Got a ticket to see the hugely popular 2005 British Advertising Awards, and I was given one warning from a veteran attendee: Watch out, the old ladies mean business and they will push you around.
I chose a seat near the back.
There was a lot of clever work on display, but some of my favorite ads came from the public service ads sector, including topics like illegal minicabs, anti-tobacco, teen road safety, and child abuse. I was really impressed with these striking messages. Definitely worth checking out.
I brought a lot of geek love to the Regis Dialogue last night with Ang Lee and James Schamus. Geek. Love.
Ang was so cute! So funny! So inspiring! James seemed to be his perfect professional complement.
Photo: Kimberley French, 2005, Focus Features
Lee told of his initial attempts to be an actor, studying at a US school where he had trouble with the language. As a result, his only really significant role was as a mime. A mime! (This is totally a shout out to my boss who has a strange programmatic phobia with mimes.)
Another co-worker asked a great question about the prominent role that food often plays in his films, and he responded that early on he was fueled by the experience of cooking for his children while his wife was away at work. He also talked about the portrayal of human desires on film, such as eating, sex, etc. “[In today's films] we see the sex, but not enough food.” Awesome!
Schamus provided a great counter to Lee’s softspoken explanations – tossing in anecdotes and one-liners – and the audience was totally in to it. I can just imagine Lee on the set of Sense & Sensibility, shying away from those powerhouses of British acting. Schamus also talked about the move from producing to writing, and how he likes to underwrite scripts for Lee so there is room to breathe, create, and fill in the gaps. Lee readily agreed, stating that most of the scripts sent to him are “built like battleships.”
Overall a fantastic evening with plenty of insight into Chinese and American filmmaking. I am SO over Brad and Angelina. Ang and James are Hollywood’s cutest couple!
I was at the Walker yesterday for a matinee performance of Between the Fire and Ice (Mjollnir II), presented by Joe Chvala (pronounced like koala!) and the Flying Foot Forum with special guest Ruth MacKenzie. Try to imagine a forward slash through the “O” in Mjollnir.
The work pulls from Nordic and Teutonic myth to explore the way our modern world collides with those ancient mythologies. I don’t think that I actually got most of it. I could recognize a few key players, like the gods Odin and Loki. I liked the idea of life beginning between the two extremes of the world: the world of ice, Niflheim, and the world of fire, Muspellheim. I think I would need some Cliff Notes to get any deeper with this.
I loved the dance/fight choreography between the two rival queens, Kriemhild and Brunhild, in the world of ice. It was so gorgeous, and Ruth MacKenzie provided a stunning vocal background. Ruth was accompanied by two other vocalists, and the three of them looked like the Muses, Furies, or the Fates – depending on the scene.
Muspellheim was full of sharp choreography and percussive work. The battle of Ragnarok was really menacing. My first thought was that it would be the perfect set for a Nine Inch Nails show circa Pretty Hate Machine and Broken.
Disclaimer I should have put at the beginning of the post: I know very little about performing arts, and the Performing Arts department will probably be embarrassed by me and this post. But only if they find it.
After some initial confusion about whether or not author (and celebrity) Sarah Vowell, herself, would be in attendance at last night’s gathering of The Artist’s Bookshelf (she would NOT), we settled into an interesting conversation about her most recent book, ASSASSINATION VACATION, and its curious relationship to the Walker’s current Warhol exhibit, all of which led to intriguing speculation about the very nature of celebrity, itself, and how we, as Americans, often seem to be simultaneously drawn and repulsed by its powers.
We all found the book to be an intriguing, and irreverently humorous journey into the heart of America’s cultural fascination with violence (specifically assassinations), and our sometimes bizarre tendency to iconize and memorialize these events through plaques, historical markers, and pilgrimages.
We generally agreed that Ms. Vowell (along with McSweeny-esque writers Dave Eggers and David Sedaris) speaks for a new literary generation, (dare we demography it as Generation Y?) whose caustic and sarcastic surface more often than not belies an underlyingly soft and tender heart of emotional gold.
We wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone with as much as a passing interest in assassinations, the Civil War, vacations, Sleater-Kinney, 19th Century sex cults, or the t-shirts worn by Timothy McVeigh.
