In 2012, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art debuted Levitated Mass by Michael Heizer. How it got there was a work of art in itself, and the topic of a documentary by Doug Pray. Derek Blasberg caught up with Pray to talk about his film.
Isolated Mass / Circumflex (#2) Artist: Michael Heizer 1968/1978 Mayari-R steel 146 × 1461 × 8 in. (370.8 × 3710.9 × 20.3 cm) Place Created: United States, North America
De Menil
Michael Heizer Isolated Mass./Cucumflex 2 1968
https://www.menil.org/exhibitions/260-outdoor-sculpture-at-the-menil
Author Any Tan and her mother in a still used in James Redford’s documentary “Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir.”
“I was very reluctant to do it, but Jamie was a very charming person,” Tan said. “… When I watched this documentary, I said, ‘Gosh, I look like I’m on the verge of crying all the time,’ and I think that I was, because it was just talking to him and very openly. He was somebody that I trusted so much that I felt he was never going to judge me, he was never going to pity me, he was just going to listen.”
The two became close during the nearly three years spent making the film.
“He got a little obsessed with Amy, I have to say,” said Kyle Redford, with a laugh. “We couldn’t get into a car without playing one of Amy’s stories. No music, no NPR anymore, just Amy on audio!”
Kyle Redford said her husband was drawn to making a documentary about Tan because he needed a break from “problem” documentaries, which he felt had saturated the market —and yet her story appealed to his sensibilities.
Alex Winter’s Documentary Hauntingly Captures the Skewed Passion of Frank Zappa, a One-of-a-Kind Rock Legend
The film finds an emotional through line by taking Frank Zappa as seriously as he took himself.
Perhaps you might remember me from my stupid phone call last January, if not, my name again is Frank Zappa Jr. I am 16 years old … that might explain partly my disturbing you last winter. The reason for my letter at this time is that I am visiting relatives in Baltimore and as long as I am on the East Coast I hope I can get to see you.
It might seem strange but ever since I was 13 I have been interested in your music. The whole thing stems from the time when the keeper of this little record store sold me your album “The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse, Vol.l.” The only reason I knew it existed was that an article in either LOOK or the POST mentioned it as being noisy and unmusical and only good for trying out the sound systems in high fidelity units (referring to your “IONIZATIONS” [sic]). I don’t know how the store I got it from ever obtained it, but, after several hearings, I became curious and bought it for $5.40, which, at the time seemed awfully high and being so young, kept me broke for three weeks. Now I wouldn’t trade it for anything and I am looking around for another copy as the one I have is very worn and scratchy.
One of the most captivating documentaries about a journalist I’ve seen in a long while. If you are parents of teenagers, show this film, they can learn important history of America, not just Rock’n Roll.
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(Ben Fong-Torres (left) and Art Garfunkel (right) mimic a famous album cover)
He conducted interviews for Rolling Stone of entertainment figures including Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, comedian Steve Martin and Linda Ronstadt’s first cover story in 1975. He also profiled Marvin Gaye, Sly and the Family Stone, Bonnie Raitt, Paul McCartney and Rodney Dangerfield. A Fong-Torres interview with Ray Charles was awarded the Deems Taylor Award for Magazine Writing in 1974.
Fong-Torres was also a rock DJ for San Francisco radio station KSAN-FM in the 1970s. He later hosted a live, weekly entertainment and talk show, Fog City Radio, on NPR affiliate KQED-FM. On television, he is the five-time Emmy Award-winning co-anchor of the Chinese New Year Parade broadcast on KTVU (Fox) in San Francisco.
What does it mean to live on the edge of the country, but at the heart of art?
At her spectacular oceanfront farm in Newfoundland, performance artist Colette Urban becomes a half woman-half bear, dances a tango while strapped into bungee cords, wheels nonsensical record contraptions and turns herself into a parody of consumer goods.
“I am timid in the real world. Performance and this idea of disguise are a real comfort to me. I’m not me. I’m someone else once I am in that role of the performer.”
This is a film about following a dream, having courage and believing in oneself. It’s about embracing risk and sustaining courage through acts of the imagination. It’s an astonishing representation of Colette Urban’s enigmatic art performances set against the rugged beauty of rural Newfoundland
Review here
Ziff has pulled off an astonishing accomplishment with Witkin and Witkin. The film works on many levels. Firstly, the viewer is drawn into the “weird news” curiosity about identical twins who go their separate ways. Then comes the compelling rush of fascination around the art they make. Finally, she delivers a tender, charming look at two very different lives of artists have gone through many experiences and relationships. It combines a sideshow with an art course and a twin biography that is exceedingly entertaining.
