Hollywood Chinese Documentary Tonight on TV
HOLLYWOOD CHINESE
Watch it Tonight on PBS at 9pm, Wednesday May 27
(check local listings)
From ARTHUR DONG, three-time Sundance award-winning director of
Forbidden City, U.S.A., Sewing Woman, Licensed to Kill, and Coming Out Under Fire.
I really enjoyed this documentary and highly recommend it.
140 Films, 17 Countries: San Diego Asian Film Festival 2008 October
THE WASHINGTON POST
TV Week Cover Story, May 24, 2009
“A CHINESE LEGACY IN TINSELTOWN”
Nancy Kwan sips her coffee in a Los Angeles hotel lobby, still the lithe, delicate beauty who won fans around the world almost a half-century ago….
“A CINEMATIC BANQUET”
– Lou Lumenich, New York Post
“A FASCINATING JOURNEY FOR AUDIENCES”
– Kenneth Turnan, Los Angeles Times
Cannes Film Festival Wanderlust
by Euro Geezer
photo credit: Philippe sergent
Wandered over to Cannes Film Festival today…
Though the papers say attendance is down and everybody is on a tight budget, the old magic is still there with fans, stars, red carpet, hoopla, and screenings. The streets are full of Limos, harbor full of yachts, and the airport full of private jets. To me, the crowds look the same size as ever. Enthusiasm of prior years is there too. Ahhh, so many gorgeous sexy girls on parade, dressed to be noticed!
Years ago, I always engineered a few party invitations for myself and girlfriend(s) of the day, but these days I can’t be bothered.
Just a “has been” I guess.
Inspired by the Leviathan!
ART: MEDICINE FOR WRITER’S BLOCK
by Jaden
Art is one of the infinite reasons why you ought never complain about writer’s block.
What is special about art, apart from the other inspirations of our world, is that often artists create art with the intention of sparking your creativity — artists like the ambiguity of their product and want you to interpret it in your own unique way. They are begging you to be inspired.
Leviathan! pictured above is a piece that inspired me this year and I want to share it with you.
Evening Art Walks are springing up in Manhattan, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. For a few hours in the night, once a month, all the art galleries remain open and it’s a big party on the street spanning many blocks. Street lights shine upon hipsters selling cupcakes and gangsters pushing hotdogs. Jug bands pound out rhythms to make you stop in your tracks and start grooving.
At one such event, the Oakland Art Murmur, I had the great honor to come upon one of those pieces of art that stands out in history, something so massive that its magick swirls around you and sets your ship adrift.
A color arch of rain, sunshine, and gold, the Leviathan! (pictured above; click on it to see its details) was created by Danny Scheible and Zara Hayes in Sacramento. Taking six months to build, Leviathan! is constructed out of 3,000 hangers and 500 fabric sheaths. In the mouth is the eighth wonder of the world: a miniature city made from masking tape.
With little press, I could not believe Leviathan! was not in the entryway of some high-ticket-price major metropolitan museum of modern art.
Like a monster jammed into a shoebox underneath a child’s bed, the Leviathan! waited patiently in the dark to blow the minds of the thugs and art aficionados who chanced upon it at the legendary Front Gallery.
The sculpture’s title: Leviathan!, along with its shape and details were born out of stories and lend to new stories, which you can read about below. Like all art, it is inspired by the past and it inspires the future.
Art is everywhere. You don’t have to be rich and you don’t have to travel to Musée d’Orsay in Paris, France (although I highly recommend it). Some of the best art can be found at your local thrift store or made from the consumer trash you find there.
Not only is observing art inspiring, but creating art is good for writers too; it allows you to think in symbolism and imagery, like dreams, giving your brain a rest from all those words and an opportunity for you to expand in the abstract.
As the artists of the Leviathan! created a majestic sea monster from rags and wires hangers, you too can be a breakthrough writer by taking the humdrum of regular life and reshaping it into something magnificent and original.
For more inspiration, read the artists’ stories below.
Interview with artist Danny Scheible about Leviathan!
1. How did this art installation come into existence? What were the thought processes and preceding art projects that lead you to Leviathan!?
The installation at the Front Gallery is the continuation of my sculpture over the last 4 years. I didn’t have any art background — in fact, I had never been in or known what an art gallery was until I was 20. I found out at school and finally the world made sense. I have been building the same sculpture since then, this is a piece of it. It is the newest part.
My art started as a way to understand myself but soon became a way to understand others, these projects are cumulative.
I had been sculpting in masking tape before this piece and I felt a need to create something entirely new. This piece was created as a way to consume my old sculpture, which was a city of masking tape — the Leviathan! was to eat the city. The tape sculpture can be seen in its eyes and teeth.
Many of the materials for the sculpture were donated and ideally it will be made by other people in the future.
I have been studying and practicing social sculpture, and trying to make self generating sculpture. Ideally this piece would be sold and the money would go towards setting up a residency program where an artist would organize places to show it and people to build it. The process I work with have to be simple materials that are readily available. I hope that individuals would make there own scales and send them into the piece, every time it comes to a new city that city would provide more materials for it to grow. My sculptures are designed to be created by others I simple bring them into existence and then set them free.
