The American Friend - Wim Wenders (1977)

 

“The American Friend (German: Der amerikanische Freund) is a 1977 neo-noir film by Wim Wenders, adapted from the 1974 novel Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith. The film features Dennis Hopper as career criminal Tom Ripley and Bruno Ganz as Jonathan Zimmermann, a terminally ill picture framer whom Ripley coerces into becoming an assassin. The film uses an unusual ‘natural’ language concept: Zimmermann speaks German with his family and his doctor, but English with Ripley and while visiting Paris. Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) is a wealthy American living in Hamburg, Germany. He is involved in an artwork forgery scheme, in which he appears at auctions to bid on forged paintings produced by an accomplice to drive up the price. ...”

Wikipedia

Criterion

NY Times: Wim Wenders’s High Plains Grifter - J. Hoberman (Feb. 12, 2016)

amazon

YouTube: The American Friend - Trailer

Separated by Distance? Send Pressed Flowers

 

“Flower pressing began in the West in earnest during the late 1800s, after trade — and the exchange of ideas — opened with Japan. There, oshibana, the art of arranging flattened dried blooms into ornate compositions on paper, had been part of the culture for centuries. The technique then made its way, albeit in less elaborate form, to America and Britain, where people began pressing and even scrapbooking botanicals they’d collect at home or on holiday. Later, during World War I, the self-soothing craft evolved from a hobby into something more poignant: Soldiers picked wildflowers and weeds growing near the trenches in Europe and mailed them home inside letters as forget-me-nots to their lovers and families. ...”

NY Times

Harry Dean Stanton Day

 

“A character actor who briefly became a star in 1984, appearing in leading roles in Paris, Texas and Repo Man, Harry Dean Stanton (born in Kentucky in 1926) was also part of what made the seventies such a great decade for film, a time when character actors had the heft of leading parts but happened to play on the margins of a movie rather than at its centre. In Sophie Huber’s Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction, writer and actor Sam Shepard talks of the actor’s reservations about playing the main role in Paris, Texas. Yet Shepard couldn’t see any reason why Stanton couldn’t master the role: it is just a character actor getting a bigger part. Shepard has a point but maybe for many actors this wouldn’t have been so, since film often practices a variation on what the novelist EM Forster calls round and flat characters. ...”

Harry Dean Stanton Day

2012 March: Paris, Texas (1984), 2014 August: Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction, 2017 September: Harry Dean Stanton (July 14, 1926 – September 15, 2017) , 2020 April: Harry Dean Stanton - Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain, etc....

Housing Works

Panorama of the City of New York. Photo: Queens Museum.        

“A large chunk of the Queens Museum is taken up by its most famous attraction: the permanently installed and periodically updated to-scale Panorama of the City of New York built for the World’s Fair in 1964. Commissioned by Robert Moses, the urban planner instrumental in engineering a postwar city that catered to an exclusionary class of day-tripping managers as a growing undercommons transitioned to a service or underground economy, its proximity to a current exhibition on housing injustice and urban planning, ‘After the Plaster Foundation, or, Where can we live?,’ makes for a rich historical and discursive combination. The miniature city’s production also roughly coincides with the timeline of the new exhibition, which begins with Jack Smith’s eviction from his SoHo loft (he called it the Plaster Foundation), undoing some of the mythologies about the free and easy lives of bohemian artists in the ’60s. ...”

