Vitro Nasu

The Art of Fiction Paris Review on Carlos Fuentes

Yes. I suppose I started to write Terra Nostra in that Catholic school in Mexico City. St. John Chrysostom says that purely spiritual love between a man and a woman should be condemned because their appetites grow so much and lust accumulates. This is an essential point in Terra Nostra, where people can never meet in the flesh and have others do the actual fornication for them. I learned a lot in Catholic school.

Carlos Fuentes passed away – he was 83

The elegant, mustachioed author’s other contemporary classics included “Aura,” “Terra Nostra,” and “The Good Conscience.” Many American readers know him for “The Old Gringo,” a novel about San Francisco journalist Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared at the height of the 1910-1920 Mexican Revolution. That book was later made into a film starring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda.

Carlos speaks On Drug War (youtube)

Carlos Fuentes

Intelligent Life -his visit to a museum

Nothing new here. Many aboriginal cultures, worldwide, were built by hand labour and despotic rulers garbed in myth. Yet Xalapa offers a great surprise. Next to the colossal heads and the sacred jaguars, there are human beings, and they are laughing.

This, for me, is the most salient aspect of the Xalapa museum: all the power, all the divinity, all the ceremony, all the myths of state and religion, finally provoke laughter. The outright, irrepressible humanity of the little heads smiling, holding up their hands in amusement. Laughing, perhaps, at the pomp and circumstance of the world.

Günther Kaufmann 16 June 1947, Munich – 10 May 2012, Berlin

Obit via Wetern Booth Hill

German film actor best known for his association with director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Fassbinder directed Kaufmann in a total of 14 films, casting him in leading and minor roles. Kaufmann was also romantically involved with the director for a time.
He died while walking in the Grunewald district of heart failure, the newspaper said. The actor, who in 2009 went to RTL “jungle camp” and at one time was wrongly imprisoned for murder was 64 years old.

“The White Negro of Hasenbergl” – the title of his autobiography – grew up the son of a U.S. Army soldier and a German mother in Hasenbergl quarter of Munich. In the 70s and 80s, he starred in 16 Rainer-Werner Fassbinder films, including “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” “The Marriage of Maria Braun” and “Querelle”. In the ’90s he had roles in TV series including “Derrick” and “The Old Man”.

Gunther Kaufmann

In 2002, Kaufmann was accused of murder in relation to the 2001 death of Hartmut Hagen, a 60-year old accountant whom Kaufmann’s wife had defrauded. The death was ruled accidental, though Kaufmann was sentenced to prison for lesser crimes relating to the incident. In 2005, a new police investigation discovered that Kaufmann was innocent, and had confessed to the crimes to cover up for his late wife, who may have been the perpetrator. He was subsequently released from prison and resumed his acting career.

Relationship with Fassbinder

Though Kaufmann was married when he met Fassbinder, the two men began a romantic relationship. Kaufmann is often described as the first major love interest of the director’s career. Like many of Fassbinder’s relationships, it was troubled, and the director would often try to buy Kaufmann’s affection with expensive presents, particualrly cars. During their relationship,(via wiki)

TELL THEM ANYTHING YOU WANT: A PORTRAIT OF MAURICE SENDAK 2009 directed by Lance Bangs, Spike Jonze.

Maurice Sendak’s Opera inspired drawings here.

Bram Bogart

Portrait via

Artnet Twitter announcement he was 90 years old

Riverside

His paintings at Artnet

Bio

Bram Bogart (1921) is one of the artists of the ‘Informel’, the loosely knit aesthetic movement which produced a generation of painters in the early 1950s. The movement included such European artists as Alberto Burri in Italy, and Antoni Tàpies in Spain, whose textural canvasses distance them from their American counterparts, the Abstract Expressionists.

From 1946 Bogart worked in Paris for a decade, a difficult time during which a typical reaction to his work (from a Dutch critic) was ‘a form of rock and roll with paint in its most stupid manifestation’. However after his move to Belgium in 1959, Bogart’s work became widely recognized. From the early 1960s onwards his canvasses are characterised by a new technique radiant with colour, light and optimism. Bogart became a Belgian citizen in 1969.

Dance, Dance Otherwise We’re Lost

Dinh Q. Lê
Born in Ha-Tien, Vietnam – Dinh Q. Lê a Vietnamese American fine arts photographer, best known for his woven-photographs.

Hong Chun Zhang
Via Juxtapose

China-born, Kansas-based artist Hong Chun Zhang has a fascination with hair.

Paris View interview

Joseph Heller May 1, 1923

Books by Josep Heller: No Laughing Matter, Now and Then,Catch 22, Something Happend, Good as Gold, God Knows, Picture This. He did screnplays for Sex & single girl, Casino Royale, Dirty Dingus Magee.

“Do not make war in a hostile distant land unless you intend to live there. The people will outnumber you, your presence will be alarming, the government you install to keep order will not keep order, victory is impossible if the people keep fighting, there is only genocide to cope with determined military resistance.” – Picture This – Joseph Heller

Oh, shit, sighed the elderly author and chuckled to himself once more. He was not surprised, and began to think seriously of writing the book you’ve just read’…The End..’Portrait of an artist as an old man – Joseph Helle

“A philosopher,” he wrote in 1944, “is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

The Early Years

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was born in Vienna, at Alleegasse 16 (now Argentinierstraße), on 26 April 1889 at 8.30 in the evening.

Composite photo

“Don’t think, look!” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

The woman with the haunted look staring back out of the photograph has never existed. She is a composite, created by overlaying four different photos of four different faces: three sisters, all middle-aged Austrian women, and their brother, the philosophical genius Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The tragedy of Wittgenstein’s photographs

Two scenes from Derek Jarman’s film ‘Wittgenstein’ (1989)

The House of Wittgenstein here.

