1. The artist talking at MoMA about Isamu Noguchi, Buckminster Fuller, and Landscape Model for Total Reflective Abstraction:

2. The artist spelunking in the Henry Art Gallery's collection and emerging with a story about a team of glassblowers inspired by their fantasy of the boss's wife (further inspiring a fashion show on Saturday):

3. The artist in a summer romp of death, modernity, vanity, and decoration at the Tacoma Art Museum:

4. The artist spinning another elusive tale: The Only Known Grave of a Glassblower at Seattle Art Museum.

(SAM doesn't have an image, and I couldn't find one anywhere online.)*

^{* I concur with Culturegrrl that SAM's web site is in need of a serious overhaul. The Henry's, thankfully, is under renovation as we speak.}

To reverse the experience you'd have outside right now, go to the Henry Art Gallery, march down the entry ramp, make your first left, your first right, and your first right again.

Sit in the dark room and take in Oliver Boberg's Country Road (Landstrasse), one long rainstorm with the sound of a dog bark in the distance and the on and off of a light in the house behind the hedge. The fact that it's a stage set makes it even more beautiful, not to mention service-oriented for the Summer-SAD Northwesterner. (A short loop plays here for the deskbound.)

Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, whose depiction of alienation made him a symbol of art-house cinema with movies such as ''Blow-Up'' and ''L'Avventura,'' has died, officials and news reports said Tuesday. He was 94.

There was a misprint in the newspaper when I was an art house teenager, and so, when I went to see a revival of Bergman's 1966 mind-fuck Persona, I thought it was called Person.

RIP Ingmar Bergman.

Because Wikipedia is obviously the best thing ever (and fuck you too Tom Wolfe, you frivolous, unnecessary geezer) I started by looking up a small bird and wound up at Project Gutenberg, reading The Physiology of Taste, or Transcendental Gastronomy by the French laywer, politician, and gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (died 1826).

What little I've read of it is aristocratic, sometimes bizarre, and great. It begins with a series of aphorisms. Here are my favorites, which are pretty much all of them:

APHORISMS OF THE PROFESSOR.

TO SERVE AS PROLEGOMENA TO HIS WORK AND ETERNAL BASIS TO THE SCIENCE.

I. The universe would be nothing were it not for life and all that lives must be fed.

II. Animals fill themselves; man eats. The man of mind alone knows how to eat.

III. The destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they are fed.

IV. Tell me what kind of food you eat, and I will tell you what kind of man you are.

VIII. The table is the only place where one does not suffer from ennui during the first hour.

IX. The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity than the discovery of a new star.

X. Those persons who suffer from indigestion, or who become drunk, are utterly ignorant of the true principles of eating and drinking.

XI. The order of food is from the most substantial to the lightest.

XII. The order of drinking is from the mildest to the most foamy and perfumed.

XIII. To say that we should not change our drinks is a heresy; the tongue becomes saturated, and after the third glass yields but an obtuse sensation.

XIV. A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman who has lost an eye.

XV. A cook may be taught, but a man who can roast is born with the faculty.

XVI. The most indispensable quality of a good cook is promptness. It should also be that of the guests.

XVII. To wait too long for a dilatory guest shows disrespect to those who are punctual.

XVIII. He who receives friends and pays no attention to the repast prepared for them is not fit to have friends.

XIX. The mistress of the house should always be certain that the coffee be excellent; the master that his liquors be of the first quality.

XX. To invite a person to your house is to take charge of his happiness as long as he be beneath your roof.

(I'm pretty sure he would've objected to the word "foodie," too.)

Commenter Musely was so inspired by the latest installment of Whose Calves Are These? that he wrote a poem:

Whose calves these are I think I know.
He lives upon the hill though;
He will not see me stopping here
To snap his calves with my cellphone so.
It is indeed rather queer
To snap these calves while standing near
But a shot of them I must take
I'll do it boldly, without fear.
He gives his sexy ass a shake
And I'm quite sure it's no mistake--
Above the din of some band's beat
He must have heard me picture-take,
Ogling his legs from ass to feet,
But oh those calves--this shot I'll keep--
And gaze at it before I sleep,
And gaze at it before I sleep.

I had his permission--but whatever. Nice going.

(PS: White's been right on all of them. The Drummer is Jason Finn, The Boss is Tim Keck, The Genius is Susan Robb, and The Cripple is Brendan Kiley.)

(PPS: Next one will be a lady, for you, Sean.)

