Fathoming, though, is a big part of sustainability – that’s why we love it at the IMA.  Green thinking demands an experimental spirit, and usually reflects a nod to smart design.  The status quo (pollution, wastefulness, inefficiency) has got to go.

In that vein, this spring you can hear three free radicals speak at The Toby, as part of the IMA’s Planet Indy series: guerilla gardener Richard Reynolds is here tonight, design educator Emily Pilloton on March 24, and the uncategorizable Temple Grandin on April 28. (Grandin is a visual thinker, a cow whisperer, slaughterhouse designer, and heroine to anyone who lives with autism.  Plus, actress Claire Danes just won a slew of awards for portraying her. Thanks to her crossover appeal, tickets for Temple’s talk are already sold out, however overflow seating with a live feed are still available.)

While London-based Reynolds runs a global movement planting gardens in urban areas without permission, Pilloton has guested on The Colbert Report and is re-designing civic life in a poor rural town in North Carolina and the ways its kids are educated.  Introducing sustainability on the scene is often a case of designing a new system, whether it’s a wind farm, a carbon stock exchange, or a national network to power plug-in cars.

Behind the scenes at IMA, we need a redesigned system as well.  The IMA’s recycling program for staff and visitors, admittedly, leaves something to be desired.  There’s a meeting this week to review the text on our recycling bins for greater clarity and redesigning our dock to expand space for collected recyclables.  As a member of the IMA’s green team, I’ll definitely be collaborating with our crack Design staff to find solutions.

My fantasy is that we compost food scraps from Nourish Café and use it to feed the new plantings in 100 Acres.  Another fantasy is eliminating plastic from the Café (check out a prior meditation on plastic here).

But the IMA has gotten quite a few green things right, from energy efficient gallery lighting to a rain garden that absorbs storm water runoff.  Help us improve by leaving your suggestions for how you think we ought to keep greening.  Or supply your ideas for green innovators you’d love to hear speak…

Eddie Muller, founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation, writes about the seminal film noir Criss Cross, screening this Friday night at the TOBY as a part of the Winter Nights series:

When people ask me to cite the definitive film noir, I usually say Double Indemnity. That’s the one most people have likely heard of. But these days, I’m more inclined to call Criss Cross the perfect film noir. I’ve seen it several more times in recent years and it improves with each viewing. Its mood of thwarted passion and desperate melancholy only deepens with the passing years.

Criss Cross was essentially the culmination of the film noir era (roughly 1944-1952), made at the movement’s peak in 1949. It reunited the brain trust from The Killers (1946), one of the films that ignited Hollywood’s fascination with dark, cynical crime stories. The one collaborator missing, unfortunately, was producer Mark Hellinger who died of a heart attack at age 44, just as the project came together. A one-time Broadway newspaper columnist, the brash and ballsy Hellinger had recently scored his biggest success with the groundbreaking police procedural Naked City (1948). He seemed destined for a long career as film noir’s dominant storyteller.

Hellinger was inspired by Don Tracy’s 1934 novel about a daring racetrack robbery, complicated by sexual passions. It was essentially The Killers redux, only better: this time there was no dispassionate protagonist (Edmond O’Brien) to distance the audience from the tale’s maelstrom of lust and longing. Daniel Fuchs fashioned a screenplay that greatly improved upon Tracy’s novel. Michel (Michael) Kraike stepped into the producer’s role and smartly let director Robert Siodmak have free rein. (Although theirs was a successful collaboration, Siodmak and Hellinger often butted heads while making The Killers.)

Steve Thompson (Burt Lancaster) is an armored car guard who still has it bad for his ex-wife, Anna (Yvonne De Carlo). He’s drawn back to Slims, a nightclub where their passion burned brightest. He discovers that she’s hooking up with Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea), a slick and shady operator. Anna, in fine femme fatale fettle, ignites a fire fight between the two men. When Dundee catches him with Anna, Steve blurts out a cover story: he’s willing to act as the inside man so Dundee can knock over one of his company’s armored cars. Both men stage a cagey mating dance, while setting each other up. Steve plans on swindling Slim, grabbing his cut, and running off with Anna. Slim plans to kill Steve in the heat of the heist.

