October 07, 2004
Technically, I should not be as sleepy as I have been lately.
I went to a lecture at The Modern the other night by artist Erik Swenson, who made, among other wonderful things, this sculpture that is one of my favorites of that museum's permanent collection (you have to see it in person to fully appreciate the desperately whimsical and physically confounding qualities it has). Swenson himself was an affably shy guy whose lecture, which involved as few words as possible, reminded me of Matthew Barney's commentary track, only with a sense of humor. I'm always afraid that lectures will be stuffy and overly expository, but Swenson's obvious disinterest in heavy explanations and his utter lack of pretention made for a really great presentation. He also showed a video he made of him creating a rather epic sculpture of a deer freezing to death on a brick-paved street, although much of the footage consisted of him of giving a tour of his apartment (which he redecorated to accurately resemble an 19th Century Saloon) and playing a CD he made called 'Simon And Garfunkle's Greatest Hit,' which was 14 songs from the famous duo layered on top of each other. It was brilliant. Again, it's so wonderful to see cool people who are successful and still really cool. I guess that's something I strive for. Someone kick me if I ever get too pretentious (personally -- I can make pretentious movies if I want to).
Yen's staged reading last night went well, and it was really inspiring to see the script take such dramatic life. Screenplays always change so much when they begin to involve more people than a single writer and a reader (actors and a full audience, in this case) and there's always a bit of suspense over whether that change will be for the better. It was defintely for the better in this case, and the script seemed even stronger with all these voices attached to it.
I was also proud of myself for being the only one to catch the explicit Friends homage.
So anyway, these are two things that have been worth waking up for lately.
Posted by David Lowery at October 7, 2004 01:57 PM