Saw the first screening this afternoon with my kid. The first ten minutes--which includes a string of fast-and-furious jokes and Bart's full-frontal skateboard ride--is worth the price of admission. Total genius. The rest of the movie, eh, kinda underwhelming. It's good, glad I saw it, will rent it when it comes out on DVD. But it's no South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.

Hey, when are they going to make another South Park movie anyway?

First, some news:

Karen Allen is going to return for the next Indiana Jones movie. Even better: Spielberg has stated that the movie will feature no CG. Nice.

Now onto movies that are actually open, beginning with, of course, The Simpsons Movie. From Andrew Wright's review: "[W]arts, post-freshness dating, needless Green Day cameos, and all, the simple fact is that I laughed more here—particularly in the first 20-minute chunk—than at any other movie this year. I'm not booing, I'm saying Boo-urns."

Also opening: Talk to Me ("With a better script, and more life in the camera, Talk to Me might have become the movie everybody is talking about," says Charles Mudede); Sunshine ("The term "visionary" gets batted around a lot when it comes to the sci-fi genre, but in its final, blazing moments, Boyle's dazzling, triphoppy space opera comes closer than most," says Andrew Wright); No Reservations ("Crack my shell, Eckhart! Crack it!" says Lindy West); Steve Buscemi's Interview ("When you come to despise the only faces you're given to watch, it's hard to keep caring," declares some jackass); My Best Friend ("Despite a promising black-comedic concept and the presence of the dependably wonderful Daniel Auteuil, that inner dimension just ain't happening here," says Andrew Wright); and The Trials of Darryl Hunt ("Every American should see this movie," according to Christopher Frizzelle.

And finally, a couple interviews: Andrew Wright sat down with Sunshine director Danny Boyle, and Charles Mudede had a conversation with Talk to Me director Kasi Lemmons.

I saw this film at last year's SIFF (where it won Best Documentary), and it changed the way I think about the legal system. Made over 10 years, it is the story of a man who spent 20 (!) years in prison for a rape/murder he was wrongly convicted of (by an all-white jury, with testimony given by a KKK member, and then some). The film looks at the race and class bias in the justice system and the incredible work of the Innocence Project.

You won't believe all the crap that went on in this case; it would be comic if it weren't so awful. Also, this isn't some old-timey case from way back when, this was 2004! This film will blow your mind.

The Trials of Darryl Hunt plays July 27 through August 2 at Northwest Film Forum.

Bonus: Hunt's attorney Mark Rabil in attendance Friday and Saturday.

A woman is standing at a busy intersection--where Denny crosses over the freeway--reading the new Harry Potter book.

I did not ask if I could take this photo, because she was so far away and there were cars streaking between us. As we crossed in the intersection, I said, "How's the book?" and she said, quickly, "It's good."

The next day, I'm walking by Rite Aid and I see this guy, evidently without a home, on the ground reading the new Harry Potter book.

I ask if I can take his photo and he says, "If you want." I ask how the book is, and he says, "It's good."

The following evening at the Hideout is a party for the release of the new issue of Rivet. It looks as follows.

It includes the work of Ellen Forney, Brangien Davis, Jennifer Borges Foster, Susan Robb (a genius), and Jennifer Zeyl (also a genius). I asked the editor of Rivet, Leah Baltus, how the new issue is. The glow of a juke box behind her was lighting up her hair. She said, "It's good."

This book review has introduced me to a new enemy, the economist Tyler Cowen:

The best sections of [Discover Your Inner Economist], concern tactics for maximizing one’s cultural consumption, or what amounts to imitating Cowen. He lists eight strategies for taking control of one’s reading, which include ruthless skipping around, following one character while ignoring others, and even going directly to the last chapter. Your eighth-grade English teacher would faint. But the principle here is valuing the scarcity of your own time, which people often fail to do. It works for movies, too—Cowen will go to the multiplex and watch parts of three or four movies, rather than just sit through one. Why wait for a highly predictable ending when a fabulous scene might be unfolding in the movie playing next door? Cowen also offers advice for how to defeat the boredom that, despite our best intentions to be culturally literate, overtakes many of us minutes after we enter an art museum. How do we deal with this “scarcity of attention”?

I agree that watching the parts of four Hollywood movies is much better than watching just one Hollywood movie. What's wrong is Cowen's reason for doing this: scarcity.

Cowen is pushing the idea that you must watch these movies in this way because of the "scarcity of attention." But that is completely the wrong way of looking at it. One must watch these movies in this way not because of scarcity but because of the abundance of images. But, in the first place, why does Cowen come up with such an idea as "the scarcity of attention"? Not for existential or psychological reasons, but because scarcity is the ground on which his whole economic concept stands.