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(Still Life with Mirror – Joel Peter Witkin
In December 1966, Barzini was named one of the “100 Great Beauties of the World” by the American fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar. She began training at the Actors Studio around that time,[4] and in the process became romantically involved with, and later engaged to, New York poet and media artist Gerard Malanga, an early collaborator of Andy Warhol.[5] He would dedicate various works to her, such as his Poems for Benedetta Barzini and The Last Benedetta Poems.[4] Additionally, Malanga’s 1967 black-and-white film In Search of the Miraculous is an emotional, vivid poem of adoration for Barzini.
Benedetta Barzini in a dress by Norell. Photo by Irving Penn. Vogue, April 1, 1965.
Barzini was discovered at age 20 on the streets of Rome[3] by Consuelo Crespi in 1963; Diana Vreeland soon thereafter received photographs of Barzini and sent a telegram asking if she could come to Manhattan to shoot for American Vogue[3] with Irving Penn
(Benedetta Barzini and Marcel Duchamp – from “The Dissapearance of My Mother’)
American portraitist Elsa Dorfman, known for her intimate large-format Polaroids of friends, artists, celebrities, and herself, has died at age eighty-three from kidney failure, the Boston Globe reports.
Raising awareness
Dorfman suggested elements of healing through her work in a variety of ways. She photographed terminal cancer patients, emphasizing their dignity. In 1995, she collaborated with graphic artist Marc A. Sawyer to illustrate the booklet 40 Ways to Fight the Fight Against AIDS. She photographed people, both with and without AIDS, each engaged in one of forty activities that might help AIDS victims in their daily life. The photographs were exhibited 1995 at the Lotus Development Corporation in Cambridge, in Provincetown and in New York City. The artist donated the costs of producing the photographs for this project.[16]
Dorfman co-starred in the documentary No Hair Day (1999) as she’s taking the portraits of three women undergoing treatment for breast cancer
The above image shows two books by Robert Creeley, the one pictured is Elsa’s Housebook which I bought on my first trip to Boston.
Dylan has written notable hits such as “6th Avenue Heartache” and “One Headlight”, which is listed at number 58 on Rolling Stone’s list of the “100 Greatest Pop Songs”. He has won two Grammy Awards, and released two solo albums: Seeing Things in 2008 and Women + Country in 2010. Women + Country became Dylan’s highest-charting album since the Wallflowers’ 1996 breakthrough Bringing Down the Horse, peaking at number 12 on the Billboard 200.
The film, directed by Dylan’s manager and former record exec Andy Slater, combines history lessons with new performances of the era’s music (from “In My Room” to “Goin’ Back”) from Fiona Apple, Beck and others. Dylan found himself nostalgic for an era before his birth. “There was a lot of support,” he says, “and a lot of tradition.”
To Edna Gundersen, USA Today:
GUNDERSEN: Your son Jakob has been very much in the spotlight this year. Do you worry about him?
DYLAN: I’m proud of his accomplishments. He’s still young, and he’s come a long way in a short time. I worried about him when he started out. I just didn’t want to see him get roughed up. This business can really throw you into deep water. He’s had his ups and downs. What he does with the future remains to be seen, but he and his band have done rather well. In the contemporary music scene, they have got a voice to be heard.
Much more interesting to me was the film he attempted to make in 1969, tentatively titled 1 AM (or One American Movie). A collaboration with cinema-verite pioneers D. A. Pennabaker and Richard Leacock, the project was abandoned after Godard lost interest during the editing phase but Pennebaker ended up completing his own version of the existing footage which he titled 1 PM (or One Parallel Movie). This is a brief history of the film’s journey from concept to screen.
On Don’t Look Back – “What I thought was, this person is trying to generate himself,” Pennebaker told The New York Times in 2016. “He’s trying to figure out who he is and what he wants to do. So I filmed him talking to people and listening to people. When the concerts came, I would only shoot little parts of them. I didn’t want it to be a music film. I wanted it to be a film about a person who was finding out who he was.” (via Rollingstone obit)