“Ronald Tavel's ingenuity was tested on several fronts in the spring of 1965. He had to imagine and write scenarios that represented different genres, and he had to create them very quickly.”

For about six months, they shot a film every two weeks to be precise. This is again from FACTORY MADE.

“He had to formulate strategies so that the cast could deliver his lines, even though they never tried to memorize them.”

It's hard to think of Warhol's films having had any semblance of script prior to filming, but apparently they did and they're all available for download.

#reads

“He's a fag from New York, he's just a fashion thing, we've read his publicity, this is no serious artist.”

The response from the board of the ICA to the suggestion of a Warhol retrospective in February 1965. The ICA (the Institute of Contemporary Art) was a modest noncommercial art space at Wesleyan University in Philadelphia. Exhibiting there would hardly be considered a major career achievement. Warhol was in trouble though. Despite this being what may be considered the height of Warhol's much mythologized Factory years, he was hardly making any money and practically operating at a loss. It would also mark the first time for an artist to be offered a one-person show less than a year and a half after their first serious gallery exhibition.

Chairman of the board, Mrs. Horatio Gates Lloyd III decided to make the trip to New York and pay Warhol a visit together with ICA director Sam Green, a young recent hire who was pro Warhol, and who got the position out of sheer dumb luck (and connections).

From FACTORY MADE by Steven Watson:

“Warhol seemed uncommunicative, not responding to any of the diplomatic conversational ploys at which Mrs. Gates was so adept. When she asked Warhol about his interest in movies, he just looked at her and said nothing. 'Mr. Warhol,' she said, 'is there anything wrong?' Warhol looked at her and said, 'Uh, gee, Mrs. Lloyd, you are so great. I just think you're really terrific. Would you be in one of my movies?' Mrs. Lloyd reached for her pearls and said what a fascinating idea, what role did he have in mind. Warhol said, 'Would you fuck Sam?' When Green heard that, he thought, 'Oh God, there it goes.'

”'Mr. Warhol, what a very interesting idea and I'm quite flattered,' she said. 'However, you might realize that my husband is the administrative head of the CIA, and it might not be appropriate for me to play that role. Could you think of another?'

The retrospective was eventually approved and scheduled for the fall.

#reads

34 pages left on PROJECT OLDBOOK, after which I'm sure I'll come out the other end completely transformed. Can already feel my brain getting rewired.

“It is to Cubism that the next serious innovators are bound to return.” – John Berger, THE SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF PICASSO

I feel this, in a sense, is very spot on. Not so much Cubism's aesthetic, as much as its intent.

#journal #work #reads

“Between 1884 and 1900 the European powers added one hundred and fifty million subjects and ten million square miles to their empires. By 1900 they had reached the stage where, for the first time, there was nothing left to claim—except by claiming from one another.”

16 years. A mere sixteen years that are more or less responsible for all the wars and struggles, independence movements, genocides, and border conflicts that have taken place around the world since, including within Europe itself. From John Berger's THE SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF PICASSO, which as the passage suggests touches upon much more than just Picasso. No one exists in a vaccum.

#reads

“Caribbean sugar plantations constituted the first truly modernized societies in the world where people, mobilized through violence and oppression, were thrust into remarkably industrial settings for their time. The sugar industry also created the economic basis for the European merchant and commercial classes to challenge, gradually, the monolith of the feudal aristocratic order.”

From Dominic Boyer's NO MORE FOSSILS. Here's another bit:

“The automobile has a surprisingly deep and complicated history, one that intertwined with the locomotive for many decades. A rail-less automotive machine was a serious aspiration of inventors no later than the end of the eighteenth century. The locomotive won out for both engineering and infrastructural reasons and was safeguarded by inconvenient legal measures like the British Locomotive Act of 1865 that required non-rail automobiles travel at a maximum speed of four mph and be preceded by a man waving a red flag.”

Personally, I'd love to see a return of the above legislation, but I know I'm in the extreme minority here. Another bit:

“The philosopher Andre Gorz argued back in the 1970s that the class structure of capitalist society was sustained by a phenomenon he termed the 'poverty of affluence.' What he means is that capitalism utilizes scarcity as a means for reproducing social inequality and preserving class heirarchy. New technological achievements and luxuries are enjoyed first only by the elite, which displays them as status symbols to attract the desires of the masses toward them. As the masses gain access to old luxuries, new unattainable luxuries develop to replace them. This treadmill of luxury means that no universal “good life” will ever be enjoyed in a capitalist society.”

