Vitro Nasu

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.

Frank Zappa – Birth date, December 21
Edard Varese – Birth date, December 22

(Snegurochka and Ded Moroz crossing a Moscow street in 1968)
Soviet Santa

How Santa Survived the Soviet Era
Of all the variations on the beloved character, Russia’s Ded Moroz might have the strangest history.

(Actor Alexander Khvylya plays Ded Moroz at a New Year performance the Kremlin in 1969.)

Ded Moroz emerged around the late 19th century. One of the first major cultural introductions of the character was in the 1873 play The Snow Maiden, by Alexander Ostrovsky, one of the most important playwrights in Russian history. Ostrovsky was often a political writer, and The Snow Maiden is an odd entry in his oeuvre. It’s a fairytale, based in part on obscure and largely forgotten pre-Christian pagan mythology, and designed to promote a different kind of Russian patriotism than the Imperial government’s brand. The play was published—not necessarily a given for Ostrovsky, who had many of his plays censored or banned—and eventually rewritten as an opera, which was performed many times.

Christmas sounds like Kurushimimasu (suffering in Japanese)
Homeless Person’s Guide to Homelessness

RIP Panamarenko

Artist, Engineer, Poet, Physicist, Inventor and Visionary, and has for thirthy years pursued a singular course of exploration of space, movement, flight, energy and the force of gravity.

More images from Artnet

Web Gallery …Thermo Photovoltaic Energy Convertor

The name Panamarenko is supposedly an acronym for Pan American Airlines and Company.

Raven’s Variable Matrix, 2000.

Anna Karina French New Wave actress (Rolling Stong obit)

Anna Karina Day (Dennis Cooper Blog)

(Anna Karina directed by Jacques Rivette)

Anna Karina French New Wave Icon a Life in Pictures
In addition to working with Rivette, Ingmar Bergman directed Anna Karina on stage Anna Karina in After the Rehearsal Renaissance Theatre in Paris in September 1997. ..(scroll way down to see the photo from the link above). She also worked with Fassbinder, Visconti (The Stranger based on Albert Camus, starring M. Mastroianni), Karina was not just a muse for Jean Luc Godard.

Murmuration

Squidsoup returns to Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA) with a site-specific artwork that uses a networked data system to connect hundreds of lights and audio sources, creating a responsive data swarm. During the daytime, “Murmuration” offers a harmonious auditory experience, but when the sun goes down, a dynamic audiovisual experience swirls around SMoCA like its namesake—a term for a flock of starlings whirling in unison through the sky.

Image credit: “Murmuration” rendering by Squidsoup

Counter-Landscapes-Performative-Actions from the 1970’s

Digital image by Fung Lin Hall

Exhibition includes works by Allora Calzodilla
(See part i and parti)

And Rebecca Horn

Counter-Landscapes: Performative Actions from the 1970s – Now presents a group of artists working in both natural and urban environments whose work exploits the power of place to address issues of social, environmental, and personal transformation. Through a focused selection of key works made between 1970 and 2019, which extend beyond traditional categories, Counter-Landscapes illuminates how the strategies created by women artists in the 1970s and 1980s are employed by artists today. Developing a practice of performative actions, these artists countered the culture that surrounded and oppressed them by embodying the live elements of performance art in order to push for social change.

Featuring photography, video, sculpture, painting, drawing, performance, and installation centered on performance in the landscape, the exhibition initiates a dialogue across generations, locations, and genders. It brings the work of an innovative generation of women artists—Marina Abramović, Eleanor Antin, Agnes Denes, VALIE EXPORT, Rebecca Horn, Leslie Labowitz, Suzanne Lacy, Ana Mendieta, Adrian Piper, Lotty Rosenfeld, Bonnie Ora Sherk, Beth Ames Swartz, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles—together with more recent work by artists who have adopted and extended their methods. These artists, both male and female, include Allora & Calzadilla, Francis Alÿs, Angela Ellsworth, Ana Teresa Fernández, Maria Hupfield, Saskia Jordá, Christian Philipp Müller, Pope.L, Sarah Cameron Sunde, Zhou Tao, and Antonia Wright. Counter-Landscapes shows how, in the process of overcoming the extraordinary obstacles they faced as women, artists working in the landscape in the late 20th century developed inventive methodologies that have profoundly influenced younger artists and changed the face of the art world. Ultimately, the works underline and emphasize the pervasiveness of the feminist legacy, which is too often neglected, marginalized, and undervalued.Counter-Landscapes-Performative-Actions from the 1970’s

Our Lady of Guadalupe

Pope Leo XIII granted the venerated image a canonical coronation on 12 October 1895.

