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Wave to Orlando

January 25th, 2012


Tilda Swinton on Virginia Woolf (Telegraph)

When Tilda Swinton first discovered Virginia Woolf’s ‘Orlando’, she embraced it as a practical guide to living. Fifteen years later she played the gender-hopping hero on screen. Now, as a new edition is published, the actress maps the obsessions behind Woolf’s revolutionary novel

  • Roger Fry’s portrait painting of Virginia Woolf

  • Virginia Via
    25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941


  • Painting of Virginia Woolf by her sister Vanessa Bell

  • Recently departed Etta James was also born on Jan 25.

  • Etta James – The Sky is Crying

    January 24th, 2012

    Etta James January 25, 1938 – January 20, 2012
    She would have been 74 years old today.

    Funeral set for Saturday

  • Etta James her lonely sound

    She was an accident, born to a fourteen-year-old black girl in Depression-era Los Angeles. She never knew her father, but thought that he might have been the famous white pool player, Rudolf “Minnesota Fats” Wanderone, whom she met in the nineteen-eighties.

    Salon five great youtube moments

  • Filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos hit by a motorcycle. R.I.P

    Happy Dragon New Year

    January 22nd, 2012

    Happy birthday Jim Jarmusch. Jan 22, 1953. he is a Water Dragon.

    Some trivia from (IMDB )

  • Once almost died from eating wild mushrooms, which resulted in an interest in the study of mushroom.
  • Father worked at the Goodrich tire plant in Akron, Ohio. Mother reviewed films for the Akron Beacon Journal.
  • Although Broken Flowers (2005) came out after Lost in Translation (2003), Jarmusch wrote the script exclusively for Bill Murray before Sofia Coppola.
  • (via)

    On why Jim Jarmusch dedicated “Broken Flowers” to Jean Eustache.

    There’s something in him that I want to carry in myself: making a film the way you choose to make it, true to yourself without being concerned with the marketplace or anyone’s expectations – just the pure spirit of wanting to express something in your own style. That’s very important to me.(via)

    Jim Jarmusch is working on a new film – a vampire movie no less! – featuring Tilda Swinton, Michael Fassbender, Mia Wasikowska and John Hurt, to be shot in Germany, Morocco and Detroit in early 2012. (wiki)

    On his planned Stooges film (youtube)

    What happend to his Nikola Tesla Opera?

    Music sucks in 99% of commercial films.. in complete agreement here with Jim Jarmusch on(Youtube)


    (Repost – his Mitchum stories are too funny.)

    Thunder Road Robert Mitchum..

    J.J. in Bored to death

    A quote from J.J..

    The beauty of life is in small details, not in big events.

    Ozu Yasujiro (Jim visited his grave in Japan)

    Not dead, no broken flowers, no stranger in paradise.. mystery train? maybe..
    definetely coffee and cigarattes..and let’s spend a night on earth driving taxis all over the world.

    Jan 22 birthday people
    Antonio Gramasci

    Dennis Oppenheim – One year after his death

    January 21st, 2012

    “Device to Root out Evil” (via JTWINE) Dennis Oppenheim passed away a year ago.


    Stab Bats 1991

  • Two objects

    Museum in Tokyo (Photo by Mario A )

    The Museum of Contemp. Art Tokyo (MOT) shows his work in a separate room, a smart gesture. (Thanks to Mario A )


    Buildings Poking Their Eyes Out
    1997 2’ x 16’ x 5’
    A: One Eye Out, B: Two Eyes Out, C: Four Eyes Out
    Corrugated fiberglass, rolled galvanized metal, wax, fiberboard, pigments
    Photo: Erma Estwick

    Dennis Oppenheim (Previous post has many links to interviews, his bio etc)

    Iron Boat

    Stop SOPA

    January 18th, 2012

    SOPA black out protest makes history – Amy Goodman
    Artists opposing the PROTECT-IP / SOPA Act

    If you hate big government – no 2 SOPA

    Take action - google message here

    We answer your questions during wiki black out.

    See more quote from Emmanuel Levinas

    Jan Groover R.I.P

    January 12th, 2012

    Jan Groover dies at 68. (NYtimes)

    Jan Groover, whose relentlessly formal still lifes of mundane objects brought a sense of Renaissance stateliness to postmodern photography, died on Jan. 1 in Montpon-Ménestérol, France, where she had lived since 1991. She was 68.

    Using a variety of camera formats to affect perception and plane, Jan Groover creates complex, abstract spatial arrangements in her still-life, portrait, and landscape photography. Her images demonstrate her craftsmanship in the darkroom with their finely-wrought delicacy. A painter by training, Groover makes reference to art history in her photographs, from Renaissance perspective drawings to Cezanne’s tabletops.

    Pears from Sals Blog (Still life research)

    Vintage Kitchen Still Life

    Triptych (SFMOMA)

    Emmanuel Levinas

    January 11th, 2012

  • Emmanuel Levinas

    12 January 1906

    His work is based on the ethics of the Other or, in Levinas’ terms, on “ethics as first philosophy”. For Levinas, the Other is not knowable and cannot be made into an object of the self, as is done by traditional metaphysics

    Levinas Text(via)

    Other birthdays
    Alice James Alice James, wife of William James by Sargent or or Mrs William James
    Water color portrait by John Singer Sargent
    Born On January 12, 1856

    Wiiliam James January 11, 1842

    Eve Arnold R.I.P

    January 7th, 2012

    Eve Arnold a famous Magnum photographer who showed Marilyn reading James Joyce died at 99.

