Vitro Nasu

Yve Klein web ride

Gif anime Unknown Pleasure – Joy Division

Gif Collection II (Don’t miss Gif I from previous posts)

Direct link here

See Byrd as a young Fiddler – Senator Byrd to receive fiddler award at Grand Ole Opry

Goodbye and thank you.

Picture gallery slideshow here

Byrd was best known for his ardent defense of both the U.S. Constitution his love of Senate history. He was also a man who fought the 1964 Civil Rights Act — to his later regret — but who took great pride in his fight against authorizing the use of force in Iraq. (NPR)

“I served with him for 36 years. We sat in the same row. He was a senator’s senator. He was a keeper of our traditions, a keeper of the rules, and the kind of senator who always kept his word. … I will miss Bob Byrd.” — Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. (Via)

Reactions in DC

Lafcadio Hearn was born on 27 June 1850 – and died 26 September 1904, was also known as Koizumi Yakumo (小泉八雲)

Hearn a geographic biography (a great post and many wonderful links from Issa’s Untidy Hut)

Today, Lafcadio Hearn is probably best remembered for his artful adaptation of Japanese folktales and ghost stories, including the collection Kwaidan (full text from google books), subtitled “Stories and Studies of Strange Things.” He certainly was instrumental in the introduction of Japanese culture to the West in the late 19th century.

Lafcadio Hearn – (Nippon)

Journey to the center of the Japanese spirit

Illustration of Lafcadio Hearn’s Fairy Tales

Ping Chong Kwaidan here

Alan Sondheim read 12 books by Hearn.

The film Kwaidan was directed by Kobayashi with a great sound work by Toru Takemitsu.

Toru Takemitsu produced over one hundred film scores during his career, working primarily with the masters of the Japanese New Wave. Directors such as Nagisa Oshima, Hiroshi Teshigahara, and Masaki Kobayashi were able to achieve more poetic means of expression thanks in large part to Takemitsu’s searching, unconventional accompaniments. (Harvard film archive)

Harry Partch June 24, 1901 – September 3, 1974
documentary

Part of the keyboard of the Chromalodeon (via Harry Partch wiki)

Happy birthday Terry Riley!
He is 75years old today.
(Terry and Harry were both born on June 24).

G Song Early collaboration with Kronos

Terry Riley and Don Cherry

Bang on a can

Music of the Gift III

R.I.P Tracy Wright 1959–2010

Tracy was an utterly unique performer with an offbeat yet compelling sense of humour that made her memorable even if she only appeared on screen for a matter of minutes.Tracy was an utterly unique performer with an offbeat yet compelling sense of humour that made her memorable even if she only appeared on screen for a matter of minutes.
The loss of such a talented woman is especially sad because, in a way, we feel we were only just really getting to know her.

Eric Dolphy

Eric Allan Dolphy (June 20, 1928 – June 29, 1964)

Trying to play

With Mingus <> <> <> Gazelloni

You don’t know what Love is

Young Saint with a horn
(Image via)

Jazz needs Eric Dolphy more than ever. A virtuoso on saxophone, clarinet and flute, his work bridges the two sides of a debate that dogs jazz fans and performers today. To oversimplify, the neoconservatives argue that jazz must be profoundly grounded in tradition, that new developments are little more than a gloss, and that history stops with Miles Davis and modal jazz in the middle ’60s, with bare whispers of Ornette Coleman and nothing from swingless radicals like Cecil Taylor. The rebels (most now older than the neocons) counter that jazz loses its essence by going backward, that the titans revered by the neocons were fearless innovators, and that the whole reactionary movement reduces jazz to a museum music with a self-righteous fence around it. Dolphy could have listened to both sides, picked up his horn, and showed the way out in a dozen choruses. But he died in 1964, barely 36, struck down by complications stemming from undiagnosed diabetes. (Salon Young Saint with a horn )

Google logo 2010

Happy Father’s day!
Necktie Skirt by Charles LeDray

Adeus Jose Saramago
16 November 1922 – 18 June 2010

NYtimes obit

José Saramago, the Portuguese writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998 with novels that combine surrealist experimentation with a kind of sardonic peasant pragmatism, died on Friday at his home in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. He was 87.