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(L’eclipse – Antonioni)

Delon’s Love Letter to Romy Schneider

Le Samurai

Editorial use only. No book cover usage.
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Universal/Kobal/Shutterstock (5871098d)
Peter Fonda
The Hired Hand – 1971
Director: Peter Fonda
Universal
USA
Scene Still
Western
L’Homme sans frontière

See Full Film

Fonda was drawn to a scenario by Alan Sharp (Night Moves, Ulzana’s Raid), which he read in one sitting during a restless night while promoting Easy Rider in Italy. “I felt I had to do this one,” he said, “because there were no clichés in this script, just western mythology.”

Martin Scorsese personally selected the 1971 western for a revival screening at the inaugural Tribeca Film Festival in Manhattan. Clint Eastwood has acknowledged its “gritty realism” as a major influence on his own Unforgiven. Quentin Tarantino treasures his copy of the movie’s original theatrical trailer.

viA

(Verna Bloom played a strong, independent woman brilliantly)

Japanese Poster

A “Western” Masterpiece Hollywood couldn’t sell

On Vilmos Zigmond

Fonda had gotten to know his chosen cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond during the filming of Easy Rider, as Zsigmond had been a close friend of that feature’s cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs. Upon receiving the green light to make The Hired Hand, the young director knew exactly who he wanted to be his cinematographer.

The same year he shot The Hired Hand, Zsigmond had also been employed by Robert Altman to create the gorgeous photography on his own unorthodox western, the aforementioned McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Early in his amazing career, Zsigmond proved far more than capable of producing painterly images through his camera lens.

Peter Fonda (Feb 23, 1940-Aug 16,2019)
Peter Fonda (previous post)

Great News for Milan Kundera (Guardian)

Milan Kundera’s Czech citizenship restored after 40 years

More from here

Czech premier proposes restoring writer Kundera’s nationality

Brno daily

In Photos: Exhibition “Milan Kundera (Not Lost) in Translation”

(Kundera, Vera Kundera and Roth)
With Philip Roth

Oharu
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi , Tanaka Kinuyo as Oharu.. she was his muse.

(Toshiro Mifune and Kinuyo Tanaka in Wedding Ring)

Dragnet Girl
Ozu’s silent film.

More Photos of Kinuyo Tanaka

Kinuyo Tanaka Fragility and Resilience

The Life of Oharu, Mifune Toshiro and Kinuyo Tanaka directed by Mizoguchi

(Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller: The Cast of “Beyond the Fringe)
BBC obit

Jonathan Miller, director and humorist, dies at 85

Jonathan Miller and The Kinds of Genius

(Jonathan Miller directs Mikado)

(Prince de Hombourg – 1952 Festival du Avignon – Gerard Philipe and Jeanne Moreau)
Photo by Agnes Varda

He died from liver cancer while working on a film project in Paris, a few days short of his 37th birthday. (His doctors concealed from him the nature of his disease.) In accordance with his last wishes, he is buried, dressed in the costume of Don Rodrigue (The Cid), in the village cemetery in Ramatuelle, Var near the Mediterranean Sea coast (via wiki)

Books & G.P.
Gérard Philipe posing for a campaign to promote reading, 1949-1950 by Lucien Lorelle

La Ronde

Gérard Philipe – Monsieur Ripois 1954 – Director: René Clément

“Everything rings true in this totally false film. Everything is illuminated in this obscure film. For he who leaps into the void owes no explanations to those who watch.” Jean Luc Godard

Montparnasse 19 was originally to have been directed by Max Ophüls with a script by Henri Jeanson. Becoming ill, Ophüls turned the project over to Jacques Becker. Dissatisfied with Jeanson’s script, Becker re-wrote the scenario. (Leap into the Void, Godard and the Painter)

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Gérard Philipe and Micheline Presle in an adaptation of Radiguet’s novel, Devil in the flesh. (1947)

(France was slowly overcoming a murderous war, its veterans were revered, the adultry of a soldier’s wife was intolerable. via.)

The novel is described as,

an extraordinary mixture of perception and brutality, tenderness and heartlessness. (via)