Vitro Nasu

Shusaku Endo

Photo by Mario A

Shusaku Endo

His books reflect many of his childhood experiences, including the stigma of being an outsider, the experience of being a foreigner, the life of a hospital patient, and the struggle with TB. However, his books mainly deal with the moral fabric of life. His Catholic faith can be seen at some level in all of his books and it is often a central feature. Most of his characters struggle with complex moral dilemmas, and their choices often produce mixed or tragic results. His work may often be compared to that of Graham Greene.

Silence Martin Scorsese and Shusaku Endo’s ‘Silence’

Shusaku Endo – born on 27 March 1923 in Tokyo – moved with his family to Dailan in Manchuria while still very young. He stayed there until the age of 10 when his mother took him back to Japan after divorcing his father. After returning to Japan to live in Kobe with his mother and an aunt, those early years in Manchuria may have created in Endo a sense of alienation from mainstream Japanese culture that profoundly affected him. The defining moment of his life, however, was his baptism as a Catholic in 1934. His struggles to reconcile himself with a faith that was and still is very much a minority in Japan, his experiences as an outsider and with hospitalization for pleurisy and tuberculosis – all of these deeply impacted his sensibilities and thematic preoccupations as a novelist.

Tadanobu Asano replaced Ken Watanabe. He played the interpreter for the priests in “Silence”.

Sea and Poison
Kei Kumai
Wonderful Fool

Shusaku Endo was an extremely funny man, a satirist who made a fortune presenting long-running humorous Japanese TV shows and was something of a household name.

Adam Purple, Legendary Gardner 84 is Dead – Was Biking Across Williamsburg Bridge

Adam Purple

Adam Purple (died September 15, 2015) was an activist and urban Edenist or “Guerrilla Gardener” famous in New York City from the seventies to the present day. His name at birth was David Wilkie, though he’s gone by many others, including the Rev. Les Ego.

He is often considered the godfather of the urban gardening movement, and his “Garden of Eden” was a well-known garden on the Lower East Side of Manhattan until it was demolished in January 1986 to make way for low-income housing.[3][5][6][7] He is one of fifty subjects featured in Harvey Wang’s New York, a book of photographs and brief biographies of notable and colorful New Yorkers

See photo of Adam by Lawrence Swan

John-Perreault-noted-art-critic-for-the-village-voice-and-artnews-dies-at-78

via
Hannah Weiner, Scott Burton, Anne Waldman, Vito Acconi, Bernadette Mayer, Eduardo Costa and John Perreault, NYC, 1969

NYtimes obit

Mr. Perreault started out as a poet and painter, but after being recommended by the poet and art critic John Ashbery, he began writing criticism for Art News.

Portrait of John P by Alice Neel

Art Experience Interview

John Perreault as Vincent Van
Gogh in Les Levine’s Analyze
Lovers, The Story of Vincent,
for Dutch National Television.
Courtesy John Perreault

New Marcel Duchamp Interviews

Dada Perfume Marcel Duchamp Interview

Ubu Roi
Ubu Roi

It is considered a wild, bizarre and comic play, significant for the way it overturns cultural rules, norms, and conventions. For those who were in the audience on that night to witness the response, including William Butler Yeats, it seemed an event of revolutionary importance. It is now seen by some to have opened the door for what became known as modernism in the twentieth century. It is a precursor to Dada, Surrealism and Theatre of the Absurd. It is the first of three stylised burlesques in which Jarry satirises power, greed, and their evil practices—in particular the propensity of the complacent bourgeoisie to abuse the authority engendered by success.

Alfred Jarry
Born 8 September 1873
Laval, Mayenne, France
Died 1 November 1907 (aged 34)
Paris, France

Guardian-
Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life by Alastair Brotchie – review

Both Burroughs and Ballard were inspired by him, he had a profound influence on the British authors associated with New Worlds magazine, and was admired by artists from Duchamp to Paolozzi as well as any number of playwrights, including Artaud, Beckett and Ionesco. His posthumous Exploits and Opinions of Dr Faustroll, Pataphysician has been cited several of today’s most innovative authors. This fine biography, written with loving honesty by Alastair Brotchie, is the best to date.

The Fiction duo (J.G. Ballard and Alfred Jarry)

Raymond Queneau, Jean Genet, Eugène Ionesco, Boris Vian were Pataphysics followers.

Jarry’s Bike (previous post)

Alfred Jarry was played by an actress, Annette Robertson in Always on Sunday (a film by Ken Russell on Henri Rousseau’s bio pic)

(via)

John Cage met Marcel Duchamp in the 1940’s
(Only when Duchamp’s health was failing, Cage decided to seek Marcel out with the pretext of taking chess lessons. So Duchamp, his wife and Cage met and played chess.)

Silence (repost) Time Lapse

Stones by John Cage
(image source)

satieE

goes in seaRch

of sunlIght he comes across haydn

bill anastasi is looKing at haydn through a lorgnetter

Vexations – Satie and John Cage

‘What a writer learns from Cendrars is to follow his nose, to obey life’s commands, to worship no other god but life.’ – Henry Miller

Cendrars by Modigliani

Blaise Cendrars : September 1, 1887

Blaise Cendrars was born Frédéric Louis Sauser
Cendrars… the name he chose was a mix of cendres, ashes, and ars, or art.

“I am haunted by no phantoms. It is rather that the ashes I stir up contain the crystallization that hold the image (reduced or synthetic) of the living and impure beings that they constituted before the intervention of the fire. If life has a meaning, this image (from the beyond?) has perhaps some significance. That is what I should like to know. And it is why I write.”(BLAISE CENDRARS [the greatest poetic spirit of the 20th century] )

Yasuo Kuniyoshi 1 September 1893

Yasuo Kuniyoshi A Modernist often overlooked gets a Smithsonian Retrospective (see many images here)

Kuniyoshi portrait by Arnold Newman

Vittorio Gassman was Il Mattatore
Al Pacino’s Scent of a woman was a remake.. Vittorio played first. His early film Mambo was a hit..he did some Hollywood films. . Vittorio seduced Audrey (War & Peace) and played opposite Elizabeth Taylor, married Shelley Winters.. had a daughter. Gassman played an Italian Patriarch in The Family.

Vittorio Gassman recites Cesar Pavese – Death Will Come With Your Eyes

Vittorio Gassman 1 September 1922