Archive for May, 2022

Frank Zappa – See a Documentary by Alex Winter

Wednesday, May 25th, 2022
  • Photo via Frank Zappa Hot Rats Anniversary Collection

  • “Zappa” documentary directed by Alex Winter
    (Streaming at Kanopy)

    Alex Winter’s Documentary Hauntingly Captures the Skewed Passion of Frank Zappa, a One-of-a-Kind Rock Legend
    The film finds an emotional through line by taking Frank Zappa as seriously as he took himself.

    Zappa and Vaclav Havel – see the photo of them, here.
    (Zappa’s visit to Prague was covered in this documentary).


  • Letter to Edgard Varese, Zappa was 16 years old

    Dear Sir:

    Perhaps you might remember me from my stupid phone call last January, if not, my name again is Frank Zappa Jr. I am 16 years old … that might explain partly my disturbing you last winter. The reason for my letter at this time is that I am visiting relatives in Baltimore and as long as I am on the East Coast I hope I can get to see you.

    It might seem strange but ever since I was 13 I have been interested in your music. The whole thing stems from the time when the keeper of this little record store sold me your album “The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse, Vol.l.” The only reason I knew it existed was that an article in either LOOK or the POST mentioned it as being noisy and unmusical and only good for trying out the sound systems in high fidelity units (referring to your “IONIZATIONS” [sic]). I don’t know how the store I got it from ever obtained it, but, after several hearings, I became curious and bought it for $5.40, which, at the time seemed awfully high and being so young, kept me broke for three weeks. Now I wouldn’t trade it for anything and I am looking around for another copy as the one I have is very worn and scratchy.

  • Kronos

  • See Frank Zappa art

  • Zappa Homepage

  • Virginia Overton – Found Objects, Site Specific, Sculptures

    Friday, May 20th, 2022

  • Virginia Overton – 2009, Ladder via Artforum – Tim Griffin


    (Virginia Overton, Untitled (MA), 2015, Pressure treated wood beam, acrylic, rock and hardware, 247 × 39.1 × 138.1 cm (97 1/4 × 15 3/8 × 54 3/8 in)


  • Virginia Overtone – at Bartolami Gallery

  • See more art from Artnet.com Virginia Overton

  • Goodbye Vangelis

    Thursday, May 19th, 2022
  • Vangelis composer of Chariots of Fire, Blade Runner dies

    Later in the decade he scored the Palme d’Or-winning Costa-Gavras political drama Missing, starring Jack Lemmon; the Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins drama The Bounty; and the Mickey Rourke-starring Francesco. He worked again with the Blade Runner director, Ridley Scott, on 1992 film 1492: Conquest of Paradise, and elsewhere during the 1990s, soundtracked Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon and documentaries by Jacques Cousteau.

    Vangelis wiki

    As a hobby, Vangelis enjoyed painting. His first exhibition, of 70 paintings, was held in 2003 at Almudin in Valencia, Spain. It then toured South America until the end of 2004.[42][79][80]

    Vangelis died on 17 May 2022, aged 79, at a hospital in France while receiving treatment for COVID-19.

  • Re visiting “Kamikaze Girls”

    Tuesday, May 17th, 2022
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    (Kamikaze Girls – singer Anna Tsuchiya as Ichigo – the biker girl, she was ferocious.)

  • Lolita Fashion, Biker Gangs and the Power of Friendship

    One thing about this film that really stood out to me is the stylish editing and cinematography.

  • Kamikaze Girls wiki

    Kamikaze Girls was awarded Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress, and two other awards at the 26th Yokohama Film Festival.[8] It also won Best Film and Best Director at the 14th Japan Film Professional Awards.[15] For her performance in the film, Anna Tsuchiya was named Best New Actress at the Awards of the Japanese Academy, the Blue Ribbon Awards, and the Hochi Film Awards

    Farewell Fred Ward, Memorable as Henry Miller

    Saturday, May 14th, 2022
  • Fred with Ann Archer

    219G-148-001
    SHORT CUTS PORTRAITS


    Photo by Mary Ellen Mark

    Via Adrian Martin from FB. (I did not know that Fred Ward was directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet)

    R.I.P. Fred Ward. A great actor, and what an incredible range of directors he managed to work with: Roberto Rossellini, Walter Hill, Jonathan Demme, Don Siegel, Beth B, Philip Kaufman, Dennis Hopper, George Armitage, Rachel Talalay, Errol Morris, Robert Altman, Alan Rudolph, Michael Apted, Howard Zieff … and Alain Robbe-Grillet ! … and I haven’t even made it yet to the delightful SECRET ADMIRER.

