DC's

—-

 

‘Ivan Zulueta was born Juan Ricardo Miguel due to the Russian origin of that name, which was not allowed by anti-communist Franco dictatorship, in San Sebastián, Basque Country, Spain. Zulueta moved to Madrid in 1960 and enrolled in decoration courses. At the end of 1963, he was offered the opportunity of traveling in a merchant vessel to New York. There, he discovered pop art, Nouvelle Vague, the New American Cinema and artists such as Jonas Mekas and John Cassavetes. Coming back to Madrid in 1964, Zulueta enrolled in the Spanish Cinema School. He directed a couple of shorts in 35 mm. The first one, called Agata, based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. And the second one, called Ida y Vuelta (Round Trip), based on a short story by William Jenkins. However, he did not get his degree and the School was closed by the dictatorship. Zulueta would not be allowed to sign his works until Franco died because of this.

‘In 1968, Jose Luis Borau, his teacher in the Film School, produced a TV show called Ultimo Grito (Latest Trends). The anchormen were Jose Maria Inigo and Judy Stephen. Ivan Zulueta directed the show. The production means and budget were low and therefor among the methodologies employed for this production was to have friends take on the different positions and creative capcities required for its realization. In 1969, Un, Dos, Tres, Al Escondite Inglés (Hide and Seek) was produced. It was Jose Luis Borau’s first work as a producer of a full-length movie. The production was carried the same way as in the TV show Ultimo Grito. The film was a musical which made fun of Eurovision contest with a Richard Lester style. It was first released in Cannes Film Festival.

‘Jose Luis Borau provided Zulueta with unused film from his newly-created production company. Zulueta used it for experimenting mainly with tempo and editing. He also used other underground formats like 16mm or 8mm. Most of the time, the experimentation was related to re-fiming preexisting material in other formats and rhythms. At same time, Zulueta started a prolific career as poster designer. Ivan met Pedro Almodóvar and helped him in his first underground short movies. Zulueta also worked as assistant director for other directors such as Jaime Chavarri or Antonio Drove. Ivan Zulueta proposed to hit other non-underground segments of the public by directing a short movie and releasing it. The result: Leo Es Pardo (Leo is Dark); a short movie recorded with a 16mm camera. It was released in the Berlin Film Festival.

‘A Spanish architect interested in movies decided to help Zulueta financially. The planning was a 15-day filming. However, it was shot in real interiors owned by Zulueta and other friends, like Jaime Chavarri; and most of collaborators used drugs like heroin, that drove the planning and the budget to be highly increased. Pedro Almodóvar dubbed one of the female characters, but he was not credited. The relationship between the director and the producer was poorly damaged. Moreover, the film had a lot of problems to be commercially released due to its experimental and underground style; even though the dictatorship had fallen through. It was finally released in 1980. Ivan Zulueta was labeled as a problematic auteur and Arrebato became a cult movie.

‘Finally, his heroin addiction forced him to retire temporarily. Living in San Sebastián, he declined offers for new projects in filming industry. On the other hand, Zulueta continued with his career as poster designer. It is in these years when he produced his best known works for Pedro Almodovar, among others. He also started experimenting with photography. At the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s, Zulueta directed a couple of episodes for two different TV serials. The first one, called Parpados (“Eyelids”), was a love story between a couple of twins. The second one, called Ritesti, was a horror story. Both were traced by Zulueta’s style, visual obsessions, circular screenplay, format mixing (film and video) and a fragmented editing which reminded some of David Lynch movies.

‘By mid-90s, Zulueta came back to the silence. He continued his work designing posters. However, at the beginning of the 2000s, some personalities in the Spanish film industry rediscovered Zulueta’s early work: different expositions (paintings, posters and photography) were organized in different Spanish cities such as Madrid or Barcelona; his films were broadcast on TV and cinema again; his short movies were shown on film festivals and Arrebato was first launched on DVD. Un, Dos, Tres, al Escondite Inglés was released on VHS and some of his experimental shorts were launched on a limited DVD release. His death was reported on 30 December 2009.’ — collaged

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Ivan Zulueta Website
Iván Zulueta’s Cinephilia of Ecstasy and Experiment
Mike Kitchell on Zulueta’s ‘Arrebato’
Mike Kitchell on ‘Leo Es Pardo’
Ivan Zulueta @ IMDb
‘The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes: A Look at Ivan Zulueta’s ‘Lost’ Cult Film
Ivan Zulueta @ mubi
‘Arrebato. Ivan Zulueta’s cinematic rhythm
Frankenstein: Boris Karloff and Iván Zulueta
From Ecstasy To Rapture: Ivan Zulueta
Ivan Zulueta @ pobladores.com
The televisual practices of Iván Zulueta
How to Get High: Ivan Zulueta’s Arrebato
The Dark Heart of the Movida: Vampire Fantasies in Iván Zulueta’s “Arrebato”
Punctures and Molecular Politics: Topographies of the Body in Iván Zulueta’s Arrebato
The creative constants and authorship of Ivan Zulueta
Ivan Zulueta’s Spanish posters for Pedro Almodóvar

