Vitro NasuIconoclastic Incubator
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Happy Birthday W.S. Merwin – 30 September 1927
Merwin’s writing influence derived from his interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Residing in Hawaii, he writes prolificall…y and is dedicated to the restoration of its rainforests.
Birthday of Deborah Kerr 
(her obit with many clips from her films)
and Truman Capote too – see this beautiful tribute page.
This is the first part of Le gros et le maigre (The fat and the lean), a great short film made by Roman Polanski in 1961, just after completing film school.
J.P. Rameau
Les Paladins
Jean-Philippe Rameau (September 25, 1683 – September 12, 1764) was one of the most important French composers and music theorists of the Baroque era.
Director Robert Carsen and his creative team flood the stage with summer blossoms, drifts of autumn leaves, winter snows and thunderous spring storms. The cast of 140 are attired in elegant costumes inspired by late 1940s Dior. This mythical tale of a young queen, Alphise, determined to abdicate rather than contemplate an enforced marriage to a descendant of Boreas, is nothing less than highly-charged.
Ground-breaking modern dance ensemble La La La Human Steps, choreographed by Édouard Lock, perform dance ‘divertissements’ in this strikingly beautiful staging.
Sylvie Guillem selected la Poule for you.
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In what is quite a coup for the Viennale, Vienna’s film festival, Jean-Luc Godard came out of semi-retirement to make a trailer for the festival, his first film work since 2006. Entitled Une catastrophe, it runs for just sixty-three seconds, but it is hereby claimed for the silent film community because it makes use of Battleship Potemkin and People on Sunday. The film opens with the over-famous Odessa Steps sequence from Potemkin, accompanied probably for the first time by the sounds of a tennis match.
Then, following a shot of an agonised man with a knife (from what film?) and gaudy colour footage of war, we get a slowed-down, stop-start sequences of two lovers from People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag), Edgar G. Ulmer, Fred Zinnemann and Billy Wilder’s exquisite 1930 drama with a Berlin documentary background. Throw in some fractured titles, snatches of Schumann’s “Scenes from Childhood”, and an eighteenth century poem in Low German, and you have a mightily rich concoction for your sixty-three seconds.
Love, death, guns, music, language, iconography, montage. Histoire(s) du cinéma, indeed.(The Bioscope)
J. L. Godard 
Richard Brody writes about Jean-Luc Godard, with a related slide show online. Here Brody discusses watching Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, their tumultuous friendship, and French New Wave cinema.
See all the pictures from the slideshow by New Yorker.
Here is a clip of Jean Luc Godard and François Truffaut appeared together on behalf of Cinematheque – (Poor Jean Pierre Leaud who served and work with both masters, caught between the two grandpas of Nouvel Vague. No wonder he aged so fast.)
It is a real tribute to the Cinémathèque Française and its founder Henri Langlois that these two often bitter rivals would agree to make a joint appearance to attempt to save this unique institution.
Godard first appearance in Jacques Rivette film on youtube.
FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE of H.G. Well’s first novel; one of the foundational works of science fiction.(Manhattan Rare Books)
Although there were sensationalist accounts in the press about a supposed panic in response to the broadcast, the precise extent of listener response has been debated. In the days following the adaptation, however, there was widespread outrage. The program’s news-bulletin format was decried as cruelly deceptive by some newspapers and public figures, leading to an outcry against the perpetrators of the broadcast, but the episode launched Orson Welles to fame.
Welles’ adaptation was one of the Radio Project’s first studies.
Orson Welles meets H.G. Wells (youtube)
1936 – A positively amazing picture of H.G. Wells on the set of “Things to Come .” That’s Raymond Massey and Margaretta Scott. A classic, and the 2001 of it’s day. It provided the design ethic for the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
H.G.Wells -21 September 1866 – the Time Machine..
“If we don’t end war, war will end us.”
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” He. G Wells..
During his marriage to Isabel, Wells had liaisons with a number of women, including the American birth-control activist Margaret Sanger (Wiki)
Google Logo 
Mystery Is Finally Solved
“He, I know—for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made—thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.”
Agnes de Mille 
(18 September 1905 – 7 October 1993) was an American dancer and choreographer
When Agnes was very young, her father followed his brother, Cecil B. de Mille to California, to try for work in the new gold field of motion pictures. He went for a year’s stay and remained for the rest of his life. (Her bio here)
Oklahoma ! – Out Of My Dreams (Part 2)
Agnes de Mille’s career was a long, successful, but also turbulent journey through the world of 20th century American theater and ballet (via)
W/Thanks to Steven Schwartz!
Kate Millet 
by Alice Neel
Happy Birthday Kate Millett – Sept 14, 1934
Millett’s deeply personal autobiographical works, including Flying (1974), Sita (1977), and A.D. (1995), reveal the difficulties she has faced in her public and private life.
Sexual Politics was circulated before the publication of her thesis.
Kate Millett is an artist 
and a feminist.
See her with her sculpture from Feminist Art movement
Her book Flying (1974) tells of her marriage with a Japanese sculptor and her love affairs with women.
