Iconoclastic Incubator
<> <>
Portrait of Sylvia von Harden 
1926
( youtube video about her here.) – She was a poet rather than a journalist.
Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix (2 December 1891 – 25 July 1969) was a German painter and printmaker. Noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of Weimar society and of the brutality of war, he, along with George Grosz, is widely considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit. (Wiki)
Blue Elephant 
Collage by Fung Ching Kelling
Cid <> <> <> 
Hello 
Digital image by Fung Ching Kelling
Blue Kai Poi (repost)
Happy Birthday Fung Ching! (She is my sister)
Wave Apples Digital images
Fung Ching shares a birthday with Rene Magritte Memory-Souvenir (previous post)
My father used to say,
“Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow’s grave
or the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self-reliant like the cat—
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse’s limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth—
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.”
Nor was he insincere in saying, “Make my house your inn.”
Inns are not residences.
What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt, –
(Read more here)
See Moore’s handwriting here.
Marianne Moore was a Modernist American poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.
Georgia 
O’Keefe
(photo by Don Worth)
Georgia O’Keefe and Marianne Moore were both born on Nov 15, 1887.
Georgia married and lived longer than Marianne.
Update: Georgia O’Keefe: More Real than Realism by John Haber (Whitney Show)
Her abstractions show how often she surprised even herself. Instead of sustaining an image, including her image, she pushed an image just to see what it could become. When it got predictable, she threw it away and started over. Is this really an artist known for her purity? O’Keeffe gets one thinking how pure her abstraction or realism ever were. As she said, “Nothing is less real than realism,” and it drew her close to abstraction all her life.
This clip was captured with my digital camera by filming the clip of Last Life in the Universe on youtube. It was a quick way of shortening to the length I wanted. The camera noise is left there on purpose.
A few more selections from my youtube account.
Radha’s Dance (from the film The River directed by Jean Renoir)
Napoleanic Soldiers Changing Hairstyles (The Duellists by Ridley Scott) Take the film quiz – whose story was it from?
Signs of Life (Werner Herzog’s first feature film)
Three digital images developed from a digital photo of lobster tank in the Chinese restaurant.
Shiki<> 
Shabu –
Stanley 
The Noodle House and the Debt to Pleasure (Story of the Chinese restaurant where they kept the lobster tank).
Ivan Regina (above) – to Heros Fragiles
<> 
Alan Tired – Mobile phone photo by Alan Ebnother
Mr Blank in Heilbronn by Jurgen Trautwein
<> <> <> 
Google Missing link by Fung Lin Hall
Nov 2 birthday artists :
K. D Lang – SalmonBerries -Percy Adlon
Emperor Huizong – The Emperor, Brushes and Brice Marden
Luchino Visconti – part 1/12 youtube documentary
A May-December love for all seasons
Within a year of living with Isherwood, Mr. Bachardy, who grew up in Los Angeles, had assimilated so many of his British mentor’s mannerisms that he had assumed Isherwood’s British accent and dry, precise vocal tone. One talking head observes that Isherwood had “succeeded in cloning himself in some weird way.”
After Isherwood, an ever-attentive father figure, noticed Mr. Bachardy’s talent as a draftsman, he sent him to art school, where he flourished. Had Mr. Bachardy not developed a successful parallel career as a portrait artist (many drawings and paintings of celebrities are shown), the relationship might not have endured.
Chris and Don by David Hockney
Here is another portraits of them by David Hockney in colors/
This pen and ink drawing by Don Bachardy was on the paperbook cover of “Christopher and His Kind’.
More about Christopher Isherwood or his Berlin days..
Christopher and his Kind
(A book I read with much relish more than two decades ago.)
Don Bacardy and Christopher Isherwood in Santa Monica
Nancy Spero images with Miles Davis soundtrack on youtube
Nancy Spero – Aug 24 1926 – October 18, 2009
Obit from Edward Winkleman
Feminist art pioneer Nancy Spero passed away at NYU Hospital yesterday according to friends of the family. Having only met Nancy once (when she received the Visual AIDS Vanguard Award in 2007), she was always a more of a legend in my mind than personal acquaintance, and so I’ll leave the proper eulogies to those who knew her better and simply note that just the other day in conversation, discussing who should represent the US at the next Venice Biennial, she was the only artist we could agree on.