 

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Extras

IVAN ZULUETA – En memoria de…

IVAN Z (fragmento inedito)

InFocusExtra Ivan Zulueta ABNewsTV

Screen Tests (1978)

 

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Pedro Almodovar on Ivan Zulueta

 

How to begin? I met Iván in Madrid when I had been living there for almost ten years. He was already known and admired for his work in television – that mythical series Último grito (The Latest Craze) – as well as Un dos tres al escondite inglés (One Two Three What’s The Time Mr Wolf) – a feature film credited to its producer José Luis Borau because Iván did not have the director’s union card – and one of the few examples of pop cinema made in our country at the end of the 1960s that was not shabby, that could stand comparison with any product of English psychedelia in terms of quality, albeit outdoing their irony, of course. Fans of Arrebato may not know this, but Iván Zulueta was a person with a great sense of humour.

We hit if off immediately; we were bound together by psychedelia, the American undergrounds, the earliest English pop, some friends in common, some enemies in common too, the new wave music being made in Madrid, Glam, comics, Cecilia Roth, an absolute hunger for cinema, and the fact that we were both shooting small films in Super 8. He was much better than me. I was a beginner with the camera when Iván was already an absolute virtuoso in his use of this instrument.

Arrebato (1979), his second work, a filmic testament right from the beginning of the shoot, wouldn’t be anything without the thousands of metres that Iván filmed in Super 8 throughout the previous years. Not for nothing was it the Super 8 camera (like the 16mm camera of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, although with a different meaning) that enraptures the prostrate and expectant bodies of the protagonists Will More and Eusebio Poncela, that ushers them to a better, or non-world. The only information the film gives us is that this non-world is a sort of void of reddish colour.

It is difficult to speak about Iván Zulueta and death.

It is very difficult to speak about his latter years, those immediately after Arrebato, when he was retired in San Sebastián, like Norma Desmond, but with all of his senses intact, and without having relinquished one iota of his exquisite sensitivity. Spanish cinema has just lost one of its most original filmmakers, and together with Erice, the one that managed to give his images the greatest aesthetic meaning. He never filmed a single banal image. The element in which he felt most comfortable was abstraction. The pure image, brimful of meanings but freed from the burden of fiction, always cushioned on a rich variety of soundscapes. David Lynch, but less shadowy and more pop. Psychedelia was his school, and he made genuine masterpieces in this style.

His work as a graphic designer and draftsman was inextricably linked to his cinematographic work. From the end of the 70s to the mid 80s he designed many wonderful film posters. I remember how impressed I was with the one for Furtivos (Poachers, 1975) and how much fun we had whilst he was designing the one for Entre Tinieblas (Dark Habits, 1983) or Laberinto de pasiones (Labyrinth of Passions, 1982). Even if he seems an ephemeral figure (I hope he doesn’t), Iván Zulueta bequeaths an incredibly rich and essential legacy to the history of Spanish cinema, in minor formats but possessed of extraordinary greatness. Arrebato reverberates with the same force as it did 30 years ago, the year it opened.

Spanish cinema loses a unique individual, and José Luis Borau his best disciple. I remember those days in his flat in Plaza de España in Madrid so clearly. Everything was charged with life, and we used to laugh so much!

 

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11 of Ivan Zulueta’s 15 films

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Ida y vuelta (1968)
‘Zulueta’s second film, Ida y Vuelta (Round Trip), is based on a short story by William Jenkins.’ — IMDb

the entirety

 

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Un, dos, tres… al escondite inglés (1970)
‘A group of Spanish fans of the best British pop music from the late sixties owned an odd record store, which only sold what they like. They decide to boycott the song “Lie, lie” that will represent Spain in a contest called ‘Mundocanal’ (parody of the music festivals of the time, as Eurovision). In order to accomplish the aforesaid, they will put in practice several stratagems to avoid that the selected bands would participate in the festival, whose performances will be happening throughout the film.’ — jsanchez

Excerpt

the entirety

 

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Kinkón (1971)
‘Zulueta began to draw the album covers and film posters for which he would become famous in the movida madrileña—the Madrid underground scene of the years of the transition to democracy—and beyond. He was also making experimental films, mostly in Super 8. Freed from audience and producer demands, he began to explore the sense-making and sense-destroying possibilities of montage and the immersive and perception-altering power of the manipulation of image velocity in a trio of short found-footage variations. The first of these is Kinkón (1971), a silent adaptation of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1933 classic, King Kong. Zulueta re-filmed a television broadcast of the original, and through creative subtraction and manipulation of camera speed, condensed the original’s feature length to an intensified seven minutes. The cathode-ray flicker and flattening that results from the re-filming defamiliarises the original, but its classical continuity mode of address continues to operate on the viewer, and the increase in velocity makes mesmerisingly urgent the dramatic plot of the original.’ — Senses of Cinema

the entirety

 