Such are the rudiments of the plot. Staple crime story stuff. Yet the film unfolds in the most seductive fashion, flashbacks within flashbacks, moved dreamily along by Lancaster’s voiceover narration, one of the best in noir. Siodmak shows his cinematic genius by transforming this routine pulp into an achingly exquisite example of l’amour fou. For beyond all else, Criss Cross is about love—albeit a one-sided, obsessive love that moves steadily, sensually, toward an uncompromisingly bleak finale.

One of the lasting pleasures of Criss Cross is its stylishness. Robert Siodmak had a tremendous flair for compositions and camera movements, ominous yet elegant. Images simultaneously inviting and foreboding are essential to the noir vision, and Siodmak mustered them like no one else. From the start—the camera swooping down like a hungry night bird to catch Lancaster and De Carlo in a secret embrace in the nightclub’s parking lot—the director infuses the drama with an sexy urgency that gets under your skin like a narcotic.

The acting couldn’t have been more stylish, either. In the best noir, actors play with flourish. They understand that memorable moments are way up there—dangerously close to over-the-top. Lancaster had been a trapeze artist before acting, for Pete’s sake. In noir, where he usually played a predator turned prey, he always suggested an imminent eruption beneath his implacable machismo. Costar Dan Duryea possessed an innate sense of how to colorfully sketch a character—a caricature, really—while nailing the priorities: advance the story, entertain the audience. Duryea was so good at playing villainous cads (he specialized in smacking around recalcitrant dames) that in the late 1940s he received more fan mail than any other actor in Hollywood.

A viewing of Steven Soderbergh’s remake of Criss Cross provides a telling contrast between then and now. Retitled The Underneath (1995), it’s well told and engrossing. But to accommodate the supposedly more sophisticated tastes of contemporary audiences, the film is relentlessly “realistic.” It outlines motivation for every character to lend the proceedings as much credibility as possible. The actors sell the material with the studied naturalism now required of dramatic film acting. As a result, the film is an involving, but forgettable, 120 minutes.

During its 88 concentrated minutes, Criss Cross shoots out little slivers of art that will never leave your head. The lazy torpor of a nightclub in the late afternoon; the lanky Duryea, dangling around his digs like a jackal in a zoot suit; Lancaster’s lovelorn face as he watches his lost love rumba around the dance floor (with a young Tony Curtis); bandits in gas masks firing blindly through a smoke haze; the terror of a lurking shadow in a hospital hallway. Vivid, dynamic imagery—and vivid, dynamic acting—stick in the mind long after the extraneous details of “naturalism” have evaporated.

Modern film noir plays like real life. Classic film noir plays like a fevered dream. Criss Cross is one of the very best dreams you’ll have at the movies.

The subject of this film, Mark Hogancamp, almost had his head taken off by a pack of bullies in a bar.  But Hogancamp lived to create a painstaking, war-torn, one-sixth scale universe called Mar-wen-col (a word combining his own name, and the names Wendy and Colleen, two significant women in his life).  Marwencol is overrun with punk-i-fied Barbies and Nazi G.I. Joes, enacting a cycle of torture and love.  Hogancamp’s bird’s eye photos of Marwencol are worthy of a New York gallery show.

Watching the film is like unstacking a set of Russian dolls, revealing ever weirder scenarios combined with spectacular pathos. The Boston Globe critic Ty Burr calls Marwencol “a strange and very beautiful documentary about the gray area between obsession and art — about the compulsive need to create something when the world leaves you with nothing.”  (Read his full review.)

Any art museum is a haven for objects of embodied power: a Buddha statue, a Bidjogo mask, a painting of the Virgin Mary.  The dolls he created to live in Marwencol are just as effecting for Hogancamp – and for viewers of the film.

My IMA colleague Lindsay Hand went to the South by Southwest film festival last March, and this was the standout film that we had to bring to the IMA.  The screening’s co-presented by our friends at the Indianapolis International Film Festival.  After the film, we’re going to skype in filmmaker Jeff Malmberg for a virtual post-film chat in The Toby.

Marwencol is also showing this week in Toronto, Minneapolis, and San Francisco.  We’ve brought it to Indianapolis for your viewing pleasure—if it pleases you to have your mind blown.

