We just had our first Bad at Sports blog meeting a few nights ago and aside from the fact that I got WAY TOO MUCH PIZZA (and have been eating pizza pretty much every day, twice a day ever since) we had a great conversation. A conversation that, among other things, prompted this new column — my WEEK IN REVIEW.

So, now that we all know our former president can paint, I’d like to appoint him as a new advocate for arts funding. Bush’s return to the humanities may be as good an indicator as any, that art might serve a valuable purpose — if only to ease the heart and mind from a deluge of ghosts and existential crises. (Someone pointed out that, as both self portraits — hacked out of his email account earlier this week — involve bathing, there might be some psychological message at work. Personally I get a kick out of seeing the dude’s bare feet.)

First of all —  ORANGE, SIBLINGS, & CHAINS are IN. Even if you can’t play guitar, you can still go ELECTRIC, because e-cigarettes also made the T list. And they’re healthy (?).

Otherwise, this week on Bad at Sports has been very much ABOUT THE BODY lately — abstract painting was compared to  human waste; dance and movement was discussed as a mode for learning — which led to a great meditation, later on in Romero’s same post, about  the way we organize space. As he puts it, “Space as it exists conceptually promotes an occupation of itself by a certain kind of body. A body that is best represented by the athletic body.” Countertops, door frames and tables are built to certain standardized, ideal bodies.  There is a post about other bodies, specifically foreigners and the kitsch of foreign identity as it is present in the 70s Chicano Arts Collective, ASCO. Goransson ties that kitsch to nausea: “In Julia Kristeva’s famous definition of ‘abjecting’ as vomiting out the abject in order to maintain the self. ‘The abject’ is that which troubles boundaries.” In a later post by Friel, Tarantino was called out for “giving history a wedgie” in Django Unchained. In anticipation of Valentine’s Day, Daniel Orendorff reflects on internet hookups, and the attraction of sadness. Indulge me as I repost one of Orendorff’s Friday passages:

All of this is to say that isolation and promiscuity may be natural bedfellows. In his 1999 essay “Sex and Isolation,” ex-hustler and American chronicler of all things sexually subterranean, Bruce Benderson, laments the migration of cruising or chance encounter off the streets and onto the internet, saying; “The abandonment of the body is isolation, the triumph of pure fantasy.” Yet, fantasy wants to be recognized, and we depend on others for that. Dating or hooking up online is never really about getting to know someone, it’s about the desire to be known. Furthermore, it’s about the desire to be known as the person we’re writing and editing and framing and Photoshopping and staging for others; about the fantasy we believe ourselves to be and depend on others to corroborate. For Benderson, wary of how American entrepreneurialism and the Protestant ethic (myth?) of self-reliance has led to the shrinking of the public sphere and the routinization of social encounters, the internet represents some vague final stage; “Our minds spit our longings and obscenities into the atmosphere. And media have ensured that these ejaculations are everywhere. The self is now nowhere in particular, and, depending upon how you look at it, we have everywhere, or nowhere, to go.”

Lastly, Terri Griffith points out, the Chicago Filmmakers upcoming screening of Wonder Women: The Untold Story of American Superheroines (2012). A  documentary that uses the superheroine Wonder Woman to address “media representations of strong women and what these representations mean to our society as a whole.” See? A whole lot of BODY convos.

ASCO

There was a whole lot of Midwest love  with dispatches from the Kansas City Bureau (“KANSAS CITY INSIDE OUT”) that involved the work of a couple artists re-thinking architectural spaces (I feel like Vorhees work might present a kind of non-normative space)

“Lean-To” by Cincinnati-based Chris Vorhees for “Composite Structures”. www.chrisvorhees.com

and St. Louis’ “Identity Crisis: Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts,” that captures a great non-commercial, idiosyncratic art space that’s been around for 10 years. It once took advantage of abandoned buildings on the block for art happenings and is now transitioning into a new stage of professionalism and sustainability.

