Thessaly La Force

Or rather, next, next year.

I’ve started to use Google Wave on a daily basis, and already I have a list of complaints. I’ll probably update this, but for now:

• Notification: It’s funny, really, since Google must know that I’m not going to give up my other forms of online communication for their new tool. I am still very dependent on Gmail, chat, and Twitter. It’s annoying there is no outside-the-Wave notification system to alert me that a Wave has been updated or I have been invited to new one. So the best thing you can do is send someone an email saying, “Check your Wave.” Ultimately, someone recommended I try Waveboard, which is helpful, but it’s only available for Macs and iPhones. This is something that should be built into the system. Ideally, I’d like to be pinged by Wave.

• Linking: This builds on my first complaint. If I want someone in a Wave, I have to invite them through Wave. But because notification is only within Wave, and because, realistically, I still primarily rely on email and chat, there is no way to link a Wave to people outside it. I can’t send a chat to someone with a link to a particular Wave. In other words, say I want to alert my co-workers that I have started a new Wave to work on a project with a short deadline. I’ve already invited them, and I know they’re at their desk. They haven’t responded because maybe they’re on email or maybe they’re on the phone. Wave should allow me to have a link to a particular thread so I can chat or email someone and say, “Hey, please join this discussion. I need your input now.” Instead, as the current system works, they have to go to Wave and then find particular Wave I want them to work on, and click on it. This is inefficient!

• Read/Unread: Wave has this annoying bug/feature, where you have to click every single update in the thread before it becomes unread. That is tedious, and ignores the fact that often, when you’re catching up, you skim, since a lot of issues may be resolved by the time you jump in. As someone who is meticulous about keeping Inbox Zero, I have been forced to click “read” on every wave, even though I have already opened and scrolled through it.

One fun part about the Banksy screening was the speculation that Banksy would reveal himself. Was he there? Was he still in Utah? For just a second, I thought he was going to appear. At the screening, the Sundance lady announced the film and gave some introductory remarks. Then she said something like, “Ladies and Gentlemen, I present Banksy!” I got really excited and fumbled around for my Flip camera. The lights were still on in the theatre, and it wasn’t until they dimmed and the film started rolling that I realized that she just meant the movie.

Fred and I once met someone who claims they saw Banksy. He had gone to see the Banksy show in L.A. He was flying back (to London I think?) from the show, and he was reading Lauren Collins’s article in The New Yorker when he looked over at the person sitting next to him on the plane. The guy was wearing a hoodie, and he had paint on his hands. They made eye contact, and the guy swears that it was one of those moments where “he knew that I knew that he knew.” Who knows!

I was told before I even set foot in Park City that Sundance always saves one movie as a secret. On the program, they call it the “Spotlight Surprise.” This year, it was a documentary film by the street artist Banksy, called “Exit Through the Gift Shop.” Reports of Banksy graffiti around Park City floated around. When I spotted my first Banksy on an errant wall off Main Street, I snapped a photo like everyone else. But I felt jaded. After all, how different was this from those Hollywood “guerrilla marketing” campaigns?

Sundance is fun because there aren’t any publicity campaigns telling you what to do, there aren’t critics telling you what to think. You go and you watch. If you don’t like it, you can leave. (And people do.) So I didn’t know what to expect with the Banksy film, but the hype surrounding him in recent years made me skeptical. Hadn’t he sold out?

“Exit Through the Gift Shop” is about a French man living in Los Angeles named Thierry Guetta. He owns a thrift store, has massive sideburns and a paunch, and is obsessed with documenting his life with a video camera. There is no explanation for what he films. There are shots of the toilet being flushed, of him taking a bath with his children. His wife, exasperated, accepts it. His friends learn to ignore the camera. It’s not until Guetta starts filming his cousin, the street artist named Space Invader, that he finds his calling.

Guetta starts telling people he is making a documentary about street art. And through his cousin’s network, he gets access to all kinds of street artists, each with names more awesome than the next: Monsier Andre, Zeus, Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Neckface, Dotmasters, Borf, Buffmonster. These artists agree to let themselves be filmed, despite the fact that what they do is illegal. “Street art has a short life span,” Banksy says at one point. “It needed to be documented. It needed someone who could use a camera.” (Btw–forget any chance of learning Banksy’s identity. He appears in a dark corner, with a black hoodie obscuring his face; his voice is modified.) One of the best things about the movie is the amazing footage Guetta logged: a breathtaking shot of an artist wheat-pasting in the middle of the night from the top of an enormous building; a slap-stick moment of Shepard Fairey on a ladder, pasting up an Obey poster in front of a couple of oblivious cops in broad daylight. It’s funny, daring, and beautiful to watch.

Only one street artist eludes Guetta: Banksy. And Guetta loves Banksy. Like, really, really, really loves him: “He was–He is–He was,” Guetta gushes at one point. “I really like him.” He will do anything to meet Banksy, anything to have the opportunity to film him doing his work.

How Guetta meets Banksy, and how Guetta leverages his connection to Banksy into an enormous art show in downtown Los Angeles with a Warhol-like factory employing dozens of minions, raking in over a million dollars–well, I’ll leave that to the film to explain.

But I will say this: I don’t think Banksy sold out. The film, in a brilliant way, salvages his reputation. Banksy, in casually taking us step by step through Guetta’s journey, slowly pulls the focus of the camera away from himself and onto Guetta and the art world. And Guetta, in emulating Banksy and cashing in on the street art craze, ultimately embodies everything that is rotten about the art industry.

As Nigel says in Spinal Tap, “This one goes to eleven.”

