Vitro Nasu

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Sad news from BBC
Sean Connery passed away at 90.

Collaborations of Sean Connery and Sidney Lumet
(Sean Connery made five films with director Sidney Lumet)

(With Audrey Hepburn, Robin and Marian directed by Richard Lester)

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The Man Who Would be King (John Huston)

The Name of the Rose, based on a novel by Umberto Eco.
Further, Umberto Eco is an expert on the subject of 007, which adds him to the worldwide group of bondologs (“Bondologists,” Scandinavian expression for an expert in the field of James Bond).
Time Magazine obit showing a photo of Sean Connery holding a “rose’ in his hand.

Sean Connery on Michael Crichton

Connery says of Michael Crichton:
He’s got a very big influence on my life….I’m interested more in writers and directors than I am in actors as a rule. I really have a terrific measure of affection for Michael here because I wasn’t joking out there when I say he can write bestsellers and take out your appendix. Because he reminds me so much of Umberto Eco in that he’s got all the elements that I adore. Terrific mind, good writer.
Crichton shares some thoughts about Connery during the press conference:
He’s had an enormous effect on my life. He’s one of the few people that I can remember things that he said in passing while we were walking down the street 25 years ago.

From Russia with Love, The Hunt for the Red October, and the Russia House find them in Sean Connery’s filmography here.

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Ana Lily Amirpour Homemade Covid 19 short film Netflix

Ana Lily Amirpour made a brilliant COVID-19 short for Netflix. It’s unlike anything she’s ever done

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Happy Halloween!

“There was more circus in that courtroom than I show in the movie. The scene where Sacha Baron Cohen [as Abbie Hoffman] and Jeremy Strong [as Jerry Rubin] enter the court wearing judges’ robes and then take them off with police shirts underneath — that really happened, but I decided to take it out of the movie, and it took Sacha and Jeremy lobbying me to put that back in. They persuaded me, and they were right.”

Rememebering Abbie Hoffman
(Allen Ginsberg Project)

Langella on Youtube

Eddie on Youtube

Mark Rylance – interview

Was there anything about Kunstler in particular that impressed you?
More frightened than anything. He’s so different than me. I was very impressed by him and his whole life really, and how these events changed him, and how he let go of the image of his life—of comfort and security—in a way that a lot of the other older people at the time couldn’t let go. He was so inspired by the eloquence and wisdom and passion of these young people that he went on to work for those poor prisoners in Attica and the American Indian movement when their issues came to the surface. He really spent his whole life after that defending those who might not be properly defended.

I wish we had him around at the moment to unravel the knot of something like Guantanamo Bay; it’s so distressing to hear the people who were there without any justice. It’s an unresolved issue, for sure. But there are people around like Kunstler who are doing that work.

What Happend to the real life major platyers

The Trial of the Chicago 7 Is a Riveting Movie. But the True Story Is Even More Dramatic
Time Magazine True Stories

Amer. Army nurse 2nd Lieut. Florence Vehmeier walking past GI w. bullet wound in his stomach & rubber tube taped to his lip which drains his stomach through his nose to bucket on the floor in makeshift hospital in Cens Cathedral, during WWII.

WORLD WAR II. The Pacific Campaign. February 1945. The Battle of Iwo Jima (Japanese island). US Marine demolition team blasting out a cave on Hill 382.

Magnum Photos – W. Eugene Smith
(Died: October 15, 1978, Tucson, AZ Smith was 59 years old.)

(Woman bathing her daughter, a victim of mercury poisoning, Minamata, Japan 1971)

It has been called photojournalism’s Pieta. In 1971, Smith and his wife, photographer Aileen Mioko, moved to the
Japanese village of Minamata for three years.
Many regard this as the first photograph to awaken the world to ecological abuse. Page 525 – The Great Life Photographers.

Charlie CHAPLIN. 1952.
Buster KEATON (left) and Charlie CHAPLIN (right) during the shooting of the movie “Limelight”, starring Charlie CHAPLIN, Sidney CHAPLIN, Claire BLOOM and Buster KEATON.

See more photos of Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight set here.

