Vitro Nasu

Time to revisit Chantal Akerman

From the Other Side

From the Other Side is an unsentimental look at the plight of illegal Mexican immigrants as they attempt the dangerous crossing from Agua Prieta in Sonora, Mexico, to Douglas, Ariz.

How it is in Germany

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Mr Blank is reading
Happy birthday to Mr Blank. (Last year he was very colorful and less Blank).

Hard to see those ducks panel of 3 photos
How it was in Arizona

History of violence in Arizona

See photos and read his journey to Siberia.
Dan and Monk

Das Man in the Moon (obit)

Dan Asher 1947 – 2010

James Kalm (dailymotion) – goes to galley to show us Dan’s works.

Having known Dan Asher for over twenty five years, James Kalm is saddened to hear the news of his passing. This video was originally meant as a documentation of Dan’s show at the Mitchell Algus Gallery, not a memorial. We’ll all miss you Dan.

Benefit for the artist Dan Asher April 1

The Loneliness of Long Distance Runner

Forgotten Classic Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Obit by Bruce Weber

Alan Sillitoe, a British writer whose two early works — a novel, “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” and a short story, “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” — drew attention to the seething alienation of the postwar working class in England, died on Sunday in London. He was 82.

RIP Alan Sillitoe (Telegraph UK)

In his earliest work, before his powerful sense of social injustice began to dominate his fiction, Sillitoe created plausible, complex youths who rebelled against the establishment, epitomised by parent, policeman and boss. Inevitably his work chimed at a time when youth culture and adolescent anger were beginning to dominate the media through the work not only of John Osborne, but of Brando, James Dean, JD Salinger and the still-embryonic pop music.

The various protagonists of Sillitoe’s early fiction are generally restless young men from the slum world, who oppose the established order of things, but who are at the same time affected by consumerism and hedonism. Sillitoe rejected artistic elitism and instead of satirizing cosy middle-class British life, he focused on rebellious individuals and poor people, who have vile lives. “If I lost all I have in the world I wouldn’t worry much,” (Via)

Happy birthday Claire Denis
Finally saw 35 Rums last night.
Claire on Yasujiro Ozu

Partial list of films dedicated to Ozu
Hou Hsiao Hsien Cafe Lumiere – Dorris Dorie, Cherry Blossoms, Wayne Wang – Dim Sum and a documenatary by Wim Wenders Tokyo Ga

Claire Denis

The Auteurs

In an Ozu film, you are instantly invited into a story, and you are also invited into the past of the character. They have a past. It’s not just a movie with a beginning and and= end. It has already begun and it’s going on, as life is going on. So everything, like weddings, funerals. ..

And now people are so anxious about working or not working. And now I understand more about Ozu he was really a visionary about the importance of work in our modern world. Maybe the family he describes is more traditional, but you gain an appreciation of it because it’s the only solid thing facing the fragility of existing as an employee.

Darren Hughes – Best of 2009 film list
Darren chose “Beau Travail” the Best film of the decade.
Darren Hughes interivewed Claire Denis (Senses of Cinema)
Claire on writers.

Yes, but I don’t like Nadine Gordimer. I’ve met her a few times and our chemistry … We didn’t experience Africa the same way.
The only person I can feel so much is Doris Lessing. Nadine Gordimer is too dictatorial and she has no heart. I prefer [J. M.] Coetzee.

Claire Denis is excellent – Previous post

Documenatary film of his life.

Birthday of Bas Jan Ader April 19, 1942.

Bas Jan Ader was born to idealistic ministers in the Dutch Reformed Church on April 19, 1942. His father was executed by the Nazis for harboring Jewish refugees when Ader was only two years old. A rebellious student, he failed art school at the Rietveld Academy, where friend Ger van Elk recalls that he would use a single piece of paper for the entire semester, erasing his drawings as soon as they were finished. At the age of 19 he hitchhiked to Morocco, where he signed on as a deckhand on a yacht heading for America.

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Art review Cultural Monster

A newly found video (very short and enigmatic)

I am too sad to tell you

Pioneering film editor Dede Allen, whose work on movies like Serpico and The Hustler revolutionised American cinema, has died aged 86.

R I P Dede Allen 1923-2010.‎

She was an extraordinary editor.

Her influence also manifests itself in other visual media; television commercials, music videos, animation, and children’s television compress many images into very short sequences. Almost every music video owes its rapid, nontraditional editing constructs to Allen. In retrospect, Allen expresses concern about her contribution to increased editing tempo—”I wonder if we’re raising enough people in a generation who are able to sit and look at a scene play out without getting bored if it doesn’t change every two seconds. We talk an awful lot about cutting; we talk very little about not lousing something up by cutting just to make it move faster. I’m afraid that’s the very thing I helped promulgate. . . . It may come to haunt us, because attention spans are short.”

Allen is best known for having edited classic films such as Dog Day Afternoon, The Hustler, Reds, and Bonnie and Clyde and for having worked with filmmakers such as Arthur Penn, Sidney Lumet, Robert Wise, Elia Kazan, and George Roy Hill.(wiki)

Watch these films here.
Dog Day Afternoon

Boonie and Clyde

5 clips Dede Allen edited.

Javier Marias has a new book Your Face Tomorrow. – Stephanie Merritt welcomes the third and final part of an extraordinary work by a great novelist of our age
Marias talking here on video.