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Masaje (1972)
‘Using the technique of direct photography off the TV screen, he composes three minutes ‘in which we see, speeded up, the complete television programming on a day of union and military parades. There was a subliminal Franco, and we didn’t even submit it to the censors…’. The soundtrack of Masaje alternates effects, noises and sounds of all kinds. The result is a really frenetic visual ‘massage’ that exposes the viewer’s eye to fleeting movie images, ads and news reports in rapid-fire succession.’’ — Carlos F. Heredero

the entirety

 

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Frank Stein (1972)
‘Filmed before Arrebato, Zulueta’s Frank Stein is a very personal reading of horror cult classic Frankenstein (1931), filmed directly from its television broadcast and reducing Whale’s original to only three packed and dizzying minutes, during which the intimate monster evolves at an unusual rate.’ — Impakt.nl

the entirety

 

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Te Veo (1973)
‘The title of Te Veo, is a joke with T.V. (television). Consists of a collage of shots in super 8 of images of the TV. The collage is extremely quick, mixing average people with famous paintings, landscapes and churches, etc. The images become more and more abstract, the referential pre-existing images are transformed by means of extreme close-ups of the screen, which ultimately become completely abstract with texture of the TV like a television pointillism.’ — filmaffinity

the entirety

 

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Roma-Brecia-Cannes (1974)
‘Roma-Brescia-Cannes, made in 1974, could be called a lyrical home movie. P. Adams Sitney defines the lyrical film as one that “postulates the film-maker behind the camera as the first-person protagonist of the film. The images of the film are what he sees filmed in such a way that we never forget his presence and we know how he is reacting to his vision”.’ — Senses of Cinema

the entirety

 

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Aquarium (1975)
‘The 1975 Super-8 short Aquarium is Zulueta’s first available incursion into the psychodrama—in which the filmmaker dramatises a disturbed state of consciousness—in which appear lyrical passages of the kind that will be made by the fictional experimental filmmaker played by Will More in Zulueta’s 1980 feature Arrebato. Aquarium features the use of a timer to film vertiginous fast-motion shots of clouds passing over the cityscape, which alters the perception of the change-movement relationship: instead of seeing stably-shaped clouds that apparently move across the sky, the clouds’ shape can be seen to change as their position remains the same. After several of these exercises in perceptual alteration, the film settles in to focus on its protagonist, also played by Will More. By way of eye-line matches the distorted images are made to express the agitated interiority of More’s character. He is alone in his room in the Aquarium hotel (really Zulueta’s Madrid apartment overlooking the Plaza de España), making explicit the theme of agoraphobic isolation and anguish that one could imagine to be the conditions of production of most of Zulueta’s short films. More’s character is apparently overwhelmed by ennui and seeking escape through sources of stimulation. He eventually plugs into the television by placing his hand on the screen, which transports him into a rapturous state as he watches what looks a lot like Zulueta’s own Frank Stein. He later finds stimulation at the window of his room, discovering to his surprise that the city’s inhabitants are also speeding by in fast motion, before his agitation is further reflected in a fast montage of repeated zooms and views of the urban landscape from above. The penultimate sequence is a remake of part of Un chien andalou (1929), as a woman appears and the two characters act out the street sequence from Buñuel’s film. This apparently throws causality out the metaphoric window, and for the last minute of the film we see what looks like re-filmed footage of the final section of Roma-Brescia-Cannes.’ — Senses of Cinema

the entirety

 

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Leo es pardo (1976)
‘This short film of Ivan Zulueta is a masterpiece realized before “Arrebato” and one of the most disturbing short films that I’ve ever seen. Without a screenplay, the film experiments with the montage of still images and sound. Is indescribable. Heavily addicted to heroin at the time, he created a world on his own where pop art, the wild side of nature, and the obsession with the still unrevealed power of moving pictures get together.’ — collaged

the entirety

 

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A MAL GAM A (1976)
‘With the thirty-three minute A MAL GAM A he made in 1976, Zulueta brings the lyrical film into the territory of mystico-psychedelia. The cinema as drug, as vehicle for rapture—as will later be seen in Arrebato—is a theme of this most autobiographical of Zulueta’s experimental films (which could also be seen as a documentary of an agoraphobic mode of artistic production), the protagonist is played by the filmmaker himself (“Jim Self” is the trans-linguistic homophone that appears in the credits) and shot mostly in the family villa in San Sebastián.’ — letterboxd

the entirety

 