Laura Gilpin
(Photo via)

Laura Gilpin (April 22, 1891 – November 30, 1979) was an American photographer known for her photographs of Native Americans, particularly the Navajo and Pueblo, and her Southwestern landscapes.

Just weeks before her death, she leaned out the window of a small plane flying low over the Rio Grande valley to make her last photographs.
Laura Gilpin died on November 30, 1979, at the age of 88.(via)

Laura Gilpin – An Enduring Grace (See Georgia O’Keefe and 5 more photos)

Navajo Roots

“The subject in the photo is Susan Tsosie, my grandmother. Susan is seated on the ground, holding a kid goat and wearing traditional Navajo clothing: a hand-woven shawl draped around her shoulders, silver coins and buttons adorning her blouse and a stunning piece of turquoise jewelry around her neck.”

Dylan and Levon Helm (via)

NYtimes Obit and his homepage. <> <>Dylan responds (Rolling Stones)

Levon was a real voice of America.

He passed away peacefully at 1:30 this afternoon surrounded by his friends and bandmates,” (via)

(So very sad..)

The Band – The Weight <> <> <> Ophelia on PBS

Helm was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1998. At the time, the cost of paying for treatment threatened to leave him homeless. “You got to pick one – pay your medical bills or pay the mortgage,” he said in a 2010 CNN interview. “Most people can’t do both, and I’m not different.” Helm recovered, and his home became the venue for a star-studded weekly concert series, the Midnight Rambles. These gigs led to a creative resurgence and two acclaimed albums, 2007′s Dirt Farmer and 2009′s Electric Dirt.

Jane Fonda and Levon Helm starred in the Dollmaker (youtube full film – more than 2 hours long – see this film if you missed.)

Levon named after Levon Helm.. – Levon by Elton John (We’ll be singing this song…)

The Philosopher
by David Shrigley 2009, painted ceramic plant pot and cacti, 26 x 22 x 37 cm

Marquis de Sade by Man Ray

Lyotard’s Nose De neus van Jean-François Lyotard by Jiri Georg Dokoupil

Magritte Philosopher’s Lamp

Michel Foucault <> <> <> <>Judith Butler <> <> <> Emmanuel Levinas

The Duty of Philosophy? Zizek has the answer.

Cioran

Emil Cioran (wiki) The Melancholy thinker..

Regarding God, Cioran has noted that “without Bach, God would be a complete second rate figure” and that “Bach’s music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded a complete failure”.

William H. Gass called Cioran’s work “a philosophical romance on the modern themes of alienation, absurdity, boredom, futility, decay, the tyranny of history, the vulgarities of change, awareness as agony, reason as disease”. (via wki)

“The amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its profundity”

—E. M. Cioran

( Full film on youtube) Trailer from MUBI

The ground-breaking first feature from the director of Orlando and The Tango Lesson, The Gold Diggers is a key film of early Eighties feminist cinema. Made with an all-woman crew, featuring stunning photography by Babette Magolte and a score by Lindsay Cooper it embraces a radical and experimental narrative structure.

Celeste (Colette Laffont) is a computer clerk in a bank who becomes fascinated by the relationship between gold and power. Ruby (Julie Christie) is an enigmatic film star in quest of her childhood, her memories and the truth about her own identity. As their paths cross they come to sense that there could be a link between the male struggle for economic supremacy and the female ideal of mysterious but impotent beauty.
Sally Potter - the Gold Diggers

Julie Christie

Far from the Madding Crowd (Breathtaking!)

Don’t Look Now

McCabe & Mrs Miller

Away from Her

You can see Darling on youtube

GO Between

Happy birthday to Julie Christie and Lothaire Bluteau (April 14) both made films directed by Sally Potter.

Lothaire Bluteau and Tilda Swinton in Orlando.

I Shot Andy Warhol..

Lotharire Bluteau was terrifc in Black Robe.

Julie Walking Home (A Healer) by Agnieska Holland

Photo of Samuel Beckett by Steve Schapiro

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett was born on Good Friday, April 13, 1906, near Dublin, Ireland. Raised in a middle class, Protestant home, the son of a quantity surveyor and a nurse, he was sent off at the age of 14 to attend the same school which Oscar Wilde had attended. Looking back on his childhood, he once remarked, “I had little talent for happiness.”
Beckett was consistent in his loneliness. The unhappy boy soon grew into an unhappy young man, often so depressed that he stayed in bed until mid afternoon. He was difficult to engage in any lengthy conversation–it took hours and lots of drinks to warm him up–but the women could not resist him. The lonely young poet, however, would not allow anyone to penetrate his solitude. He once remarked, after rejecting advances from James Joyce’s daughter, that he was dead and had no feelings that were human.

Beckett and Giacometti

John Banville on Beckett – Storming Beauty

Barney Rosset and Samuel Beckett

Barney Rossett was his publisher and ex husband of Joan Mitchell.

Samuel Beckett Reading List -1941 -1956

The Temptation to Exist by Emil Cioran: “Great stuff here and there. Must reread his first.”

Lautreamont and Sade by Maurice Blanchot: “Some excellent ideas, or rather starting-points for ideas, and a fair bit of verbiage, to be read quickly, not as a translator does. What emerges from it though is a truly gigantic Sade, jealous of Satan and of his eternal torments, and confronting nature more than with humankind.”

The Castle by Franz Kafka: “I felt at home, too much so – perhaps that is what stopped me from reading on. Case closed there and then.”

Online guide to Samuel Beckett (A Piece of Monologue)