Laura Gilpin (April 22, 1891 – November 30, 1979) was an American photographer known for her photographs of Native Americans, particularly the Navajo and Pueblo, and her Southwestern landscapes.
Just weeks before her death, she leaned out the window of a small plane flying low over the Rio Grande valley to make her last photographs.
Laura Gilpin died on November 30, 1979, at the age of 88.(via)
Laura Gilpin – An Enduring Grace (See Georgia O’Keefe and 5 more photos)
“The subject in the photo is Susan Tsosie, my grandmother. Susan is seated on the ground, holding a kid goat and wearing traditional Navajo clothing: a hand-woven shawl draped around her shoulders, silver coins and buttons adorning her blouse and a stunning piece of turquoise jewelry around her neck.”
Helm was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1998. At the time, the cost of paying for treatment threatened to leave him homeless. “You got to pick one – pay your medical bills or pay the mortgage,” he said in a 2010 CNN interview. “Most people can’t do both, and I’m not different.” Helm recovered, and his home became the venue for a star-studded weekly concert series, the Midnight Rambles. These gigs led to a creative resurgence and two acclaimed albums, 2007’s Dirt Farmer and 2009’s Electric Dirt.
Jane Fonda and Levon Helm starred in the Dollmaker (youtube full film – more than 2 hours long – see this film if you missed.)
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)
“The amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its profundity”
The ground-breaking first feature from the director of Orlando and The Tango Lesson, The Gold Diggers is a key film of early Eighties feminist cinema. Made with an all-woman crew, featuring stunning photography by Babette Magolte and a score by Lindsay Cooper it embraces a radical and experimental narrative structure.
Celeste (Colette Laffont) is a computer clerk in a bank who becomes fascinated by the relationship between gold and power. Ruby (Julie Christie) is an enigmatic film star in quest of her childhood, her memories and the truth about her own identity. As their paths cross they come to sense that there could be a link between the male struggle for economic supremacy and the female ideal of mysterious but impotent beauty.
Sally Potter – the Gold Diggers
Samuel Beckett was born on Good Friday, April 13, 1906, near Dublin, Ireland. Raised in a middle class, Protestant home, the son of a quantity surveyor and a nurse, he was sent off at the age of 14 to attend the same school which Oscar Wilde had attended. Looking back on his childhood, he once remarked, “I had little talent for happiness.”
Beckett was consistent in his loneliness. The unhappy boy soon grew into an unhappy young man, often so depressed that he stayed in bed until mid afternoon. He was difficult to engage in any lengthy conversation–it took hours and lots of drinks to warm him up–but the women could not resist him. The lonely young poet, however, would not allow anyone to penetrate his solitude. He once remarked, after rejecting advances from James Joyce’s daughter, that he was dead and had no feelings that were human.
The Temptation to Exist by Emil Cioran: “Great stuff here and there. Must reread his first.”
Lautreamont and Sade by Maurice Blanchot: “Some excellent ideas, or rather starting-points for ideas, and a fair bit of verbiage, to be read quickly, not as a translator does. What emerges from it though is a truly gigantic Sade, jealous of Satan and of his eternal torments, and confronting nature more than with humankind.”
The Castle by Franz Kafka: “I felt at home, too much so – perhaps that is what stopped me from reading on. Case closed there and then.”
Dorothea Tanning
Rainy Day Canapé, 1970, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Dozen works by Tanning now on view in LACMA’s special exhibition In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States.
The typical Miller film has a central figure under a lot of pressure, either self-imposed or coming from others. His is a cruel universe, created with great sensitivity and handled with astonishing ease, fluidity and economy.”
Mr. Rottiers’s strong, un-showy performance suggests that the circumstances of Thomas’s parentage can’t be blamed entirely for his troubles; they may go deeper. One of the film’s strengths is its detached, even-handed view of someone whose turbulence and fits of rage are ultimately inexplicable, as is often the case in real life. (NYtimes film review)
Alias Betty – very entertaining film
The Best Way – his debut film to world of cinema, a challenging subject on transgender.
Yasuhiro Ishimoto June 14, 1921 – February 6, 2012 was an influential Japanese-American photographer.
From 1942 to 1944, he was interned with other Japanese Americans at the Amache Internment Camp (also known as Granada Relocation Center) in Colorado. It was here that he began to learn photography
While still a student at the Institute of Design in the early 1950s, Ishimoto’s teacher Harry Callahan introduced his work to The Museum of Modern Art photography curator Edward Steichen, who would exhibit it in the seminal 1955 Family of Man group show and a later solo show in 1961.
Adrienne Rich, a pioneering feminist poet and essayist who challenged what she considered to be the myths of the American dream, has died. She was 82. via Jacket
She came of age during the social upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s and was best known as an advocate of women’s rights, which she wrote about in both her poetry and prose. But she also wrote passionate antiwar poetry and took up the causes of the marginalized and underprivileged.
For the Dead
I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer
The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself
I have always wondered about the left-over
energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped
or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting long after midnight
Adrienne Rich :
“She was very courageous and very outspoken and very clear,” said her longtime friend W.S. Merwin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. “She was a real original, and whatever she said came straight out of herself.”
As Merwin noted, Rich was a hard poet to define because she went through so many phases. Or, as Rich wrote in “Delta,” “If you think you can grasp me, think again.”
For Ms. Rich, the getting of literary awards was itself a political act to be reckoned with. On sharing the National Book Award for poetry in 1974 (the other recipient that year was Allen Ginsberg), she declined to accept it on her own behalf. Instead, she appeared onstage with two of that year’s finalists, the poets Audre Lorde and Alice Walker; the three of them accepted the award on behalf of all women.
In 1997, in a widely reported act, Ms. Rich declined the National Medal of Arts, the United States government’s highest award bestowed upon artists. In a letter to Jane Alexander, then chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts, which administers the award, she expressed her dismay, amid the “increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice,” that the government had chosen to honor “a few token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.”
Art, Ms. Rich added, “means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.”
“For me, socialism represents moral value — the dignity and human rights of all citizens,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2005. “That is, the resources of a society should be shared and the wealth redistributed as widely as possible.”
His drawing
Gregory Corso. Original drawing, undated, probably 1970.
Patty first met Gregory Corso at a party given by Charles Henri Ford at his apartment in the Dakota. She recalls “Gregory was quite a madman…He just gave them [the drawings and manuscripts in her archive] to me later…I think he liked me….I would see him from time to time…”
‘I think Corso is a more perfect poet, unique and independent of modes and manners’
– Allen Ginsberg
‘….it comes; I tell you, immense with gasolined
rags and bits of wire and old bent nails, a dark
arriviste, from a dark river within.’
– Gregory Corso
It seems an almost well accepted fact that more than fifty years on from when it was first published in 1958, Gasoline (City Lights, 1958) by Beat poet Gregory Corso is a seminal book in the birth of that particular literary generation. Yet today, when compared to Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, the other major Beat writers, his work is still relatively ignored, and while their books can be found in large amounts in most British and American bookshops, Corso is still almost untraceable.
– No time for poetry but exactly what is
-Visionary tics shivering in the chest
-In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
-Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
-Like Proust be an old teahead of time
De neus van Jean-François Lyotard by 
