Category: Arts

Art news from all over (not including film arts and music arts)

Francis Ford Coppola Sees the Future For Artists

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Francis Coppola Claret

Francis Ford Coppola sees the future, and for the artists among us, you better plan on having a day job, or a patron:

I once found a little excerpt from Balzac. He speaks about a young writer who stole some of his prose. The thing that almost made me weep,  he said, “I was so happy when this young person took from me.” Because that’s what we want. We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can’t steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that’s how you will find your voice.

And that’s how you begin. And then one day someone will steal from you. And Balzac said that in his book: It makes me so happy because it makes me immortal because I know that 200 years from now there will be people doing things that somehow I am part of. So the answer to your question is: Don’t worry about whether it’s appropriate to borrow or to take or do something like someone you admire because that’s only the first step and you have to take the first step.

Q: How does an aspiring artist bridge the gap between distribution and commerce?

We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.

This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?

In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it.

(click to continue reading Francis Ford Coppola: On Risk, Money, Craft & Collaboration :: Articles :: The 99 Percent.)

Or as in my case, not care. My art1 is a hobby that gives me pleasure, so I do it. I have no expectations of selling my work to be hung on Steve Jobs’ wall, or used in a Coppola film. I just do it because I want to. Sometimes I sell my work, and this is good too, satisfying even, but I don’t expect to sell enough of my work to quit my day2 job.

Speaking of which, if you want a print of something I’ve done, just ask, and I’ll make arrangements. Eventually.

via

—

p.s., Mick Jagger said something quite similar a few months ago

Footnotes:
  1. such that it is [↩]
  2. well, literally, day and night job [↩]

Burden of the Beast

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Burden of the Beast

Hubbard Street, Fulton Market, West Loop.

by tiptoe

It was the first of a three part werewolf series which went up in Chicago and New York.
I’m glad to see it’s aging well.

The artist’s website has photos of some other work (that I’ve also photographed), check it out.

such as:

RIP Solve closeup

and

Say Goodbye

plus my sister took this photo in New York recently.

Interesting stuff, I like it.

 

Banksy half-assed

swanksalot0 comment
Banksy half-assed
Banksy half-assed, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

I think Chicago got less interesting work than other places.

www.nileguide.com/blog/2010/05/27/on-the-stencil-trail-fo…

Embiggening

From an interview with First District Alderman Joe Moreno:

Who’s getting tagged in your ward? The tagging is mostly happening to small and independently owned, women-owned, minority-owned businesses: boutiques, restaurants, and clothing shops. Our community is an artists’ community, but we don’t want to have people putting their own paint on small business owners’ shops.

I moved to Wicker Park 14 years ago because of the artists, and I want to preserve that. But in my mind, tagging isn’t permissible.

What if a super-famous street artist like Banksy, who paid us a visit not long ago, created a piece on one of your constituents’ facades without asking? Would you make an exception for Banksy? Permission has to be granted. I would hope he’d work with a pro-art, progressive alderman like myself, and we could have his art displayed. And he could perhaps even get paid for it.

How would that happen? Well, I’ve been taking on this issue in two ways: the illegal removal side, and also in promoting spaces for street artists to show their work off and get paid for it. I’m working with various parties to make their walls accessible to street art. Brooklyn Industries also has an initiative for artists to use their exterior wall for street-art purposes that would be traditionally seen as graffiti.

How many of these specially designated wall initiatives have you worked on since becoming alderman? There’s two right now, and I’m working on two or three others to get permission. But I’d like to expand it. I’m also working with a gallery to do an art installation on the el platform.

(click to continue reading Even Banksy Has to Follow the Rules in Proco Joe’s Ward | The Blog | Chicago Reader.)

Arrested Development Movie Is Definitely Happening

Seth Anderson0 comment

Awesome. Coincidentally, we’ve been watching Arrested Development on DVD, and we have been rolling on the floor with guffaws of laughter. Such a funny show, holds up to a second viewing even though Iraq is not in the news as much as it was in 2003.

Arrested Development

According to GQ, both star Will Arnett and Mitch Hurwitz, creator of the beloved cult Fox sitcom, have verified that their highly anticipated film adaptation is finally in the works after years of rumors. Of course, there are still some details to be worked out, such as trying to co-ordinate the filming around the schedules of a dozen in-demand stars like Jason Bateman and David Cross, but considering the trials and tribulations the film has faced to get to this point over the last four years, that’s barely a minor hurdle.

So what do we know about the movie? Well, not much, other than these two vital facts: Everyone from the original series, which went off the air in 2006 after three critically acclaimed seasons, has agreed to return for the movie

(click to continue reading ‘Arrested Development’ Movie Is Definitely Happening, Say Will Arnett and Mitch Hurwitz | Inside Movies.)

and from GQ:

we were talking to Will Arnett. And this is what he said: “Yes, it’s happening.” He went on, but here’s the upshot: there is a script—!!!—but it is not finished; all of the principle cast members are on board, but there is no timetable to actually make the movie. So then we called Mitch Hurwitz to make sure that our ears did not deceive us and that Arnett wasn’t just pulling our leg. They didn’t, and he wasn’t.

“Believe it or not, we have started the script,” Hurwitz told GQ. (And by “we,” he means himself and “Arrested” co-executive producer Jim Vallely.) “We’re taking a little abeyance while we get [‘Running Wilde’] up and running. But it is our absolute next priority and we can’t wait to do it.” So, rejoice! Hurwitz also had a bit more to say: “We’re changing some of the Bush references to Obama because we started it awhile ago. And the Bluths may not be vacationing in the Gulf of Mexico anymore. We also might have to recast the part of Uncle Mel, the former action movie star. But other than that we have a clear path.”

(click to continue reading GQ Exclusive: Arnett, Hurwitz Say “Arrested Development” Movie Is On Like Donkey Kong: The Q: GQ.)

Can’t wait, and even though I’d prefer Arrested Development came back and did another three year stretch on television, a movie would be the next best thing.

Dustin Hoffman on new HBO show – Luck

Seth Anderson0 comment

I’d give Luck1 a chance – even after John From Cincinnati crashed and burned, David Milch still is permanently of interest 2 because of Deadwood. Dustin Hoffman has his moments, as does Nick Nolte. Wonder if it will be done in time for September?

Deadwood Fan #1

HBO announced Wednesday that it has picked up the series “Luck,” which was written by David Milch (“Deadwood,” “NYPD Blue”) and stars Dustin Hoffman. Michael Mann directed the pilot for “Luck,” which also stars Chicagoan Dennis Farina, Nick Nolte, Richard Kind, Jason Gedrick and Jill Hennessy.

“‘Luck’ is a provocative look at horse racing – the owners, gamblers, jockeys and diverse gaming industry players,” according to HBO’s press release. The drama “begins shooting this fall at Santa Anita Park and other Los Angeles locations” but no premiere date has been set.

(click to continue reading Dustin Hoffman bets on new HBO show – The Watcher.)


“Deadwood: The Complete Seasons 1-3” (Michael Almereyda, Timothy Van Patten)

The press release from HBO is below.

LOS ANGELES, July 14, 2010 – HBO has picked up the new drama series LUCK, it was announced today by Michael Lombardo, president, HBO Programming. LUCK is a provocative look at horse racing – the owners, gamblers, jockeys and diverse gaming industry players. LUCK begins shooting this fall at Santa Anita Park and other Los Angeles locations.

“Michael Mann delivered a pilot from David Milch’s brilliant script that took our breath away,” notes Lombardo. “We are truly excited that these two artists, and our extraordinary cast headed by Dustin Hoffman, will be bringing LUCK to life.”

The cast for the pilot stars Dustin Hoffman, Dennis Farina, John Ortiz, Kevin Dunn, Richard Kind, Jason Gedrick, Ritchie Coster, Ian Hart, Tom Payne, Kerry Condon, Gary Stevens and Nick Nolte. Jill Hennessy guest stars. Pilot credits: executive producers, David Milch, Michael Mann and Carolyn Strauss; co-executive producer, Henry Bronchtein; producer, Dustin Hoffman; written by David Milch; directed by Michael Mann.

