Vitro Nasu

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The above photos by Alex P. Hall

One more IPhone pix
Highest toilet in Arizona

Sundance – Skiing in Utah (Previous post)

Howard Zinn, historian who challenged status quo, dies at 87

How the Great Howard Zinn Made All Our Lives Better by Harvey Wasserman

Bill Moyers Interview (3 parts)

Howard Zinn turned to comics 9 pages of comics here.

Howard Zinn was in People Magazine (Vitro-Nasu People)

Interview with Professor Howard Zinn
(Includes a video of On the Stupidity of War)

His birthday was two days ago. (January 23, 1922 – August 8, 2004) )

Remembering Leo (Brooklyn Rail)

Donald Kuspit was right to call Golub an existential/activist painter. Golub’s work enacts a real challenge to painting itself. He threw down the gauntlet right at the beginning, and waged a furious, muscular struggle with it the rest of his life. His art is agnostic and agonistic. It exists in the heat of battle, where everything is at risk. This lead, paradoxically, to constant renewal, so that Golub’s work was never done. And this is why, though he lived a long and productive life, to all of us who knew him, he died, Goddamnit, too soon. (David Levi-Strauss)

Leon and Nancy Spero, were a great art/activist duo. (Previous post)

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When the Media is a Disaster Rebecca Solnit

I’m talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti.

Revisiting Shock Doctrine in the Wake of Haiti Disaster by Naomi Klein

Haiti Aid and Bank Bonuses
Calls are in for cancellation of Haitian debt (via Rescue)

Stranger on a train by Hitchcock.

The Haunts of Miss Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith wrote 22 novels, many of them set in Greenwich Village, where she lived. But the landscape of Highsmith Country consists not only of the physical Village neighborhood, but also the dark and desperate territory of Highsmith’s psyche.

Ripley Films: Alain Delon was Ripley in Plein de Soleil. Matt Damon is Ripley in Minghella’s TheTalented Mr. Ripley. Malkovich stars in Liliana Cavani’s Ripley’s Game.
Plein de Soleil<> Talented Mr Ripley
American Friend Ripley’s Game.
Gerald Peary interviews Patricia Highsmith

“He mingled two books for American Friend. One of them he didn’t buy.” (Wenders’ frame story concerns forged paintings, a plot fragment borrowed, uncredited, from Ripley Under Ground.)
Highsmith met Wenders before The American Friend, when he tried to buy film rights to one of her books. According to Wenders, the novels he was interested in, Cry of the Owl and The Tremor of Forgery, were already optioned. Highsmith suggested he read the one she had just finished writing. “It was Ripley’s Game,” said Wenders, “and I liked it from the beginning.” And Highsmith liked Wenders. “There’s something about him that’s OK. His artistic quality, his enthusiasm.”

The American Friend, she concedes, has a certain “stylishness,” and she thinks the scenes on the train are terrific. Also, she liked Wenders’s Paris, Texas. But, back in the American Friend, she is confused by Dennis Hopper’s highway cowboy rendition of Ripley. “Those aren’t my words,” she says of his philosophical soliloquies.

Repley – Anti-Hero

Hiding in plain sight by Jeannette Winterson

Patricia Highsmith said of herself, “I am always in love. . . .” Yet at her memorial service in Tegna, Switzerland, in 1995, there were no lovers from the past, and there was no lover to mourn her in the present. The service was filmed, which Highsmith would have liked, because although reclusive, she was interested in posterity. Such display also allowed Highsmith to hide in plain sight (as her hero Edgar Allan Poe put it in “The Purloined Letter”) the fact that all her relationships had failed. Highsmith had died in a hospital alone, and the last person to see her was her accountant. Highsmith was obsessed with taxes.

This woman is dangerous

The hallmark of her work is a calm, hallucinatory intensity built on sentences of unemotional plainness and clarity. Her hypersensitive protagonists, logically, inexorably, spiral downhill from ordinary anxiety to murderous rage and madness. Like animals keenly alert for invisible traps or New Yorkers in the first uneasy months after September 11, Highsmith’s characters move through their lives with an ever-increasing and sometimes justified wariness. Graham Greene famously called her “a poet of apprehension” who had “created a world of her own—a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger.”

Photo of Ali by Flip Schulke

The Idiot Dostoevsky intepreted by Andy Kaufman (youtube)

Mack Sennett January 17, 1880
Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.; January 17, 1942)
Andrew Kaufman January 17, 1949
Jim Carry born January 17, 1962
Happy birthday to Ali and Jim who are still with us, Andy Kaufman died young tragically and Mack Sennett the innovator of slapstick lived a long life. Both Jim and Mack Sennett are from Canada.

Mack Sennett has a blog

Keystone comedy (youtube)

Christian Boltanski: It’s a jumble out there
Christian Boltanski has filled Paris’s Grand Palais with a 50-tonne mountain of clothes, and the sound of 15,000 heartbeats. Adrian Searle is mesmerised

Boltanski, one of France’s leading artists, is compiling an ­archive of heartbeats that he intends to be housed, eventually, on a remote and inaccessible Japanese island. He has ­already collected over 15,000 ­individual recordings. One day, these beating hearts will all belong to the dead. If Boltanski’s art endures, one might also imagine that the visitors who make it to the island in the future have yet to be born.

More images here.

Christian Boltanski and Max Jacob: Deeply thought and felt. (Previous post)

Gymnasium Chases (Crown Point Press) a portfolio of photogravures by French artist Christian Boltanski, is based on a photograph of the 1931 graduating class of the Gymnasium Chases, a Jewish High School in Vienna. Although Boltanski has employed many of these portraits in altar-like installations, this is the first time the class is presented in its entirety.

