Vitro Nasu

Image via Outsider Insider NYtimes.

Alexander Trocchi (30 July 1925 – 15 April 1984) was a Scottish novelist.

Mean Street (guardian) 2003

Alexander Trocchi was the smack-addled icon of beat literature, whose writings have been eclipsed by a lurid life of porn, pimping and dissolution in New York, Paris and London. By Tim Cumming

The making of Young Adam
(Behind the scene clip narrated by great actors from this film)

Young Adam

Tilda’s interview on Nerve about a character in Young Adam

I have this very strange relationship with my work, which is that it’s like a
conversation between me and it. It just develops and develops, and I’m
very nicely served by the universe: just as I’m ready to take the conversation
further with myself, some other individual pops up, like David McKenzie did,
with this idea of making this film, and provides exactly the leap to the next
adventure.

Tilda Swinton (previous post – great photos and 3 film clips)

The junkie genius of Alexander (guardian)

The plotless beauty of his writing, and its fearless look at the emptiness of his own life, put ‘the Scottish Beat’ on a par with Kafka and Camus.

(link to youtube)

Maury Chaykin, Character Actor, Dies at 61 on his birthday.

R.I.P Doug Ohlson, Painter of Vivid Abstracts, Dies at 73

Roberta Smith from NYtimes

Mr. Ohlson’s work astutely fused aspects of Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting and Minimal Art on a grand scale; his paintings sometimes measured as much as 23 feet across. The staple of his formal vocabulary was repeating vertical bars that seemed, increasingly, to levitate before clouds of vibrant contrasting color.

See another painting High Low <> <> Installations

More paintings from Elain Baker Gallery

Peter Zimmermann

More images from artnet here

What is a painting today? Peter asks (youtube), Part II
Thanks Marlene Sarroff for Peter’s Interview.

Luis Camnitzer

Interview with conceptual artist Luis Camnitzer (youtube)

Luis Camnitzer bio <> <> installation

Two images from Amy Haney blog

This song was selected by Hunter Thompson as his favorite.
Hunter S. Thompson’s compilation album is titled Where Were You When the Fun Stopped? It contains eighteen tracks selected by Hunter.

Happy birthday Gus Van Sant!
July 24, 1952

Previous post – Skateborad art with a clip from Paranoid Park

Karel Reisz (21 July 1926 – 25 November 2002) was a Czech-born British filmmaker who was active in post–war Britain, and one of the pioneers of the new realist strain in 1950s and 1960s British cinema.
Until today I did not know he directed Sweet Dreams and Isadora. What a surprise.

Cinema Obscura Isadora – (with a nice photo of Vanessa and James Fox)

What’s difficult to grasp is a major movie that seems to fall off the map. Case in point: Karel Reisz’s brilliant, messy Isadora Duncan biopic, “Isadora,” which provided star Vanessa Redgrave with her most emblematic, self-defining role.

Karel also directed The Gambler (youtube sample)- James Caan gave the performance of his lifetime.

Karel Reisz remembered

Karel Reisz must have been a border-crosser all his life. He was born in 1926, in the Czech mill town of Ostrava, an afternoon’s walk from the Polish border. At the age of 12, he was forced to leave, and in every sense he left for good: he was a child of the Kindertransport. He came to England, where he eventually served in the RAF, before studying natural sciences at Cambridge. He later became a teacher and a writer for film journals, one of which, Sequence, he co-founded with Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert. Along with Anderson and Tony Richardson, Reisz aimed to bring a version of auteurism to British film, and they did as much with the documentary movement Free Cinema. In 1959, Reisz directed We Are the Lambeth Boys, and he made his first feature film a year later, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. He went on to direct Night Must Fall, Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, Isadora, The Gambler, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Who’ll Stop the Rain?, Sweet Dreams and Everybody Wins. (read more from Karel R. Remembered)

Saturday Night Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe .

Karel was married to Betsy Blair who was Gene Kelly’s first wife.

Morgan (image via)

Reisz’s next film, the off-beat comedy Morgan – a Suitable Case for Treatment (1966), was described by the critic John Simon as “the first underground movie made above ground”. (Obit)

Happy birthday to Bela Tarr and Norman Jewison.
Tarr’s Damnation with Shostakovich soundtrack is here.

(via Staircase to nowhere)

Jeremy Blake R.I.P July 17 2007
Little different from Modigliani and Jeanne, Jeremy was an up and coming successful artist who followed his paranoid girlfriend.. glamour, beautiful people and madness.

A Movie about Jeremy & Theresa

Brett Ellis talks about “Golden Suicides’

In Memoriam Theresa Duncan (via her blog – her family played this film at her funeral) She was sexy and pretty.

We are for the Dark part I oddly naked. (via Theresa’s blog Wit of Staircase)

Listening

Theresa Duncan previous post

Port Bou
Border crossing resting place

On Truth
Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help. Walter Benjamin

Berlin Childhood

Walter Benjamin (W.B for dummies on youtube)

Three great philosophers were born on July 15.
Wlater Benjamin 15 July 1892
Iris Murdoch 15 July 1919
Jacques Derrida 15 July 1930

Derrida and Iris Murdoch

Speech is blind :On ‘Echo And Narcissus’ (Derrida on youtube)

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
Iris Murdoch

Summer Interlude, Missing Dahlia, Iris Murdoch and Jacques Derrida (previous post).

