Free Thai Cinema: Award-winning director Apitchatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady) has shown his films all over the world, including here in Minneapolis for a 2004 retrospective, but with his latest, he can’t get a showing in his home country. The Thai director submitted Syndromes and a Century (Sang Satawat) to Thailand’s Censorship Board, and was told four cuts had to be made for the film to be released commercially. Saying he treats his “works as my own sons or my daughters,” Weerasethakul refused to make the cuts. Now the Thai government says they’ll hold onto his film print until the four prescribed deletions are made. Thai artists have begun an online petition — already signed by more than 4,000 people — urging the government to return the film print, but also seeking “a long-needed modernization of Thai legislation concerning movie censorship,” which is based on a law from 1930. Sign the petition here.
Skate Museum: Jason Schwartzman (Rushmore, I Heart Huckabees, Marie Antoinette) recently released his solo album under the name Coconut Records. The first video from the album is a mix of footage from December of 1998 of skate legend Mark Gonzales performing/skateboarding in the Stadtisches Museum in Monchengladbach, Germany. The original footage was shot by filmmaker/photographer Cheryl Dunn for a film called Backworlds for Words. [Submitted by Witt.]
Travels with Chuck: Minnesota Monthly profiles Heather Scanlan of the Walker’s registration department, as she accompanies Chuck Close’s massive painting Big Self Portrait (1968) as it goes out on loan to Madrid’s Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa for the show Chuck Close: Pinturas 1968–2006. From Minneapolis to Chicago to Paris, Bilbao, and Madrid, she plays bodyguard to the nine-foot Close as it’s transfered from truck to cargo plane to truck and, finally, a new–albeit temporary–home.
GOOD Videos: Good Magazine features a new video interview with artist/activist Natalie Jeremijenko. And Tate Shots runs a vodcast with sculptor Dan Graham, who says 19th-century painter John Martin could’ve been a science-fiction painter.