Archive for May, 2019
Miles Davis from Louis Malle’s Elevator To The Gallows & Lee Chang Dong’s Burning
Sunday, May 26th, 2019
Photo via
Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows and it’s historic Miles Davis recording
Burning – interview with Lee Chang Dong
MM: I want to know more about your choice of music, such as the jazz by Miles Davis. Can you comment a little bit about the pieces you have used for this film, and the reasons behind your selection?
LCD: I needed the music in that scene to have a sense of freedom since that’s what Hae-mi’s dance is about. I wanted to use music that has this specific quality that jazz has where it feels like there’s no beginning or end. That song is called “Lift to the Scaffold,” and I like the sort of bad omen feeling that comes from that title.
Poetry was his last film (Lee Chang Dong previous post here)
Last Feb at MoMa – honoring Lee Chang Dong – Cinema of Trauma.
Happy birthday Miles Davis!
This is funny “At one time, Miles Davis was one of the highest – paid artists in jazz. He made BIG money. He invested some of this money in an electric company that supplied New York with electricity. Every time he phoned me, his opening remark was, “Have you got your lights on? Go turn your lights on.” (I think I read this from Horace Silver “s autobio)..
RIP Lawrence Carroll – (26 October 1954 – 21 May 2019)
Wednesday, May 22nd, 2019The Australian-born, American-raised painter Lawrence Carroll—known for his expressively elegant, restrained sculptural pictures often assembled from found materials—has died. (Artforum)
The Passing of Mono-ha Artist Nobuo Sekine at 76 -May 18, 2019
Saturday, May 18th, 2019Nobuo Sekine (1942–2019)
Conceptual artist Nobuo Sekine—whose ephemeral, site-specific sculptural and installation works were associated with Mono-ha (the School of Things), the postwar Japanese art movement active in the late 1960s to the mid ’70s—died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was seventy-six years old.(Artforum Obit)
(Phase of Nothingness – Cloth and Stones)
Nobuo Sekine and his Phase of Nothingness (1969) installed at the Japanese Pavilion, 35th Venice Biennale, 1970. Photo by Yoriko Kushigemachi. © Nobuo Sekine.
RIP I M Pei – East- West Center in Manoa
Thursday, May 16th, 2019
Henry Moore and I M Pei
RIP I M Pei at 102
Jefferson Hall, East-West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii This 1963 building was one of a handful commissioned from Pei by the US government, who viewed the East-West Center, in the centre of the Pacific as “a meeting place for the intellectuals of the East and the West,”
“Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei was tapped to design the core buildings of the new campus on the eastern edge of the university grounds,” Bradley writes. “Pei was already coming into his own as a brilliant architect, after designing a number of buildings in Atlanta, Denver, and was also designing the new L’Enfant Plaza in DC at the time. Of course, the symbolism of having a Chinese-American architect design the buildings of the East-West Center was probably not lost on anybody.”
The residential blocks were heavily influenced by Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation designs; (Pei was such a Corbu fan he even wore glasses similar to those favoured by the Swiss-French architect). However, the Hawaiian climate allowed Pei a little more freedom, prompting him to include outdoor communal kitchens for Honolulu students, offering them good ventilation, and even better views of the surrounding hills.
Sayonara, the Passing of Int’l Actress Kyo Machiko at 95
Tuesday, May 14th, 2019
(Kyo Machiko in Floating Weeds directed by Ozu Yasujiro)
Machiko Kyo, internationally acclaimed Japanese actress, dies at 95
Kyō continued to act through her 80’s. Her final role was as “Matsuura Shino” in the NHK television drama series Haregi Koko Ichiban in 2000. In 2017 she was presented with an award of merit at the 40th Japanese Academy Awards.[1] After retiring from film, she moved back to Osaka, where she resided until her death.
Kyō never married, although her romantic relationship with Daiei’s president Masaichi Nagata was well-publicized in her native country.
Kyō died from heart failure on May 12, 2019. She was 95
(Kyo Machiko with Marlon and Glenn Ford from the Tea House of the August Moon)
Her sole role in a non-Japanese film was as the young geisha Lotus Blossom from The Teahouse of the August Moon opposite Marlon Brando and Glenn Ford, for which she received a Golden Globe nomination.
Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa)
(Rashomon – Kurosawa, cinematography by Miyagawa)
(The Face of Another, Kyo Machiko directed by Teshigahara)
Street of Shame
Kenji Mizoguchi and actresses on the set of his film “Street of Shame (Akasen Chitai)
The Usual Suspects Meet Bohemian Rhapsody
Monday, May 13th, 2019Caravaggio
(Dexter Fletcher played young Caravaggio, directed by Derek Jarman)
Dexter Fletcher how he ended up replacing Bryan Singer here
Fletcher replaced Singer in the Freddie Mercury biopic last December, after Singer became ‘unavailable’ following reports of major clashes with Rami.
