Vitro Nasu

Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch
Happy New Year of the Pig (or Inoshishi in Japanese, meaning wild boar)

Chinese New Year in 2019 starts on Tuesday, February 5th and ends on January 24th, 2020. Conforming to the chinese horoscope , the year of the Pig 2019 comes right after the Year of the Dog (2018) and before the year of the Metal Rat (2020)!

Ohara Koson (Wild Boar -Ukioe)

Inoshishi <>
(Image source)

The Happy Pig
Tomoo Gogita (Cloe Sevigny saw his exhibit in Japan)

All I Need Is Ham – (Remixed from Obama’s Inaugural poem)

Here is a trailer Pigsty by Pasolini (seemingly unpalatable and enigmatic film).

Porcile (Pigsty) by Pasolini.

A savage parody of Godard, Resnais and… Pasolini, ironically chronicling the ‘existential anguish’ of the children of the bourgeoisie, it features Léaud as a mystic youth whose being finally merges with ‘nature’: he gets eaten by the pigs he loves.

The first, “Orgia,” was originally conceived as a possible companion piece to Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert, and concerns a 15th-century cult of cannibals who must eventually reckon with Church and State. The second, “Porcile,” involves a West German industrialist and Nazi war criminal whose son (played by Truffaut and Godard regular Jean-Pierre Léaud) likes to copulate with pigs.

James with pig photo by Dennis Stock

photo via

Tributes to Michel Legrand (Variety) Pour In

Criterion – Jacques Demy and Michel Legrand – partners in song

Michel Legrand studied under Nadia Boulanger – see two videos from Go Between)

Dear Friends,
Jonas passed away quietly and peacefully early this morning. He was at home with family. He will be greatly missed but his light shines on. — with Maria Sweet-Herz. (via FB Jonas Mekas)

Jonas Mekas, hailed by many as “the godfather of American avant-garde cinema” has passed away at the age of 96. (via FB Experimental Conversation)

Left, Jonas Mekas and brother Adolfas at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, 1962. © Jonas Mekas. Right, Jonas Mekas with his Bolex in Lithuania, 1971. © Jonas Mekas
Photo via Life of a happy man

Jonas Mekas wiki

Arthur with Jonas Mekas

Jonas Mekas

Jonas Mekas, Jim Jarmusch on film, poetry and Trump

JJ: I was just looking through a small amount of different artists – film artists – that you have preserved or celebrated. This is only a small amount of people that have really moved me: Peter Hutton, Hollis Frampton, Nam June Paik, Bruce Conner, Hans Richter, Taylor Mead, Danny Lyon, Rudy Burckhardt, Shirley Clarke…
JM: And we have not only their finished films, but unfinished materials. Outtakes of Hans Richter, Maya Deren, Hollis Frampton and even Tarkovsky.
JJ: … Man Ray, Joseph Cornell, Robert Frank, Harry Smith, Jack Smith, George and Mike Kuchar, Kenneth Anger, Lizzie Borden, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Baillie, Ron Rice, Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, Maya Deren… on and on.
JM: Anthology is the bastion of poetry and cinema and we are here to stay. This is the building where the poets of cinema live. It is a metaphor, this building.

Jonas Mekas inspired Andy Warhol to be a filmmaker

Corradp Cagli, Vittorio Rieti,Tanaquil LeClercq George Balanchine -the Ballet Society; Photo by Irving Penn

Edward Gorey

What did Gorey appreciate about Balanchine’s work?

He had a real artistic genius’ ability to zero in on genius in other artists, and he appreciated Balanchine at that level. As he famously said in one interview, “What makes Balanchine so extraordinary is that when you see his dances, you feel ever after as if the steps were absolutely perfect for the music, and there can be no other choreography.” It was literally as if the music was becoming flesh before his very eyes. And it was that absolute clarity and concision and complete mastery of the medium that I think struck such a responsive chord with him. In the same way that Balanchine famously said, “Ballet is woman,” I daresay Gorey would say ballet is Balanchine.

Balanchine and Arthur Mitchell

(Balanchine with Farrell, McBride, Mimi, Paul, Verdy in promo for Jewels)
Photo by Martha Swope

Soumitra Chatterjee is 84 years old today. Happy birthday!
(photo via)

(On his mater Satyajit Ray, via Time of India)

Portrait of Francine Du Plessix Gray by Balthus and Man Ray.

(Francine with her parents) became a cover photo of her book “Them”.

Francine Du Plessix Gray passed away

Francine du Plessix Gray (1933–2019)

Francine du Plessix Gray, the French-American reporter, critic, novelist, and feminist known for her elegance and unsparingness in chronicling issues of the self and beyond, died in Manhattan on Sunday from complications of congestive heart failure. She was eighty-eight years old.

Gray’s upbringing was defined by both entitlement and loss. Born to a French father and a Russian mother in Warsaw’s French embassy in 1933, Gray emigrated from France to New York with her mother, Tatiana Yakovleva, after her father’s plane was shot down by fascists near Gibraltar in 1940. In New York, Yakovleva—once a muse for the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky—married socialite and future Condé Nast director Alexander Liberman and eventually became a prolific milliner for Saks Fifth Avenue. Gray recounted her complex childhood and family life in 2006’s Them: A Memoir of Parents, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Paris Review – Francine and sorrel soup.

Gore Vidal on “At Home With The Marquis de Sade – (A Life) by Francine Du Plessix Gray

“It was brilliant idea of Francine du Plessix Gray to re-create not so much the “Monster” who was to become, somber fate, an adjective but the actual man who spent so much of his time in prisons… thanks not only to his sexual capers but, also, to a real-life monster, his mother-in-law, who would have walked off with Les Liaisons Dangereuses had the author dared cast her.
“This is an elegant, enlightend Enlightenment study of a powerful sexual imagination trapped in the mere human body, not to mention the Bastille from which it would take a revolution to free him—and us, his unborn readers.”

Photo by Fung Lin Hall (Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art)

Photo by Fung Lin Hall

Carla
Carla Fernandez via Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art

Double Agents: Carla Fernández and Pedro Reyes
Oct 27 – Feb 3, 2019

Mexian artists are transforming gun violence into arts.

Two of Mexico’s most prominent artists, Carla Fernández and Pedro Reyes, have created a joint exhibit to promote social change in Mexico.

Nina Leene died on Jan 1, 1995. (New Yorker – the Surreal World of Nina Leen)

Nobody knows how old the Russian-born photographer Nina Leen was when she died, in 1995. Judging from her obituary, information about Leen is scarce. She lived in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland before moving to the U.S., where she became one of Life magazine’s first female photographers, in the nineteen-forties. She shot countless assignments for the magazine, including more than fifty cover stories, and produced fifteen photo books. Her most well-known subjects were animals (including her dog Lucky), American women and adolescents, and the Irascibles, a group of abstract artists, including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.

Nina Leen bio with a photo of the Irascibles here .

A squirrel wearing a baby doll’s dress.

(Jacky with baby Caroline)

Nina Leen’s portrait by Gordon Parks.