(Nun Waiting for Survivors, Andrea Doria, 1956)

Minamata Homage to W. Eugene Smith
(More photos here)

Nobel lecture performed by Mark Rylance – 2018

Art, Truth and Politics: Harold Pinter’s legendary Nobel lecture performed by Mark Rylance
By Robin Beste

And how right he was.
As well as in their professional lives, Mark Rylance and Harold Pinter were linked by their political activism, particularly in their opposition to injustice and war. Unsurprisingly, this led both to a close involvement with the Stop the War movement (STW), which was founded nearly two decades ago in response to the war in Afghanistan, and is one of the most significant mass movements in British history.

Harold Pinter quotes

I think we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else’s life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.
Harold Pinter

Julian Sands
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Julian Sands, Harold Pinter the pregnant pause extended

In his one-man show “A Celebration of Harold Pinter,” which he performs tonight at the Whittier College Writers Festival, the 55 year-old Brit reveals Pinter’s lesser known side—his surprising warmth and tenderness, as evidenced in his poetry, prose, letters, and the recollections and anecdotes of friends, including Sands himself. John Malkovich, with whom Sands previously worked in The Killing Fields, directs.

It is the dead of night,

The long dead look out towards
The new dead
Walking towards them

There is a soft heartbeat
As the dead embrace
Those who are long dead
And those of the new dead
Walking towards them

They cry and they kiss
As they meet again
For the first and last time

Harold Pinter, 2002
(Born: October 10, 1930, Hackney, London, United Kingdom)

(via)

Louis Gluck

The American poet Louise Glück – awarded this year’s NobelPrize in Literature – was born 1943 in New York and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Apart from her writing she is a professor of English at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
Glück seeks the universal, and in this she takes inspiration from myths and classical motifs, present in most of her works.
The voices of Dido, Persephone and Eurydice – the abandoned, the punished, the betrayed – are masks for a self in transformation, as personal as it is universally valid.
Louise Glück is not only engaged by the errancies and shifting conditions of life, she is also a poet of radical change and rebirth, where the leap forward is made from a deep sense of loss.
In one of her most lauded collections, The Wild Iris (1992), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, she describes the miraculous return of life after winter in the poem “Snowdrops”:

Louise Gluck Weebly com

You will hear thunder and remember me

October

Louise Glück – 1943-

Is it winter again, is it cold again,
didn’t Frank just slip on the ice,
didn’t he heal, weren’t the spring seeds planted

didn’t the night end,
didn’t the melting ice
flood the narrow gutters

wasn’t my body
rescued, wasn’t it safe

didn’t the scar form, invisible
above the injury

terror and cold,
didn’t they just end, wasn’t the back garden
harrowed and planted—

I remember how the earth felt, red and dense,
in stiff rows, weren’t the seeds planted,
didn’t vines climb the south wall

I can’t hear your voice
for the wind’s cries, whistling over the bare ground

I no longer care
what sound it makes

when was I silenced, when did it first seem
pointless to describe that sound

what it sounds like can’t change what it is—

didn’t the night end, wasn’t the earth
safe when it was planted

didn’t we plant the seeds,
weren’t we necessary to the earth,

the vines, were they harvested?

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(Santa Barbara Chairs 1983)

Robert Bechtle Bay Area photorealist dies at 88

Though Bechtle painted from photographs, he was so good that he could have done just as well from memory, said his contemporary and friend Wayne Thiebaud.
“Drawing is the basis of all painting, and Bob was a supreme draftsman,” said Thiebaud. “We had lots of good conversations and I respected him very much as a serious, probing painter.”

(Potrero Hill)

See more here, Gladstone Gallery

Fashion designer Kenzo Takada dies of Coronavirus

BBC obit

(Japanese fashion designer Kenzo Takada posing during a photo session in his home in Paris on January 9, 2019. AFP)
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Self Portrait

Gore Vidal
Born Eugene Louis Vidal
October 3, 1925
West Point, New York, U.S

(Gore Vidal with Noam Chomsky –
Now is a great moment to listen to Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky talking in 1991)

Anais Nin and Gore

Gore Vidal in Rome

NY Magazine (Best of Enemies)