ER: I was very impressed with Billy painting something he seemingly loved to do, which was motorcycling. I thought, What a perfect combination, that is, making art out of something you’re really in tune with. Later on Billy got me into motorcycling, which diverted my attention away from making art. We went to Baja, all points north and south, a lot on motorcycles.
Avant-garde pianist and composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, who studied with John Cage and went on to lead Japan’s advances in experimental modern music, has died
One of the leading composers in Japan during the postwar era, Ichiyanagi worked in a range of genres, composing Western-style operas and orchestral and chamber works, as well as compositions using traditional Japanese instruments.[1] Ichiyanagi is known for incorporating avant-garde techniques into his works, such as chance music, extended technique, and nontraditional scoring.[1] Ichiyanagi was married to artist Yoko Ono from 1956 to 1962.
John Cage, T.Ichiyanagi
and David Tudor, Great Budhha in Tokyo)
Also A Poet
Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me
“Also a Poet is packaged as a love triangle: father, daughter and O’Hara. It’s actually a tetrahedron from which all kinds of creative characters pop forth. It’s a big valentine to New York City past and present, and a contribution to literary scholarship, molten with soul.” — New York Times
Ada Colhoun was named after Ada Katz, wife of Alex Katz who painted many portraits of Frank O’Hara and his wife.
(Rembrandt Polish Rider was Frank O’Hara’s favorite painting)
In “Having a Coke with You,” as in much of his work, the poet admixes life and art. Here, life seems to come out on top: person over portrait (except maybe Rembrandt’s Polish Rider in the Frick). Scroll down to see a video of Frank O’Hara reciting “Having a Coke with YOu’
Pharoah Sanders, Saxophonist Who Pushed Jazz Toward the Spiritual, Dead at 81
“The Creator Has a Master Plan” legend was sideman on John Coltrane’s landmark avant-garde journeys before embarking on a decades-long career that concluded with 2021’s acclaimed Promises
She saw and felt things us ordinary mortals missed,’ her agent says of Booker prize-winning author who died on Thursday
Hilary Mantel remembered: ‘She was the queen of literature’
‘The pen is in our hands. A happy ending is ours to write’: Hilary Mantel in her own words
(The Trojan Women)
Irena Pappas was directed by Michael Cacoyannis in “Zorba the Greek”, “The Trojan Women”, “Iphigenia’ and “Electra”.
(“Christ Stopped at Eboli’ directed by Francesco Rosi.)
Irene Papas
was a Greek actress and singer who starred in over 70 films in a career spanning more than 50 years. She gained international recognition through such popular award-winning films as The Guns of Navarone (1961)
In 2013 she began to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease.[54] She died on 14 September 2022, having spent her final years in Chiliomodi.
(via wiki)
Her wiki on her affair with Marlon Brando.
In 1954 she met the actor Marlon Brando and they had a long love affair, which they kept secret at the time. Fifty years later, when Brando died, she recalled that “I have never since loved a man as I loved Marlon. He was the great passion of my life, absolutely the man I cared about the most and also the one I esteemed most, two things that generally are difficult to reconcile”
Manoel Oliveira directed Irene Papas in “Party” and “A Talking Picture”.
“Another famous photograph, which was used a lot. These kids were just play-acting and they weren’t as tough as they look. I asked them to look tough and for me, it’s a self-portrait, you know? I also played on the streets with guns but I was also a sort of angelic. So I was both of them.” – Klein
Messidor is an original, unpredictable, and disturbing film about two alienated young women in search of freedom from society. The film, in its poetic sweep, is reminiscent of Terrence Malik’s Badlands and could have been a prototype for Thelma and Louise.”
Influenced by his involvement with the British “Free Cinema” movement in London and with the French New Wave during his years in Paris, Tanner is best known for his movies Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000 (Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000), Dans la ville blanche (In the White City) and Messidor. (via wiki)
“My films have always represented a balancing act between those films whose objective is the discourse, the concept, and those which start from the material, from emotions, behaviour and locations.”
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)
Detail of R. Kipling’s hand on the cover of book “Written Lives”
