Vitro Nasu

R.I.P. Ben Gazarra

Ben Gazzara, an intense actor whose long career included playing Brick in the original “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” on Broadway, roles in influential films by John Cassavetes and work with several generations of top Hollywood directors, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 81.

In Cassavetes’s Husbands (1970), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) and Opening Night (1976), “he plays varieties of himself, as Cassavetes saw him: the moderate man who loses his head and takes immoderate action,” blogs the New Yorker’s Richard Brody.

MUBI obit

“Making Saint Jack was one of the great experiences of my life,” Gazzara told Ben Slater, author of Kinda Hot, which tells the story of the making of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1979 adaptation of Paul Theroux’s novel.

Interview of Ben Gazarra on Charlie Rose

I was enraptured. I was flattered that someone like that would be in love with me. But I didn’t know how deeply she was in love with me until I left her. She told others, not me, that I broke her heart. That’s the kind of classy woman she was.”read more here

Ben and Audrey co-starred in two films, Bloodline (1979) and They All Laughed (1981).. (usually overlooked by Audrey Hepburn fans).

Full movie on youtube was taken down..but luckily saw the film last week on youtube.

Quite possibly the most stunning shot in Fassbinder’s entire oeuvre: two dizzying orbits, and two destinies intertwined with consummate precision.(commentary via youtube)

Martha review here.

Martha, long unavailable, proves to be one of Fassbinder’s dramatic and visual triumphs. It features a brilliantly stylized performance from star Margit Carstensen and the virtuosic camerawork of Fassbinder’s frequent collaborator, Michael Ballhaus. This riveting tale of a sado-masochistic marriage is astonishing in its balance of psychological horror and pitch-black comedy.

Wislawa Szymborska

R.I.P. Wislawa Szymborska Feb 1, 2012 (Poetry Foundation)

Well-known in her native Poland, Wisława Szymborska received international recognition when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. In awarding the prize, the Academy praised her “poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.”

(Washington Post)

Szymborska, a heavy smoker, died in her sleep of lung cancer Wednesday evening at her home in the southern city of Krakow, her personal secretary Michal Rusinek said.

Three Poems by Wislawa
Possibilites

Three Oddest Words

First Love

Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst

Dorothea Tanning Surrealist Painter Dies at 101 .

PBS on Mike Kelly see another video.

Mike Kelley dead at 58 – an apparent suicide

Who is this?
Brithdate: January 30, 1882
Check this link to get an answer.
When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink? (an impotant question)

Seven Story Mountain

Today is the 97th anniversary of the birth of louie louie. He is a good photographer

With his sister Rosemarie 1940.
His early life in Jerusalem.. (youtube).

Beauty and Brain (Tilda and I)

In Memory of my feeling

His bathroom monologue

He likes to bike.

Costume and Sand Hong Kong Blues

(Mishima by Paul Schrader)

NYtimes

Eiko Ishioka, Multifaceted Designer and Oscar Winner, Dies at 73

LAtimes

The Tokyo native who later moved to New York began her convention-defying career in Japanese advertising but eventually expanded it to include design work for Broadway, the movies and Cirque du Soleil.

Eiko Ishioka
石岡 瑛子, Ishioka Eiko, July 12, 1939, Tokyo – January 21, 2012, Tokyo

In a career marked by great versatility, Ishioka won a Grammy Award in 1986 for best album package as art director for Miles Davis’ “Tutu.”
Her sets and costumes for David Henry Hwang’s Broadway play “M. Butterfly” earned her two Tony Award nominations in 1988.

Faye Dunaway
1) Eiko Ishioka (with Faye Dunaway) for Japanese department store, Parco

2) Faye Dunaway Peels an Egg - (youtube)

The Fall
See The Fall – trailer (Previous post – Captive Girls)

Our first marriage from the Fall (youtube)

Bjork Cocoon (youtube)

Eiko Ishioka filmography

A Tribute to Ishioka

Tilda Swinton on Virginia Woolf (Telegraph)

When Tilda Swinton first discovered Virginia Woolf’s ‘Orlando’, she embraced it as a practical guide to living. Fifteen years later she played the gender-hopping hero on screen. Now, as a new edition is published, the actress maps the obsessions behind Woolf’s revolutionary novel

Roger Fry’s portrait painting of Virginia Woolf

Virginia Via
25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941

Painting of Virginia Woolf by her sister Vanessa Bell

Recently departed Etta James was also born on Jan 25.

Etta James January 25, 1938 – January 20, 2012
She would have been 74 years old today.