ARTFORUM

Cross-Device Ambient - Ambalek

“Beautiful cross-device ambient, featuring a standard modular synthesizer setup controlling the more esoteric Plumbutter from the Ciat Lonbarde line of instruments (that’s wooden gadget in the foreground at the start of the video). It sounds like an orchestra tuning up from down the hall in advance of performing an evening impressionist program. It sounds like those orchestral musicians have found a happy degree of ensemble, of near-telepathic collaboration, and decided, spur of the moment, to just go with it, to see where the sinuous sense of collaboration takes them. Lovely lines hint at melody but pass more like wafts of cloud formations in a gentle breeze. The track is titled 'Tethered.' Video originally posted at youtube.com. More from Ambalek, who is based in London, at soundcloud.com/ambalek and instagram.com/_ambalek. This is the latest video I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine live performance of ambient music.”

disquiet (Video)

PLUMBUTTER: A DRUM AND DRAMA MACHINE

YouTube: Peter B. demonstrates Plum Butter | Ciat-Lonbarde

YouTube: Tethered ~~ Plumbutter Marbles

The Myth of North America, in One Painting

 

“The clouds are heavy and black. A grim day for fighting. In the air is the smell of damp, and mortar fire. It’s a little after 10 a.m. on Sept. 13, 1759. The battle is almost over. In the distance, the wounded French soldiers are retreating. And a young general in a red coat is dying far from England, on the other side of the Atlantic. What does history look like? Who gets to write it, in whose name? The Seven Years’ War — what Americans call the French and Indian War — was, in Winston Churchill’s estimation, the true first world war. French and British forces clashed on five continents, from the Caribbean to Senegal to India and the Philippines. ‘The Death of General Wolfe,’ painted by Benjamin West in 1770, depicts the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, outside Quebec City. It was the turning point in a war that would end with the British takeover of French colonies from Quebec to Florida. ...”

NY Times

W - The Death of General Wolfe

Death of General Wolfe” by Benjamin West (Video)

Lou Reed Concert Film Berlin Streaming Free Online for the Next Week

“Last laughs can be sweet, and according to music journalist, Anthony DeCurtis, his friend, the late Lou Reed, ‘reveled’ in the critical drubbing that greeted his 3rd solo album, 1973’s Berlin. Not immediately, however.Berlin, which followed hard on the heels of Reed’s widely adored Transformer, had a painful, protracted delivery. This was due in part due to RCA execs getting cold feet about releasing Reed’s grim concept record as a double album. This necessitated a lot of pruning, a week before deadline.Producer Bob Ezrin, who had planted the idea for a concept album based on a track from Reed’s eponymous first solo effort, was detoxing in the hospital, and thus not present for the final mastering. But much of the hell leading to Berlin’s release was a hell of Reed’s own making. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

YouTube: LOU REED'S BERLIN LIVE AT ST. ANN'S WAREHOUSE 1:21:11

2010 August: Heroin, 2011 June: All Tomorrow's Parties - The Velvet Underground, 2011 June: The Velvet Underground, 2012 November: Songs for Drella - Lou Reed and John Cale, 2013 October: Lou Reed (1942 - 2013), 2014 June: The Bells (1979), 2014 August: New York (1989), 2015 June: Capitol Theatre Passaic, NJ 9/25/1984, 2015 October: The Blue Mask (1982), 2016 March: New Sensations (1984), 2016 May: Coney Island Baby (1976), 2017 March: Celebrating Lou Reed: 1942–2013, 2017 November: Watch Footage of the Velvet Underground Composing..., 2018 February: Street Hassle (1978), 2018 October: Lou Reed at The Ritz (07-16-1986), 2019 February: Lou Reed, John Cale And Nico - Le Bataclan '72 (1972)

Notes from the Bathysphere

William Beebe and Gloria Hollister inspect the bathysphere.

“I’m writing from the outskirts of the small town of Tarapoto, in northeastern Peru. My ostensibly short trip here last March intersected with the declaration of a state of emergency: complete shutdown of domestic travel, strict curfew, international borders sealed. There were expensive ‘humanitarian flights’ requiring government permission to travel to Lima; otherwise, it was impossible to move. This was meant to keep the virus out. By midsummer the situation improved elsewhere while Peru was suddenly in the global epicenter, and lockdown was meant to keep the virus in. Now the situation is reversing again, travel restrictions are loosening, and after eight months, I’m faced with the option of heading home. Before the pandemic, I was living in Harlem, teaching at City College, and working on a book about the writings that remain from the bathysphere dives—strange, poetic texts that constitute the first eyewitness account of the deep ocean. ...”