Footnotes:
  1. IMDb doesn’t have much info about it either, other than saying it is already in post-production [↩]
  2. to me, which is implied, but might as well state the obvious [↩]

Cartier-Bresson opening

swanksalot0 comment
Cartier-Bresson opening
Cartier-Bresson opening, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/exhibition/cartierbressonmo…

Shot with my Hipstamatic for iPhone
Lens: John S
Flash: Off
Film: Pistil

plan on going to this, maybe not for the opening, but before it leaves

This exhibition of nearly 300 images is the first full retrospective devoted to Cartier-Bresson in three decades. It includes both his formally groundbreaking early images and his historically significant postwar work—in India and Indonesia during struggles for independence, in China during the revolution, in the Soviet Union following Stalin’s death—that redefined the field of photojournalism.

Following an exquisite presentation of the best of the early work, the exhibition is organized as a series of distinct sections. Several of these sections are devoted to his work in countries such as the United States, the Soviet Union, and France. Other sections present the themes that preoccupied Cartier-Bresson throughout his career: portraiture, the persistence of ancient customs and patterns of life, the transformation of these patterns by modern industry and commerce, the poetry of human encounters on the street, and the psychology of the crowd.

The retrospective, organized by the Museum of Modern Art, shows the rich interplay between Cartier-Bresson the artist, gifted at capturing the flux of life, and Cartier-Bresson the photojournalist whose lens shaped our understanding of seismic political and cultural changes across the second half of the 20th century. This retrospective is the first to draw upon the extraordinary resources and cooperation of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris. It will premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in February 2010 and after its Chicago showing, travels to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Henri Matisse – Black Is Also a Color

Seth Anderson0 comment

I still haven’t been to the Matisse exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago, unfortunately. Such a powerful artist.

In 1908, when Henri Matisse exhibited in Paris thirty paintings, sculptures and drawings representing his work of the previous eight years, a disgruntled critic complained of the artist’s “unhealthy state of mind, overworked by search and ambition.” If only he’d realized what was coming. Just three years earlier Matisse had burst into notoriety as the most radical of the Fauves, or “wild beasts,” of painting; the 1908 exhibition showed that the 38-year-old artist was ready to take stock of his work without false modesty, the better to push forward into new terrain. His sense of accomplishment and his restlessness could hardly be disentangled. “I do not repudiate any of my paintings,” Matisse declared in his “Notes of a Painter,” published a few months later, “but there is not one of them that I would not redo differently, if I had it to redo.”

Where most observers saw madness and aggression in Matisse’s work, his one great early defender among the critics, Guillaume Apollinaire, saw a “Cartesian master.” “We are not here in the presence of an extravagant or extremist undertaking,” Apollinaire argued. “Matisse’s art is eminently reasonable.” The poet was being sly, knowing as he did that to be reasonable, or rather to put one’s reason into practice, can be a most extreme undertaking. And Matisse was just as crafty when he claimed, in implicit contradiction to Apollinaire, to disdain intellect as a guide to painting: “I believe only in Instinct.” True, Matisse is the most intuitive of painters, yet to express his instinct cost him immense intellectual as well as physical labor. “Often behind one of these works,” he explained to a Catalan journalist, “a dozen more have been undergoing evolution, or, if you wish, involution, from objective vision to the sensationalist idea that engendered it.” Matisse’s insight, if it has been precisely transcribed, is extraordinary. It would have been more conventional to assume that art begins with sensation and is gradually elaborated to construct an “objective vision.” But Matissean vision is just the opposite, moving from objectivity to sensation, or rather (and here comes a curious oxymoron) to a “sensationalist idea,” apparently a sort of intellectualized sensation. It’s as if, in Blakean terms, one were to start from experience to achieve innocence.

