My friend John Yost has completed his first feature film Every Good Thing to Rust, available online for free viewing. Congrats, John; you’re my hero. More so since your movie’s actually quite good. Imagine how awkward it would have been if it sucked like that unfinished cowboy movie I tried to make with Brian & JP. If you don’t know these folk, just watch the movie. I’m biased, but some thoughts after the jump.
Rebecca was all lecturing me about how knitting ain’t crocheting– I listened, I swear– and it reminded me of the Institute for Figuring, those mathy artists out on the Left Coast. Heading back to their site, I recalled again this:
The Crochet Reef, of course, defies description. Mine, anway. Just go look at it and think cathedral.
Allan Iverson would be proud. Roberta Smith writes in the New York Times about the troubled language thrown around in fine arts discussion. Critical discourse– talk, chat, grousing– always seems to suffer from a lack of precision, which should come as no surprise. After all, the subjects are slippery, leaving critics to play catch-up.
She laments the increased use of “reference” and “privilege” as verbs. Fair enough. But in her main target, “practice,” she finds all kinds of foul association with professionalism. Doctors and lawyers practice; they need licenses. Do artists? What’s more, the looming shadow of hard sciences long ago upended art-talk. We want to sound that precise, to use statistics with the smug certainty of the white coats.
Yet I always took the word– no doubt naively– in the same spirit as the monks. Spiritual practice. You keep doing something over and over, whether drawings lines or praying the Rosary, until your soul opens up and fills with light. Or doesn’t. But look back and you’ve gone somewhere. And I would think this “practice” we’re talking about could be imprecise enough to welcome both meanings.
Apparently some of the Elephant Six folk down Athens way have finished Major Organ and the Adding Machine, a long-dreamt movie project. Orange Twin has a .flv trailer up for download, get VLC or Miro to watch it.
I can’t wait– it looks goofy as all get out and undoubtedly undistributed, in the great tradition of odd-lark movies Adolfas Mekas fired up with Hallelujah the Hills, still a royal pain just to see. Major Organ’s design reminds me of some of the Residents’
Link via hometown hero You Ain’t No Picasso from Optical Atlas, who broke the news.
In his Best of 2007 column for The Chicago Reader, film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has announced that he will retire when he turns 65 in February.
At first I was horrified, considering Harold Henderson was just excused from the paper. But it turns out to be just a well-earned retirement. He will no doubt welcome the freedom from reviewing mountains of dreck, and hopefully we’ll see more books from him, as well an an occasional article in the Reader.
I have long admired Mr. Rosenbaum as one of the two best writers on film in English currently working (David Bordwell’s the other one). I have especially enjoyed his book Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons
So thanks, Mr. Rosenbaum, for the fine essays and your exquisite taste. Thanks especially for Khroustaliov, Ma Voiture! That thing’s insane.
Happy Boxing Day! I am Bill Randall, a writer and artist, and here I will collect some of my published essays and reviews, as well as notes on art and culture. I suppose I will treat it like my porch, thus a place for either barking at the neighbors or having tea.To wit:
I have shamelessly thieved)