The Paris Review

W - Bathysphere

YouTube: Bathysphere and Beyond

The 10 Most Philosophical Movie Masterpieces of All Time

 

“’Philosophical’ is a word used so commonly that its definition merits frequent reinforcement. The word philosophy itself is formed from two Greek words: philo, meaning ‘love’ and sophia meaning ‘wisdom’. As the love of wisdom, philosophy encompasses far more than a collection of personal opinions and intricate mental gymnastics. Asking more questions than it answers, true philosophy is never pedantic and may not always seem profound.In the same way, a film can be philosophical to the extent that it aspires toward a love of wisdom and inspires in us the same love. ...”

Taste of Cinema

Robert Ashley as Minimalist By Kyle Gann

“I hope it does not seem merely opportunistic to appear with a paper on Robert Ashley as minimalist just after I have published a book on Ashley. One of the things I find historically fascinating about minimalism is the magnetic field it cast on all sides, attracting some composers and repelling others, to the point that some composers whom we do not consider part of the movement led careers that we cannot adequately describe without alluding to it as explanation. Morton Feldman is certainly one of these, perhaps James Tenney, and also Robert Ashley. ...”

Kyle Gann (Audio)

YouTube: Robert Ashley - Interview (Episode 24)

2008 March: Robert Ashley, 2012 April: Sonic Arts Union, 2012 July: Various - Lovely Little Records, 2013 October: The Old Man Lives in Concrete, 2014 March: Robert Ashley, 1930-2014, 2016 March: Perfect Lives (1977-83), 2016 June: Music Word Fire and I Would Do It Again: The Lessons (1981) , 2019 January: Sound Portraits Radio #15 Robert Ashley w/ Doron Sadjas

A Guide to the Brain-Bending Discography of Post-Punk Giants This Heat

“Over the course of two studio albums, several EPs, and live sessions, the UK group This Heat sought to decondition listeners to traditional song structures. Though the trio had superficial similarities to the post-punk bands that were emerging alongside them in late 1970’s London—spindly guitars, hypnotic vocals, and the studio-as-instrument techniques of dub—they never settled into a single approach to avant-rock deconstruction. Instead, they chose to continually experiment. Interrupting churning grooves with quiet or chaotic passages, their discography is speckled with sound collages, tape loops, and proto-techno trickery. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

2012 December: This Heat

How to Pretend You're in Paris Tonight

Empty embankment on the Seine during a Covid-19 lockdown in Paris on April.

“Paris is a collective fantasy, from the booksellers along the Seine to the gray zinc rooftops of its cream stone buildings. For ages, the city has been the place to turn for lessons in l’art de vivre, the art of living, influencing fashion, philosophy, culture, art and gastronomy around the world. Today, pop-up shops and hipster brunch spots are as much a part of Paris as street lamps and Gothic architecture. But the romance of the city is timeless. ... Take your time contemplating masterpieces and monuments through virtual tours. Get up close to paintings by Renoir and van Gogh at the Musée d’Orsay. Zoom in on the brush strokes of Monet’s Water Lilies in the Musée de l’Orangerie. ... And relish vertiginous views from the Eiffel Tower. ...”

NY Times

Google - Musée d’Orsay

amazon: Paris Movie Walks

 

 Due to the Coronavirus epidemic, the Musée d’Orsay

2018 July: Markets of Paris (2012), 2015 June: Musée d'Orsays, 2014 August: Louvre, 2016 August: The Pocket Louvre: A Visitor's Guide to 500 Works by Claude Mignot, 2018 March: Jay Swanson, 2020 April: Take a Long Virtual Tour of the Louvre in Three High-Definition Videos, 2012 December: Shakespeare and Company, 2016 January: What It's Like to Live Inside the Legendary Paris Bookstore Shakespeare & Co., 2016 September: Shakespeare and Company, Paris - A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart, 2019  December: The Secret Feminist History of Shakespeare and Companys, etc.