Gondo Gothic: Jessica Baran and Galen Gondolfi of Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts

In other news, I finally painted my toes after a three-month hiatus.

And memes can now be embodied principles: the HARLEM SHAKE has stormed the internet. Perhaps the movement, literally, offers additional insight into what can be learned from dance.

Every January 1st it seems I have the same set of New Year’s resolutions. Over the years I’ve added a few and a few have dropped away, but the core resolves always stay the same. One of those that has made the list every year since I was 15 is “See more movies in the theater.” While it is clearly true that the genre of film is its own legitimate form of art, what is also true, to me at least, is that film has the power to transport in a way that other art forms do not, with the possible exception of the novel. This power to transport exists outside of subject matter and artistic intent. A film with serious intentions is neither more nor less transportive than a film whose sole objective is to entertain. Why does this matter?, you may ask. It matters because real diversion, actual imersive experience, subverts the stresses of the everyday. At minimum, it takes your mind off the laundry list of shit to do. At best, a good movie gives our mind a reprieve so that we may return to our own work invigorated and refreshed.

In Andersonville, there’s a hidden cinematic gem, Chicago Filmmakers. Okay, the “theater” is not so great, but Chicago Filmmakers is undoubtedly the best purveyor of independent cinema in Chicago. They are running a couple of series concurrently. Feminism Flatlined: The New Girl Series, “explores the impact of today’s media and an increasingly sexualized culture on teenage girls and young women.” Coming up is Wonder Women: The Untold Story of American Superheroines (2012). This  documentary uses the superheroine Wonder Woman as a way to discuss media representations of strong women and what these representations mean to our society as a whole. I’m looking forward to the interviews with Linda Carter (Wonder Woman) and Lindsay Wagoner (Bionic Woman). Also at Chicago Filmmakers is the decade-old series Dyke Delicious. A lesbian centric film series, Dyke Delicious brings films that most likely wouldn’t show at a mainstream movie theater. March 9^th they are showing the film Pariah (2011), the story of an African-American girl coming to terms with her butch identity. Pariah won the Sundance Award for Best Cinematography. If you are so inclined, Chicago Filmmakers offers classes and independent filmmaker services. Do check them out.

The opposite of the scrappy indie Chicago Filmmakers is the international theater chain Cinemark, which has a northerly outpost at the Century 12/ Cine Arts 6 Theater in Evanston. Much to my surprise, they host a national film series called Cinemark Classic Series, which plays at theaters across the country. I finished up the winter series last Wednesday with Saturday Night Fever (1977), a surprisingly sad and serious film despite the tsunami of cultural marshmallow fluff it spawned. The next series was just announced this week. Through March and April look forward to Forrest Gump (1994), West Side Story (1961), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), American Beauty (1999), Casablanca (1943), and The Godfather (1972). The Cinemark website lists all of the theaters across the country that are hosting the series. And as an added bonus, on Valentine’s Day they’re showing all of the Die Hard films back-to-back, culminating in the release of the newest in the Die Hard saga. It’s hard to imagine anything more diverting than 12 hours of Bruce Willis.

Would that I were able to simply say, “Once a month I will go to the movies,” but I don’t have that kind of discipline. It takes a prepaid film series to get me out of the house during the week, especially at night, especially in winter. But the amazing thing about a film series is that you are there in theater with others who share your interest. Seeing a film in the theater is different than watching it at home. Somehow the big screen and the communal experience makes it easier to see these movies as works of art and not just a late night rerun.

I lived in San Francisco once. It sometimes feels distant now because I have even lived another place between there and here. San Francisco occupies an interesting place in the American imagination. Even though high rents and a sort of institutionalized and self-aware weirdness pervade much of the city, it is still, in fact, filled with oddballs, Peter Pans and visionaries. Its role in American culture is as a provocateur, a laboratory and a refuge. I think this is true and the city certainly thinks it’s true.

