Vitro Nasu

Cynthia MacAdams wiki

Portrait from Cynthia MacAdams book, “Emergence”

(Portrait of Kate Millet by Cynthia MacAams)

Kate Millet a pioneer feminist (Previous post)

Cynthia MacAdams (born Cynthia Rose Adams, September 5, 1939) is an American actress and photographer. She is recognized for her black and white portraiture,[1][2] use of natural light and infrared photography, and images of sacred architecture

Cynthia MacAadams photographer com

Chogyam Trungpa
Rinpoche was the founder of Naropa Shambala Vision

Photo via Frank Zappa Hot Rats Anniversary Collection

“Zappa” documentary directed by Alex Winter
(Streaming at Kanopy)

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.

Zappa and Vaclav Havel – see the photo of them, here.
(Zappa’s visit to Prague was covered in this documentary).

Letter to Edgard Varese, Zappa was 16 years old

Dear Sir:

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.

Kronos

See Frank Zappa art

Zappa Homepage

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(Kamikaze Girls – singer Anna Tsuchiya as Ichigo – the biker girl, she was ferocious.)

Lolita Fashion, Biker Gangs and the Power of Friendship

One thing about this film that really stood out to me is the stylish editing and cinematography.

Kamikaze Girls wiki

Kamikaze Girls was awarded Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress, and two other awards at the 26th Yokohama Film Festival.[8] It also won Best Film and Best Director at the 14th Japan Film Professional Awards.[15] For her performance in the film, Anna Tsuchiya was named Best New Actress at the Awards of the Japanese Academy, the Blue Ribbon Awards, and the Hochi Film Awards

Fred with Ann Archer

219G-148-001
SHORT CUTS PORTRAITS

Via Adrian Martin from FB. (I did not know that Fred Ward was directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet)

R.I.P. Fred Ward. A great actor, and what an incredible range of directors he managed to work with: Roberto Rossellini, Walter Hill, Jonathan Demme, Don Siegel, Beth B, Philip Kaufman, Dennis Hopper, George Armitage, Rachel Talalay, Errol Morris, Robert Altman, Alan Rudolph, Michael Apted, Howard Zieff … and Alain Robbe-Grillet ! … and I haven’t even made it yet to the delightful SECRET ADMIRER.

Henry & June

Fred Ward wiki

Freddie Joe Ward was born in San Diego on December 30, 1942.[1][2] He was part Cherokee.[3] His father was an alcoholic who was frequently incarcerated, and his parents separated when he was three. His mother remarried, to a man who worked in a carnival, and the family moved frequently.[4]> Before acting, Ward spent three years in the United States Air Force. He was also a boxer (breaking his nose three times) and worked as a lumberjack in Alaska,[5][6] a janitor, and a short-order cook. He studied acting at New York’s Herbert Berghof Studio after serving in the U.S. Air Force. While living in Rome, he dubbed Italian films into English and appeared in films by neorealist director Roberto Rossellini

Guardian obit

Veteran actor Fred Ward, star of The Right Stuff and Tremors, dies aged 79

The character actor was part of the ensemble casts of Robert Altman’s films Short Cuts and The Player, and had a career in film and television that spanned five decades

Mario A

Mario A curated paintings by Léonard Foujita and Guenichiro Inokuma at Chuo Gallery in Ginza

Guen I.
Guen (this is how he signed his art) came to live in Honolulu in the mid 70’s after he suffered a stroke in NYC. He lived in Japan in the Summer and the Winter in Honolulu. Guen became a mentor to my sister Fung-Ching Kelling during his stays in Honolulu.

(My sister Fung Ching Kelling sitting in front. Fung Lin Hall (myself) on the right of Guen Inokuma)

In My Resume (youtube only in Japanese)

.. Inokuma and Foujita shared a house when they escaped wartime Paris. He talked about how Foujita bought the train tickets at the train station (today Musee d`Orsay) and that he only took a Matisse painting and left everything else in Paris. They stayed in the countryside more than month living in the same house.
He showed us a special spot that Isamu Noguchi loved on the island of Oahu and showed us the beauty of natural rocks.
In NY Guen Inokuma (sensei) and his wife Fumiko took my sister and I to Mark Rothko’s apartment and told us what he knew of Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Yoko Ono and Isamu Noguchi were his good friends.

Painting (via artnet)
Title : City Composition (3)
Medium : Oil on Canvas
Size : 30 x 40 in. / 76.2 x 101.6 cm.
Year : 1966 –
Contemporary Japanese Art from the Collection of B.H. Rockefeller

(Toshiko D. Hamaoka, Boy’s Festival in May, watercolor, 1945. Depicts koinobori hanging from poles between Tule Lake barracks)

Children’s Day in Japan

Name These Children archive

George Nobechi – CV

George Nobechi is a photographer whose work focuses on disconnection, duality and longing. As a bicultural Japanese/Canadian he is simultaneously an insider and outsider in Eastern and Western cultures and it is this “intimate distance” and space in between two cultures that is the unifying thread of his work.

