Vitro Nasu

Frank O’Hara <> <>

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<> <> <> <> <> In Memory of My Feelings. Frank O’Hara Limited Edition (via)

Reading Frank O’Hara on the Brighton Beach Express by John McCullough.

Frank O’Hara veteran story here.

Frank O’Hara as New York Poet, Museum Modern Art Curator, Art News critic, occupied a central stage in the 50’s to 60’s art world. Larry Rivers described him as a professional hand holder and his fee was love.
Both NYTimes and wikipedia records June 27 as Frank O’Hara’s birthday. His actual birthday was March 27. He was an Aries and not a Cancer. (via “The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara by Brad Gooch). Poems he wrote about his birthday only reinforced the misinformation created by his parents to cover up the fact he was conceived before their marriage.

Frank O’hara (via) By Alex Katz

In Memory of My Feelings

And now it is the serpent’s turn.
I am not quite you, but almost the opposite of visionary.
You are coiled around the central figure,
the heart
that bubbles with red ghosts, since to move is to love
and the scrutiny of all things is syllogistic,
the startled eyes of the dikdik, the bush full of white flags
fleeing a hunter,
which is our democracy
but the prey
is always fragile and like smething, as a seashell can be
a great Courbet, if it wishes. To bend the ear of the outer world.

When O’Hara wrote this poem he never worried about democracy in America, but words like ” the bush full of white flags fleeing a hunter, which is our demorcracy ….” pop out with strange effect for today’s readers.

“He was inspired and energized by New York City as other poets have been inspired and energized by nature. In Meditations he wrote, “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.” (These words were inscribed on the railings at the Battery Park alongside Walt Whitman’s poem) He described his work as “I do this I do that” poetry because his poems often read like entries in a diary, as in this line from ” The Day Lady Died“: “it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine.”
“He was our Apollinaire.” Philip Guston said at Frank’s funeral. Edward Gorey who was his roommate at Harvard said that he was living on the edge. Like Pasolini they both received injuries on the beach, though O’Hara’s was a freak accident and not murder.

Summer Couch by De Kooning

“Well, I have my beautiful de Kooning
to aspire to. I think it has an orange
bed in it, more than the ear can hold ” (via)

O’Hara died of injuries he received when he was hit by a vehicle on the beach at Fire Island. (via)
De Kooning,who had arrived with a big checkbook offering to pay for everything, found Frank O’Hara in great pain….”De Kooning came out crying” recalls a friend. “I ‘ve never seen him like that , just weeping. When we went in we realized Frank was not going to live. He looked like a Francis Bacon.” (page 463, The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara by Brad Gooch)

A Tribute to O’Hara (via – many other great links are included from this page)

Autobiographia Literaria and many more famous poems, in here, for funny read Lines for the Fortune Cookies.

“The Last Clean Shirt” – a film by Frank O’Hara and Alfred Leslie.
Morning a blog entry of Frank’s poem last year.

“On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday” is featured at Point and Counterpoint with Frank O’Hara, Part III (Ting Alley)

We are proud to announce that Carrie Yang Costello’s book is due next December. She is my super smart high achieving daughter in law. You met her daughter Nina before. Carrie’s book may very well explain why I am a closet grandmother. (I posted on the Japanese Grandmothers a while ago. ) This subject is too complicated to explain in this post. Women I know will surely appreciate the research Carrie is doing.

James – Chine Colle by Fung Ching Kelling

My sister who is a wonderful painter/printmaker and a collagist made the above image. She lives in Honolulu, frequently exhibits in Honolulu and Tokyo.
Fung-Ching and Fung-Lin, we are two Chinese sisters from Tokyo, Japan. We did not keep our maiden name – Yang. It somehow ended up in Carrie and Nina’s middle name. Don’t ask me why.
Yang means – Willow – poplar.

Julia Kristeva and Terry Riley share a birthday today on June 24.
Happy Birthday to Julia and Terry.
Julia’s book cover was used in my web art – Tristana –
Click on Toledo and see her Black Sun. I am not qualified to talk about her theories but I simply love the sound of her name.
Some links for Julia, here, and here from A Gauche.
Re: Julia
Julia Child, Julia Roberts, aunt Julia and a scriptwriter and Annette Benning trying to be Julia – but this Julia from Bulgaria is different, a seductive, authoritative and frustrating intellectual. (Found one more frustrated reader, Dirty Olive)

Listen to Terry’s music today.
Many wonderful tracks are in this page.