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Arrebato (1979)
‘Much could be said about Ivan Zulueta’s cult classic Arrebato (Rapture, 1980). As a philosophical manifesto for the cinema, it is complex, sensitive, and humorous in its treatment of the question ‘What is cinema, what does it do?’ The film is the story of a struggling horror director José Sirgado (Eusebio Poncela), who is haunted by a strange film sent to him by his ex-lover’s cousin, Pedro (Will More). Pedro sends the film to José in an attempt to uncover its mystery: a frame of Pedro sleeping has disappeared and been replaced with a blood red mark on the reel. The psychological disturbance of Pedro and José playfully manifests itself in the materiality of the film. Voice-overs of Pedro confuse the dialogue and his image pops up like a ghost in the everyday world of José. In addition, the film slips in and out of its narrative, and psychedelic sequences scramble the continuous montage. Like the transient and hallucinatory filmic layering of Cabin in the Woods (Joss Whedon, 2011), or Brian de Palma’s Blow Out (1980), Arrebato is a self-reflexive investigation of the cinematic and its affective nature. It explores the construction of the horror genre, the questions that cinema raises as to the difference between reality and fiction, and the problem of Hollywood and spectacle. At times, the film is so doubled over it seems that it is scared of itself! However, this review will not take these points any further. Much needs to be said about this rich film; indeed, it would make a fine subject for a dissertation. But the question that it also raises, which would be clouded by any heavy-handed theoretical or intellectual musings, is: how to have a good trip. Arrebato, in this context, is not just a love-letter to the cinema but is a love-letter to its hallucinatory powers and to the dark desires of the human mind and body. It is a love-letter to a state of amour fou. The film mimics the intoxication, confusion and self-destructiveness inherent to a passionate relationship and is an experiment for states of maximum intensity, as they exist between the ecstatic and joyful, and the horrific and nauseating.’ — Lauren Bliss

Trailer

Excerpt

Watch the film here

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Carsten, Hi. Well, Schnabel is a terrible blowhard painter, IMO, so it might be by default. Basketball’s a good one. The culture that gets tons of money thrown at it is the real problem. At least in sports the money is going to something people seem to really enjoy. ** Steeqhen, What do I know but it seems like there must be a good percentage of gays, albeit maybe tight lipped about that in some cases, amongst the therapist set? Oh, yeah, ‘High Risk’, that was a cool book. Kind of era defining in a way. Sad about your soup. I am, seriously. ** _Black_Acrylic, When my nephew was a kid he was really excited about a secret track on a Blink 182 album called ‘I Want to Fuck a Dog in the Ass’. Cities have more than one club? I didn’t realise that. Paris only has PSG, I think? Maybe I’m wrong. ** Steve, It’s true re: Bieber. And now he’s … well, I wouldn’t say beloved, but one can prop him and remain a hipster. Haha, now that is a dream. Almost worth filming. Ah, if you see any stellar new French films, pray tell. I might actually be able to see those. An arts organisation here is organising a screening of ‘Iron Lung’ so hopefully I can finally figure what that is. ** Laura, That post made me feel 10 years old again. I’m definitely not at my most focused when I’m doing the p.s., so the fault is surely mine. I think you have to think that what you’re writing is a disaster at certain, hopefully brief points. I’m still a ‘side’ with the script, but it’s consuming and proceeding apace. No place to go dancing there? I don’t dance, but that’s grim. ** kenley, I did. I even want to go back somehow sometime. It’s your birthday!!! Happiest one! Jump onstage and grab the mic and get wrestled to the ground by the band you love’s roadies. Or something. Why did you do? ** HaRpEr //, Me too, obvs. I grew up in a mansion kind of house, and I spent years studying its blueprint and running my fingertips over the walls feeling for secret buttons and things. No luck. Well, you know how into secret interior areas in fiction I am, i.e. ‘The Marbled Swarm’. It’s possible to do, I found out, not that many if any readers have the interest or patience to find them. You on Roussel! Nice! I’m so sorry about the thing with your dad. I can relate from my young days of facing how impossible it was that my dad would even begin to understand that me writing wasn’t just me being lazy and doodling. I so love early Cat Power. I loved going to see her live when she was extremely shy and weird and had nervous breakdowns onstage. For me, something got lost in her work after ‘You Are Free’. I feel bad that the decrease coincided with her gaining confidence, but there you go. ** DonW, Well, hey, Don! Great to see you, bud. I still have a bunch of those tear-out floppy discs. So cool, but, boy, did they sound terrible. Hm, no, on the favorite album covers thing. Huh, that would take some serious thinking and culling. Maybe, yeah. Could be good. Envy on the Pavement show. I don’t think they’re coming over here. They’re kind of the only reunion band I would love to go see. You’ll be in Paris? Look me up, man. Let’s coffee, etc. I don’t know Manchette, I don’t think. I’ll investigate. Thanks! All the ultra-best to you. ** Uday, Thanks. Cool, just let me know re: the possible screening. Excited about it. I’m always really careful who I watch Bresson films with because I too get very silent and internal afterwards, and if anyone talks, even to say how great the film was, I get very irritated. Obviously congrats on the NYC trip. And obviously I hope your intended person feels whatever you wish he will feel. Sounds like there’s a chance. ** Okay. Today you’re being asked to explore the work of the very originality-inclined Spanish filmmaker Ivan Zulueta. And see you tomorrow.

