~ONDI TIMONER & WE LIVE IN PUBLIC !!
ONDI TIMONER and ROBERT REDFORD.
SUNDANCE INSTITUTE DIRECTORS LAB, UTAH. JUNE 2010.
PHOTO COURTESY/INTERLOPER FILMS
more info on this conference and a brief up-date on WE LIVE IN PUBLIC – to post shortly in artlovers’ MOVIE REVIEW SECTION !!
in the meantime, check this out !!
Ondi’s team just sent us a great link to a video-interview with Ondi – put out by the AMBULANTE FILM FESTIVAL , where WE LIVE IN PUBLIC recently enjoyed a special presence. The festival, in Mexico was founded by actors GAEL GARCIA BERNAL and DIEGO LUNA . . .
read more: 4th AMBULANTE FILM FESTIVAL/LA TIMES !!
there’s one priceless quote in that LA TIMES link:
“the actors, and the director of the festival, ELENA FORTES, said they wanted to challenge the assumption that documentaries are boring” !!
yo, everyone knows – DOCS RULE !!
here’s the link to the interview: ONDI TIMONER on WE LIVE IN PUBLIC/AMBULANTE FILM FESTIVAL !!
what’s so great about the clip, is Ondi relating how our Pseudo / JOSH HARRIS dot.com millions NYC-based downtown Millennium Artist Party – QUIET – started it all off !!
plus the clip actually has a really cool sound track, and is edited really sweetly.
at the very beginning – the ‘underground’ artist bunker based on Japanese pod hotels and archival footage of Nazi concentration camp prisoners stacked one on top of the other – goes up. it will house over 100+ in-house production crew and artist guests – as well as quite a few live wires. and not, just as in characters. literally, each bunker was wired for 24/7 surveillance and had its own small screen for choosing among several live action channels of the multi-faceted event.
JEFF GOMPERTZ and JOSH HARRIS.
Jeff built the bunker pod hotel – with a lot of input from Josh.
he had to put it up pretty damn fast – like in one week, two weeks – tops.
though it’s come down through legend and the media – as being described as an “underground bunker hotel” – though it was a truly a hotel, underground is used in the rebel sense – it was fabricated to look like an underground bunker, but it was actually installed on the 2nd or 3rd floor of an old manufacturing loft building on Lower Broadway near Chambers St. what was really underground – was the art scene that Josh tapped to make it all happen – a raw frontier downtown art scene – where the only things you had to have – were an ability to capture Josh’s A.D.D. T.V. baby – attention span – and, not, that’s NOT !! be affiliated with an established gallery. from there on in – it was one big wide-open and really wild scene. talk about 24/7 artist par-tay !!
of course any hotel, downtown or not – underground bunker or not – had to come up with some sort of eating option – as in FOOD !!
the dining room at QUIET serviced the 100+ artist residents and guests – and was most def not – bunker – it was 4 star. for real. with its own 4 star Asian chef and 4 star meals. 3 meals a day. and completely FREE. the seating arrangements could get a little intense – but let’s not go there. it was wired too.
the bubble wrap interior and the creative dining menu, and even some over-the-top table-top performances were the brain child of OWEN BUSH. the bubble dining room, and small custom kitchen – were actually built in the adjoining building. a one or two story storefront that used to be a famous photographer’s studio at the time of the civil war. After QUIET it morphed into the LEO KOENIG gallery and CANADA was downstairs. there was a lot of rivalry.
actually rivalry ruled. everywhere, and all the time. but particularly between these two after-the-shock of QUIET gallery venues. Leo used to block off the entrance to the stairway leading to CANADA at his openings – with a big piece of wooden board – so CANADA couldn’t ride on his coattails !!
and, it’s really true – what Ondi says – that everybody there – would have opted to stay there forever, if they could have. it wasn’t so much the community – as the intense anti-community !! – the rush of the 24/7 rivalry and jousts to stay in Josh’s favor, in the spotlight and in the dough !! big time. big time money. big time rivals. kept you in high-gear production mode double-time. no fake wannabes there, you could get shot – it was that intense. plus like Ondi says – free meals 3 times a day. free pod hotel lodging, and a huge dot.com budget. not to mention – the never-ending open bar driven parties.
speaking of which – all you new generation VAMPIRE fans.
nobody’s saying this, in the mainstream media press or in the various festival interviews – but it’s true.
