Vitro Nasu

Maggie Cheung, Wong Kar Wai and Tony Leung are “In the Mood for Sitting Down on the Stairs.
Chinese cinema album

Pierre Clementi (28 September 1942 – 27 December 1999)
Archive here.

Beloved the one who sits down
(Cesar Vallejo)

Beloved be the unknown man and his wife.
My fellow man with sleeves, neck and eyes!
Beloved be the one who sleeps on his back.
The one who wears a torn shoe in the rain.
Beloved be the bald man without hat.
The one who catches a finger in the door.
Beloved be the one who sweats out of pain or out of shame.
The one who pays with what he does not have…
Beloved be the ones who sit down.
Beloved be the one who works by the day, by the month, by the hour.
Beloved be the one who sweats out of pain or out of shame.
The person who goes, at the order of his hands, to the movies.
The one who pays with what he does not have.
The one who sleeps on his back.
The one who no longer remembers his childhood.
Beloved be the one who sits down.
Beloved be the just man without thorns.
The bald man without hat.
The thief without roses.
The one who wears a watch and has seen God.
The one who has honor and does not die!

(Seeing the photo of Hong Kong movie stars sitting on the stairs, the reader offered me this poem.)

via

Tim Rollins

Artist Tim Rollins Has Died at 62
Through his more than three decades working with the collective KOS (Kids of Survival), Rollins developed a unique model for art as collaboration, activism, and pedagogy.

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Tim Rollins and K.O.S.
The Bricks, 1982/83

Kids of Survival

“What we’re doing changes people’s conception about who can make art, how art is made, who can learn and what’s possible, because a lot of these kids had been written off by the school system. This is our revenge.” – Tim Rollins

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Photo taken from Grand Canyon.

Yosemite

Hermit’s Rest
South Rim Grand Canyon

John Muir passed away on 24 December 1914
He was a Scottish-born American naturalist, author, and early advocate of preservation of United States wilderness.
“John Muir convinced Teddy Roosevelt to conserve Yosemite Park. In 1871
Also that year, one of Muir’s heroes, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, arrived in Yosemite and sought Muir out. Muir’s former
professor at the University of Wisconsin, Ezra Carr, and Carr’s wife
Jeanne encouraged Muir to publish his ideas.”

Painting from watch tower at Grand Canyon

William Gaddis and William Gass photo by Mary Gass
New Yorker – the Radical Criticism of William Gass

William Gass, who died this week, argued that the charge of a writer was not to relate a world but to create one—a world of sound, of the melody made when syllables collid

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William Gass being painted by Philip Guston before a reading in 1969. Photograph: Digital Gateway Image Collections
Guardian on Gass

Four interviews of William Gass
William Gass’ interview from Believer Magazine.
“But I do have a very conscious desire not to be academic. I’m antiacademic. I hate jargon. I hate that sort of pretension. I am a person who [commits] breaches of decorum—not in private life, but in my work. They are part of my mode of operation. That kind of playfulness is part of my nature in general. The paradox that, in a way, to take something very seriously, you can’t always be serious about it..” (via 3quarksdaily).
On Teaching and writing, interviewed by Jan Garden Castro.
“Gass: I’m interested in making a self-contained system of concepts, ideas that will then define a kind of consciousness. It’s a way of inventing a consciousness by supplying someone with the structure and content of an experience. So I make that up and create that consciousness. It’s not a consciousness of the world; it’s a consciousness of the work.”
On Wittgenstein,
“The intellectual integrity he displayed was awesome, absolutely. I was watching not just a really great mind in operation but also an absolutely honest and pure intellect. I don’t think he was an honest and pure person, but he had that intellect, and you saw it. It was like seeing a great artist in operation—absolute scruple. No second-rate stuff would be permitted. That was really impressive. Again, it was an exemplification. Socrates embodies that way; I’m sure Spinoza must have. And Wittgenstein was the complete embodiment of that quest in himself.”

From Gadfly an interview on William Gass in 1998 – “The Tunnel may well be the greatest prose performance since Nabokov’s Pale Fire, but only the most stalwart readers will be able to last the full trip through Kohler’s anti‑Semitic, sexually-depraved and bathroom‑humor obsessed world. ”

“For instance, I can show in what way a sentence by Henry James “is” a spiral staircase. It has the same thought. And my mind works that way. (From Center for book culture – W.G interviewed by Arthur M. Saltzman)

William H. Gass, Allan Ginsberg, and Arthur Miller outside the apartment house of Fyodor Dostoevsky in St. Petersburg, Russia, 1985

William H Gass (The Soul inside the sentence)

Item (“The Surface of the City” Slide Photographs)

Gass as Photographer

Navy

Rilke and Paul Valéry

Paul Valery’s influence on William Gass

In William H. Gass’s “Art of Fiction” interview, in 1976, he declared two writers to be his guiding lights—the “two horses” he was now “try[ing] to manage”: Ranier Maria Rilke and Paul Valéry. He added, “Intellectually, Valéry is still the person I admire most among artists I admire most; but when it comes to the fashioning of my own work now, I am aiming at a Rilkean kind of celebrational object, thing, Dinge”

Happy birthday Ed Ruscha (Scroll down – Happy anniversary to Vitro-Nasu. Ed Ruscha “Sin” was the first post published on Vitro-Nasu on his birthday, Dec 16, in 2004.)

