John Menick Blog

* “Shoot all scriptwriters,” he wrote in his popular, long-running Village Voice column, “and we may yet have a rebirth of American cinema.”

* “The original plan for the film was that every shot would be digitally placed over archival footage. So that literally, the film would be “shot” in 1945 Berlin; the actors would be green-screened over archival. There was a scene in a butcher shop, for example, and I had to find every camera angle we needed in a butcher shop in 1945 Berlin. If there was a scene outdoors, a destroyed park or a zoo, I had to find those camera angles. There was interplay between the writing, directing, and archival research: what I could find that was in Paul Attanasio’s script, and whatever else I found in my research that might work or that piqued Paul’s interest, or Steven Soderbergh’s… A colleague of mine in the art department, Joanna Bush, created an amazing database of all the footage I’d collected. It was organized based on the geography of Berlin. So that on Steven’s computer, he could click on a map of Berlin and it would find all the archival footage that I had gotten on a particular plaza or a particular street or a particular location, and pull up all that archival footage and all the stills. Steven could know where he was situated in Berlin, and the art department could recreate a particular strasse. We’d know the ruins and we’d know how much that area was bombed out and all that.” More…

* “My first exposure to the subject came in a book by another medical anthropologist, Margaret Lock, whose Twice Dead (2002) is a brilliant comparative anthropology of Japanese and North American attitudes to brain-death as the criterion of death. Hence the title: a person is ‘once dead’ when technical criteria establish that the brain has stopped, while the body is still ticking over quietly on a ventilator; ‘twice dead’ when the heart is stopped and the organs harvested.”

* “What, he wondered, did we want to do? Did we want to eat, to drink, to fuck? Uh, dinner sounds cool.”

* And last, but not least, the Athanasius Kircher Society 2006

The Who Cares book launches this Friday at 5pm at the NY Art Book Fair. The whole fair looks interesting with Walid Raad, John Lurie, Silvia Kolbowski and others presenting new publications.

Last year, Creative Time invited me to be part of a series of discussions on the topic of politics in contemporary art. The series, organized by Doug Ashford, included a lot of great people, and now the edited transcripts of those talks are about to be published. Four related projects by artists are also due to open soon.

JG Ballard interviewed about his new novel Kingdom Come:

“Boredom is a fearsome prospect. There’s a limit to the number of cars and microwaves you can buy. What do you do then?” asks Ballard. In the past he has predicted a future where boredom will be interrupted by violent, unpredictable acts. “Consumerism does have certain affinities with fascism,” he argues. “It’s a way of voting not at the ballet box but at the cash counter… The one civic activity we take part in is shopping, particularly in big malls. These are ceremonies of mass affirmation.”

The Times has a favorable review of David Friend’s recent study of the photography of September 11th, Watching the World Change. Besides being a well-written and impressively researched study of the images surrounding the event, I was happy to see that Friend foregrounds Wolfgang Staehle’s work, which I wrote about several years ago for Parachute magazine. Friend’s book is probably the first important study of 9/11 photography, and is a must for anyone interested in a critical and historical look at that day.

(I haven’t gotten a chance to listen to the audio interview posted with the review.)