Vitro NasuIconoclastic Incubator
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<> <> <> Google Nasu Day or 50th anniversary of NASA
<> <> Death Valley Sky 
Night Sky Death Valley photos recognized by NASA
Death Valley Video by Philip Bloom (With good music and good editing)
Update:Funny Face Space Man <> Drilling the gallery floor <> NASA according to Tom Sachs
Devil General, Kato Kiyomasa 
(July 25, 1562-August 2, 1611) was a Japanese daimyō of the Sengoku and Edo period.)
Pretty scary guy, especially dealing with the Christians. (Click the image to see better)
A ferocious fighter and often ruthless, Katô Kiyomasa was a warrior, nothing more, nothing less. He wrote to his followers later in his life that poetry and dancing were shameful pastimes for a samurai, and ordered anyone who found himself engaged in the latter to commit suicide. His cruelty and love of combat (for sport, he hunted tigers with a spear in Korea) earned him the nickname Kishokan, or, ‘Devil General’. (via)
Another July 25 birthday person was Thomas Eakins who was born in 1844.
Thomas Eakins 
Where Muybridge’s system relied on a series of cameras triggered to produce a sequence of individual photographs, Eakins preferred to use a single camera to produce a series of exposures on one negative. (via)
Are you familiar with this image? Here is his Walt Whitman.
Eric Hoffer the author of the True Believer and Elias Canetti were born on July 25 three years apart.
This Nobel prize winning author is more known for “Crowd and Power” and “Auto-Da-Fe”
Elias Canetti 
His Aphorisms – Canetti-scope (Mixed with his planets from his horoscope)
*Today everyone takes part in public executions through the newspapers.
*Most religions do not make men better, only warier.
*There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.
My favorite book by Canetti is “Kafka’s Other Trial” – Kafka’s Letters to Felice B.
Canetti sees that writers are responsible of the preservation, revivification, and invention of the life-sustaining myths and their meaning. Tolstoy is rejected as a model for having “struck a kind of pact with death” in his late turn to religion, and Kafka emerges “among all writers as the greatest expert on power”.(Via)
The Odd Bod (In literary London, Elias Canetti was everybody’s favorite refugee, by Jonathan Wilson.)
Iris Murdoch, Canetti’s lover for three years from 1952, gets absolutely and cruelly ripped, as a lover, as a novelist, and as a philosopher.
Canetti appeared in Iris Murdoch’s novels as..
he spawned in her not just mysterious power-broking Mischa Fox, but also demonic puppet-master Julius King in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, and rapacious woman-hating tyrant Charles Arrowby in her Booker-winning The Sea, The Sea. (Fox on the Loose)
In Party in the Blitz Canetti exacts his vengeance on her. “Everything I despise about English life is in her,” he declares. His portrait of her, though “caricature” is surely a better word, fairly seethes with venom and bile. He scorns everything from her enthusiasms for Sartre and Heidegger to the diaphanous blouse she wears to a meeting with Canetti and his friend the aristocratic Aymer Maxwell. He describes in detail the circumstances of their love-making–“she had things on that didn’t have anything remotely to do with love, it was all woolen and ungainly”–and, even worse, he is dismissive of her gift:
Iris is what I would call an “illegitimate” writer. She never suffered from having to write. There was always something schoolgirl-like about her, even after twenty-four novels, and if not schoolgirl-like, then schoolmarmish, which in a writer is even worse.
It is a pity that Party in the Blitz should stand as Canetti’s last word. He was, in his way, a great figure, one of the last of those omnivorous intellects produced by Old Europe in its dying decades before the catastrophe of World War II. If Auto-da-Fé is more impressive than satisfying, Canetti’s Crowds and Power, which grew out of the disastrous politics of the 1930s, will surely survive. For all the cruelty of his late judgments on those he loved and those who loved him, it is well to heed the warning of Murdoch’s biographer Peter Conradi: “Those wishing to honour Iris’s reputation must fight the temptation to blacken Canetti’s.”
Monster’s Ball by John Banville)
July 26 birthday boys – Aldous Huxley, Stanley Kubrick and Carl Jung (Previously here and here ).
