Vitro Nasu

Chantal Akerman:Moving Through Time and Space at MIT List Visual Art Center -
May 2 - July 6, 2008

Chantal Akerman retraces a journey from the end of summer to deepest winter, from East Germany, across Poland and the Baltics, to Moscow. (via)

D’est on youtube

From the Other Side is an unsentimental look at the plight of illegal Mexican immigrants as they attempt the dangerous crossing from Agua Prieta in Sonora, Mexico, to Douglas, Ariz. (Via)

Last month Marian Goodman gallery (New York) exhibited Chantal Akerman’s photographs. (Chantal’s main audience is from museums, galleries and film societies.)

The first time I was introduced to Chantal Akerman’a work was her documenatary film on Pina Bausch.
(An Italian version of this film is cut awkwardly in 6 parts, now provided on youtube).

Part Five

Other samples of film clips from youtube
The Buzzcocks: Boredom - from “Jeanne Dielmain”

Hotel Monterey (1972) Akerman - passage (Glenn Gould Bach aria is added to the silent film footage on Youtube)

A Couch in New York - trailer (Chantal’s most accessible film starring Juliet Binoche and William Hurt)

A week ago I decided to see “La Captive” starring my favorite actress Sylvie Testud.
Here was a review by Hoberman (scroll down)

Chantal Akerman’s La Captive is another sort of psycho-epistemological inquiry that asks: How can we know another?

Visual as La Captive is in its rigorously formal compositions, the filmmaker is straightforwardly concerned with language. She filters her Proust through the old nouveau roman of Duras or Robbe-Grillet to fixate on recurring phrases: “au contraire,” “if you like,” “you think so?” Similarly, Akerman takes situations from Proust and elaborately defamiliarizes them.

More films by Chantal Akerman by Acquarello

Still images from Mister Lonely by Harmony Korine

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Harmony Korine Interview (youtube)

Mister Lonely - Trailer by Harmony Korine (youtube)
Harmony Myspace

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The return and (reform) of Harmony Korine (NYtimes)

In Panama, he befriended a cult of fishermen called the Malingerers, who were trying to find a fish with gold scales. After a few months he got into an argument with the cult leader — he thought they were living a lie — and as he was leaving, a fisherman’s wife handed him a dog leash. “She said she was walking the dog. It was an invisible dog.”
In New York recently he offered further details. After he moved to Nashville, “I mounted this leash on the wall and I heard it bark,” he said. “I swear to you. Something at that moment just felt right. I know it sounds weird.”
It may be useful at this point to note that Mr. Korine’s mythomania has always been central to his art. “I don’t know if that story’s true,” Mr. Blaine said. But, he added cryptically, “The real story about Harmony and his life is more mind blowing than any story he could ever make up.”

How an eccentric new film gave Richard Strange a summer he will never forget.
Playing Abe Lincoln in an oddball film about retired impersonators inspired a new passion for harmony in Richard Strange.

A Welsh photojournalist renowned for his coverage of the Vietnam war has died at the age of 72. (BBC)

From 1966 to 1971, Mr Jones Griffiths reported on the Vietnam war, publishing a photojournalism book focused on the suffering of civilians.
Vietnam Inc galvanised the anti-war movement in the United States and helped to turn public opinion against the war.
It is now hailed as a classic of photojournalism.

In an interview with the BBC news website published in 2005, Mr Jones Griffiths said: “The only thing we photographers really want more than life, more than sex, more than anything, is to be invisible.”

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High Hopes by Lee Welch (Dublin Artist)
High Hopes was a song by Frank Sinatra, also incidentally used as JFK’s campaign song. (Via)
For All We Know<> <>falling somewhere in-between<><>Lee in animation quicktime

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Loop 3 by Niall de Buitlear

In this series of work the artist has selected various pairs of words with opposite meanings. A thesaurus has been used to build strings of successive synonyms which break down the gap between the pairs of words.

Niall has a great blog, his sculptures here.

Jackie Nickerson’s photographs of Faith (image source)
Green Room

This hermetically sealed world hearkens back to a time of Thomas Merton, vows of silence, and deep contemplation. Nickerson’s still lives of orderly, empty rooms, and clergy members at work capture the peaceful silence that must echo through those convents and abbeys.(Alicatte Amp)

Ritualistic Faith (more photos by J. Nickerson)

Happy St Patrick’s Day
(Previous posts on Irish cinema here and here).

