. It would be a real shame to waste this mak­ing some super­fi­cial bull­shit movie packed with celebri­ties. And every­one will be run­ning around talk­ing about how much they adore Warhol and what an impact he had and all that — like get­ting all into Nir­vana after Kurt Cobain done killed hisself.

I’m sure by now most of you have either seen the pre­view for or oth­er­wise heard of “Death of a Pres­i­dent,” the fake doc­u­men­tary about the fic­tional assas­si­na­tion of Pres­i­dent Bush. The film was con­tro­ver­sial for about a milisec­ond; then it won best film at the Toronto Film Fes­ti­val, and I think maybe some oth­ers. It was sup­posed to come to the­aters, I don’t know if it did or if it didn’t, but it has made its way onto Google Video, and is free for the watch­ing. I also have the tor­rent for you if you pre­fer, cour­tesy of mini­nova. Man, has the inter­net got­ten great or what?

I want to men­tion some­thing about the fake news pho­to­graph, which is pretty inter­est­ing. it really is a fan­tas­ti­cally iconic image, instantly rec­og­niz­able and well done. I imag­ine that it wasn’t all that easy to coör­di­nate such a shot; it has the spon­tane­ity of a true news pho­to­graph, one that would be the go-​​to image for this would-​​be vio­lent turn­ing point in a sad period of America’s his­tory. The assas­si­na­tion, how­ever, is staged. So rather than being ele­vated to icon, this pho­to­graph is merely fan­tas­tic mar­ket­ing for a con­tro­ver­sial film.