Archive for March, 2019

Adieu Agnes Varda, Innovative Filmmaker, Photographer, Wife & Mother

Friday, March 29th, 2019
  • Adieu Agnes Varda, she died at 90. (BBC obit)

    I fought for radical cinema all my life – Agnes Varda (Her last interview at Guardian)


  • (Agnes Varda and Jr while filming Faces and Places)

  • Interview: This is Part of the Work- Agnes Varda

    She studied art history at the Louvre, but at night took classes on photography.

  • Peter Bradshaw (Guardian)

    Greatest of the great’ – Agnès Varda: the eternally youthful soul of world cinema

  • Agnes Varda with blooms –


  • Criterion – Jacques Demy and Michel Legrand – partners in song
    (Repost)

    Agnes Varda archive here.

    Agnes Varda (wiki)

    Dirk Bogarde, Actor, Writer, Artist & Gardener

    Thursday, March 28th, 2019

  • (Fassbinder directed Dirk Bogarde in “Despair”, scripted by Tom Stoppard,
    based on the novel by Vladamir Nabokov)

    Dirk Bogarde (homepage)

    Dirk Bogarde. .. actor/writer.. gardener – most admirable for courage and honesty.. J. Losey said his career was revived by teaming up with Bogarde.. The Servant & The Accident (Harold Pinter script)..Dirk B won Bafta with Darling (he was superb).. Providence (Alain Resnais) He persuaded Charlotte Rampling to do the Night Porter (Liliana Cavani).. he liked danger & taboo subjects..Despair (Fassbinder).. Death in Venice (Visconti).. his last film was Daddy Nostalgia (w..Jane Birkin directed by Bertrand Tavernier..


  • ( Dirk Bogarde and Marisa Berenson- film still from Death in Venice)

    Daddy Nostalgia.1aabirkin

    (Dirk Bogarde, Tavernier and Jane Birkin in Daddy Nostalgia.)

    Bogarde had only praise for the director: ‘He knows more about the cinema than practically any director I have worked with, Visconti coming a close second.’ I have said, when asked, that Visconti is the Emperor of film, Losey is the King, Tavernier is the Genius. And, for me, so he is a genius in the minutiae of life which he gets on to a cinema screen as no one else has ever done quite so brilliantly before. Nothing very much happens in a Tavernier film. Just all of life.

  • In his second career as a best-selling writer, Dirk wrote 8 volumes of memoirs, six novels, a volume of collected journalism and writings, and a selection of the hundreds of letters he wrote, in “Ever, Dirk.” (via Dirk Bogarde FB)

  • Discreet Reformer – Victim

    Dirk seized with relish on the role of Melville Farr, the successful barrister with the beautiful wife, because Victim (1961) had something important to say about a society in which the blackmailing of homosexuals was commonplace. When the film was made, Lord Wolfenden’s Committee had reported on the merits of qualified reform, but the legislature was slow to respond.

    Six years later, the Sexual Offenses Act was passed, partially decriminalizing homosexual acts in private between consenting males aged 21 or over. In 1968 the Earl of Arran, who had introduced the legislation in the House of Lords, wrote to Dirk, acknowledging the part the latter had played in helping to change the climate for the better. The brief but gratifying letter is reproduced on these pages by kind permission of the writer’s son, the 9th Earl.

  • Scott Walker, Brel, Pola X, The Passing of 30th Century Man

    Tuesday, March 26th, 2019
  • 30th Century Man, Pola X (Previous post)

    Scott Walker 30 Century Man

  • Obit (Perfetly)

    Scott Walker dead at 76

    Guardian Obit

  • Two stars from Pola X have departed early.

    Yekaterina Golubeva (9 October 1966 – 14 August 2011)

    (29 Palms, Pola X, I Can’t Sleep – Claire Denis )


    Guillaume Depardieu(7 April 1971 – 13 October 2008)
    Previous post on Guillaume Depardieu (Tous Les Matin du Monde + Duchess of Langlois)

  • (Soundtrack from Pola X)

    Viva Rebecca Horn & Lawrence Ferlingetti -March 24 2019

    Sunday, March 24th, 2019
  • Happy birthday Rebecca Horn and Lawrence Ferlingetti
    (Underwear, Unicorn body suit – previous post)

  • Rebecca Horn, Body, Art installations

  • <> <>
    Dreaming Stones – Rebecca Horn.


  • Lawrence is 100 years old today!

    Little Boy (LA Times)

    Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s ‘Little Boy’ reveals his life before the San Francisco beat scene

    Nelson Algren – “Never a Lovely So Real”

    Wednesday, March 20th, 2019

  • Nelson with Simone de Beauvoir –Paris with Sartre, Chicago with Nelson Algren

  • Chicago Man Nelson Algren
    (click to see large)

  • Nelson Algren – (Nation)

    J. Edgar Hoover sought to destroy Nelson Algren’s career — and was largely successful.

    Into this maelstrom comes the first three-pound excavation of Algren, Colin Asher’s Never a Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren, which Norton is bringing out, with some fanfare, in April. Besides being larger in size and scope than any previous biography of this last celebrant of what once was called Proletarian Literature, Asher’s book is devotional and beautifully written, seven years in the making, its sentences capturing the very same mix of lyricism and street, hard truths and sentimentality that made Algren himself so special. It delves into Algren’s lifelong struggle to stay true to his credo, his soulful cry that the purpose of any writer is to stand up to power, to take the judge down from the bench, to give voice to the voiceless. And it delivers a wrenching portrait of a man who struggled to maintain his sanity and his spirit in a society that was well prepared to see its writers give up or sell out, but struggled to comprehend writers who persevered and paid the price as Algren did.

