Silkscreen. 1973

Otolith the on line literary magazine has just posted a collaboration that me and the poet Paul Dickey. Otholith's has been very supportive of my art over the years, putting my art on the cover of their print issue a few years back. This is the link.

 
http://the-otolith.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/paul-dickey-and-ira-joel-haber-from.html

paintings on paper from the 80's and 90's recently photographed

Such Good Friends. 1971

Such a terrible movie. Otto Preminger what were you thinking?  Otto there are some folks who think that you should have stopped making movies after Laura, but I won’t go that far.  However Otto maybe you should have stopped after Anatomy Of A Murder, and then we would have been spared so many of your turkeys including this morbid and listless tale of adultery and manners among the upper classes of Manhattan that hinges on the forced and labored device of an unfaithful husband who goes into the hospital for an minor operation and winds up in a coma. Loaded with self-conscious and leaden performances especially by Dyan Cannon who looks like a Pug, and James Coco who unconvincely  plays a heterosexual doctor and in what might be one of the most tasteless scenes I’ve ever seen ( certainly in 70’s cinema)  has Coco struggling to get out of his man’s girdle while Cannon goes down on him. There are other gag inducing moments including one where poor Burgess Meredith in one of Cannon’s fantasies dances nude. The film is flat looking and ugly and manages to make one of the most photogenic cities in the world look like shit. Also horrible are the clothes (did we really dress like that in the 70’s) and look for Louise Lasser and Doris Roberts in small bits, that’s if you can make it pass the first 15 minutes of this bomb.  The screenplay as such was written by Elaine May who decided to use the pseudonym “Esther Dale” (smart lady) thus maligning the wonderful character actress for all time.

Notebook drawing April 2012. Paint and collage on notebook paper

End of April 2012 Collage

Teenage Drawings

I just found this sketchbook of mine full of drawings that I did when I was maybe 18 or 19. They are very small measuring only 4 3/4" x 3 3/4" Here are the first 25 with many more to come.

J. Edgar. 2011

I can’t begin to express how lousy this Clint Eastwood directed movie is and who with this undertaking brings a new mature superficiality to American movies.  Eastwood goes back and forth and back and forth in time to tell us his dreary story of J.Edgar Hoover (and our country) without any verve or intensity.  Everything is at the same level, its neither high nor low, just boring and visually dark, which is a trademark with Eastwood. It seems that Eastwood and the screenwriter Dustin Lance Black’s big ah ha moment is the overused mother shtick and they hit us over the head with it. Here we have Hoover’s  very deep, dark and disturbing relationship with his mom who is poorly played by a hideous looking Judi Dench, and how this poisonous relationship explains everything about this unhappy distorted and ugly man and by using this chestnut they avoid any real sense of  understanding who he really was. Maybe if the film had a better script, (this one is dreadful) with some flesh and blood characters, instead of a runway of wax museum figures, each one more jaw dropping then the next, maybe if this film had some truthful and honest performances, that gave us some insights into this complex and dangerous man then maybe we would have a movie worth watching.  The makers of the film are clearly but cowardly interested in the love relationship between Clyde Tolson and Hoover. Tolson who is played by the sweet Armie Hammer who in his later years scenes has more rubber packed on his face to show old age than even Sam Jaffe did as the High Lama in Lost Horizon. He almost doesn’t look human but appears like some weird monster from another planet and you worry that he’s going to crack apart in front of our eyes. Eastwood shows their relationship on tippy toes, he never tells us why Tolson and  Hoover were in love, I mean there must have been something about J.Edgar that Clyde found lovable and appealing, but we never see anything pass between the two that would make us even begin to understand the attraction and why this relationship lasted for so many years. Also wasted is Naomi Watts as Hoover’s loyal secretary, who knows where all the bodies are buried and also gets to wear lots of old age makeup. Eastwood tries to cover a lot of plot, there’s The Lindburg kidnapping, gangsters, communists, peeks at his troubled relationships with the Kennedy’s, Martin Luther King and Eleanor Roosevelt who is finally outed, and other famous figures including (my favorite) Ginger Rogers mother who freaks out J.Edgar when she asks him to dance with her at a swank nightclub. “I don’t want to dance with women” he later tells his Mom, who decides to teach him how to dance while telling him what happens to daffodils “I would rather have a dead son than a daffodil for a son.” The movie is ugly looking, claustrophobic and sloppily made (one scene has Ms. Dench on her death bed, and in the next scene she’s dressed to the nines at a movie premiere in New York City with the boys. Back from the dead as the saying goes.  One of the worst films of 2011.

Some more paintings on paper from the 80's and 90's recently photographed

Notebook Drawing. Collage, ink and paint on notebook paper. April 2012

Some Recent Photographs

Some more paintings on paper from the 80's and 90's recently photographed