The Rocketman by Dexter Fletcher (Hollywood reporter, see a trailer)
The Usual Suspects , (Me Too are after both Kevin Spacey and Bryan Singer. )
Bryan Singer described the film The Usual Suspects as Double Indemnity meets Rashomon, and said that it was made “so you can go back and see all sorts of things you didn’t realize were there the first time. You can get it a second time in a way you never could have the first time around.”[16] He also compared the film’s structure to Citizen Kane (which also contained an interrogator and a subject who is telling a story) and the criminal caper The Anderson Tapes.[12]
Gabriel Byrne Homepage (Who just had a birthday celebration on May 12.. also a link to his saying goodbye to Albert Finney who starred with him in Miller’s Crossing.)
Mr. Kobayshi or Peter Postlethwaite here .
The Passing of Enigmatic Painter Thomas Nozkowski at 75
Thursday, May 9th, 2019
photo via (See more paintings here)
Thomas Nozkowski passed away (Art News)
Thomas Nozkowski (b. 1944, Teaneck, New Jersey, d. 2019) is recognized for his richly colored and intimately scaled abstract paintings and drawings that push the limits of visual language. An awareness of perception and the desire to explore the possibilities of seeing, is at once grounded in reality for the artist and released from specific legibility. His concurrent practices of painting and drawing reflect on specific places and experiences—from the deeply symbolic to the notational—translating sensations and memories into abstract compositions
Gary Snyder – Poet of Deep Ecology at 89
Tuesday, May 7th, 2019
Gary Snyder (Photo by Allen Ginsberg )
Happy birthday Gary Snyder (May 8 1930)
“I feel ancient, as though I had
Lived many lives.
And may never now know
If I am a fool
Or have done what my
karma demands.”‘ Gary Snyder
“Range after range of mountains.
Year after year after year.
I am still in love.”
― Gary Snyder“Clouds sink down the hills
Coffee is hot again. The dog
Turns and turns about, stops and sleeps.”
― Gary Snyder, Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems
Reality Insight (poem on youtube)
”Poetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics”
“Once Only almost at the equator almost at the
equinox
exactly at midnight from a ship the full moon in the center of the sky.”
Iain Sinclair meets Gary Snyder (The Man In the Clearing)
The dialectic that I observed in Jack, which was kind of charming, really, and you see it at work in his novels, was that be could play the fool and he could play the student very well. “But see, I really don’t know anything about this. Teach me!” “Wow! You really know how to do that?” and lead you on. ‘I’hat was balanced by sometimes great authoritativeness and great arrogance, and he would suddenly say, “I am the authority.” But then he would get out of that again. It was partly maybe like a really skillful novelist’s con, to get people to speak. And be uses that as a literary device in his novels, where he presents himself often as the straight guy and he lets the other guys be smart.
I much appreciated what he had to say about spontaneous prose, although I never wrote prose. I think it influenced my journal writing a lot, some of which would, say, be registered in the book Earth House Hold. I think that I owe a lot to Jack in my prose style, actually. And my sense of poetics has been touched by Jack for sure.
Our interchanges on Buddhism were on the playful and delightful level of exchanging the lore, exchanging what we knew about it, what he thought of Mahayana. He made up names. He would follow on the Mahayana Sutra invention of lists, and he would invent more lists, like the names of all the past Buddhas, the names of all the future Buddhas, the names of all the other universes. He was great at that. But it was not like a pair of young French intellectuals sitting down comparing their structural comprehension of something. We exchanged lore. And I would tell him, “Now look. Here are these Chinese Buddhists,” and that’s how we ended up talking about the Han-shan texts together, and I introduced him to the texts that give the anecdotes of the dialogues and confrontations between T’ang Dynasty masters and disciples, and of course he was delighted by that. Anybody is. ‘I’hat’s what we did.
Orson Welles’ Sketchbook & Max Ophuls
Sunday, May 5th, 2019Orson Welles sought justice for Isaac Wood a African-American World War II veteran.
Max Ophuls and Orson Welles share a birthday on May 6. Max was born 12 years earlier, in 1902, Orson in 1915.
La Ronde
Gerard Philipe
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Actor James Mason, who worked with Ophüls on two films, wrote a short poem about the director’s love for tracking shots and elaborate camera movements:
A shot that does not call for tracks
Is agony for poor old Max,
Who, separated from his dolly,
Is wrapped in deepest melancholy.
Once, when they took away his crane,
I thought he’d never smile again.
photos via (A Sharper focus with a review)