Unintended Consequences

“THE FOLLOWING DAY, NO ONE DIED.” thus begins Portuguese Nobel laureate Saramago’s newest novel. In this inventive work, each country in the world has its own angel of death or grim reaper and Portugal’s is female, bored, restless, and wants to experiment.

A Flor Máis Grande do Mundo (animation on youtube)

Jose Saramago watches Blindness (Jose Saramago was kind to Fernando M)

Blindness trailer

From Memory to Fiction through History with Jose Saramago (Youtube)

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Happy Birthday John Baldessari – June 17, 1931

Pure Beauty (C-Monster blog)

The Unknown Hipster
The faux Baldessari (a true story) – via Ward Schumaker

Previous post Flap-a phone and Telescope
Beethoven’s Trumpet

Baldessari – Yellow Fin and Tristram (A trailer for A Cock & Bull Story, scroll down)

“John Baldessari: Sediment,” Margo Leavin Gallery. Los Angeles, CA, May 22 – July 10, 2010.
June 2010
“John Baldessari: Foot and Stocking (With Big Toe Exposed) Series,” Gemini G.E.L. Los Angeles, CA, June 26 – September 3,

Panic

John Baldessari: Pure Beauty,” Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, NY, October 19, 2010 – January 9, 2011.

Ken Goldberg, a Professor of Engineering and Information at Berkeley was inspired by Baldessari – (vimeo – Respectful Cameras)

Being There

Jerzy Kosinski was born on June 14, 1933. He was an award-winning Polish-American novelist, best known for the novels The Painted Bird (1965) and Being There (1971), the latter of which was adapted into a film in 1979.

Steps (1968), a novel comprising scores of loosely connected vignettes, won the National Book Award in 1969.[
American novelist David Foster Wallace described Steps as a “collection of unbelievably creepy little allegorical tableaux done in a terse elegant voice that’s like nothing else anywhere ever”. Wallace continued in praise: “Only Kafka’s fragments get anywhere close to where Kosiński goes in this book, which is better than everything else he ever did combined.

Book cover

His last words “I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call the time Eternity.”

Who was Jerzy Kosinski?
The rise and fall of Jerzy Kosinski by Philip Roth

In the end, I don’t understand Jerzy Kosinski. At some level, he must have judged his life as successful. Using his talent, wits, boldness and determination, he went far, if you consider the boy growing up under the most menacing of shadows. Was he happy? There is so much darkness in his novels, I wonder how much brightness there was in his life (inside him, in the place he kept hidden). I am left with a sense of pity, which I’m sure he would not want me to feel. He would prefer respect. And I can grant him that.

Circus Theatricals Presents More Lies about Jerzy – 5/18-6/26

It’s early 1970s. World-famous media darling and controversial author Jerzy Lesnewski causes a scandal that rocks New York and Hollywood – after a journalist accuses him of fabricating key points in his autobiography about his childhood during the Holocaust and plagiarizing parts of his best-selling novels. The work is inspired by the life of Polish author Jerzy Kosinski.

Jerzy played the Soviet bureaucrat Grigory Zinoviev in Reds (directed by Warren Beatty – film trailer on youtube here).

NYtimes Roberta Smith

Sigmar Polke, an artist of infinite, often ravishing pictorial jest, whose sarcastic and vibrant layering of found images and maverick, chaos-provoking painting processes left an indelible mark on the last four decades of contemporary painting, died yesterday in Cologne, Germany. He was 69; the cause was complications of cancer, according to Gordon Veneklasen, a partner at the Michael Werner Gallery New York, the artist’s chief American representative.

Potato house

R.I.P Sigmar Polke (High and Low Between)

Mono Blog on Sigmar P.

See previous post Bric – a Bra-C

A great collection of Polke prints here

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Yet another Edition

Sigmar Polke’s editions are not something the artist “does on the side”. They highlight the reproductive techniques which his paintings also return to time after time: printing, complete with raster dots, photographs and Xeroxes. The editions literally render what the paintings simply translate. But they also translate what the artist himself has painted, or anticipate it. The editions are an important element in Polke’s enquiry into the representation and duplication of the world.