“The critical economic problem is scarcity,” he says in his book. Like all other capitalist economist, Cowen is ideologically welded to this bad idea of lack and shortages as the key problem. However, scarcity is rarely real but manufactured. There is an abundance of energy in the world. The sun gives it to us daily for free. All this talk about there being not enough energy, food, fuel has been essentially false. And the wars that have been fought to protect the little there is for survival have been false wars--wars whose only truth is that they benefited those who in this or that period of history owned the means of production.

If scarcity was an authentic problem (rather than a fabricated one) then Africa would not be poor.

Last week, an artist named Jeremy Blake was seen wandering into the ocean off of Rockaway Beach. Nearby, his clothing, wallet, and a suicide note were found under a boardwalk. The week before that, Blake's girlfriend of 12 years, Theresa Duncan, had committed suicide in their apartment. (Duncan was a filmmaker with a blog called The Wit of the Staircase.)

At first, the story of Duncan and Blake was blurry and sad. It looked like he had walked to a watery death out of mad grief over his lost love. It brought to mind Ophelia, without the floating body. The 35-year-old Blake was just missing, gone, disappeared. I thought of Bas Jan Ader, who, for his final work of art, sailed out to sea alone in 1975 after his friends sang him a romantic shanty, and never returned. He, too, was never found. (Jan Verwoert has a really terrific recent book about Jan Ader's alternately heartbreaking and rationalistic, fake and real, art.)

Yesterday, the LA Times published a story titled "The Apparent Double Suicide of Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan." Evidently, the lovers had been convinced that Scientologists were after them. Friends and family who expressed doubts about the pair's claim were shut out. Blake and Duncan became something like a cult of two themselves.

And then comes today's news, linked on Artsjournal, that a fisherman has found a body in the area. The story is all talk of physical details: a body marked by "brown eyes brown hair, but no scars, tattoos or any other distinguishing features except for several teeth with gold crowns," the investigators' search for "any dentists or doctors who might have worked on Blake's teeth."

Blake's best-known work outside the art world, where he has shown at big museums and even has a major exhibition scheduled to open in October at the Corcoran in DC, is the abstract color sequence he did for the film "Punch Drunk Love." The sequence is set right into the middle of the movie, like a visual intermission from plot. The movie has been underappreciated, but it is a thing of strange, popping beauty, full of rage and uneasy love. I'm going to watch it again and think about the media image of Blake's blank skin and gold teeth.

New York is Now and Ghost World by Charles Mudede:

The future of Africa is Miller's next and most important step as an artist.

Chad Wentzel and a Star-Studded Celebration of Infinitude and Perpetual Beauty by Peter Gaucys:

As in his previous show at Crawl Space, the cut-paper extravaganza Everything I've Ever Wanted All at the Same Time, Wentzel makes a genuine attempt to pin down his euphoria and share it. His vision is ecstatic. He wants to bring it to the gallery. And yet, as his own larger-than-life rhetoric acknowledges up front, he knows that he will fail to.

UPDATE: Christopher Frizzelle just alerted me to the fact that this post makes no sense. Charles Mudede and Peter Gaucys did not make any art. They wrote about art made by Paul D. Miller and Chad Wentzel, respectively. They wrote about this art in our paper, this week, which has just been posted online. Basically, I wanted to point you toward two reviews worth reading about art worth thinking about.

Oh, and what's with all the attitude about the cat in my post from earlier today? I mean, I thought the cat thing was sweet, but here everyone seems to think the cat is causing the death? Wouldn't you want to have a cat around to notify the nursing home to notify you so that you could get to the nursing home in time to say goodbye to your dying relative? That cat is performing a service! And it's not just a service to you, it's to the one who's dying, too. Give a cat a break!

Christopher praised the work of local graffiti artists last night. This guy buries 'em...

Via Sullivan.

My two favorite things, porn and comics, have formed an unholy alliance. Today, at the San Diego Comic-Con, Virgin Comics (haw!) announced that uber-mega-porno-superstar Jenna Jameson will star in her own graphic novel, titled Shadow Hunter.

According to the press release:

Shadow Hunter is the story of a provocative superheroine who survives a brush with death only to find herself fighting the legions of hell for her very soul. The story, while provocative and sexy, contains no nudity and is intended for a mainstream audience.

What what what??? No nudity? Legions of hell? Mainstream audience?

“I’m thrilled to be collaborating with Virgin to bring this story to life, first as comics and eventually in film and other formats,” said Jenna Jameson. “Working with comics is creatively liberating – everything is possible. My character is sultry, sexy and kicks ass!’