My thoughts go out to her family and friends
<> <> 
The bug helicoptor, victim
Installation view from PBS Art 21 (via)
Nancy 
and Leon Golub
Nancy Spero – Artnet
I have deliberately attempted to distance my art from the Western emphasis on the subjective portrayal of individuality by using a hand-printing and collage technique utilizing zinc plates as an artist’s tool instead of a brush or palette knife. Figures derived from various cultures co-exist in simultaneous time… The figures themselves could become hieroglyphs–extensions of a text denoting rites of passage, birth to old age, motion and gesture…Woman as activator or protagonist dancing in procession, elegiac or celebrator a continuous presence, engaged directly or glimpsed peripherally; the eye, as a moving camera, scans the re-imaging of women.”
In Conversation – Nancy Spero at Brooklyn Rail
(Don’t miss how Ivan Karp who worked for Castelli at that time insulted Nancy Spero when she showed her drawings to him)
Nancy Spero, an American artist and feminist whose tough, exquisite figurative art addressed the realities of political violence, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 83 and lived in Manhattan.
NYtimes Obit
Nancy Spero’s death means the art world loses its conscience
A vital, energetic artist who could be funny as well as macabre, Nancy Spero never lost her curiosity in the world – Adriane Seale
R.I.P. Nancy Spero – We will miss you greatly.
Husband and wife paint violence – that was how I described you, the greatest partnership in the history of art.
You have re-imagined the feminist figures away from the convention.
Thank you!
Driving past the Painted desert last July.
Friends from France made this neat video.
<>
Nod le Fou, Ivan Régina, juillet 2009
From Jurgen. Francisco 707
<> 
Super Duty 961
<> 
Santa Monica August 2008
<>
See the finished walls Walls from blu blu org.
<> <>
Piranesi from National Gallery of Art
<> <> <> 
Fireworks 
by Son of Piranesi
The Girandola at the Castel Sant’Angelo, ca. 1783
Francesco Piranesi (Italian, 1756–1810) and Louis-Jean Desprez (French, 1743–1804)
Etching with colored washes
The Dark Brain of Piranesi by Marguerite Yourcenar
(M.Y is known as Madame Bibliotheque – I would like to read her essay on Prisons of Piranesi’s etchings)
Aldous Huxley on Piranesi’s Prisons
The raw material of Piranesi’s designs consists of architectural forms; but, because the Prisons are images of confusion, because their essence is pointlessness, the combination of architectural forms never adds up to an architectural drawing, but remains a free design, untrammelled by any considerations of utility or even possibility, and limited only by the necessity of evoking the general idea of a building.
<> <>
This discussion must have taken place at this Farmhouse.
Huize Piranesi
The history of Huize Piranesi is the transition of a farmhouse where the peasant family and their livehood used to live together under one roof, into a family house with space for performances.
In the beginning of the seventies, the house welcomed the philosophers Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, Leszek Kolakowski, Arne Naess and Karl Popper.
Farmhouse build on the inspiration of Piranesi.
From what I could see, Chomsky kicked his bald ass all over the stage.
Nice pairing. Two totally annoying know-it-alls that I’ve learned something from.
I do have to admit that the clip shows Foucault at his most dogmatic, while Chomsky is actually asking for support for creative activities outside his usual focus. Foucault focuses so much on established government institutions, as makes sense for his great work on the Enlightenment, as if Obama had more power than the banks too big to fail, that he could drive me to become a dogmatic Marxist.
(The above from Facebook discussion on occasion of Giovanni B. Piranesi’s birthday – Oct 4)
Kate Millet 
by Alice Neel
Happy Birthday Kate Millett – Sept 14, 1934
Millett’s deeply personal autobiographical works, including Flying (1974), Sita (1977), and A.D. (1995), reveal the difficulties she has faced in her public and private life.
Sexual Politics was circulated before the publication of her thesis.
Kate Millett is an artist 
and a feminist.
See her with her sculpture from Feminist Art movement
Her book Flying (1974) tells of her marriage with a Japanese sculptor and her love affairs with women.
Fumio Yoshimura Sculpture
Yes she has lost mind once – Her Loony Bin Trip.
“Not since Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest has the literature of madness emitted such a powerful anti-institutional cry.” — Washington Post ADVANCE PRAISE “The forced incarceration, the mental anguish, and the sheer humiliation of ‘going mad’ are made real in Millett’s detailed and passionate narrative of her own experiences.
