Vitro Nasu

February ends with these low fat sculptures by Michael Beatty.
Enjoy!

Michael Beatty

Above images from here and here.

See his giant mobiles here.

Robert Weight is blogging from Buenos Aires.
A few of his photos are featured at Agog post featuring two novels by Argentinian Martinez.

Yesterday an email came from Valery Grancher announcing his new project, Miniature China blog.

Stanley Bay Hong Kong by Valery Grancher (via)
Buenos Aires and Hong Kong are happily linked together here at vitro-nasu.

(China Daily)

Gōngxǐ fācái from youtube chinese pop song celebration.

Open your fortune cookie here.

Pigs on Parade from Seattle

Happy New Year of the Pig (or Inoshishi in Japanese, meaning wild boar)

China heralds year of the fluorescent green Pig

Bosch image of pig came out greenish too.
Hieronymous Bosch
Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights

Sue Coe’s Porkopolis enlarged.

Inoshishi
(Image source)

Pachelbel’s Canon accompanies a game of These Little Pigs by Orisinal.

Porcile (Pigsty) by Pasolini. (Not many have seen this film including moi.)

A savage parody of Godard, Resnais and… Pasolini, ironically chronicling the ‘existential anguish’ of the children of the bourgeoisie, it features Léaud as a mystic youth whose being finally merges with ‘nature’: he gets eaten by the pigs he loves.

The first, “Orgia,” was originally conceived as a possible companion piece to Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert, and concerns a 15th-century cult of cannibals who must eventually reckon with Church and State. The second, “Porcile,” involves a West German industrialist and Nazi war criminal whose son (played by Truffaut and Godard regular Jean-Pierre Léaud) likes to copulate with pigs.

Here is a disturbing picture of Jean Pierre Leaud from this unpalatable and enigmatic film.

What goes with what?

Kaitlyn and Spike

The Backroom

The Chinese noodle place we frequent kept the Thai decor of the previous owners which now coexists without fuss, very casual, in a setting of typical lack of Chinese propriety. Only the food matters.

Another example of casual world we live in, here is a blog from our friend prosecutor Patrick Fritz. (I am sure he has no time to keep a blog)

Milan Kundera has a new book which sounds like a rehash of his last essays “The Art of Novel”.
The Nation on Kundera, here .

“The Debt to Pleasure”
Hanif Kureishi explains how the work of the Japanese master inspired him to write the screenplay for Venus

Tanizaki does take these ideas further, throwing open the whole question of love itself, of what it is we love about the other. The characters in his work are deeply involved with others. But in what way and what does it mean? How do perversion and love interact? Is fetish love real love? Is being excited by only a part of the other real sex? Is fetishism a version of love, or its obverse? Is it only, as Havelock Ellis designated it, “auto-erotic”?

Much as they might like to be, Tanizaki’s characters cannot be self-sufficient. They never stop needing one another. As both characters struggle for ultimate, complete control over the other, the engagement is almost comical. Tanizaki is aware that, in the end, you are always dependent on the other; indeed, you are partly creating them, having them play a role with which you identify. This is not only the case in exhibitionism or voyeurism, but in sadism, too. Yet the freedom of the other, which resides in their words - or perhaps a diary - will ultimately elude you; it has to. Total control would end in death, or the murder, of one of the subjects, at which point the game ends.

Imagining Kundera, Kureishi and Tanizaki

Jules Olitski was 84 years old.

American painter and sculptor Jules Olitski, a prominent representative of the postwar abstract art movement, died of cancer on Sunday, February 4, in New York, reports the Austrian paper Der Standard. (Via Artforum)

Sand of the Sea

Olitski was born Jevel Demikovski in Snovsk, Russia, on March 27 1922, a few months after his father, a commissar, was executed by the Russian government. (via Wikipedia)

See Jules’s painting “Volitions” from “Modern and Postmodern” (the last essay by Clement Greenberg).

You don’t have to think that Jules Olitski is ”the best painter alive,” as an unrepentant Clement Greenberg did as late as 1990, to appreciate his current show. Mr. Olitski, who has exhibited since 1951, has never given up on Color Field painting, the art movement that Greenberg promoted as the rightful heir to Abstract Expressionism; but he has made it quirkier, more complicated and, well, less Greenbergian. (Roberta Smith’s review of his show)

Jules Olitski aping Jean Arp
Mushroom Perfume

More paintings here
.

Obit from Iconia and from Jules’ granddaughter.

More on Olitski’s motivation and how he was rescued by Clement G. from Art or Idiocy.

The Grey Xavier University Collection.

The Owl

Werner Herzog found this owl in Mexico, and used the experience to give a sense of absurd and extraneous elements to this scene.

Island of Lost Dreams - a review of “Signs of Life”

Showdown Dogmacracy - A couch dogumentary
Daisy as Hillary Clinton and Spike as Barack Obama. The first chihuahua candidates playing to win.