Vitro Nasu

First winter rain by Matsuo Basho

First winter rain–
even the monkey
seems to want a raincoat.

Rain Rain Rain
Three Monoprints by Fung Lin Hall

The Rain by Robert Creeley

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quite, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent–
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

Marjorie Perloff on Robert Creeley’s Radical Poetics.

Roberto Bolaño

Álvaro Rousselot’s Journey (New Yorker Fiction Nov 26, 2007 – my introduction to his work and I intend to read more.)

Vagabonds:Roberto Bolaño and his fractured masterpiece by Daniel Zalewski from the New Yorker.

Bolaño began submitting short stories to state-sponsored contests around Spain; when a story won prize money, he would retitle it and submit it to another competition, which it would also win. (Similar mischief is detailed in his darkly witty story “Sensini.”) When he was thirty-eight, Bolaño learned that his liver was severely compromised, and he began writing with unrelenting concentration; starting in 1996, he published one or more books a year.

Obit from Guardian Chilean creator of ‘infrarealism’

Another one

Bolaño wasn’t shy about revealing that he lived a hard life in his wanderings. His nutrition, dental care, and smoking habit were bad enough that he lost nearly all his teeth on the way, and he joked he left them scattered throughout Latin America the same way Hansel and Gretel left a trail of bread crumbs in the forest.

Pagina Official (Multimedia page in Spanish)

Comparison to Borges from here.

Another Borges and Bolano

Bolano on youtube (Spanish only)
This Spanish page has great Photos

Self Portrait at Twenty Years

I set off, I took up the march and never knew
where it might take me. I went full of fear,
my stomach dropped, my head was buzzing:
I think it was the icy wind of the dead.
I don’t know. I set off, I thought it was a shame
to leave so soon, but at the same time
I heard that mysterious and convincing call.
You either listen or you don’t, and I listened
and almost burst out crying: a terrible sound,
born on the air and in the sea.
A sword and shield. And then,
despite the fear, I set off, I put my cheek
against death’s cheek.
And it was impossible to close my eyes and miss seeing
that strange spectacle, slow and strange,
though fixed in such a swift reality:
thousands of guys like me, baby-faced
or bearded, but Latin American, all of us,
brushing cheeks with death.

—Roberto Bolaño
(translated from the Spanish by Laura Healy)

Looking for Archimboldi 2666, Roberto Bolano, 2008

This last novel of Chilean writer Bolano was published posthumously in Spanish in 2004.
Part one is the most entertaining, containing a wonderful look at the strange, sometimes irrelevant world of academics. Four professors of German, an Italian, a Spaniard, and Frenchman, and and Englishwoman have all built their academic careers and reputations writing articles about the obscure German writer Archimboldi whom no one other than his publisher seems to have met and for which no picture exists.

Digital image by Fung Ching Kelling

More art and digital images by Fung Ching K.
Wave Apples

Painting – Two Side by Side

Chine Colle below
James

Happy Thanksgiving

Goose and Potato heart (Last year’s fun with google image)

May Ray died twenty-nine years ago today on Nov. 18, 1976

Hero I Monotype by Janet Paparelli

Six Man Ray films at Ubuweb

Lee Miller, an assistant, muse and onetime girlfriend of Man Ray is getting a lot of attention these days.

Lee Miller (image source)

Portrait Imaginaire de Marquis de Sade this one without the burning building.

His portrait of Antonin Artaud is all too familiar for Artaud fans.

Marcel Duchamp with shaving cream from Man Ray and its double.

Unlike American born Man Ray who died in Paris, Steichen was born in Luxembourg, he lived a long life and died in America. Both men started out with painting, however Steichen burned all of his paintings in the 1920’s.

Edward Steichen

A novel based on Edward Steichen is out recently.

This first novel of London born Mitchell deals with the life of real world photographer Edward Steichen during two period of his long life 1906-1914 when he lived and worked in France and 1917 to 1923 with the American entry into WWI and events immediately after the war. An American in Paris – The Last Summer of the World, Emily Mitchell, 2007

Self Portrait with Photographic Paraphernelia

Portrait of Brancuci among his sculptures

Looking back on Edward Steichen with a photo of Fred Astaire (Time magazine)

Match and Matchboxes (image source)

See Cafe Muller here and Pina Bausch here.

Looking at Flavin’s neon wall sculpture

Two ravers who came home from a club and decided to take more ecstacy. after a walk in the park, they found the museum. They are both dancing to the same album on their headphones (Beaucoup Fish by Underworld) but are slightly out of synch. Dan Flavin’s work looks brilliant on drugs, they both think. The Backstory of Minimoma -Drawing-Animation 2000, Minimoma by Craig Robinson

Looking at wall sculpture by Martin Puryear.

The above photo was taken at DC Hirshhorn Museum long long ago.
This photo was incorporated in my Post Mutant Eggplant index page. If you were the girl with a great t-shirt looking at Martin Puryear thanks for being there that day. (I will not make up your background story.)

Martin Puryear:Thirty Year Retrospective, at the MoMA

The above clip was recorded by James Kalm.

Coming upon sculptures by Martin Puryear is always an arresting pleasure. – Peter Schjeldahl (Seeing Things – the New Yorker)

Here is another short clip on youtube from Nebraska, showing a piece by Puryear called a Nightmare.

