The title comes from a section of Arizona State Route 74 in north Phoenix. Said Lightfoot, “I thought it would make a good title for a song. I wrote it down, put it in my suitcase and it stayed there for eight months.”[2] The song employs “Carefree Highway” as a metaphor for the state of mind where the singer seeks escape from his ruminations over a long ago failed affair with a woman named Ann. Lightfoot has stated that Ann actually was the name of a woman Lightfoot romanced when he was age 22:[2] “It [was] one of those situations where you meet that one woman who knocks you out and then leaves you standing there and says she’s on her way. (via wiki Carefree Highway)
Spanish novelist Javier Marías dies at home in Madrid aged 70 (Guardian)
Marías, also a translator and columnist, was described as ‘one of Spain’s greatest contemporary writers’
“The Man Who Would be King” was the favorite book of both Faulkner and Proust, so we learned from Javier Marias.
28 snippets of writer’s lives are told according to this author with a mixture of affection and humor, except for three; Joyce, Mann and Mishima, who took themselves too seriously.
“The idea, then, was to treat these well-known literary figures as if they were fictional characters.
“Spanish writer Javier Marias’s parallel career as a translator taught him how to be a novelist, he tells Aida Edemariam.”
Marias has said that “in the intellectually mediocre country I grew up in, in which everyone thought Franco was eternal, people like me took shelter in the movies. The American pictures of the ’40s and ’50s were our stimulation”.
The summer he was 17, Marias saw 85 films in six weeks.
J. Marias described Laurence Sterne whose novel he has translated thus “He was a kindly, easy-going man, who once tried to “inherit” two children left behind by a poor widow on her death” ” He included a few pages speaking against slavery in the later volumes of Tristram Shandy.”
“As of Nobakov, he is a joker who prefers not to aknowledge this openly, which is why his expression is one of passion and discovery. ”
Djuna Barnes in Silence – “in her youth when she worked as a journalist, it was the activity to which she devoted most of her time – well, that and maintaining prolonged silences. Her silences were both written and verbal.
“This habit of choosing is central to the kind of writer Marías has become, and explains much of what is unique about his work: he has made indecision—the space between two alternatives—the center of his stories. And this indecision is conveyed in the equivocations and qualifications of the narrative voice.” (A MAN WHO WASN’T THERE The clandestine greatness of Javier Marías. by WYATT MASON – from the New Yorker)
Brian Hioe is one of the founding editors of New Bloom. He is a freelance journalist, as well as a translator. A New York native and Taiwanese-American, he has an MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University and graduated from New York University with majors in History, East Asian Studies, and English Literature. He was Democracy and Human Rights Service Fellow at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy from 2017 to 2018.
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.
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)
.. 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
Jeanne Dielman understands what all the best works of cinema do: implication and occurrence are two different things. Where so many mediocre films deal in visual shorthand that merely suggests to us that certain events have happened, this one has its events actually take place. That this builds their importance far beyond any quick-cut battle for the very future of humanity might point toward an answer to the feminist question: these are domestic duties we’re watching, and the film treats them with a gravity that somehow goes beyond aesthetics. You could call its story tragic, but just by existing it demonstrates an artistic fact that’s sadder than anything going on in its content. By letting its content dictate its form — or rather, by letting its content and form exist in symbiosis — the film achieves what most films could if they did the same. But almost no film does.
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.
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
The film was Parajanov’s first major work and earned him international acclaim for its rich use of costume and color. The film also features a detailed portrayal of Ukrainian Hutsul culture, showing Carpathian environment, family rituals, the beauty of Hutsul traditions, music, costumes, and dialect.
by Alice Neel – 1970
Detail of R. Kipling’s hand on the cover of book “Written Lives”
