Vitro Nasu

Postscript New Yorker (1923-2013)

Leiter’s best photographs lack all pretense, and are full of a productive doubt. When I heard the news of Leiter’s death, I asked Leach what the experience of working on the film—over a period of three years—had been like. “He was funny, intelligent, and insightful,” Leach wrote to me. “He was full of curiosity and mischief.” The Magnum photographer Alex Webb, who is celebrated for the sophistication of his color work, said Leiter had “an uncanny ability to pull complex situations out of everyday life, images that echo the abstraction of painting and yet, simultaneously, clearly depict the world.”

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The Color of Genius

Seeing beauty with Saul Leiter

Photo via and via

Chico Hamilton died at 92 (NYtimes)

Click to see large
Soundtrack opening theme from Repulsion (youtube)

See a video of Chico Hamilton and Polanski from a link below.
Chico Hamilton Dancing to a different drummer (Very curious about this documentary)

Click to see large

White House drum solo. (youtube)

Pollock Family

Photo via Janet Paprelli (Thanks Janet)
(Warning.. don’t drink and drive..)

Menu:
• Onion Soup En Croute
• Lobster and Shrimp Newburg
• Rack of Lamb, Roasted Winter Vegetables
• Meyer Lemon Pudding
• Jackson Pollock’s White and Rye Bread
American letters 1927–1947: Jackson Pollock and Family
S. Winter Pollock (ed.)
(h/t to Patrick Morell)

American letters 1927–1947: Jackson Pollock and Family
S. Winter Pollock (ed.)

Rainbow Trouts – Jackson Pollock and Birds

Quiz of the day who are they?
The answer is here..

Happy Shicimencho Day
Turkey in Japanese is called Shichimencho(七面鳥) meaning seven faced.

Strange photo

Virgil T
and Gertrude Stein (Photo via )

Four Saints in Three Acts Music by Virgil Thomson, original libretto by Gertrude Stein.

(Mark Morris – here and here )

Alice Neel
1971 Virgil Thomson
Oil on Canvas
48 x 37 inches / 121.9 x 94 cm
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.

Virgil Thomson (November 25, 1896 – September 30, 1989)

Virgil Thomson like many other great composers studied under Nadia Boulanger (scroll down)

More music by V.T.

Portraits (youtube)

Louisiana Story.. (Youtube)
Robert Flaherty – 1948

Francois Perier as Heurtebise from Orphée

French actor famed for his role as Heurtebise in Orphée, who was a friend of Jean-Paul Sartre
Ten years later, Perier reappeared as Heurtebise in Cocteau’s valedictory ciné-poem The Testament of Orpheus (1960), in which the dark angel compares a poet to “a sleeping invalid, with neither arms nor legs, who dreams that he runs and gestures”.

Testament of Orpheus full film (youtube)

Paul Celan Nov 23 1920

Celan is an anagram of the Romanian spelling of his surname, Ancel.

Paul Celan (1920-1970) was born in Romania to Jewish parents. His parents were deported and eventually died in the Nazi labor camps, and he was interned for eighteen months before escaping to the Red Army. He ultimately settled in Paris in 1948 to study German philology and literature. He published seven books of poetry and numerous translations during his lifetime. (via )

He was a prolific translater.. see the list of poets he translated .. via wiki.

Todesfuge
Previous Post (see a video of him reciting Todesfuge.. powerful & moving)

Paul Celan –Nelly Sachs Correspondence

Paul Celan reads Corona (Youtube)

Celan Reads Japanese.

