“Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again:
You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday.
Heart feels better, then.
But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.
Heart is so new to this.
I want them back, says heart.
Head is all heart has.
Help, head. Help heart.”
Lydia Davis (Click to see large) Photo by Odeta Catana
LD My father was an English professor, and somehow it must have been in the house. It made a very strong impression because it was so different from anything I had read. I opened this book and it said on the first page, “I’m lying here. I’ve dropped my pencil.” Later, in high school, I would go through one novelist after another—Nabokov, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, Joyce—and read everything.
FP Do you think about Beckett a lot now?
LD He was very important to me in my early twenties. I studied him. I was really picking apart sentence structures, seeing exactly how he constructed a sentence. Why it worked so beautifully. I suppose I wanted to do it as well as Beckett. So if I was going to do it as well as he did, I had to learn how he did it.
But now the South African novelist has surprised critics by revealing his profound, almost obsessive respect for an unlikely figure – the Swiss tennis star Roger Federer.
Revealing himself as an armchair sports fan, Coetzee describes Federer’s best tennis as “something like the human ideal made visible” and says the experience of watching him play is “very much like my response to masterworks of art”.
Recalled from memory, Silent Topography are painted aerial views of land and water formations observed on transcontinental flights between Europe and the West Coast of the United States.
Saturday, June 15, 2013
66 Elgin Park
San Francisco CA 94103 Gallery 60Six
A Trautwein such as “Frozen Blue” hints at his process. It involves crumpling and flattening found paper – in many cases old airport blueprints – then coating and flooding the sheet with acrylic to produce a sort of relief-map-like skin.
Echoes abound of an earlier generation’s more rugged exercises in color field abstraction. I think particularly of the turn-of-the-’70s unframed soaked paper abstractions of Manny Farber (1917-2008).
Yet Trautwein’s works’ illegibility as imagery does more than frustrate. It calls up the anxious uncertainty that attends our inability to read satellite imagery of the Earth.
Almost offhand, it seems, Trautwein aligns the inscrutability of certain scientific imaging with that of his paintings and with our incapacity to recognize in everyday life the signs of snowballing ecological calamity. Or rather, he relies on us to do that. And once the possibility comes to mind, resisting it feels like denial.
2008 prototype..
(photo by Fung Lin Hall -This was taken in his apartment. He explained that this painting was the prototype for the new work.)
Manzarek grew up in Chicago, then moved to Los Angeles in 1962 to study film at UCLA. It was there he first met Doors singer Jim Morrison, though they didn’t talk about forming a band until they bumped into each other on a beach in Venice, California in the summer of 1965 and Morrison told Manzarek that he had been working on some music. “And there it was!” Manzarek wrote in his 1998 biography, Light My Fire. “It dropped quite simply, quite innocently from his lips, but it changed our collective destinies.”
Ray Manzarek
Ray Manzarek pays tribute to Jim Morrison and realizes his own filmmaking dreams with ‘Love Her Madly’
“I had a class with Joseph von Sternberg at UCLA, which changed my life, if not my attitude towards women, which has always been lustfully wonderfully beautiful, but in terms of style,” he says.
Bruce Chatwin Edinburgh flat
Bruce was born on May 13, 1940
Susan Sontag wrote of him: “There are few people in this world who have the kind of looks which enchant and enthrall … It isn’t just beauty, it’s a glow, something in the eyes. And it works on both sexes.”
Werner Herzog said Chatwin was a great story teller..
German filmmaker Werner Herzog relates a story about meeting Chatwin in Australia while Herzog was working on his 1984 film, Where the Green Ants Dream. Finding out that Chatwin was in Australia researching a book (The Songlines), Herzog sought him out. Herzog states that Chatwin professed his admiration for him, and when they met was carrying one of Herzog’s books, On Walking In Ice. The two hit it off immediately, united by a shared love of adventure and telling tall tales. Herzog states that he and Chatwin talked almost nonstop over two days, telling each other stories. He said that Chatwin “told about three times as many as me.”[24] Herzog also claims that when Chatwin was near death, he gave Herzog his leather rucksack and said,”You’re the one who has to wear it now, you’re the one who’s walking.”
In 1987, Herzog made Cobra Verde, a film based on Chatwin’s 1980 novel The Viceroy of Ouidah, depicting the life of Francisco Manoel da Silva, a fictional Brazilian slave trader working in West Africa. Locations for the film included Brazil, Colombia and Ghana. via his wiki..
Cobra Verde was based on Bruce Chatwin’s novel The Viceroy of Ouidah.
Click to see large ( Photo by Eve Arnold)
INDIA. Bruce CHATWIN interviewing in Delhi for the Sunday Times. 1977 On the Road with Mrs G. (A witty and charming article on Indira Gandhi by Bruce Chatwin- they talked about Joan of Arc & Margaret Thatcher- describing a leader out of touch.)
