Vitro Nasu

Photo by Tim Richmond.

Happy birthday Paul Bowles and Patti Smith (Dec 30.. they share a birthday).
Night Waltz (See Jane and Paul Bowles)

In Memoriam..

Philip Seymour Hoffman known for playing beautiful losers, leaves behind a legacy of work that broke your heart and hit you in the gut.

Alain Resnais

Yamaguchi Yoshiko and Isamu Noguchi

Pete Seeger, the power of song- he loved boating.

Visionary Land Artist Nancy Holt

Genpei Akasegawa – Neo Dada Artist

Jane and Kate Barry

Rene Burri –Swiss Magnum photographer <> <> Jane Bown –Shy & Gentle photographer
Minimalist photographer Lewis Balts

Billie Whitelaw (Samuel Beckett’s perfect actress)

Maximillian Schell

Robin Williams

Shoji Masui he passed away on March 3, 2014. (Burmese Harp directed by Kon Ichikawa)

Luis Rainer A Movie Legend with 2 Oscars was 104.

Jane Freilicher – (See portraits of Frank OHara, Koch and Ashbery)

Ruby Dee
Amiri Baraka

Adios Senor Horace Silver (click to see large)

Let our scars fall in love, Farewell Galway Kinnell<> <> Maxine Kumin<> <> Mark Strand
Charles Barsotti (Cactus Dwarf Orchard)

Camille Lepage Young Photo Jounalist Killed In Central Africa

Takakura Ken -legendary actor was 83.

Rilke and Valery
(At the garden at Anthy – photo Monad)

On Dec 29, 1921 –
Rilke wrote to Lou Andrea-Salome (On Freud, he told her how his work is now beginning to have an important effect in France then he turned to Paul Valery) page 279 -280 – Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke – 1910 -1926.

Only the poetry of Paul Valery really astonishes me, whose “Le Cimetiere marin” I managed to translate with an equivalence I scarcely thought could be achieved between the two languages….

“Eupalinos – like all Valery’s few works of a serenity, a calm and equanimity that you too would entirely appreciate. Paul Valery stems from Mallarme.

But Valery kept silent and worked at mathematics until he was ready for artistic expression 25 years later,

so much the purer. In 1915, a man of fifty (Valery): and what has since come from his is of the greatest distinction and significance.

Rilke and Rodin
photo via

Rilke’s bio timeline..(photos and sound files)

David Markson on Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke, Raron, Canton Valais, Switzerland – (see his grave)

1926
On December the 29th, Rilke dies at Val-Mont. “The Poetical Work of Michelangelo”,
as well as his voluminous correspondence, are published post mortem. This body of work,
which includes letters to some of the most prominant writers and intellectuals of his time,
such as Marina Tsvetaeva, Auguste Rodin, André Gide, Hugo von Hofmannstahl,
Boris Pasternak, and Stefan Zweig.

Rilke as a child

Rilke photo via

Rilke the Poet
Previous post Photo of Rilke by Shaw – Letters to Balthus, Lou A. Salome

Dec 29 birthday of William Gaddis.. (See David Markson and William Gaddis- scroll down)

Klaus & Pierre

With Kinski, Pierre Clementi was in La chanson de Rolland (1977) and Zoo Zero..

Full film Zoo Zero – Klaus Kinski, Pierre Clementi (youtube – sorry no subtitles)

(via)

Sweet Movie Pierre Clementi directed by Dušan Makavejev.

Idols (full film)

Pierre Clementi

Born at 6am in the 14th arrondissement in Paris, 28th September 1942, Pierre Clémenti died in the same city, of liver cancer, Monday 27th December 1999; days before the end of the century. He never knew his father, who was said to have been killed in the war, and instead took his name from his Corsican mother.

He discovered poetry at reform school as a young teenager, and his love of it lasted a lifetime. After working as a bellboy at the Hotel Littré in the late 1950s, where he managed to sell a few poems to a female guest he’d spent the night with, he was able to concentrate on hanging out with his friends in Saint Germain. On these streets he was fatefully sidetracked into an acting career that became symbolic of so many aspects of European cinema of the time: experimentalism, anarchy, androgyny, anti-heroism, surrealism and pariah culture.

Repost

See a must not copy this image of Clementi..

Previous post –
(Clementi was an actor/poet/filmmaker)

– actor for Buñuel, Garrel, and Bertolucci, was a brilliant filmmaker, free, poetic, adventurous, madly in love with editing and color.

