Vitro Nasu

Google is black today to celebrate the Earth Hour.

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A few days ago I made this google gray image for my Google Spring collection.

Jasper Johns:Gray (Nytimes slideshow) for fun and reference.

My Google Spring collection
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Still images from Mister Lonely by Harmony Korine

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Harmony Korine Interview (youtube)

Mister Lonely - Trailer by Harmony Korine (youtube)
Harmony Myspace

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The return and (reform) of Harmony Korine (NYtimes)

In Panama, he befriended a cult of fishermen called the Malingerers, who were trying to find a fish with gold scales. After a few months he got into an argument with the cult leader — he thought they were living a lie — and as he was leaving, a fisherman’s wife handed him a dog leash. “She said she was walking the dog. It was an invisible dog.”
In New York recently he offered further details. After he moved to Nashville, “I mounted this leash on the wall and I heard it bark,” he said. “I swear to you. Something at that moment just felt right. I know it sounds weird.”
It may be useful at this point to note that Mr. Korine’s mythomania has always been central to his art. “I don’t know if that story’s true,” Mr. Blaine said. But, he added cryptically, “The real story about Harmony and his life is more mind blowing than any story he could ever make up.”

How an eccentric new film gave Richard Strange a summer he will never forget.
Playing Abe Lincoln in an oddball film about retired impersonators inspired a new passion for harmony in Richard Strange.

This was the most satisfying and fantastic men’s competition we have ever seen. Two artistic skaters were rewarded with gold and bronze and an athlete came back to sneak in to take the silver.
Jeffery Buttle - Gold

Buttle followed up Jourbet’s spectacular skating with this beautiful and flawless performance that beat Jourbet. (Ararat was from a film by Atom Egoyan)

See also Buttle’s short program on youtube. (Music by Astor Piazzolla, choreographed by David Wilson)

Brian Jourbet - Silver

Brian Jourbet performed brilliantly with great power. He has improved in many areas. Kurt Browning helped him with his footwork.

Johnny Weir- Bronze (Short program - he placed second)

Johnny skated conservatively in his long program for the worlds. He was very honest, saying that he had a Michelle Kwan moment referring to the time Kwan lost the gold to Tara Lapinsiki in the Olympics,’
(Here is a clip of his long program from the Nationals.)

R.I.P Paul Scofield
Mr. Scofield and Vanessa Redgrave in the 1996 production of Ibsen’s “John Gabriel Borkman” at the Royal National Theater in London.

Richard Eyre, who directed Mr. Scofield in the play, maintained that he was “not just the best there is, but the best there has ever been.” (Slideshow - Nytimes )

On stage, the actor Paul Scofield, who has died aged 86, was braver than a lion. Off stage this genial man kept his private life quiet as a mouse. (GreenCine daily)

I’ve always used the running gag that “All British actors are whores” though I always qualified that with one exception: Paul Scofield. (Edward Copeland - read more here.)

Scofield reportedly had been offered a knighthood but declined. In 2001, however, he was named a Companion of Honor, one of Britain’s top honors and limited to 65 living people.(Herald Tribune)

A Matter of Conscience: Henry VIII and Thomas More (Youtube)

The Train - Ending (Youtube)

A Delicate Balance

This is my favorite Albee play because I am still thinking about it. It presents us with the question of how good a friend we really are. Albee challenges those of us who think we are capable of being good friends. Scofield runs away with this film. (Janet Paparelli via email)

A Welsh photojournalist renowned for his coverage of the Vietnam war has died at the age of 72. (BBC)

From 1966 to 1971, Mr Jones Griffiths reported on the Vietnam war, publishing a photojournalism book focused on the suffering of civilians.
Vietnam Inc galvanised the anti-war movement in the United States and helped to turn public opinion against the war.
It is now hailed as a classic of photojournalism.

In an interview with the BBC news website published in 2005, Mr Jones Griffiths said: “The only thing we photographers really want more than life, more than sex, more than anything, is to be invisible.”

Anthony Minghella
Known as the Oscar winning director for the English Patient Minghella ’s life was cut short, he was only 54 years old.

Minghella directed a play by Samuel Beckett, with Alan Rickman, Kristen Scott Thomas and Juliet Stevens. (You can watch this on youtube now.)

Mr. Minghella first began working in theater, both as a writer and a director. Samuel Beckett was a particular fascination and Mr. Minghella organized a star-studded tribute to Beckett in 2006. (See a slideshow here)

(Image Source)
Anthony and his wife were going to direct this documentary about Chinese Calligraphy. (He was married to a Hong Kong Born Choreographer.)

Truly, Madly, Sadly Anthony Minghella’s best movie was his first one. (Dana Stevens from Slate)

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Photo by Eugene Hoshiko/The Associated Press
Young Tibetan monks asked for a donation as a police car parked to patrol the Tibetan quarter of Chengdu in China, Monday. Scattered protests were said to have continued in ethnic Tibetan communities in numerous Chinese provinces

France raises idea of boycotting Olympics ceremony over Tibet

“The initiative of Reporters Without Borders, which does not have the French government’s support, was made this morning,” Kouchner said. Let’s consider it.”

Tibet’s government in exile says it believes 99 people have been killed in the violence, a figure disputed by the Chinese authorities.

