Vitro NasuIconoclastic Incubator
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Passage way from the Chinese cultural center in Phoenix.
People from the search engine are visiting my 2005 New Year post looking for “Akeome Kotoyoro” happy new year in Japanese. I have decided to add a photo to my old post – the photo is from 2009.
2009 ended with Martin Wong memorial, a most fitting finale I must say.
Happy New Year 
Namahage (youtube) – a ritual from Akita.
James Kalm helps to memorialize a wonderful artist. Janet Paparelli via email
Wong’s mature work ranged from gritty, heartfelt renderings of the decaying Lower East Side, to playful, almost kitschy depictions of New York’s and San Francisco’s Chinatowns, to “traffic signs for the hearing impaired”. He is perhaps best known for his collaborations with Nuyorican poet Miguel Piñero, paintings that often combined Piñero’s poetry or prose with Wong’s painstaking cityscapes and stylized fingerspelling. (Wiki)
Rupture <> <> 
Untitled prison image here.
Martin Wong is dead a painter of poetic realism (Aug 18, 1999 Roberta Smith – NYtimes )
In the early 1990’s, Mr. Wong focused increasingly on Chinese, or more specifically Chinese-American subject matter, fashioning a fluid but characteristically hybrid style that drew on classical sources, childhood memories, Hollywood movie stereotypes and his collection of Chinatown gift shop souvenirs.
Piñero – Benjamin Bratt played a poet and lover of Martin Wong who died a decade earlier. (Youtube trailer)
Piñero played an important role in acquainting partner, artist Martin Wong with the Lower East Side, becoming a benefactor at a time when Wong found it difficult to meet his rent. Several of Wong’s paintings are illustrations of poems given to him by Piñero. (wiki)
Many thanks to Janet Paparelli
Paul Bowles
His music on youtube
Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 – November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. (wiki)
Paul Bowles, Blue Mountain Ballads: 3. Cabin
” it all seems limitless’
Baptism Of Solitude: A Tribute To Paul Bowles (Paul Bowles voice over + animation)
Keef, Mick & Ronnie travel to Tangier, Morocco to record with the ‘Master Muscians of Jajouka’ for the track “Continental Drift”. Mick visits ‘ol beatnik Paul Bowles and Keef remembers Morocco of the 60’s and Brian Jones. Shot 16th & 17th June and broadcasted 10th Dec. 1989. Five parts.
Paul Bowles reads Up Above World (Youtube)
Paul Bowles and Matisse in Morocco (Previous post)
Kepler Optica
Johannes Kepler December 27, 1571 – (his horoscope shows a different birthday.)
On Kepler
Koestler and Kepler; the perfect fusion, a review Written by Devin Mcintosh.
“The Watershed” by Arthur Koestler is a magnificent piece of literature that is unique, yet well organized and informative of the life and works of Johannes Kepler. Koestler does a great job in showing how the modern world-view was slowly replaced by the medieval world-view and how science has progressively advanced.
Johannes Kepler saw himself as a hapless lap dog from Arthur Koestler’s most delightful book, read the excerpt from my previous post. (Kepler is always attached to Arthur Koestler in my mind.)
Arthur Koestler 
Man of Darkness (NYtimes)
Koestler’s Big Week, he read 3 reviews of Koestler’ new biography.
Louis Menand: The Road Warrior (the New Yorker)
Koestler wrote in German (the original language of “Darkness at Noon”) and English. He spoke Hungarian, Russian, Spanish, and French, too. (Hebrew gave him trouble; characteristically, he blamed the language.) He was, in his own phrase, the “Casanova of causes,” from Zionism to the campaign against capital punishment, and he donated generously to many of them. He maintained lifelong relationships (including the occasional feud) with the writers, scientists, and political activists he met in the various places he visited. And he was a social and sexual torpedo. Academics generally avoided him, but he socialized and debated—alcohol, generously administered, was a necessary lubricant and invariably made him obstreperous and sometimes violent—with nearly everyone else in midcentury intellectual circles, from George Orwell and Jean-Paul Sartre to Whittaker Chambers and Timothy Leary. He was married three times, and he had literally hundreds of affairs. He was the sort of person who records his liaisons in a notebook.
Paris Review – Arthur Koestler
LouBu
Louise Bourgeois by Ueltz Hoeffer
Happy Birthday Louise Bourgeois! She is 98 years old.