    Henry & June

    Fred Ward wiki

    Freddie Joe Ward was born in San Diego on December 30, 1942.[1][2] He was part Cherokee.[3] His father was an alcoholic who was frequently incarcerated, and his parents separated when he was three. His mother remarried, to a man who worked in a carnival, and the family moved frequently.[4]> Before acting, Ward spent three years in the United States Air Force. He was also a boxer (breaking his nose three times) and worked as a lumberjack in Alaska,[5][6] a janitor, and a short-order cook. He studied acting at New York’s Herbert Berghof Studio after serving in the U.S. Air Force. While living in Rome, he dubbed Italian films into English and appeared in films by neorealist director Roberto Rossellini

    Guardian obit

    Veteran actor Fred Ward, star of The Right Stuff and Tremors, dies aged 79

    The character actor was part of the ensemble casts of Robert Altman’s films Short Cuts and The Player, and had a career in film and television that spanned five decades

    Mario Ambrosius Curated Guen Inokuma, Léonard Foujita at Gallery in Ginza

    Thursday, May 12th, 2022
  • Mario A

    Mario A curated paintings by Léonard Foujita and Guenichiro Inokuma at Chuo Gallery in Ginza

  • Guen I.
    Guen (this is how he signed his art) came to live in Honolulu in the mid 70’s after he suffered a stroke in NYC. He lived in Japan in the Summer and the Winter in Honolulu. Guen became a mentor to my sister Fung-Ching Kelling during his stays in Honolulu.

    (My sister Fung Ching Kelling sitting in front. Fung Lin Hall (myself) on the right of Guen Inokuma)

  • In My Resume (youtube only in Japanese)

    .. Inokuma and Foujita shared a house when they escaped wartime Paris. He talked about how Foujita bought the train tickets at the train station (today Musee d`Orsay) and that he only took a Matisse painting and left everything else in Paris. They stayed in the countryside more than month living in the same house.
    He showed us a special spot that Isamu Noguchi loved on the island of Oahu and showed us the beauty of natural rocks.
    In NY Guen Inokuma (sensei) and his wife Fumiko took my sister and I to Mark Rothko’s apartment and told us what he knew of Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Yoko Ono and Isamu Noguchi were his good friends.

    Painting (via artnet)
    Title : City Composition (3)
    Medium : Oil on Canvas
    Size : 30 x 40 in. / 76.2 x 101.6 cm.
    Year : 1966 –
    Contemporary Japanese Art from the Collection of B.H. Rockefeller

  • Rolling Stones Journalist Ben Fong Torres – See a Documentary of His Life

    Tuesday, May 10th, 2022
  • One of the most captivating documentaries about a journalist I’ve seen in a long while. If you are parents of teenagers, show this film, they can learn important history of America, not just Rock’n Roll.

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    (Ben Fong-Torres (left) and Art Garfunkel (right) mimic a famous album cover)

  • Ben Fong Torres wiki

    He conducted interviews for Rolling Stone of entertainment figures including Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, comedian Steve Martin and Linda Ronstadt’s first cover story in 1975. He also profiled Marvin Gaye, Sly and the Family Stone, Bonnie Raitt, Paul McCartney and Rodney Dangerfield. A Fong-Torres interview with Ray Charles was awarded the Deems Taylor Award for Magazine Writing in 1974.

    Fong-Torres was also a rock DJ for San Francisco radio station KSAN-FM in the 1970s. He later hosted a live, weekly entertainment and talk show, Fog City Radio, on NPR affiliate KQED-FM. On television, he is the five-time Emmy Award-winning co-anchor of the Chinese New Year Parade broadcast on KTVU (Fox) in San Francisco.

  • Happy Mother’s Day – 2022

    Sunday, May 8th, 2022
  • Little Joe Jessica Hausner Sci-fi Plant Horror Drama

    Emily Beecham won the best actress award at Cannes 2019

  • Colin Marshall..

    Jeanne Dielman understands what all the best works of cinema do: implication and occurrence are two different things. Where so many mediocre films deal in visual shorthand that merely suggests to us that certain events have happened, this one has its events actually take place. That this builds their importance far beyond any quick-cut battle for the very future of humanity might point toward an answer to the feminist question: these are domestic duties we’re watching, and the film treats them with a gravity that somehow goes beyond aesthetics. You could call its story tragic, but just by existing it demonstrates an artistic fact that’s sadder than anything going on in its content. By letting its content dictate its form — or rather, by letting its content and form exist in symbiosis — the film achieves what most films could if they did the same. But almost no film does.

  • Lourdes 1aLourdes

    Jessica Hausner is an Austrian film director and screenwriter.

  • Happy Children’s Day – May 5 2022

    Thursday, May 5th, 2022

  • (Toshiko D. Hamaoka, Boy’s Festival in May, watercolor, 1945. Depicts koinobori hanging from poles between Tule Lake barracks)

  • Children’s Day in Japan

    Name These Children archive