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Self Portrait of Stanley Kubrick (Drama and Shadows: Photographs 1945-1950. Phaidon Press. ISBN 0-7148-4438-1. 2005. Originally taken for Look Magazine.)

The Real Stanley Kubrick by Michael Herr (Vanity Fair)

He was thinking about making a war movie next, but he wasn’t sure which war, and in fact, now that he mentioned it, not even so sure he wanted to make a war movie at all.
He called me a couple of nights later to ask me if I’d read any Jung. I had. Was I familiar with the concept of the Shadow, our hidden dark side? I assured him that I was. We did half an hour on the Shadow, and how he really wanted to get it into his war picture.

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Carl Jung and Arthur Schnitzler

And then there was this other book he was fascinated by - he was fairly sure I’d never heard of it - Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Traumnovelle, which means Dream Novel, meaninglessly called Rhapsody in the only English edition available at that time. He’d read it more than 20 years before, and bought the rights to it in the early 70s (it’s the book that Eyes Wide Shut is based on), and the reason I’d probably never heard of it (he started to laugh) was that he’d bought up every single existing copy of it. Maybe he’d send me one. I could read it and tell him what I thought.

Related links
Eyes Wide Shut - Strange German Version (Youtube)

The Jungian Things - a Discussion

Stanley Kubrick shared a birthday with Jung and Huxley.

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Weegee

Much like Weegee, Stanley Kubrick started his career as a photographer on the streets of New York & contributed era defining shots to LIFE magazine. Kubrick admired Weegee’s photographs & during shooting of Doctor Strangelove employed him as a stills photographer. When Peter Sellers heard Weegee speak he apparently used Weegee’s peculiar voice as the basis for that of Dr Strangelove!

Another photo of Kubrick and Weegee (Lovely Water Parade)

Dr. Strangelove - (John Edward’s favorite film).

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Clouds photos taken last week on our weekly bike ride to garage sales in the neighborhood.

This morning just before uploading these photos above,I found coincidentally more photos of clouds from Matt “Clouds Last Evening”

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Our limo dogs are used to getting attention during the bike-thru garage sale run. Spike (the black one in front) anticipates a stuffed animal for him to play with at home. Spike is not familiar with mega stores like ToyR”Us. He loves to drag these stuffed animals to the yard outside.
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Created a new catogory “Garagesale” to see some of our garage sale collection. (The China is embedded in our homevideo. We did not find the Necktie Skirt by Charles Delray.)

(image source)

Pick a title from the list below.

1 - The Last of the Mohicans Couch
2 - A Room with a View and Why the Couch Got Away
3 - The Crucible
4 - There Will Be Blood
5 - The Unbearable Lightness of Furniture Being
6 - The Boxer in the Age of Innocence

(image source)

The image below is a repost, more about this here.
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This post is dedicated to Heath Ledger who inspired Daniel Day Lewis.

May Ray died twenty-nine years ago today on Nov. 18, 1976

Hero I Monotype by Janet Paparelli

Six Man Ray films at Ubuweb

Youtubers are puttting their own choices of composers for soundtrack to Man Ray’s pioneer film La retour à la raison. This one is with Shostakovich, another one with John Cale and the original version is at Ubuweb.

Lee Miller, an assistant, muse and onetime girlfriend of Man Ray is getting a lot of attention these days.

Lee Miller (image source)

Portrait Imaginaire de Marquis de Sade and this one without the burning building.

His portrait of Antonin Artaud is all too familiar for Artaud fans.

Marcel Duchamp with shaving cream from Man Ray and its double.

Unlike American born Man Ray who died in Paris, Steichen was born in Luxembourg, he lived a long life and died in America. Both men started out with painting, however Steichen burned all of his paintings in the 1920’s.

Edward Steichen

A novel based on Edward Steichen is out recently.