Fumio Yoshimura Sculpture
Yes she has lost mind once – Her Loony Bin Trip.
“Not since Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest has the literature of madness emitted such a powerful anti-institutional cry.” — Washington Post ADVANCE PRAISE “The forced incarceration, the mental anguish, and the sheer humiliation of ‘going mad’ are made real in Millett’s detailed and passionate narrative of her own experiences.
“The Basement” was disturbing but I had to read it.
Here is a review of the Basement by Duncan Mitchell
Happy Kate 
by Hyder in 1994.
Her homepage is here. – AN INVITATION TO THE WOMEN’S ART COLONY/FARM
Of course she went to Iran.
In 1981 Millett published Going to Iran, which was a new journalistic account of a trip she made to Iran in March 1979 to address Iranian feminists on International Women’s Day. The Shah of Iran had just abdicated, and the Ayatollah Khomeini had not yet fully consolidated his power. Nevertheless, Millett was soon expelled by the fundamentalist government for her feminist views. The chronicle is recorded in the rigorously honest style of her earlier works. (via)
The Return of the Troublemaker
Society has lost its patience. So why isn’t she more downhearted? She smiles and says it’s because she is having too much fun. “I love making trouble. It’s a wonderful job. You don’t get paid but you have a lot of adventures.”
‘Gulag’ book, once banned, is now required reading
Aleksandr Sokurov The Knot. Conversations w/ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. (Russian only)
The film, commissioned by a Russian TV channel and shot in 1999 consists of two parts of about 90 minutes each, thus the total comes to slightly over three hours. The first part s called The Knot (Uzel) while the second is entitled simply Dialogues. At the time of these interviews Solzhenitsyn is about eighty years of age, but his mind is remarkably agile and his judgement is swift; he has strong opinions on many issues. He talks a lot about writing and literature, about aspects of the Russian language, and about many of the most important Russian writers, from Gogol and Dostoyevski through Plekhanov and Karamzin, to present-day Valentin Rasputin or emigre Nabokov. (Dina review)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 
Wall streets the biggest banks of America
(Next frame says : the wall streets helped the Bolsheviks in Russia.)
This image was posted by me at Facebook 
and tagged way too many friends as an experiment.
-Solzhenitsyn is dead, would you like to finish what he was about to say? Was my question.
Some who are used to being tagged participated, soon the emails flooded and objections were raised by some who do not know the workings of FB interface. (Click ‘remove’ ).
A spirited and amusing response came from Ramiro Martinez – here is a link to his blog.
Aterial Destination
Then I read something about Bolshviks and politburo stuff and suddenly I got shot back to the time when my older brothers and sisters were in college. And the Chicano Movimiento was goin on and there seemed to be a lot of fear in the air. At this time I was getting my ass kicked all over the neighborhood and learning how to fight. I never liked it. (More,here) .
Previous post on Ramiro here. 
Sample responses I received:
Matt Janovic
“Wall Street, the biggest banks in the world, are no different in the nature of their exploitation and oppression of the world than the Politburo, only they are winning.” ;0) Happy Labor day!
“Yeah, that’s true, the house of Morgan did initially help the Bolsheviks but it ended with the 1920 bombing on Wall Street, probably done by British intelligence, they didn’t want the US and the Bolshies hooking-up. Sidney Reilly (“Ace of Spies”) might have been involved in that operation.””
Alan Sondhiem
read pretty much all of Solzhentsyn and couldn’t comment – on one hand brilliant samizdat writer along the lines of dostoevsky of course and on the other problematic nationalist along the lines of dostoevsky of course..
He had a wide dark side : his nationalism…
Last time he came in France, it was to meet Philippe de Villiers, an exterme right leader, who is the political chief of the right wing of the french catholic-fundamentalist movement
William Dimitroff
One Day in the Life of Bernie Madoff
(I enjoyed reading the First Circle: it is often forgotten today.)
Thomas Odde
…dispensers of capital punishment.
Terry Wahl
“have all the altruism and national allegiance of a starving hyena…
Solzhenitzn was unique. One wants to dislike him for his politics, and to me there’s little reason to listen to him about politics. Yet the three main novels (Cancer Ward, First Circle, Ivan Denisovich) were all very fine indeed, and the Gulag Archipelago was an amazing achievement. Without it, we would have the same revelations from others, including more progressive voices, as with Medvedev’s Let History Judge. Perhaps nothing will have the daring of Kruschev’s own ‘secret speech.’ But it’s a remarkable book all the same.
R.I.P Chrstian Poveda
A French film-maker and photojournalist who spent years researching a documentary on the criminal underbelly of El Salvador’s gang culture has been found dead in the Central American country, police said today. More, here from Guardian.
Did he die for his art? (Independent)
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(via edward chang)
See La Vida Loca photos by Chrisitan Poveda
Overturned Pot 
and Paper Towels
by Stacey Fisher
The Longest Day 
Stacey Fisher
A Double Contradictory Feeling 
by John Stezaker
Heimo Zobernig <> <> 