* (restored)

 

_______________

… furniture

 

_________________

… blur

‘You could say that Iraqi artist Halim Al Karim is an interrupted being. You wouldn’t blame him, after all he was forced to spend three years living alone in a hole in the ground covered by rocks since he opposed Saddam’s regime during the Gulf war.

‘Throughout that time his only interaction with the outside world was through a Bedouin woman who brought him food and water on occasion and thus kept him alive.

‘Al-Karim has since emigrated to America and is currently living in Dubai. He says: “My works are concerned with ongoing and unresolved issues, especially as they relate to violence. The main challenge for me is to identify and stay clear of the historical and contemporary elements of brainwashing. The out of focus images, imply an uncertainty of context, time and place. These techniques, which have become the hallmark of my work, are means to overcome the effects of politics of deception and, in turn, transform me and the camera into a single entity, seeking a greater truth”.’

 

______________

… Central Park

‘You won’t find it on any official maps, or find sign posts to show you the way. Tens of millions of visitors come to enjoy Central Park every year, but very few know that hidden away in the middle of the park is a mysterious cave. It’s so ancient it predates Central Park itself! The cave has been the site of murder, suicide, assaults, and secret trysts. In the late 19th century it was even the home of a runway school girl for a while.

‘Whilst much of Central Park was sculpted into picturesque lawns, tree-lined avenues and lakes, Olmstead and Vaux deliberately created some wilder, more overgrown places; chiefly that maze of hills, winding steps, and lush, thick undergrowth they called the Ramble; “a wild garden away from the carriage drives and bridal paths.” And lurking in the midst of this idyllic reverie is the hidden cave – to find it requires keen eyes.

‘The cave was sealed up in 1934, leaving only the entrance, sealed with bricks. For this secret hideaway was not just an ‘Eldorado of pleasures’ but the sight of many nefarious crimes. Assaults and deaths were common here in the obscure cave.’

 

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… homes

 

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… games

‘Where is the secret room in Nicholas’ weird adventure 2? Keep clicking on the drawing in the shop and he will give it to you and DON’T PRESS THE RED BUTTON then play until you find a castle not the one with the gate put the drawing in the shredder and there you have it!!:)

Once i told the tavern owner that i wont pay the 50 GP for another week and he attacked me, so i couldn’t buy his teleport rune to the tavern, and it happened to me with other merchants. There are several secret solutions. The best one is to kill his wife and cast the oblivion spell on him, but then you see her dead body in the market every day.’

 

‘The Monkey People can be found on the first playable level of Halo 3. If you follow these instructions you can spot them hiding in the jungle, and then … nothing. You can’t kill them, but if you shoot them they actually bleed (only real characters do that). Note that they all look exactly the same only in different sizes, which suggests that they might be the product of genetic experiments or excessive inbreeding. For all we know, the monkeys might keep decreasing in size right down to a subatomic level. A lone Monkey Man can be found in a different, much harder to reach part of the level (it’s actually outside the game map and you can only get there by killing yourself and respawning in the right place).’

 

‘lluminati is a standalone card game that has ominous secret societies competing with each other to control the world through sinister means, including legal, illegal, and even mystical. This is not funny but a sad truth. Please give your heart to Jesus.’

 

‘I remember there used to be a mod for 1.6 that basically allowed co-op play for half-life and had a ton of maps made by a very strange individual that had nothing to do with much of anything? It’s had to explain but it was like dropping LSD made of old internet memes and 1.6 coding. Colored lights everywhere, weird music, things that just made no sense at all, so on. If you found the ‘red’ map and followed it, you’d find hidden tunnels behind walls leading to some sort of burial chamber, with plots of bone-filled dirt in the walls. Dark rooms full of barely audible whispering. Things would almost always get more abstract as you went on, meaning eventually you’d be in some sort of void. From what I’ve read, only 8 players ever found that void in the game, and 6 of them later committed suicide. Coincidence?’

 

_________________

… the desert

‘Art does not always want to be seen – at least, not easily. Since the 1960s, some of the most memorable works of art have been hidden in remote places, or knowable only through photographs.

‘The latest such elusive treasure is a swimming pool created in the Mojave desert by Austrian artist Alfredo Barsuglia. The pool is full of clean blue water, whose appeal under the fierce sun in the middle of the desert must surely be amplified hundreds of times, set in a white, modern structure with pool-cleaning equipment supplied so you can leave it as you found it. You are also asked to bring water to replenish the pool.’

 

________________

… portraits

‘The first photographic images in the late 1820s had to be exposed for hours in order to capture them on film. Improvements in the technology led to this exposure time being drastically cut down to minutes, then seconds, throughout the 19th century. But in the meantime, the long exposures gave us a few unmistakable Victorian photography conventions, such as the stiff postures and unsmiling faces of people trying to remain perfectly still while their photograph was being taken.

‘Seems children were just as squirmy then as they are today, because another amusing convention developed: photographs containing hidden mothers trying to keep their little ones still enough for a non-blurry picture. These fantastic portraits of children all contain their mother and one father, disguised as chairs or camoflauged under decorative throws behind them.’