This brownstone is an anachronism in Tudor City

“Tudor City belongs firmly in the 20th century. This quiet ‘city within the city’ built on a bluff west of First Avenue between 41st and 43rd Streets consists of 13 residential buildings, almost all reflecting the Tudor Revival style popular in the 1920s. In 1925, Tudor City’s developer, Fred French, bought up five acres of land and former middle class brownstones in the neighborhood—brownstones which by that time had been turned into tenements or carved into apartments, according to a 1926 New York Times story. He bulldozed them to revitalize an area that in the early 1900s had become a slum, putting up modern new ‘efficiency’ units that appealed to young professionals working in Midtown. ...”

Ephemeral New York

Sometimes Our Favorite Sports Need to Love Us Back

Donations to a food bank outside a Newcastle match. Soccer’s billion-dollar business is often disconnected from its far more local connection with its fans.

“Clutching his phone in one hand and his passport in the other, Ruben Gabrielsen sprinted through his apartment. Duty had called, and he would answer. He had even tied a makeshift cape around his neck for the occasion. He would be the one to save his country in its hour of need.A 28-year-old defender playing in France’s second division, Gabrielsen probably would not have chosen these to be the circumstances in which he made his first international appearance. Not long ago, he probably would not have been able to imagine them. ...”

NY Times

Bill Evans - Another Time: The Hilversum Concert (1968)

 

"With so many previously unissued trio recordings by Bill Evans crowding shelves and 'the cloud,' it’s fair to ask whether another archival discovery adds anything of real significance to the piano icon’s legacy—particularly since the latest, Another Time: The Hilversum Concert, comes on the heels of two other Resonance sets from 1968, Live at Art D’Lugoff’s Top of the Gate and Some Other Time: The Lost Session From the Black Forest, as well as Fantasy’s On a Monday Evening, from 1976. The answer, in this case, is a decided yes, for completists and non-completists alike. ..." 

Jazz Times  

Discogs (Video) 

amazon 

YouTube: Another Time 1 / 9

2019 June: The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 - Bill Evan (2005), 2019 November: Some Other Time (2016)

Venice - Jan Morris (1960)

 

“Now that spring is bringing back its gentle warmth, it’s time to go travelling. Specifically, to Venice: a place that often seems like a feat of imagination as much as a real bricks-and-mortar city. A place that is forever being made and remade in fiction by writers as impressive and various as Shakespeare, Byron, Hemingway, Thomas Mann, Evelyn Waugh, Daphne Du Maurier, Goethe, Stendhal, Dante.  ... No one captures this elusive quality better than Jan Morris. We’re going to look at her 1960 classic Venice, as well as exploring the broader literature of Venice and its history. I’m also delighted to say that Jan Morris has agreed to answer questions from you about this book and her long, brilliant career.Just in case you don’t know why this is so very exciting, a quick overview.  ...”

Guardian - April’s Reading group: Venice by Jan Morris

Vanity Fair - Jan Morris Remembers the Magic of Venice, Then and Now

amazon: Venice, Jan Morris

No Papers, No Jobs: The New Street Vendors of Queens

“The stretch of Roosevelt Avenue in Queens teemed with people weaving their way through carts and stands that offered everything from sweet-scented roast corn to masks.The regular roar of the 7 train often drowned out the sound of haggling. On one corner, Cristina Sanchez stood forlornly at a produce stand. She had not sold a single thing. During the pandemic she had lost her job, and then her rented room, triggering a frantic hustle to survive: First she sold produce, then tacos, then produce again. ... She is among the city’s more than half a million undocumented immigrants whose lives have been upended by the pandemic but who are ineligible for most financial assistance, including stimulus money and loans. ...”