“Model for a death wish generation” by Dominic McGill is a replica of a rusted out early-model hydrogen bomb. The device is unsealed at its equator, the top half of the sphere elevated to form a Pacific sky beneath which a scale model of the verdant (and uninhabitable) Bikini Atoll floats serenely in the bomb’s heart, complete with detonation crater submerged in the lagoon. (Click the link to see the image)

Project for the New American Century – 2003

Love is the Only Shelter – 2002

From the detailed photo from the link below you can see the sandbags at the front door of the church.
More art here.

Fear is a man’s best friend (an article by Nico Israel)

The author of “All Quiet on the Western Front” Eric Maria Remarque was born on June 22, 1898.
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) is the first major anti-war film of the sound era, it has won the Oscar for the best picture.
June 22 is a birthday for two actors from “Out of Africa” Meryl Streep and Klaus Maria Brandauer. Meryl loves Chinese films. I love her for saying that she wished we would see more Chinese films. She is scheduled to do a film Dark Matter directed by a Chinese. From China Daily on Meryl, here.

Imperial Dragster, Napoleon Rebuilt 2002. Julian Laverdiere (via)

The tiny toy from Columbia

My neighbors who changed their minds about selling the toy after
I showed an interest.
The lady on the right asked me then

if I could guess which one of the girls (there were three young girls) was her daughter I could then have the toy for free. Lucky for her I guessed wrong.

Picture of a biker coming home from Saturday garagesale ride to neighborhood.

Looks like she got something to cover her arse.

“next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ’tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in very language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shell the voice of liberty be mute?”

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

e.e. cummings

” No poet deserves praise for remaining a poet. Yet in looking back on the war years I see only one American poet who kept his humanity and his poetry, and that man is Estlin Cummings.” Alan Tate (from the back of the book 100 Selected poems e. e. cummings).

The Viaduct Theater Proudly Presents “Him” by E.E. Cummings
E. E Cummings
“You have to admire the Viaduct for attempting this almost impossible play – which requires some 20 actors, a live band, a re-creation of carnival oddities and a constantly changing set and frame of reference.” Chicago Sun-Times: Hedy Weisscaption
The play runs till June 25.

More on Him

e. e. cummings the painter
(“He painted all day when the light was good,” said Kostelanetz, “and wrote poetry at night.”
“He actually painted more than he actually wrote,” said Sawyer-Lucanno. )

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

a hopeless case if — listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go

— e. e. cummings

e. e. cummings published 95 Poems in 1958 (Norton).
This was the last book of new poems published in Cummings’s lifetime.
On the number 95
Fibonaci number and this from the Math site.
Leonardo Fibonacci discovered the series which converges on phi

Fibonaci Painting by David

I know what I like (Fibonaci flash wonderful from textism)

Minimal Aubergine Fibonaci from Belgium, not mutating rather stiff
eggplants.

Fibonaci aubergine

Ryo Ikebe and Keiko Kishi in “Snow Country”

Yasunari Kawabata was born on June 11, 1899 in Osaka, Japan.
A hand copy of passages from Snow Country (雪国抄) found at Kawabata’s bedside after his death.

“The Train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The earth lay white under the night sky. The train pulled up at a signalstop. A girl who had been sitting on the other side of the car came over and opend the window in front of Shimamura. The snowy cold poured in. Leaning far out the window, the girl to the station master as though he were a great distance away. The station master walked slowly over the snow, a lantern in his hand. His face was buried to the nose in a muffler, and the flaps of his cap were turned down over his ears. ” (Translated by E.G. Seidensticker).
Teaching guide to Snow Country here.

In his Nobel acceptance speech Kawabata condemned suicide. He was depressed by Mishima’s suicide, (here) yet Kawabata, against his own counsel, later himself committed suicide.
(When Kawabata won the Nobel prize, Mishima as a fellow Japanese writer concluded that his chance of winning a Nobel prize in his lifetime was nill. The Nobel prize was later awarded to Japanese writer Oe Kenzaburo in 1994)

Yukiguni (Snow Country) by Fung Lin Hall

Donald Richie and Kawabata.
(from here.)

“Go is to Western chess what philosophy is to double entry accounting.” quote from Kawabata.
The actual game recreated here. Amazing!

Kawabata loved Japanese Ceramics.
Samples of Iga wares.
Samples of Shigaraki wares.
A Letter to Kawabata Yasunari from Directory of Lost Causes by Quentin S Crisp. A curious piece of Dazai Osamu‘s letter to Kawabata showing up in the cyberspace.
This letter to Kawabata, Dazai concluded with these words, ” You have to be more aware, in your dealings, that a writer lives in the midst of absurdity and imperfection.”

