Ordinary finds

via - kanamit:

Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript

Barry Feinstein, the rock and roll photographer, was digging through his archives last year when he found a long-forgotten bundle of pictures, dozens of dark and moody snapshots taken of Hollywood in the early 1960s. And tucked next to the photographs was a set of prose poems, written around the same time by an old friend: Bob Dylan.

At the time that he had originally arranged the group of photographs in the 60s, Mr. Feinstein had thought of Dylan, whom he had met earlier on the East Coast. “I asked him as a joke, ‘Wanna come out and maybe write something about these photographs?” Mr. Feinstein said. “So he came out and wrote some text.” Mr. Dylan, then in his 20s, arrived in Hollywood, examined the photographs and wrote his own prose poems to accompany them.

Now, after being neglected in storage for more than 40 years, the text and photographs will be published in November in a collection titled Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript. The photographs in the book were taken during a period in the 1960s when Mr. Feinstein was in his 20s and just a lackey at a Hollywood movie studio. “I was living in California, in Hollywood, working at the studio, and I thought there was something there journalistically in taking these pictures that were not at all glamorous,” Mr. Feinstein said. “They were really the dark side of glamour.”

The result is a collection of vintage photographs that is sometimes dreary and sometimes tongue-in-cheek, snapshots of movie props and roadside stands, topless starlets and headless mannequins. In one photograph a young woman, who is visible only from the ankles down, crouches on Sophia Loren’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, her hand pressed onto the cement. In another photograph, a completely empty parking lot at 20th Century Fox is sardonically marked by a large sign for “Talent.”

(Photo Above: Hollywood, CA, 1959)

Mingus, U.S. Bicentennial show, Lower Manhattan, July 4, 1976
(photo by Tom Marcello)

Grace Slick by Herb Greene

(More than 70 searches have clicked thru to my birthday post for Grace on October 30th, so here is one more…)

Franz Kline by Peter A. Juley… (Smithsonian)

John Cohen:

Robert Frank and Larry Rivers in Conversation on Waterfront, During Filming of “Pull My Daisy”, New York City, 1959

Metropolitan Museum

One more from John Cohen:

Jack Kerouac listening to himself on the radio, 1959

Bram Stoker, Irish writer - famous for authoring the epistolary novel Dracula - was born Nov. 8, 1847 (d. 1912)…

Stoker was fascinated with folklore and conducted years of research before composing Dracula.

Of course the legend of Dracula is a complete fabrication of Stoker’s and actual Transylvanians have never heard of such vampires - except through Stoker’s novel… For them Vlad Dracul, or more commonly Vlad Ţepeş (The Impaler) is a national hero keeping the West safe from Turkish invaders in the 15th C.

Martha Gellhorn, b. Nov. 8, 1908 (d. 1998, suicide) was a war correspondent and novelist, famous perhaps chiefly for being Hemingway’s third wife in the 1940s. She, of course, resented reflected fame and notoriety and preferred to be judged on her own merits as a writer, which were considerable…

She reported on the Spanish Civil War, World War II (where Hemingway had appropriated her press credentials, so that she had to sneak around, talking only to non-ranking soldiers), the Vietnam War, The Six-Day War in 1967 and several other minor conflicts…

Gellhorn was a leftist in terms of politics, but she sympathised with the state of Israel (after witnessing the liberation of Dachau in 1945). Both her parents were secular half-Jews, and Gellhorn was an atheist…

“A self-described “hater”, she attacked fascism, anti-communism, racism, Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the Palestinian and German peoples with equal vigor” (Source) - Feisty!

Quotes:

“Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.”

“Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.”

“It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.”

Alain Delon, one of the best-loved European actors of the 60s and the 70s, and a specimen of charismatic masculine beauty, is 73 today! Delon starred in numerous French and Italian films directed by some of the best in the business, including Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti and Louis Malle.

One of the best English writers of the 1980s and 90s is Japanese-born Kazuo Ishiguro, who was among the wave of so-called ‘Spicy Brits’ that dominated the re-invigoation of the English novel in that period.

Ishiguro won the Booker Prize in 1989 for Remains of the Day, a novel set in a large English country house, where servants and masters alike have to resist the temptation of Fascism, and also come to terms with self-sacrifice versus fulfilment - a classic carpe diem theme.

The book was masterfully adapted for film by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala for Ivory and Merchant, starring Anthony Hopkins as Stevens, the Butler who lets his chance for happiness slip away, and Emma Thompson as the one who offers him human warmth and love…

Ishiguru’s later work has also been short-listed for the Booker, but has not captured readers’ attention to the same extent as Remains…

William Stroud, The Frederick Nale Bakery, Norristown, Pennsylvania 

Daguerreotype, 1850

~~

Early American photographer, William Stroud, was born Nov 8, 1812 in Norristown, Pennsylvania (d. 1889)

~~

“According to an advertisement in the Norristown, Pennsylvania, Register, Stroud—the town’s first resident photographer—opened his daguerreotype studio on September 3, 1850. His advertisements urged clients to “‘call as early in the day as possible … avoid [wearing] light blue, or too much WHITE.’”

- Merry A. Foresta. American Photographs: The First Century (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996).

Earlie Hudnall, Jr. - African-American photographer - is 62 today.

Here: Girl with Flag, 1991

“Hudnall has been described as “arguably the most accurate chronicler of black life over the last twenty years.” His photos from African American communities in Texas, Mississippi, and Georgia tell stories of the universal in the day to day. His work is in numerous collections including the National Museum of American Art and the Smithsonian Institute.” (More from this source)

Click thru for an interview w. Hudnall

Charles Demuth (Nov. 8, 1883 - 1935): I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, 1928 -

Inspired by:

The Great Figure (William Carlos Williams)

Among the rain

and lights

I saw the figure 5

in gold

on a red

firetruck

moving

tense

unheeded

to gong clangs

siren howls

and wheels rumbling

through the dark city

Another example of Charles Demuth’s art - this time from his own museum, run by The Demuth Foundation…

Aviariste, watercolour, 1915

Demuth’s delicate watercolours and his later oil paintings, in a new style developed by him - dubbed Precisionism - together form a very improtant body of work within American art of the first third of the 20th C.

Demuth’s friendship with many writers and artists, including his firm friendship with William Carlos Williams, Alfred Stieglitz and Marsden Hartley puts him at the center of modernist and avant-garde circles in the US and in Paris in the 20s and 30s.

Love, love, love… Homage to Gertrude Stein, 1928

Click thru for many works by Demuth at Wikimedia

In 1963, Robert Indiana, pop artist and painter (b. 1928), completed the circle with this version of the Figure 5…

Indiana has collaborated with poet Robert Creeley on the book American Dream

(Click thru to view the book online at 2River.org)

Robert Creeley

Love

One can’t know love like a tree in the ground
nor can one determine where it will be found.
One day it’s there, the next day gone.

But that seems a bleak before and after.
Best think of it as another matter,
which comes simply by changing one letter.

Blue of sky, green of earth’s cover,
blood’s red pulse, these go together,
make place for love now and forever.

(Illu. Robert Indiana, from American Dream)

John Sirica, American artist - chiefly, print maker - would have been 72 today, but died in March 2008…

Here, his portrait of Goya, 1973 (Smithsonian)

Francisco Goya: The Dog (1820?) - Prado, Madrid

(Click thru for an article on controversial new findings re. the authenticity of Goya’s “”Black Paintings)

Dig this cool mock-LP cover by Marco Acevedo…

(via America Adrift and Bag News Notes)

I love the idea of a Blue Vote Records!