    Parting Glance (lens.blogs NYtimes obit)

    “Eve was a dynamo,” Ms. Meiselas said. “She might have been small and compact, but she was just unbelievably productive and hugely generous.”
    She was outspoken, too. “She didn’t hold back in a gang of men. She was very present and encouraging and generous, in a sense — to me as a young woman, but also in a collective spirit.”

    Eve Arnold self-portrait

    Malcolm X

    See Andy Warhol photos from Magnum collection (see him exercising, using toilet as his chair)

    Guardian selection

    More photos

    Space Talk

    January 3rd, 2012

    Stephen Colbert interviews Neils deGrasse Tyson

  • Lunar Tom Sachs

  • Black hole lensing Moving Side by Side

  • Tom Sachs Nasa

  • Xin Nian Kuai Le 2012

    December 31st, 2011

  • Happy New Year 2012

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  • Helen Frankenthaler R.I.P

    December 28th, 2011

    Slipper dance or shuffle.

    Helen Frankenthaler died at 83

    Like Diane Arbus Helen Frankenthaler came from a wealthy family, unlike Arbus, Helen was at home in the 1% world enjoying access to influential people, to a life of comfort and, to laughter.

    With Motherwell
    (Motherwell upstairs and Helen below) As the Wifewell of Robert Motherwell, she enjoyed entertaining guests, threw a big party. They were the Olivier and Vivien of the art world, elegant, erudite (Motherwell was) and grand.
    Helen and Motherwell divorced, Nancy Spero and Leon Golub they were not.. (an enduring activists/artists who painted violence.)

    Telegraph obit

    In 1953 Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland were both profoundly influenced by Helen Frankenthaler’s stain paintings they were brought to her studio in 1953 by critic Clement Greenberg her lover at the time, the artist was not there.
    If Helen did not date Clement what would have happend to Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis?

    (James Brooks was amongst the first abstract expressionists to use staining as an important technique. According to Carter Ratcliff) See his gorgeous paintings..

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    NYtimes – Grace GluecK

    In 1972, Ms. Frankenthaler made a less successful foray into sculpture, spending two weeks at Mr. Caro’s London studio. With no experience in the medium but aided by a skilled assistant, she welded together found steel parts in a way that evoked the work of David Smith.

    Although she enjoyed the experience, she did not repeat it. Knoedler gave the work its first public showing in 2006.

    Ward Schumaker on Helen’s Sculpture (via email).

    “For a very long time I had a photo of one of her sculptures in my wall, a bronze, looking a bit like a blown up film canister, and no one recognized that it was her work. But when told, many would gasp and sat, now, I really like that, I didn’t know she did anything like that , so lovely, amazing, really. I like many of her paintings but, as with Twombly, I prefer the sculptures.
    “I think this is hers, but it’s not the piece I fell in love with.”

    Collection of obits here.. including a scathing review by Charlie Finch. .. no surprise there.. he likes to pinch.

    Over on Artnet, Charlie Finch declares that Ms. Frankenthaler “was another one of those painters who, like the recently deceased George Tooker, basically made one painting,” Mountains and Sea (1952)—which, he writes, “inspired so many lazy imitations in studios across the world, including that of Frankenthaler herself.”

    LA Obit

    Frankenthaler did take a highly public stance during the late 1980s “culture wars” that eventually led to deep budget cuts for the National Endowment for the Arts and a ban on grants to individual artists that still persists. At the time, she was a presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts, which advises the NEA’s chairman.
    In a 1989 commentary for the New York Times, she wrote that, while “censorship and government interference in the directions and standards of art are dangerous and not part of the democratic process,” controversial grants to Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe and others reflected a trend in which the NEA was supporting work “of increasingly dubious quality. Is the council, once a helping hand, now beginning to spawn an art monster? Do we lose art … in the guise of endorsing experimentation?”

    Champagne & 4 -Leaf Clovers

    December 23rd, 2011


    Marilyn Photos

    Photographer Len Steckler shot the black-and-white images of Monroe when she unexpectedly arrived at his apartment in December, 1961.
    She was visiting his friend, Pulitzer-prize winning poet Carl Sandburg
    As we know, Marilyn loved older men, she loved the intellectuals — and Carl was very parental with her,’ said Steckler. ‘It was a lovely thing to see.’

    Carl and Marilyn

    The actress died in August, 1962, and Sandburg, who won Pulitzer prizes for his poetry and for a biography of Abraham Lincoln, died seven years later.


    My Best Marilyn – It arrived, I drank it, and I was gayer.

    Jessica Hines who found Marilyn’s letter also visited Carl Sandburg’s home.

    Thinking of Carl Sandburg and Marilyn Monroe (from the video shared by Fung-Lin), I remembered finding these two 4-leaf clovers in the yard there. Good memory. Hope they are still bringing me good luck.

    Visit Jessica Hines‘s homepage which includes her award winning photography project “My Brother’s War” and many other intriguing projects.

  • What did Jesus do ? by Adam Gopnik + Mr. Blank and Jesus

    Nuclear Christmas Tree in reverse (made in the 70′s by Tetsumi Kudo )

    Happy Holidays!