Les gens protègent ce qu’ils aiment (Jacques-Yves COUSTEAU) – (people protect what they love)

World Wide Celebration of Jacques Cousteau’s Birth Begin

Cousteau with google logo 2010

Jacques-Yves Cousteau was born 100 years ago – 11 June 1910.

was a French naval officer, explorer, ecologist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and researcher who studied the sea and all forms of life in water. He co-developed the aqua-lung, pioneered marine conservation and was a member of the Académie française. He was commonly known as “le Commandant Cousteau” or “Captain Cousteau”.

Michael Cacoyannis!
(11 June 1922, Limassol)

Zorba the Greek
Teach me to dance Anthony Quinn and Alan Bates
Another clip from Zorba Looking for a goat

Iphigenia

Electra

Michael Cacoyannis Foundation

Born on June 11, 1922 in Limassol, Cyprus, Michael Cacoyannis was the elder son of Sir Panayiotis and Lady Cacoyannis. He studied law in London and was called to the Bar (Barrister-at-law) in 1943. While working for the BBC’s Greek service, first as a news announcer and then as a producer of cultural programs, he also studied acting at the Central School of Dramatic Art in London and directing at the Old Vic School.

Obit from a friend (Sarah Weinman)

One of America’s greatest writers has passed on, and even though I shouldn’t have been surprised – he was 82 years old and not in the greatest of health the last few years

(She also informed us that David Markson was at DFW’s funeral)

Obit NYtimes by Bruce Weber
The Master

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.
Self-evident enough to scarcely need Writer’s say-so.

Obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax.
Here perhaps less than self-evident to the less than attentive.

David Markson (previous birthday post – 2004 – next birthday post 2007) + Vanishing Point

David Markson Reads at the 92nd Street Y – introduced by Anne Beattie

A Terrific interview at Conjunctions (Markson’s friendships with other writers).

Dead Beat

Sad news that David Markson has passed away. Posted below is a text derived from one of his early books. About fifty years ago, Markson wrote a pair of hard-boiled detective novels set in Greenwich Village, Epitaph for a Tramp and Epitaph for a Dead Beat. The books read like beat-flavored Spillane, and within the private eye character of Harry Fannin you can see the beginnings of the voice, form, and preoccupations of Markson’s later innovative novels, Readers Block, Vanishing Point, This is Not a Novel, and The Last Novel. “Dead Beat” is an excised narrative that examines Markson’s core themes: literature, art, music, philosophy, pop culture, sex, and death.

Another editor friend

Markson, a giant of postmodernism– if you’re true to the word– maintained closer friendships than he courted publicity. His life and work are intertwined, and his memory will live on in those he touched as well as in his works of art.

Comment from mefi – Old Tired Sick Alone Broke

“Shit. He was one of my favorites. And despite DFW’s praise of him, I like to think of David Markson as the anti-DFW.”

Talk about “his melancholy” from another ardent fan who tried to see David Markson.

But he knew everything else—everything worth knowing. And more importantly, he knew how everything worth knowing can be forgotten. And how it is always being forgotten, not only by others, but by oneself.
That tragedy—and how a writer responds to it—forms, for me, the center of his genius.

Image from 5cense.com

A serious fan (This is bookmarked for a return visit)

Each sentence in the book is a wave. Better yet, a wave packet. Collapsing onto the page to form something bigger than itself.

Peter Maclaclin

Is Writer, thinking he can bring off what he has in mind?
And anticipating that he will have any readers?

Ed Rants

Along with John Barth, William Gaddis, and Gilbert Sorrentino, Markson was one of the few writers who proved that experimental writing need not be prescriptive. For Markson, chronicling the consciousness was often tremendous fun: both for him and the reader. And if you were fortuitous enough, it could extend beyond the book. If you lived in New York, Markson could often be located in the Strand’s basement, amicably chattering in good humor with any stranger willing to engage in wanton mischief.