 

_____________

… Melrose Place

‘Conceptual artworks were secretly used as props on primetime television series Melrose Place. The artists worked with the show’s scriptwriters to ensure that the artworks had relevance to the plot, even though the audience had no idea of their existence.

‘The pieces were specially designed by art collective the GALA Committee. The group was led by Mel Chin, who gathered fellow artists along with faculty and students from the University of Georgia and California Institute of the Arts under the GALA Committee umbrella.

‘So when Courtney Thorne-Smith’s character, Alison, works from her couch while pregnant, the quilt she is under is stitched with a pattern of the chemical structure for the abortion drug RU 486. The drug was illegal in the US at the time.

‘Some of the interventions included material that evaded the censors at the Federal Communications Commission, like a set of bed sheets printed with graphics of unrolled condoms – images of which were banned from public broadcast.

‘Motivated by the idea that network television could prove a more powerful site for public artwork than a physical place, they pitched the idea to the Melrose Place producers, who agreed to the unconventional product placements.

‘The artists were not paid by Spelling Entertainment; instead, the project was independently funded by arts institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (MOCA), Grand Arts in Kansas City and The Rockefeller Foundation.’

Reconstruction of the Melrose Place bar location Shooters

75 unique bottles behind the Shooters bar detail the health and social issues relating to alcohol consumption throughout history.

An emblem of the African continent replaces the white circle on an Africa Is the Eight-Ball, a reference to the ubiquity of racism.

The Target Audience dartboard reflects the target audience of Melrose Place, women aged 18 to 49.

 

_____________

… a boulder

‘Swiss studio Bureau A has concealed a wooden cabin inside an artificial rock and transported it to a remote site in the Swiss Alps.’

 

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… candles

‘This spectacular vary of high finish candles are some things fully new and exciting. Along with award winning packaging and eleven divine fragrances, every candles with jewelry hidden inside additionally contains an additional special hidden surprise. Revealed from the wax because the candle burns could be a hidden treasure, a spectacular ring. There are over 50 different styles of rings that range in value from $25 – $7,500. Every candle is carefully hand-crafted in New Zealand and are a fabulous gift that will be always be treasured.’

 

______________

… Minecraft

‘Marcuss Persson, better known to the gaming community as Notch, is the man who created a world one block at a time, and an indie empire to go along with it, in the cultural phenomenon that is Minecraft. During a conversation between Notch and SpyParty’s Chris Hecker at GDC 2012, Persson teased there’s still some undiscovered secret in Minecraft, though no additional details were provided on what it might be. With how rabid and dedicated the Minecraft fan base is, I find it very surprising that any stone would be left unturned. When you consider the millions who play this game and all the time logged, this secret has to be buried very deep in the game. I wonder if it is some sort of uber secret recipe or dungeon. According to some Notch has hinted elsewhere it is a hidden recipe, according to others Notch has stated it is NOT a recipe. One big hint is that it “may or may not have something to do with time”. Notch said that the secret rare item was more rare than wearable cloaks that only Mojang employees could obtain, which, considering said cloaks are unobtainable by regular players, made the secret rare item pretty darn rare indeed. Lots of people think that it might have something to do with the new phases of the moon. Personally, I think whatever it is will rather be triggered by a certain player’s action or by a special seed for the world generation. It won’t be anything huge I’m assuming, but hopefully they prove me wrong with a HUGE idea! I dont care how big or small it is, I will love it all!’

‘Do people really think this is it? LIES. Notch is Swedish retard. I thought it would be a rainbow sheep. Notch tweeted that we can all stop looking for the secret now, since it was “very minor”. He also pointed out that he never said it was a big secret, but the internet over-hyped it. LIES, LIES. That is the stupidest bull shit I ever heard. That being the big secret is just fake in all kind of ways. I’m a member of a secret Minecraft society so exclusive it makes the Illuminati look like a Costco, so I should know. Maybe that so-called big secret is a secret message? One day we will have mince rafts. Whatever a mince raft is.’

 

_______________

… Milan’s manholes

 

___________________

… text

‘We often talk about “hidden text,” but in reality what is hidden text? Hidden text is also known as “invisible text” or “fake text.” Hidden text is often used for spamming the search engines. But many smart search engines, such as Google can detect the use of hidden text. To give a simple definition, hidden text is text on a Web page which is visible to search engine spiders but not visible to human visitors.

‘You should not use hidden text to get high ranking in search engines. Search engines can detect certain forms of hidden text algorithmically and when they do they will automatically drop the offending site from their index. By hiding keywords in hidden text, you may be able to trick the search engines for a limited amount of time. Anything that hides text from a browser, but is still in the body of the document, will be indexed by the search engine spiders. But the use of hidden text can cause search engines to permanently ban your website.

