But in this case, please hear this the show’s network producers (Jerry Bruckheimer), the plotline seemed to be so vague as to be an accidental object lesson, if at all. In the end, for lack of a better way to end the show, they have the hockey player savagely murdered by his brother’s stick done in by the guy least likely to commit a crime — the high school doper who wanted to just get the heck out of being trapped, and felt dissed that his friend was likely to do so, because of a possible hockey scholarship  to college. Somehow on reflection the story of this story strikes me as being nostalgic for those of us who came of age in the 70s. Kids getting out of college now are taking on more debt to continue at school because the job market is so bleak. Meanwhile as the government stresses things like tax credits for small businesses of which we at adobeairstream.com are certifiably one, I keep thinking that what I can offer is slim yet we are still here. I believe we who came of age in the 70s are a powerful psychographic with an embedded desire for conversation about critical mindedness in a time of cultural savagery, deceit, and all manner of blind alleys that tend to be presented as done deals. For anyone who caught Robin Williams last week on HBO in Weapons of Self-Destruction, it strikes me that that is really all so right for now. Things have gone extreme and need to be talked about (while swigging bottled water and working up a sweat). We change by participating.

Of course I have a dog in the race because I changed from a print editor to an online magazine editor of my own fully owned website this year, and really like it. But I have been wanting a forum to blog on media, so this is the fledgling one.

Earlier this year the prominent blogger known as Newsosaur blogged about the demise of two websites that the Rocky Mountain News journalists had tried to start in Denver after the Rocky, the West’s oldest newspaper, failed earlier this year. Both those websites also failed. Both had startup investors but a bad plan to make money off of subscriptions (the idea was that 50,000 subscribers would pay $5 a month or $60 a year.) But I still found it interesting that Newsosaur reported of the post-Rocky Rocky blogs’ problems this way. First came suggestions the writers wanted to be overpaid (up to the levels they had enjoyed at the paper, owned by Scripps). The second held that the writers continued to insist on presenting things as they had at the paper. Re the first: LOL. Re the second: On Mars.

But even as I came across notes I had jotted at the time I still am pondering one sentence of Newsosaur’s post. It captured my attention along with that of an anonymous commenter. Newsosaur: “Neither of the (Rocky journalist) sites leveraged the power of the Web to weave social networks, enable users to personalize content, or do any of the things that consumers commonly expect from a modern interactive experience.” Anonymous wrote to Newsosaur that he had no idea what this sentence meant, and he should never never write such sentences. Anonymous had a point. But it’s not so much the sentence that is hard to parse as the many meanings behind the elephant’s left tusk, examined by the blind.

“Personalize content,” “weave social networks,” and the implications that readers are now “consumers” in all aspects of their online experience,  crabbing over bad service, is just a statement of three problems that might but do not necessarily coalesce into an agenda. Social networks are a route of distribution for new media in a universe still full of old behavior like sitting on couches watching TV and eating pizza while playing with telephones. Personalized content, parsed, probably means more bandwidth than you can afford. Interactivity and media? To some extent media makers are all princes of their own little countries. I can look into my plumber’s toolbox but I can’t hook up the new boiler and wouldn’t know where to start. For a “citizen journalist,” to actually get a good story, seems very 2007. These days citizens on the scene of news tend to characterize a big security breach — or an example of how not to parent. The desires, as reported, of these newsmakers-newsinteractors: To get a reality TV show. Because “real” reality is presumably just no longer satisfying, without the “interactive experience consumers commonly expect“? Italics mine.

I am perplexed. During 25 years as a professional journalist I cannot say that “what do consumers expect, commonly?” has been a question that has regularly guided my practice. As a trained journalist I am meant to know what is newsworthy by experience and instinct. The public is that entity that journalists think of as having a trust in knowing. As a new media producer I am eager to know that some of those others care not just to know but to discern. At my other website of Adobeairstream dot com we’ve had 240,000 page views this month, so I guess so.  Thankfully.