Louise Bourgeois: Well… I guess that’s what you’d call ‘the conscious’
“I am a scientific person. I believe in psychoanalysis, in philosophy. For me the only thing that matters is the tangible.” -Louise Bourgeois (via)
I like these feet and click next page for angry cat (two drawings by Loubou )
Antony Gormley interviewed about Louise Bourgeois on BBC1’s Imagine (youtube)
Chet Baker was born on December 23, 1929
Untitled 
painting 1980 by Fung Lin Hall
R.I.P Larry Sulatn <> <> Obit NYtimes
5 films that influenced Larry Sultan
When I was working on Pictures from Home, my parents’ voices – their stories as well as their arguments with my version of our shared history – were crucial to the book. They called into question the documentary truth the pictures seemed to carry. I wanted to subvert the sentimental home movies and snapshots with my more contentious images of suburban daily life, but at the same time I wished to subvert my images with my parents’ insights into my point of view. – Larry Sultan, from an interview with Sheryl Conkelton in Flintridge Foundation Awards for Visual Arts 1999/2000.
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Vivian Maier 
Vivian Maier blog by John Maloof
Vivian Maier – Her Discovered Work
This was created in dedication to the photographer Vivian Maier, a street photographer from the 1950s – 1970s. Vivian’s work was discovered at an auction here in Chicago where she lived for 50 years but was originally a native to France. Her discovered work includes between 30-40,000 mostly medium format negatives. Born February 1, 1926 and deceased on Tuesday, April 21, 2009.
Courtesy to Andrew Pothecary for introducing me to her works.
Roy DeCarava 
Roy DeCarava, Harlem Insider Who Photographed Ordinary Life, Dies at 89
Excellent slideshow of his photos here.
“Didn’t know Roy DeCarava had died. I went to a talk of his once – about 20 years ago – and his jazz photos were an inspiration at the time. Nice guy. He was great at photographing in the dark (front rooms or jazz clubs) – even going home unsure if anything had been exposed onto his film! These digital days there are no such worries…” –
Happy Birthday Ed Ruscha! He is 72 years old.
This blog started with your birthday post in 2004 Dec 16. – vitro-nasu celebrates bonne anniversaire with you!
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(via)
Who is Cesc Gelabert ?
An extract from one of the last two works of the Company. Choreography: Cesc Gelabert Comissioned score: Pascal Comelade. Costumes:L.Azzopardi
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(Digital image by Fung Lin Hall)
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<> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> Michael Jackson heals the world
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Close window and begin healing process – I am not addicted to internet.
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Look who is trapped? 
Jurgen Trautwein seems to go……
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jtwine
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Digital image by Fung Lin Hall
Winter water winter water <> <> <> <> <> Pacific Winter – Calm Ocean .. <> <> <> <> <> <>
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A film based on his novel Fatelessness was made in Hungary in 2005 for which he wrote the script.[3] Although sharing the same title, the movie is more autobiographical than the book. The film was released at various dates throughout the world in 2005 and 2006.
“The film had to try very hard to avoid Holocaust clichés,” Mr. Kertész said. “It could be emotional, but never sentimental.” (NYtimes)
Part I/14 of Fateless (You can watch the entire film on youtube).
“For writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history”
“I am a medium for the spirit of Auschwitz. Auschwitz speaks through me. Everything else seems stupid to me, compared to that.”
Nobel Prize
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Children and Adolescents in Buchenwald Concentration Camp
The Last Word: Interview with Irme
Q: You’re the first Hungarian to win a Nobel literature prize. How is it to be getting a hero’s welcome?
A: It’s very strange for me because I’m certainly no hero. I’ve always looked on my writing as a very private matter. For decades I had no audience and lived on the fringes of society.
Q: You’ve said that it’s easier to write literature in a dictatorship than in a democracy.
A: That was too sweeping a statement, but there’s a truth to it. Because I didn’t write what the communist government wanted to see, I was cut off and alone with my work. I never thought my book would ever be published, and so I had the freedom to write as radically as I wanted, to go as deep inside as I wanted. In a democracy you have to find a market niche, make sure a novel is “interesting” and “spectacular.” That may be the toughest censorship of all.
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Happy Birthday Mark Salzman!
“He is a modern Renaissance man who is a good journalist, writer, musician, and most fundamentally, someone who is interested in the broader questions of the mysteriousness of being human.” (Via)
True Notebooks 
Teaching young toughs
Juvenile offenders find release in a creative writing class (Bookpage on True Notebooks)
(One of few recent books that made me cry – so very sad)
Lying awake – (salon)
After a year in a car with a towel around his head, the author of “Lying Awake” finds that religion and art aren’t so dissimilar.
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