  • See thetrailer here on youtube

  • Studs Terkel salutes a seriously funny man
    (Visit youtube on Terkel and Nelson Algren)

  • The Passing of Poet, Tireless Traveler, W. S Merwin at 91

    Friday, March 15th, 2019
  • Merwin Conservancy.org

    Pulitzer Pris winning poet W.S. Merwin passed away at 91


  • (With his wife Paula)
    Photo via

    FOR THE ANNIVERSARY OF MY DEATH

    Every year without knowing it I have passed the day When the last fires will wave to me
    And the silence will set out
    Tireless traveler
    Like the beam of a lightless star

    Then I will no longer
    Find myself in life as in a strange garment
    Surprised at the earth
    And the love of one woman
    And the shamelessness of men

    As today writing after three days of rain
    Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
    And bowing not knowing to what

    — W.S. Merwin

  • New Yorker -The Final Prophecy of W.S Merwin

  • W.S. Merwin 1ws-merwin
    Paris Review (Obit)

    “The kind of writing that matters most to me is something you don’t learn about,” Merwin tells Edward Hirsch in his interview. “It’s constantly coming out of what I don’t know rather than what I do know. I find it as I go. In a sense, much that is learned is bound to be bad habits. You’re always beginning again.”

  • Art of Poetry (Paris Review)

  • The Ascetic Insight of W.S. Merwin (New Yorker)

  • Stephen Hawking Died on Einstein’s Birthday on March 14, 2018

    Thursday, March 14th, 2019
  • Marie Curie’s Pict0410
    Sex scandal?
    (photo by Fung Lin Hall from the supermarket rack).

  • 1aErrollHawlking
    Stephen Hawking (previous post)

  • See more March 14 birthdays here.


    (Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer – photo by Alfred Eisenstaed)


  • Einstein and Tagore

    On July 14, 1930, Albert Einstein welcomed into his home on the outskirts of Berlin the Indian philosopher, musician, and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. The two proceeded to have one of the most stimulating, intellectually riveting conversations in history.

    John Richardson – an Art Historian & Picasso Biographer died at 95

    Wednesday, March 13th, 2019

  • John Richardson’s home with a portrait of him by Andy Warhol. Photo by François Halard, courtesy of Rizzoli.
    Artnet obit

  • Richardson wiki


  • From left to right: son Paolo, Picasso, Jacqueline, daughter-in-law Christine,
    art expert John Richardson, poet Jean Cocteau and art historian Douglas Cooper
    Photo via


    Modigliani, Picasso & Andre Salmon.
    (John Richardson – A Life of Picasso Volume II 1997.)

  • Michael Andre

    I read enough John Richardson. He is as pious about Picasso as a banker is about his gold reserves.
    Poetry and painting are fundamentally difficult. Poetry is essentially without pecuniary value. Art can be more valuable than gold or platinum.

    (A day before the passing of John Richardson, there was a lively discussion on FB on Picasso)

  • Art News obit

  • RIP Carolee Scheemann (1939 – 2019)

    Wednesday, March 6th, 2019
  • Art News obit

  • Carolee
    Photo via
    Carolee Scheemann

    Carolee Schneemann, multidisciplinary artist. Transformed the definition of art, especially discourse on the body, sexuality, and gender. The history of her work is characterized by research into archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, the body of the artist in dynamic relationship with the social body.


  • Photo via

  • Carolee Schneeman on Robert Morris (See photo of their collaboration)

    OH DEAR BOB . . . your death is unacceptable. Your absence joins the current stampede of death, diminishing the continued conversations among my generation. Missing in action. I am so grateful for our wonderfully enriching history and for the configuration of friends and work that surrounds the years we shared. We were neighbors here in the Hudson Valley, and it’s wrenching to consider that we cannot anticipate more good times together.


  • Carolee Schneemann
    Terminal Velocity
    2001-2005, impressions jet d’encre 96 x 84 chacune. Collection Musée départemental d’art contemporain de Rochechouart

    Intime Images Mediatsisees pour reflechir histoire

    Conversation with Carolee Schneemann

    Artplus interview

    Hinamatsuri, Happy Girls Day in Japan – March 3, 2019

    Sunday, March 3rd, 2019
  • <> 1americagirls
    Photo by Fung Lin Hall (Scottsdale, Arizona)

  • 1adollsKitano
    The Dolls – (Directed by Takeshi Kitano, Poland gave this the best film award – costume design by Yoji Yamamoto)

    Name these girls – Happy Hinamatsuri album

    Google Hinamatsuri

    The custom of displaying dolls began during the Heian period. Formerly, people believed the dolls possessed the power to contain bad spirits. Hinamatsuri traces its origins to an ancient Japanese custom called hina-nagashi (雛流し, lit. “doll floating”), in which straw hina dolls are set afloat on a boat and sent down a river to the sea, supposedly taking troubles or bad spirits with them.(via wiki)

  • James Merrill (March 3, 1926 – February 6, 1995)

    Saturday, March 2nd, 2019

  • James Merrill, Stonington, Connecticut, June 1973; photograph by Jill Krementz
    (photo via)

    James Merrill (March 3, 1926 – February 6, 1995)

    Log

    “[…] Now and then
    “It is given to see clearly. There
    “Is what remains of you, a body
    “Unshaven, flung on the sofa. Stains of egg
    “Harden about the mouth, smoke still
    “Rises between fingers or from nostrils.
    “The eyes deflect the stars through years of vacancy.
    “Your agitation at such moments
    “Is all too human. You and the stars
    “Seem both endangered, each
    “At the other’s mercy. Yet the gem
    “Revolves in space, the vision shuttles off.
    “A toneless waltz glints through the pea-sized funhouse.
    “The day is breaking someone else’s heart”

    ~ birthday celebrant James Merrill.

    Thanks to Chris Schneider for the poem above.

  • Poetry Foundation