Matisse’s paintings can appear to have taken form effortlessly. Their timelessness is akin to that of the icons that stunned the painter when he visited Russia in 1911—”the true source of all creative search,” he declared. Of course, the frank evidence of multiple revisions observable on the surfaces of most of them tells us that this sense of ease is deceptive. Readers of Hilary Spurling’s biography of the painter can easily come away from it thinking of the artist as an absolute kvetch: high-strung and anxious, a reckless workaholic on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Of the 1906 painting The Gypsy, he later observed that it “shows the energy of a drowning man whose pathetic cries for help are uttered in a fine voice,” while the mural Music (1910) he described as “an immense effort which has exhausted me.” Of the glorious 1912 still life Basket of Oranges, later purchased by Picasso and now on view in Chicago, he told Françoise Gilot, “It was born of misery.” When a painting happened to achieve an unexpected success he took little pleasure in it, seeing the work as just “the beginning of a very painful effort.” A confirmed atheist—except “when I work”—he would use the Lord’s Prayer as a mantra to calm himself down. And yet as his friend the writer and socialist politician Marcel Sembat observed, “He has no wish to offer other people anything other than calm.”

(click to continue reading Black Is Also a Color | The Nation.)

 

And from the AIC:

Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917 examines what is without question the most innovative, momentous, and yet little-studied time in the artist’s long career. Nearly 120 of his most ambitious and experimental paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints from the period are on view. Matisse himself acknowledged the significance of these years when he identified two paintings, Bathers by a River and The Moroccans, as among his most pivotal. These monumental canvases from the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, inspired the collaborative work of this exhibition and serve as major touchstones within it. This is the first exhibition to offer an in-depth investigation of Matisse’s art from this time, revealing information uncovered through extensive new art-historical, archival, and technical research.

(click to continue reading Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917 | The Art Institute of Chicago.)

Daley as Patron of the Arts

Seth Anderson0 comment

Really? Mayor Daley? I guess one could argue that the downtown has been revitalized since the 1990s, certainly more after-dark options in the Loop than there used to be.

Wicked TRI-X 400

The downtown Chicago Theater District honored Mr. Daley on its 10th anniversary, led by Broadway in Chicago, the potent operator of downtown theaters, as well as by the Goodman Theatre and the 250-theater Chicago League of Theatres. The celebratory tone came amid the mayor’s difficult year, replete with an awful economy, budget travails, the suicide of a top ally and his lowest popularity ratings in years.

“No one has worked harder and risked more than Mayor Daley,” declared Lou Raizin, president of Broadway in Chicago.

Mr. Raizin alluded to the Loop’s distinctly melancholy state not long ago — before the refurbishing of several theaters like the Auditorium, the expansion of Loop university campuses, and new restaurants — and the benefits of the revitalization for his firm. They include annual audiences of 1.7 million, a decade of payrolls totaling $100 million and the impact on other sectors, like hotels, with 6.7 percent of local hotel occupancy attributed to people coming to town to see his shows, like the musical “Billy Elliott.”

Some Daley critics might have winced upon hearing Mr. Raizin present the case for tax increment financing, or TIFs. They’re a development tool, used nationwide, that Daley has relied on to, critics say, benefit developers at the expense of other public entities such as public schools and parks. They’ve been essential to the downtown theaters, he said.

And if the activity in the Loop at night leaves a lot to be desired, you cannot deny the failure of previous mayors to turn matters around. Remember Jane Byrne’s ignominious State Street Mall gambit?

Roche Schulfer, executive director of the Goodman, called what has happened with the theater district “a signal achievement in urban development and private-public partnerships,” lauding the mayor’s “vision, tenacity and courage.”

Mr. Daley’s arts record is solid and goes well beyond the time he stood on the “Jersey Boys” stage and exhorted Chicagoans to go watch theater. For all the caricature of the monosyllabic, middle-brow politician, the mayor has been a force, in part due to his world travels and a propensity to borrow the ideas of others.

Whether it’s fiberglass cows on street corners, the handiwork of world famous architects or teaching Chinese in the public schools, the mayor has a sophisticated sensibility akin to a plodding baseball pitcher’s sneaky changeup — it’s frequently missed.

(click to continue reading Chicago News Cooperative – Daley Takes Center Stage as Patron of the Arts – NYTimes.com.)

Cadillac Palace BW

So I guess let the Mayor have his moment, he won’t be in office much longer, doling out the TIF dollars.

