Philosophy and Myth in John Gardner's Freddy's Book

I'm going to try to write little book reviews, as I forget everything I read. No offence taken if you skip them.


Horrible scan of a great cover.

I just finished Freddy's Book, a moody and ruminating frame-story tale set in the Swedish post-middle ages, right on the rise of Lutheranism and the birth of the printing press. John Gardner is a Medieval literature specialist famous mostly for Grendel, which I remember almost nothing about excepting that I really, really enjoyed it. Like all of his books I've read this one does a fantastic job of embedding various competing philosophies within the narrative. It overlaps the folklore and myth of Sweden with the contemporary continental issues at the time in a way that stays relevant and thought-provoking.

After the book got properly into its personal mythology the philosophical musings became especially powerful, kicked off with a discussion on evolution in terms of religious systems. Bishop Brask is a jaded clergyman who decides that the sustaining element of any man-made society is simply might. The strongest survives, he concludes, regardless of whether the strongest is correct. In his day he sees Catholicism losing ground to Lutheranism and foresees the eventual abandonment of religion as a folly. The constant revision of the bible in the 1500 years in-between Brask and Christ affrims his sense of Religious Darwinism. God is dead, or at least hasn't spoken to anyone sane in that millenia-and-a-half. Later, he turns his jaded eye toward the notion of truth and the intentions of those in power, wondering how truth can be found in a complicated world of many contending self-interests.

Though god may be dead, the Devil is more alive than ever, and physically manipulates the events of the world. His effects are observed by the knight Lars-Goren, who brings a taciturn contemplation to the novel's measuring of good and evil. The cut-throat city is pitted against the naive rural, Mysticism dances with rationalism, and everything is trivialized in the face of the individual passage from life, to death.

Gardner takes pleasure in his characters' turn of phrase, which is a bit much in the early introductory frame story. But after a while his characters self-consciously mock the meaning and use of rhetoric, whether it's the devil forgetting what he's saying halfway through spinning a plan into existance, or Bishop Brask being paralyzed by whether or not his delivery of some rhetorical point is staged perfectly or not. There are self-referential jabs about the point of striving to write, to communicate, and a decent story of political cunning to tie it all together.

All in all a book for boys (mostly), a chance to loosely brush up on medieval history, and several beautiful takes on melancholy philosophies along the way. The calm Lars Goren and his eerie confrontation with a dead witch are great. The mysterious indigenous Lapplanders of the north are beautifully created as well. If you start it and get bored, skip to the last 3 chapters for some great climatic mental struggles with futility, good, and evil. Read More......

Al's Art in the Trib

This article makes me so happy.


Not only does it center around work by my best friend and film partner Alex Haworth, it references my good friend Laura Decker too! Oh, and it mentions this blog :). Coupled with the fact that the inversion needs to die and be taken seriously by Salt Lake, I'm very happy about all this.

Local art's feeling good right now, as if awakening from hibernation, It's great to be a part of it, and I'm looking forward to what comes out of the spring. Read More......

Masterful Paint

I don't know a thing about this fella, except that this is his flickr account and he looks like this, but he's a pretty impressive painter. He masked this Pinerello with actual leaves.:






Supa-cool. Read More......

Luke's Show, Luke Sez

My dear buddy Luke Williams has some news!:

"Hi friends,

This Thursday is going to be a really big show for Matteo. We're going to be playing some new stuff that we're really excited about, including one song that I wrote.

This is also a big show for me personally, as I'll be playing a pretty large set of exclusively new stuff (post-ancient eyes EP). So, new stuff! yeah! good job luke!

Here's the info:

2/18/10 @ Kilby Court, 7:00, $6. The set order will be: Luke Williams, Matteo, The Archer's Apple.
You can listen to the Matteo EP here: www.myspace.com/chinesematteomusic"

I'll be there! Read More......

More Salt City Sprints Madness

Come one come all to the Third Annual SLC Roller Sprints. LADIES GET IN FREE! Come race!

