Vitro Nasu

John Berger dies aged 90.

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Bento (Berger)

A meditation, in words and images, on the practice of drawing, by the author of Ways of Seeing
The seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza—also known as Benedict or Bento de Spinoza—spent the most intense years of his short life writing. He also carried with him a sketchbook. After his sudden death, his friends rescued letters, manuscripts, notes—but no drawings.

For years, without knowing what its pages might hold, John Berger has imagined finding Bento’s sketchbook, wanting to see the drawings alongside his surviving words. When one day a friend gave him a beautiful virgin sketchbook, Berger said, “This is Bento’s!” and he began to draw, taking his inspiration from the philosopher’s vision.

In this illustrated color book John Berger uses the imaginative space he creates to explore the process of drawing, politics, storytelling and Spinoza’s life and times.

Tilda Swinton on making ‘The Seasons in Quincy’, four short films about maverick artist and thinker John Berger.

For Swinton, making the film was a chance to spend time with someone who had become a firm friend. “I wanted a glimpse of his gimlet eye and a blast of his company,” is how she puts it. “I went to find him in Quincy for a check-in, for a catch-up, for a chinwag.”

Previous post – Ways of Seeing – John Bergmer.

“Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.” John Berger.. (Michael Ondaatjie quoted J.B. in his forward of his novel In the Skin of a Lion)

John Berger collaborated with Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner who made inspiring films in the 70’s – (Tanner’s Messidor was remade as Thelma and Louise in Hollywood).

Revisionsing Europe the films of John Berger and Alain Tanner

is among the few existing English-language discussions of the films made by British novelist John Berger and Swiss film director Alain Tanner. It brings to light a political cinema that was unsentimental about the possibilities of revolutionary struggle and unsparing in its critique of the European left, and at the same time optimistic about the ability of radicalism and radical art to transform the world

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The Philosopher of Failure: Emil Cioran’s Heights of Despair
-By Costica Bradatan

On Two types of societies –

All societies are bad; but there are degrees, I admit, and if I have chosen this one, it is because I can distinguish among the nuances of trumpery” .

Emil Cioran (1911–1995) was a Romanian-born French philosopher and author of some two dozen books of savage, unsettling beauty. He is an essayist in the best French tradition, and even though French was not his native tongue, many think him among the finest writers in that language. His writing style is whimsical, unsystematic, fragmentary; he is celebrated as one of the great masters of aphorism. But the “fragment” was for Cioran more than a writing style: it was a vocation and a way of life; he called himself “un homme de fragment.”

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)

(repost, see other philosophers)

10 Delightfully Surly Books for the Relentless Pessimist

(via)

A further glimpse into Cioran’s peculiar manner of political thinking, in a letter he sent to Mircea Eliade in 1935: “My formula for all things political,” he writes, “is the following: fight wholeheartedly for things in which you do not believe.” Not that such a confession brings much clarity to Cioran’s involvement, but it places his “ravings” within a certain psychological perspective. This split personality characterized the later Cioran, and it makes sense, for a philosopher who sees the world as a failure of grand proportions, to mock the cosmic order (and himself in the process) by pretending that there is some meaning where there is none. You know that everything is pointless, but by behaving as if it wasn’t, you manage to articulate your dissent and undermine the designs of the “evil demiurge.” And you do that with boundless irony and humor, which is rigorously meant to counter the divine farce. He who laughs last laughs hardest.

Coffee and Cigarettes – Cate Blanchet in two roles.

Jim Jarmusch dedicated Broken Flower to Jean Eustache

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The Mother and The Whore directed by Jean Eustache.

(Picasso, Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus and Picasso’s dog)

Simone de Beauvoir – Paris with Sartre, Chicago with Nelson Algren.

Monty Clift as Freud

Sartre and John Huston

Open Culture – Jean Paul Sartre writes a script for John Huston’s film on Freud

Ralph Waldo Emerson -b. May 25, 1803

1) When asked to sum up his work, he said his central doctrine was “the infinitude of the private man.” Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of fellow Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau (via wiki )
Walt Whitman sent a copy of Leaves of Grass to Emerson.
Emerson was strongly influenced by the Vedas, and much of his writing has strong shades of nondualism. One of the clearest examples of this can be found in his essay “The Over-soul”:

Quotes by Emerson

Children are all foreigners.

Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Emerson tweets
– What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think
– I can find my biography in every fable.

Raymond Carver -b. May 25, 1938

Prose as Architecture: two interviews with Raymond Carver

Suppose I say summer,
write the word “hummingbird,”
put it in an envelope,
take it down the hill
to the box. When you open
my letter you will recall
those days and how much,
just how much, I love you.
Raymond Carver

Dreams Are What We Wake Up From, directed by Daisy Goodwin. (Youtube)

Theodore Rothke

b. May 25, 1908
photo by Imogen Cunningham, 1959

MY PAPA’S WALTZ

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

5 Poems by Rothke on youtube here.

Italian author and philosopher Umberto Eco dies at 84

A great Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist has gone where names of roses never fade – – Citizen 5

His homepage

Playing music with his wife.

Paris Review – Umberto Eco

His quotes –

“Then why do you want to know?”

Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.”

I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Further, Umberto Eco is an expert on the subject of 007, which adds him to the worldwide group of bondologs (“Bondologists,” Scandinavian expression for an expert in the field of James Bond).

Umberto on Lists.