I’m here at the Indianapolis International Airport waiting for the 11 members of the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra to arrive.  They perform at The Toby this Saturday night, 7 pm.

Since seeing their picture in a cooking magazine five years ago, I’ve been obsessed with bringing them to perform at IMA.  I love that they take an everyday object like an eggplant and mine it for its expressive sonic properties.  I love that they wear all black and let the colorful veggies create a visual pop.  I love that they treat vegetables as sculptural objects.  I love that their music is experimental.

Here’s a listen to their latest CD, Onionoise. I especially like Brazil.

NUVO music critic Scott Shoger did a great piece on them this week. CBS Sunday News Sunday Morning is coming to record their visit. The Austrian Consulates from Chicago and New York are coming too.

Getting them here wasn’t easy.  Let’s just say, if you’ve never dealt with the US Citizen and Immigration Service, be glad!  The good news is that their concert is a signature event in the 2010 Spirit & Place Festival, whose theme is “Food for Thought.”

Today, some donated veggies are being delivered.  If they aren’t the right size and shape, we’ll have to go shopping tomorrow, probably at Saraga. Note: If you want to learn how to make you own veggie instruments (hint: drills are involved), sign up for tomorrow’s 1 to 5 pm workshop.

Friday night, I may take the orchestra members to First Friday.  I will definitely let them take a look at the IMA’s Warhol show.  After the show, we’ll go to either Brugge Brasserie or Barcelona Tapas, I think.

Since they are worldwide one-of-a-kind, you won’t regret coming to their concert Saturday night at The Toby.  As part of the event, we are also displaying vegetables as art in The Toby lobby, and having a cookbook swap, too.  I know I’ll see you there…

Since the art of film was born, directors and screenwriters have snatched drama from the lives of real people and transmuted them into works of cinematic art. From Erin Brockovich and Larry Flynt to Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, there are a gazillion real lives that beg for big screen treatment. Jake LaMotta, anyone?

In his new book, Whose Lives Are They Anyway?, Bingham interrogates the oft-dismissed biopic genre for its power to mythologize, demonize, sanctify, and complicate.

Think of the innovative 2007 Bob Dylan biopic, I’m Not There. Or Oliver Stone’s takes on Nixon and JFK. Not to mention Gretchen Moll in The Notorious Bettie Page–a film that might have been naughty but was actually quite nice. Plus Denzel Washington‘s channeling of Malcom X back in ’92.

See you October 28 at The Toby for this free 7 pm talk (details here). Meanwhile, leave us a list of biopics you find most notable – whether schlocky, exploitative or aggrandizing…

(A lot like what the Indianapolis Island residents are going to experience in the IMA’s 100 Acres: Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park).

There’s an architect who’s long advocated for the domestic pleasures and greater sustainability possible with smaller, well-crafted homes: Sarah Susanka, author of the Not So Big House series of books.  She speaks at The Toby this Thursday, May 20 at 7 pm, as part of the IMA’s Planet Indy speaker series.

In advance of her Indy visit, I asked Sarah a few questions about her ideas:

What is the relationship between good design and sustainability?

In my books, they go hand in hand.  I believe that anything that is well-designed will stand the test of time and will sustain the inhabitant.  The wise use of both energy and monetary resources is a core element of good design.

How do you create desire for small instead of big?

I talk to people and work with people at all ends of the spectrum–people who want 600 sq. ft. homes and those who want 6,000 sq ft.  I’ve tried to offer the tools they really need to evaluate their decision.  When people are focused on high square footages, there is usually some “keeping up with the Joneses” going on.  I tell these clients: “How about having the coolest house, not the biggest?”  I help people “right-size” their homes.

What about modular homes?

The pre-fab industry is learning how to make better a house than the typical modular home currently on the market.  But a small house doesn’t have to be a cheap house.  You don’t buy a Porsche because it’s big – the point is that it’s beautifully made.  I believe that if we could look into the future we would find that many houses are going to be made through a manufacturing process.  The art of the home will be greatly enhanced and tailored onsite, but basic form will be delivered.

Manufactured Housing

What projects are you working on now?  What trends do you see?