You can see Huxley here. (Mike Wallace interviewed him)
Introducing Kay Ryan, our Poet Laureate
(via)
Like Jasper Johns, Ryan frequently focuses upon objects or language with which we are so familiar that we may have forgotten to pay much attention any longer, forcing a fresh look. Perhaps no other poet, except Ashbery, brings back to life dull and overused terms or platitudinous sayings as often and as well as Kay Ryan. In Ryan’s poetry, clichéd and hackneyed phrases become sources of inspiration.(One Poet’s Notes – Kay Ryan the Niagara River)
Kay Ryan, Outsider With Sly Style, Named Poet Laureate (NYtimes)
In 1976 she finally realized that she could not escape the poet inside her. She had decided to ride a bicycle from California to Virginia in 80 days. Riding along the Hoosier Pass in the Colorado Rockies, she said, she felt an incredible opening up, “an absence of boundaries, an absence of edges, as if my brain could do anything.”
I Go to AWP – lifetime of preferring not to
I have always understood myself to be a person who does not go to writers conferences. It’s been a point of honor: the whole cooperative workshopping thing, not for me.
One of Ryan’s poems – “How Birds Sing” – is permanently installed at the Central Park Zoo in New York City. “It’s on top of a little retaining wall that children run up and down on,” she said. (Sfgate)
I never thought of myself as having copied his line consciously, but one of the many things I admire in Williams, and a thing that I love about poetry and aspire to have in my poetry, is a terrific sense of lightness. I can’t stand the pounding, drumming, assaulting, kind of poetry. I just love the unemphasized casualness in Williams. I think I associate the lightness of the appearance on the page with another kind of lightness—not lightness of intention, but lightness of delivery. Does that make sense?
I like her a lot.
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker –
Rosas_Fase_Clapping Music
De Keersmaeker’s biography here.
(See Happy Geta Feet – Japanese tap dancing video from previous post)
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Listen to Delia Derbyshire’s Experimental dance track
Delia is a pioneer in Electronic music
A recent Guardian article called her ‘the unsung heroine of British electronic music’, probably because of the way her infectious enthusiasm subtly cross-pollinated the minds of many creative people. She had exploratory encounters with Paul McCartney, Karlheinz Stockhausen, George Martin, Pink Floyd, Brian Jones, Anthony Newley, Ringo Starr and Harry Nilsson.
Delia at BBC 
Gustav Klimt was born on July 14.
Klimt movie directed by Raúl Ruiz.
Schubert at Piano <> <> <>
Farmhouse with Birch Tree <> <> <> After the Rain
Portrait of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein (Ludwig Wittgenstein‘s sister).
Gretl Wittgenstein 
Gustav Klimt – the Ladies Man
Bombhead 
by Bruce Conner
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The great collage artist and accidental avant-garde father of found-footage, Bruce Conner died July 7th 2008. His legacy in Library of Congress and in collections among major art institution the world over. But long before he certainly had been immortalized on YouTube, and that of course bears an amusing double-irony. Some might interpret it as “giving back” others as “stealing from a thief”.
Feather 
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Metronome Cocoon
The above images from Susan Inglett Gallery and Paule Anglim
Blessing Angel by Bruce Conner – 12 more angels to click through (via Life on Mars)
The Sound of Two Hand Angel. (This angel appeared on NYtimes obit )
Various works by B. C from Kohn Gallery
Bruce Conner and his poet friend had a lovely adventure by calling up Robert Motherwell from a phone book.
(Read more here, an obit by Leah Garchick.)
R.I.P Bruce Conner (previous post)
Bombhead by Bruce Conner 1933 – 2008
Bruce Conner, San Francisco Artist With 1950s Beat Roots, Dies at 74 (Ken Johnson NYtimes)
See Mea Culpa, Bruce with David Byrne and Brian Eno from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts–
Connor mainly uses old educational films, science films, government footage and film footage that people throw out and then recuts them to new music, creating dark and sometimes hilarious moods and visual commentaries.
A-Movie – It is referred to as the piece that brought Conner to notoriety. In skillfully editing stock footage, Conner created abstract metaphors of mankind’s violence.
EVE-RAY-FOREVER 
(via)
His interview 1990
Devo’s Mongoloid :From “The Complete Truth About De-evolution.” (youtube)
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“Erasing Dreamland” was created using found footage from Youtube in order to forge a digital homage to the analog techniques of the artist and film maker Bruce Conner, specifically his film “Take The 5-10 To Dreamland.”
The digital recreation of “Take The 5-10 To Dreamland” was created by searching through the meta data associated with videos on YouTube and sorting through the resulting clips for bits and pieces that would sync in time with Bruce Conners’s film.