I love it when celebrities half-heartedly endorse comics. Has Jenna ever picked up a comic before in her life? Do you think she's a Marvel girl or a DC girl? Does she know that Batman could totally beat Superman in a fight?

I plan to ask her these questions, and many more this Friday when she's kinda sorta in town.

Via Newsarama

Responding to my post about how Star Wars broke my belief in a Christian God (I now believe in a Spinozistic God), Brad Steinbacher, a man who knows his galactic stuff, posed this tough question:

"If Star Wars is great because it lacks God, then how come in the Empire Strikes Back, which everyone on the planet agrees is the best SW film, Han Solo tells a lowly rebel member: 'Then I'll see you in hell!,' when he sets out in search of Luke Skywalker on Hoth? The existence of Hell -- or the idea of Hell -- means there is an existence of Heaven... Star Wars films only achieved true greatness when God was brought into the fold?'"

This is a very important point. Why does Han Solo have a concept of hell? The solution: We must never forget that his is a concept (idea) of hell, and not specifically a Christian hell. As we have seen on Earth, hell as an idea is transcultural and transhistorical. Hell has existed, in one form or another, in different cultures, and has changed over the years in these separate cultures. Because hell as a concept can be imaged in different and unrelated cultural environments, we can image that, as a concept (an idea), it can exist in galaxies that are far, far away and in times that are long, long ago.

What is important is not God or Satan but their forms as The Good and The Bad. You must see not persons or living beings but forces, isomorphisms, universal structures, trans-galactic moral systems.

From Alec Soth's photography blog.

If you see one of these (or a moose or a bear) around the city, it's the work of artist Lars Bergquist. There's a video about him at the newish blog Dodge & Burn.

James Gaddy, associate editor of PRINT magazine, has a lyrical story, Shadow Boxer, about the aspiring abstract expressionist who, in his day job, designed the Brillo boxes that helped make Andy Warhol famous.

For two artists whose aesthetic philosophies and levels of success were diametrically opposed, Warhol and Harvey had much in common. They both came from blue-collar, immigrant families. Warhol was born in Pittsburgh in 1928, Harvey a year later in Toronto before his family moved to Detroit when he was three months old. Warhol earned a degree at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon), moved to New York, and started illustrating for Glamour. Harvey studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago; after a brief move back to Detroit, where he designed window displays for retail giant J. L. Hudson (Warhol designed windows for Bonwit Teller), he moved to New York to break into the art world.

Imagine Harvey's surprise when he saw Warhol's Brillo boxes in their 1964 gallery debut. Harvey had despised the commercial process of making them, Gaddy writes. Harvey's gallery, the Graham Gallery, responded to Warhol's use of Harvey's design.

The Graham Gallery was less amused. It issued a feeble press release on behalf of Stuart and Gunn (and Harvey) that stated: “It is galling enough for Jim Harvey, an abstract expressionist, to see that a pop artist is running away with the ball, but when the ball happens to be a box designed by Jim Harvey, and Andy Warhol gets the credit for it, well, this makes Jim scream: ‘Andy is running away with my box.’” But the final line practically admitted defeat: “What’s one man’s box, may be another man’s art.”

But Gaddy doesn't stop there. He details more of the undoing of James Harvey, an unknown abstract expressionist who arrived a generation too late.

History has been as kind to Warhol, the aesthetic maestro, as it has been harsh to Harvey, the romantic on the cusp of the age of irony. James Harvey’s last show, at Graham in November 1964, presented paintings that were “dynamic, restless, and painted with rich skill,” according to the Times. But by July 15, 1965, Harvey was dead in New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital. He had succumbed to what was described in his obituary as a “long illness” (according to Washburn, this was a cancer of the blood). His family came and picked up his photographs, unsold canvases, and remaining possessions, and took everything back to Detroit, where it remains.

The image Gaddy uses for his story in PRINT is a Brillo box held in the apartment of the art historian Irving Sandler.

One of the few surviving examples of Harvey’s box is owned by the art historian Irving Sandler, who keeps it in his Manhattan apartment encased in Plexiglas. When Warhol was autographing copies of his Brillo Box at the Stable Gallery for $300, Sandler suggested that Harvey sign copies of his Brillo boxes at Graham—and sell them for 10 cents. Harvey signed only one and sent it to Sandler as a gift, a half-hearted gesture to reclaim something he never much cared for in the first place.

Check out the classified ad if you're art-curious...

Look at the look on that boy's face:

Part One

That's a look to make any father proud. Get rid of that silly head thing he's wearing, and there you have a perfect boy. No hurt, no pain, no emotion on the surface. All summer within; all winter without. You can smile at him, and what you'll get back is that wall, that supreme indifference. Melt into the air the clownish clothes, gaudy gold, and traditional values of aristocrats, but keep forever that expression made of stone.

