Jeff Wall is one of those artists that smart people seem to really like. Nearly every smart person I know seems to think of Wall as a seminal figure.

A couple of weeks ago I took a quick lap around his retrospective at MoMA. Maybe a bit too quick because I still don’t see why everyone goes so apeshit over Jeff Wall. I need to think about him a bit more.

When you think of Jeff Wall you think of light boxes—big transparent photographs lit from behind with florescent bulbs and mounted to the wall. Light boxes are just intrinsically great—any large photo lit from behind is going to look fantastic. I don’t care what it is—a Tylenol ad at the airport—if it’s in a light box, I’m sold. So we can all agree that light boxes are good—that’s one thing that Jeff Wall has going for him.

You also think about the fact that his photos are carefully posed. Even though they look like he just went into the street and happened to be at the right moment to capture something interesting, that’s not what happened—he spent days (days!) rounding up people to pose for him in very specific locations. So if you weren’t familiar with Wall’s work you’d say to yourself, “Whoa, look at that redneck making that ‘slanty-eyed’ gesture to that Asian dude.”

But you’d be wrong because these were “actors” of a sort.

That the photos are “fakes,” meant to look real, is interesting to some people. There was a critical armature that developed around photography in the 60’s and 70’s that attempted to understand the medium by determining its unique and intrinsic properties. One of the intrinsic properties of Photography was thought to be its “truthfulness”—a photograph was a record of light hitting film; it was impartial in that way; it didn’t have the messy subjectivity that painting had. So when you looked at a Henri Cartier Bresson photo, you thought to yourself, “Oh, how delightful that he was there to capture that moment. Isn’t life magical?” By posing everything to look real, Jeff Wall undercuts this assumption of photography’s truthfulness and that makes people feel kind of exhilarated, as if one of life’s big barriers had finally been torn down. “Thank God we can no longer trust the accuracy of the photo,” they say. (they don’t really…)

But perhaps Wall is less a photographic provocateur than a throwback to a 19th century mode of photography that took painting as its model. He seems to like to fill his work with art historical references.

There’s this one that borrows from a 19th century woodblock print from Katsushika Hokusai.

The little figures on the left of this one are posed like the ones in Manet’s “Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe” or maybe like that Giorgione painting whose name I don’t remember. In any event, his pictures look vaguely art historical. People seem to like this about him too.

They also like his politics. Wall has concern for the underclass and really we all should. Even though to you and me, rounding up a bunch of itinerant laborers and making them pose for several days for a big expensive photo seems like the height of bourgeois decadence, for some people this makes Wall a friend of the common man. Kind of like Courbet—an artist that Wall also quotes.

So I’m obviously missing Wall’s greatness and importance. But I’m going to go back to MoMA and see the show again.

I know I don’t write a lot on my blog anymore so I’ll try to be better about that too.

The first draft of the spec script was finished a couple of weeks ago (agents: that’s how fast/funny I am). Thanks for the suggestions.

Here is a picture of me and my smokin’ hot girlfriend, Kaveri:

For the past couple of days I’ve been trying to write a 30 Rock spec script. Everyone I know—as if directed by some mystical force—has recently decided to write a spec script and rather than feeling left is the dust, I’ve decided to try my hand at it too.

It turns out that writing a spec script is kind of hard. I’m a little lost. I feel as though I can “write funny”— I can access funny specifics, I can write funny banter, I can make cute references.

But what I can’t seem to do is come up with a plot to hang the funny on.

What’s the story going to be about? What actually happens in the show? What’s the plot? Seriously, someone give me some ideas. Does anyone watch 30 Rock?

I am taking suggestions.

Before making my recently-canceled show on channel102.net, I had taken one “Intro to Filmmaking” course in graduate school. So I don’t know much of anything about filmmaking.

But I’ve started to think about it a good deal—how you put a movie together. The rinky-dink operation of “Sexual Intercourse: American Style” was nothing like how real movies are made, but the basic language of filmmaking—lighting, shot selection, editing patterns—were things I thought about and it was fun to think about them. I hope to make more stuff like that, more video stuff. Maybe a short movie. Maybe.

So entertain my pretensions for a bit—I’m going to talk about what I’ve learned after making SIAS.

I’ve learned that I have to pay attention to movies. When I started with the show, I described it to Jamey Shafer as “’The Ice Storm ‘ meets ‘Three’s Company’” but really I was thinking of Wes Anderson—movies like “Rushmore” and “The Royal Tennenbaums”—their mix of drama and comedy, the way they don’t seem located in a specific period of time. But also about how they are put together—the shots, the editing. But I didn’t really go back and look at his movies—I just had them in my mind. It’s better to actually watch a scene and try to pick it apart.

