Vitro Nasu

(Self Portrait- Michiko Kon)

Michiko Kon Mistress of the Dark

(Art by Kaitlyn who is 15 years old)

Happy Halloween!

Laurie Anderson at the Hirshhorn

Looking Back While Facing Forward: Laurie Anderson at the Hirshhorn

Laurie Anderson: The Weather – Hirshhorn Exhibition and Portrait

Laurie Anderson – interview

See more art from Vito Schnabel Gallery – Laurie Anderson

(Photo by Mary Ellen Mark)
RIP Lou Reed who passed away on Oct 27, 2013.

Manuel Neri wiki

Manuel Neri – Hackettmill (See more art here)

Manuel Neri was an American sculptor who is recognized for his life-size figurative sculptures in plaster, bronze, and marble. In Neri’s work with the figure, he conveys an emotional inner state that is revealed through body language and gesture.

Granddaughter Kaitlyn performed at Phoenix art museum.

Crimes of the Future

(On David Cronenberg)[He] has helped me do really good work, better than other directors. Maybe because he understands my process and because we have some things in common in terms of our sensibility – the kinds of books we like to read, our sense of humor is similar.
It’s comforting to be working with someone you know will make a good movie. Some people will say, ‘Ahhh, he’s over the top, it’s gratuitous,’ [but] I disagree completely. He’s one of the most responsible filmmakers today as far as showing violence – which there’s very little of compared to other movies. It just stays with you because he shows very little of it. It just stays with you and he’s very direct about it. He shows you what happens, and what the consequences are physically and emotionally, in some cases; certainly he does in A History of Violence (2005), and also here [in Eastern Promises (2007)], that makes him very honest.

Viggo Mortensen IMDB

Eureka – Viggo’s new film with Jauja director Lisandro Alonso

The first part of the film, titled “Western” and set on the U.S.-Mexico border, will have echos of Jauja but is not a sequel, following Mortensen playing a father named Murphy searching for his daughter (Agger), who has been kidnapped. The second part of the film, titled “Pine Ridge,” is set in South Dakota on a Native American Reservation in the present-day. While there aren’t details on Part 3 yet, Part 4, titled “Amazonia,” will follow a character named Ubirajara, “a member of a far happier indigenous settlement in the Amazon who goes off to dig for gold, contracting, literally, gold fever.”

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Far from Men
See Far from Men – Viggo Mortensen and Albert Camus (Previous post)

Viggo on his art –
“Photography, painting or poetry those are just extensions of me, how I perceive things, they are my way of communicating.” (via IMDB)
Happy birthday Viggo Mortensen

How the facts of Hannah Arendt’s life read like fiction

Lesson from Life – Hannah Arendt

As her friend Mary McCarthy once said, Arendt was “a magnificent stage diva”. Focusing on only one episode in Arendt’s eventful existence, Margarethe von Trotta’s dull 2012 biopic Hannah Arendt didn’t show the half of it. Time, surely, for the 12-part HBO drama series. Having read Ann Heberlein’s lyrical yet lucid On Love and Tyranny, I suggest Episode One end with the young Arendt declaring, “I can either study philosophy or I can drown myself”.

Raul Hilberg, the first historian to document the banality of Nazi evil, nursed a lifelong grudge against Arendt. who borrowed from and popularized his work without crediting him.

Hanna Arendt never did the research, she popularized the idea that Nazis were primarily bureaucrats. Here is a book about the man whose research Hanna used without attribution.

Hilberg was not happy either. After toiling for thirteen years on his book, he was being eclipsed by someone who had worked for little more than two years on hers. “Who was I, after all?” Hilberg asked bitterly in his autobiography. “She, the thinker, and I, the laborer who wrote only a simple report, albeit one which was indispensable once she had exploited it.”

Hannah and Her Admirers by David Rieff (Susan Sontag’s son)

Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic of Hannah Arendt is a film about ideas that remains intellectually detached from them.
Arendt had relied, by her own admission, on Raul Hilberg’s magisterial history of the Shoah, The Destruction of the European Jews, published in 1961. Most valuable of all to her was Hilberg’s account of the role of the Judenräte during the Shoah, and to what degree the leaders of these councils had in effect collaborated in the Jews’ extermination. Her conclusion was that had the Jews been leaderless and unorganized, there would have been chaos and misery, but nowhere near as many as 6 million would have been murdered. It was this position, far more than her thinking about the banality of evil, that had set so much of the official Jewish world against her. And while Hilberg did not agree with her, as he makes clear in a few icy paragraphs of his memoir, The Politics of Memory, he nonetheless defended Arendt publicly during the controversy.

It is a film about ideas that remains intellectually detached from them. Despite her immense talent as a director of actors, perhaps with Hannah Arendt von Trotta is not so far from those late Rossellini films after all, and is nowhere near being as diligent or trustworthy.

Billion Dollor Code (Zurich film festival)

Meet the splendid cast

Etel Adnan Art

Poetry Foundation

tk

Exhibition – Etel Adnan Lights – New Measure

She was born in Beirut in 1925 to a Greek mother and Syrian father; grew up speaking French, Arabic, and Greek; and as an adult has lived for extended periods in Lebanon, the United States, and France. She began to paint in the late 1950s, while working as a professor of philosophy in Northern California. It was a period when, in protest of France’s colonial rule in Algeria, she renounced writing in French and declared that she would begin “painting in Arabic.”

While Adnan’s writings have been unflinching in their critique of war and social injustice, her visual art is an intensely personal distillation of her faith in the human spirit and the beauty of the natural world. She has stated, “It seems to me I write what I see, paint what I am.” Adnan creates her paintings decisively and intuitively.

(Via Guggenheim)

The Luminous Abstractions of Etel Adnan (New Yorker)

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Leonie (Film)
Written and Directed by Hisako Matsui, Emily Mortimer played Leonie who was the mother of Isamu Noguchi.
Watch trailer on Kanopy

More on Isamu Noguchi (previous post) (Including the Tea Ceremony with Charlie Chaplin)

Happy birthday Emily Mortimer! She was great in The Bookshop, Young Adam, The Party, The Match Point, Dear Frankie. etc.

In 2000, Mortimer met her husband Alessandro Nivola while both were starring in Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Emily Mortimer is now directing, In the Pursut of Love (Rolling Stone)

Emily Mortimer’s Lifelong ‘Pursuit’

How the actress brought a beloved book from her youth to life onscreen as writer-director of the Amazon miniseries ‘The Pursuit of Love’