Vitro Nasu

This photo by Morimura is a departure from his usual satirical performances.

Issey Miyake collaborated with the performance artist.. see him upside down wrapped in something.

Cute Dog

See more Yasumasa Morimura

Happy birthday Donald Keene .. he is 91 years old.

His latest adventure? Professor Keene adopted a son.

The adoption grew out of a friendship that started in 2006, and eventually led to Mr. Uehara’s moving into Mr. Keene’s Tokyo home and helping the older man out with things like keeping his large collection of books organized.

Interesting review of his book by Colin Marshall.. Donald Keene on Familiar Terms.

His autobiography is an excellent read.. what an amazing life.

Keene Observation

Enigmatic Emperor

Happy birthday Ken Loach

Ken Loach won Palm d”Or at Cannes in 2007 -see the trailer ..The Wind that Shakes the Barley.

See a funny scene from Riff Raff.. Margaret Thatcher’s funeral (youtube)

Ken Loach has suggested that the UK privatize the funeral of Margaret Thatcher.

Ken Loach full of fight..

Adrien Brody was cast to play the Pianist after Polanski saw him in Bed and Roses directed by Ken Loach. (see the trailer)

Birthday of Igor Google Igor
Igor by Pablo Picasso (via)
See previous post.

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Photos by Fung Lin Hall

Happy father’s day!

Sketch by Djuna Barnes

Djuna Barnes (American, 1892–1982), Sketch of a woman with hat, looking right, for “The Terrorists,” New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine, September 30, 1917. Ink on paper, 12 3/4 x 8 1/2 in. (32.4 x 21.6 cm). Djuna Barnes Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries (via)

Force feeding Djuna Barnes clipping

Photo below “Differential Action” by Thomas Eakins

L’immoralist
Louis Jourdan and James Dean

Photo collage by Fung Lin Hall

Roger and me by Jon Jost (Roger Ebert reviewed his film)

I am certain that most people who meet me and tell me I am “famous” heard of me through Roger.

Still from All the Vermeers in New York (Art 21 youtube_)

In March 1991 Jost was honored, along with Producer Edward Pressman, with the IFP/West’s first “John Casavettes Lifetime Achievement Award” for independent filmmaking.

In March, 2000, he received the “Maverick Spirit Award,” at the San Jose-based independent “Maverick” festival.
(via Jon Jost homepage )

Intense viewing

All here in one page..Jon Jost Work (See the trailers)

Something from his past….
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50 years ago, taken in Cassina Amata di Paderno Dugnano, Italy. A family, the Rebosio’s. picked me up hitch-hiking & I stayed with them 3 months and shot my first film, Portrait, of their 12 year old daughter, Matilde. Thanks to FB we’re in touch again and they sent me this foto I took back then.

Jost vimeo – Jost IMDB

American Pastorial Thoughts and things (One of his blogs with a short bio)

Jon Jost & Sushi (Instanbul T-shirt Man photo by Fung Lin Hall).
Jon Jost was filming at Grand Canyon, he took a day off to escape the tourists and found the time to meet me and my husband for a sushi dinner and conversation.. Jon was a nurse to Nick Ray when he was dying of Cancer . Forgot to ask him about Raul Ruiz..

Roxanne Rogers gave Jost the T-shirt he was wearing. That day our thoughts were far away from Istanbul Turkey.
See a group photo below. Roxanne currently resides in Istanbul providing her friends with some news.

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Photo of a happy film family.. Jon Jost, Roxanne Rogers, Steve Taylor, and Kate Sannella cast and director of Coming To Terms.

I look horrible (very into that trashy character) in all the other photos. This was the last moment I got to wear that dress as the first character. Right after this photo was taken we dashed off to find locations, change hair and make up for the second film we made….in TEN days!!! Jost works so fast when he is cranking. We were just falling all over our selves to keep up. It’s fabulous. Wish we were making another fim this year.” (Roxanne Rogers via FB)

Jon Jost was in Korea to showcase two films – film blog Coming to Terms

I also sent the documentary shot last autumn in the Fukushima district in Japan, The Narcissus Flowers of Katsura-hima. It is a delicate work on survivors of the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. So far it’s been rejected by a handful of festivals

This is where he went (to Grand Canyon) ..travellin man

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and snapped this

Pather Panchali - Full film (youtube)

Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore was recently honored by the U.N.

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Einstein and Tagore

The film comprises dramatized episodes from the poet’s life and archived images and documents. (See full film directed by Satyajit Ray here)

The documentary was made to celebrate Tagore’s birth centenary in May 1961. Ray was conscious that he was making an official portrait of India’s celebrated poet and hence the film does not include any controversial aspects of Tagore’s life. However, it is far from being a propaganda film.

Satyajit Ray (NYtimes)

“I find I am inimical to the idea of making two similar films in succession,” wrote the great Indian director Satyajit Ray in 1966, and in this, as in everything he wrote or filmed, he spoke the truth.