A scene like this:
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It’s interesting to look at where an edit comes and why. Most directors try to make the edits as smooth as possible—editing on a movement or when an actor looks in a particular direction or at an appropriate shift in focus, overlapping the sound of the second shot to smooth the transition. But Wes Anderson movies often have these terrific awkward edits, like at 2:31, when Richie moves over to Margot—a normal director would start Richie’s movement in the first shot and then have that movement continue on the edit as he sits down next to Margot. Instead, we have Richie sitting still for the first shot and then moving to sit down in the second shot. The edit comes at a pivotal point in the drama—when Richie confesses his love for Margot—so the edit acts as a “restaging” device, forcing us to acknowledge a shift in the narrative, from the small-talk to love-talk. Great.

Also. Wes Anderson is known for these very “framed-up” shots—shots where the plane of the camera is parallel to the plane of the back wall and actors are dead center (Dyna sent me an article about the history of this shot). It’s a very deliberate, presentational way of staging a shot and I’m a big fan. In the scene above, this type of set-up is used when we first see Margot in the tent and when we see the close up of the record player, on Richie’s second close up, on Richie and Margot sitting together and then lying in bed together. And then when Margot kisses Richie’s hand and with Richie’s final medium shot. Aside from its Brechtian quality these shots also help to frame the key moments in the narrative (deliberately framing the narrative might be Brechtian too, but don’t really know anything about Brecht).

So this is what I learned from paying attention to the filmmaker I was trying to rip off.

And this is what I came up with:

Today I tried the Neti Pot my friend Alex gave me. What is a Neti Pot, you ask? Well, it looks like a gravy boat, except instead of gravy you use salt water and instead of a turkey you use your nostril.

You see, a Neti Pot is some sort of ancient (?) Hindu holistic medical device that is meant to cleanse your sinuses. I have terrifically poor sinuses, so I’m the perfect candidate for said pot.

You fill the pot with very hot water and 1⁄4 teaspoon of salt. You then tip your head to one side, shove the spout up a nostril and pour the contents of the Neti Pot directly into your nose. The salt water travels through your nasal passage and sinuses and back out the other nostril. The whole process is utterly bizarre.

Here is a picture of me and the Neti Pot:

The sensation of hot water passing through your head is a strange one but it’s one I’d recommend. I mean, I imagined it would sort of feel like drowning but I found it weirdly comforting—just me and the Neti Pot, alone at my bathroom sink on a Sunday afternoon.

Alex expects the pot back, so I’ll be cleaning it vigorously.

EDIT: category changed to “Products I Find Myself Using”

So I’m sure by now you’re all aware of this game that’s going around—this game where you’re “tagged” to reveal 5 things about yourself that no one knows.

Thank you, Rob Lathan.

Here are my 5:

1. I once walked into a stranger’s hotel room in Moscow and fell asleep in their bed.

2. Ten years ago, I wrote and recorded an earnest homosexual rock ballad. I am straight.

3. After moving to New York—and in a period of personal crisis—I burst out crying at a rooftop barbeque after being scolded by a friend for cutting the hamburger line. Heaving sobs, I fell off a roof-ladder, slashed my chin open and landed in the emergency room.

4. In 1991 I bought 3 pairs of unusually-colored jeans (red, brown, mint-green). I put them in a dresser drawer. They remained there for 2 years until I finally threw them out.

5. I spent several nights in Rome hurling enormous 2-liter wine bottles out the widow of a friend’s apartment, attempting to clear the busy street below and land the bottles in the Tiber River.

Now, I thinking about tagging the marvelous Trevor de Clerq and Gabriella.

I need to shave about 20 seconds off of my Channel 102 show to bring it under 5 minutes. Where will these 20 seconds come from?

Kaveri has been visiting for the past couple of weeks. For those of you who have not been keeping track of my girlfriend of seven years, she’s in her last year of graduate school at RISD.

We were invited yesterday to the studio of one of her teachers, a very terrific guy.

He used the word desemiotize. I had never heard the word but I now plan to use it regularly. It may be borrowed from the French by way of Deleuze. I love desemiotize. I’m not sure exactly what it means. My guess is that it means the act of “de-signing”—removing the signifying function from an image or object. So, for instance, Jasper John’s Cézanne-esque brushwork was an attempt to “desemiotize” the American Flag. Something like that.

This teacher had been “desemiotizing” stuffed animals by covering them with a sculpting compound.

But what if it was modeled after a signboard for the Société Anonyme?