A great video from the Guardian

Ethnic Tibetans on horseback riot in the western Chinese province of Gansu, demanding freedom for their homeland and replacing the Chinese flag with that of the former independent Tibet

Beijing Wide Open - A Tibetan Activist Speaks Out About the Olympics

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High Hopes by Lee Welch (Dublin Artist)
High Hopes was a song by Frank Sinatra, also incidentally used as JFK’s campaign song. (Via)
For All We Know<> <>falling somewhere in-between<><>Lee in animation quicktime

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Loop 3 by Niall de Buitlear

In this series of work the artist has selected various pairs of words with opposite meanings. A thesaurus has been used to build strings of successive synonyms which break down the gap between the pairs of words.

Niall has a great blog, his sculptures here.

Jackie Nickerson’s photographs of Faith (image source)
Green Room

This hermetically sealed world hearkens back to a time of Thomas Merton, vows of silence, and deep contemplation. Nickerson’s still lives of orderly, empty rooms, and clergy members at work capture the peaceful silence that must echo through those convents and abbeys.(Alicatte Amp)

Ritualistic Faith (more photos by J. Nickerson)

Happy St Patrick’s Day
(Previous posts on Irish cinema here and here).

Val Foubert & Jim Wichterman taught English and Philosophy in ‘Anarchist Alley’ at Mercer Island High School. Each influenced Stanley Dunham, Barack Obama’s mother, who graduated in 1960. They collaborated in nurturing her independence of mind. (via)

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“She was a scholar who was one of the first to see about microbanking,” Neil Abercrombie says.

She was just too cool - from Dana Stevens at slate

Somewhere around the words “peasant blacksmithing,” I found myself thinking, “This man can never be president. His mother was just too cool.” American presidential mothers don’t drift bohemianly around the globe, marrying and divorcing foreigners, working for Third World development banks and discussing “esoteric Indonesian woodworking techniques” with their daughters. They are not named Stanley.

Barack Obama’s trubute to his mother (youtube)

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Obama is plugged in to America

“I need a breath of fresh air” Barack’s niece danced naked in front of a security guard, Maya Soetoro-Ng (Barack’s sister) also talked about her brave mother who loved to watch the moon.

Theres no one as Irish As Barack O’Bama
Moneygall is the village where Barack Obama’s great great great great grandfather Fulmuth Kearney emigrated from.

Obama Champon looks like a regular ramen.
Obama city in Japan has already cashed in. (See this youtube coverage in Italian)

Obama wrote the letter in English but signed it in Japanese, “Your friend”.
“We share more than a common name; we share a common planet and common responsibilities,” Obama wrote in the letter.

Different Biography (earlier at agog)

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Self Portrait of Stanley Kubrick (Drama and Shadows: Photographs 1945-1950. Phaidon Press. ISBN 0-7148-4438-1. 2005. Originally taken for Look Magazine.)

The Real Stanley Kubrick by Michael Herr (Vanity Fair)

He was thinking about making a war movie next, but he wasn’t sure which war, and in fact, now that he mentioned it, not even so sure he wanted to make a war movie at all.
He called me a couple of nights later to ask me if I’d read any Jung. I had. Was I familiar with the concept of the Shadow, our hidden dark side? I assured him that I was. We did half an hour on the Shadow, and how he really wanted to get it into his war picture.

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Carl Jung and Arthur Schnitzler

And then there was this other book he was fascinated by - he was fairly sure I’d never heard of it - Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Traumnovelle, which means Dream Novel, meaninglessly called Rhapsody in the only English edition available at that time. He’d read it more than 20 years before, and bought the rights to it in the early 70s (it’s the book that Eyes Wide Shut is based on), and the reason I’d probably never heard of it (he started to laugh) was that he’d bought up every single existing copy of it. Maybe he’d send me one. I could read it and tell him what I thought.

Related links
Eyes Wide Shut - Strange German Version (Youtube)

The Jungian Things - a Discussion

Stanley Kubrick shared a birthday with Jung and Huxley.

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Weegee

Much like Weegee, Stanley Kubrick started his career as a photographer on the streets of New York & contributed era defining shots to LIFE magazine. Kubrick admired Weegee’s photographs & during shooting of Doctor Strangelove employed him as a stills photographer. When Peter Sellers heard Weegee speak he apparently used Weegee’s peculiar voice as the basis for that of Dr Strangelove!

Another photo of Kubrick and Weegee (Lovely Water Parade)

Dr. Strangelove - (John Edward’s favorite film).

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Clouds photos taken last week on our weekly bike ride to garage sales in the neighborhood.

This morning just before uploading these photos above,I found coincidentally more photos of clouds from Matt “Clouds Last Evening”

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Our limo dogs are used to getting attention during the bike-thru garage sale run. Spike (the black one in front) anticipates a stuffed animal for him to play with at home. Spike is not familiar with mega stores like ToyR”Us. He loves to drag these stuffed animals to the yard outside.
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Created a new catogory “Garagesale” to see some of our garage sale collection. (The China is embedded in our homevideo. We did not find the Necktie Skirt by Charles Delray.)

Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3, 1847.

Did he invent the telephone?

The modern telephone is the result of work done by many people, all worthy of recognition of their contributions to the field. Alexander Graham Bell was the first to patent the telephone, an “apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically” after experimenting with many primitive sound transmitters and receivers. The history of the invention of the telephone is a confusing mass of claims and counterclaims, further worsened by lawsuits which attempted to resolve the patent claims of individuals. Bell is often credited as the inventor of the first practical telephone, although others provided groundbreaking research and development work and subsequent improvements.

History of Telephone
Bell wanted “Ahoy” but Edison wanted “Hello”. (From Mamma’s Cradle First Hello)

(Animate the phone here)

And finally don’t pick the banana fone!