Nabakov The Moment of truth (youtube)

<> <>

Cab Calloway and Humphrey Bogart were born on Dec 25.
Happy birthday Sissy Spacek, Louise Bourgeois and Hannah Schygulla.

Happy Holidays 2014!

Update: Arnold Schoenberg wishes you a very merry Xmas

(via)

Samuel Beckett died on Dec 22, 1989.
Billie Whitelaw died on Dec 21, 2014 (A day early)

Billie Whitelaw dies

In her autobiography Billie Whitelaw… Who He?, however, she acknowledged it was her work with Beckett that generated the most interest.
Without their association, she wrote, “nobody would have been remotely interested in my autobiography.”

See photos (guardian)

Click to see large
Photo by Jane Bown bromide print, 1969
Jane Bown photographed Billie Whatelaw

photo by Jane Bown

Jane Bown, revered Observer photographer, dies age 89

Her first commission for the Observer was a portrait of philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1949. From then, Bown photographed the great and the good, the rich and the poor, the ordinary and extraordinary with a compassionate and gentle eye.

Gypsy Child, Kent, 1961. Photograph: Jane Bown for the Observer

Samuel Beckett
Jane Bown died on Dec 21, 2014, one day before the anniversary of passing of Samuel Beckett who died on Dec 22, 1989.
News just came in Billie Whitelaw died on Dec 22, 2014.

The Coventry-born star, who was made a CBE in 1991, worked in close collaboration with playwright Samuel Beckett, who described her as a perfect actress.

(Jane Bown as a girl)
“As you can see, I was a very contented and well-behaved child.” As before, she mentioned aunts and grandparents – but there was no mention of parents. Born out of wedlock in 1925, she was passed around maternal aunts, “it was like pass the parcel”, until one day when she was 12 she realised that Aunt Daisy, her favourite, was in fact her mother. Gradually, as she revealed more, I came to understand that this early trauma in some fundamental way provided the key to Jane’s work. She tentatively agreed to do an interview despite her reluctance to talk about herself and her work, not to mention her extreme discomfort at being filmed.

Art & Design

Sinead O’Connor by Jane Bown

Bruce Chatwin

There is nothing there with Blair (Youtube)

Click to see large
Angelica Garnett
via

JMW Turner’s 1817 watercolour Landscape: Composition of Tivoli

J.M.W Turner
On Dec 19 1851 Turner passed away.

Turner died in the house of his lover Sophia Caroline Booth in Cheyne Walk in Chelsea on 19 December 1851, and is said to have uttered the last words “The sun is God”.

See a painting Ancient Italy Ovid Banished From Rome

How Turner set painting free War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet 1842

“Turner has always been a key figure for me,” he says. “When you look at a Turner painting, you can sort of drift into it – and that drifting allows the painting to hold you. It takes time – it’s not an instant, it’s not a selfie, but something that has a process within it. And that’s interesting. Turner made something so abstract that he must have trusted the people who looked at the painting to finish the story off. I think this trust is amazing.” Olaf – Elliasson

Armin Mueller Stahl is 84 years old today.
(click to see large)

German actor Armin Mueller-Stahl has had careers – and success – in three different countries under three very different systems. First in communist East Germany, where he was a heartthrob and matinee idol, then in West Germany where he worked with Rainer Werner Fassbinder in films including Lola and Verona Voss, and, finally, in Hollywood, where he has worked with directors such as David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh, Ron Howard and Barry Levinson. (via Hollywood reporter)

He appeared in such films as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Lola (1981), Veronika Voss (1982), Andrzej Wajda’s A Love in Germany (1984),
Angry Harvest (Agnieszka Holland), The Music Box, Avalon, Shine, and Eastern Promises.

Previous post -2010 (Buddenbrooks + showing off Armin’s paintings)

Eastern Promises (youtube) (love this film).

Armin directed Conversation with Beast (youtube)

<> <>
Ed Rucha

Blog Vitro Nasu is 10 years old.
See the first post – here..

Contact (2005 – fun stuff) or the Archive.

Jane Freilicher (in film star pose) Water Mill, NY, 1958
By John Jonas Gruen

R.I.P Jane Freilichner an outsider in era of Abstract Expressionism dies at 90.