Here is When Caveh [Zahedi] met Bruce (Conner) (who didn’t meet Louise [Brooks])
Conner was cantankerous and one-of-a-kind. He would wear an American flag pin. When asked why, he said, “I’m not going to let those bastards take it away from me.” Sigh. (via Movie city indie)
San Francisco author Rebecca Solnit wrote;
My friend Bruce Conner died yesterday morning in San Francisco, I heard from many mutual friends this morning (I’m overseas). He had been ill for decades and had been given months to live twenty years earlier and more seriously. I met him when I was in my early twenties; I approached him with considerable trepidation when I wrote my thesis on the artist Wallace Berman and found him duly terrifying but also charming, hilarious and possessed of a stunning memory for events of the 1950s, when he joined the other visual artists who, allied with the beat poets of the era, created one of California’s first and most significant avant-gardes. We became friends and had a bumpy, a musing, precious friendship over the next near-quarter century, with interruptions. Bruce himself as most of you know was an extraordinary prodigal genius in many media, reshaping the way film could be understood with his short found-footage movies from A Movie (1958) on, making brilliant, eclectic, and deeply individual work in painting, collage, assemblage, printmaking, photography and other still media, mostly in black and white, a drama of beauty, strangeness, moral wrestling, pop culture and spiritual inquiry that is in my opinion among the most important visual stuff to come out of that strange midcentury moment; I think posterity will raise him higher in the history books, though his choice to spend his life in San Francisco was a choice not to give a damn about that, and he made many uncareerist decisions in a career that is better described as a quest for unattainable perfection that left him dissatisfied but kept his standards high. He was able to see what was sad in porn ography, beautiful in atomic explosions, strange in shadows and photograms, comic in Jesus engravings, rich in black and white. I remember him telling another interviewer about his first viewing of a movie–a Shirley Temple film seen with his mother in Kansas when he was five; his mother kept urging him to admire Temple’s cuteness and he recalled, “She was fifty feet tall and the scariest thing I’d ever seen.” And he commented, “I’m just a stranger on earth, that’s all,” or words to that effect suggesting that aliens see things differently than the natives. No longer of this earth…..
warmly,
Rebecca
(Via email from Hal Lum)
Alan Sondheim – I saw his films years ago, this is sad (via email)
Obit from Sf MoMa Open Space
I chose this clip. It is too painful to show a clip of how Federer dumped his ball into the net and lost after almost 5 hours of playing on the court.
Nadal’s win was anticipated by many tennis fans who have been following Tennis. Federer came back and fought hard after losing two sets to win two more until he lost in the final. Federer could not break Nadal’s serve. He won two tie breaks against Nadal and unfortunately for Federer, Wimbledon does not have a tie break for the final set.
Today, Nadal and Federer represented tennis played at its absolute highest level and with its most generous and admirable spirit, and that’s why I think they are the greatest rivalry the sport has known, since I’ve been watching. (Dispatches: A Post-Wimbledon Dialogue – 3quarksdaily)
The greatest match I’ve ever seen – J. McEnroe
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Name the sculptor who made the above piece. You see him here (photo:Edward Steichen) and here, two great photos with this cup like sculpture on the edge .
Scott Burton made a career out of studying this great artist and extend the concept of merging art and design, abstract non-functional to functional.
Mahogany 
Table by Scott Burton
Mr. Burton, a small, wiry man known for his erudition, verbal precision and explosive laugh, worked as a critic and an editor for Art News and Art in America before becoming a full-time artist. He emerged in the late 1960’s and early 70’s as part of an artistic generation that came of age in the shadow of Minimalism. (Obit by Roberta Smith)
See more Scott Burtonhere Bronze Chair <>Steel furniture <> Rock Sattee Sitting on his stone chair
Ellen Harvey’s Panel (partial view – via)
Don’t know Ellen? Look her up here.
Matt Christie 
Crafted by Matt Christie. (Yes, the reader of philiosophy and literature and an author of Pas-audela)
Wood work you can buy. (Make great wedding, anniversary, or housewarming gifts) They are on sale now at GREENRIVERWOODS Etsy.
Kafka as a young child 
October 18, 1921. Eternal Child. Life calls again.
April 11 1922. Eternal youth is impossible : even if there were no other obstacle, instrospection would make it impossible. (from Diaries 1914- 1923)
July 3 (today) was Franz Kafka’s birthday. (July 3, 1883, 7 am in Prague – a Cancer with moon in Gemini.)
See another photo of Kafka at 13 Bar mitzvah
Anthony Perkins in the Trial (1962) directed by Orson Wells (Villagevoice review,here)
Architect Steven Holl has completed the interior of the Franz Kafka Society in Prague, Czech Republic.
“Kafka is in ecstasy, writes whole nights through. A novel, set in America.”-Max Brod
When Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened in Prague in 1964, its title was changed to Who’s Afraid of Franz Kafka?
Orson Wells narrates Before the Law
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