Vitro Nasu

Milan Kundera was born on April 1. (His first novel was called The Joke.)

Life is Elsewhere Photo collage by Fung Lin Hall.
The above image is a photo collage of an outdoor art installation from a street near Malostranska station in Prague. The statue of Sigmund Freud hanging by one hand by David Cerny – Czech Sculptor. *
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Philip Kaufman saw Miss Julie on stage and cast Lena Olin in The Unbearable Lightness of Being for his adaptation of Milan Kundera’s most popular novel.
Daniel Day Lewis and Lena Olin

Easter Sunday – 2018

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The Rabbit knows how to relax.

Pool Bunny Fung Lin Hall (See Hotel lobbies in New Mexico and William James)

Arizona Tales

The Good, The Bad and The Rabbit

Rabbit by Henri Rousseau, Durer and others here.

Via Wiki Feet (Les Noces rouges Year -Claude Chabrol)
Michel Piccoli and Audran directed by Buniel
NYtimes obit

Guardian Obit

Of all the director-and-star couples in the history of cinema, there was none more prolific than Claude Chabrol and Stéphane Audran, who made 23 films together.

Noiret and Audran from Coup de Torchon directed by Bertrand Tavernier.

Washington Post obit

Ms. Audran and Chabrol divorced in 1980 — he later said that he “found myself becoming more interested in her as an actress than a wife” — and she remained an important supporting player in several of his films, notably as an alcoholic in “Betty” (1992).

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Alexandre Stewart, Audran, Christa and Samantha Fuller.
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Bible 1995 – Dorothy Cross

‘Frenchy’ caretaker of the old lumber camp, Gemmel, Minnesota Lee, Russell/Library Congress
Lee Russell

History of Hole Punched photos –

During the Great Depression, the US government launched a project to portray the country’s reality.

See Hole Punched collages and monoprints by Fung Lin Hall here.

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Over a year of writing, cutting and proto-typing later, comes Tree of Codes, a haunting new story by Jonathan Safran Foer cut from Bruno Schulz’s words.
The book is as much a sculptural object as it is a work of masterful storytelling: here is an “enormous last day of life” that looks like it feels.

Yayoi
Yayoi Kusama with one of her Infinity Net paintings in New York, c. 1961 (repost)

(via)
George Clooney was customized by Yayoi Kusama

Photographed by Emma Summerton, Clooney is decked out in a Giorgio Armani suit, shirt, bow tie, and shoes that are all customized by the artist Yayoi Kusama. According to the accompanying W article, the Japanese artist admitted to not being familiar with who the Hollywood star was.. (2013 – old news)

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Kusama and Joseph Cornell New York 1971

In 1972, American assemblage and collage artist Joseph Cornell died. Twenty-six years her senior, Cornell had been Kusama’s closest friend. New York was by this time home to a community of Japanese artists, but Kusama had avoided the associations many of her compatriots formed with groups such as the anti-art happening bunch in the neo-Dada group Fluxus.
“I had gone to New York to be independent,” she says, “Not to join a group.”
Cornell’s death left Kusama dangerously isolated, and her mental condition began to deteriorate. She experienced frequent hallucinations and bouts of severe depression and developed heart problems. Heeding her parents entreatments, Kusama returned to Japan. Her father died two years later, and despite out-patient psychiatric treatment, Kusama’s anxiety neurosis was now unmanageable. In 1977 she entered the psychiatric institution.
Kusama has lived in the same hospital for over 20 years. There is no furniture, save a bed. Her 12 square-meter room has a big, French-style bay window that looks out onto a small garden. Kusama sometimes watches people playing tennis in a court that lies behind the garden.
Every morning after breakfast, Kusama walks five minutes up Gaien Higashi street to her studio to paint. She walks back to the room for lunch, then returns to her studio and works through the afternoon. Kusama takes her dinner at the hospital before retiring each evening.
“It’s very comfortable, very private” says Kusama, “And very simple, I like it.”

Yayoi Kusama loves pumpkins and polka dots

Happy birthday S. Zizek March 21 1949

See young Zizek here.
Lacanian Sympton

Scroll down – Sophie Fiennes (sister of Ralph Fiennes directed Zizek.)

The Duty of Philosophy? Zizek has the answer.

Peter Brook is 93 –

Peter Brook’s Filmography

1953, The Beggar’s Opera
1960, Moderato Cantabile (UK title Seven Days… Seven Nights)
1963, Lord of the Flies
1967, Ride of the Valkyrie
1967, Marat/Sade
1968, Tell Me Lies
1971, King Lear
1979, Meetings with Remarkable Men
1979, Mesure pour mesure
1982, La Cerisaie
1983, La Tragédie de Carmen
1989, The Mahabharata
2002, The Tragedy of Hamlet (TV)

L’avventura
Moderate Cantabile
Both film nominated at Cannes 60.