“Everything I despise about English life is in her,” Elias Canetti declares.

Amadeo Modigliani was born on July 12 1884.

What I am searching for is neither the real nor the unreal, but the Subconscious the mystery of what is Instinctive in the human Race.
Modigliani’s intense artistic, spiritual [for him no distinction existed between these two states of being] search to express what he saw as the mysterious, innermost beauty of the human soul, drew him to Buddhist, Indian, Greek, Etruscan, Egyptian, African, early Italian and Renaissance art. (via)

Jacques Becker directed Les Amants de Monpartnasse starring Gerard Philipe and Anouk Aimee.

French + Spanish full film

“Everything rings true in this totally false film. Everything is illuminated in this obscure film. For he who leaps into the void owes no explanations to those who watch.” Jean Luc Godard

Montparnasse 19 was originally to have been directed by Max Ophüls with a script by Henri Jeanson. Becoming ill, Ophüls turned the project over to Jacques Becker. Dissatisfied with Jeanson’s script, Becker re-wrote the scenario. (Leap into the Void, Godard and the Painter)

Read the sad story of Jeanne Hubuterne here.

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Anna Akhmatova

This tender, moving drawing portrays Akhmatova as both Egyptian goddess. And poet lost in her dream.
Erotic in its restraint and languid, sensual pose, it evokes the elongated body and ‘helmet’ of hair of the Egyptian queens and goddesses depicted in the Louvre reliefs Modigliani and Akhmatova returned to, time and again, during the summer of 1911.

Anna Akmatova’s crucial role in Modigliani’s art (many great images and text)

He met the first serious love of his life, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, in 1910, when he was 26. They had studios in the same building, and although 21-year-old Anna was recently married, they began an affair. Tall (Modigliani was only 5 foot 5 inches) with dark hair (like Modigliani’s), pale skin and grey-green eyes, she embodied Modigliani’s aesthetic ideal and the pair became engrossed in each other. After a year, however, Anna returned to her husband.
Gallery of works (wiki Modigliani)

“Anna Akhmatova’e memoir, fifty-four years later, of her affair with Modigiliani in 1911. Sitting in the rain under an unreliable umbrella in the Luxemberg Gardens and reciting Verlaine to each other — unable to afford anything Gander” Page 7 David Markson – Vanishing Point.

Slideshow of Modi’s imprtant paintings on youtube

Jeanne Modigliani, the only surviving daughter of Modi and Jeanne is on wiki here.

Ward Schumaker
Shostakovich is a hand-painted book, created in 2004, with pages 13″ w x 19″ h, 64 pages.

Shostakovich Suit – (something fun and charming from Ward – he is a great story teller).

I’d come down to the waterfront earlier in the evening, to the offices of Walter Landor, advertising man and San Francisco celebrity, a man who carried on his business aboard an old ferryboat, The Klamath, berthed at Pier Five. Landor died recently but his company continues on the boat. (read more here.)

“My hand-painted book, 5-and-Dime Deluxe, will be shown in UNBOUND, an exhibition at the Lesher Center for the Arts’ Bedford Gallery, July 11 thru September 19, 2010.”

Shostakovich previous post – Shostakovich, Hamlet and Bela Tarr’s Damnation

Jurgen Trautwein has been busy painting these days. (Both Ward and Jurgen live in San Francisco).

Sans Sucre Soxy

More Sans Sucre here, here and here.

Patrick Michael Fitzgerald is an Irish artist who lives and works in Vizcaya, outside Bilbao, Spain.
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GUEST ROOM/CONTEMPORARY ART | BRUSSELS, BELGIUM | JUNE 10 – JULY 17, 2010 -PATRICK MICHAEL FITZGERALD Drawings
by John Yau (Brooklyn Rail)

Chris Asheley interviewed Patrick Michael Fitzgerald

A Conversation with Patrick Michael Fitzgerald
Patrick M. Fitzgerald lives in Bilbao, Spain and Chris Ashley lives in Oakland, California. This conversation about Patrick’s art was conducted via email between December 2008 and April 2009.

PATRICK MICHAEL FITZGERALD will be showing in Oakland California next September (via Chris Asheley)

Lassie

We are sharing today.

We never tire of watching Cow Song – O mio babbino caro from Gianni Schicchi

Animal Alphabet with sound effect here.

Wislawa Szymborska

Three Oddest Words

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no nonbeing can hold.

Wislawa Szymborska ‘s birthday today (July 2 1923)

Last year’s terrific birthday post from Issa’s Untidy’s Hut – One Hole in the Nest – (3 more poems by W. S)

Happy birthday Tao Lin His second novel is called Richard Yates.
Go Diving with Tao Lin (previous post)

W.S. Merwin is our new US Poet Laureate- LAtimes, NYtimes and this one too.

See a video of W.S Merwin here.

Kay Ryan our wonderful sly poet laurete of 2009 here.

Two poems by Kay Ryan