My best attempt at that stone look:

Part Two

My mother to me, while driving to downtown Gaborone in 1988: "Do you know what I hate about Americans. They always smile at you when you pass them on the street. And you think they know you, and you realize they don't know you. They are just smiling at you because that's what Americans like to do. I hate smiling back at someone who is smiling at me for no reason. Really, haaah, what is the worth of smile if you are smiling all of the bloody time?"

It's something I brought up in my film review and Dan reiterated yesterday on Slog: The new movie of Hairspray—originally written for the screen in 1988 by John Waters, adapted into a Tony-winning Broadway musical in 2003, and now back on the screen as a movie musical by Adam Schankman—has some unfortunate problems with race.

As you probably already know, Hairspray tells the story of Tracy Turnblad, an effervescent fat girl with dreams of dancing stardom who finds her calling as a segregation-busting teen leader in early-60s Baltimore. As some commenters have pointed out, expecting historical accuracy from a movie based on a musical based on a John Waters film is ridiculous. I agree, and my problems with Hairspray-the-movie-musical's handling of the plot's racial elements aren't about historical inaccuracies, but about a weird and troubling lunkheadedness on the part of its makers.

Trust me, I didn't enter the movie expecting to be offended about its cluelessness in regard to race issues—I expected to be offended by the hideous miscasting of John Travolta as Tracy's mom Edna, and I was: Travolta's aggressively terrible. But eventually even Travolta's crimes against humanity were eclipsed by the film's race problems, which especially sucks because the original film dealt with race issues so elegantly and hilariously.

In John Waters' original Hairspray, Tracy's awakening as a pro-integration activist is spiked with a rich and telling dash of vanity and cultural fetishism. ("Oh Link!" cries the original Tracy, mid-make-out session. "I wish I was black!" With dewey earnestness, Link replies, "Our souls are black, though our skin is white.")

This entire aspect of Tracy and Link's "turning on" to the struggle for civil rights is completely axed from the new movie, as are all of the original Velma Von Tussle's racial slurs, and the entire storyline of Penny Pingleton forced into shock therapy for dating a black guy.

A similar blanching occurs with the music: In the original, black people were represented by ass-kicking R&B, the type of songs that would make David Duke wish he were black—"Shake a Tail Feather" by the Five Du-Tones, "Tell Him" by the Exciters, "Nothing Takes the Place of You" by Toussaint McCall. In the musical, we get black actors singing showtunes about "the darker the berry, the sweeter the juice." I wish I were kidding.

And yes, I know it's all supposed to be a light froofy goof, but I was unable to get swept up in mindless fun because I kept getting hit in the face by the filmmakers' tone-deafness in regard to one of their movie's main themes (and John Travolta's horribleness). That is all.

So some woman kissed a Cy Twombly painting on display in France, left a red lipstick stain, and is facing prosecution:

"A red stain remained on the canvas... This red stain is testimony to this moment, to the power of art."

Speaking to French news agency AFP, she said the artist had "left this white" for her.

Crazy narcissistic mademoiselle, oui?

Oui.

But a good chance to bone up on our Twombly, whose last name is an anagram for nothing at all. Which I find suspicious. Also, his father was a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox. Also, he was born in Lexington, Virginia, which was also the birthplace of Sam Houston, the only person ever to be governor of two states (Tennessee and Texas) and who, in this picture, looks manly but, in this picture, looks like a goof.

Also, Holland Cutter of the New York Times wrote that Twombly's "wiry, vernacular anti-aesthetic has become a patrician exercise in a kind of horticultural expression." I'm with him up until the "horticultural" part. Hey Holland! You know what his wiry anti-aesthetic has actually become? Kandinski + meth.

Oui?

Oui.

What Islam and Christianity have in common is narrative ressentiment toward their parent, Judaism. At one point, The New Testament attempted a complete break from its parent book, the Bible. But what would it be without the great stories of Noah, Abraham, and Job--the greatest story ever told? Jesus walking on water was nothing compared to Moses parting the sea. Instead of a cut, it decide to turn the Bible into an amazing map (an amazing story) leading up to its own realization. The New Testament is a coda, a tail. This is why it's saturated by the end of Jesus, his death.

As for Islam, it practically kidnapped Abraham and took him to Mecca. A gap in the Bible--what happened to Hagar and Ismael, Abraham's lover and son?--was enough to build a new narrative passage to the oasis of Islam. In essence it was a narrative theft. And the Jews of Medina didn't hide this judgment of Muhammad's scheme. They rejected him on the spot ("Give us back our story! You thief you!"). That rejection politicized what would become Islam.