This next Saturday the 20th at 7-10 PM, Nobrow Coffee. Pretty sure the W Lounge Event on the 19th isn't happening.
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Banksy Exits the Scene, Groucho Marx Caught Red-Handed: Exit Through the Gift Shop's review

I hate art, the art world, and everything that comes of it.

Wait, no. I love it. I couldn't live without it. Images, and their subsequent appreciation, are what give my life color.

This is going to be rough.

Knee-deep in the final throes of my own film project, I decided I should go to one Sundance film. The Festival Spotlight Surprise. Banksy's "Exit Through the Gift Shop" is an incredibly relevant, coherent epilogue to the recent street-art explosion. it is inspiring and cringe-worthy in all the right places.

The story's about Banksy, really it is. He pops in at the beginning, and while disguised his mannerisms and modes of speech are spot-on with the images he's become so famous for. I began to think how nice it'd be to have Banksy narrate any documentary, wry and subversive and witty the whole time. But the bulk of the film hinges around and introduces the life-story of an insane man, Thierry Guetta. Somehow, in a boggling implausibility, this goofy Frenchman transplanted to LA falls squarely in the center of the birth of street art as we know it. Even more implausibly, he is allowed to film, ad-nausem and with no real focus or direction, the lives of the artists. People who have operated anonymously under fear of self-destruction for years. Luckily for everyone involved, Thierry films compulsively, like an addict, and never touches his tapes. By and large, before this film, they never saw the light of day.

What unfolds is a beautiful, playful origin story. The biggest names of a movement that inspired me and everyone else are shown young and in action, simply mobbing the streets with their art before anyone cared about it. A short list of the top billers includes Space Invader, Shepard Fairey, Buffmonster, and Neckface. Everyone, even Banksy, show their roots in nonchalant brazen tactics that awe and inspire. Footage from Banky's incredible feats on the Israeli-Palestine Wall and in the Tate gallery are preceded by lucky/adventuresome clips of Space Invader's first trip to LA. The art and the actions people took to create it are fresh, and you're boggled by the quantity and caliber of the artists recorded. Guetta as a filmmaker, however, is astonishingly silly, essentially an insane tourist/dad/inspector clueseau amalgamation who would never be suspected as the holder of vaults of uncensored graff images. He just.... Keeps. Rolling. Endless pans, snap zooms, wandering focuses, it's total home movie stuff, but the subject happens to be the holiest of holies for anyone who grew up stenciling, wheat pasting, and crouching down to look at whimsical images in the street. By being unprofessional and more than a little crazy, Guetta was there for it all.

What Banksy undertook to make it happen is possibly the most ambitious logging and capturing process of all time. He selected the best from a lifetime of footage, crates upon crates, ROOMS of DV tapes, and edited them into a killer story. I loved the gaudy, reverential unfolding of Banksy as a mystery creature, the film's narrator and music trumping him up, the rarest form of celebrity. In an early climatic scene, Guetta finally gets to film Banksy at work, and if you care about this stuff it actually was astonishing. Banksy preparing to go out bombing in LA has the feel of a sacred rite, seeing the cut negatives of his all-too-iconic images early on is... remarkable.

As Banksy's fame peaks and works begin to sell for staggering figures the story shifts to focus entirely on Guetta, who becomes the doomed mascot of the commercial takeover of street art. It starts simply: Guetta, who is crazy, takes a stab at editing his mountains of footage, at Banksy's behest. The resulting film (if Exit Through the Gift Shop's portrayal of it is to be believed) is not unlike a Nine Inch Nails music video: flashy, adrenaline-filled, and incoherently unwatchable. Banksy watches this movie, and does what most of my friends do when they see something I've made. They take a deep breath, say "It's... Good," and suggest I take a vacation. Banksy takes over the footage, and suggests Guetta tries doing some art.

Herein, story goes incredibly sour. Guetta, like any poor creative soul, has confidence in his ideas and strives to put out some art. But unlike most any other artist, he doesn't give it *any* forethought. He just does it. At around the time that Fairey and Banksy are international art superstars, Guetta gets together some talented people and starts churning out the most derivative, predictable mishmash of images pop-art and graphic art could ever produce.