See more here George Nobechi – Lens Culture

Marjorie Perloff -Marcel Duchamp & Wittgenstein (From Tablet)

At 90, the poetry critic Marjorie Perloff doesn’t want to analyze verse. She wants to discuss Wittgenstein and Duchamp

Network of Stoppages

(Marjolie Perloff on Wittgenstein and Marcel Duchamp)

Marjorie: They did have a lot in common. They were almost exact contemporaries, you know—only two years apart. Duchamp was born in 1887, and Wittgenstein was born in 1889. And they both had training in engineering and mathematics. They made equations. There’s Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages. That is the key work. I really do think so.

Wittgenstein Archive

Marcel Duchamp Network of Stoppages – 2018

(Chloe Zhao and Brady Jandreau)

See their interview on youtube here

How, horse, actors, six man crew Chloe Zhao made Rider (Film Independent blog)

Happy birthday Chloe Zhao !

In 2017, Zhao directed The Rider, a contemporary western drama, which follows a young cowboy’s journey to self-discovery after a near-fatal accident ends his professional riding career.[38] The film was executive produced by her father, Yuji Zhao.[39] As with her first feature, Zhao engaged a cast of non-actors who lived at the filming location, in this case on a ranch.[40] Her inspiration came from Brady Jandreau—a cowboy she had met and befriended on the reservation where she shot her first film—who suffered a severe head injury when thrown from his horse during a rodeo competition.[41] Jandreau would star in the film, playing a fictionalized version of himself as Brady Blackburn

Zhao now resides in the Topatopa Mountains in Ojai, California with three chickens, Red, Cebe, and Lucille and two dogs, Taco and Rooster[81] and her partner and cinematographer, Joshua James Richards.[11] Richards and Zhao met while Zhao was researching for her first feature film Songs My Brother Taught Me and Richards was still a film student at NYU. He has been her cinematographer for her next two films and served as camera operator on Marvel’s Eternals.

Happy birthday Xavier Dolan

Xavier Dolan MUBI
(“Tom At The Farm” described as Beautiful, Interesting, Incredible Cinema)

Gaspard Ulliel
(And Xavier Dolan)

Xavier Dolan’s emotional tribute to Gaspard Ulliel at Cesar Awards

Melvil Poupaud
Laurence Anyways directed by Xavier Dolan.

Great interview on Xavier Dolan Melvil was eloquent. (Youtube)

Sad news, William Hurt passed away on March 13, 2022, he was 71 years old.

William Hurt
A Couch in New York, directed by Chantal Akerman

(William Hurt and Sandrine Bonnaire were in the Plague an adaptation of Albert Camus novel. They had a daughter. William Hurt appeared in Bonnaire’s documentary film years later).

William Hurt, Harvey Keitel

“My Inspiration is no longer drawn from the cinema” (MUBI)

(Celine Sciama scripted “Being 17”, here Techine with Sciama and actors from Being 17)

Andre Techine wiki

Brontes Sisters

Brontes Sisters – Modern Family – art forum

Sensitive to the extreme limits the Brontë sisters faced owing to their sex, Téchiné is careful not to overdramatize the fact that Charlotte, Emily, and Anne all published, in 1847, their first novels under male pseudonyms (becoming, respectively, the “brothers” Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell). The director’s insistence on understatement—though never at the expense of diminishing the anguish and thwarted desire the sisters endured during their too-short lives (all died before reaching the age of forty)—clearly guided the performances as well.

Roland Barthes as an actor

Roland Barthes

(Via Téchiné wiki)

Téchiné is noted for his elegant and emotionally charged films that often delve into the complexities of human condition and emotions. An intimist flavor pervades his work. One of Téchiné’s trademarks is the lyrical examination of human relations in a sensitive but unsentimental way. Influenced by Roland Barthes, Bertolt Brecht, Ingmar Bergman, William Faulkner and the cinematic French New Wave, Téchiné’s originality lies in his subtle exploration of sexuality and national identity, as he challenges expectations in his depictions of gay relations, the North African dimensions of contemporary French culture, and the center-periphery relationship between Paris and his native Southwest.[6] Shy and ascetic-looking, Téchiné does not opine on political issues and rarely appears on television.[2] Fear of flying prevents him from attending most film openings or festivals more than a train ride from his Paris apartment overlooking the Luxembourg Garden.[2]

“I never know how each film will end,” Téchiné has said. “When I’m filming, I shoot each scene as if it were a short film. It’s only when I edit that I worry about the narrative. My objective is to tell a story, but that’s the final thing I do