Archive for July, 2009

Agnes Varda

Thursday, July 30th, 2009


Agnes Varda at age 81 is still telling her story.

Beach house movie set on the street where she lives

Here is a review of “the Beaches of Agnes” from Hammer to Nail.

varda

Now, as an octogenarian, she’s taken her project of introspection even further, making a feature-length video about her own life, her own art, her outlook on the world as she’s grown older, her relationships, childhood, memories. It’s the kind of film a less charitable critic might call indulgent; yet why shouldn’t a filmmaker write her own life story on the screen rather than the page? As with any autobiography, the author’s passions and blind spots are all there for us to see, and despite the expected amount of immodesty coursing through it, “The Beaches of Agnès” is a mostly enchanting troll down memory lane. (Indiewire)

Have you missed this film by Agnes Varda?

This is the first four minutes of Agnes Varda’s full-length documentary “The Gleaners and I” (2000). Inspired by Realist painter Jean-François Millet’s famous painting “The Gleaners [Les Glaneuses].

One more short clip from The Gleaners and I

Young Susan Sontag appeared with Agnes V. in an interview, smoking and listening from this clip.

Gravitational Pull Of The Avant-Garde – Agnes Varda and Tilda Swinton (Getty Image blog)

<> <> <> <> Photographs by Agnes Varda (repost) Photos by Agnes Varda

Shit We’re Diggin: Agnes Varda’s 1981 Documentary “Mur murs” (Wooster Collective)

Merce Cunningham R.I.P

Monday, July 27th, 2009

annie_leibovitz_merce_cunningham (photo by Annie Leibovitz)
Merce Cunningham( April 16, 1919 – July 26, 2009)

Goodbye Merce and thank you.
About Merce and Merce org. here.

Three clips from Ubuweb including one with John Cage and Nam June Paik.

Perfect Balance Memoir of Cage/Cunningham by Carolyn Browns

For all of her devotion to and love of Cunningham, Brown reveals that of the famed duo, Cunningham was the difficult one, a man often lost within himself, at times almost reclusive, failing to explain his decisions….
Cage, on the other hand, comes across as a generous spirit throughout, a man who loved games, eating (his mushroom-hunting expeditions are renowned), and, most of all, talking. The gregarious Cage, traveling in the early days with the company, was responsible, so Brown suggests, for the feeling that they were, in fact, a company, for the sense of group spirit. Like a loving mother, Cage is always there to help Cunningham get through the ordeals of travel and the horrible pain the body of any dancer must endure.
Cage is presented as a joyful being, seeking everyone’s happiness. Brown writes:

Obit from artbeat blogs NYtimes.

Merce Cunningham, the American choreographer who was among a handful of 20th-century figures to make dance a major art and a major form of theater, died Sunday night. He was 90 and lived in Manhattan.
Mr. Cunningham ranks with Isadora Duncan, Serge Diaghilev, Martha Graham and George Balanchine in making people rethink the essence of dance and choreography, posing a series of “But” and “What if?” questions over a career of nearly seven decades.

The Three Kings

Sunday, July 26th, 2009

Birthday Child 1carlj2
Birthday Child 2aldous21

Name These Children album was upgraded. Now the links do not go to facebook. Just click the photos to get the answers.

Stanly Kubrick kubrick shared a birthday with these children.
Kubrick was thinking a lot about ‘The Shadow Concept’ and decided to explore that in his next war film.

Kubrick on Jung and Arthur Schnitzler

Brian Eno on Barry Lyndon (youtube)
He thinks it’s the best film and he tells us why in this clip.

Birthday child 1 wrote,

1) An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
2) Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.
3) Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to a better understanding of ourselves.

Birthday child 2 wrote,

1)A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.
2)All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
3)After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

July Photo Random

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

Heath Ledger heath-ledger-0908-pp04 Vanity Fair

You MY Mirror 2emily2
Emile Hyperion Dubuisson

You MY Mirror 1emily1
Emile Hyperion Dubuisson
See Siberia by Emile Hyperion Dubuisson (Follow tiny > sign on top left)

Recently I had returned to some images I made in Russia a few years ago.
These bleak images from Siberia, which I once gave up as lost due to an
accident in development, have been brought back to life through careful
scanning.
By putting contradictory feelings side by side, I tried to recreate the
rudeness and the fullness of this landscape. This story is a very personal,
intimate and human portrait of these men and women.

Polaroids by André Kertész Stephen Bulger Gallery
Have you seen his Polaroids?

Pulled these two iconic photos from my file.

André Kertész 52kertesz

André Kertész <> 79kertesz

André Kertész: The power of reading
Blake Morrison on André Kertész’s photographic celebration of the joy of the written word (Guardian)

The Budapest-born Kertész enjoyed a long life (1894-1985), visited many countries and was involved in several different artistic movements. But wherever he went and whatever the commission, a constant preoccupation was with people reading. In one of his earliest and most moving images, three small boys (two of them barefoot) crouch over a book in a Hungarian street in 1915; in one of the last, a young woman stands reading in the shadow of a vast Henry Moore statue. Ferocious concentration is common to both. The act of reading involves no action, beyond turning the page. But the mental activity is intense, and it’s this that fascinates Kertész.

First Manga – Choju Giga

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

Two delightful comic illustration from Fay Ryu.
faycat

<> faycat21

CHOJU GIGA (鳥獣戯画) “, the first manga in Japan. It was written 900 years ago by TOBA-SOJO. Rabits, monkeys, frogs, foxes behave like human.

118bd3fa

<> <> <> <> 9882

What is Choju Giga?

