Vitro Nasu

Pina Bausch (1940 – 2009) Photo by Peggy Jarrell Kaplan

So shocking, terribly sad.
The Guardian obit

Farewell to Pina Bausch, the dangerous magician of modern dance
Beautiful and strange, tragic yet hopeful, Pina Bausch’s creations entranced the audience. The news of her death is terribly sad – and a challenge for dance-makers

German dance legend Pina Bausch dies at 68

The director of the Wuppertal Tanztheater said Tuesday that Bausch had passed away unexpectedly earlier that morning. The choreographer had just last week been diagnosed with cancer, but had continued with her work up until her death.

Chantal Akerman made a documentary of Pina Bausch

Pina Bausch Picture galleries from Guardian here.

Dreaming of Pina (A wonderful Video)

Her influence is clear in the work of European choreographers like Jan Fabre, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Sasha Waltz and Alain Platel. Her work has also been a major influence on American contemporary dance choreographers who question the boundaries between theater and dance.

A scene from “Orpheus and Eurydice” at the Opera Garnier in Paris in 2005.

Created a Pina Bausch archive under dance.

Kontakthof

(Yolande Moreau as Séraphine)

Seraphine, a beautiful movie about an artist – Roberta

I watched a screener and have to say its a beautiful and thoughtful movie with a sad story at its core. All movies about artists should be this lovely. (read more)

Michael Galasso won award for the film score.

Accented by Michael (In the Mood for Love) Galasso’s haunting score and Laurent (The Grocer’s Son) Brunet’s cinematography (via)

Deux grandes marguerites
Louis Séraphine de Senlis

Yolande Moreau, a mature actress with a mature figure, is so beautiful as Seraphine you want to cry. She tromps through the movie like a farm hand and yet her face and body are so full of natural grace that she’s captivating. Moreau won the Cesar for best actress and it’s deserved.

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Music: Stabat Mater of ‘Arvo Pärt

Pitfall
Dan Harper (senses of cinema)

Described by Teshigahara as a documentary–fantasy, the film is all the more unsettling for its matter-of-fact illogic. Typical of Abe’s other works, The Pitfall also employs a pulp-fiction framework—a ghost story—but only to throw into relief both our preconceptions of the genre and the underlying truths that it unearths (in this case, literally). Antonioni had already exploited a similar approach in L’avventura (1960), which spends much of its time engaged in a futile search for a missing person. For his efforts with The Pitfall, Teshigahara won the NHK Best New Director award and the film earned the rare honor—for a novice director—of being released abroad.

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One of the sixties’ great international art-house sensations, Woman in the Dunes was for many the grand unveiling of the surreal, idiosyncratic worldview of Hiroshi Teshigahara. Eija Okada plays an amateur entomologist who has left Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle that resides in a remote, vast desert; when he misses his bus back to civilization, he is persuaded to spend the night in the home of a young widow (Kiyoko Kishida) who lives in a hut at the bottom of a sand dune. What results is one of cinema’s most bristling, unnerving, and palpably erotic battles of the sexes, as well as a nightmarish depiction of everyday Sisyphean struggle, for which Teshigahara received an Academy Award nomination for best director.(Via Criterion)

The Face of Another
The Face of Another (1966) is both a psychological study and an existential allegory. The protagonist is again a scientist, “the section head of a respectable laboratory,” whose face has been disfigured in a chemical explosion. This disfigurement creates a rift between the scientist and everyone he encounters –particularly his wife. The source of this rift is due less to others’ repulsion at his face than to the scientist’s self-disgust, both physically and mentally.

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Facebook Teshigahara (Fung Lin Hall copyafterfight image)

Abe Kobo and Toru Takemitsu are two of Teshigahara’s collaborators.

Gardens of Dreams
Khan was born in what is today Bangladesh in 1922 and held his first performance in the United States in 1955. He opened a music school in Berkeley in 1967, later moving it to San Rafael.

NYtimes obit

Ali Akbar Khan, the foremost virtuoso of the lutelike sarod, whose dazzling technique and gift for melodic invention, often on display in concert with his brother-in-law Ravi Shankar, helped popularize North Indian classical music in the West, died on Thursday at his home in San Anselmo, Calif. He was 87.

Ali Akbar Khan with Ravi Shankar
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Sarod Maetro Ali Akbar Akbar Khan Dies (World music central org)

Learning the ragas and mastering the instrument were both difficult challenges. Ali Akbar sais, “If you practice for 10 years, you may please yourself, after 20 years you may become a performer and please the audience, after 30 years you may please even your guru, but you must practice for many more years before you finally become a true artist-then you may please even God.”

His film scores, including Chetan Anand’s Aandhiyan, Satyajit Ray’s Devi, Merchant-Ivory’s The Householder, and Tapan Sinha’s Kshudista Pashan (“Hungry stones”), for which he won the “Best Musician of the Year” award. Later in 1993, he would score some of the music for Bernardo Bertolucci Little Buddha.[9]

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Antiquity makes it presence felt in an illustrated copy of the plays of the Roman playwright Terence that was made in St. Albans, England, in the 12th century. Here classical motifs and details mix freely with medieval ones in plain ink and wash, which were considered appropriate for pre-Christian themes.

In an 11th-century French codex, the Maccabees pursue their retreating foe across the gutter of a two-page spread as over adjacent hills. Line dominates, especially satisfying in its account of the lunging horses and contrasting body language of victors and vanquished.

“Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, features 50 rarely-seen works on view.

Roberta Smith writes:
The works span nearly five centuries and reveal medieval drawing to be vital, evolving, remarkably diverse and essential to the medium’s Renaissance blossoming.