My latest book [published March 2010] is More Not So Big Solutions For Your Home, about doing more with less space.  And we’re developing a line of houses for the builder market, for the people who build suburbia.  Some of them are gung-ho about building smaller houses, but you can’t just shrink a big one and make it livable.  We need to take their simple-to-build houses and make them a whole lot more interesting to live in.

A longer version of this interview will appear in the June-July issue of Indiana Living Green magazine.

So what’s Crispin’s mission at the IMA? To present a taboo-busting film he co-directed called It is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE! It’s a journey into the psyche of a kinky, bloodthirsty guy with cerebral palsy. Crispin calls the film a response to the question: “What does it mean when a culture does not properly process taboo?”

He’s referring to the fact that the major film studios tend to pre-censor material that is darkly ambiguous or productively disturbing, thus preventing our ability to wonder, question and learn from cinema.

So Crispin has taken the making of challenging films into his own hands. He uses the proceeds from his roles in films like Hot Tub Time Machine to fund independent film projects at his new sound stage in Prague.

Joe Shearer of the local website The Film Yap did a great interview with Crispin (to be posted soon) in which Crispin expounds on his mission as an artist.

Crispin’s Toby April 24 appearance will include the 74-minute film, a one-hour narrated slide show, Q&A, and book signing. He is committed answering every fan question if it takes all night. Tickets are $15 for IMA members and $20 for non-members. It’s open seating; doors open at 6:30 pm.

This culturally adventurous event is co-sponsored by Big Car, Indianapolis International Film Festival, and the Naptown Roller Girls – some of whom will act as ushers, rolling up and down The Toby’s steep aisles.

Racer Xtasy (via Marc L)

What’s your favorite (or least favorite) Crispin role?

Many restaurant facades bear a cartoon depicting the main dish served, like a perky eel or cute cow.

Even bathroom doors have creative signage.

On the natural side, the mountainous Korean terrain inspires a terraced pattern for landscape architecture.

Ancient designs can pack the biggest wallop. The eaves of Buddhist temples are decorated with exquisite detail and color.

We all need dragons guarding our doors.

Back at the derby: spray-painted, crumpled automotive beasts tumble against one another.  The air is filled with terrific absurdity.  These vehicular masochists have planned these clashes.  They have intended it, and yet not intended it – very much like an artist’s relationship to the work of art s/he creates.

I learned three things at the demo derby:

• Embrace the ugly
• Push through anything crippling
• Take things that are hard by nature and try to soften them

Some of these concepts underlie the abstract form of movement called Butoh, made with slow-mo gestures, prolonged facial expressions and the baring of the unconscious.  The dancer Oguri returns to the IMA November 7 with another Butoh-inspired performance, this one an interpretation of the literary experiments of American author William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!).  Fear no art: what appears incomprehensible and senseless at first actually might actually reflect the order of the universe.

More on the November 7 event as it nears.  Until then, keep smashing, clashing, and seeking truth.

This couch is the sadness of a party that’s over, or some desire that’s run its course.  It also highlights the contrast between the soft comfort of furniture, versus the mean streets and the unforgiving elements (i.e., torrential rains this week).  The couch’s presence here puts us in a strange netherland that’s half Martha Stewart, half feral.  There’s something innocent about it too.  Do you think the couch seems ready to face the big bad world, perhaps for the first time?

I don’t think an artist arranged this incongruent scene – but this weekend some will be.  The Indy art group Primary Colours is staging Installation Nation, from 6 – 11 pm tomorrow and Sunday, on the vacant lot at the corner of College and Michigan Avenues (admission $5).

Thirteen artists, including Brian Priest and Lori Miles, were given old shipping containers.  Whole worlds may be created within and around these containers.  Buzz is that there’s a “ride” involved.  And of course, the best art experiences involve being taken for a ride of some sort.

…then the ride comes to an end, weeds choke the vehicle, and birds nest in the glove box.

Here’s a snippet of a poem of mine on this general topic:

In the field, abandoned, antique
gasoline pumps and refrigerators
rust beneath a bath of foliage,
vines and veins,
cooled in a green strangle.

Here’s to all the old school buses rusting away in yards across America.  See you at Installation Nation.