‘Some years ago, search engine optimization consisted of putting a group of phrases together with as many repetitions as possible to make up a keyword tag and, if necessary, putting the same text in a hidden form at the bottom of the pages. This was a very easy method of getting visitors, but some people overused this approach, to the point of abusing the system. Because of this abuse, search engines took action to stop this kind of search spam. The effect of this is that the actual keyword tag is virtually useless now.

‘The most successful form of hidden text is not so much hidden as ignored. This is text placed between comment tags like this . Comment tags are actually intended to be used as an aid to whoever is editing the source code at a later date and as such comments are not of course displayed in the browser. There are methods to make this text ‘readable’ or at least detectable in browsers, but they are illegal, and best of luck finding and learning them. But, to give an example, while it may not look much from the highlighting, the coder has managed to hide over four thousand words, sixteen pages of keyword rich hidden text in a single body of text. This must be approaching a world record and here is a small sample:’

Kenneth Goldsmith ‘HIDDEN TEXT / HIDDEN CODE’

 

_________________

… Fight Club

1. ‘The Tyler flashes. Before Tyler officially enters the Narrator’s life when they’re sitting together on the plane, he appears six times in the film. Once he’s riding a moving walkway at the airport (that appearance isn’t included on this list, since it’s not hidden). Four of those times, Tyler appears as a subliminal flash that occurs when the Narrator has a moment of frustration or anger during his insomnia daze. These, of course, create the foundation for Tyler.

2. ‘Tyler as a waiter. The fifth time Tyler appears? When the Narrator is in the middle of his early traveling montage and he’s watching TV in his hotel room. A group of waiters on screen all say “Welcome.” If you look carefully, Brad Pitt is in the front row of waiters, on the far right.

3. ‘No incoming calls. This is a quick, subtle hint early on that Tyler isn’t real. When the Narrator’s condo blows up, he calls Tyler from a payphone, with no answer. Then, a few seconds later, the phone rings. As the Narrator goes to answer it, the camera zooms in on some text on the payphone that reads, “No incoming calls accepted.” In other words — Tyler could not have called him back, because this phone cannot ring.

4. ‘White boxers. During the course of the movie, Tyler and the Narrator intentionally dress in opposite ways — Tyler is flamboyant, the Narrator is corporate and buttoned-down. The only place they’re identical: Their boxers. When the Narrator is ordering IKEA furniture at the beginning of the movie, he’s in plaid boxers. As soon as he moves into Tyler’s house, he begins wearing white boxers… the same exact ones Tyler wears as he bikes around the house.

5. ‘Seven Years in Tibet. This was a little inside joke of production design. When the Narrator is sending Marla out of town, there’s a marquee in the background for the movie “Seven Years in Tibet”. A movie that starred Brad Pitt.’

(continued)

 

_______________

… embroidery

‘Vintage photographs without a doubt carry with them something from the past but to Maurizio Anzeri, his work is not about preserving or celebrating the past. “I don’t want to be nostalgic. When I work on them, to me they become very present. The catch is that at some point these photographs were to some people really important and suddenly they ended up in a box,” he says. When confronted with his portraits it’s as if Maurizio wanted to create a passage for the character to escape from their present form. You can see that a part of them is still there and the other part has become something else. “I think that what makes them work is that the image and the embroidery at the top feed each other,” he explains. He has no intention to cover or to erase. “It’s about feeding another dimension,” he says. For Maurizio, the physicality of puncturing a needle in the actual image “is an action of penetration”. “I have been told many times that one of the characteristics of my work is to cover when there is nothing to cover. And I like that and it’s not even hidden the fact that there is nothing to cover,” he explains.’

 

_______________

… your face

‘The expression of a given face at a specific time is conveyed by a composite of signals from several sources of facial appearance. These sources include the general shape, orientation (pose), and position of the head, the shapes and positions of facial features (e.g., eyes, mouth), coloration and condition of the skin, shapes of wrinkles, folds, and lines, and so forth. Some of these sources are relatively fixed; others, more changeable. The most important source of change in facial expression is the set of muscular movements produced by facial muscles, which provide the most substantial changes in facial appearance over short time durations and contribute most to nonverbal communication by the face. Other shorter term origins that may contribute to expressions are blood flow and glandular secretions. As a generalization, muscular activity contributes expressive variation on a background of more slowly changing or static expressive sources. These latter sources include the sizes, positions, and shapes of fleshy tissues, hair, teeth, cartilage, and bones.

‘Corresponding to the several sources of expressive information in the face are the many nonverbal communication messages that the face can provide. Some of these messages are validly related to characteristics of the person behind the face, some are fabrications of the viewer unrelated to the real person, and others lie somewhere between these two extremes. Much of the research on the face is centered on discovering the messages that fit into these different categories. Another perspective on the range of facial messages is to consider objective description, such as a list of physical anatomical measurements, as an anchor for veridical information, and ever more abstract generalizations or inferences about characteristics more remote from these specific observations becoming increasingly difficult to verify.

