Vitro Nasu

Oliver Sacks, doctor of ‘Awakenings’ and poet laureate of medicine, dies at 82

New Yorker

As both a physician and as a writer, Sacks’s two great themes were identity and adaptation.
Oliver Sacks, the Doctor
By Jerome Groopman

Temple Grandin’s moving tribute to Oliver Sacks here. (How Oliver changed her life from Wired)

I’m a visual thinker, and Oliver’s definitely not a visual thinker; he’s a word thinker. But when it came to describing my mind, that’s where he got me right. He was extremely good at getting inside the heads of people who had these different types of neurological disorders.

Oliver Sacks blog

See my Oliver Sack’s Archive.
The Music Never Stopped

Oliver Sack – On the move

“Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.” Oliver Sacks

Nadja Tesich, the star of Eric Rohmer’s 1964 short film Nadja à Paris, originally wrote this essay in the 1990s, but never published it. In the last three months before she died in February 2014, I helped Nadja revise the piece, recording her thoughts and our discussions. —Lucy McKeon

Nadjia in Paris

I was madly in love with Paris and he had received a small sum from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to make a film about foreign students in Paris. That’s it. Of course we liked talking with each other from the beginning, in spite of our differences—age, background, etc. He said we were very much alike, strange since he struck me as a bourgeois of sorts, while I considered myself doomed and displaced. In spite of his obvious intelligence, Eric didn’t have coherent political views. He never used words like exploitation or capitalism. I said yes to him because I was penniless and he offered me money—the same sum (either $200 or $400, I can’t remember) to all involved: cinematographer Néstor Almendros, the script girl and me. It meant I could pay for my dorm, eat for a few months, buy a pair of shoes. Greece will always be there, I decided.

(see part 2 from Nadia in Paris)

Nadjia and Eric Rohmer

I don’t know if Néstor was poorer than me or not. Probably the same. After Nadja à Paris his luck changed and he would go on to shoot many of Rohmer’s films, and eventually got an Oscar for Days of Heaven. Still, at that time, he was just a refugee Cuban who didn’t look Cuban but Spanish—tall, reserved, with a shyness that bordered on fear. He longed for a seersucker jacket, washable and weightless, I remember. I sent him one from my first salary. I knew nothing about him except that he had shot a documentary film in Cuba, his country that he hated. Néstor was gay, but this was not a problem for anyone except him. We accepted it, then forgot it, just like you accept that some prefer mountains to the sea.

(Eric Rohmer with Nestor Almendros)

R.I.P Eric Rohmer (previous post with videos and links)

Nestor Almendros (A Man with a Camera – see previous post)

Eric Rohmer’s elusive life revealed in a new biography

Happy birthday Li-Young Lee

He was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents.
Lee’s father, who was a personal physician to Mao Zedong while in China, relocated his family to Indonesia, where he helped found Gamaliel University. His father was exiled and spent 19 months in an Indonesian prison camp in Macau. In 1959 the Lee family fled the country to escape anti-Chinese sentiment and after a five-year trek through Hong Kong and Japan, they settled in the United States in 1964.

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Hikari Oe (Kenzaburo Oe’s composer son who was born with autism)

A Story – Poem by Li-Young Lee

Sad is the man who is asked for a story
and can’t come up with one.

His five-year-old son waits in his lap.
Not the same story, Baba. A new one.
The man rubs his chin, scratches his ear.

In a room full of books in a world
of stories, he can recall
not one, and soon, he thinks, the boy
will give up on his father.

Already the man lives far ahead, he sees
the day this boy will go. Don’t go!
Hear the alligator story! The angel story once more!
You love the spider story. You laugh at the spider.
Let me tell it!

But the boy is packing his shirts,
he is looking for his keys. Are you a god,
the man screams, that I sit mute before you?
Am I a god that I should never disappoint?

