Vitro Nasu

Tseng Kwong Chi
The bad weather is keeping us home today instead of camping at the Grand Canyon.
Meanwhile you may follow the late Tseng Kwong Chi as he went around the world.

Of course there is plenty of humor and irony in these photographs but seeing them in this context they also begin to take on an somber air of loneliness and sadness.

Tseng was an improbable pilgrim

In 1979, Joseph Tseng changed his name to Tseng Kwong Chi and embarked on a decade-long project called East Meets West (also referred to as “The Expeditionary Series”). With the camera’s shutter release in hand, he posed for approximately 150 images as a self-described “ambiguous ambassador” from the East, wearing the vintage Mao uniform he purchased from a second-hand store in Montreal, Velvet-Underground style sunglasses, and a visitor identification badge.

Almost Bruce Lee like

Reading The Pictures: The Obama Connection (See good pictures here)

Beijing v Denver: mind boggling statistics

Denver and Beijing have hosted two of the most massive events the summer – both in scale, structure and importance. But just how do they tally up?

Obama acceptance speech on youtube,
Part I, part II

Update:The Making of a Presidential Candidate (Special Project) from Honolulu Advertiser
Obama in Hawaii: Learning the reality of power
Early defining factors for Obama
Old friends paint portrait of Obama as young man
Hawaii’s imperfect melting pot a big influence on young Obama
For more articles, go to the background section.

Found this great photo from Democratic Underground commenter.
Is Hillary blowing a kiss? Did she learn this from Marilyn?

“Now, if you’ll indulge me one last time…” (Read our Hillary Clinton’s Thinly Veiled Loathing for Obama speech-o-tron, from Newsgrist)

Maya
Barack’s sister has the voice and the same confidence her brother displays. (Maya Soetoro-Ng at the Convention)

Michelle
Gorgeous Maya and Michelle bring fresh air to the tense and chaotic Democratic Convention in Denver.

Networks Sleep While Democracy Burns by Timothy Karr.

The late George Carlin, all he wanted was to wake up a hamster, Dennis Kucinich wants to Wake up America. (Youtube presentation – the Media never covers Kucinich).
See Dennis Kucinich and his wife minipops(repeat)

Denver Diary by Amitava Kumer who is writing for India Express.

BlinkyPalermo (via)

Hello Binky Palermo (Interactive EU Berkeley)
Chris Ashley (Look, See) must have coded this work so do not skip. (Here is an old post on Blinky by Chris A)

Meeting Imi and Blinky at Dia:Beacon

Blinky Palermo and Imi Knoebel met at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf in the Sixties while studying with Joseph Beuys alongside Jörg Immendorff, Imi Giese, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter. Both Knoebel and Palermo were exploring art’s essential objectness, the importance of spatial arrangement, and dynamic installation strategy. Like other artists in both the United States and Germany, they earnestly aspired to change the course of art history. Knoebel, investigating the imageless areas between materiality, objectness, and arrangement, worked with unpainted fiberboard. Palermo was particularly interested in non-objective, semiotic color propositions. (Read more here)

Blinky who died mysteriously at 33 years old, continues to haunt the art world, Dia:Beacon is another one of the recurrent trends.

(via)

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Blinky Palermo was named after this boxer.

Man of the Cloth by Adrian Searle

The Unexpected Death of Blinky Palermo in the Tropics is the title of a typically blustering painting by Julian Schnabel, which fed the Palermo myth (founded on the idea that Palermo was an “artist’s artist”) and didn’t do Schnabel’s reputation any harm either. Fostering the association gave Schnabel a bit of easy gravitas.

I still remember the first time I saw his work at the gallery in New York (Betty Parsons? or Jack Tilton?), I was knocked out. Later I learned about his tragic life and his captivating name.

Blinky in MoMa Geo/Metric exhibition (Joanne Mattera) Beautiful!!

A baby sleeping peacefully in front of Blinky’s iconic paintings (flickr)

Hyun Chun’s Blinky Palermo flckr page <> <>Daneille and Blinky Palermo flickr page

#23- from Mike Dumlao’s Flickr page

Beuys and Blinky Palermo

Goodbye Beijing Olympics 08

Listen to podcast about Leopold Maler

No lines, no admission fee to see the best of Magdalena Abakanowicz, Morris Louis, Theodore Stamos, Robert Motherwell, Anselm Kiefer, Per Kirkeby, Francis Bacon, Alan Rath, Frank Stella, Rolf Iseli and others.