Born: December 16, 1937 – Omaha Nebraska

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Red Rooster 1996 by Edward Ruscha

The Year of Rooster is ending soon to make room for the Year of Dog.

Dog by Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha
Psycho Spaghetti Western #14, 2013–14
Acrylic on canvas

Lockeed Air Terminal by Ed Ruscha

Garage Sales

Happy birthday Liv Ullman

Born: December 16, 1938 Tokyo Japan

Langston
Photo by Gordon Parks

Daybreak in Alabama

Daybreak In Alabama – Poem by Langston Hughes

When I get to be a composer
I’m gonna write me some music about
Daybreak in Alabama
And I’m gonna put the purtiest songs in it
Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist
And falling out of heaven like soft dew.
I’m gonna put some tall tall trees in it
And the scent of pine needles
And the smell of red clay after rain
And long red necks
And poppy colored faces
And big brown arms
And the field daisy eyes
Of black and white black white black people
And I’m gonna put white hands
And black hands and brown and yellow hands
And red clay earth hands in it
Touching everybody with kind fingers
And touching each other natural as dew
In that dawn of music when I
Get to be a composer
And write about daybreak
In Alabama.
Langston Hughes

Jukebox Love song (previous post)

Takuma Nakahira – Okinawa (Japan Times)

This solitary figure was the late Takuma Nakahira, then at the height of his influence as both a photographer and radical cultural critic, and now revered together with Daido Moriyama as an originator of the are-bure-boke (rough, blurry, out-of-focus) style of black-and-white photography associated with the turbulent urbanization and political activism of late 1960s Japan.

For a Language to come (MoMa – Takuma’s photos for the 1971 Paris Biennial)

Takuma Nakahiro (Pinterest)

Aperture

Daido Moriyama

Artforum

Nakahira started out as an editor for a left-wing journal in the mid-’60s, but left this post to help organize a major historical survey of Japanese photography at the invitation of photographer Shōmei Tōmatsu. As he transitioned into being a full-time photographer in the late ’60s, often collaborating with Daidō Moriyama and the poet-playwright Shuji Terayama, Nakahira sought to test photography’s capacity to engage with and incite critical thought.

Shuji Terayama (born on Dec 10) – he was Pencil Dracula

Klaus Kinski was directed by Terayama see more photos and video here)

Master Photographer Shomei Tomatsu

Heat and Dust (Merchant-Ivory production)

BBC

Shashi Kapoor: Remembering Bollywood’s crossover star

Sammie and Rosie Get Laid Shashi Kapoor with Clarie Bloom (script by Hanif Kureishi)

Rare and Unseen photos from the set of Shakespeare Wallah

Wiki – Shashi Kapoor

Ulli Lommel (wiki)

(21 December 1944 — 1 December 2017) was a German actor and director, noted for his many collaborations with Rainer Werner Fassbinder and his association with the New German Cinema movement.[1]

Ulli Lommel (homepage)

Ten years before I met Warhol I had another encounter that would prepare me for Andy: German genius Werner Rainer Fassbinder. In 1967 I was a teenage movie star in Germany, on the cover of teen magazines and receiving tons of fan mail each day.

When I first met Fassbinder he said that if I played the lead in his debut film he would get money from an investor and to finance it. I accepted and starred in “Love is Colder than Death” (1968).

I invented a love story at dinner with Warhol, Truman Capote and Jackie Kennedy called “Blank Generation”.
Three months later we were shooting with French super star Carole bouquet and punk rocker Richard Hell. Andy himself played and helped producing. I never returned to Europe and after making the second movie with Warhol in 1978 entitled “Cocaine Cowboys” (starring Jack Palance and Andy Warhol), and after working with Andy in the Factory in Manhattan for three years, creating art, Polaroids, music and screen tests, I was on my way to Hollywood and in August of 1980 my horror cult film “Boogeyman” stormed the charts and was soon the No.1 movie in America.

Blank Generation (1980) Directed by Ulli Lommel

Ron Norman on Ulli Lommel (via FB.)

Straight more or less from UCLA Film School, I worked closely (but not too close) with Ulli on my first 5 or 6 Hollywood-adjacent feature films, as (often co-) writer, editor, producer, production manager, assistant director, production designer, publicist, casting director, location manager, special effects, driver, caterer, poster designer, best/worst boy, worst actor, therapist, diplomat, politician, banker, crook, lackey, muse….I was mesmerized, like in Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (or Cabinet of Donald Trump). I learned everything I know about film from Ulli, Akira, Ingmar, Federico, Jean-Luc, François, and Satyajit. Ulli was no Fassbinder, or Michael Bay. His infinite list of films, visible and invisible, would fill a book, if anyone wanted to write one…or a great far-underground movie – an absurdist tragicomedy no-budget C-horror flick, in the alternate reality of Ed Wood, but without his passion and charm, starring Nick Cage at his most undirected….I liked Ulli. Also Idi and Adolphus, in a Marquisian way.