But I still wonder: can you be served “interactivity”?And do you commonly expect it? Or do you expect it to be common only to your wishes and group?

The Rocky blogs probably failed because subscription paid sites don’t work.

Still, what seems clear is we are all being watched. Even now. And I will do the same later when I turn back on to see who has watched my perplexed ruminations.

Late May this was written: It is with enormous pleasure that I announce the launch of our full magazine site at adobeairstream. This blog has been a terrific adventure and for all of you who are seeing this post consider this a simultaneous thanks and wave on to join us as we really step out now.

Trine Bumiller paints with a luminous and varied palette. Her subject forms found in nature such as shimmering river stones, a reflecting full moon and brilliant dogwood stems. Each work is composed of multiple and variously-sized canvases uniquely combined to further emphasize the artist’s ongoing visual themes addressing order and the organic; form and formlessness.

“The Blue Hour” refers to the cyclical transition times of each day that are neither total darkness nor full daylight. Bumiller’s explorations into this time of day reveals a monochromatic realm and offers a subtle shift in her work toward an increased depth of layering and sense of light in her canvases. Contrasting elements are unexpected yet contemplative. The work reveals a reinvigorated eye toward an increased depth of layering and sense of light in her canvases.

Each canvas is saturated in rich, variegated blue hues through multiple layers of oil pigments. Leafless tree limbs and twigs bisect the blue ground. Superimposed over the trunks and branches, electrified geometric elements of white and red scatter, swirl and undulate. While the intricate patterns engage, it is the blue connective space between – mercurial memory, the passage of time and the promise of renewed growth – that conveys the essence of “The Blue Hour.”

Reed Danziger Untitled 2008 mixed media on paper over panel

Playing the blues with Bumiller is new works and works on paper by California artist Reed Danziger from her “Indeterminate Order” and “Sequence” series.

Presenting paintings on panel and paper, including large-scale diptych and triptych works, Danziger creates complex and complicated systems with layers of drawing, silkscreen with powdered graphite and watercolor washes. Each subsequent layer informs the next until the resulting organic form which is pushed and pulled, layered and expanded, emerges into a vast interlacing of bold and delicate lines; geometric clusters and pinpricks of pigment. Each painting becomes its own specifically-ordered cosmological system that, as the artist states, “is the collision of human orchestrated design and the elemental, atmospheric and natural world.” Meticulous and labor-intensive, Danziger’s paintings exude a sense of overall rhythm that implies interconnectedness and perpetual reinvention.

A new foundation dedicated to supporting the work of Native American artists has been launched with a $10 million commitment from the Ford Foundation, the New York Times reports.

The Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, the first permanently endowed national foundation dedicated to developing and revitalizing Native American artistic expression, will work to foster indigenous arts in American Indian, native Hawaiian, and Alaska native communities by awarding grants to artists and arts organizations, supporting native arts leadership, and partnering with other native-led efforts to increase financial support for indigenous arts and cultures. The Portland-based foundation, which also received a $1.5 million grant and additional $1.5 million commitment from the Rumsey Band of Wintun Indians near Sacramento, will be led by president and CEO Tara Lulani Arquette, a native Hawaiian and longtime advocate for native communities who most recently was president and executive director of the Honolulu-based Native Hawaiian Hospitality Association.

The foundation hopes to provide about $4 million in grants and program services over the next five years and will begin making grants later this year or early in 2010, board chair Walter Echo-Hawk, a Pawnee, told the Times. The ultimate goal, said Echo-Hawk, is to establish a permanent endowment of about $20 million over the next five years and increase that figure over time. “Arts and culture and traditional languages and religions have been the glue that held Native Americans together, often in the face of great adversity,” he added.

“We needed our own endowment for native arts and culture in this country,” said Elizabeth Theobald Richards, a program officer at Ford who has overseen the project and who is a Cherokee. “The indigenous peoples…have an incredible wealth of cultural heritage and cultural expression that very few people know about. And it’s also incredibly underfunded.”