But what do you do if all the great stories have been told--and only a great story can establish a religion, a state, a race? You take, borrow, steal, and become resentful.

My correct position on the death of narratives is accurately expressed by the poem "La Cloche fêlée":

It is bitter and sweet, during winter nights,
To listen, beside the throbbing, smoking fife,
To distant memories slowly ascending
In the sound of the chimes chanting through the fog.

Happy is the bell with the vigorous throat
Which, despite old age, watchful and healthy,
Faithfully sends out its religious cry,
Like an old soldier sentinel under the tent!

My soul is cracked, and when in its boredom
It wishes to fill the cold air of the night with its songs,
Often it happens that its feeble voice

Seems like the thick death-rattle of one wounded, forgotten
By the edge of a lake of blood, under a great pile of the dead,
And who dies, without moving, after enormous efforts. (Translation: a mix of Wallace Fowlie and Geoffrey Wagner)

I enjoy the hearty and holy (and wholly naive) narrative "which sends out its religious cry, like an old soldier sentinel under the tent!" But I cant see this narrative as anything than what it is: as dead as Homer. And as a writer (and filmmaker), I can only say this to myself, in all honesty: "moi, mon âme est fêlée." My soul/bell is cracked.

By the middle of the 19th century, the greatest poet of that century (Whitman's negative), Baudelaire knew that the cracked bell would be the condition of the writer, the artists, the drinker--his/her soul is not only cracked for good but also trying to move while under the pile of the dead (Aescylus, Christopher Marlowe, John Lyly, John Webster, Spinoza, Nietzche, Hegel, Marx, Dickens, Ruskin, Walter Pater, Joyce, Zora Neal Hurston, Gogol, Richard Wright, Nabokov, Ellison, Bely, Sontag, Sologub, Borges--and all the rest of my dead).

To get excited over a story is to get excited by a voice coming out of a tomb.

Briefly, the news: As noted by Adam Sekuler at Northwest Film Forum's Hot Splice, two filmmakers with local ties made it into Filmmaker Magazine's annual roundup of fresh talent. Congrats to Adam Blubaugh and Calvin Reeder (who's mostly in LA now, but still counts).

You can see Calvin act in his buddy Brady Hall's June & July, which appears in the web version of On Screen. (If you're clutching a print edition, flip back to Film Shorts.) Also in the On Screen lineup: the pointless film-adaptation-of-the-musical-adaptation-of-the-superior-film Hairspray (condemned by veritable bad-movie connoisseur David Schmader), the SIFF biopic Goya's Ghosts (Jen Graves says Javier Bardem's great, but, um, he doesn't play the artist), the eccentric-agrarian doc The Real Dirt on Farmer John (Andrew Wright admits it wanders, but apparently it's still worthwhile), and Lady Chatterley, a refined French take on D.H. Lawrence's novel (Jon Frosch says it's better the second time around).

And in extra-special web extras this week, we have Lindy West taking down I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry.

Film Shorts is located at Get Out. This week, you'll find reviews of Half Moon, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, Cashback, and many more. And with that, I'm off to a vacation in the woods where no movies can find me. See Monsieur Hulot's Holiday for me!

posted by Jeff Kirby

Tonight is the beginning of the end for children and childish adults across the world. The final installment of the Harry Potter book series goes on sale at midnight, and is expected to smash sales records. According to the Guardian, it’s also expected to smash children’s fragile emotions, exposing them to the grief that comes along with the death of imaginary literary friends (although they haven’t leaked who gets the axe).

Virtually every bookstore in Seattle is trying to get in on the wizard action, throwing Harry Potter parties with games, trivia, bands, and prizes. At first the plan was to compile a list of all the bookstores with events tonight, but as it turned out, all of them are, so the choice is yours where you want to spend Friday night wearing a pointy hat and holding a wand.

...which remains my all-time favorite sport, forensic artist Stephen Mancusi has posted his works depicting how Jackson might have aged without plastic surgery and all the rest of the shit he's done to his head.

See the whole series here. (And thanks for the heads-up, Towleroad.)

JK Rowling rails against spoilers.

JK Rowling said fans wanted to finish the saga "in their own time."

JK Rowling has hit out at US newspapers that have published plot details from the final Harry Potter book. The author said she was "staggered" that papers including The New York Times had printed reviews ahead of the novel's publication on 21 July.

