Vitro Nasu

Darjeeling India – photo by Marc Riboud

Marc Riboud
India – 1956
Marc Riboud (NYtimes obit)
Born: June 24, 1923, Saint-Genis-Laval, France
Died: August 30, 2016

Prague Nude
See Nude in the mirror, Prague, 1982 and other photos here Slideshow czechoslovakia

From left to right: Panchen Lama, Dalaï Lama, Zhou Enlai, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. India, 1956
(via Politicians from Marc Riboud homepage)

China II slideshow

Marguerite Yourcenar

Photo of Marguerite Yourcenar by Marc Riboud – (she was Madame Bibliotheque – see her book on Mishima.)

Lens culture: Educating the Eye: Looking Back With Marc Riboud
In conversation with Marc Riboud

Sad news – Gene Wilder passed away.

Prison scene from Stir Crazy (youtube)

Interview – Gene Wilder getting personal (youtube)

Cary Grant stopping Gene Wilder to talk about Silver Streak – (via Sheila’s Variation)

Oh, Mr. Wilder! … Mr. Wilder!” I turned and saw Cary Grant stepping out of the taxi. My heart started pounding a little faster, but I didn’t throw up this time, as I did when I met Simone Signoret.
Cary took his daughter to see Silver Streak.. and he saw the film again.
Tell me something, will you?”
“Of course.”
“Was your film in any way inspired by North by Northwest?”
“Absolutely! Collin Higgins, who wrote the film, loved North by Northwest. It was one of his favorites. I think he was trying to do his version of it.”
“I thought so,” Mr. Grant said. “It never fails! You take an ordinary chap like you or me … (An ordinary chap like you or me? Didn’t he ever see a Cary Grant movie?) … put him in trouble way over his head, and then watch him try to squirm out of it. Never fails!”

Aug 29 – birthday of Charlie Parker and Dinah Washington
Photo by Herman Leonard
1949 for charlie 1955 for Dinah

Michel Butor

Michel Butor dies aged 89 (14 September 1926 – 24 August 2016)

Queen of Knits dies, she was 86.

Steven Greenberg and Sonia Rykiel – photo by Andy Warhol

Happy birthday Fatih Akin –

“The funnier it is in the beginning of a story, the more dramatic it can become. Because when an audience is laughing, that’s opening their souls somehow, and when you have an audience with an open soul, it’s much better to hit them with a knife.” MUBI/Fatih Akin

Tahar Rahim the actor here watching Charlie Chaplin film “The Kid” for the first time – a scene from “In the Cut”

In the Cut – (NYtimes)

The film stars the French-Algerian actor Tahar Rahim (“A Prophet”) as an Armenian blacksmith who travels around the world — from Aleppo to Havana to North Dakota — in search of his two daughters, with whom he lost touch after the outbreak of systematic violence that would eventually claim the lives of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians.

Fatih Akin

Fatih Akin talks about Soul Kitchen

Fatih Akin on filmmaking –

Commencing with his own personal inspirations, he referred to Bruce Lee as a key formative influence, although he admitted that he hadn’t yet made a film in direct tribute to Lee.
For his first major international breakthrough, “Head On” – that won the Berlinale Golden Bear in 2004 – he says that he was inspired by Soderbergh’s “Traffic,” especially in terms of the freedom of camera work, and by Lars von Trier’s “Breaking the Waves.”

Another key influence for “Head On” was Patrice Chereau’s “Intimacy.” Akin wanted to explore the boundaries of showing sex -scenes in the context of a hard-hitting drama and wanted a Turkish female lead, but this proved to be difficult because of the nude scenes. He ultimately cast former adult film actress Sibel Kekilli.
“I have to fall in love with my actors,” he said. “Filmmaking is a war, a holy war. It’s my own private jihad. When you’re in a war, you’re in the trenches. You create a brotherhood and you depend on each other for your lives.”

Head On – Strategies of Representation in Fatih Akin’s Head on

Roger Ebert – review of Edge of Heaven here .

