Vitro NasuIconoclastic Incubator
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Kuroneko directed by Kaneto Shindo
Gliding figure 
Nakamura K.
Nakamura Kichiemon in Double Suicide (previous post)
Bat Chair & Halloween digital photos
Bonus Link
40 Black & White Photos That Cannot Be Explained (Creepy and weird)
Jacques Barzun, 30 Nov 1907 – 25 Oct 2012
Historian & Scholar dies at 104 (NYtimes)
The Achievement of Jacques Barzun (The First Things)
Cynthia Ozick – “the last of the thoroughgoing generalists,”
My notion about any artist is that we honor him best by reading him, by playing his music, by seeing his plays or by looking at his pictures. We don’t need to fall all over ourselves with adjectives and epithets. Let’s play him more.
— Jacques Barzun, in an interview with John C. Tibbetts
Barzun 100 (a blog dedicted to Barzun)
William James – (blog fantasy)
Philip Whalen, Sensei, in his peaceful chair, my apartment living room,
East 12th Street New York March 1984. he was visiting East coast to give
readings N.Y. and Buffalo, calm poet. ‘What are you reading?’ ‘I’m
not reading I’m just turning the pages.’ (Ginsberg caption.)
photo c. Allen Ginsberg Estate]
The Invention of the Letter: A Beastly Morality by Philip Whalen
Invention of of the Letter #16 (sample drawing).
And God descended to Adam’s side and abstracted Eve therefrom, telling her ‘Never let him sleep,
in the afternoon. Make him keep drawing and writing.”
Julian Schnabel – photo by Annie Leibovitz
(photo via)
Happy birthday J.S.
Steve Nash & Julian Schnabel (previous post)
Two friends at home by Diane Arbus – 1965 (photo via)
Revealed and discovered – Diane Arbus (previous post)
R.I.P George McGovern 
photo via
Democracy Now on George McGovern’s new film..
Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail
Russell Means 
by Andy Warhol
(image via)
Russell Means – American Indian Activist dies at 72 (NYtimes)
Russell Means comment on Obama peace prize (youtube)
See Russell Means with Daniel Day Lewis
Robert Capa 
Birthday: October 22, 1913
War & Ingrid Bergman (previous post on Robert Capa )
Michael devoted his work to exploring the limits of the galleries and schools and museums that give context and space for art, poking at all sorts of barriers and shibboleths with a humor that was sometimes sly, and sometimes hilarious,” Thomas Lawson
In 1970, Michael Asher created a piece that opened to the street outside Pomona College’s museum. (Pomona College Museum of Art)
Michael Asher was 69.(July 15, 1943 – October 14, 2012)
Storied Teacher and Artist Who Examined, Defied Convention
(Image via)
Michael Asher’s “2010” work, “No Title,” opened the Biennial continuously to the public twenty-four hours a day from Wednesday, May 26 at 12:00 am through Friday, May 28 at 11:59 pm. This video features surveillance footage—taken in the Museum’s lobby—of the first ten seconds of every hour during the project.
Washington post obit
(Glenn Gould Goldberg Variation)
Oscar Wilde
by Toulous-Lautrec (via)
Rupert Everett to make director debut on Wilde biopic
Helen Cixous – The Dumb Box and Two Helens
Italo Calvino 
Calvino-google 
Italo Calvino – Oct 15, 1923
Kublai Khan 
Cities and Memory 3. – Italo Calvino – Invisible Cities
In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions. I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering; the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen’s illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock.
Colin Firth as Lomax and Nicole Kidman as his wife (image via)
Eric Lomax, a former British soldier who was tortured by the Japanese while he was a prisoner during World War II and half a century later forgave one of his tormentors — an experience he recounted in a memoir, “The Railway Man” — died on Monday in Berwick-upon-Tweed, England. He was 93.
Lomax 
Eric Sutherland Lomax (30 May 1919 – 8 October 2012)
Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth mourn death of the man who inspired their movie, The Railway Man
The men’s struggle against the odds was most famously depicted in David Lean’s 1957 film ‘The Bridge On The River Kwai’.
Lomax eventually returned to the place he had been ruthlessly worked almost to death and met the interpreter and torturer, who had been the cause of so much pain.
The film’s producer, Andy Paterson, told the BBC :”The cast and crew of The Railway Man are deeply saddened to hear of Eric Lomax’s death. All our thoughts today are with his family.”
Skarsgard played Lomax’s wartime buddy, while Sanada portrayed Lomax’s tormentor who he meets again years later.
Happy birthday Hiroyuki Sanada. (birthdate: October 12, 1960)
Hiroyuki Sanada – (previous post)
See Twilight Samurai (Full film on youtube)
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Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard photographed by Arnold Newman
Harold Pinter was born on 10 October 1930.
The Servant (Scripted by Pinter, directed by Losey, starrig Dirk Bogarde, James Fox & Sarah Miles)
R.I.P Harold Pinter (don’t miss “Apart from that” – much better than the presidential debate).
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Portrait of Harold Pinter by Joe Hill
The Lovers – Clip from 1963 TV Play by Pinter
Harold Pinter without dialogues? Vivien Merchant, Pinter’s first wife
plays the character.
In his screenplays Pinter constantly returns to fascism’s pyschological and historical origins . It is that that makes his movies as significant as his plays and elevates him from the ranks of a master-stylist into an auteur.
“I think definitely. But it’s worth noting that Havel and Pinter were close friends. During the communist period Pinter, along with other playwrights, really tried to lobby for Havel’s release, to help – he was active. In terms of the plays I think that the only major difference was that Mr Havel wrote more from the ‘lived’ experience of the absurd whereas with Pinter it’s almost a philosophical question. I mean, he was living in a democracy and not under a communist system. But there are areas where they meet.
Go Between – Alan Bates Julie Christie script by Harold Pinter(see two youtube clips)
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Pascal Blanchard posted a sad news of Raoul de Keyser‘s passing on Facebook.
Raoul de Keyser was 82 – (- a painter of modest, mysterious abstraction via Gallerist)
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(Image via )
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Title: Come On, Play It Again Number 4 (Image via)
More paintings on Artnet
Belgian artist Raoul de Keyser (born 1930) is someone whose work one doesn’t often get to see in the US, especially on the West Coast, but I have been fortuntate to see some of his work and I’ve also read a great deal about him. His work interests me because he doesn’t seem wedded to a particular style other than making what one would call “abstract” images while still referencing real things. His subject matter has personal origins without being hermetic or self-centered, he works in series or small bodies of work, and he has a sense of scale about his overall project: he doesn’t make large paintings for the just sake of making large paintings, and there is a kind of self knowledge, modesty, and openness in his work. Much of what I wrote here could apply to another painter I follow, Thomas Nozkowski. Three other people I’ll name whose work shares some of these qualities and who I will always go see are Mary Heilmann, Pat Steir, and Louise Fishman, all painters.(via Thinkin about art)
My Knitted Boyfriend is a cushion with a story. A cushion with a personality. A cushion to kiss! (See vimeo.. fun stuff) Design by Noortje De Keijzer.
Film still from The Sweet Hereafter.. (Trailer – directed by Atom Egoyan)
“None of us realized the potency yet of this medium–how many homes it was going to, what kind of affect it was having on people and so forth.. I think everybody who works in the visual medium would love to have that kind of innocence again.” Arthur Penn
Close ups..a knee jerk response.. the Media killed Nixon- (youtube)
Presidential Archive Kennedy Nixon Debates
Bonus Subject: How did Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn come to make the classic firm Bonnie and 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.
