Archive for September, 2011

Merrill Lynch Wall Street Waltz

Thursday, September 29th, 2011
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    Merrill Lynch Wall Street Waltz (Digital photo collage by Fung Lin Hall)

    Occupy wall street org.

    Noam Chomsky on Occupy Wall street

    Occupy Together (check the listings for your local headquarters).

    I support these protests (Rootaction.com)

    Take a Whiz on Wall Street: Danish Artists Move JPMorgan’s Executive Bathroom to a Lower East Side Diner

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    The Market is open (Digital photo collage by Fung Lin Hall)

  • Arthur Penn (September 27, 1922 – September 28, 2010)

    Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

  • Arthur Penn and Warren – Photo by Irving Penn
    Arthur Penn (September 27, 1922 – September 28, 2010)

    Arthur Penn brought the sensibility of ’60s European art films to American movies.

    Arthur Penn -(Cerebral – Subversive)

    How did Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn come to make the classic firm Bonnie and Clyde

    The Big Idea – Bonnie & Clyde

    After finishing the script, the writers sent it to Truffaut, their first choice to direct. He was interested, but eventually passed on the film, suggesting they offer it to Godard, who also turned them down.

    Beatty learned about Bonnie and Clyde when he and then-girlfriend Leslie Caron had dinner with French director Fran¿s Truffaut in an effort to convince him to direct a film biography of Edith Piaf for Caron. Truffaut passed on that project, then suggested that a script he had just received had a great part for Beatty. The role was Clyde Barrow.

    Beatty had worked with director Arthur Penn on Mickey One, a small, surrealistic film that had failed at the box office in 1965. But Benton and Newman thought the film had a distinct European-American flavor and suggested they offer Bonnie and Clyde to him. Penn’s career was at a standstill after the failure of Mickey One. He had just been fired from The Train (1964) by that film’s star, Burt Lancaster, and shortly after that, producer Sam Spiegel seized control of The Chase, (1966) another film Penn was directing. Naturally, he was depressed and turned down Bonnie and Clyde at first, complaining that he didn’t like the script. Beatty almost had to browbeat Penn into taking the job.

  • Left Handed Gun, The Miracle Worker, Bonnie and Clyde, Little Big Man Four Friends., Alice’s Restaurant (see Previous post )
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    The Chase (Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, Angie D and Jane Fonda in Chase.)

    Night Moves, Mickey One. LIttle Big Man, Marlon hijinks with Sam Spiegel, the producer on “The Chase”
    (Arthur in an interview)

    Arthur arthurMekas with Jonas Mekas

    Harvard Archive

    Previous post – learn from Arthur about Bucky Fuller and the history of Black Mountain College.

    Arthur Penn on Ingmar Bergman(his last interview)
    Anthropologist Erikson is mentioned here.

    Irving Penn and Arthur Penn (artists brothers – vanity fair)

    On being brothers
    There was an inherent competition and inherent admiration—both, you know. It was fragile … except that we knew our lives sort of depended on each other. His wife, Lisa, was an absolute marvel. We all four were very close.

    And the secret to their success …
    I do think it was something we learned from each other. [A beat.] I just don’t know what.

    Update Arthur Penn died a day after his birthday Sept 28, 2010..
    Obit from Vanity Fair

  • Stephen Mueller R.I.P

    Saturday, September 24th, 2011


    (Thanks Marlene Sarroff)

    Color field painter dies at 63 Stephen Mueller – Sept 24, 1947 – Sept 16, 2011

    Stephen Mueller obit at ARTCRITICAL

    He would have been 64 years old today.

    Mueller_02_body

    His Bombsite interview (lots of interesting stuff here)

    I’m interested in demonstrating the folly of duality; I’m deliberately toying with that thing about figure/ground, which is which. The ground being the way we set up what we think reality is, the warp and woof of how we see our situation. The paintings are not constricted or rigidly mathematical; it’s like the fiction of our perception is ready to fall apart, the whole grid is ready to collapse, or change.