It's not that the Potter book is bad or good, but this: why do people still care about stories? Or more specifically, narratives. The art of narration is so primitive, so old, so dead. As a mode of transferring information, nothing new can be received from a narrative. Every story has been told. This is the sole wisdom of Christianity: The Bible (or what they shamelessly call the Old Testament) exhausted every story. It was from then on a matter of interpretation, of reading into the narrative, looking for the signs of the Messiah. It's only the process (reading/hearing/watching) that matters. Knowing where a story is heading is something of great importance only to a mind that believes in a prime mover that is unmoved. That is what Hegel brought to Spinoza's substance: a story. And it is precisely our indifference to the story of world history (the story of Him) that has made us modern, made us sterner, made us urban. The protection of the narrative elements against "spoilers" is like a wizard protecting his bag of bad tricks.

Raymond Loewy designed trains, planes, cars, desks, lipsticks, jukeboxes, dishes, refrigerators. He created the logos of Lucky Strike, Hoover, Shell, Exxon--even the US Postal Service. He was a Frenchman, born in 1893, but he came to the United States in 1919 (after both his parents died in the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918-19). Once here, he changed the look of modern American life completely, streamlining everything from the Greyhound Bus to Air Force One.

There's an exhilarating show about him at Bellevue Arts Museum. If you're in the area for the art/craft fair this weekend, don't miss it. (Drawings for failed designs--it is barely believable that someone ever proposed a fecal unit remover--are fascinating, too.)

This is a perfect show for Bellevue Arts Museum, although it's presented terribly on the disjointed spaces that act as galleries on the second floor, instead of on the unified third floor.

It made me wish that this museum that has struggled so much to get its mission right would drop the art angle completely and limit itself to industrial design and craft instead of trying to exploit old ideas about art and design and art and craft. (As for the permanent Pilchuck glass galleries at BAM, they rightly belong at the Museum of Glass.)

My visit also made me hope that BAM will dust the bronze stack of chairs by Peter Pierobon in the middle of its lobby. It is covered--covered--in dust.

I'm sorry I missed this when it was published last month: Christopher Hitchens writing about what might be closer to his heart than Orwell: Marx's journalism.

Discussed: Wodehouse, the Victorian opium trade, New York newspaper wars, and Prussian peasants, who used to be allowed to gather firewood that fell on the ground. (Marx wrote editorial after editorial defending their traditional right to fallen branches which seems, in light of his subsequent achievements, kind of noble and kind of cute.)

And here is a shot of pure, distilled Hitchens—elegant and edifying with a heroic dose of self-regard:

If you are looking for an irony of history, you will find it not in the fact that Marx was underpaid by an American newspaper, but in the fact that he and Engels considered Russia the great bastion of reaction and America the great potential nurse of liberty and equality. This is not the sort of thing they teach you in school (in either country). I beseeched Wheen to make more of it in his biography, and his failure to heed my sapient advice is the sole reproach to his otherwise superb book.

It's Identity Theft: Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman, Suzy Lake 1972-1978 at the Santa Monica Museum of Art--LA-based NYT writer Jori Finkel's curatorial debut.

Holly Myers of the LAT liked it, too.

Congratulations, Jori.

(I'm going to see the show in two weeks; Finkel is an old friend and mentor of mine.)

^{A still from A Natural Way to Draw by Suzy Lake, 1975.}

Parts of Lorenzo Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise--a masterwork of Renaissance sculpture--are coming to Seattle.

Back in May, I noted here on Slog that the Art Institute of Chicago's web site named Seattle Art Museum as a stop for the famed gilt panels, which have never before been seen in North America and will only be in Atlanta, New York, Chicago, and Seattle before returning to Italy, where the government says they will not travel again.

SAM sent out its press release this morning for the traveling show, tentatively scheduled to make its Northwest visit January 26 through April 6, 2008.

In the show are three original panels and four sculptures, two before restoration and two after.

It will be a classical moment: Also on view at SAM during that time will be Roman Art from the Louvre (February 21-May 11, 2008).

In this image I find what I'm always looking for in a woman's face: a lazy eye.
What is it that makes a lazy eye so special? And it can only be one lazy eye, not two. To find low lids on both eyes is to find a face that has been drugged. One eye must be alert, aware, and striking the surfaces of objects with its ray of vision. The other eye is the one caught between the sleeping world within and the awake world without. But why is this beautiful? Why is it sexy? What kind of love is this laziness?

Tacoma Art Museum announced Tuesday that it has hired Margaret Bullock, formerly of the Portland Art Museum, as its new curator of collections and special exhibitions--filling the last of two second-in-command openings on Seattle-area museum staffs.