It was stirring, then, to see so much of San Francisco last week at Northwestern University’s Block Cinema screening of Stories Untold, one of over 20 different programs of (mostly) shorts under the umbrella of the Radical Light project. The project, whose full name is Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000, encompasses a large, brimming book, those 20-some programs of experimental media and a gallery exhibition at the Berkeley Museum of Art. The monumental exhibition was facilitated by curators/editors/programmers Steve Anker (now the Dean of the School of Film/Video at California Institute of the Arts, once of the San Francisco Cinematheque), Kathy Geritz and Steve Seid (Film and Video Curators at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive,). Over the course of a decade, the three scholars and exhibitors wove together a history of alternative and experimental media notable for the quality, diversity and energy of the work.

The book teems with interesting essays, artist pages, personal reflections and histories and, ecstatically, loads of ephemera from various screenings. Cinema is an event and even when large institutions are involved (SFMOMA, SFAI, KQED and BAM/PFA all having played interesting roles in the development of Bay Area media), the works and culture in Radical Light’s purview are scrappy, marginal and rule-defying. Flyers from shows, dispatches from seminal organizations and photographs enliven the text and remind young guns that the culture has always been suffused with polymaths—artists as curators as critics as janitors as flyer-makers as audiences as artists—and that making a show is as simple and as complex as making a show.

On Thursday February 16^th, the excellent Conversations at the Edge series at the Gene Siskel Film Center brings Steve Anker and the New Preservation/New Prints program. The program features works from 1906 to 1984. A number of these films and some of their makers—for me, at least—fall under the “seen about but haven’t seen” category. Making this an even bigger treat is that these films have been well preserved and new prints have been struck. For all the great benefits of increased online visibility of canonical (and forgotten) experimental film history, the joy of seeing these works in a proper cinematic context and in their correct format is immense. You can watch Oh, Dem Watermelons by the recently deceased Robert Nelson below, but you’re better served just tasting it here and letting your interest be sated by real thing.

One week later, CATE brings us George Kuchar: HotSpell. I love Kuchar’s work, especially the video diaries he began to make in the 1980s. Ed Halter wrote this lovely piece on Kuchar for Artforum and I think it perfectly sums up what makes his work so endlessly watchable. The work is funny, smart and messy. It’s about cinematic representation and camp and biography and the weather while still mostly being about that moment. Halter nails it nicely: “cinema à la Kuchar pivoted on the dialectic between overblown fantasy and schlumpy reality, the films always working double time as documentaries of their own making.”

Then, on Friday the 24th, Chicago Filmmakers hosts Radical Light’s Found Footage Films program. The Bay Area has had a long entanglement with collage and appropriative filmmaking. This program is of particular interest to me now because of the (seeming,) (current,) wholesale mainstream embrace of borrowed images. The ease of digital editing and prevalence of moving image media has enabled entire new folk arts of super-cuts, stretched videos and detourned mass media. Bring a teenage friend who’s never heard of Craig Baldwin or who can’t imagine what a debate about sampling would even be and see if the works’ radical histories can still be felt.

(Thad Povey‘s Thine Inward-Looking Eyes)

I had the privilege of helping bring some of Radical Light to Portland last year and with it Steve Seid. Among the great joys were meeting Loren Sears (the book is almost worth its price just for the picture of him from Bolinas in 1973 sitting cross-legged in his Video Van, a mobile video editing and processing station replete with patterned rugs and a lingering hippie/techno-utopian/media shaman vibe that feels quintessentially Bay Arean), having the chance to learn even more secrets than were divulged in the book and, if it isn’t too horn-tooting to admit, to participate in Seid’s reading by doing a performative reading as Kuchar, one of the few impressions I can do. Kuchar’s presence was all over last week’s screening and remains one of the many vital personalities Radical Light teases into the large, varied, tangential and fascinating tape-stry of a half century of inventive cinema.