The prevailing critical current, for most of her career, devalued the landscape and still-life genres. In landscape, what Mr. Ashbery called her “sweetness of tone” drew unfavorable comparisons with Mr. Porter’s moodier treatment of similar scenes.

“My work was deviant enough to explain why I was not rising through the ranks,” she told The New York Times in 1998. “But I liked not having the demands made on me a big career would have made. It allowed me a certain freedom to fool around.”

art news obit In 1958, the poet James Schuyler termed her “a poet’s painter who may yet become the public’s painter”—an apt description for her entire career.

Jane with Ruth Kligman and DeKooning.

Frank O’Hara

Ashbery and O’Hara regularly sought her advice for poems in process. Urbane, affectionate, and gossipy, the letters put the artist’s legendary wit on display.
O’Hara wrote his celebrated series of “Jane poems,” weaving her name into the titles.(via)

Flying Point Road -1959

See more paintings by Jane here.

See Jane with Hartigan and Larry Rivers

John Ashbery

The poet John Ashbery, with whom she shared a six-decade friendship, wrote, “Her pictures always have an air of just coming into being, of tentativeness that is the lifeblood of art.” The two met when Ashbery, fresh out of college, came to stay at the poet Kenneth Koch’s apartment at East 16th Street and Third Avenue, and Freilicher, who lived one floor above, provided the key to let him in. –

Kenneth Koch

Jane and her friends

The depth of Koch’s friendship with Freilicher is equally evident. There’s a typed manuscript page for his script for The Automotive Story, a 1954 short film directed by Rudy Buckhardt featuring Jane Frelicher; likewise the painter’s portraits of Koch are reproduced, as is Freilicher’s painting The Car, alongside the painter and poet’s jokey collaborative text “A Car” (“Dashboard: I am my setting sun, a dashboard. / Clutch: I clutch. We like each other.”).

<>
Klaus Kinski in Fruits of Passion directed by Terayama Shuji

Pencil Dracula Shuji Terayama (wiki)
See more from previous post
Pencil Dracula – Terayama Shuji

Arielle Dombasle – (married to Henri Bernard Levy) and Klaus Kinski in Fruits of Passion.

Graphics by Shuji Terayama

<> <> Labyrinth Tale (See an amazing film)

<> <>

Happy birthday Tom Waits.

See and hear Gun street girl (youtube)

Kronos

Tom Waits Kronos String Quartet Bridge School Cold Ground

Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.
Tom Waits

More “Wit and Wisdom” from his homepage.

1) I knelt at the altar of Ray Charles for years. I worked at a restaurant, and that’s all there was on the jukebox.
2) The blues is like a planet. It’s an enormous topic. You can’t ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It’s a tree that everyone is swinging from. Without it, I don’t know where I would be. It’s indelible and indispensable.
3) I love Burroughs (William S. Burroughs). He’s like a metal desk. He’s like a still, and everything that comes out of him is already whiskey.
4) He is one of the standards by which I measure all singers. (On Harry Belafonte) (via IMDB)

Gordon Parks
Photo by Gordon Parks (Harlem, 1963)

Who are police killing?

The racial group most likely to be killed by law enforcement is Native Americans, followed by African Americans, Latinos, Whites, and Asian Americans.

Dec 1 – On World’s Aid Day.
We remember poets, filmmakers, actors, authors, artists, photographers, sculptors, philosophers, cinematographers, composer singers, figure skaters who died of Aids .

Aids Memorial (Fotos of Eleven Good Men) Klaus Nomi & and others.

Aids Memorial part II

Susan Sontag and Nestor Almendros

Susan Sontag, the American critic and a former supporter of the Castro regime, describes the Castro campaign against homosexuals as ”a heritage, in a way a ‘Puritan’ one, that is deeply embedded in the morals of the Left.” She continues: ”The discovery that homosexuals were being persecuted in Cuba shows, I think, how much the Left needs to evolve.”

(Susan Sontag’s son David Rief translated Francois Truffaut’ forward to A Man with A Camera titled “The Lights of Nestor Almendros”.)

Nestor Almendros – A Man with a Camera…(You can see his documentary from here.)

Tony Perkins relaxing on the Psycho set.

Paul Monette
(Photo by Robert Giard)
was an American author, poet, and activist best known for his essays about gay relationships.
Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir. 1988

Burce Chatwin and Werner Herzog – The Anatomy of Restlessness.