3quarksdaily –

Marías’ writing creed “I progress as I digress” underlines the importance of literary speculation in understanding the world around us. The urgency that drives Marías’ large novel in the absence of dramatic incidents flows from these often poignant meditations on history and ethics. They can be summed up in the words of another anglophone Spaniard George Santayana who said “those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.” (Via)

Javier Marias (previous post)

Problems of Life – Wittgenstein from Beyond the Pale (Tom Clark’s blog)

The human gaze has a power of conferring value on things; but it makes them cost more, too.
(1929)
Don’t play with what lies deep in another person!

The face is the soul of the body.
(circa 1932-1934)

The House of Wittgenstein

Call Him Andean Jones
Adventurer, pilot, senator—and the man who found Machu Picchu –Hiram Bingham III
Hiram Bingham III

Hilberg
Hanna Arendt never did the research, she popularized the idea that Nazis were primarily bureaucrats. Here is a book about the man whose research Hanna used without attribution.

Hilberg was not happy either. After toiling for thirteen years on his book, he was being eclipsed by someone who had worked for little more than two years on hers. “Who was I, after all?” Hilberg asked bitterly in his autobiography. “She, the thinker, and I, the laborer who wrote only a simple report, albeit one which was indispensable once she had exploited it.” (From the Nation)

Thrill of the Chase the Truth about Gandhi’s sex life
With religious chastity under scrutiny, a new book throws light on Gandhi’s practice of sleeping next to naked girls. In fact, he was sex-mad, writes biographer Jad Adams
Father and Son (previous post)

April 16 update:
1178 BC; The calculated date of the Greek king Odysseus’ return home from the Trojan War.

Odysseus by Arnold Böcklin

Odyssues by Max Beckmann

Coen brothers claimed never to have read Homer’s poem. “O Brother Where are Thou”

(Red flag photos by Fung Lin Hall)

Took the old door out

Fly hover and perch – jtwine in Germany. <> <> <> German soil “deutsche-erde-dreckstuecke”

This is not art – <> <> More Art Chops continue here.

Mice can draw (April 10 updated)

Hack art video by jtwine (the critics voice, art catalogue destruction from the Kunst auf’m Hackklotz project.)

Bullshit artists or another boring article about the art world.

Do not linger at the gate. David Shrigley warns.

Sentimental journey to the old art world Rosalind Krauss from bookforum.

Frank Lloyd Wright passed away April 9 1959.
His curious Chinese collection from my last year visit to Taliesin West –

The Pool Trailer

The Pool is directed by Chris Smith

The film and story were changing on a daily basis. One of the great things about the way we were working was that it was completely fluid. We were editing as we went along—so that had a huge impact on the finished film as well.
—Chris Smith (popMatters)

Another review from Indiewire

Greencinedaily on Chris Smith and the Pool

Chris Smith Interview – Filmmaker

Filmmaker: When did you first read Randy Russell’s short story? And when did you decide you want to transpose it to Goa?

Smith: I’m always looking for something that looks interesting and engaging. For me, it was one of those stories that I read and then came back to. It just sort of stuck with me; it was so simple and some of the themes seemed so universal. I thought back to the experience I had when I was in India about four or five years ago helping some friends shoot a movie, where we were living at that hotel and interacting with the roomboys and getting a sense of their lives. The idea of putting those two worlds together seemed really interesting to me, and I thought the two could be combined in a way that could provide a lot of rich material to work from.
2)The kids didn’t know how to read so for me it was more important to get a good performance than to get word-for-word.

The Fool with King Lear Hiroyuki Sanada and Nigel Hawthorne

2002 – Helen Mirren on Nigel Hawthorne [1/5] (Helen appeared with Nigel in Madness of King George)

A loving tribute and documentary film about Nigel Hawthorn – 5 parts on youtube. (Really enjoyed this documentary. Nigel visits Cape Town Africa where he grew up in addition to his visits to Japan where he played King Lear).

Portrait

Is this Portrait by Lee Miller?
Max Ernst (2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976), his birthday today.
Max Ernst Documentary is on youtube

Max Ernst dancing in Hans Richter film (youtube)

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Max with Lee and Man Ray.
(Via)

Max Ernst fled Europe helped by his marriage to Peggy Guggenheim. He left his girlfrind Leonora Carrington and she suffered a major mental breakdown.

Max had a terrific reputation for his beauty, charm, and success with women. He had white hair and big blue eyes and a handsome beak-like nose resembling a bird’s. He was exquisitely made – (picture caption from Peggy Guggenheim’s Out of this Century).

When Peggy found out that Max did not love her she turned to Marcel Duchamp the first time. She wrote,

While Max was away I was untrue to him for the first time, with Marcel, at last after twenty years. It was really too late and was almost like incest.

All good ideas arrive by chance (See a photo of Max and Dorothea Tanning)

During World War I he served in the German army, which was a momentous interruption in his career as an artist. He stated in his autobiography, “Max Ernst died the 1st of August, 1914.”

California in October of 1946, in a double ceremony with Man Ray and Juliet Browner, he married Dorothea Tanning. The couple first made their home in Sedona, Arizona. In 1948 Ernst wrote the treatise Beyond Painting. As a result of the publicity, he began to achieve financial success.

Lee Miller (repost)

Man Ray and Edward Steichen