Vitro Nasu

“A philosopher,” he wrote in 1944, “is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

The Early Years

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was born in Vienna, at Alleegasse 16 (now Argentinierstraße), on 26 April 1889 at 8.30 in the evening.

Composite photo

“Don’t think, look!” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

The woman with the haunted look staring back out of the photograph has never existed. She is a composite, created by overlaying four different photos of four different faces: three sisters, all middle-aged Austrian women, and their brother, the philosophical genius Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The tragedy of Wittgenstein’s photographs

Two scenes from Derek Jarman’s film ‘Wittgenstein’ (1989)

The House of Wittgenstein here.

Laura Gilpin
(Photo via)

Laura Gilpin (April 22, 1891 – November 30, 1979) was an American photographer known for her photographs of Native Americans, particularly the Navajo and Pueblo, and her Southwestern landscapes.

Just weeks before her death, she leaned out the window of a small plane flying low over the Rio Grande valley to make her last photographs.
Laura Gilpin died on November 30, 1979, at the age of 88.(via)

Laura Gilpin – An Enduring Grace (See Georgia O’Keefe and 5 more photos)

Navajo Roots

“The subject in the photo is Susan Tsosie, my grandmother. Susan is seated on the ground, holding a kid goat and wearing traditional Navajo clothing: a hand-woven shawl draped around her shoulders, silver coins and buttons adorning her blouse and a stunning piece of turquoise jewelry around her neck.”

Dylan and Levon Helm (via)

NYtimes Obit and his homepage. <> <>Dylan responds (Rolling Stones)

Levon was a real voice of America.

He passed away peacefully at 1:30 this afternoon surrounded by his friends and bandmates,” (via)

(So very sad..)

The Band – The Weight <> <> <> Ophelia on PBS

Helm was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1998. At the time, the cost of paying for treatment threatened to leave him homeless. “You got to pick one – pay your medical bills or pay the mortgage,” he said in a 2010 CNN interview. “Most people can’t do both, and I’m not different.” Helm recovered, and his home became the venue for a star-studded weekly concert series, the Midnight Rambles. These gigs led to a creative resurgence and two acclaimed albums, 2007’s Dirt Farmer and 2009’s Electric Dirt.

Jane Fonda and Levon Helm starred in the Dollmaker (youtube full film – more than 2 hours long – see this film if you missed.)

Levon named after Levon Helm.. – Levon by Elton John (We’ll be singing this song…)

The Philosopher
by David Shrigley 2009, painted ceramic plant pot and cacti, 26 x 22 x 37 cm

Marquis de Sade by Man Ray

Lyotard’s Nose De neus van Jean-François Lyotard by Jiri Georg Dokoupil

Magritte Philosopher’s Lamp

Michel Foucault <> <> <> <>Judith Butler <> <> <> Emmanuel Levinas

The Duty of Philosophy? Zizek has the answer.

The Last Laugh of the melancholy Philosopher Emil Cioran

Emil Cioran (wiki) The Melancholy thinker..

Regarding God, Cioran has noted that “without Bach, God would be a complete second rate figure” and that “Bach’s music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded a complete failure”.

William H. Gass called Cioran’s work “a philosophical romance on the modern themes of alienation, absurdity, boredom, futility, decay, the tyranny of history, the vulgarities of change, awareness as agony, reason as disease”. (via wki)

“The amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its profundity”

—E. M. Cioran

McCabe & Mrs Miller

Julie Christie

The ground-breaking first feature from the director of Orlando and The Tango Lesson, The Gold Diggers is a key film of early Eighties feminist cinema. Made with an all-woman crew, featuring stunning photography by Babette Magolte and a score by Lindsay Cooper it embraces a radical and experimental narrative structure.

Celeste (Colette Laffont) is a computer clerk in a bank who becomes fascinated by the relationship between gold and power. Ruby (Julie Christie) is an enigmatic film star in quest of her childhood, her memories and the truth about her own identity. As their paths cross they come to sense that there could be a link between the male struggle for economic supremacy and the female ideal of mysterious but impotent beauty.
Sally Potter – the Gold Diggers

Far from the Madding Crowd (Breathtaking!)

Don’t Look Now

Sarah Polley directed Julie Christie in Away from her.

You can see Darling on youtube

GO Between

Happy birthday to Julie Christie and Lothaire Bluteau (April 14) both made films directed by Sally Potter.

Lothaire Bluteau and Tilda Swinton in Orlando.

I Shot Andy Warhol..