Celan’s words are not containers, they are openings. I go through the opening in the gate each time I read them. The ideogram to open 開 appears in this book as well, in the crucial last line of the poem Ein Körnchen Sands {‘A Grain of Sand’}:

und ich schweb dir voraus als ein Blatt,
das weiß, wo die Tore sich auftun.

and I waft before you, a leaf
that knows where the gates will open

Image via

Happy birthday Meredith Monk

Book of Days

Peter Greenaway

Lots of great images and videos here: Meredith Monka An Art That Seeks

Happy birthday Bjork and Meredith M.. (Bjork’s birthday is Nov 21..one day later)

Make me a Mask 2005
Ruben Torres-Llorca

In Conversation Ruben Torres llorca

“My fundamental influences are coming from film and literature. The only reason I choose to be a visual artist is the independence that it carries. Of the art forms, it is the one least in need of an outside producer, and I have a pathological inclination for naughtiness,” says Torres Llorca. “Through the years I haven’t cared what type of classification my art is subject to, whether it’s considered art, post-art, literature, or a simple commentary. I do not care what type of resources it uses, the provenance, or how bastardized it could be if I can use it. The essence for me is to establish a public dialogue.”

Facial Cosmetic

An Mendieta Artist work foretold death

(I lived few buildings away at the time of her most unfortunate fall from the building in the village. )

Art in America – Ana Mendieta

Carolee Schneeman, discussed her friendship with Mendieta
“Most riveting, however, was her frank assertion that she is convinced that Andre murdered Mendieta. “She made me change her light bulbs. She was afraid of heights. She would never go near the window,” Schneeman confided, adding how eerie it is to her that Andre still lives in the same apartment from which Mendieta plunged to her death, and that his new wife allegedly makes window-based artworks.”

Artslant Ana Mendieta see her works here.

Ana Mendieta – 18 November 1948 – 8 September 1985)

Previous post Mendieta with other Latin American artists –
Order, Chaos the Space Between

Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.” – Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing
(image via Litencyc.)

Margaret Drabble Doris is my hero..

She was a good cook, and enjoyed seeing other people eat and drink. Her company was miscellaneous – African writers and politicians, feminist publishers from the antipodes, people she’d met at a Russian evening class, scientists, novelists, playwrights, poets, journalists, campaigners, translators, an old lady who lived down the (rather shabby) street.

Eileen Battersby

Doris Lessing: matriarch, prophet, maverick
Author’s death, a week shy of her 95th birthday, marks end of fittingly long life of enduring survivor

NYtimes.. obit – (more complete summary of her life except for a quote from Michiko Kakutani).

Guardian Obit – her younger son died 3 weeks ago.

Doris Lessing passed away

J M Coetzee called her “one of the great visionary novelists of our time” .

Previous post: Doris Lessing.. (On her birthday in 2007 – the year she won her nobel prize..)

Doris and her mother – a capable and talented woman who was extremely frustrated.

Paris Review

Doris Lessing: a model for every writer coming from the back of beyond– Margaret Atwood

Inventive, brave, down-to-earth – she never hedged her bets or pulled her punches, doing everything with all her heart.

If there were a Mount Rushmore of 20th-century authors, Doris Lessing would most certainly be carved upon it. Like Adrienne Rich, she was pivotal, situated at the moment when the gates of the gender disparity castle were giving way, and women were faced with increased freedoms and choices, as well as increased challenges.

(Happy birthday Margaret Atwood! – Nov 18)

Doris Lessing Org.

Click to see large
Doris with Philip Glass

The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 Opera

Paul Krugman’s cats were named Doris Lessing and Albert Einstein.

*Hanif Kureishi first informed me of the sad news of her passing on Facebook this morning.

You don’t discover the Sufi message from a writer. Sufism is something you experience on your own. It’s the same for Buddhism. You can’t read a book and receive enlightenment. (via)

More 4 T’s ballet on youtube here <> <> here and here

Four Temperaments

The Four Temperaments is a ballet made by New York City Ballet co-founder and balletmaster George Balanchine to music he commissioned from Paul Hindemith (the latter’s eponymous 1940 music for string orchestra and piano) for the opening program of Ballet Society, immediate forerunner of City Ballet. The première took place on Wednesday, November 20th, 1946, at the Central High School of Needle Trades, New York City

George Balanchine – archive

Paul Hindemith
(16 November 1895 – 28 December 1963) was a German composer, violist, violinist, teacher and conductor.

