Vitro NasuIconoclastic Incubator
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Fortress Gump…Photo collage by Fung Lin Hall
Roman Gladiator at Papago, Arizona
Neil Young in Desert Shot – Photo by Dennis Hopper (Repost)
Phantom of India Chemical Halloween
Charles Ives “Hallowe’en” + Lumiere Brothers Skeleton Dance..
Galway Kinnell 
(via his hompage )
Poet who went his own way dies at 87. (NYtimes)
Quotes
“Never mind. The self is the least of it. Let our scars fall in love”
“Is there a mechanism of death, that so mutilates existence no one, gets over it not even the dead?”
― Galway Kinnell
Galway Kinnell reads “The Deconstruction of Emily Dickenson” – (youtube)
Galway Kinnell reads – After Making Love, We Hear Footsteps
The Bear (G.K. reads a poem on youtube)
R.I.P Genpei Akasegawa – (he was 77 years old.)
Genpei Akasegawa is a pseudonymof Japanese artist Katsuhiko Akasegawa (born 1937). During the 1950s and 1960s, he became involved within the Neo-Dada movement, when he formed the Hi-Red Center collective. In 1970s he worked with the idea of Hyper-Art, ordinary street object that happened to look like a conceptual artwork. For what was to become the “Thousand-yen bill incident”, Akasegawa sent out invitations to a solo exhibition in 1963, in a cash envelope mailed through the post. The printed invitation reproduced a 1,000-yen note with the exhibition details at the back, when the local police notice, they arrested him for producing counterfeits.
“A Record of the Wind” by Genpei Akasagawa
Going Nowhere (see more images here)
His irreverent humor and cunning observation of everyday life made him popular as a writer, peaking with his 1998 book Rõjinryoku, in which he put forth a hilariously positive take on the declining capabilities of the elderly. Hyperart: Thomasson, marks a crucial turning point in his metamorphosis from a subversive culture to a popular culturatus.
Photos by René Burri
Click to focus.
Che Guevara 
Havana, 1963
Performance of Bertold BRECHT’s play “Mother Courage”.1959
Martine Franck and Cartier Bresson
René Burri (9 April 1933 – 20 October 2014) was a Swiss photographer known for his photos of major political, historical and cultural events and key figures of the second half of the 20th century. Burri worked for Magnum Photos and has been photographing political, military and artistic figures and scenes since 1946. He made portraits of Che Guevara and Pablo Picasso as well as iconic pictures of São Paulo and Brasília.
A Model for Matisse available on netflix. (see nice photos)
Monique Bourgeois 
later Sister Jacques-Marie
NY times on Sister Jacques-Marie
As a painter he loved the splendid mass of her dark hair and the way her neck rose from her shoulders like a white tower,” Hilary Spurling, his biographer, wrote.
Click to see large 
Monique Bourgeois, as Sister Jacques-Marie was known before she took orders, was the 21-year-old daughter of a soldier. Her upbringing had been painfully strict: she had never worn make-up or read a book without asking her mother’s permission. Her parents told her she was ugly and would never amount to anything.
When Matisse took her on, she was astonished. She certainly didn’t fit the description of the girl he had advertised for. ‘Young I certainly was,’ she later said. ‘But pretty? Hmmm.’
Matisse, however, was charmed.
‘Who said you were ugly?’ he asked her. ‘Your parents?’
According to Ms. Spurling’s book, “Matisse the Master,” the lonely Matisse “found warmth and comfort in the uncomplicated affection” of the nun. Accounts of the chapel’s genesis vary, but according to Ms. Freed, the filmmaker, Sister Jacques-Marie sketched an Assumption for Matisse and he urged her to turn it into a stained-glass window. It happened that the rest home, Foyer Lacordaire, was hoping to convert a ramshackle garage used for prayer into a full-fledged chapel, and Matisse wondered if displaying the window could help raise money.
With the aid of a monk convalescing at the rest home, Matisse roughed out a sketch for a chapel, and Sister Jacques-Marie made the working model. Soon Matisse immersed himself in every aspect of the chapel, from the brushstroke sketches of a Stations of the Cross mural to the vestments and the slender Crucifixion altarpiece. The stained-glass windows, with one pair, “Tree of Life,” suggestive of a flowering cactus, are regarded as particular triumphs; they allow lemon-yellow, bottle-green and blue light to play capriciously against white-tiled walls and the marble floor.
Sister Jacques-Marie did preliminary design work and offered candid evaluations. As important, she ran interference with her local superior, who disapproved of a chapel designed by an artist known for his nudes. In the end, Matisse described the chapel as “their shared project.” When Sister Jacques-Marie told Matisse that she believed he was inspired by God Almighty, he replied gently, “Yes, but that god is me.”
Photo of Matisse
by Robert Capa (Previous post War and Ingrid Bergman)
Caterpiller trailer
<>
Caterpillar is a 2010 Japanese drama film directed by Kōji Wakamatsu, partially drawn from Edogawa Rampo’s banned short-story “The Caterpillar” (芋虫 Imomushi?)
The film is a critique of the right-wing militarist nationalism that guided Japan’s conduct in Asia during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II. The film deals with various issues, such as war crimes, handicapped veterans, and spousal abuse. The film also deals with themes of sexual perversion and features graphic sex scenes.It was nominated for the Golden Bear at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival.[4] Shinobu Terajima received the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival for her portrayal of Kurokawa’s wife.