Puryear is certainly one of my contemporary heroes.
I got to meet him a few years back at Penland. He seemed like a really gentle soul with little pretense. (A note from Robert Gardner, the Asheville Glass master.)

And one more see Dennis Kucinich and his wife (Minipops by Craig Robinson).

If Fred McDarrah was the eyes for the Voice, Norman Mailer would have been the eyebrow and the brain for the Voice. Norman Mailer who co-founded the Village Voice passed away following the death of the Voice Photographer Fred McDarrah.

Obit by David Wiegand (SF Gate), Obit by Louis Menand of the Newyorker. BBC here, Villagevoice here.

Mailer as Houdini
Norman Mailer, who mythified Gilmore in his best-selling book The Executioner’s Song, plays the escapologist Harry Houdini. (Mathew B. plays Gary Gilmore in his Cremaster 2.)

Mathew Barney spoke of Mailer, Gary Gilmore and Houdini.

Well, I think what Norman Mailer’s book The Executioner’s Song does so elegantly is it describes the psychological state that landscape creates.

I think he has (qualities) not so different from this idea of Houdini having himself chained and locked and blindfolded and thrown in a box and this is the procedure to make a light, creative gesture. There’s a brutality in there that appeals to me in the same way. There’s a brutality and a physicality… that combination of accuracy and speed and violence. (Read more here)

Mailer on reincarnation

You believe in reincarnation. So what are you coming back as?
Well, I’m waiting, right? I’m in the waiting room. And finally my name is called. I go in and there’s a monitoring angel who says, Mr Mailer, we’re very glad to meet you. The good news is you’ve been passed for reincarnation. I say, Oh thank you, I really didn’t want to go into eternal peace. And the monitoring angel says, Well, between us, it isn’t really necessarily eternal peace. It can be a little hectic. Let me see, before I look and see what we’ve got you down for, we always ask people, What would you like to be in your next life? And I say, Well, I think I’d like to be a black athlete. I don’t care where you put me, I’ll take my chances, but yes, that’s what I want to be, a black athlete.
And the monitoring angel says, Listen, Mailer, we’re so oversubscribed in that department. Everybody wants to be a black athlete in their next life. Let me see what we’ve got you booked for. So he opens the big book, looks, and says, Well, we’ve got you down for a cockroach. But here’s the good news: you’ll be the fastest cockroach on the block. (From here)

My country is my spiritual wife and I lost respect for her. (Mailer on Youtube with French subtitle)

Mailer and his perfectionism – the sound of punching himself to eternity. Tough Guys – Nostalgia

Cinematic Life of Norman Mailer (Harvard Films Archive)

Mr. Tendentious and his enemies.

The last word was reserved for Andy Warhol: ‘I always thought Norman kept a low profile, that’s what I liked about him. (via greencinedaily also from Norman Mailer writes his own Obituary)

Mailer was an Aquarius dog – Brash Rescuer DOB:January 31, 1923

Remembering Fred W. McDarrah (1926-2007) – A slideshow.
The Voice work of the iconic photographer, from Bob Dylan to Andy Warhol to Rudy Giuliani

Obit and photo of Fred here (Ron Silliman)

Jack Kerouac creating a poem with Gloria McDarrah (Image Source)

De Kooning in His Broadway Studio, March 23, 1962
Vintage gelatin silver print, printed 1962

<><><>
Susan Sontag at a symposium on sex in 1962 at the Mills Hotel, now defunct, on Bleecker Street. (Image source from NY Times “On Self” by Susan Sontag)

Cedar Bar is closing

Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest (center) at the closing of the Cedar Bar, New York, 30 March, 1963, detail, photo copyright © Fred W.McDarrah, 1963, 2000 (Jacket Magazine)

Six Pop Artists at Warhol Loft Party, April 21, 1964 (click to see)
Pop Quiz – Name other five artists in this photo.

Lovely Eva Hesse with her sculptures using fragile material, (little did she know that these would eventually disintergrate.)

Iris Chang (Image source)

For Iris Chang
Alan Sondheim

If this were a suicide note, I would leave you my all. You would hear my voice in it, you would speak me as I have spoken to you, for the last time, and the words, the words would resonate in familiar tones uniquely my own. You would hear the silence after the speaking, and you would hear nothing else, nothing from me, but these words, over and over again. You might speak, but I would not hear. You might reach out to me, but I would not be there. I would not have known your new day, or the way you would read these lines, or even the smallest, simplest word, you might say, upon their completion. Such sadness, such anger, would not be mine, would not be of me, would not be anywhere. (Read more here.)

Book TV: Paula Kamen – Finding Iris Chang (youtube)

What happend to Iris Chang

Paula Kamen digs deep into the ambitious life and tragic death of her most successful friend.

Related link “Nightmare in Nanking” by Sue De Pasquale

Iris Chang’s homepage

The screenwriters will go on strike in Hollywood on Monday. This may be a great time for them to study and why not start with Bresson and Schrader? Bresson’s Pickpocket had a direct influence on Paul Schrader’s screenplays for Taxi Driver and American Gigolo.

In Pickpocket, the society whose laws Michel breaks is far more criminal than he is—not technically, not legally, but spiritually: this is Bresson’s archly comic irony, heavily veiled in nocturnal chiaroscuro.