Click to see large
Not a travel writer but a traveling writer, he was a biblioperipatetic. He read, that is, as he walked — large swatches of Western literature and thought were lavished on the places and people he visited — and he walked as he read.
In Patagonia
The quest writing was dazzling at the time (I reviewed some of it, and was dazzled). Visiting the aged Nadezhda Mandelstam, he sorts out body and soul. She lies curled up in bed, shabby and unkempt, welcoming a gift of marmalade, sniffing at a bottle of less than premium Champagne and getting Chatwin to straighten a painting she’d knocked awry by hurling an unsatisfactory book at it. It was modernist white-on-white: ”Perhaps that is all one can do today in Russia?” she muses.(via There’s No Place That’s Home)
Bruce Chatwin Photo by James Ivory
In the summer of 1972, before starting to work as an adviser on art at the Sunday Times, Chatwin went to Oregon (USA) trying to finish his nomad book. He stayed in a cabin, owned by the film director James Ivory, in the Lake of the Woods (Klamath County).
Chatwin met Ivory in England in 1969, at the house of the painter Howard Hodgkin near Bath.
Here is a Chatwin’s picture taken by Ivory in the Oregon desert (1972): (via Facebook)
What Am I Doing Here?
In this text, Bruce Chatwin writes of his father, of his friend Howard Hodgkin, and of his talks with Andre Malraux and Nadezhda Mandelstram. He also follows unholy grails on his travels, such as the rumour of a “wolf-boy” in India, or the idea of looking for a Yeti.
During her service in the front Nightingale collected data from diseases, wounds and deaths. Her data showed that a large part of the casualties was due to bad or non-existent sanitation in the barracks. She made her data tangible using a special graphic representation, known originally as the “Nightingale’s Coxcomb”, or more recently, the “Nightingale’s Rose”. The graph efficiently portrayed the root causes of deaths, and was the beginning of modern nursery and sanitation, helping to save millions of lives.
Despite her intense personal devotion to Christ, Nightingale believed for much of her life that the pagan and eastern religions had also contained genuine revelation. She was a strong opponent of discrimination both against Christians of different denominations, and against those of non-Christian religions. Nightingale believed religion helped provide people with the fortitude for arduous good work, and would ensure the nurses in her care attended religious services. However she was often critical of organised religion. (Florence Nightingale -wiki )
BEFORE THEY WERE FAMOUS A Winter on the Nile: Florence Nightingale, Gustave Flaubert and the Temptations of Egypt
By Anthony Sattin
Florence Nightingale’s Egypt is a place of spiritual self-fashioning. Gustave Flaubert’s Egypt is somewhat different. It was a great place to buy sex.
I assume that the full scope of my mother’s influence on me lies beyond my understanding. I figure it must be like an iceberg: only the tip of it shows.
Mark Salzman – Previous post.. (See his inspirational lecture at Dewey).
Taylor Mead, the Warhol “superstar,” Beat poet, stray-cat feeder and sweet face and voice of an era, died on Wednesday at 88, taking a large slice of Lower Manhattan’s cultural history with him. (via NYtimes City room)
What happened when you came to New York?
I got into the poetry scene in the 50’s. We were all protesting, it was a revolutionary time….many people from the Midwest, disinherited like me, came to New York to the coffeehouses, and with BOB DYLAN, and WOODY ALLEN, and BIILL COSBY, and ALLEN GINSBERG, and GREGORY CORSO, we were “outré”, avant-garde , and we read our stuff.
You shot Nude Restaurant on drugs?
We shot Nude restaurant, we shot it as we shot it, because we were stoned. Unfortunately I knew Viva’s private life. Her family life. So I think she wanted to be glamorous, and her childhood, but I made her stick to the story, she was magnificent. It’s one of my favorites.
He was born in 1844
He wrote “My honors are misunderstanding, persecution & neglect, enhanced because unsought.” see him with others (scroll down – a link to Walt Whitman painting)
Alice Liddell ( 4 May 1852 – 16 November 1934), known for most of her adult life by her married name, Alice Hargreaves, inspired the children’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
Jane Jacob was an American–Canadian journalist, author, and activist best known for her influence on urban studies. Her influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) argued that urban renewal did not respect the needs of most city-dwellers.
He knows how to cast, how to tell a great story.. he calls the Prophet anti– Scarface.. and his films.. Melo-Trash.. his people are mostly working class.. having a rough time.. his films fill your heart and brain.. it’s a good mix.
Earlier in his career..he produced films for Claude Miller. Jacques Audiard gets the big picture but he is also very meticulous..I watched how he works with actors on a DVD special feature.
He has introduced us to Tahar Rahim and Matthias Schoenaerts. (Mathhias Schoenaerts speaks three languages)
Photo by Odeta Catana
and 