Eearly Years (See many family photos here)

Hindemith’s early childhood was marked by his father’s draconian style of upbringing. He brought up his children with extreme harshness, attempting to secure upward mobility for them (that had been denied him) through «colossally strict drill starting at the earliest age» and «the most precise inspection.»

Paul Hindemith by August Sander

Via Tate

Paul Hindemith and Stravinsky

Paul Hindemith and Igor Stravinsky in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1961.
Santa Fe Opera mounted Hindemith’s “News Of The Day” and Stravinsky’s “Persephone” that summer.

Mathias Der Maler (Opera)

Trauermusik (Funeral music)

Hindemith wrote Gebrauchsmusik (Music for Use)—compositions intended to have a social or political purpose and sometimes written to be played by amateurs. The concept was inspired by Bertolt Brecht. An example of this is his Trauermusik (Funeral Music), written in January 1936. Hindemith was preparing the London premiere of Der Schwanendreher when he heard news of the death of George V. He quickly wrote this piece for solo viola and string orchestra in tribute to the late king, and the premiere was given that same evening, the day after the king’s death.[

The Camera Can Create a Lovely Poem Even from Trifling

Katue Kitasono – Plastic Poems on view at LACMA till December 1, 2013.

POÉSIE

billions of ladies with billions of tongues have billions of peacocks
billions of ladies with billions of peacocks are calm as billions of
peacocks

ABOVE THE SAND DUNE
THE MOON’S OPERA

Katue
Thing Net I

Thing Net II

On View a Reconsideration of Katue Kitasono (NYtimes)

Theory and Practice

LACMA

Jacket – 3 Poems Black Fire

‘mabou’ (words, nova scotia)

Andrea Mabou
Looking again at Robert Frank

Robert Frank -Sunday Salon Utata.org

In 1971 Frank bought an old fisherman’s shack in Mabou, Nova Scotia on Cape Breton Island. He began to divide his time between there and his loft in New York City. He took up his Leicas and bought a cheap Polaroid, and returned to still photography. The photographs he began to shoot in Mabou were, at first, relatively simple in composition, but they were significantly more introspective and personal than anything he’d done before. His earlier work was all about the external world; his new work was deeply internal. It was less about others and more about himself. It’s as if Frank began for the first time to use photography as a mode of personal expression. The photographs retain the air of melancholy that marked his more famous work, but the melancholy grew out of the style of the work—out of the photographer, it could be said—rather than from the subject matter.
Some of that grew out of his personal life. Frank’s son Pablo was diagnosed with schizophrenia in the early 1970s, and eventually he required hospitalization. In 1974 Frank’s daughter Andrea died in an airplane crash in Guatemala. These personal tragedies clearly began to shape Frank’s work. It became more volatile and almost painfully personal.

The Fire Below Mabou January 1980
( Click to see large)

Paris photos (youtube)

The Americans

Robert Frank
and his wife June Leaf. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
Shooting from the hip..

via

Volker Schlordorff talked about this film here.

Robert Musil (6 November 1880 – 15 April 1942)

His unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities (German: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) is generally considered to be one of the most important modernist novels.

Young Robert M. (click to see large)

On the Edge of Revelation by Coetzee – Musil’s Five Women

“[…] a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, Vol. 1

“What is perceptible to one’s mistrust is the cut-and-dried way that life is divided up and the ready-made form it assumes, the ever-recurring sameness of it, the pre-formations passed down by generation after generation, the ready-made language not only of the tongue but also of the sensations and the feelings. ”
― Robert Musil (more quotes here)

Related link – Volker Schlöndorff
Circle of Deceit (Bruno Ganz & Hanna Schygulla )

Mathieu Carriere, an actor who played Torless is married to Jennifer Bartlet (American artist).