Pilgrims Progress (repost)

Slow Progress Digital image by Fung Lin Hall (repost)

Mr. Mohsen Makhbalbaf, the distinguish movie director is a spokesman
for Mr. Mir Hossein Mousavi – see his film clip.
Silence

I speak for Mousavi – (guardian)

Riots in Tehran

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Images via Guardian

2009 Iranian Election Protests – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mousavi Twitter

Iran Radio Free Europe
Stop Ahmadi
Stand with Free Iran Twitter
Message from Mousavi (via 3quarksdaily)
Ahmadi sucks at photoshop (Joy Garnett)

(Via – Lanny Quarles)

David Bromige 1933-2009

Silliman called the first stanza of Mr. Bromige’s 1968 work “The Ends of the Earth” “as good an opening as anyone has ever written for a poem:”
“One aches to know one fact as axiom to act. Whatever I do I die as you also at times doubt the beneficence of the inevitable terror Earth-bound as one is.”

Obit from SF Chronicle

Poetry is the theory of heartbreak

Remembering David

DAVID BROMIGE QUOTES / FOUND POEMS

You can’t be a poet without being arrogant or naïve

He just disappeared! They can do that, Buddhist monks– invisibility and removing the fear of death are part of their super powers.

At the “Bromige School of Writing” that’s what we like to see – complete confidence…even if it’s shit.

(Regarding his poems:)
They must mean something to someone somewhere

Small things, the world is made up of them…small things (via)

David Bromige
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David Bromige

More Things To Do in Poetry

After Ron Silliman

You can call me anything, as long as you don’t call me late for breakfast.

You can drop me a line anytime, as long as you don’t drop me period.

You can kiss my ass, as long as you don’t have your teeth in.

You can roll over and play dead, as long as I’m not in the middle.

You can stripe me pink, as long as the other stripes aren’t mint-green.

You can blow me down, as long as you don’t blow me up.

You can search me, as long as your findings are legal and tender.

You can read me the Riot Act, as long as you do it in Croatian.

You can drop dead, as long as you’re playing possum.

You can shove it where the sun don’t shine, as long as you moon us.

You can quote me, as long as you change my name.

You can conjugate with yourself, but not in Anglo-Saxon.

You can think about it tomorrow, if you’ll be O’Hara tonight.

You can take a long walk off a short plank, as long as you don’t say “Plash!”

The Majestic El Capitan

A British veteran paralyzed while serving in Iraq is climbing Yosemite’s El Capitan to raise money to help injured fellow soldiers. (via)

Facebook Yosemite Park here

My travel photos from Yosemite (previous post)

Watch our earth rising from the moon via Kaguya (youtube)

Roger Federer vs Tommy Haas

The late David Foster Wallace is smiling in heaven.

If, read by Roger Federer & Rafael Nadal (Rudyard Kipling)

(Poetry in Motion at the French Open 2009)

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

John Maynard Keynes was born on June 5 a birthday he shared with Adam Smith another famous economist who was born earlier.

John Maynard Keynes by Roger Fry

Who’s This Fella Keynes, Anyway?

The ideas of British economist John Maynard Keynes, dead for 62 years, are back in vogue, it seems, as President Obama’s economic team attempts to fix the planet. You can learn all about Keynes and the cool crowd he ran with, the Bloomsbury Group, at the exhibition on view now at the Nasher Museum.

A room of their own (Bloomsbury Exhibition)

J. M. K. by Duncan Grant

An actor in lavender colored suit plays John Maynard Keynes in Derek Jarman’s film Wittgenstein.

(via)
John Maynard Keynes & Lydia Lopokova

Economics debunked.

The basic tenet of Keynesian economics is that only aggressive government policy can stabilize the economy which is otherwise subject to massive swings, creating enormous problems such as run away inflation, failing financial institutions, failing corporations, and massive unemployment. But, hey, today everyone in Washington is a Keynesian, right? After forty years of Chicago school dominance, Keynes is back.

Paul Thek Untitled, 1968

Paul Thek, who died of AIDS in 1988, first gained notice with his Technological Reliquaries (1964-67), yellow-tinted Plexiglas boxes that contained realistic wax replicas of human tissue, hair, teeth and bone. Influenced in part by Thek’s complicated attachment to his Catholic faith, these visceral sculptures were later echoed by the more esthetically detached work of Robert Gober, Damien Hirst and Matthew Barney.(Via)

Paul Thek by Peter Hujar
Susan Sontag dedicated her classic book “Against Interpretation” to Paul Thek. (1966)

1959-62 Thek lives in New York. He supports himself by designing textiles at Prince Studios. He meets the writer Susan Sontag. They become close friends. (via)

Chalice from Paul Thek Project
What is PT Project?

This site is dedicated to the installation work of Paul Thek. It is an ongoing project to collect and contextualize documentary photography and other relevant sources around Paul Thek’s environments

Shortcut to a labyrinth of PT’s mind
Objects include – boat <> <> bridge <> <> candle <> <> pyramid

Paul Thek
La Corazza di Michelangelo, 1963

Paul Thek at Rove TV includes many paintings.

Paul Thek Worship Zone by Dennis Cooper. (All you need to know about Paul Thek is here).

Should the artist be a man of the word? Paul Thek came up in the ’50s and ’60s, when it was hard to answer “no,” when “avant-garde artist” became a profession, an idea that repulsed him. Wrestling with this question in 1979, Thek wrote to a priest, “I am OK, still trying to be ‘an artist’ in the secular world . . . as you know, the world is the world, very ‘worldly,’ etc., etc.” He longed for recognition, but had little respect for posturing or artistic orthodoxies, retreating to Europe – and even, late in his life, to a monastery – for long periods.

Thanks to Hal Lam for reminding me about Paul Thek.

Update: Paul Thek & Peter Hujar
(Paul Thek’s Retrospective at the Whitney Museum + a show at Alexander & Bonin – Oct 2010)