New piece. Mixed on Paper. January 2024

 

Chita Rivera 1933-2024

 

Sandra Milo 1933-2024

 Memorable

It's All About The Food

Midnight Diner & Tokyo Stories

Popular and sweet series based on a Manga Comic about a 12 seat diner that is only open from 12 midnight to 7 A.M. Owned and operated by one man, “the master” who does all the cooking with ingredients he has on hand. The master is a mystery and what is that scar on his face about but he is good natured, and always ready to give advice to his steady group of customers along with his tasty dishes. Each episode runs only about 25 minutes and includes charm along with simple recipes for the dishes that are also characters in the shows.

The Makanai Cooking For The Maiko House

Two young girls leave their hometown for kyoto to become apprentices at a geisha house. Only one of them makes the grade but the other one talks her way into becoming the cook for the house. Also based on a Manga, this is another sweet series mixing pathos with food. Full of rich details on the routines of the young women including the costumes and styles of their lives along with all that cooking and food. You can almost smell the ingredients cooking and you can even get the recipes on line for all the dishes served.

Samurai Gourmet

Another short and sweet series mixing life and food. The episodes are only about 20 minutes long and are about a recently retired man played by Naoto Takenaka with a much younger wife (at first I thought it was his daughter) who needs to find something to do with all his free time. His solution is to take walks and to have lunch at various restaurants he stumbles upon. In his wanderings he images a fantasy Samurai who gives him inspiration and helpful advice on his daily journeys as Naoto remembers past events from his life brought on by what he is eating. It doesn't get more charming than this delightful series.

Kantaro The Sweet Tooth Salaryman

Maga is once again the source of a delicious Netflix series about food, this one is all on deserts. The plot is easy. A reliable and top notch salesman for a book publisher has a sweet tooth passion and is secretly the author of a popular blog on deserts and the cafes and restaurants that serve them. He rushes through his business visits to bookstores so he can get to well known and real cafes and restaurants where he can relish and sooth himself with gorgeous looking and tasting cakes, ices, and other delectables where he melts into orgasmic reactions to them. Played by the marvelous actor Matsuya Onoe who to my mind is a comic genius. His mentioned reactions reduced me to howls of laughter along with desires for what he's eating. There are also bizarre and hallucinatory fantasies in which the actors have giant cherries or melons for heads or blast off into outer-space while doing wild dance numbers. Again these are short pieces maybe 25 minutes each but brimming with pop color and images along with Onoe giving us some history about each desert and the famous cafes that serve them. It's hard to read Kantaro as a person. He has no interest in women or the female co-workers who drool after him like he drools after his beloved deserts, and his relationship with his mother in one episode is puzzling. He is gay or asexual? I do know that he loves and lusts after those deserts.

Mixed on paper. January 2024

 

Carl Andre 1935-2024

I had my ups and downs with him, he once threw a wine glass at me in a drunken rage and then there is that still stinging death.

Norman Jewison 1926-2024

 

Robert Whitman 1935-2024

 

Winter collage on notebook paper January 2024

 

Postcard from "postcards from the edge." Sold

 

Midnight 1939

 

“There is Paramount Paris and metro Paris and of course the real Paris. Paramount's is the most Parisian of all.” Ernst Lubitsch

“I've been to Paris, France, and I've been to Paris, Paramount. Paris Paramount is better.”-Ernst Lubitsch

Another fairy tale screw ball comedy from the golden age and indeed golden year of Hollywood. This one has a screenplay by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett with direction by Mitchell Leisen. It opens on a rainy night in Paris as a train pulls in from Monte Carlo and sleeping on it is a well dressed but down on her luck showgirl Claudette Colbert. Claudette has just escaped from Monte Carlo with only the shimmering gold lame Irene gown on her back and no money or luggage. She lost her dough in the casinos and her luggage wound up hocked in a pawn shop I guess to get train fare.

Heavy rain coming down, Claudette is woken up and is on her own when Don Ameche handsome smooth and gentle playing a Hungarian taxi driver asks her if she needs a lift. Well of course she needs a lift and it kinda turns out to be the lift of her life. Thinking that Don is putting the make on her, and could that be so bad Claudette? She escapes his cab and finds herself by mistake at a posh high society party run by a bored Hedda Hopper, yes that Hedda Hopper where Claudette gives her pawn ticket to the guard to get in from the rain.

Chaos of a gentle and funny kind takes place here and it doesn't let up until “the end” flashes across the screen painted on court house doors. Colbert is so smooth and silky like that golden gown she wears in the early part of the film, and is her usual wonderful self. Supposedly she gave everyone problems with her famous only being filmed on her left side of her face, but who cares she was great from every side.

Coming to her rescue at the party is her fairy godfather played with glee and relish by John Barrymore whose screen wife is played perfectly by Mary Astor and who when very young was a secret lover of his one of her many life time scandals. Mary is carrying on with Francis Lederer.and to get even with them Barrymore comes up with a perfectly ludicrous but delicious plan to spoil it for Mary and Francis by making Claudette play up to Francis and steal him away from Mary.

Fairy godfather Barrymore gets her a suite at the Ritz, lots of clothes and lots money to take part in this charade and makes sure that Claudette shows up at their mansion in Versailles for a blow out party where the guests do the conga while have conversations at the same time. Meanwhile Don and his taxi pals are looking high and low for Claudette and of course he locates her at the mansion where he drives up in his taxi and in a tux and crashes the bash claiming he is Claudette's husband a Hungarian baron. It goes uphill from here including a laugh out loud buffet breakfast scene where Claudette tries to convince Mary and the others that Don is quite mad and is from a long line of madness.

“ When I married, I didn't realize that in the Czerny family there was a streak of... shall we say, eccentricity? And yet, I had warning. Why else should his grandfather have sent me, as an engagement present, one roller skate - covered with Thousand Island dressing?”

The rest of the cast includes Elaine Barrie as the bitchy high fashion milliner who was married to Barrymore at the time and Rex O' Malley one of Hollywood's best fey actors who did a few movies mainly for George Cukor, but here he kinda plays it straight and very well indeed as a pal of Astor's. The screenplay is fast loose and very funny with many memorable lines and moments in time. Leisen directed with a smooth hand and had quite the career including art director and costume designer before directing such hits as “Hold Back The Dawn”, “Easy Living”, “Remember The Night” and “To Each His Own”. A known and “notorious” gay and bi man who was married while carrying on with men, he had to put up with the raging homophobia of the day including from several of his screenwriters including Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett and Preston Sturges who disguised their prejudices behind not liking how he was directing their scripts. Rubbish. It doesn't get any better than this. One of the best films of 1939.

winter collage mixed on notebook paper january 2024

 

Three new collages January 2024.

 

Joyce Randolph 1924-2024

 

First new piece of 2024.

 

Marisa Pavan 1932-2023

 

Three artists have passed this week and last. I knew 2 of them. Elke Solomon ?-2024 Alexis Smith 1949-2024 Martha Diamond 1944-2024

 

Glynis Johns 1923-2024 a life well lived

 

Maurice Hines 1943-2023

 

My art in the home of a collector