One more:

“Green capitalism as a whole is paradoxical. It will never be satisfied by sustainability. What we call capitalism is a metastasizing arrangement of production, trade, rent-seeking, and consumption that constantly fights for more resource usage and technological development. Its hunger is sucropolitical, it thirsts after the sweet taste for more. Its bones and sinews, especially in the rapidly industrializing world, are still surprisingly carbopolitical, driven by machines and coal toward relentless production of more things. Its epidermis is petropolitical, mobile, plastic, ever reshaping itself in response to technology, desire, and fashion.”

NO MORE FOSSILS by Dominic Boyer

#reads

Hit the 100-page mark on Salman Rushdie's THE SATANIC VERSES, my threshold for testing my appetite for any given book. It still feels like a drop in THE SATANIC VERSES' hellish waters, because it's not even a quarter of the way through and I'm not entirely sure what it's even about yet. Rushdie writes beautifully. It's all very poetic, but I haven't the slightest clue what the hell is going on most of the time. When I do have a grasp on the narrative, it is in fact captivating, but those pages are far and few between.

Just put the child down and my body is aching and my brain is dead and I cannot for the life of me see myself spending my extremely limited leisure time carrying on with THE SATANIC VERSES. Do I feel guilty for putting it aside? Not right now. Maybe tomorrow.

Need a palette cleanser of sorts, something easy that I know I'll enjoy. It's been years since I've read Elmore Leonard, who's always an easy bet for me. I think I'll read TOUCH, a battered old paperback of which I picked up in Denver for three bucks some years ago and have yet to crack open. Pages literally falling out, this may be the last time this particular copy will ever be read by anyone.

#reads

Third day in a row to wake up with a migraine. Beginning to think that the culprit lies in my new supplements.

In other news, my TBR pile has grown rather unruly.

Some of these are partially read (a terrible habit), and that's not even taking my Kindle titles into consideration. I also have a borrowed copy of Rushdie's THE SATANIC VERSES coming in from a friend. Will have to move onto that one so I don't end up holding onto it for too long, and then I think I'll get going on Thompson's FEAR AND LOATHING which I have actually yet to read but am kind of dying to after watching the film adaptation for the first time a few weeks ago.

It's a hot, beautiful day here in Houston, Texas, temperatures soaring at 26 celsius just asking for one to kick back and linger but I cannot turn off my brain from the great many to-do`s on my plate, whether it's continued work on some of my ongoing projects or the resuscitation of things I've been neglecting like the website and newsletter. I've also been putting off accounting for way too long now, and there are a number of houses things to tend to.

Also thinking about how to best maneuver work stuff with the summer month I'll be getting to exclusively spend with my kid (a first for me). Was initially thinking of planning a trip for us to Egypt during that month, but there are time, cost, and logistical considerations to take into account.

No wonder my head hurts.

#journal #reads

Another thing that stood out to me from HITCHCOCK TRUFFAUT; apparently, a great many films from the silent era were based on plays. That is fascinating, because dialogue tends to be the core story engine of playwriting, whereas silent filmmaking is concerned, you have to do without dialogue altogether, save for a handful of title cards.

It's got me thinking about adapting plays to silent comix and all the different changes one would have to make along the way. Changes that would inevitably alter the plays rather drastically I think.

#reads #journal

Woke up in the middle of the night and decided to crack open the volume of HITCHCOCK TRUFFAUT that's been jeering at me unread from my shelf for a while now. A few pages in and I was prompted to beam Mernau's DER LETZTE MANN on the projector, which both Hitchcock and Truffaut express their admiration for. First minute into this 1924 silent film and I was hooked! The framing and shots are just absolutely gorgeous, and the story intense, told entirely without words got me thinking about the big vacuum left unfilled by the absence of silent visual storytelling in today's world. The potential to reach people across borders regardless of language or culture is immense, especially if phones/social-media were to be utilized as the delivery mechanism. But that would necessitate coming up with short ultra-condensed narratives of about one minute or a minute and half tops. Which in itself is something of an attractive limitation.

#journal #reads #film

Painting of living room has commenced. My break between coats has been to read passages from Isaac Asimov's FOUNDATION TRILOGY, a 1955 hardback edition I purchased for $8.50 back in Denver some six years ago and never got around to reading.

First of all; I really cannot believe it's been six whole years, and second of all; thus begins my mission to read all the unread books in my possession in the new year to come before buying anything new.

Right.

130 pages in and enjoying it a great deal.

#journal #reads