    Occupy Wall St

    Monday, September 19th, 2011

    <> <> <> alksandr1 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Previous Post)

    Occupy Wall St 1wallst-250-3

    Wall street Anti- Captitalist Protest Picture Gallery slideshow (Guardian)

    LiveStream Global Revolution

    Wall Street Occupation continues (see a clip of Lawyers back protesters + more)

  • A line from Salvador Allende

    Balancing between abstract
    expressionism & futurism
    the calm metal instrument
    of my voice tweaks the once-

    sacred double-helix to create
    pyramids in bold colors &
    textures. Exquisite tropes. The
    great avenues will open again.

    Mark Young Sept 19 2011 (gamma way from Australia)

    Fall Film Notes – Shame & Faust

    Friday, September 16th, 2011

    Shame !ShameFassbender

    Fassbender, who also stars in this fall’s sexually themed psychoanalysis drama “A Dangerous Method” as Carl Jung, won an acting prize at the Venice Film Festival this weekend for “Shame.”
    Despite the overt sexuality, Fassbender said the movie is in many ways a critique of our hyper-sexed era. ” (via)

    Fassbender talks about John Cazales and his love of American films of the 70’s (youtube).
    Fassbender was amazing in “Hunger’ also directed by Steve McQueen… appeared in “Angel” by Fracois Ozon and “Jane Eyre”

    Faust won the best film at Venice –

    The film is the final part in a series of films where Alexander Sokurov explores the corrupting effects of power. The previous installments are three biographical dramas: about Adolf Hitler in Moloch from 1999, Vladimir Lenin in Taurus from 2001, and the Japanese emperor Hirohito in The Sun from 2005. (Faust wiki)

    In One Breathe – the making of the Russian Ark is on youtube. (A breathtaking achievement..more fun to see this than the actual film).

    Part II <> <> Part III <> <> Part IV <> <> Part V

    Wilt Stillman of Metropolitan and Barcelona..Damsels in Distress..

    director’s first in 12 years, tells the story of three young girls trying to change life at an American university.

    Richard Hamilton Brit Pop Visonary R.I.P

    Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

    Richard Hamilton, the original pop artist, dies at 89 : Driven by intellect and political belief, Hamilton created undying icons of the modern world

    In in 1952, Richard Hamilton was introduced to the Green Box notes of Marcel Duchamp through Roland Penrose. (Roland Penrose later became a husband of Lee Miller)

    Richard designed the Beatles “White Album”

    Hamilton said he was “surprised how little” he was paid for the cover – only 200 pounds.
    “I thought that was a bit mean,” he said.

    Richard Hamilton’s Ulysses Illustrations

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    Picasso’s Meninas by Richard Hamilton

    adonisinYFront
    Adonis in Y Front

    1richard-hamiltonBlair
    Shock and Awe 2007
    The British Visionary
    Richard Hamilton has a new show at the Serpentine, but the Pop Art pioneer’s fame has never matched his extraordinary influence.

    Giotto’s Dream

    Monday, September 12th, 2011

    Decameron by Pasolini

    In his “Satyricon,” Fellini contented himself by playing God, the artist, off screen. Pasolini is not quite so modest. About halfway through “The Decameron” he himself shows up as Giotto, one of the founding fathers of the Renaissance. Thereafter we see him periodically, surrounded by his students, at work on a giant fresco, the holy faces of which are those of the thieves, whores, merchants, nuns, friars, rubes, deceived husband and not-so-virginal lovers, whose stories we’ve been watching.
    When his work is finally completed, Giotto is spent, drained, empty of feeling. “Why produce a work of art,” he says to himself, “when it’s so nice to dream about it?”
    Pasolini’s dream is composed of the tales he tells us, takes as its theme a frenzied Giotto nightmare, in which the artist’s religious visions are overwhelmed by the more attractive visions of a pagan orgy.

    GiottoDecaPasolini
    Film still from Decameron by Pasolini

    Giotto giottoFrancis
    Legend of St Francis, Homage of a simple man

  • jennispota

    Giotto’s Dream by Jeni Spota

    Giotto’s Dream an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Jeni Spota. Using Pasolini’s interpretation of Boccaccio’s medieval allegory The Decameron, specifically Giotto’s dream sequence, Spota’s paintings blend traditional religious painting with a hallucinatory vibrancy.