NY Times

Atangana Records exhume sound treasures from mythical Guadeloupean studio

“The producer Henri Debs was a real visionary. The creator of Latin biguine, also called Creole salsa, this musical style thrilled the ‘Gran Moun ball’ generation, something we can relive the Mizik la ka dansé compilation. The Debs Studio, ran by Henri Debs in Guadeloupe, recorded the greatest tracks of Latin biguine, also known as Creole salsa. This visionary was addicted to music and production and gave 52 years of his life to Caribbean sounds. The first compilation from the Atangana Records label is the result of a year and a half of listening to his studio’s archives, a long job since they needed to whittle two hundred tracks down to twelve. Get ready to discover the Super Combo, Les Aiglons, Les Maxel’s, Lola Martin, Camille Soprane, Max and Henri, plus many more.  ...”

PAN (Audio)

Cakes and Ale

 

“The club has six members. Maks and I bring the cake. Beth brings drinks. Talia sets out chairs in front of the bookshop. Penelope carries the metal grill and turns the shop sign to CLOSED. Follie, the black dog, goes wild. She jumps and licks and runs in circles. Then she goes in search of an empty bookshelf to curl into. We have a joke about Follie reading all the books inside while the club congregates on the shop terrace, across from the gates to the Luxembourg Gardens. It’s really not that funny. But somehow at a gathering, it can become hysterical. The club is called Cakes and Ale. That might be my favorite of Maugham’s books, though it’s Penelope who came up with the name. She’s been a bookseller for thirty-five years, which means that she’s a master punner. ...”

The Paris Review

W - Cakes and Ale, W. Somerset Maugham

María Berrío

“Based in Brooklyn, María Berrío grew up in Colombia. Her large-scale works, which are meticulously crafted from layers of Japanese paper, reflect on cross-cultural connections and global migration seen through the prism of her own history. Populated predominantly by women, Berrío’s art often appears to propose spaces of refuge or safety, kaleidoscopic utopias which in the past have been inspired in part by South American folklore, where humans and nature coexist in harmony. To these apparently idealised scenes, however, Berrío brings to light the hard realities of present-day politics. ...”

Victoria Miro

Guardian - ‘Like magical realism’: María Berrío on her surreal collages

W - María Berrío

ARTFORUM: From Victoria Miro: María Berrío (Video)

YouTube: Maria Berrio at Praxis - Sep 16, 2017 (Video)

Can America Restore the Rule of Law Without Prosecuting Trump?

“Early in November, as President Trump challenged the integrity of the election with baseless lawsuits, Joe Biden delivered his first speech as president-elect, declaring it a 'time to heal.' It was a phrase that many Americans were surely longing to hear, given the precarious state of the nation’s political culture. But it was also one that carried significant historical weight and possible implications for the future. ... Whether Biden intended to do so, his words provided an early signal about one of the first questions he is going to confront as president: What to do about Donald Trump? Biden faces many daunting challenges — mitigating the ongoing damage from the pandemic, repairing institutions, restoring faith in government — but how to deal with his predecessor’s flagrant and relentless subversion of the rule of law is in many ways the most vexing. Last year, one of Trump’s lawyers, William Consovoy, memorably argued in open court that a sitting president could shoot a man in public and not be prosecuted. ...”

NY Times (Audio)

2020 October: Trump

Robert Wyatt - Nothing Can Stop Us (1982)

“Founding member of art rock group Soft Machine, Robert Wyatt, helped set the tone of the sixties psychedelic scene in the UK. With his distinctive drumming and vocals, Wyatt attracted a massive following across Europe. An accident in 1973 left the drummer paralyzed forcing him to shift efforts on solo recordings. His distinct style of mixing simple and effective keyboard melody lines with poignant lyrics, often filled with personal and political references, have proved both haunting and reflective. Signing to Rough Trade in the early 80s, on the understanding from his former label Virgin that he wouldn't release any lps for a while, Wyatt released a series of singles of cover versions. The set was recorded with a straight, simple, beauty informed by the experience of geopolitics just as the term was being invented. ...”