“The Basement” was disturbing but I had to read it.
Here is a review of the Basement by Duncan Mitchell
Happy Kate 
by Hyder in 1994.
Her homepage is here. – AN INVITATION TO THE WOMEN’S ART COLONY/FARM
Of course she went to Iran.
In 1981 Millett published Going to Iran, which was a new journalistic account of a trip she made to Iran in March 1979 to address Iranian feminists on International Women’s Day. The Shah of Iran had just abdicated, and the Ayatollah Khomeini had not yet fully consolidated his power. Nevertheless, Millett was soon expelled by the fundamentalist government for her feminist views. The chronicle is recorded in the rigorously honest style of her earlier works. (via)
The Return of the Troublemaker
Society has lost its patience. So why isn’t she more downhearted? She smiles and says it’s because she is having too much fun. “I love making trouble. It’s a wonderful job. You don’t get paid but you have a lot of adventures.”
‘Gulag’ book, once banned, is now required reading
Aleksandr Sokurov The Knot. Conversations w/ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. (Russian only)
The film, commissioned by a Russian TV channel and shot in 1999 consists of two parts of about 90 minutes each, thus the total comes to slightly over three hours. The first part s called The Knot (Uzel) while the second is entitled simply Dialogues. At the time of these interviews Solzhenitsyn is about eighty years of age, but his mind is remarkably agile and his judgement is swift; he has strong opinions on many issues. He talks a lot about writing and literature, about aspects of the Russian language, and about many of the most important Russian writers, from Gogol and Dostoyevski through Plekhanov and Karamzin, to present-day Valentin Rasputin or emigre Nabokov. (Dina review)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 
Wall streets the biggest banks of America
(Next frame says : the wall streets helped the Bolsheviks in Russia.)
This image was posted by me at Facebook 
and tagged way too many friends as an experiment.
-Solzhenitsyn is dead, would you like to finish what he was about to say? Was my question.
Some who are used to being tagged participated, soon the emails flooded and objections were raised by some who do not know the workings of FB interface. (Click ‘remove’ ).
A spirited and amusing response came from Ramiro Martinez – here is a link to his blog.
Aterial Destination
Then I read something about Bolshviks and politburo stuff and suddenly I got shot back to the time when my older brothers and sisters were in college. And the Chicano Movimiento was goin on and there seemed to be a lot of fear in the air. At this time I was getting my ass kicked all over the neighborhood and learning how to fight. I never liked it. (More,here) .
Previous post on Ramiro here. 
Sample responses I received:
Matt Janovic
“Wall Street, the biggest banks in the world, are no different in the nature of their exploitation and oppression of the world than the Politburo, only they are winning.” ;0) Happy Labor day!
“Yeah, that’s true, the house of Morgan did initially help the Bolsheviks but it ended with the 1920 bombing on Wall Street, probably done by British intelligence, they didn’t want the US and the Bolshies hooking-up. Sidney Reilly (“Ace of Spies”) might have been involved in that operation.””
Alan Sondhiem
read pretty much all of Solzhentsyn and couldn’t comment – on one hand brilliant samizdat writer along the lines of dostoevsky of course and on the other problematic nationalist along the lines of dostoevsky of course..
He had a wide dark side : his nationalism…
Last time he came in France, it was to meet Philippe de Villiers, an exterme right leader, who is the political chief of the right wing of the french catholic-fundamentalist movement
William Dimitroff
One Day in the Life of Bernie Madoff
(I enjoyed reading the First Circle: it is often forgotten today.)
Thomas Odde
…dispensers of capital punishment.
Terry Wahl
“have all the altruism and national allegiance of a starving hyena…
Solzhenitzn was unique. One wants to dislike him for his politics, and to me there’s little reason to listen to him about politics. Yet the three main novels (Cancer Ward, First Circle, Ivan Denisovich) were all very fine indeed, and the Gulag Archipelago was an amazing achievement. Without it, we would have the same revelations from others, including more progressive voices, as with Medvedev’s Let History Judge. Perhaps nothing will have the daring of Kruschev’s own ‘secret speech.’ But it’s a remarkable book all the same.
Overturned Pot 
and Paper Towels
by Stacey Fisher
The Longest Day 
Stacey Fisher
A Double Contradictory Feeling 
by John Stezaker
Heimo Zobernig <> <> 