Jung Chang and her husband’s book”Mao:The Unknown Story’ is out and a review is here.
“the book uses sources they have unearthed that reveal Mao as a psychopathic leader, responsible for the deaths of 70 million, and driven by a hunger for power.”
“Mao was deeply influenced by Fredrick Paulsen, a minor German philosopher who shunned all constraints of responsibility and duty. He put his theories into practice during the Long March and in Yenan, the Communists’ first headquarters in China.”

“Contrary to the perceived idea that Stalin disapproved of Mao, Halliday says these documents revealed that the Soviet leader had talent-spotted his Chinese counterpart and nurtured his power-base from the 1920s. “Mao always perpetuated the myth that he’d risen to power without help from the Russians. But he was the one that the Russians were pushing and protecting.” The material Halliday unearthed on four trips to Moscow was so extraordinary, he remembers leaving the archives at 4pm every day, bathed in sweat.”

The Last Banquet by Zhang Hongtu/Hongtu Zhang
“Sometimes the hole in my work might remind you of the Nothingness of Taoism or the negative space of traditional Chinese ink painting, but the visual inspiration of my work comes directly from a bagel.”
(via)

PENG WEI (b. 1974)
Robe / Palace on the Immortal Mountains
Ink and color on paper, with one seal of the artist, Peng Wei
(From The Ancient Robe – New Ideas.)

Google fun Wright or Wrong?

Pretty at night.

Born, Never Asked
It was a large room. Full of people. All kinds.
And they had all arrived at the same buidling
at more or less the same time.
And they were all free. And they were all
asking themselves the same question:
What is behind that curtain?

You were born. And so you’re free. So happy birthday.
(From Big Science)

Happy Birthday! Laurie Anderson
Laurie is a Gemini/Pig. (THE INDUSTRIOUS CONNOISSEUR).

What do you know, Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes shared a birthday with Laurie.

June 5, 1723 Economist Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland.
June 5, 1883 Economist John Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge, England.

Nytimes today described Laurie as Rock singer on On this day birthday page. No fact checking? (the times they are changing, ha).

“Some common themes in her works are airplanes, dogs, family, the United States, dreams, and language. ” I must add Walter Benjamin, Italo Calvino and all the other smart people are referenced in her work.
A very useful site if you want to know more about her work, L.A FAQ
by John Gluck and Jim Davies.
(Fassbinder and Marilyn Monroe have appeared in Laurie’s songs, the Gemini compatriots were born one day apart, Fassbinder on May 31 and Marilyn on June 1st. Andy Warhol and Fassbinder wanted to be Marilyn and Norma Jean thought she wanted to be Marilyn. )

Sound Zero, an interview.
Songs and Stories from Moby Dick
Moon Rocks (Interview on her work with Nasa)

(via)

Gravity’s Angel
You can dance. You can make me laugh. You’ve got x-ray eyes.
You know how to sing. You’re a diplomat. You’ve got it all.
Everybody loves you.
You can charm the birds out of the sky. but I, I’ve got one thing.
You always know just what to say. And when to go.
But I’ve got one thing. You can see in the dark.
But I’ve got one thing: I loved you better.

Last night I woke up. Saw this angel. He flew in my window.
And he said: Girl, pretty proud of yourself, huh?
And I looked around and said: Who me?
And he said: The higher you fly, the faster you fall. He said:
Send it up. Watch it rise. See it fall. Gravity’s rainbow.
Send it up. Watch it rise. See it fall. Gravity’s angel.
Why these mountains? Why this sky? This long road. This ugly train.

Well he was an ugly guy. With an ugly face.
An also ran in the human race.
And even God got sad just looking at him. And at his funeral
all his friends stood around looking said. But they were really
thinking of all the ham and cheese sandwiches in the next room.
And everybody used to hang around him. And I know why.
They said: There but for the grace of the angels go I.
Why these mountains? Why this sky?
Send it up. Watch it rise. See it fall. Gravity’s rainbow.
Send it up. Watch it rise. And fall. Gravity’s angel.

Well, we were just laying there.
And this ghost of your other lover walked in.
And stood there. Made of thin air. Full of desire.
Look. Look. Look. You forgot to take your shirt.
And there’s your book. And there’s your pen, sitting on the table.
Why these mountains? Why this sky? This long road? This empty room?
Why these mountains? Why this sky? This long road? This empty room.