Picasso Considered Working with Franco

Seth Anderson0 comment


“A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Vol 3)” (John Richardson)

According to John Richardson, at least, Pablo Picasso was in serious discussions with the fascist Franco government to have an exhibition in Spain. I don’t know if an artist agreeing to an exhibition of his work in his own country would really destroy his reputation as Mr. Richardson asserts, but I wasn’t alive at the time. Maybe it would have, maybe it wouldn’t.

Picasso was a steadfast communist, a tireless peace campaigner, and he loathed the fascists – depicting General Franco with witty brutality in works such as The Dream and Lie of Franco (1937).

But the Picasso who consorted with Soviet officials, who was photographed examining pictures of Stalin, who received telegrams from Fidel Castro, is only part of the story.

According to John Richardson, the biographer of the artist who knew him from the 1940s to the 1960s, the Spaniard secretly undertook negotiations with Franco’s representatives in 1956.

Richardson and his collaborator, art historian Gijs van Hensbergen, have discovered that the Spanish art critic José María Moreno Galván was dispatched to the Côte d’Azur, where Picasso was living, in order to open talks about holding a retrospective for the artist in Madrid.

The critic reported back to the Spanish cultural attaché in Paris, José Luis Messía, who responded: “What a pity García Lorca [poet, dramatist and theatre director] isn’t alive, we could have killed two birds with one stone.”

The point was that had Picasso accepted the proposals it would have been a major coup for the Falangists, “destroying Picasso’s status as a hero of the left; he would have been regarded as a traitor to the left for going back to Spain”, according to Richardson.

As it happened the negotiations – which, had they continued, would have been conducted by Messía and involved the director of the Madrid Museo de Arte Contemporáneo – ground to a halt because they were leaked to the press.

…

The talks were conducted on a basis of secrecy and the Spanish minister of foreign affairs had decreed that if the news leaked the whole affair would be denied, according to van Hensbergen.

But they were sufficiently far advanced and known among a small circle for a concerned group of Spanish notables to send a letter to Picasso entreating him not to be tempted by the proposal – as recorded by Jean Cocteau in his diary.

According to Richardson and van Hensbergen, who are working together on the fourth volume of Richardson’s biography of Picasso, the point is that Picasso’s views were “10 times more subtle than you can imagine … nothing about his views were black-and-white; the history of this period is a history of grey areas”.

(click to continue reading Picasso nearly risked his reputation for Franco exhibition | Art and design | The Guardian.)

Apologize Pull out his eyes

I’m suspicious of people who have views simply of black and white1, without subtlety; the world is complex, people’s minds should be flexible enough to parse nuance.

Footnotes:
  1. George W. Bush, remember him?? [↩]

Al-Battani

Seth Anderson0 comment


“The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America Its Name” (Toby Lester)

Since his name came up in a book I’m reading12 called The Fourth Part of the World

Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Jabir ibn Sinan ar-Raqqi al-Harrani as-Sabi al-Batani (Arabic محمد بن جابر بن سنان البتاني `Abū `Abd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Jābir ibn Sinān ar-Raqqī al-Ḥarrānī aṣ-Ṣābi` al-Battānī c. 858, Harran – 929, Qasr al-Jiss, near Samarra) Latinized as Albategnius, Albategni or Albatenius was an Arab astronomer, astrologer, and mathematician, born in Harran near Urfa, which is now in Turkey. His epithet as-Sabi suggests that among his ancestry were members of the Sabian sect; however, his full name affirms that he was Muslim.

One of his best-known achievements in astronomy was the determination of the solar year as being 365 days, 5 hours, 46 minutes and 24 seconds.
His work, the Zij influenced great European astronomers like Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, etc. Nicholas Copernicus repeated what Al-Battani wrote nearly 700 years before him as the Zij was translated into Latin thrice.
The modern world has paid him homage and named a region of the moon Albategnius after him.

Al Battani worked in Syria, at ar-Raqqah and at Damascus, where he died. He was able to correct some of Ptolemy’s results and compiled new tables of the Sun and Moon, long accepted as authoritative, discovered the movement of the Sun’s apogee, treated the division of the celestial sphere, and introduced, probably independently of the 5th century Indian astronomer Aryabhata, the use of sines in calculation, and partially that of tangents, forming the basis of modern trigonometry. He also calculated the values for the precession of the equinoxes (54.5″ per year, or 1° in 66 years) and the inclination of Earth’s axis (23° 35′). He used a uniform rate for precession in his tables, choosing not to adopt the theory of trepidation attributed to his colleague Thabit ibn Qurra.

