Andrei Tarkovsky and Johann Sebastian Bach

Title page of Bach's autograph score [Wikipedia]

Johann Sebastian Bach     

St Matthew Passion   

Andrei Tarkovsky

The Sacrifice

[IMDb]

See also: 

The Mirror (Zerkalo), by Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Tarkovsky: The Sacrifice

Βecause strength is nothing

A day in the life: Jean-Michel Basquiat

[WikiArt.org]

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Horn Players, 1983

Charlie Parker | Dizzy Gillespie

See also: 

Ko-Ko, by Charlie Parker

Charlie Parker and John Coltrane: in pictures

Angelus Novus: Paul Klee and Walter Benjamin

[Wikipedia]

Paul Klee

Angelus Novus, 1920

Walter Benjamin

Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1940

IX 

Mein Flugel ist zum Schwung bereit,

ich kehrte gern zuruck,

denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit,

ich hatte wenig Gluck.

- Gerhard Scholem, "Gruss vom Angelus" 

My wing is ready for flight,

1 would like to turn back.

If I stayed timeless time,

I would have little luck. 

A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Excerpt from "Theses on the Philosophy of History," transl. Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Hanna Arendt (ed.), New York: Schocken Books, 2007, pp. 257-258

Love bears it out even to the edge of doom

Tzortz St., Athens, 24.03.2016

William Shakespeare | Sonnet 116

                                             Let me not to the marriage of true minds
                                             Admit impediments. Love is not love
                                             Which alters when it alteration finds,
                                             Or bends with the remover to remove:
                                             O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
                                             That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
                                             It is the star to every wandering bark,
                                             Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
                                             Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
                                             Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
                                             Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
                                             But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
                                                 If this be error and upon me proved,
                                                 I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Art and social protest: Words Fly Away | Söz Uçar

[Sözcü]

The short film Words Fly Away (Söz Uçar) was directed by Tufan Taştan and is based on a story by Barış Bıçakçı. It refers to Nuriye Gülmen, a professor of literature, and Semih Özakça, a primary school teacher, who are on hunger strike to protest against the dismissal from their jobs and have been arrested and detained by the police in Turkey, as well as to Veli Saçılık, a sociologist, who has also been dismissed and was attacked by the police and hit with dozens of plastic bullets while protesting.

Kitaplardan geliyorlar | They flourished from books

"Nuriye, Semih, Veli..."

Photograph by Altan Gocher [The Guardian]

[Bianet]

Film quotes #9: Amadeus

[The Clinton Street Theater]

Milos Forman | Amadeus

SALIERI: Can you recall no melody of mine? I was the most famous composer in Europe. I wrote forty operas alone! [Suddenly inspired] Here, what about this one? 

[SALIERI begins to play the First Movement: Allegro of Eine kleine Nachtmusik on the piano. FATHER VOGLER instantly responds by singing the melody] 

FATHER VOGLER: [Happily] Yes, I know that! Oh, that's charming! I'm sorry, I didn't know you wrote that. 

SALIERI: I didn't. [Pause] That was Mozart. [Pause] Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Film quotes, #8: Paterson

[IMP Awards]

Jim Jarmusch | Paterson

Another One | Ron Padgett

                                                             When you’re a child

                                                             you learn

                                                             there are three dimensions:

                                                             height, width, and depth.

                                                             Like a shoebox.

                                                             Then later you hear

                                                             there’s a fourth dimension:

                                                             time.

                                                             Hmm.

                                                             Then some say

                                                             there can be five, six, seven…

                                                             I knock off work,

                                                             have a beer

                                                             at the bar.

                                                             I look down at the glass

                                                             and feel glad.

But the sun is coming up anyway

[The Art Institute of Chicago]

Jules Breton | The Song of the Lark, 1884

Bill Murray

Clair de Lune revisited

[Brooklyn Vegan]

Kamasi Washington | The Epic

Claude Debussy | Suite Bergamasque

[Pinterest]

Film quotes #6: A River Runs Through It

[Wikipedia]

A River Runs Through It

Robert Redford | Norman Maclean

But when I am alone in the half-light of the canyon, all existence seems to fade to a being with my soul and memories, and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River, and a four-count rhythm, and the hope that a fish will rise. 