“I sat with Suzuki on the sofa and we talked of all kinds of things to do with Zen and with life … For once in a long time I felt as if I had spent a few moments with my own family.” (Dancing in the Water of Life, pp. 116-117)

“One had to meet this man in order to fully appreciate him. He seemed to me to embody all the indefinable qualities of the “Superior Man” of the ancient Asian, Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist traditions. Or, rather in meeting him one seemed to meet that “True Man of No Title”, that Chuang Tzu and Zen Masters speak of. And of course this is the man one really wants to meet. Who else is there? In meeting Dr. Suzuki and drinking a cup of tea with him I felt I had met this one man. It was like finally arriving at one’s own home.” (Zen and the Birds of Appetite, p. 61)

Thomas Merton met D.T. Suzuki in NYC in 1964

“Without contact with living examples, we soon get lost or give out …. He really understands what interior simplicity is all about and really lives it. This is the important thing.” (Letter to Anglican priest, Fr. Aelred, Dec. 8, 1964, The School of Charity, p. 254)

Seven Story Mountain
Happy birthday louie louie. He is a good photographer

Merton Dalai Lama

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)

Oliver Sacks, doctor of ‘Awakenings’ and poet laureate of medicine, dies at 82

New Yorker

As both a physician and as a writer, Sacks’s two great themes were identity and adaptation.
Oliver Sacks, the Doctor
By Jerome Groopman

Temple Grandin’s moving tribute to Oliver Sacks here. (How Oliver changed her life from Wired)

I’m a visual thinker, and Oliver’s definitely not a visual thinker; he’s a word thinker. But when it came to describing my mind, that’s where he got me right. He was extremely good at getting inside the heads of people who had these different types of neurological disorders.

Oliver Sacks blog

See my Oliver Sack’s Archive.
The Music Never Stopped

Oliver Sack – On the move

“Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.” Oliver Sacks

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Vanishing Techniques – photography of Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard was born on 27 July 1929.

RIP Jean Baudrillard (previous post)
Sainte Beuve

Then, on one of my trips to Japan, I was given a camera, and I began to try it out a bit, taking photographs from the plane on the return journey.
I like photography as something completely empty, ‘irreal’, as something that preserves the idea of a silent apparition.

Marcel Duchamp

Military avoidance

The essay traces military relationships in the work of Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), paying particular attention to his notes of 1912 known as the ‘Jura-Paris Road’. These are interpreted as ‘military texts’ and the author shows how military concerns remained with Duchamp throughout his career, resulting in facetious outcomes that obscured uneasy preoccupations.

Marcel Duchamp was born on 28 July 1887.

The Music Never Stopped

Based on Oliver Sacks’ essay The Last Hippie, the film tells the father-son relationship between Henry Sawyer (J.K. Simmons) and his son, Gabriel (Lou Taylor Pucci), who suffers from a brain tumor that prevents him from forming new memories. Henry, with his son unable to shed light on their strained relationship, must connect with him through music.

Oliver Sacks – My Periodic Table (NYtimes)

11 Beautiful Oliver Sacks Quotes That Capture the The Power of Music

“Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

Oliver Sacks

As Oliver Sacks observes the mind through music, his belief in a science of empathy takes on new dimension.

photo via Doron Gild

On the move,the Brain and the Heart of Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks

Happy birthday Oliver Sacks! (July 9, 1933)

“I sometimes wonder why I have spent more than fifty years in New York, when it was the West, and especially the Southwest, which so enthralled me. I now have many ties in New York—to my patients, my students, my friends, and my analyst—but I have never felt it move me the way California did. I suspect my nostalgia may be not only for the place itself but for youth, and a very different time, and being in love, and being able to say, ‘The future is before me.'” —from ON THE MOVE

David Ehrenstein Exemplary Life of Oliver Sacks

Famed neurologist exchanged his white coat by nightfall for motorcycle leathers

Oliver Sacks on Twitter

Vanity Fair with photo slideshow

Atlantic –Oliver knows what it really means to live

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Oliver Sacks and Robin Williams

NYtimes obit

Derrida and Ornette

Derrida Interviews Ornette – The Others Langauge (Three of Being)

Philosopher Jacques Derrida Interviews Jazz Legend Ornette Coleman: Talk Improvisation, Language & Racism (1997)

One more lengthy article on Ornette Coleman and Derrida

previous post (see videos – Chappaqua suite & Naked Lunch)

John Lurie – June 11 2015 via FB

When I first started playing saxophone and discovered Ornette Coleman he freed me up. He put me on a path that made sense for me to follow.
I would search the Worcester Public Library for anything about jazz and found a book about him and Cecil Taylor. For some reason the line that stayed with me that Ornette said was, “I knew I was on to something when I found I could make mistakes.” That hit me so profoundly. Yeah, that is exactly right, even if no one but you knows, you are on to something if you can make mistakes.
I managed to see him play often. When he took his solo at the end of Skies in America at Carnegie Hall, Bill Noel turned to me and said, “he just stopped time.”
Which was also exactly right.
Later, when the Lounge Lizards started he was remarkably supportive and helpful to the young band leader following in his footsteps.
And much much later, when I had found my musical voice, I had some of the guys in my band that he used to hire, but was having a really rough time with them.
So I called Ornette and we had an amazing two hour conversation
about running a band.
Ornette’s passing hit me really hard. He meant something to me and not because of all the musical innovations that he made, which are many but because of the sweetness in him. Almost like an angel.