Last Thursday, fresh off my flight, I snagged a hot ticket to see the premiere of Shorts Program 1, on the opening night of the Sundance Film Festival. The line-up featured four films: “I’m Here” by Spike Jonze; “The Fence” by Rory Kennedy; “Logorama” by Francoise Alaux, Hervé de Crécy, Ludovic Houplain (H5); and “Seeds of the Fall” by Patrik Eklund.

The Egyptian Theatre, with its Art Deco vibe, and old-fashioned seats, is a reminder of what the typical movie experience used to be. The crowd was chatty, and as I sat there, waiting for the premiere to begin (most screenings at Sundance, I learned, don’t start on time, but you still have to get there early), I could hear industry insiders catching up with one another. (The woman behind mentioned her lunch with Michael Moore three times: “He said some really interesting things, things I can’t repeat here.”) Either way, everyone seemed quite pleased that their screening was special enough for Robert Redford to take the stage before its start. He’s quite charming in that all-American way, with his cowboy boots, tousled hair and perfect posture. Here’s what he said to us:

I want to say, this is an opening tonight, the Shorts Program. Maybe a lot of people don’t know that. And there are a lot of things we’re doing differently this year. One of the things we wanted to do, tying to the diversity of Sundance and the fact that we have different types of films–rather than putting all the eggs in one basket—’OK, we’re going to have a grand opening at the Eccles Theatre’–we’re going to have multiple openings featuring the different parts of Sundance that we hold with equal importance. And Shorts is that: equally important. So we’re really happy to have this screening tonight as an opening. I just wanted you to know that.

On the idea of shorts: Over the years Sundance has been committed to forging new ground in film. We started with documentaries in the late eighties on the assumption that documentaries would and should reach the level of narrative films, and find a marketplace.

When we select, we ask people to send tapes and they usually send shorts. So we look at these shorts to evaluate the filmmakers and see if they can come to Sundance. Well, looking at those shorts–it’s very, very impacting, because they are all stories–and it occurred to me a long time ago that this category should be encased and put into a kind of program. That someday there would be a future in the marketplace for them. So we were doing a lot of that for a lot of years and now with the advance in the new technologies and the shortening attention span, now there is a distribution marketplace for shorts. And I think the shorts programs are going to play a greater and greater role.

I think it’s interesting that Redford said this (the bold is mine), in part because YouTube was a big sponsor for the festival this year, but also because I think he’s right. The Internet may have caused a lot of trouble for the movie industry, but I think it is also the perfect home for short films.

I caught a bit of Robert Redford on my Flip camera, too:

Robert Redford at Sundance from Thessaly La Force on Vimeo.

Though I doubt that my friends and family do not think about what to give me for Christmas year round, I thought I’d share some insanely practical covets just to be safe:

This Tiffany & Co. Cuff.

This curved-bar necklace.

A renewal of my subscription to the NYRB. I still can't figure it out online!

A package I mailed to my sister that was lost by the post office.

This cocktail dress, which would work well with the cuff.

Or this one.

How hilarious are the transcriptions by Google Voice? None of these messages had anything to do with what was in the transcription. At this point, I never trust what I read. Below, a selection of my favorites:

My friend had called me back to say she was also walking around downtown and that I should come over to see her apartment:

Fred called to see if it was okay to have his brother over for dinner:

My friend Sophie called to see if she could bring her friend Jacob over to my apartment:

My friend called to see if she could pick up her shoes that she left at my house during our Halloween party:

Many nights ago, I had a dish at Po on Cornelia Street that had bacon, dark olives, and a tomato-based sauce, which altogether tasted like a combination of arrabiata and puttanesca, and reminded me, vaguely, of that song by Das Racist. Tonight, Fred and I tried to recreate it, and the result was pretty darn close.

I took a small yellow union, thinly sliced, with two gloves of garlic, and simmered them both in olive oil. Then I added some chopped bacon. Then a can of crushed San Marzano tomatoes, with a dash of red pepper flakes. Reduce, reduce, reduce, and then another dash of oregano and some chopped Kalamata olives. Garnish with some basil and cheese. It was delicious.

We also made a quick David Chang-inspired salad with mezuma leaves and half of a Fuji Apple. We used our friend George’s secret dressing which, if you must know, is equal parts lemon and olive oil, mixed with raw, crushed garlic. I could eat salad morning, afternoon, and night with that dressing. Behold, the final product*:

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*I sort of hate food bloggers who take pictures of their food, but like a lot of things I knock before I try, it’s kinda fun. It reminds me of when my sister and I would assemble our Thanksgiving dinners to look–probably to our mother’s horror–like “Boston Market dinners.” Now, living in California, we had never been to a Boston Market, but they advertised on our television, and so we had been bombarded with image after image of steaming, perfect plates of chicken, mashed potatoes, and well…I can’t remember what else.

Upon beginning this blog, I had hoped it would be a place to include the material and fun details about my life while still managing to avoid the mundane and superficial. Stuff I can’t normally write about, but stuff I’d like to mention. Here’s my first attempt. This weekend, I bought one of Alexander Wang’s T-shirts from his new T from Alexander Wang line.

I’m now a huge fan. I have worn this shirt three days in a row, and the boyfriend seems to have not noticed the repetition. There’s something about the shirt that’s just right. The size (baggy), the shape (not super clingy), the comfort (insanely soft cotton), and the style (it’s black, okay?). The price did raise an eyebrow, but I had heard others rave about his T-shirts, and well, it’s affordable when you look at the prices of his regular line.