And don't get me wrong here, I get contemporary art. I understand that most successful artists have people working under them, and I know that most images we see (especially in art that finds its roots in popular culture) are derivative of something. But Guetta's work is worse than that. It's like Warhol, but without any twist. Stuff like this:


Or this:


Or this:

Sensing a trend here?

It's absolute, barefaced, emptiness. It's shameless borrowing. Further, it's made off the backs of people who worked hard at what they do, and the rewards go to the boss. Mr. Brainwash, Guetta's newly minted pseudo-subversive pseudonym, jumps straight into Warhol/Hurst style factory work, employing talented artists and essentially profiting on their work. Not to mention every image he's touched is a copycat, a vapid mockery of the movement that tolerated him. In short, it's the perfect 21st century art world commodity. The beauty of the film is that in the face of this horrible, horrible stuff, the market goes for it. Collectors, gallery-goers, newspapers, everyone raves over the hype Guetta creates, and he cashes out, to the tune of $1 Million, on his first show.

In the wake of it I feel sick. Banksy steps back onto stage, a bit sheepishly, with a "sorry about that," and the film closes. But Banksy couldn't have made a better 'exit.' Right as his fame and value rises to a peak, he shows us what a sham that value system is. If the next big thing after Banksy is a bumbling LA jerk who is rewarded for not paying his dues and making crap, what's the big deal with being a 'big thing?' As Banksy sneaks out a side door, we're left mocking the serious Groucho Marx mask that he leaves in his place: Thierry Guetta, the unfortunate doppelganger to Banksy's success and career as an artist. Ultimately the film serves as Banksy's cautionary tale: Love art, love street art, enjoy it for what it is and be inspired by it. But beware putting extraordinary cultural and monetary value on something that wasn't made to sell. There is an end result to that path, and it's Mr. Brainwash. "They say Art is dead, but here it is!" Says a diva-esque LA girl at Guetta's opening, all facsimile with her base make-up and movie-star glasses. Damn right sweetheart, that's art, right there in front of you. Try to get out before it starts to stink.

Later published by 15 Bytes. Read More......

Don Giovanni News

Been editing up a storm, makin' music with James and Luke and Camillo. We had a studio session until 12:30 at Midnight Records, a sweet nonprofit studio where Cal Cruz mans the boards. Very cool place with very cool gear.


Greg snapped this iPhone shot while we were there.


I'm so grateful for these guys. James's band Bramble will be busking up in Park City all festival long, and check out Luke's site for info on his projects.

Yesterday was too beautiful to edit, so I decided to pick up some quick shots of Gary racing around for the alleycat scene. Gary was the actual winner of the cat we thew for the movie, so it'll be neat to incorporate this footage of him:
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Some arty things on my mind

This is really great. A Banksy popped up in Park City. Clever bugger. Speculation is that one of the suprise Film Festival films will be about him, more over here.



Also locally, definitely check out the show up in the Gittins gallery right now, the art gallery connected to the Art and Art History building up at the U. The exhibit, Invisible Logic, is one of the best student art shows I've seen at the U. It contains the work of 9 students from both the Art and Engineering departments, who collaborated on some really impressive kinetic objects and living art pieces incorporating circuits, drawing robots, lasers, and multimedia of all kinds. Overall the aesthetic and presentation style is very rough and low key, which plays off the technically advanced objects rather well. There is a clever whimsy to the show that I really appreciate.

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Alex Haworth's Smog Lake City

I love this video, and have so much respect for my best friend/film partner/roommate Al:

Smog Lake City: Main Street from Dada Factory on Vimeo.

Such a well done series of shots, showing a part of town that's very familiar to me in a completely different light.

Two days ago we were sitting on the couch at the Dada Factory, talking about new years resolutions. Al says "I'm going to try to step my game up, in general." The next day he goes out and shoots, edits, and posts this. Hells yeah.