His most important work is his zij, or set of astronomical tables, known as al-Zīj al-Sābī with 57 chapters, which by way of Latin translation as De Motu Stellarum by Plato Tiburtinus (Plato of Tivoli) in 1116 (printed 1537 by Melanchthon, annotated by Regiomontanus), had great influence on European astronomy. The zij is based on Ptolemy’s theory, showing little Indian influence. A reprint appeared at Bologna in 1645. Plato’s original manuscript is preserved at the Vatican; and the Escorial Library possesses in manuscript a treatise by Al Battani on astronomical chronology.

[Click to continue reading Muhammad ibn Jābir al-Harrānī al-Battānī – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

Al-Battani’s book, On the Science of the Stars, apparently discusses

the system proposed by Bartholomeus and confirmed by the ancients, in which the places and regions of the world are noted according to latitude and longitude.

Footnotes:
  1. on my iPad, if you are curious [↩]
  2. thanks to a tip by phule [↩]

Alterman on the Retirement of Bill Moyers

Seth Anderson0 comment

On the topic of the imminent retirement of Bill Moyers, Eric Alterman recounts, in part:

Socios TV Service

Nearly twenty years ago, I spoke to Edward R. Murrow’s top producer, Fred Friendly, who told me he thought of Bill Moyers as “the Murrow of our time…the broadcaster who most upholds his mantle.” But while Murrow remains television journalism’s most admired historical figure, it’s all but inarguable that Moyers long ago surpassed his achievements.

This is no knock on Murrow, who, after all, spent most of his career on radio. His See It Now–the program that helped take down Joe McCarthy in 1954–enjoyed just four years of life in a regular prime-time slot before it gradually disappeared as an occasional series, unable to find a sponsor. Defenestrated at CBS, Murrow gave up on network news entirely and accepted John Kennedy’s offer to head up the USIA in 1961. But when Bill Moyers likewise found his brand of journalism unwelcome on network news, he had another option. He was able to return to PBS, where he had begun his career as a broadcaster fifteen years earlier. With his decision to found his own production company, Public Affairs Television (PAT), together with his wife and executive producer, Judith Davidson Moyers, he assured himself complete editorial independence, and in the quarter-century that followed, he fashioned a body of work without parallel in the medium’s brief history.

Who but Bill Moyers could have devoted so much time to the work of Joseph Campbell and Robert Bly; done television’s most hard-hitting reporting on the Iran/Contra scandal; investigated the media’s failure in Iraq; defined the human impact of economic inequality; examined the ability of corporations to manipulate the “public mind”; evaluated the real-world impact on local communities of corporate-driven “free trade” agreements; devoted hours and hours of TV to a poetry festival, to the Book of Genesis, to the sources of addiction and to the relationship between the environment and religion, etc.? The variety of topics, moreover, is only half the story. Moyers’s methods were unique. Where else but on a Bill Moyers program were Nobel laureates and laid-off steelworkers invited to speak at length to America, without interruption or condescension?

Bill and I have been friends–and frequent professional collaborators–for nearly two decades. But we first met in Managua in 1987, where he and his crew were talking to protesters outside the US Embassy for his landmark PBS special on The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis. Not long afterward, I spent months speaking to his co-workers at CBS and elsewhere for a magazine profile of him. All were eager to talk, as we were in the midst of one of many brief “Draft Moyers for President” movements, though a few were conflicted. Some felt abandoned by his decision to leave CBS and quit fighting the good fight for network news; but most remained grateful for the opportunities his work had offered them. Onetime CBS Morning News producer Jon Katz told me, “When you work with Bill, it ruins you for everyone else.” Yes, Moyers would “drive the executives berserk with his agonizing over everything, and getting him on the morning news was like a three-month Kabuki dance every time. But the end result was the most brilliant stuff we ever had.”