Jeanne Moreau and Jean Paul Belmondo in Moderate Cantabile directed by Peter Brook, an adaptation of a story by Marguerite Duras.

See “on the bench” from Moderate Cantabile (youtube)

Dorothy Cross

Kerlin Gallery is showing Dorothy Cross

Dorothy Cross (wiki)

Bible 1995 via

Dorothy Cross studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, among others, from 1980 to 1982, before eventually choosing to return to Ireland, in Dublin then Connemara. Since the mid-80s her work has included sculpture, photography, video, and installations. She reappropriates the locations and materials she uses to make new metaphorical associations that sound out today’s sexual and religious behaviours, habits and identity constructions. She utilises the animal realm (sharks, jellyfish, cows, crabs, birds, snakes) to question male and female stereotypes and the notions of power, dependence, and fertility. The Udder series (a phonetic play on the word other), created between 1990 and 1994, most notably includes the pieces Virgin Shroud (1993), inspired by her mother’s wedding dress, and Saddle (1993). Her experience working at an electric plant for a few years resulted in a series of object/environments, which she explored through photography: the “residues”, which include Control Room, Dresser, and Parthenon, were presented at the Powerhouse exhibition in 1991. She also represented Ireland at the 1993 Venice Biennale.

Happy St Patrick’s day!

Seamus Heaney ( Putting Feelings into Words)

Photo of Samuel Beckett by Steve Schapiro

Beckett was asked by a reporter how a small country like Ireland could have produced so many great writers since the last half of the nineteenth century.

“It’s the priests and the British, Beckett replied tersely. “They have buggered us into existence. After all, when you are in the last bloody ditch, there is nothing left but to sing.” (Page 282, A biography of Samuel Beckett by Deirdre Bair.)

Samuel Beckett Archive

Digital image by Fung Lin Hall
(Kitch invades the sacred land or Our Lady of the Desert)

Happy St Patick’s Day (See Frank McCourt and other Irish luminaries)

High Hopes in Ireland (see Irish art here)

The wind that shakes the Barley

See the full film, here.

Criterion – A Brief History of Time – Macrobiography

Erroll Morris
and Stephen Hawking

Eroll Morris – Ecstatic Absurdity, It’s Confrontation with Meaninglessness (previous post)

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NYtimes obit

See Audrey and Cary Grant in Charade here.

Marcella Hansch (Meet Marcella Hansch, on a quest to save world’s oceans)

But during a 2013 dive in Cape Verde, it wasn’t a fish that alarmed her–but a plastic bag. This led Hansch (who was studying architecture in Aachen, Germany) to come up with an idea for her university thesis project–a concept that could ultimately solve what many regard as one of our planet’s biggest environmental problems: plastic pollution.

Pacific Garbage Screening (An Innovative Approach to Cleaning Up Our Oceans)

Meet the team here.

Lego – First Sustainable Lego Pieces to go on Sale.

Gordon and Ingrid

“Ingrid and Roberto felt like the whole world was against them,” Parks explains, “but Ingrid was sane enough to realize that they had to have a professional down there to take photos of them making the picture. She had seen a story of mine in LIFE, so she asked me to come to the island. Perhaps she thought I would do the story with more discretion.” (via)

The most remarkable photographs that Parks made on Stromboli are two slightly different portraits of Bergman in a distant part of the island. As he was photographing her, he writes in A Hungry Heart, the last of his memoirs, “three women stopped on the hill above us. Clad in black, and resembling ominous birds, they stared at her with curiosity. Aware of their presence, Ingrid waited for them to leave. I allowed my camera to record this sardonic moment.”

See photos of Ingrid Bergman and Rossellini here.

“Gordon Roger Alexander Buchannan Parks (November 30, 1912 – March 7, 2006) was a groundbreaking African American photographer, musician, poet, novelist, journalist, activist, and film director. He is best remembered for his photo essays for Life magazine, and as the director of the film, Shaft.”

See Langston Hughes here.

Gordon Parks
Photo by Gordon Parks (Harlem, 1963)

Richard Wright

Richard Wright (Check his Haikus- previous post)

Gordon Parks photographed Alain Locke.
Alain Locke & Harlem Renaissance

Adam Rippon and Mirai Nagasu at the Oscar.

Olympian Adam Rippon’s Oscar Tux And Harness Are Gold Medal-Worthy
This. Is. Everything.

Nancy Grossman .

Rippon and Reese were guests at the Colbert Show – (March 8, 2018)