Obit Guardian

Eric Rohmer: philosopher, rhetorician, and an ally of the young

Rohmer came from the New Wave tradition of critic-turned-director; he was a former editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, and became the distinctively romantic philosopher of the New Wave and the great master of what was sometimes called “intimist” cinema: delicate, un-showy movie-making about not especially startling people, people often in their 20s, whose lives are dramatised at a kind of walking, talking pace.

Marquis d’O – directed by Eric Rohmer
(Marquis d”O was based on the novel by Heinrich von Kleist)

Eric Rohmer
Photos slideshow

But the man born Jean-Marie Maurice Scherer, whose pseudonym took the first name of director Eric von Stroheim and the last of “Fu Manchu” creator Sax Rohmer, knew what he wanted. Natural light. A sense of humor, but a sidewinding one. (Via)

“This sense of the unknowable emphasizes Rohmer’s understanding of the world as profoundly complicated. People are called upon to make choices whose consequences they cannot know. They have to deal not only with their own desires but also those of others. Desire is never simple. It is mixed with fear—often the fear of making the wrong choice.” (Previous post see M. Duras archive)

Interview Eric Rohmer discusses with Barbet Schroeder the unique philosophical sensibility he brought to world cinema. (youtube)

Horsesthink mentioned Nestor Almendros collaboration with Rohmer. (A Man with a Camera is a great book and Nestor’s collaboration with Rohmer were treated with respect and love. He mentioned how they both loved simplicity and austerity in design).

(Full Moon in Paris)
Dying young Pascale Ogier, Full Moon Ghost Story

Cars outside our fence.

Burning cars captured on the road trip.

Tomorrow my family and I will head to the ski slope and afterward we’ll spend the evening at Grand Canyon. (Like we have no other place to go).
Last time I went skiing I saw burning cars on the road, luckily no burning men.

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History of violence in the desert
Six cops and nothingness

Border Patrol

Light bulb and Lemon by Josef Beuys

Josef Beuys at Mary Boone We are the Revolution – Jan 9 – Feb 6

Laurie Anderson

Birthday of John C Lilly January 6, 1915 and Allan Watts January 6, 1915.
They were both Capricorn with moon in Virgo. (scroll down)

John Lilly birth chart (Capricorn rising)

Alan Watts birth chart (Sagittarius rising)

Interview with John Lilly

Let me say how I got to work with dolphins first. I was floating in the tank for a year and wondering, who floats around twenty-four hours a day’? I went to Pete Shoreliner and he says, “Dolphins. They’re available. Go down to the Marine Studios in Florida.” So I did, and I immediately fell in love with them.

Lisa Lyons was adopted by John Lilly (I thought she was his girlfriend.)

Through the center of Mandala (New agish John Lilly on youtube)

Youtube loves Allan Watts (many clips out there)

Taoism: Wisdom of the ridiculous

Music and Life

Alan Watts died an alcoholic (revealed and reconsidered)

Alan Watts was a flat-out genius of a philosophical entertainer, and this video segment, along with the other segments comprising the entire video, are more impressive and inspiring to me than all of the words I’ve ever heard uttered by Ken Wilber, Thich Nhat Hanh, Krishnamurti and all of the other spiritual sages I’ve ever heard in person or on “record” put together, with all due and genuine respect to these remarkable persons in their own right.

Kenneth Noland color field artist is dead at 85 – Roberta Smith (Nytimes)

who painted some of the great emblems of the postwar American abstract style called Color Field painting, died Tuesday at his home in Port Clyde, Me. The cause was cancer, said his wife, Paige Rense, editor in chief of Architectural Digest. He was 85.
Born in Asheville, N.C., in 1924, he studied art at the adventurous, short-lived Black Mountain College (conveniently located just outside his hometown) from 1946 to 1948

Slide show :portrait of Kenneth Noland with his paintings.

Kenneth Noland from Anaba.

Shaped paintings by Paul Theroux

These “shaped paintings’? – Ken Noland’s characteristically unpompous description – are sculptural pieces, which also occupy our space. This is another way of saying that, gazing at them, we are also moving around them, reacting to them, and perhaps reminding ourselves that we are not alone.

Kenneth Noland and Diane Waldman 1977 interview 28 min.

Kenneth Noland (wikipedia)

Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis were fellow explores of colors and field. Kenneth influenced Ann Truit.

Zhezong A good emperor 哲宗
dying young doing good. He was only 24 yrs old.

Emperor Zhezong (January 4, 1076 – February 23, 1100) was the seventh emperor of the Song Dynasty of China. His personal name was Zhao4 Xu1. He reigned from 1085 to 1100….

Zhezong lowered taxes, stopped all negotiations with the Tangut Empire and resumed armed conflict which eventually forced the Xixia to enter a more peaceful stance with the Song. Overall, Zhezong’s reign gave the Song dynasty a breathe of fresh air but Zhezong was not able stop fighting between conservative members in his government and the more liberal members catering to Wang Anshi’s reforms. This eventually lead to the northern Song’s demise in the 12th century. (wiki)

Huizong the emperor as an artist
(See previous post – Emperor and the Brushstrokes or how this emperor resurrected Brice Marden’s career)

Song Emperors and Song Dynasty

Happy birthday to Gao Xinjian winner of 2000 Nobel Prize for literature and his paintings are here.

Google celebrates
Isaac Newton’s birthday. (Why apples are falling on Google today)
But apples do not fall from this copy.