Grape Lights

Drag City has put out a Curtis Harrington bio called Nice Guys Don't Work in Hollywood . From Drag City: Starting in the midst of film's 1940s avant-garde heyday, Harrington made two deeply intuitive and evocative films: Fragment of Seeking, and Picnic, which were heralded by the likes of Maya Deren and Christopher Isherwood. He became a Hollywood insider, working as assistant for Jerry Wald while still keeping a foot in the world of experimental film, collaborating with Kenneth Anger on Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. As a director, he made the cult classic Night Tide, worked in the Roger Corman stable, and helmed several distinctive horror films including Games and What's the Matter With Helen? In the 1980s he began what he called his descent down the "slippery slope" of television work and soon found himself directing episodes of Charlie's Angels and Dynasty.

DIE ANDERE SEITE DES MONDES : CLAUDE CAHUN, AUTOPORTRAIT, 1927, FOTOGRAFIE, SILBERGELATINEABZUG, 10,4 X 7,6 CM, MUSÉE D'ART MODERNE DE LA VILLE DE PARIS, © JERSEY HERITAGE TRUST Claude Cahun, my latest mindmelt

From Light-Saraf Films : Calvin Black was a folk artist who lived in California's Mojave Desert and created more than 80 life-size female dolls, each with its own personality, function, and costume. He also built the "Bird Cage Theater," where the dolls perform and sing in voices recorded by the artist. The film works on two levels. One is the documentation of the artist's legacy and commentary on women: grotesque female figures moving in the desert wind and the theater with its frozen "actresses," protected by his widow from a world she views as hostile. The other is the re-creation of the artist's vision through the magic of film, as the camera enables the dolls to move and sing and brings theater to life as the artist imagined it.

Me & Bruce & Art - 1966 Ben Van Meter "In 1966 Uncle Art Linkletter invited Bruce Conner and me to be on his show and give him the word about the difference between Art and Dirty Movies. It was one of those typical L.A. trips. The guy that drove us to and from the airport talked non stop about the laws on buying fully automatic weapons." - Ben Van Meter

Berlin-Charlottenburg, April 10, 1917 Dear Sir, You made me unhappy. I bought your "Metamorphosis" as a gift for my cousin. But, she is incapable of understanding the story. My cousin gave it to her mother who doesn't understand it either. The mother gave the book to my other cousin, who also didn't find an explanation. Now they have written to me: They expect me to explain the story to them as I am the doctor in the family. But I am at a loss. Sir! I have spent months in the trenches exchanging blows with the Russians without batting an eyelid. But I could not stand losing my good name with my cousins. Only you can help me. You must do it, as you are the one who landed me in this mess. So please tell me what my cousin should think about "Metamorphosis." Most respectfully yours, Dr. Siegfried Wolff

“Documentary should not be simply about film or art—it should have a direct relationship with the reality that we live in every day, a direct relationship with social work. From this it follows that one person making a documentary film is not important; what is important is many people working together for its sake.” - Wu Wenguang Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers (1990):

Wittgenstein Tractatus (1992) - Péter Forgács

Cannot wait to see this....

Patrick Bokanowski's La femme qui se poudre (1972)

Julio Cortázar Axolotl (1956) There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl. I got to them by chance one spring morning when Paris was spreading its peacock tail after a wintry Lent. I was heading down the boulevard Port-Royal, then I took Saint-Marcel and L'Hôpital and saw green among all that grey and remembered the lions. I was friend of the lions and panthers, but had never gone into the dark, humid building that was the aquarium. I left my bike against tbe gratings and went to look at the tulips. The lions were sad and ugly and my panther was asleep. I decided on the aquarium, looked obliquely at banal fish until, unexpectedly, I hit it off with the axolotls. I stayed watching them for an hour and left, unable to think of anything else. In the library at Sainte-Geneviève, I consulted

Margaret Tait's stunningly beautiful A Portrait of Ga (1952). -Thanks to der Blue Angel for pointing this short film out to me

ぜんまい少女箱人形 Windup Girl Dolls in a Box (ぜんまい少女箱人形), by Takato Yamamoto (2004). Takato Yamamoto feels like Aubrey Beardsley illustrating a Lewis Carrol fable as an Art Nouveau Shunga hand scroll.

After several years of searching, I finally learned the name of the painter and the title of the work I noticed in The Limits of Control . Very little is available in English on Cristóbal Ruiz Pulido, but it was his painting, a portrait of his daughter in a hallway, that triggered a need to know more about his work. A substantial article in Spanish can be found here . Cristóbal Ruiz Pulido, painter and poet, was born in 1881 in Villacarrillo, a city in the south-central province Jaén in Spain. He studied at the School of Fine Arts, Cordoba with Rafael Romero Barros and then in San Fernando in Madrid with Alejandro Ferrant. From 1902 to 1914 he lived in France, Belgium and Holland, studying under Jean-Paul Laurens at the Académie Julian in Paris. In 1910 he participated in the National Exhibition of Fine Arts. In 1917 he won third prize, and in 1920 Tierras de labor won second prize. In 1925 he participated in the exhibition and in the manifesto of the Iberian Artists Hall,

A w oodcut by Aoki Shukuya (1737-1802) 青木夙夜  from 解屍編 / 河口信任子遠著 (Complete notes on the dissection of cadavers) More can be found HERE