This first novel of London born Mitchell deals with the life of real world photographer Edward Steichen during two period of his long life 1906-1914 when he lived and worked in France and 1917 to 1923 with the American entry into WWI and events immediately after the war. An American in Paris - The Last Summer of the World, Emily Mitchell, 2007

Self Portrait with Photographic Paraphernelia

Portrait of Brancuci among his sculptures

Looking back on Edward Steichen with a photo of Fred Astaire (Time magazine)

Match and Matchboxes (image source)

Remembering Fred W. McDarrah (1926-2007) - A slideshow.
The Voice work of the iconic photographer, from Bob Dylan to Andy Warhol to Rudy Giuliani

Obit and photo of Fred here (Ron Silliman)

Jack Kerouac creating a poem with Gloria McDarrah (Image Source)

De Kooning in His Broadway Studio, March 23, 1962
Vintage gelatin silver print, printed 1962

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Susan Sontag at a symposium on sex in 1962 at the Mills Hotel, now defunct, on Bleecker Street. (Image source from NY Times “On Self” by Susan Sontag)

Cedar Bar is closing

Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest (center) at the closing of the Cedar Bar, New York, 30 March, 1963, detail, photo copyright © Fred W.McDarrah, 1963, 2000 (Jacket Magazine)

Six Pop Artists at Warhol Loft Party, April 21, 1964 (click to see)
Pop Quiz - Name other five artists in this photo.

Lovely Eva Hesse with her sculptures using fragile material, (little did she know that these would eventually disintergrate.)

We received two tickets to see Italian Bel Canto Opera last Saturday, at the Orpheum, a last minute surprise.

Retouched digital image of the restored Orpheum Theater Phoenix Arizona

Stanley Theater by Hiroshi Sugimoto

I received this email from Janet Paparelli when I described my experience at the Orpheum Theater in Phoenix.

When I was a child, my parents used to take me to a movie theater that looked just like your Orpheum. I remember at the age of 7 or 8, just running around the balcony lobby and pretending. There were benches covered with red velvet cushions and small ponds everywhere with small fish and gurgling water. The balcony railing was this gold baroque design. I used to play that I was a royal princess, it was so much fun. The sky inside the theater itself was blue and when the lights were dimmed for the movie to start there were crowds of stars. There were small boxes where nobody really sat, you know, the kind you would find in a Degas or Renoir painting. They hung off the side walls just waiting for royalty to arrive, and nobody royal ever came, I guess, because they were always empty. That was the Stanley Theater in Jersey City. Much more royal than the Gusman here in Miami which has been restored. I am not sure that that theater is even there any more. It was the most elegant. It became a temple for one of those groups that knocks at your door to tell you that Jesus loves you

Janet then found on youtube about the theater. 2007 Follow the Christ Convention Photos

Art Deco Neon (Image source)

I grew up in Orinda—and hated it, try being one of the lone Jews among the WASPS in the 70s, but at the theater, staring at the walls painted with long-haired women, soaring upwards against blue and stars… I could forget for awhile.
a comment from here

The Only Cool Thing in Orinda (A stunning photo from flickr)

Orinda was shaken by a tragedy when a cheerleader was murdered in revenge for bullying by another student 0n June 24, 1984 when this blogger and her family lived there. (Fifteen minutes from Berkeley, conservative Orinda hides its troubled residents in leafy beautiful redwood exteriors.)

Orinda Theater by Hiroshi Sugimoto

See more and read Hiroshi Sugimoto’s statement

Photograph by Wang Ning De

Today is the 58th Anniversary of People’s Republic of China.
A Chinese film depicting Mao Zedong founding the People’s Republic of China. Title unknown (From youtube)

The heroism of Burmese, the shame of China by Rosemary Righter (London Times)

When China joined Russia last January to veto a fairly mild United Nations Security Council resolution calling on Burma to free political prisoners and improve its abominable human rights record, Beijing’s Ambassador at the UN helpfully explained that “no country is perfect” and that “similar problems exist in other countries”. Including, as he of course did not say, China.

Looking for great photos of contemporary China?
Meeting Place Photo Beijin

Dance in a Small Town - Wang Nin De (Federico WangNinde Fellini)

Photograph by Raw Hage (Via)

Rawi Hage was born in Beirut and lived through nine years of the Lebanese civil war. He immigrated to Canada in 1992. He is a writer, visual artist, and curator. His writing has appeared in Fuse Magazine, Mizna, Jouvert, The Toronto Review and many others, and his visual art has been shown in galleries and museums around the world.

Rawi Hage talks about his novel here, part of Giller Prize Short list videos.
De Niro’s Game or Beirut in Long Sentences

De Niro’s Game refers to the Russian roulette scenes from the movie Deer Hunter staring Robert De Niro. After the movie, Russian roulette became a popular game among young boys in Beirut with ready access to guns. (Read more here)

Hage wants Ken Loach to direct his film.

Ahmed

My name is Ahmad. I arrived from Egypt on a rainy day. Only the clouds and noises of the waiting taxis met me at the airport. (Read his short story here)