On reading further, it turns out that the longer tours-of-duty (15 months instead of 12 months) is specifically for the Army, not the other branches of the armed forces yet. But it is for about 100,000 now in the Army....

It's still horrible.

Sol LeWitt died on Sunday. It's really true, an era is ending. The whole idea of New York City as an art scene is over. "Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis" opened at Film Forum; with "Notes on Marie Menken", these were two works i saw last year at the Tribeca Film Festival. So far, we haven't received a full press schedule for Tribeca, but the program has been posted. But one point i'd like to make: most of the people i've met recently, people who want to be artists or filmmakers, would have no interest in meeting Jack Smith or Marie Menken. (Most of the recent interest in people like jack Smith or Marie Menken has come from abroad: Australia is a real hotbed of interest. I remember meeting the Cantrills in the 1970s; at that time, the Australian experimental cinema was just in its early stages.)

Ed Halter has an interesting point in his review of the Collective for Living Cinema shows: the avantgarde cinema is now a nostalgic enterprise, with a lot of the energies devoted to cinema in the past tense.

This is totally against what drew many of us to the cinema in the first place: its immediacy, its sense of being the art of the future.

On his blog, George Robinson says that there are some interersting new releases. Michael Giltz (www.popsurfing.blogspot.com) has some great comments on "American Idol".

Watching "Stingaree" on TCM: the name "Lynn Riggs" is among those who worked on the script. Lynn Riggs is the person who wrote the original play that Rodgers and Hammerstein turned into "Oklahoma". "Stingaree" is a pseudo-Western operetta set in Australia....