The first was filled in April, when Marisa Sanchez arrived as Seattle Art Museum's new assistant curator of modern and contemporary art.

(Sanchez replaces Susan Rosenberg; Bullock fills the spot once held by Rock Hushka, who now heads up TAM's curatorial department. Patricia McDonnell used to be TAM's chief curator, but the museum dispensed with the title after she left. Hushka is in charge, but he's not called the "chief": his title is director of curatorial administration and curator of contemporary and Northwest art.)

Bullock comes from the Harwood Museum of Art at the University of New Mexico in Taos. Before that, she was at PAM from 1998 to 2001, working her way up to associate curator of American art. She has dual master's degrees, one in anthropology from WSU and one in art history from the U of O, and a dual bachelor's degree in art history and English from the University of Colorado, Boulder. In Portland, Bullock curated exhibitions ranging in subject from 19th-century American silver to Childe Hassam, John Singer Sargent, Norman Rockwell, and Grandma Moses.

We'll get to know Bullock in time, but for now, are you curious about what SAM's Sanchez is like? Tune in to an In/Visible podcast on www.thestranger.com this afternoon.

When Lawrimore Project opened a year ago with an exhibition that involved SuttonBeresCuller building and then unveiling a trompe l'oeil Chinese restaurant in the gallery, I got an email from a Seattle curator letting me know about another artist who makes Chinese restaurants: Montreal-based Karen Tam.

Tam has been doing it since 2002. Her restaurants, unlike SBC's, are fully functional. (SBC did occasionally serve Shanghai Garden in theirs.) She builds kitchens as well as eating areas, and she serves.

From August 3 to September 1, Tam will build a restaurant installation at Centre A in Vancouver, as part of a group show about Chinese restaurants called REDRESS EXPRESS:

Providing the starting point of this project, the exhibition brings together recent artworks that explore the Chinese restaurant as an iconic institution and bring forward critical discourses in relation to the head tax redress [the head tax was a fixed fee charged for each Chinese person entering Canada] and identity politics in general. The Chinese restaurant installation by Karen Tam exposes the cultural underpinnings and ethnic stereotypes that define family-owned Chinese restaurants in Canada as well as the evolution of Chinese Canadian cuisine. Kira Wu's photographic series of the exteriors of Chinese-Canadian restaurants in the neighbourhood initiate a review of signage and cultural arbitrage. Shelly Low's self-portraits and Rice-Krispies squares sculpture intimates a self-conscious projection and representation of the consumable ethnic or exotic 'other'. The Yellow Pages (1994) by Ho Tam provides a video primer from A to Z of past and present Asian experience within North America. Gu Xiong's series of hanging banner portraits of present-day and historical figures important to the development of Chinese Canadian communities gives face to the historical moments of redress.

I wonder whether Tam's restaurants have misspellings on the menus--the classic misspellings of English words that are so common at Asian restaurants. This is something that arose in my mind when I first saw SBC's installation. I asked about it, and the artists explained to me that they felt it would be disrespectful to leave the misspellings of local restaurant menus intact in their artwork, even though they said the artwork was an homage to local restaurants. That elision points to a larger question about cultural voyeurism. And one thing missing from SBC's Chinese restaurant was the Chinese people who live in the surrounding International District and/or work in its restaurants.

I wonder about the conversation that Tam's installation will kick up. If you're curious to see, there's a symposium about the exhibition Aug. 2 and 3 in Vancouver.

It's in the Wall Street Journal, it's conspicuously late (although not as late as the maybe-never New York Times), and Lee Rosenbaum has a middling opinion of the new Seattle Art Museum.

A new book presents Jesus as a political thinker:

The revolutionary idea finds its most powerful expression in the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The familiarity and brevity of the Golden Rule sometimes obscure its radical implications. Unlike the Ten Commandments or various secular codes, it does not list a series of prohibited acts. Instead, it provides a way to think about how to behave toward one's fellow man.

But against the Golden Rule as a political platform there is Mark 12:17: "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." Ultimately Jesus rejected politics. His mission on earth was basically spiritual. It's hard to hide or get around that fact. The same is not true for Muhammad; politics was at the center of his Medina period. (During his earlier Mecca period, Muhammad was more like Jesus--apolitical.)

Christians should just take their founder's advise and keep God out of politics. As for the Golden Rule, it's as empty as Kant's categorical imperative: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

Specifically, the amount is $112,214 to 77 Washington artists working on projects in literary, performing, media, and visual arts.

It was Artist Trust's 20th-anniversary year, and it raised more than expected at the annual auction. The spoils go to artists.

Here's the whole list of money-winners.