‘A further difficulty for interpreting the face is that the appearances produced by one source of facial information can interact with another, producing a mixture, as mentioned above, that can hide, mask, or interfere with the messages conveyed by each source. The structure of facial nonverbal communication is complex.

‘The facial muscles are like elastic sheets that are stretched in layers over the cranium, facial bones, the openings they form, and the cartilage, fat, and other tissues of the head. These are the muscles of facial expression, acting singly and in combination. The diagram below shows a simplified view of how the facial muscles are actually arranged. Move the mouse cursor over the list of facial muscles and click on a facial muscle of interest to see more information. Most of the muscles have a short video that illustrates the appearances that are produced when the muscle acts. Innervation and blood supply are also indicated.’

[inner/outer frontalis] [corrugator] [procerus] [depressor supercilli] [inner/outer orbicularis oculi] [nasalis] [depressor_septi] [levator_labii] [buccinator] [caninus] [risorius] [zygomatic_major] [zygomatic_minor] [depressor_labii] [orbicularis_oris] [masseter] [triangularis] [mentalis] [platysma] [levator of the upper eyelid] [incisive muscle of the lips] [other facial/head muscles]

 

________________

… Justin Bieber

*

p.s. Hey. ** Joe, Hey, Joe. Obviously great to see you! Oh good, Ponge is great. Take care ’til soon. xo. ** sam jenks, Greetings, sam. No, we’ve been working on UK screenings for months, but it has proven to be difficult. We haven’t found venues there that have been interested yet. A bit surprising and strange, but that’s been the situation. But I was working on two London possibilities yesterday. We’re determined to screen the film there, and we will somehow. Hopefully good news before too long. Thank you for asking and wanting. ** _Black_Acrylic, He’s terrific. We remain just sort of chilly and often wet over here. It’s getting pretty old, I must say. ** Steeqhen, Thanks for the rec. I’ll watch for it. Resting scares and bores me for the very reason you mention. Plus I don’t seem constitutionally able to do it. Thanks about the Triskel. ** Laura, Hi! I didn’t fully follow your thoughts on Ponge, but they were very interesting. The script and I are chasing each other. Hopefully I’ll wind up on top. Yes, I read that the powers that be don’t want to let ‘Adolescence’ be a singular, good thing but intend to drag it out thinking more money can be made and more critical acclaim accrued. ** James Bennett, Yes, I guess there must be Gevais superfans out there, but what a strange idea. I don’t know that Jim Dodge book, but there’s a kind of Agota Kristof thing in her writing that excites me to no end. Luck with the excitement plus hassle. xo, me. ** kenley, Yeah, the people I interacted with in TO, if an outsider can call it that, were pretty warm-ish and not foreign seeming to an LA guy. Not sure if I can pinpoint exactly why. A vibe, as, yes, we LA types like to say. I remember Vancouver feeling and kind of looking SoCal-like, but I don’t remember the people. It was, like, ages ago. Luck galore escaping application hell as needed. Aw, thanks, about ‘Closer’. ** Carsten, Oh, no, I was probably thinking of the French self-styled environmental activists who tried to get his Pompidou explosion/event canceled. Haha, yes, and yet some of the most serious, daring artists I know are huge sports fans. I used to be very into baseball when I lived in LA, so I’m kind of in that camp a teeny bit, although I haven’t gone whole hog over soccer/football over here. But I do think it’s a beautiful sport. I can’t remember that Schnabel film, but, boy, problems not withstanding, he is an infinitely better filmmaker than he is a visual artist even so. Nice quote there, and, yeah, fragrantly applicable to Ponge. ** HaRpEr //, Stephen M. is a sweetie. I curated an art show years ago in NYC and titled it ‘Brighten the Corners’ without asking and he wrote me a thank you note. ‘Self-indulgence’ is one of lazy, skittish thinkers’ favorites, yeah. ‘Pretentious’ too. Kay Gabriel is such a smarty. I’m sorry to hear about the confrontation. Curious because yesterday I randomly had to listen to ‘Nude as the News’, but it was to pump me up. ** darbz (⊙ 0⊙ ), I always feel sympathetic towards bus drivers for some reason, and when they pull shit like that, I tell myself they probably deserve the little joy they get from being cruel. A friend who’s loose with their Criterion password is a friend indeed, except over here where there is no Criterion, but even then the givers are well meaning friends. ** Uday, Um, I don’t have a specific memory, but, given that I love Ponge, it’s certainly very possible that I propped that book here in some earlier context or other, yes. I’ll look for your email, thanks. ** Nicholas., Hi, pal plus period. I don’t know who Tim Dillon, but I’ll find out. My up has been pretty predictable aka film stuff and Paris highlights when possible. Dinner: one of my usuals: Capellini pasta with a combo of tomato and mushroom sauce smeared with two forms of grated cheese, and too much of it in last night’s case. Keep keeping on, mister. ** Right. Today I’ve restored a really, really old post that looks and seems really, really old, and I’m counting on that dated quality giving it a certain charm. See you tomorrow.