The Hess collection

offers great art at beautiful setting on Mt. Veeder. Herr Donald Hess is Swiss and he has been collecting art for more than 48 years.

View of vineyard from Healdsburg, California. (Mosaic Winery, originally Delaurimier).
When we visited this winery more than ten years ago, there was no charge, now the name got changed and the taste as well.

Complimentary wine tasting is now rare. Here is a list of six wineries where we had complimentary tasting.

1, Mason Winery in Napa
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2 Sausal Winery
3 Kenwood Vineyards
4 Wellington Vineyards
5 Lake Sonoma Winery
6 Ridge Vineyards

Most wineries now charge a tasting fee, but if you are planning to buy wine, your $5.00 or $10.00 tasting charges will be deducted from your purchase.

The Headquarters of the Salvation Army in Healdsburg
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Healdsburg used to have a great thriftstore in Downtown, not anymore. The downtown where the Duchamp Hotel is located has now become another generic tourist trap.

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Ansel Adams Interactive (NYtimes) See how full the waterfall was in the old days. Now the waterfall is more like a dripfall – pathetic.

John Muir convinced Teddy Roosevelt to conserve Yosemite Park.

!n 1871

Also that year, one of Muir’s heroes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, arrived in Yosemite and sought Muir out. Muir’s former professor at the University of Wisconsin, Ezra Carr, and Carr’s wife Jeanne encouraged Muir to publish his ideas.

Leaning with De Young Museum.
San Francisco was cold as you can see. Daisy has a sweater and Jurgen is wearing a jacket.

Jurgen has a blog – it’s called JTwine – Now.
We saw Hitler Porcelain together. He mentioned bitter melon but we ate eggplant instead.

What is Niesatt?

Previous post on Jurgen Trautwein (aka JTwine)

On August 1 we left Arizona, camped at Yosemite, did some wine tasting in Napa, Sonoma and Healdsburg, peeked at Duchamp Hotel, spent a nice day with Jurgen in SF and drove to LA via Big Sur.
Both Daisy and Spike loved camping, sleeping in the tent and later they learned to sniff and love Motel 6.
Duchamp Hotel would have charged $60 per pet. (Peggy Gunggenheim had great named pets and they were buried in Venice.)
More about our California trip with photos will be coming soon.

BBC
A Palestinian man looks out from a building damaged in the conflict with Israel in the southern Gaza Strip.

Record!
I am an Arab
And my identity card is number fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the nineth is coming after a summer
Will you be angry?

R.I.P Mahmoud Darwish 1941-2008

Clara by Roberto Bolano

She had big breasts, slim legs, and blue eyes. That’s how I like to remember her. I don’t know why I fell madly in love with her, but I did, and at the start, I mean for the first days, the first hours, it all went fine; then Clara returned to the city where she lived, in the south of Spain (she’d been on vacation in Barcelona), and everything began to fall apart. (Read more – New Yorker – Fiction)

Roberto Bolano

Renate Buser

The two gif images are from here.

Sometimes you come across someone’s work and you wonder why it has escaped your attention all that time. (Mrs Deane)

Visit her website and explore in depth.
(Do not miss “Omoide Yokocho”)

Architecture and angles photos from Sushi site.

How to take the photographs off the wall

Akram Khan Zero Degrees

Zero Degrees

About a decade ago, the London-born choreographer Akram Khan and his Bangladeshi cousin were boarding a train from India to Bangladesh when police confiscated their passports and wouldn’t return them until Khan’s cousin slipped them some money. Then the cousins found a dead man in their carriage.
Khan moved to help the man’s distraught wife, but his cousin told him to stay put. “They’ll just blame you for the death,” he said. “They need to blame someone, so they’ll blame you.” They’d recognize that Khan was a foreigner–he had insubordination in his eyes–and they’d throw him in prison and he’d never get out.
When Khan and the Moroccan-Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui sat down to plan a joint work in 2005, Cherkaoui asked Khan to tell him something he’d never told anyone before. Khan told this story.

Portrait of the artist Akram Khan

Sacred Monsters by Sylvie Guillem, choreographed by Akram Khan (Youtube).
(The fact that Juliette Binoche is not a professional trained dancer like Sylvie may bring more surprises and warmth to Khan’s work, as evidenced by the sample of this clip).

Rhada’s Dance (traditional Indian dance excerpted from Jean Renoir’s film “The River”)