Funeral set for Saturday

Etta James her lonely sound

She was an accident, born to a fourteen-year-old black girl in Depression-era Los Angeles. She never knew her father, but thought that he might have been the famous white pool player, Rudolf “Minnesota Fats” Wanderone, whom she met in the nineteen-eighties.

Salon five great youtube moments

Filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos hit by a motorcycle. R.I.P

SOPA black out protest makes history – Amy Goodman
Artists opposing the PROTECT-IP / SOPA Act

If you hate big government – no 2 SOPA

Take action - google message here

We answer your questions during wiki black out.

See more quote from Emmanuel Levinas

Emmanuel Levinas

12 January 1906

His work is based on the ethics of the Other or, in Levinas’ terms, on “ethics as first philosophy”. For Levinas, the Other is not knowable and cannot be made into an object of the self, as is done by traditional metaphysics

Levinas Text(via)

Other birthdays
Alice James or or Mrs William James
Water color portrait by John Singer Sargent
Born On January 12, 1856

Wiiliam James January 11, 1842

Eve Arnold a famous Magnum photographer who showed Marilyn reading James Joyce died at 99.

Parting Glance (lens.blogs NYtimes obit)

“Eve was a dynamo,” Ms. Meiselas said. “She might have been small and compact, but she was just unbelievably productive and hugely generous.”
She was outspoken, too. “She didn’t hold back in a gang of men. She was very present and encouraging and generous, in a sense — to me as a young woman, but also in a collective spirit.”

Eve Arnold self-portrait

Malcolm X

See Andy Warhol photos from Magnum collection (see him exercising, using toilet as his chair)

Guardian selection

More photos

Stephen Colbert interviews Neils deGrasse Tyson

Lunar Tom Sachs

Black hole lensing – Moving Side by Side

Tom Sachs Nasa

Happy New Year 2012

<> <>

Slipper dance or shuffle.

Helen Frankenthaler died at 83

Like Diane Arbus Helen Frankenthaler came from a wealthy family, unlike Arbus, Helen was at home in the 1% world enjoying access to influential people, to a life of comfort and, to laughter.

With Motherwell
(Motherwell upstairs and Helen below) As the Wifewell of Robert Motherwell, she enjoyed entertaining guests, threw a big party. They were the Olivier and Vivien of the art world, elegant, erudite (Motherwell was) and grand.
Helen and Motherwell divorced, Nancy Spero and Leon Golub they were not.. (an enduring activists/artists who painted violence.)

Telegraph obit

In 1953 Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland were both profoundly influenced by Helen Frankenthaler’s stain paintings they were brought to her studio in 1953 by critic Clement Greenberg her lover at the time, the artist was not there.
If Helen did not date Clement what would have happend to Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis?

(James Brooks was amongst the first abstract expressionists to use staining as an important technique. According to Carter Ratcliff) See his gorgeous paintings..

<> <> <>

NYtimes – Grace GluecK

In 1972, Ms. Frankenthaler made a less successful foray into sculpture, spending two weeks at Mr. Caro’s London studio. With no experience in the medium but aided by a skilled assistant, she welded together found steel parts in a way that evoked the work of David Smith.

Although she enjoyed the experience, she did not repeat it. Knoedler gave the work its first public showing in 2006.

Ward Schumaker on Helen’s Sculpture (via email).

“For a very long time I had a photo of one of her sculptures in my wall, a bronze, looking a bit like a blown up film canister, and no one recognized that it was her work. But when told, many would gasp and sat, now, I really like that, I didn’t know she did anything like that , so lovely, amazing, really. I like many of her paintings but, as with Twombly, I prefer the sculptures.”
“I think this is hers, but it’s not the piece I fell in love with.”

Collection of obits here.. including a scathing review by Charlie Finch. .. no surprise there.. he likes to pinch.

Over on Artnet, Charlie Finch declares that Ms. Frankenthaler “was another one of those painters who, like the recently deceased George Tooker, basically made one painting,” Mountains and Sea (1952)—which, he writes, “inspired so many lazy imitations in studios across the world, including that of Frankenthaler herself.”

LA Obit

Frankenthaler did take a highly public stance during the late 1980s “culture wars” that eventually led to deep budget cuts for the National Endowment for the Arts and a ban on grants to individual artists that still persists. At the time, she was a presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts, which advises the NEA’s chairman.
In a 1989 commentary for the New York Times, she wrote that, while “censorship and government interference in the directions and standards of art are dangerous and not part of the democratic process,” controversial grants to Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe and others reflected a trend in which the NEA was supporting work “of increasingly dubious quality. Is the council, once a helping hand, now beginning to spawn an art monster? Do we lose art … in the guise of endorsing experimentation?”