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. 

The river was cut by the world's great flood, and runs over rocks from the basement of time. And some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.  

I am haunted by waters.

Moonrise Kingdom revisited

[Film-Cine]

Wes Anderson | Moonrise Kingdom

Adrian Tomine | 1965

[Adrian Tomine Prints]

Art and social protest: Claire Fontaine & Blockupy

[Occasional Links & Commentary]

Claire Fontaine | Blockupy

@mikrosAlexis

I wanted you to see what real courage is

Harper Lee and Mary Badham [A Writer's Ruminations]

Harper Lee | To Kill A Mockingbird

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.

[Wikiquote]

The Metamorphosis: Franz Kafka & Peter Kuper

[Wikipedia]

Franz Kafka

The Metamorphosis 

If I were to try that with my boss, I'd be thrown out on the spot. Still, who knows whether that mightn't be really good for me. If I didn't hold back for my parents' sake, I would've quit ages ago. I would've gone to the boss and told him just what I think from the bottom of my heart. He would've fallen right off his desk! How weird it is to sit up at the desk and talk down to the employee from way up there. The boss has trouble hearing, so the employee has to step up quite close to him. Anyway, I haven't completely given up that hope yet. Once I've got together the money to pay off the parents' debt to him--that should take another five or six years--I'll do it for sure. Then I'll make the big break. In any case, right now I have to get up. My train leaves at five o'clock." 

Translated by Ian Johnston, Wikisource

Peter Kuper

Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis

[revistaantidoto.com]

[printmag.com]

Click on the images to enlarge

See also:

Before the Law, by Franz Kafka

Give it up!, by Franz Kafka and Peter Kuper

Give it up!, by Franz Kafka and Peter Kuper

[Wikipedia]

Franz Kafka
 Give It Up!

It was very early in the morning, the streets were clean and empty as I journeyed to the train station. As I synchronised my watch with a clock tower I saw that it was already later than I had thought, I must make haste, the shock of this discovery left me unsure of the way, I did not know this city so well, luckily there was a watchman nearby, I walked up to him and breathlessly asked him the way. He smiled and said: "You want to hear the way from me?". "Yes", I said, "as I can not find it myself." "Give it up, give it up", he said and he swung around with the momentum of someone who wanted to be alone with his laughter. 

Translated by Wikisource 

 

Kafka: Give It Up! And Other Short Stories
Illustrated by Peter Kuper

[atomsandauthenticity.tumblr.com]

 [atomsandauthenticity.tumblr.com]

[atomsandauthenticity.tumblr.com]

[atomsandauthenticity.tumblr.com]
Click on the images to enlarge


Peter Kuper
Official Website | Drawger | WW3 Illustrated | WW3 Blog | MAD
PRINT Mag | GRITtv | The Drawn World TV
 

Self Portrait  [drawgner.com]

We learned to whisper almost without sound

guardian.co.uk

The above image was created by Anna and Elena Balbusso for a new edition of Margaret Atwood's pivotal novel The Handmaid's Tale; the title of the post is a quote from chapter one (New York: Anchor Books, 1986, p. 4).

A Grand Central birthday party

Photograph: Betmmann/CORBIS  theatlantic.com

It was one century ago exactly: New York City's Grand Central Terminal opened on 2 February 1913, and so as to commemorate the event, Alan Taylor published some incredible photographs of this iconic urban space in the Atlantic. But hey, you cannot have a real birthday without some music and some dance now, can you? And I've got just the thing: there is a scene in Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King where Parry (Robin Williams), a hallucinating homeless person, observes the shy employee Lydia (Amanda Plummer), with whom he has fallen in love, as she goes to work; and all of a sudden, the main concourse of the Grand Central is turned into a huge ballroom, in what may be seen as one of the most extraordinary visual representations of love in the history of cinema.