Hasta La Ideas

How nice it is to be back after a long weekend away. But instead of telling you all about what this writer got up to, telling funny anecdotes, letting you know what sorts of interesting things he talked to people about, let’s instead jump right into the news (we’ll get personal and catch up later over some coffee, okay?). First up, following the recent announcement that the National September 11 Memorial and Museum had teamed up with the internet start-up Broadcastr to share tagged audio recordings, and some two years after the news that actor Billy Crystal had joined the organization’s board, late last week comedian Jon Stewart was voted onto the board as well. Last year Stewart had served as the host of a fundraising dinner for the organization and according to Julie Shapiro at DNAinfo, following his commitment to discussing legislation surrounding September 11th on Comedy Central‘s The Daily Show, Mayor Bloomberg requested that the board offer him an invitation to join them. Said Stewart to the NY Times, “Luckily for me, it appears as if they’ve done 95 percent of the hard labor on this. So I’m hoping to help in any way I can offer. I’m like their intern at this point.”

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Somewhere, perhaps in a cave lined with turn of the century doll heads, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp have gotten together to drink, weep, and scream, “Why didn’t we think of that?!” The “that” in question, of course, is a movie based on the life of surrealist painter Salvador Dali. The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that a German-Australian financed production of a film about the artists’ life is preparing for production, with Alan Cumming in the title role and directed by Australian director, Philippe Mora (whose IMDb listing is a hoot, a mix of high-brow documentaries and slightly less cultured fare, like Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf. While the film’s budget is low, coming in at a reported $15 million, the current plan is to shoot it in 3D, a variation on the stereoscopic images the artist himself enjoyed creating. Shooting is to begin this summer in locations around the world. Here’s a bit about the plot:

The screenplay unfolds not as a linear narrative but as a series of dream-like, fantasy sequences intersected with reality, and is profoundly evocative of Dali’s art. The story – not a bio-pic but without doubt a life story – begins with the painter in a hospital bed, recovering from near-fatal injuries after a house fire.

…Chronicled in the film are his friendships with his mentor, Picasso, and the poet Lorca, his bisexuality and obsession with Gala. He was also infatuated with the controversial singer and performer Amanda Lear, whose mysterious mix of masculinity and womanly beauty has intrigued Europe for decades.

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If you haven’t been following the sports pages lately, particularly with regard to college football players readying themselves for the NFL draft, you might have missed the story capturing lots of news outlets’ and blogs’ attention in the form of Stanford‘s quarterback, Andrew Luck. A finalist for the coveted Heisman Trophy, the star player surprised many by announcing that he wasn’t going to throw himself into the draft so that he could finished his last two years of school. His major? Architecture. While an immediate career in professional football might have earned him in the tens of millions of dollars, the industry he’s decided to stick with for the time being has had one of its rockiest patches of the last few decades and is only now slowly (very slowly) starting to inch its way back toward recovery. Hundreds of critics have weighed in over the last couple of weeks (Luck made the announcement on the 6th), with some siding with the player/student, some taking the middle road, and others not just writing negative pieces about him, but often even leading with their disbelief, like in this piece entitled “Andrew Luck is an Idiot.” So divided are people over his decision that even Archinect‘s comments section about the news were fairly evenly split. And who knows in the end? Maybe the decision was helped to boost press, or give him another shot at the Heisman, or maybe he really does want an architecture degree (though how far one at the undergraduate level will take him in the profession is another conversation entirely). In the end, it’s an interesting story, and if you want to spend the rest of the day reading a million opinions about it, we encourage you search his name in Google News, because there are more than a few out there.

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Next Wednesday, New York’s New Museum opens “George Condo: Mental States,” a heavy-on-the-portraits mid-career survey that will span two gallery floors and more than 80 paintings. “Visitors are more likely to notice their modern edge than the techniques he used to produce them,” notes Calvin Tomkins, whose fascinating profile of Condo appears in the January 17 issue of The New Yorker. Among the first orders of business for Tomkins is a visit to the rented Manhattan townhouse that Condo uses as a studio. Amidst “a cheap schoolboy desk and chair and a brace of rickety tables” that contrast with the freshly purchased French antiques furnishing the artist’s nearby home, Tomkins paints a picture of Condo painting a picture—no easy task when the subject matter is imaginary people that include a nude girl, her demonic mother, and Rodrigo, a recurring character in the artist’s work who is partial to bow ties and here acts as “the disapproving butler.”

Two hours passed. The mother was looking even angrier. Her dress had turned dark green. Although her lower jaw was missing, she had a dangerous-looking shelf of feral teeth, and a weird, rectangular protrusion on the left side of her face. I asked [Condo] what it was. “That,” he said, “is an exaggerated swath of cheek,” and we both laughed. The butler wore a dress shirt, a black morning coat with black satin lapels, and a carmine cumberbund….One of his white-gloved hands clasped the girl’s left shoulder protectively. Another hand rested on her right thigh; Condo wasn’t sure whose hand it was, and the uncertainty amused him. “I like the idea that there’s something beyond the painting,” he said, “beyond what you can see. The girl has an expression that suggests she knows what’s ahead for her. The butler doesn’t know, and the mother just knows it’s not going to be good.”

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Back in November, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei learned that government officials in Shanghai were planning on demolishing his recently-completed studio on the outskirts of that city, the same facility the government had invited him to build. No stranger to beatings and detainment, the studio became the latest target against Weiwei’s political activism and complaints about human rights abuse in his native China. This week, citing improper building permits, the government lived up to their promise by arriving in the middle of the night to bulldoze the entire structure; as the BBC reports, they “flattened the building within a day.” Shanghaist has several photos of the demolition and Foreign Policy has a number of great shots of the party supporters threw there back in November, when the news was released that the space was not long for this world (the artist himself was under house arrest at the time and couldn’t attend). Weiwei’s Twitter feed has remained active, sharing a few links about the news, and the New Yorker‘s Beijing-based staff writer, Evan Osnos, has filed this great report on the destruction of the studio and how the whole project seemed to fall apart from the start.

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