As a side note, the tagline for Al's movie was "The carcinogenic soup that fills up Salt Lake City may be shortening our lives, but it sure makes it beautiful." How true. This inversion's been getting to me. I sent in a letter to the Des News, who had recently written an op-ed on how we shouldn't regulate because they're terrified of spending money on anything but god. Of course they didn't publish it, so I might as well post it here:

It was good to see the Deseret News examine our very real relationship to pollution here in SLC. Your editorial “EPA should consider air changes carefully” was thoughtful, noting that our geography in the valley makes this problem pervasive and daunting. I must disagree that the correct conclusion is to approach regulations with fear and hesitance. We must not diminish the seriousness of air quality control simply because smog has been here for a while. I am a local bike messenger, and I often ride between Centerville and downtown Salt Lake. On the day of your op-ed the point of the mountain was chalky white, and the air smelled of stale, burnt chemicals and rotten eggs. You are absolutely correct, fighting this dangerous pollution will be difficult; it will raise the cost of heavy industry and reduce people’s ability to drive all the time. But a blighted, unlivable atmosphere in one of the world’s most beautiful and fun places is a far harder alternative to live with.

The best solution is to get behind the companies and ideas that provide jobs and help repair our damage to the environment. For those who fear that regulations would force say, Tesoro Refineries to lay off half of their employees, those same employees could get their very same jobs in heavy manufacturing, transportation, and marketing at UTA. Public transportation is excellent in Utah and is only going to get better with more people driving less. The result of this kind of priority change is cleaner air and more ecologically responsible jobs. Crystal clear, isn’t it?

Respectfully and Hopefully,
Davey Davis

In lieu printing my letter they printed a garbled rhetorical question about how scientists aren't reporting the facts about Global Warming, how it's all a pack of lies. Gag me. Read More......

Dude

Dude
Originally uploaded by Der Blaue Reiter

Merry Freakin' Christmas.


oh, and as a chaser to that, here's a church I could get behind:



Just finished the rough cut of Don Giovanni, it's.... rough. But everything's shaping up fantastically. I'll be back at it right after I get back from NYC. Read More......

Kickin' Ass in 48hrs. Round 2

We just turned in a film, written, shot, edited, and posted this weekend. It's incredible. I haven't slept much, so bear with me.

When we won best of city with Halcyon last May in the 48hour film festival we qualified for the International Shootout. So one week after wrapping Don Giovanni shooting we headed out into the cold to rock another one. The days were just as intense, but much more organized and really varied compared to last time. We got some new talent for this shoot including Andy Turek on lighting and Rhiannon Ross as our lead.

After making the post-apocalyptic downer of Halcyon, we were bummed to find that everyone had to make a film dealing with a cataclysmic end of the world scenario. Loathe to make the same film twice, we put our own spin on it. There were some tremendous locations including La Caille, the restaurant, and a huge contribution from Moving Pictures Limited for the lights.

Here are some stills, we'll be showing it at our place soon, stay tuned.










Also, in the 11th hour we decided we need a timelapse, so up I went, to pit myself against the elements for an hour of solid cold. Checkit:

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CUT! AND WRAP!

HAHA! So it's official. And I'm finally partially recovered enough to come out and say it. Ahem. Ladies and gentlemen, with much, much help, love, and support I just finished shooting my first narrative film project. Ah-yes. 1 month, 3 parties, multiple stunts, 100s of favors pulled and man-hours coerced. All that remains now is the editing. And the music. And whatever. but regardless, I'm so happy and proud and ready to rip into this thing!

But first, here're a couple neat things, mostly courtesy of Greg:

Chris practicing his death in full moto gear.


The fabulous Elvira




And finally, the first of several wicked drawings done for the movie by Matt Delporto:



Moving into the post-production phase, there's still tons to be done, but it's all exciting stuff. Thanks so much for everything so far, if you're interested in helping me screen it anywhere in the world (venues, collectives, parks, your basement) let me know! Think alleycats and sprints and spin-the-bottle parties and dumpsterdiving expeditions and whatever else needs to be involved. Ye-ah. Read More......