    Related links
    Pen and Parchment

    Elements Tapestry and Lancelot

    King Kong and Vermeer

    Friday, September 9th, 2011

    All the Vermeers from New York from Jon Jost homepage here.

  • Marcello Mastroianni and Gerard Depardieu in a strange film directed by Marco Ferreri (I haven’t seen the film.)
    (Thanks to Salvador Fortuny Miró)

    Marco Ferreri talking about filming in New York..(youtube)

  • Cesare Pavese – Death Will Come With Your Eyes

    Friday, September 9th, 2011


    Vittorio Gassman reads Verra’ La Morte e Avra’ i Tuoi Occhi

    Cesare Pavese 9 September 1908

    Death Will Come with Your Eyes

    Death will come with your eyes—
    this death that accompanies us
    from morning till night, sleepless,
    deaf, like an old regret
    or a stupid vice. Your eyes
    will be a useless word,
    a muted cry, a silence.
    As you see them each morning
    when alone you lean over
    the mirror. O cherished hope,
    that day we too shall know
    that you are life and nothing.

    For everyone death has a look.
    Death will come with your eyes.
    It will be like terminating a vice,
    as seen in the mirror
    a dead face re-emerging,
    like listening to closed lips.
    We’ll go down the abyss in silence.

    Translated by Linh DINH

    Cesare Pavese

    Cesare Pavese is widely regarded as one of the foremost men of letters in twentieth-century Italian cultural history, and in particular as an emblematic figure: an earnest writer maimed by fascism and struggling with the modern existentialist dilemma of alienated meaning. Little known in the United States, Pavese was profoundly influenced by American literature, and, when official censorship closed his mouth, he would use his position as a translator and editor indirectly to bring into Italy messages of freedom and new ideas from English-language authors. Most Italians first encountered Herman Melville, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Charles Dickens, Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, and Daniel Defoe in Pavese’s translations, and also encountered their influence, and echoes of their meditations, in Pavese’s own highly accomplished body of novels, short stories, and poems.

    George Kuchar R.I. P

    Thursday, September 8th, 2011

    georgekuchar
    (via)

    George Kuchar, Filmmaker and Provocateur Who Inspired John Waters, Dead at 69 – Indiewire

    Throughout his early career, George worked by day in commercial arts, an industry he described as “that Midtown Manhattan world of angst and ulcers.”

    George Kuchar at Wiki

    (August 31, 1942 – September 6, 2011) was an American film director, known for his “low-fi” aesthetic, playful use of no-talent actors, plotless plots, and themeless themes. Trained as a commercial artist in a vocational high school, the School of Industrial Art, he drew weather maps for a local news show.

    George Kuchar (Sensitive Skin magazine)

    George Kuchar, RIP. Kuchar and his twin brother Michael practically invented the “camp” genre. He prided himself on making films with non-actors, script, or theme, for almost no money. The 8mm movies he made in the 60s were as important a part of the underground film scene as those made by by Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage.
    See for yourself, here’s his “masterpiece”, Hold Me While I’m Naked, a semi-autobiographical short about a pornographer. In the Village Voice’s Critics’ Poll of the 100 best films of the 20th century, it ranked 52nd.

    The Spider, the Starfish and a Poet

    Saturday, September 3rd, 2011

    “One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.”

    “If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.”

    “There is no logical reason for the existence of a snowflake any more than there is for evolution. It is an apparition from that mysterious shadow world beyond nature, that final world which contains—if anything contains—the explanation of men and catfish and green leaves.”

    Loren Eiseley September 3, 1907
    (anthropologist, philosopher, and natural science writer)

    Immense Journey (a book review)
    Starfish Story

    The Starfish and the Spider The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations is a 2006 book by Ori Brafman (Is this a good book? )

    1Surfe
    (Bored surf-board) – Fung Lin Hall)

    R.I P Samuel Menashe
    “We think not in words but in shadows of words,”

    There is never an end to loss, or hope
    I give up the ghost for which I grope
    Over and over again saying Amen
    To all that does or does not happen—
    The eternal event is now, not when –
    Samuel Menashe