Lotharire Bluteau was terrifc in Black Robe.

Julie Walking Home (A Healer) by Agnieska Holland

Photo of Samuel Beckett by Steve Schapiro

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett was born on Good Friday, April 13, 1906, near Dublin, Ireland. Raised in a middle class, Protestant home, the son of a quantity surveyor and a nurse, he was sent off at the age of 14 to attend the same school which Oscar Wilde had attended. Looking back on his childhood, he once remarked, “I had little talent for happiness.”
Beckett was consistent in his loneliness. The unhappy boy soon grew into an unhappy young man, often so depressed that he stayed in bed until mid afternoon. He was difficult to engage in any lengthy conversation–it took hours and lots of drinks to warm him up–but the women could not resist him. The lonely young poet, however, would not allow anyone to penetrate his solitude. He once remarked, after rejecting advances from James Joyce’s daughter, that he was dead and had no feelings that were human.

Beckett and Giacometti

John Banville on Beckett – Storming Beauty

Barney Rosset and Samuel Beckett

Barney Rossett was his publisher and ex husband of Joan Mitchell.

Samuel Beckett Reading List -1941 -1956

The Temptation to Exist by Emil Cioran: “Great stuff here and there. Must reread his first.”

Lautreamont and Sade by Maurice Blanchot: “Some excellent ideas, or rather starting-points for ideas, and a fair bit of verbiage, to be read quickly, not as a translator does. What emerges from it though is a truly gigantic Sade, jealous of Satan and of his eternal torments, and confronting nature more than with humankind.”

The Castle by Franz Kafka: “I felt at home, too much so – perhaps that is what stopped me from reading on. Case closed there and then.”

Online guide to Samuel Beckett (A Piece of Monologue)

Dorothea Tanning
Rainy Day Canapé, 1970, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Dozen works by Tanning now on view in LACMA’s special exhibition In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States.

See Dorothea with Max Ernst here. (Scroll down)

Six images from Steve Faletti

Alexander Calder

Everyday thing

Rare “Elephant” armchair, designed by Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann in 1926. It sold at auction in December 2010 for $290,500.

Chorus of Charis See some fanatastic chairs by famous artists from here.

Dragon chair looks like an Elephant

Claude Miller 1942-2012
(image source via MUBI)

The typical Miller film has a central figure under a lot of pressure, either self-imposed or coming from others. His is a cruel universe, created with great sensitivity and handled with astonishing ease, fluidity and economy.”

NYtimes obit

Guardian Obit

France 24 obit

Rottiers
I am glad my mother is alive – trailer here

Mr. Rottiers’s strong, un-showy performance suggests that the circumstances of Thomas’s parentage can’t be blamed entirely for his troubles; they may go deeper. One of the film’s strengths is its detached, even-handed view of someone whose turbulence and fits of rage are ultimately inexplicable, as is often the case in real life. (NYtimes film review)

Alias Betty – very entertaining film

The Best Way – his debut film to world of cinema, a challenging subject on transgender.

Two films with Charlotte Gainsbourg

Full film No subtitles Script by Jacques Audiard

The Accompanist <>

The Secret <> <> – his personal film

More photos here (Hommage a Ishimoto Yasuhiro)

Yasuhiro Ishimoto June 14, 1921 – February 6, 2012 was an influential Japanese-American photographer.

From 1942 to 1944, he was interned with other Japanese Americans at the Amache Internment Camp (also known as Granada Relocation Center) in Colorado. It was here that he began to learn photography

Ishimoto

Yasuhiro Ishimoto: writing haikus with a camera

Yasuhiro Ishimoto Visual Bilinguist

While still a student at the Institute of Design in the early 1950s, Ishimoto’s teacher Harry Callahan introduced his work to The Museum of Modern Art photography curator Edward Steichen, who would exhibit it in the seminal 1955 Family of Man group show and a later solo show in 1961.

Between Japanese Tradition and Western Modernism

Pay or Die

Tilda Swinton (photo by by Simon Annand)

We need to talk about this film – trailer

April 1 was Dan Flavin‘s birthday!
Here is “Looking at Flavin’s neon wall sculpture”

Minimoma by Craig Robinson

Gifs for Fools

The Clown Family

Happy birthday Milan Kundera!
“The Joke”, was his first novel. Milan Kundera was born on April 1 on April fool’s day.

Childhood adventure
Fifty centimeters deep –
Witch, lion, Aspelund via (Haikea – Poetry blog for the furniture of Melancholy )