Joesph Beuys talks about having an amorphic mass, a ball or lump of organic matter that life and creativity spring from. These sculptures are made to inspire, but then the making of them has to be simple so others can go home and create.
Kurt Schwitter talks about friction as a force which impedes creation, if the materials are sitting in you drawers and closets then you can just start working. Kurt also said that any object in his studio is just a material, I feel the same way about my sculpture it is just a material for the next piece. This is a good start to answering this question.
2. How did you come up with the name Leviathan!? (It’s great.)
Leviathan! came from several different places. The first being the actual piece itself, it is a Leviathan, Leviathan were what whales and huge sea creatures used to be called, so the idea that this lives deep in the depth of my mind, swimming about in the subconscious. Using the old name see logical and perfect because leviathans were mystery’s something very few saw and lived though tales and stories. Leviathan gives it an ambiguous name and lets people imagination fill in the rest. For me giving people a starting point and a direction works better then a destination.
Secondly, the name Leviathan is the name of a book written by Tomas Hobbes in the 15th century, it is about society and how they are organized like a human being. I wanted this piece to be created by the societies the was exhibited in, it was created as a reflection of its surroundings, the cloth was donated by people we know and gathered from the local GoodWill, it holds much history in it since all the hangers were used and all the cloth worn. It was built to function as a living sculpture in society a physical structure that helps those who build it understand they are the same as each other.
3. Where did you both grow up and how did you end up where you are?
Our stories about growing up are very different. I was born in Sacramento and have lived here my entire life in the same house until I left for school but I returned back to my house afterwards where I still live today with Zara. Zara was born on diseny on parade and had been to 20 countries by the time she was 2. She was kidnapped by her father when she was 8 months old and taken to Iran until she finally came back to her mother speaking only Farsi. She lived with her mother who learned ballet from the royal ballet school in England, Zara traveled with her as she went from ballet company to ballet company so she could make ends meet, she moved constantly until she was 15 when she moved to Sacramento and her mother opened a ballet company 2 blocks away from my house. We met at my opening in Sacramento and started dating after a night of performance art at the horsecow, a local artists collective, where non grata was preforming.
4. What are your scholastic and hobby backgrounds?
Zara traveled around and went to school after school, she has been trained in ballet since she was two and used to spend nights at the theater watching her mother and others practice, she is one of the sharpest and most detailed ballet instructors in the country and runs a ballet school here in Sacramento with her mother. Zara apprenticed with Sacramento ballet. While living in San Francisco, she dropped both of her arches in her feet and had to use a cane to walk for years. she recovered and dance for Oakland ballet before they folded. I went to school in Sacramento until I left to go to UCSC were I studied fine arts.
5. Have you been in any other galleries or shows?
This is Zara’s first show in a gallery, I had 6 shows last year, some in 2007 and 2006, my firsts solo show was in 2007 in Sacramento at the fools foundation it was, Universals and Infinities, 40 miles of sculpture, and it was an interactive installation.
6. How did Leviathan! arrive at the Front Gallery?
It arrived in my van on November 25, 2008 in 4,000 pieces and took the next week and a half to assemble. One of the things I have been doing with my work is building it all in components small pieces that make up a whole, these has come out of necessity and conceptuality, most things are made of smaller parts, there is very little that is made up of its self, also when you have a sculpture that is 2,000 square feet or 40 feet long; you can’t store it or move it on your own unless it breaks down.
7. Describe how you made Leviathan! Cost? Amount of hangers used? Where found the fabrics? Division of labor between you two…
This sculpture cost 700$ to build and another 400$ to install with transportation costs. It has 3000+ hangers and 500+ different garments, the cloth came from individuals and from GoodWill. The work was split evenly it took both of us 6 months to complete the project, though we did have a surplus of hangers.
This sculpture may come form my history as a visual and conceptual artist but all decisions about the piece where made jointly, it is truly a sculpture made by two people. The sculpture contains some hangers(scales) that have been printed on by Art Hazelwood, these scales are the beginning of another collaboration between my work and others, in the future I hope that the Leviation! will contain works by hundreds of artists, and one day be a gallery of its own. It also contains a peice by Jonny Angel, a tape sculpture he to and drew on. These are like the scales but made for the tape city, I have always had people tell me I should tape I am having artist draw on the tape structures to mural the city I have made.
leviathan |ləˈvīəθən|
noun
(in biblical use) a sea monster, identified in different passages with the whale and the crocodile (e.g., Job 41, Ps. 74:14), and with the Devil (after Isa. 27:1).
• a very large aquatic creature, esp. a whale : the great leviathans of the deep.
• a thing that is very large or powerful, esp. a ship.
• an autocratic monarch or state. [ORIGIN: with allusion to Hobbes' Leviathan (1651).]
Are you inspired?
24 Hours Live at the Marfa Film Festival
by Jaden
11:11pm Wednesday April 29, 2009 I step off the plane in El Paso and walk out into the parking lot, slammed by a wave of heat. I like it. I could do this.
For the past two days, a smattering of walkie-talkies communicate a 007 mission to get me from the El Paso airport to Marfa in the middle of the night.