[Click to continue reading Bill Moyers Retires]

I Will Miss Bill Moyers

Seth Anderson1 Comment

The Bill Moyers Journal was one of the few news shows I watched with regularity1. I will miss him as he retires at the end of this month.

Yellow Line Fever

Thanks to all of you who wrote to express your disappointment and dismay at hearing me say last week that the JOURNAL will be coming to an end with the April 30th broadcast. My team and I were touched by your messages, but I want to disabuse those of you who fear that we are being pushed off the air by higher-ups at PBS pointing to the door and demanding that we go. Not so. PBS doesn’t fund the JOURNAL; our support comes from foundations and our sole corporate funder, Mutual of America. Together they’ve given me an independence rare for broadcast journalists. Our reporting and analysis trigger controversy from many quarters, as any strong journalism will, but not one – not one! – of my funders has ever mentioned to me the complaints directed their way. They would continue their support if I were to stick around.

I’m leaving for one reason alone: It’s time to go. I’ll be 76 in a few weeks, and while I don’t consider myself old (my father lived into his 80s, my mother into her 90s) there are some things left to do that the deadlines and demands of a weekly broadcast don’t permit. At 76, it’s now or never. I actually informed my friends at PBS of my decision over a year ago, and planned to leave at the end of last December. But they asked me to continue another four more months while they prepare a new series for Friday night broadcast. I agreed, but said at the time – April 30 and not a week longer.

It wasn’t easy deciding to close the JOURNAL. I like what I do, I cherish my colleagues, and my viewers remain loyal and engaged. I will miss the virtual community that has grown up around the broadcast – kindred spirits across the country whose unseen but felt presence reminds me of why I have kept at this work so long. But it has indeed been a long time (almost 40 years since I launched the original JOURNAL in 1971), and that’s why I can assure you that my departure is entirely voluntary. “Time brings everything,” an ancient wise man said. Including new beginnings.

[Click to continue reading Bill Moyers Journal: Bill Moyers on Retiring from the JOURNAL]

art drama et al

And I guess it’s too late for Bill Moyers to run for President. Oh well.

Footnotes:
  1. probably the only one, if you don’t count Jon Stewart’s Daily Show [↩]

Twenty-first Century Style Architectural Tour

Seth Anderson0 comment

A new way to take a tour of Chicago’s architectural marvels using a 2-D barcode and smart phones. Sounds very cool, I’ll let you know how it works.

Rookery

A new walking tour will let you download the history of great Chicago buildings on a web-enabled cell phone.

The tour promises to give you a quick and easy way to access loads of information about ten early Chicago skyscrapers, among them Louis Sullivan’s former Carson Pirie Scott & Co. store (now the Sullivan Center) at the corner of State and Madison Streets, Holabird & Roche’s Marquette Building at 141 S. Dearborn St., and D.H. Burnham & Co.’s Railway Exchange Building (now the Santa Fe Building) at 80 E. Jackson Blvd.

The tour has been put together by the Chicago-based Society for Architectural Historians and it’s expected to be up and running by Saturday, April 17.

“We don’t get a penny. It’s a public service,” said Pauline Saliga, executive director of the society, which is holding its annual convention in Chicago from April 21 to 25.

The tour uses a barcode technology called the Microsoft tag. Each tag is a small icon. The SAH is posting tags on signs in the lobbies of ten early Loop skyscrapers. (An example, from the former Carson Pirie Scott store, is above.)

To get the tour info, which is free, you download the free Microsoft application for your web-enabled cell phone (say, an iPhone or a BlackBerry) at: http://gettag.mobi. Then, open the application on your phone and, with the application still open, use your phone to photograph the tag on one of the lobby signs. Presto! A photo of the building and its history is supposed to appear.


“The Sky’s the Limit: A Century of Chicago Skyscrapers” (Rizzoli International Publications)

The text comes from the authoritative 1990 book, “The Sky’s The Limit: A Century of Chicago Skyscrapers.” Saliga was its editor.

[Click to continue reading Cityscapes: Point, shoot and learn–new system lets you download tour information about great Chicago skyscrapers ]

Other than using the proprietary Microsoft tag instead of the open-source QR code, this is an awesome idea, and hope it spreads to more areas, and even other cities