But the boy is here. Please, Baba, a story?
It is an emotional rather than logical equation,
an earthly rather than heavenly one,
which posits that a boy’s supplications
and a father’s love add up to silence.
Li-Young Lee

Julia Bond wiki

Horace Julian Bond (January 14, 1940 – August 15, 2015), known as Julian Bond, was an American social activist and leader in the Civil Rights Movement, politician, professor, and writer. While a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, during the early 1960s, he helped to establish the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Bond was elected to four terms in the Georgia House of Representatives and later to six terms in the Georgia Senate, having served a combined twenty years in both legislative chambers. From 1998 to 2010, he was chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center

Notes from a Conversation with Julian Bond

Julian Bond, one of the greatest movers and shakers of the modern Civil Rights movement passed away on Saturday. I have neither the words nor the ability to write something that could portray how much he meant to movement. This past April, I had a once in a lifetime opportunity to sit down with and speak to him. While he spoke briefly about his experience with SNCC and the NAACP, he was much more interested in speaking about modern-day movements and the current state of social justice work. Here are some notes and reflections from our conversation:

Buzzfeed obit

Venice: Hans Haacke at the Central Pavilion

Happy birthday Hans Haacke!

The art of good business – Hans Haacke (Goes after Koch)

Hans Haacke on Gift Horse, Gulf-Labor and Artist Resale Royalties

Gift Horse

Tied to its front leg is an electronic ribbon which displays live data from the London Stock Exchange, completing the link between power, money and history. The piece attempts to make a number of hidden substructures visible – tied up with a bow as a gift to all.(via)

Trickle Up

Previous post
Tricle – Up Hans Haacke

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Hans Haacke on fighting the establishment (SFMOMA)

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See the trailer here (youtube)

Jauja: Viggo Mortensen Gets Lost in Eerie Patagonia

I fell in love with the film as I let it carry me away into it’s dreamscapes of content desolation and bathed in it’s glorious moon beams of faintest night light. I was engaged and immersed throughout the entire film and the last 30 minutes were truly stunning.

Brent Wills Bechtel

Olivier Assayas Talks the Complexities of ‘Clouds of Sils Maria’ and the Genius of Kristen Stewart

Clouds of Sils Maria

Two other things lure people, like pilgrims, to Sils Maria. One, as the title suggests, is clouds, and the twist of nature that sends them funnelling between peaks into a thin, transcendent stream: the Maloja Snake of the play. (Assayas has unearthed lovely footage of the phenomenon, from 1924.) The second attraction is the house, now a museum and study center, where Nietzsche spent many fruitful summers: “Here one can live well, in this strong, bright atmosphere, here where nature is amazingly mild and solemn and mysterious all at once,” he wrote. That is precisely the climate that Assayas wants to summon for the movie, and we feel it acutely as Maria and Valentine embark on their regular treks. Here is the true high life—“6,000 feet beyond people and time,” as Nietzsche said, and a rebuff to the ersatz variety in which Maria and her kind, not just in the movie business, and not just in Europe, are consumed.

See his house

The ‘Nietzsche Haus’ At Sils-Maria, Switzerland

Two films about anxious family life took place at ski resorts .

Force Majeure directed by Ruben Östlund

Sister by – Ursla Meier

(via)

Andy Warhol drawing
(One more Bali Drawing )

Found out that Warhol was in Bali from a page in his delightful book Angels, Angels, Angels.

The most memorable thing for me during an around-the-world trip that I took once was walking along a trail in Bali and finding a bunch of people having a big happy party, and it turned out their friend had died and they were so thrilled for him that he was now having his next life.

Some links ..

See the animation here..
Silent Stars by Andy Warhol – 1999 – click to animate..
or
Andy Warhol glancing sideway.

A very sad news of Lori’s passing came this morning from Lawrence Swan on FB.

Lori’s dazzling humilty

Love note to Lori on facebook
October 5, 1958 – August 1, 2015

On ne guérit d’une souffrance qu’à condition de l’éprouver pleinement.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full. Marcel Proust

(Lori was reading Proust for her essay.)

Lori and Lars

(for a window display at a local bookstore on Valentine’s Day. via FB)

(It’s the anniversary of my husband and mine’s engagement on Singer Island Fla. so I had to post it. 2010 via FB)

From Lawrence Swan on Lori’s last days.

Lawrence Swan new cLean warS
Saturday, September 19, 2015
Lars’ hospice journal in Lori’s last days

I want to write my log, my blog, in bed with Lori. I want to write to Lori, with her in bed next to me, and write about our thoughts on transcendental experiences.