Referring to my note, I read, “Row 4, Spot 4.” A van is waiting for me there with the key in the gas tank. Fate meanders me in the correct direction.
At noon, earlier that day, two vehicles arrived that were driven up from Marfa for 3 hours, one to pick up the band they flew in from Sweden for Friday night’s Marfa Film Festival party, and the other van they left for me.
At this late hour, the only food I can find is a hot dog at Wiener Schnitzel, and I have to admit that the all beef dog is pretty dang good.
The driving directions are easy enough to follow and gas is cheap. After 113 miles, I turn off the 10 East and get on road 90 to nowhere.
For the next 74 miles, I do not pass any vehicles except a train and a semi truck that blinds me — I pray not to have a head-on collision or run off the road into the brush. This is a danger out here on this type of desolate dark road.
I survive the one vehicular encounter of the hour.
Marfa Public Radio plays the kind of array of music that makes me wonder why the 99% of other U.S. radio stations exist at all. The tunes not only keep me awake, they fill me with joy.
Arriving at 3:30 in the morning, family instinct wakes my brother who comes down to greet me as I park. Not expecting a tall hairy beast at my window, he gives me a heart attack. He insists I leave the vehicle unlocked. It would be an insult to the local people to lock anything. There is only one thief in town and everyone knows who he is. If anything goes missing, they will retrieve it from him.
Suzie Q who’s working the film festival welcomes me, fully clothed, having passed out in her boots. After we all share some stories and have some laughs, she departs to get a few hours sleep.
Freight trains rumble throughout the night, awaking me with the vibrations of their weight and trumpeting alarms.
In the morning, Ant, owner of the van and of the room I am sleeping, thinks I went back with Suzie Q because he does not see me buried underneath the pillow and laying prone flat under the blanket.
Getting out of bed, my hands are cracking and my eyes are red from the dry hot air.
Finding food in Marfa is a challenge. There are two small grocery stores with limited hours and options, plus one restaurant that serves breakfast. Later, the locals offer up some goods: a hot dog, brisket beef, and a piña colada.
Everyone in town is friendly and waves. “Do you know them?” I ask my brother each time someone waves to us. Some of the people he knows, some he doesn’t.
“That’s just what you do here, you wave to everyone,” he tells me. “When I went to New York, I couldn’t stop waving and people just thought I was a freak.”
Everyone waves in Marfa; it’s a most bizarre and beautiful thing.
Within one day, I met and re-met most of the towns folk. “I already met you,” people start saying to me. “Oh.” I met so many people, it’s a Tilt-O-Whirl blur.
From 1-5pm daily, you may find refuge in the Marfa Tea Party, an air conditioned space full of floor pillows, wall-to-wall imagery, unusual sounds, and of course tea and biscuits.
There are lots of famous art galleries here and strange assortment of other things.
“Will Work for Patron” is scripted on the back of the Marfa Film Festival t-shirts. Tequila is offered free at every screening and event, so I was able to try some flavors that I would never have otherwise tried — like the delicious coffee flavor that quickly lured a circle of thirsty women.
Another yummy sponsor to refresh from the heat that I am enjoying is the root beer on tap from Maine Root.
At Padres bar in the evening, it was surreal to see the cowboy-hatted face of this year’s Marfa Film Festival ad campaign.
Tonight, the Swedish band Life on Earth will be playing, a special treat for the half of Marfa who are all coincidental celebrating their birthdays today. Plucked out of Stockholm and dropped in Marfa, the Swedes probably feel like aliens.
The films I have seen so far are:
Birdy
a stop animation short film by Agnieszka Woznicka
Music composition is the character that sparks life into this odd little film about a curious wingless bird on a mysterious mission. Peculiar and slow, Birdy is well done and a great intro for me to the Marfa Film Festival.
Herb & Dorothy
by Megumi Sasaki. Documentary Feature. TEXAS PREMIERE
The Crowley Theater
Herb & Dorothy is a sweet documentary about passionate modern art collectors who spent their life earnings from working at the Post Office and Library on obtaining works from new artists. Although they could have been millionaires, they opted to donate their life acquisitions to a museum that is free to the public and they continue to live modestly in their cramped apartment in New York. Inspirational and endearing, this is one that you will hopefully be able to rent someday in the near future.
The American Astronaut
Cory McAbee 2001 | Outdoor Event, Drive-In Theatre. TEXAS PREMIERE
The big talk of the town was the highly anticipated midnight screening of The American Astronaut. Wrapped in blankets, we peddled out to the thistled desert where lies the impromptu drive-in theatre. Propped up against the milky way, a screen smashed out the black and white feature. Tired and freezing, everyone hooted and hollered to this tough space cowboy musical. Some who knew it, sang along. With its blatant homo-erotic and daddy-issue themes, everyone was blown away by this torqued art film and many announced it as their new favorite movie.
The party is just getting started; you can still make it out and get your feet covered in dust for the weekend. Within a few hours, you will know the whole town and forget to cover the toilet seat because you feel at home.
Read more about the festival:
Mother of Marfa! A Film Festival
Marfa Film Festival and Writer Larry McMurty