Pogrebin, Robin. “New Group Is Formed to Sponsor Native Arts.” New York Times 4/21/09.

“Native Arts & Cultures Foundation Launches to Support Indigenous Arts in the U.S.” Native Arts & Cultures Foundation Press Release 4/22/09.

IMAGE: “Camp Crier”by Bunky Echo-Hawke exhibited in “American Icons Through Indigenous Eyes” (2007)

The question at the art auctions seems to be “when will the art market show its wounds in a collapsed economy?” So far, as a mangling of the old saying goes, the cup is still partly full.

Piet Mondrian’s Composition in Black and White, Sotheby’s top lot, brought $9,266,500.

Sotheby’s took in $61 million last week in its Impressionist and Modern Art evening sales, about 25 percent of what the auction house took in at a comparable sale 6 moths ago, which means the sale ran behind the stock market. Christies brought in $102 million. Not bad for the circumstances, the conventional wisdom went.
This week’s sales of contemporary art could be a better indicator, since the contemporary field seems to follow the fortunes of those who make (and lose) money quickly, and seems most linked to art fashion. A walk through the galleries at both major auction houses showed that consignors (sellers) are being cautious. The high-priced works are now perennials by Jeff Koons and Martin Kippenberger, yet prices are not as high as everyone assumed they would be.

In last week’s sales, some people had to sell, even in this market – cash-strapped Julian Schnabel, Madoff victims, and the heirs of the Frelinghuysen (Havemeyer) family — so works by Monet and Picasso ended up on the block, and they sold. You might still call this category “labels for less.” The great show of late Picassos, organized by John Richardson at Gagosian Gallery certainly helped build interest in late Picassos.

But why the Tamara de Lempicka paintings? – at both Sotheby’s and Christie’s — which under more prosperous circumstances might have been offered during the day with works of art deco. The German fashion designer Wolfgang Joop sold ten, assuming that the absence of competition would make them look better than they might have looked a year ago. Portrait de Madame M. of 1932 set an auction record for the artist at Christie’s with a price of $6,130,500 – just one night after another Lempicka set an auction record at Sotheby’s. One dealer offered a solution – that a veil be placed over the bare-breasts of a typical Lempicka Amazon and the picture be marketed it in Dubai as “The Muse.” He clearly hadn’t heard that Dubai, where few are buying, is now Du-bust, and that the thousands of expats who lost their jobs (and have thirty days to depart) are abandoning their cars at the airport in such quantities that their vehicles, piled up, look like nude bodies in a Spencer Tunick be-in.

As the art world wonders who might be selling – it’s easier to find out who’s not buying – another question arises. Who’s paying for the new museum buildings that were fast-tracked at a time when contemporary art was moving uninterruptedly upward? What will happen now if the prices of oversized contemporary works for which museums mortgaged themselves hit bottom, or just shrink by 50 per cent? Will the museums bring in Tamara de Lempicka exhibitions? If a share in Lehman Brothers can be worth nothing, why can’t a bad sculpture in an edition of eight lose its value? It’s clearly a crisis of credibility if these works of art, which were presented to justify gleaming new structures, can’t find buyers. What happens if the trustees who sought credibility by funding those buildings lose heart?
We may have a few answers by the end of the contemporary sales this week.

Lempicka’s Portrait of the Duchesse de la Salle ($4.45 million at Sotheby’s last week, and part of Wolfgang Joop’s unloaded 10.)

Now that you’ve seen J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek, the prequel to the show that   launched a thousand sequels, you might be wanting to see two films that have just as much imagination and far lower advertising budgets (left, Rudo y Cursi).
Star Trek is clearly a product that can be expected to be one of America’s stronger exports this year – not that there’s much competition. This flagship franchise of the “knowledge economy” that now seems invested with as much hope as money didn’t bring surprises. Nor did it economizes on explosions. There are enough of them to destroy the World Trade Center or any other iconic location more times than you could count. And there are some glittery new faces playing earlier versions of the old faces that you know from the television show. Yes, Leonard Nimoy is back as an old sage. The script is about family and loyalty. And it’s making lots of money. Surprised?