Holland Tunnel Dive

W - Nothing Can Stop Us (album)

Discogs (Video), amazon

YouTube: nothing can stop us 13 videos

2010 November: Robert Wyatt, 2012 October: Comicopera, 2013 March: The Last Nightingale, 2013 September: Solar Flares Burn for You (2003), 2014 March: Cuckooland (2003), 2014 October: Robert Wyatt Story (BBC Four, 2001), 2014 December: Different Every Time (2014), 2016 March: Interviews (2014), 2016 June: Dondestan (Revisited)(1998), 2016 September: Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard (1975), 2017 January: '68 (2013), 2017 May: Shleep (1997), 2020 January: Rock Bottom (1972)

No Walk Is Ever Wasted

“What are the politics of walking in the city? What are its poetics? In Nadja (1928), André Breton’s great surrealist novel, his autobiographical narrator at one point describes bringing a pile of books to a bar where he has made an arrangement to meet Nadja herself, who is fast becoming the object of his strange, not to say obsessive libidinal and spiritual investments. This pile of books includes a copy of Les pas perdus (1924), The Lost Steps, Breton’s first collection of essays, which he no doubt brings, along with the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), in an attempt both to educate her and aggrandize himself. ...”

The Paris Review

2016: DADA Companion, 2016: The Growing Charm of Dada, 2012 December: Impressionism and Fashion, 2017: How Baudelaire Revolutionized Modern Literature, 2017: The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology - Mary Ann Caws, 2018 May: Europe After the Rain: Watch the Vintage Documentary on the Two Great Art Movements, Dada & Surrealism, 2020 October:  What is Surrealism? (1924)

Constantly Wrong: Filmmaker Kirby Ferguson Makes the Case Against Conspiracy Theories

“Discordian writer and prankster Robert Anton Wilson celebrated conspiracy theories as decentralized power incarnate. ‘Conspiracy is just another name for coalition,’ he has a character say in The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles. According to Wilson, any sufficiently imaginative group of people can make a fiction real. Another statement of his sounds more ominous, read in the light of how we usually think about conspiracy theory: ‘Reality is what you can get away with.’ When historian Richard Hofstadter diagnosed what he called ‘the paranoid style in American politics,’ he was quick to point out that it predated the ‘extreme right-wingers’ of his time by several hundred years. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

2018 October: Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracys, March 2020: Can YouTube Quiet Its Conspiracy Theorists?, 2020 October:  QAnon, Blood Libel, and the Satanic Panic

A Few Words about F. Scott Fitzgerald

“With Fitzgerald as with no one else in American literature save Poe, the biography gets in the way. Never mind that F. Scott Fitzgerald is the author of one exquisite short novel as perfect as anything in our literature and of another longer, more chaotic novel of tremendous emotional power. Never mind that he has written a couple of dozen stories that by any standard deserve the designation of ‘masterful.’ Ignoring those legacies, much of the general public still tends to think of him in connection with the legends of his disordered and difficult life, and to classify him under one convenient stereotype or another. So diminished in stature, Fitzgerald becomes the Chronicler of the Jazz Age, or the Artist in Spite of Himself, or – most prevalent stereotype of all – the Writer as Burnt-Out Case: a man whose tragic course functions as a cautionary tale for more commonsensical aftercomers. ...”

Public Domain Review

2014 January: View the Passport Photos of F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf & Other Cultural Icons, 2014 August: Gatsby to Garp: Modern Masterpieces from the Carter Burden Collection, 2014 November: Lost Generation, 2015 November: The Crack-Up (1945), 2017 December: Living Well Is the Best Revenge By Calvin Tomkins, 2019 August: Three Letters from Switzerland By Zelda Fitzgeralds