jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Another herky-jerky time-lapse experiment, this time assembled from about 500 still photos I took on a walk through Astoria. Vimeo’s video compression adds an additional level of strangeness that makes this almost worth watching.

Another excitement-free video, cobbled together from footage shot around Berlin-Mitte last September. Next time, I’ll put some more people in it.

For a few days each spring and fall, while the increasingly volatile meteorological pendulum swings from frozen sewer to sweltering garbage heap, New York City enjoys perfect weather. September 11, 2001 was such a day, and so is today — 60 degrees, not a cloud in the sky, and an unheard-of ratio of smiles to thrown elbows at the corner of Broadway & Steinway.

So why I am I still inside, blogging? To share a few linkworthy items, along with my ever-evolving muxtape and another lousy short film: whiplash and Mozart, together at last. If you’d like to join us for the season’s first open-air Jever, drop by the Astoria Beergarden later. I’ll be the guy pointing a camera at you.

Also of note:

• I heart Foggy.
• Jammys Lineup: Page will be there to accept Phish’s lifetime achievement award, but can Trey get out of rehab long enough for a reunion? At the official site, you can vote on the awards.
• Sturges Rules: “A chase is better than a chat.”
• Twitter to the Rescue
• Barackula! The most excited I’ve gotten about the elections yet.
• J.K. Rowling tries to make a book disappear. More.

Photo sharing site Flickr added video uploads last week, and some users are up in arms. I think the video player integrates well, quality is great, and the restrictions — clips can’t be longer than 90 seconds — appeal to me. After all, every single muckfilm I ever uploaded to YouTube could have been improved by more rigorous trimming. Here are a few soothing/dull trial vids we shot this weekend. More to come!

Brian De Palma’s Redacted, the devastating reconstruction of the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl by American soldiers, has been one of the most divisive films at the New York Film Festival and it came as no surprise when tempers flared at a NYFF press conference with De Palma yesterday. “Did you intend to make a horror film for hipsters?” one incensed journalist asked. Answer: “No.”

When selection committee member J. Hoberman asked about the black bars that now cover some of the photographs at the conclusion of the film, Palma didn’t pull any punches, either: Redacted is now itself redacted,” he said. “My cut was violated.” No sooner had he fingered producer Mark Cuban for the changes in the film that a lone voice spoke up from the back of the Walter Reade Theater: “That’s not true!”

Eamonn Bowles from Magnolia Pictures went on to contradict De Palma, and after the conference, co-producer Jason Kliot took to the stage to explain that he saw the problem not as a “Cuban vs. De Palma type silly debate” but an issue of Fair Use laws, which he considered completely unfair: “they set it up so we cannot use images of our own culture to tell the truth about our own culture.”

De Palma also spoke about desensitization, voyeurism, and whether it’s easier to be labeled a misogynist or a traitor. At Spoutblog, Karina Longworth gets a statement from Cuban, and Bowles comments at Movie City Indie. My review of Redacted is up on About.com. The redacted version of the film will screen for the public on October 9 and 10. Magnolia will release the film in November.

Someone’s got it in for me, they’re planting stories in the press
Whoever it is I wish they’d cut it out but when they will I can only guess.

Around festival lobbies and parties, all over the blogosphere and on the cover of the New York Times magazine, the merits of Haynes’s Dylan picture are being debated hotly — including the question whether it can be said to be about Bob Dylan in the first place. Here’s my video from last week’s NYFF press conference, where Todd Haynes spoke to J. Hoberman. My review of I’m Not There is up on About.com. More NYFF video: Go Go Tales, The Darjeeling Limited. Coming soon: the Coen Brothers on No Country For Old Men and Brian De Palma on Redacted.

After thinking about it for a week, seeing the final few minutes again and learning that the prequel short Hotel Chevalier is available for free on iTunes, I love The Darjeeling Limited even better than I already did. At yesterday’s press conference at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater, Wes Anderson, Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody, Roman Coppola, Amara Karan, and Waris Ahluwalia talked about their Indian adventure, Jean Renoir, and badminton rivalries. Here’s my video, chopped into three YouTube-friendly parts. Marcy’s review is up on About.com. The Darjeeling Limited opens today.

• More from the NYFF
• Week One on About.com
• Redacted
• Go Go Tales with video from the press conference
• Blade Runner: The Final Cut
• Married Life
• A Girl Cut in Two
• Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
• Fados
• Seen but not reviewed yet: Flight of the Red Balloon (***), The Axe in the Attic (**), Secret Sunshine (****), and The Orphanage (***). Up next: The Man From London

(photo: soupflowers)

It’s no secret that Marcy is a great connoisseuse of pools the world over — from the gigantic Moses-built Astoria public pool to the Kaiser-Friedrich-Therme, the Nerobergbad, and Stadtbad Mitte, this summer we dunked our tails in chlorinated waters from the Hell’s Gate to the Spree. So when we stumbled past this ancient-looking city pool all lit up event-like the other night, we just had to just stick our heads in.

Lo and behold, the pool wasn’t filled, wasn’t even operable, but on two balconies, an orchestra was performing works by John Cage (”Atlas Eclipticalis,” “Songbooks”) and Bernd Thewes (”Seufzer-Halde”), with a guy down in the pit doing choreographed movements along to the music. If you had to come up with a parody of a Prenzlauer Berg art happening, this would do — but the sounds, light, and motion did transform the dilapidated building into an eerie, subterranean dreamscape, a pagan temple perhaps, devoted to the Gods of Chlorine.

The Stadtbad Oderberger Strasse has had a bumpy history; the Trockenschwimmer Festival went on for the rest of the weekend with performance art, readings, and more music.

Here are a few minutes of footage from the event: