Vitro NasuIconoclastic Incubator
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Read a synopsis Crude: The Story of Oil by Sonia Shah 2004, a condensed look at oil, its history and future. It is packed with fact and detail.
(via)
Photographs by Edward Burtynsky
Oil Fields
(via)
Update: Edward Burtynsky: Oil – A Ballardian Interpretation
Burtynsky starts at the center of the subject, at oil’s source; then moves outward around the world, showing its use. By their arrangement, the photographs survey a life cycle.
Happy Birthday! Louise Bourgeois is 95 years old today.
Paddle Woman 
Eccentric Growth
(2006 Drawing images from artnet.com)
More images at Barbara Krakow gallery
Don’t forget her sculptures, here is one.
The Material Sublime: “Ode à L’Oubli” (Ode to the Forgotten) celebrates a new edition of twenty-five books in which Louise Bourgeois remembers a long past in abstract elements.
Rap and celebrate Life with Louise Bourgeois (2006, 2005, 2004)
by clicking the sidebar menu of Louise Bourgeois under Art.
Radha’s Dance from the River by Jean Renoir
We added the dance sequence on youtube. (See previous post here.)
Additional Note:
The movie River served as a launching pad for the directorial career of Satyajit Ray, who met and befriended Renoir during the shooting of this film.
Alfonso Cuaron, Guillermo del Toro, & Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu on Charlie Rose – an hour on film and friendship
Alfonso Cuaron is currently filming a drama, based on Mexico’s violent student revolt of 1968.
Hanif Kureishi on the birth of “Venus”
One sees why O’Toole jumped at the part. Hanif Kureishi has written a hugely impressive script – funny, poignant, wise and politically incorrect in equal measure. (via)
Daniel Craig was in “Mother” by Kureishi.
It’s obviously me and Roger, and our preoccupations, and our interest in people who are older, our interest in people who are in the second half of their lives, and finding a spark in them, I guess. Roger and I are not particularly old, but we both turned fifty. We’re on the last lap, as it were. Both of us are thinking about that, but also about bringing people into the cinema, characters who are not normally represented. (via)
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Sisters and Actresses 
Read about the Soong family featuring four famous American educated siblings, three of which were notorious for their corruption.
Joseph Conrad 1863 
Here is the answer to the recent film quiz: Joeseph Conrad wrote the story of two Napoleonic soldiers engaged in duels for decades, which was adapted into a film called “The Duellists” by Ridley Scott.
NAPOLEON I, whose career had the quality of duel against the whole of Europe, disliked duelling between the officers of his army. The great military emperor was not a swashbuckler, and had little respect for tradition.
Nevertheless, a story of duelling, which became a legend in the army, runs through the epic of imperial wars. To the surprise and admiration of their fellows, two officers, like insane artists trying to gild refined gold or paint the lily, pursued a private contest through the years of universal carnage.
(via)
The truth is that in my mind the story is nothing but a serious and even earnest attempt at a bit of historical fiction. I had heard in my boyhood a good deal of the great Napoleonic legend. I had a genuine feeling that I would find myself at home in it, and The Duel is the result of that feeling, or, if the reader prefers, of that presumption
…….because in truth that is exactly what I was trying to capture in my small net: the Spirit of the Epoch — never purely militarist in the long clash of arms, youthful, almost childlike in its exaltation of sentiment — naively heroic in its faith. 1920 J.C.
Sonia Shah has written a thorough and disturbing history of the pharmaceutical industry that makes John Le Carre’s The Constant Gardener look pretty tame. Read a synopsys at The Body Hunters
Film quiz
1 Name this film and who directed it.
2. Whose story was it based on?
Pick the correct answer.
a Leo Tolstoy
b Joseph Conrad
c Ivan Turgenev
d Arthur Schnitzler
The answer is here.
Shuji Terayama, Labyrinth Tale, Tarot & Klaus Kinski
Terayama Shuji – Experimental Image World (7 Volume Collection): Poet, playright, theatre director, filmmaker, essayist, agitator and lover of all things anarchistic, chaotic, and truthful, TERAYAMA SHUJI (1936-1983) is one of Japan’s most revered and respected artists.
See his films at Ubuweb here. (Vol 3, 4 and 6 recommended.)
On the 10th December, 1935
I was born an imperfect dead man
Years will follow years and one day I know
I shall become a perfect dead man
When that day comes
I will think of the
Cherry treeNot long before he died, Shuji Terayama wrote this poem, which may have been his last. The translation is by Paul Schmidt and Kazuko Oshima.
Who was Shuji Terayama? 
The french wiki name who Terayama was influenced by.
Ses œuvres, souvent expérimentales et crues, témoignent d’un activisme artistique aux influences multiples, d’Antonin Artaud ou Bertolt Brecht à Federico Fellini et Lautréamont.
Excerpt from The Missionary and the Libertine
Love and War in East and West
By IAN BURUMA
Japan, on the other hand, as I saw it in Terayama’s theater, was utterly fantastic, yet closer to the world I knew and lived in. The actors wore the same clothes as we did, listened to the same music, smoked the same drugs. But at the same time their world seemed more exotic than the China I read about in the People’s Daily. This was partly because of Terayama’s style: he mixed Western and Japanese imagery in a way that made both West and East look bizarre and marvelous. His Japan was like a great, colorful souk, or like a costume party in which the guests tried on this costume and then that—old, new, Japanese, Chinese, European. They did so playfully, freely, following only the whims of their imagination. Everything in Terayama’s theater was opposed to dogma, orthodoxy and puritanism. He made Japan look sexy If Mao’s version of “Asiatic despotism” appealed to religious puritans, Terayama’s Japan was the modern version of a sensual Orient that has attracted libertines and appalled missionaries for centuries. Read more here.
See his poetic postcards sent from all over the world.
One more clip, here.
Christopher Strone plays bass, cello, piano , mandolin and percussion.
December 
special edition from vitro-nonsense-nasu
Happy Birthday Noam Chomsky!
He is a Sagittarius/Dragon like Bruce Lee.
An admirable but not always gentle character, the Sagittarius/Dragon is a warrior on the grand scale.
(I was misled by a source that indicated Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky sharing a birthday. Howard is a Leo.)
Helen is terrific as Elizabeth I (HBO) , can’t wait to see her play a Queen (Elizabeth II). (Helen Mirren was funny as Ayn Rand, she is part Russian.)
Let’s get to know Michel Suber whose career was resurrected by Claire Denis. Jean Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat contains the torture scenes, mild compared to the recent tortures ordered by Rumsfeld. Michel Suber narrated Jules et Jim.
Read a synopsys of Thin Ice: unlocking the secrets of climate in the world’s highest mountains chronocling scientist Lonnie Thompson’s work over thirty years collecting and analyzing ice cores, some a million years old.