Family is also a theme in Revanche (revenge in French), from Austria, which opened this week, but director/screenwriter Gotz Spielmann finds an odd way into it. Unlike Star Trek, whose merits I still don’t get, it’s neither sanctimonious nor celebratory. At first it seems like an Austrian Badlands, as ex-con brothel worker Alex (Johannes Krisch) falls in love with the Ukrainian prostitute Tamara (Irina Potapenko) with whom he’s been having wild sex. Naturally, we get a look at the sex industry in Austria and other countries where East European women are a seemingly inexhaustible source of cheap and exploitable labor. It’s one of Europe’s many immigration scandals – as present in Paris and London as it is in Vienna. His composure collapses when he sees her beaten by a thug at the orders of his boss — he sneaks her out of a hotel, and decides to rob banks to give them something to live on. It’s Bonnie and Clyde, although this Clyde’s only functionality is sexual, in the most ordinary of Austrian settings.
Yet as they’re driving away from his first heist at a small-town bank, when a policeman has taken them by surprise, the policeman shoots at the car and kills Tamara.
Alex heads off to his elderly father’s farm, where the nearest neighbor happens to be the policeman, Robert (Andreas Lust), who just shot Tamara. Robert and his wife can’t conceive a child, and his anguish over killing the girl doesn’t help. Alex can’t endure the fact that Robert won’t pay for killing his girlfriend. He plans revenge as he moves in with his sickly pious father (Hannes Thanheiser), who can’t hide his contempt for his failure of a son.
Spielmann’s drama is languorous and tense at the same time, with Alex stalking Robert to punish him, and the police trail running cold on the bank robbery. There’s a heavy dose of Dostoyevsky here as guilt corrodes both men, not to mention the guilt felt by Robert’s lonely wife, Susanne (Ursula Strauss) when she initiates an affair with the coarse Alex . There’s also plenty of darkness, too much of it for Revanche to have had any hope of winning the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for which it was nominated this year.
Lighter, but just as discouraging in its view of human weakness is Rudo y Cursi, the soccer movie that reunites Mexico’s top two young actors, Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna. Each character is a star in his rural town, and each is looking for the ticket out of town offered by a sharp professional scout, played magnificently by Guillermo Francella – Jerry Maguire with a killer instinct.
Both boys rise to success as pros, but success, with all its money and fame, isn’t good enough. Rudo (Gabriel Garcia Bernal)is determined to be singing star, and Cursi (Diego Luna) never met a gambling table that he didn’t like, not to mention gold diggers lurking around every television camera. The boys head toward their fate as if this film fable were a telenovela with an ending that the audience knew by heart. At first you try to think which athletes’ lives the screenplay is based on. Then you recognize that this fate, which fits athletes like a uniform, isn’t anything special. What’s special is the way that each of the actors keep you engaged with a story that plays every day on the gossip pages.
Both Gabriel Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna are actors with comic gifts, and Rudo y Cursi plays like a comedy of errors – one of the most glaring is the ridiculous mustache on Luna. (It’s a fortunate role for GGB, who was seen at the Berlin Film Festival in the lead role in the dismal Mammoth, by Lukas Moodysson.)
Rudo y Cursi is a welcome event for another reason. The film is entirely in Spanish. Given the popularity of its stars, it should be able to transcend the balkanization of Latin American commercial cinema to reach all territories south of the border. But watch how it performs commercially in the US, where some 40 million people speak Spanish and won’t have to read the subtitles.
The director and screenwriter of Rudo y Cursi is Carlos Cuaron, the brother of filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron, who produced the film along with Guillermo del Toro. Besides journeying to Hollywood to make Harry Potter and Hellboy, Mexican filmmakers are nurturing their own. It’s a model other countries should adopt.