Happy birthday A.S. Byatt

Mark Rylance and Kristin Scott Thomas in Angels and Insects

See a trailer here (youtube)

THe Children’s Books (youtube)

Paris review – interview

A.S. Byatt’s essay on Sigmar Polke

Sigmar Polke
Anyone Can Have Out-of-Body Experiences at Will 2002
Mixed media on fabric, 302 X 403 cm
Courtesy Michael Werner, New York and Cologne © Sigmar Polke

Sausages and potatoes, fairytale images and the dots of newspaper photographs – Sigmar Polke explores modern reality through an extraordinary range of imagery. The novelist A.S. Byatt sings his praises

Tokyo Olympiad

“None of this, however, was what the Olympic Organizing Board wanted,” continues Richie. “Not only had Ichikawa refused to monumentalize the games, he had humanized them. In the uncut version (never publicly screened), the camera turns time and again from the major events to capture details: the spectators; athletes at rest; those who came in, not first, but third – or last. Japanese victories are not favored. At the end, the celebrations over, the stadium is empty. A man with a ladder crosses the field, from far away comes the sound of children at play. The games were, after all, only games. They are over and life goes on. Much of this footage has never been publicly screened, and among examples of film vandalism, the case of Tokyo Olympiad must rank as especially regrettable.”

I remember Ernest Hemingway telling me once that the unnoticed things in the hands of a good writer had an effect, and a powerful one, of making readers conscious of what they had been aware of only subconsciously. A parallel adage suggests that a great photographer can take a picture of a familiar street and tell you something about it you never knew before. After watching the 1964 Tokyo Olympiad, one can surely say that Ichikawa is of that tradition. (Geoorge Plimpton)

Tokyot Olympiad Criterion

See the Marathon clip..

(Via)

Mary Reynolds and Marcel Duchamp
photo by Man Ray.

Jean Cocteau by Man Ray

See Jean Cocteau by Irving Penn and others by Penn.

Photo by Irving Penn -Two Guedras, Morocco, 1971

Chris Marker and Alain Resnais
(Click to see previous posts on Marker and Resnais)

11 Things I Learned from the Hieronymus Bosch – by David Byrne

5. He was among the first to paint what he imagined
Bosch was considered among the first to paint things that were wholly out of his imagination. Previously there were standard demons as described in the Bible and elsewhere, but his figures went beyond that. His landscapes were fictional, too—a conflation of traditional Dutch elements and imagined versions of somewhat spectacular Middle Eastern holy lands.

7. Humanity is, for the most part, wretched

Hieronymus Bosch painted sheet music on man’s butt and now you can hear it.

Hieronymous Bosch
Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights

Previous post – Porcille and Earthly Delight

Hieronymus Bosch: The Wayfarer, circa 1500–1510

The Mystery of Hieronymus Bosch by Ingrid D. Rowland

The Cop and Peter Cook the Comic Genius

Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing archive here.

Herman
and the Cat.. another photo from writing & the feline muse.

Herman Hesse – The Glass Bead Game

Yuichi Hibi – Neco

Kay Ryan
A CAT/A FUTURE

A cat can draw
the blinds
behind her eyes
whenever she
decides. Nothing
alters in the stare
itself but she’s
not there. Likewise
a future can occlude:
still sitting there,
doing nothing rude.

Patricia Highsmith (archive)

via Andrew Bonheler

Hillary Clinton didn’t win the Democratic Party nomination – she simply won the game of trickery, collusion and fraudulence that modern politics in this country has devolved into. And while Sanders’ bid to clean house ultimately failed, it opened the eyes of many millions of voters to show just how corrupted that system has become.

Uncounted (Youtube) Documentary of Corrupt California Primary includes proof of fraudulent voting machine counts.
.

Joint studies from Netherlands and Stanford. Statistically impossible that Hillary won primaries.

And something else, congratulations Garry Trudeau.

Via Amy Goodman

With Frank Ohara

In a biographical note he wrote for An Anthology of New York Poets (edited by Ron Padgett and David Shapiro in 1970), Berkson paid tribute to O’Hara’s deep influence on him:

General ‘cultural’ education through friendship with Frank O’Hara: the Stravinsky-Balanchine Agon (and Edwin Denby’s essay on it), Satie (we created four-hand ‘annoyances’ at various apartments, once played for Henze in Rome), Feldman, Turandot, a certain Prokofiev toccato, Virgil Thomson (I had heard a recording of Four Saints at Harry Smith’s, Providence, 1957), movies … we read Wyatt together, recited Racine, skipped through galleries, collaborated on The Hymns of St. Bridget 1961-64, a note on Reverdy for Mercure de France 1961.

As he later told Brad Gooch, “I listened hard to what he said about poetry, about all the arts, about people, about living.”

Read For the Chinese New Year & for Bill Berkson by Frank O’Hara here.

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Hymns St Bridget (jacket)

Hymns Of St. Bridget begins simply enough in October 1960 as the first collaboration between Bill Berkson and Frank O’Hara — from there it multiplies energetically into an ongoing exchange between Berkson and O’Hara that includes the FYI poems, The Letters of Angelicus and Fidelio, and Marcia: An Unfinished Novel.

Wiki

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With Ron Padgett

via