the downtown VAMPIRES of New York City came out of the shadows of their daytime hiding jobs – to run a lot of the QUIET parties. daytime didn’t exist at QUIET. It was nighttime, party time all the time.They even had their own huge super intense VAMPIRE NEW YEAR 2000 PARTY, on the night before New Year’s Eve proper !! JUDGECAL, aka CAL – the leader of the pack – worked for Josh at Pseudo and also ran the war video game installation on the (real) underground basement floor, right next to Alfredo’s shooting gallery, and the now infamous interrogation room !! At some of the real early parties – you could even score your very own custom-made pop-on fangs !! on the spot. no kidding. I know because – I was there. I witnessed it first-hand. and, no I personally – didn’t get pop-on fangs. but I was really and truly – honored, mke that fascinated – that Cal and the Vampires chose my quilt installation space – also adjacent to the shooting (as in guns) gallery in the real basement – for their wild and ritualistic party-hearty pre-NEW YEAR 2000 all night bash !! they were not evil, they were just intense. much very wired into the cosmic forces and rhythms of the natural primordial world. celebrating the Millennium – was a natural. after awhile there was no day and there was no night at QUIET, at some point it all meshed. there were no windows. there was no sunlight. and if you were working behind the scenes for Josh – you were working 24/7. you just crashed – in that damn pod hotel – until it became an orgy – but like Ondi says, “that’s a narrative” for another time. another person. put it this way, I dug the Vampires over the quasi-porn stars.
that was the thing about Quiet – it had this amazing range. from day to night, vampires to college kids proposing Zen gardens on the rooftops. guns to quilts. Josh would arrange to have anybody who pretty much made a contribution to the creative energy – ‘financed’ and installed – with the one hand, while he deliberately pushed buttons and sabotaged others – with the other. the 360 degree world of human nature – from creative genius to puppet master. dot.com CEO to Luvvy. in other words: the works. looking both backwards and forwards. making things and tearing them down. the juice, the in-the-moment – was unbelievable.
. . . and, I do remember when Ondi got hired !! like she says here, in this Ambulante clip – “so, I go hired for this job” – to film QUIET 24/7 for the live action feeds – with such matter-of-fact countenance – yet with such look-back-in amazement realization. She was just, what 31 ? when she approached Josh for work. Josh liked the rough cuts of ‘DIG!’ that she had to show him !! and gave her the job. that’s the way it worked. and p.s. she had a large film crew with her 24/7.
see: ONDI TIMONER/WIKIPEDIA !!
what can I say. the only words – that every struggling young artist who hits the Big Apple wants to hear, and what ultimately makes QUIET and WE LIVE IN PUBLIC such a rush: was that yes !! at QUIET and in WE LIVE IN PUBLIC – indie talent could prevail. raw talent could win. and raw talent could rule.
just to make sure you got the picture right: make that . . . nothing-to-lose talent. end-of-the-world and beginning of the Millennium talent. fulcrum and vortex of the very beginning birth of the internet – talent. 100% straight up – Indie talent. rock bottom NYC underground talent. raw and rough cut. burning the night, losing the day – and owning the city. for 2 weeks. at the rock bottom day zero crossroads of this crazy millennium century. and its only, what – one decade later.
under-written and funded by an eccentric dot.com visionary – only 10 years ago – a bunch of ground zero NYC artists and tech nerds – partied like it was the end of the world – under the no-holds-barred yin yang inspired – black and red PSEUDO logo.
the FEDS, the suits, they even sent in FEMA !! the NYPD and the NYFD thought we were a suicide cult !! or at the very least – ya’ll – pure anarchy in the heart of the country’s biggest cost of us, and they shut us down. the dot.com bubble burst, and Pseudo went belly-up.
Flash forward . . . just 10 puny years later.
and it’s starting to feel like the end of the world. except it’s – corporate anarchy that rules.
funny how – instead of a rogue artist group under a stark black and red Pseudo logo . . . now it’s the innocent green and yellow flower of the BP suits – that captivates the imagination, and rules the waves with their 24/7 live action ocean floor feed. and you thought you’d never live to see a bubble – you’d actually want to see busted. and you thought Pseudo – meant deceptive. I’m thinking just 10 years later – the gulf oil spill is only gonna make a bunch of outsider artists and nerdier than nerd computer geeks – look even more – Pseudo. out of this world. and right on message.
and, as the Millennium progresses – with each succeeding interview – Ondi seems even more amazed that she was there to “catch it”.
see: PSEUDO/Wikipedia !!