This youtube trailer for Choju Giga is accompanied by a sountrack from tap dancing finale of Zatoichi.
Click to see this funky Happy Geta Feet – zatoichi finale. (repost)

Thank you Tadano Kinshu for Choju Giga clip!

Goodbye Teacher Man – R.I.P Frank McCourt

Monday, July 20th, 2009

Angela’s Ashes
tunelight © 2001 Video: Alexander Ng, Sunghun Kang, and Damien Borowik Sound: Stuart jones

Author Peter Matthiessen, who became friendly with McCourt after “Angela’s Ashes” came out, said he was “stunned” when he read it. “I remember thinking, ‘Where did this guy come from?” Matthiessen said. “His book was so good, and it came out of nowhere.” (via Huffingtonpost obit)

Time obit

“It was only when I felt I could finally distance myself from my past that I began to write about what happened.”

Frank McCourt, rest in peace! I think his writing made me a better person. (that is a rather large order) He really could tell a story, a personal, disastrous, story and somehow guide the reader with a seamless wisdom. Paul Hasegawa Overacker

I interviewed him for an hour or so about two years ago. He was not sweet or grandfatherly or playing up his old country Irish roots — he was a driven, determined man who talked at length about how power corrupts, how authority, especially religious authority, can twist and ruin people’s lives, and how you have to find joy through decency, justice and a fiery commitment to telling the truth. I liked him immensely and reread all of his work with more attention. I realized that for all their humor, his books are intense and pointed efforts to redress the wrongs of the past and save people in the present from their desire to be told what to do. posted by Matthew Stopheles (Metafilter)

Elements, Tapestry & Lancelot

Saturday, July 18th, 2009


“A student shared this with me as a part of his assignment on the Bayeux Tapestry. Now if we could animate the rest of art history…”Philip Buntin

Pen and Parchment : Drawing in the Middle Ages” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

<> threatening-sky1
Threatening Sky by McLoad V Wauthy Waldon

<> feluy1
Feluy by McLoad V Wauthy Waldon

Trailer Lancelot du Lac Robert Bresson.

Poem by Robert Creeley

Bresson’s Movies

A movie of Robert
Bresson’s showed a yacht,
at evening on the Seine,
all its lights on, watched

by two young, seemingly
poor people, on a bridge adjacent,
the classic boy and girl
of the story, any one

one cares to tell. So
years pass, of course, but
I identified with the young,
embittered Frenchman,

knew his almost complacent
anguish and the distance
he felt from his girl.
Yet another film

of Bresson’s has the
aging Lancelot with his
awkward armor standing
in a woods, of small trees,

dazed, bleeding, both he
and his horse are,
trying to get back to
the castle, itself of

no great size. It
moved me, that
life was after all
like that. You are

in love. You stand
in the woods, with
a horse, bleeding.
The story is true.

Julius Schulman R.I.P

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

Julius Schulman oz_kaufmann1
Julius Schulman – Modernity & Metropolis -Getty

L.A Obit

Shulman died Wednesday at his L.A. home. One observer says he had ‘a profound effect on the writing and teaching of architectural history … especially Southern California modernism.’

Photographic Memory of Julius Schulman

More photographs from artnet

Koenig Case study (LA times) House 22

The Stahl children recall growing up in the iconic glass-and-steel structure, which is marking its 50th year.

Shelter

Narrated by Dustin Hoffman, VISUAL ACOUSTICS celebrates the life and career of Julius Shulman.

Name These Children

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

She is a free Spirit stanley
Her son’s tribute on youtube here.

“She is an intrepid Soul” doris2
Described by Margaret Atwood.

Is he self conscious? john-updike-200x345

Click the photos to see who they are.
camuskidconrad_18631jung-child2
duras2mayaderen22enfance
yukio_mishima_1931kafka22babyingrmar

Catherine Breillat

Monday, July 13th, 2009

Happy Birthday Catherine Breillat
Brian Price from Senses of Cinema.

Her films are, as I have said, uniquely concerned with a woman’s understanding of her own sexuality. The representation of this sexual reckoning encompasses a wide range of issues including the adolescent obsession with the loss of virginity, in films like Une vraie jeune fille (1975) and 36 Fillette (1988); a woman’s (possibly) masochistic relation to sex in Romance (1999); and the seemingly unbridgeable sexual and emotional gulf between an older woman and a younger man, in Parfait amour! (1996) and Brève traversée (2001).

Happy Birthday to Keith Ulrich, author of House Next Door film blog.

Hans Heiner Buhr

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

Could be better hanscouldbe
Painting by Hans Heiner Buhr. (via Flickr)

More paintings by Hans Heiner Buhr

Hans has just created his google profile.

Linked his Art Club Caucasus in vitro-nasu sidebar menu.

Mickey Rourke hansmickey

  • His delightful gif animations were featured here – Gifs for Gaffe (Hillary Clinton Bosnia Gaffe)

    Click to animate here true

    Jean Cocteau Part II

    Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

    Jean Cocteau jean-cocteau-irving-penn-1950 by Irving Penn

  • Two more great clips from youtube.
    We are all going to die, I am off

    Le Testament d’Orphée (1959)

  • <> <> <> <> Raymond Radiguet by Jean Cocteau

    Max Jacob introduced Radiguet to Jean Cocteau.

    Do not accuse fate. Do not speak of injustice. He belonged to the solemn race of men whose lives unfold too quickly to their close. (Jean Cocteau, more here)

    He was hard and of a brutal force, alternately passionate and indifferent, as Cocteau said, it needed “a diamond to scratch his heart.” (via)

    Smoking a cigarette “At the Age of Fifteen”, another drawing by Jean Cocteau from Flickr.