Koji Wakamatsu 
(1 April 1936 – 17 October 2012)
The Essential Films of Koji Wakamatsu
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Nobel Prize in Literature- New Yorker
Today, the prize went to the French novelist Patrick Modiano, “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.”
The first thing this blogger learned about Patrick Modiano was that Raymond Queneau was his mother’s friend.. Queneau and Andre Malraux were at his wedding .. they argued about artist Dubuffet..(via wiki).
Françoise Hardy and Patick Modiano Photo via
Modiano has confessed his love for all things mysterious. “The more things remain obscure and mysterious, the more they interest me. I even try to find mystery in things that have none,” he wrote in the autobiographical work “Pedigree” (2005).
In a nod to that penchant for mystery, the French term “modianesque” has come to refer to a particularly ambiguous person or situation.
Published at just 22
Ten things to know about Patrick Modiano
Aurore 
He co-wrote the screenplay for Lacombe Lucien, a movie directed by Louis Malle, which focussed on French collaboration with the Nazis.
Modiano is not only a screenwriter for both film and TV, but an actor, who appeared with famous French actress Catherine Deneuve in the 1997 Raoul Ruiz film Genealogies of a Crime, playing a character called Bob.
La Perfum d”Yvonne” (see a trailer here) directed by Patrice Leconte (Men on the train, Ridicule etc) based on Villa Triste by Patrick Modiano.
Modiano has produced around 30 works in all, most of which are shortish novels. He had first work published when he was just 22, when most people his age are still struggling to write essays at university. He owed his big break to a friendship with a friend of his mother, French writer Raymond Queneau, who was first introduced him to the Gallimard publishing house. The book “La place de l’etoile” (The Star’s Place), was a direct reference to that mark of shame inflicted on the Jews.
Missing Person/ Rue des boutiques obscures – Patrick Modiano wins Nobel Prize – these are his three best books.
In French, this book has the far better title Rue des Boutiques Obscures (1978). It is Modiano’s sixth novel and possibly his best. The premise is dismaying, I admit: An amnesiac detective named Guy Roland sets out to find … himself. But Missing Person is anything but hackneyed in its treatment of the way the past lives on both in the world outside and in our minds. Roland tries to reconstruct his old self using unreliable, fragmentary, evidence—photographs, scraps of paper, old newspapers—creating strange poetry as he goes: “An ash-blonde. And who perhaps had played an important part in my life. I would have to study her photograph carefully. And, gradually, everything would come back.”
To see better films by Raul Ruiz (previous post)
Toru Takemitsu (武満 徹 Takemitsu Tōru, October 8, 1930 – February 20, 1996) photo by Kinoshita Akira
Composer and writer on aesthetics and music theory. Takemitsu’s contribution to film music was considerable; in under 40 years he composed music for over 100 films. via wiki
Follow his works.. you’ll get the best of post war Japanese cinema.
Double suicide 
Trailer (youtube)
See Woman in the Dunes full film (Abe Kobo, Teshigahara, Toru Takemitsu)
Hiroshi Teshigahara Two films based on novels by Abe Kobo, The Face of Another, Woman in the Dunes, Rikyu about the zen/artist/tea master. and Pitfall –
Click to see large – Rikyu 
The Burmese Harp 
The Burmese Harp full film (youtube) directed by Kon Ichikawa
Harakiri – trailer (youtube) (With Masaki Kobayashi – Takemitsu also did the film scores for Kwaidan and Samurai Rebellion)
Takemitsu also composed for Black Rain (Imamura Shohei), Ran, Dodeskaden (Akira Kurosawa), Empire of Passion (Nagisa Oshima) and Rising Sun (Philip Kaufman).
Toru T and Iannis Xenakis 
click to see large
Iannis Xenakis (previous post)
Multitalented Artist, Dies at 84
Mr. Holder directed a dance troupe from his native Trinidad and Tobago, danced on Broadway and at the Metropolitan Opera and won Tony Awards in 1975 for direction of a musical and costume design for “The Wiz,” a rollicking, all-black version of “The Wizard of Oz.” His choreography was in the repertory of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Dance Theater of Harlem. He acted onstage and in films and was an accomplished painter, photographer and sculptor whose works have been shown in galleries and museums. He published a cookbook.
Geoffrey Holder and 
Carmen de Lavallade
This lavish ballet choreographed, composed and designed by Geoffrey Holder depicts real and imagined events in the life of the renowned Haitian painter, Hector Hyppolite. The goddess Erzulie and St. John the Baptist appear to the central character in a vision, inspiring his vivid, exotic illustrations of the African gods and goddesses that populate Holder’s mystical theater and dance drama.
Glenn Gould died of a stroke on October 4, 1982, and was laid to rest in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Interview (youtube)
Orlando Gibbons
He refused to play Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Debussy and much of the other core piano repertoire, deriding their masterpieces as empty theatrical gestures. He especially disliked Mozart, and named the obscure 17th century English composer Orlando Gibbons as his all-time favorite. (via)
On Orlando Gibbons
…”ever since my teen-age years this music … has moved me more deeply than any other sound experience I can think of.”
* The Glenn Gould Reader. p. 438. New York: Knopf.
(Thanks Richard Bohn for the above quote)