A must see…documentary – life of Satyajit Ray part I Ray of Hope (youtube)

Happy birthday Morgan King – (born June 4, 1930) is an American jazz singer and actress. Her best-known role was that of Carmela Corleone in The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II

Morgana King and Marlon Brando

The wedding

Derrida loved cinema and especially Godfather I, II. (Benoit Peeters Derrida Biography page 434)

“Cinema remains for me a great hidden enjoyment, secret avid, greedy and thus infantile

In Cinema I like there to be an intelligence that isn’t that of knowledge, or intellectual in quality, but of the way it’s directed.” “and Jean Luc Godard had not been the “slightest influence” on Derrida. Page 435..Benoit Peeter’s Derrida biography.

Related link -John Cazale (previous post) – an amazing actor who was in both Godfather I, II, Dog Day Afternoon, Deer Hunter and the Coversation.

Lydia Davis wins Man Booker Int’l Prize

“Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again:
You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday.
Heart feels better, then.
But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.
Heart is so new to this.
I want them back, says heart.
Head is all heart has.
Help, head. Help heart.”

Lydia Davis (Click to see large) Photo by Odeta Catana

Bombsite interview

FP You read Beckett at 13?

LD Yeah, I didn’t read the whole thing.

FP Where did you find it?

LD My father was an English professor, and somehow it must have been in the house. It made a very strong impression because it was so different from anything I had read. I opened this book and it said on the first page, “I’m lying here. I’ve dropped my pencil.” Later, in high school, I would go through one novelist after another—Nabokov, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, Joyce—and read everything.

FP Do you think about Beckett a lot now?

LD He was very important to me in my early twenties. I studied him. I was really picking apart sentence structures, seeing exactly how he constructed a sentence. Why it worked so beautifully. I suppose I wanted to do it as well as Beckett. So if I was going to do it as well as he did, I had to learn how he did it.

The Believer Interview.. here.

Click to see large.. resembling a heroic abstract action painting (via)

Ferrer hot shot

Ferrer lost that match to Nadal.

DFW was not the only one who admires Federer

But now the South African novelist has surprised critics by revealing his profound, almost obsessive respect for an unlikely figure – the Swiss tennis star Roger Federer.
Revealing himself as an armchair sports fan, Coetzee describes Federer’s best tennis as “something like the human ideal made visible” and says the experience of watching him play is “very much like my response to masterworks of art”.

Paul Auster and Coetzee see a cartoon and read the New Yorker article – The Better Player.

Click to see large Who is this?

Previous Post The Seven Samurai and Coetzee.

Congratulations Jurgen Trautwein. Wall St Int’l

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Recalled from memory, Silent Topography are painted aerial views of land and water formations observed on transcontinental flights between Europe and the West Coast of the United States.

Saturday, June 15, 2013
66 Elgin Park
San Francisco CA 94103
Gallery 60Six

See more from Silent Topography

At the gallery -click to see large

SF Chronicle – Kenneth Baker

A Trautwein such as “Frozen Blue” hints at his process. It involves crumpling and flattening found paper – in many cases old airport blueprints – then coating and flooding the sheet with acrylic to produce a sort of relief-map-like skin.
Echoes abound of an earlier generation’s more rugged exercises in color field abstraction. I think particularly of the turn-of-the-’70s unframed soaked paper abstractions of Manny Farber (1917-2008).
Yet Trautwein’s works’ illegibility as imagery does more than frustrate. It calls up the anxious uncertainty that attends our inability to read satellite imagery of the Earth.
Almost offhand, it seems, Trautwein aligns the inscrutability of certain scientific imaging with that of his paintings and with our incapacity to recognize in everyday life the signs of snowballing ecological calamity. Or rather, he relies on us to do that. And once the possibility comes to mind, resisting it feels like denial.

2008 prototype..
(photo by Fung Lin Hall -This was taken in his apartment. He explained that this painting was the prototype for the new work.)

See Jurgen with Daisy and Spike in 2008 here.

Ray Manzerek - Doors Keyboardist dead at 74

Manzarek grew up in Chicago, then moved to Los Angeles in 1962 to study film at UCLA. It was there he first met Doors singer Jim Morrison, though they didn’t talk about forming a band until they bumped into each other on a beach in Venice, California in the summer of 1965 and Morrison told Manzarek that he had been working on some music. “And there it was!” Manzarek wrote in his 1998 biography, Light My Fire. “It dropped quite simply, quite innocently from his lips, but it changed our collective destinies.”

Ray Manzarek

Ray Manzarek pays tribute to Jim Morrison and realizes his own filmmaking dreams with ‘Love Her Madly’

“I had a class with Joseph von Sternberg at UCLA, which changed my life, if not my attitude towards women, which has always been lustfully wonderfully beautiful, but in terms of style,” he says.

Introduction by Gary Snyder..