Robert Venturi 1925-2018

Arthur Mitchell 1934-2018

Niveous Magazine

Niveous Magazine has just published 3 of my works on paper. You can view them by clicking on the link and browsing through the issue.


https://issuu.com/niveousmagazine/docs/edition_1

Works on paper September 2018

John Wilcock 1927-2018

Sorry to learn of John's passing. He was probably the first person to recognize my art when he published many of my young collages in his "Other Scenes" underground newspaper. I was barely 20 and it was a great introduction for me into the "glamorous" New York Art world. It began as a contest the winner would get to do the whole newspaper,but at the last minute John changed his mind and I had to share it with a few other artists. He spread the work out over months and I was still pleased. I haven't seen John in decades but remember how pleased he was when we finally met. Thank you John and R.I.P.

Creaddictive

This is new to me. Found it while browsing on line. Includes images of my art, links, and bio info.

http://creaddictive.com/artist/ira-joel-haber/

Collages September 2018

Burt Reynolds 1936-2018

Oddball

Oddball has posted an old collage of mine from 1994 along with a poem by edgar ted davis read and see it at this link.
https://oddballmagazine.com/2018/09/04/poem-by-edgar-ted-davis/

Last notebook drawing of the summer 2018

Stand Clear Of The Closing Doors. 2014

               A small stunning gem of a movie that hopefully will move you as much as it moved me. Ricky a 13-year-old Latino boy with asperger’s syndrome lives with his hard working mom and slightly older sister whose head is up in the clouds and whose only concern is what costume to wear on Halloween. One day Ricky who is having trouble in school and needs a lot of care decides to take leave of all this and follows a guy with a dragon emblem on the back of his jacket and heads out on a journey on the New York City subway system.  The boy is amazing, smart, charming and talented, we get small glimpses of his beautiful complex drawings which include dragons (which helps to explain his following the young man with the dragon jacket) & sea life especially fish.    His father is not with the family who by the way are illegal immigrants but upstate working at a job, and his mom works hard long hours cleaning rich people’s houses. His sister is charged with watching him, and picking Ricky up at school, but as I indicated she is a typically self-involved teenager, and is lax and lazy when it comes to her brother. They live far out in Rockaway, a desolate ugly place next to a beautiful beach and this is one of the places Ricky loves, along with the neighborhood sneaker store, and these are the first two places his frantic mom goes looking for her missing boy.  Ricky takes to the subway and rides and rides and this is where most of the film takes place and will be familiar and sometimes worrisome to any New Yorker no only in real life but also in the film. On his journey he meets one or two kind people or as is usually the case with the subway, people who are self involved in their own lives and worries to notice let alone care about a young boy riding the beast. The film has a very authentic feel to it, especially in the candid scenes in the subway and around the Rockaway area, and is cast with many non actors including Jesus Sanchez Velez who plays Ricky and has Asperger’s Syndrome himself. This gives his performance extra zest and a doze of reality. The film was underway in its shooting when Hurricane Sandy hit and it plays a part in the film, but does not take it over and the ending should bring a smile to your face. Directed by Sam Fleischner with quiet assurance and technique this is a film to search out for viewing.  

Paul Taylor 1930-2018

So many greats have passed lately, but the orange pile of shit still walks this earth. Unfair.

Notebook drawing Late August 2018

Neil Simon 1927-2018

Lean On Pete 2018

What’s with all these horse movies lately? I’m not complaining mind you and this one is a beaut and was a pleasure to watch, a gift I might say. Starring a new young actor Charlie Plummer (no relation to Christopher) as a 15 year old kid also named Charley who is trying to keep his head above water, living poor on the far outskirts of Portland with his runaround womanizer hard drinking dad who clearly loves Charley dearly. This is a good kid, you immediately take to him and the sadness that surrounds him also surrounds us.
One day as he is out jogging he comes across a local down and out racetrack and meets up with Steve Buscemi a horse owner who is also down and out. Buscemi is cranky, and crinkly and in a role that might have been played by Walter Brennan years back and shows us why he is one of the best actors around. Buscemi needs help and soon takes on Charley as his all around helper with the horses and anything else that needs fixing. Charley takes to one of the horses Lean On Pete who has seen better days and is not doing so great. The two of them strike up a deep friendship that moves the story forward. Charley loves Lean On Pete and that’s what the movie is about their love affair and Charley’s tough complex journey to find a place in this world for the two of them. Without giving much away I will say that its a sometimes a tough nut for Charley and Lean On. There are some tragic loses throughout and one or two made me gasp out loud but I wiped away the few tears and continued on. The journey through this vast beautiful landscape takes the young man horse on what might be called Picaresque and some of his adventures could be right out of Dickens if he lived and wrote in the 21st century. Also in the film is Chloe Sevigny as a tough as nails female jockey, and the direction is by Andrew Haigh who directed two other well received films “Weekend” and “45 Years” One of the ten best films of the year.

Barbara Harris 1935-2018

I'm terribly sad to learn of the passing of one of my favorite actresses. This hurts. I first discovered her in the movie A Thousand Clowns and fell in love with her. I saw her on Broadway in the Apple Tree, and in the early 70's I was at an intimate art world party and was at the buffet table when I turned and there she was. She was approachable but I froze like a fool and passed up a chance to swoon all over her. And the pile of shit still walks this earth.

BlacKkKlansman 2018

I’ve never been a big fan of Spike Lee’s films and I have to say that I have mixed feelings about his latest joint which I saw the other day. Its getting good reviews and it seems to be a mild box office success gearing itself up to maybe finally win Lee that Oscar that has alluded him for all these years.

Based on the memoirs of Ron Stallworth who was the first African American to join the Colorado Springs police force in the mid 70’s and is played well by John David Washington, and yes he’s Denzel’s son. No sooner than he’s gotten his new position that he hatches an outrageous plan to infiltrate the local KKK chapter with the help of his fellow officer played by Adam Driver.

Much is made of the fact that Driver is a Jew, (made up for the movie) so we have a perfect duo of maligned minorities geared up to take on the evil forces of the Klan. Driver will play Stallworth in action with the klan while the black Stallworth will be behind the curtain and on the phone pulling the strings and punking the members of the klan including the leader of the pack David Duke who falls for the ploy hook line and stinker.

The film is full of stereotypes on both sides of the fence, there are the good cops and bad cops and the small chapter of the klan bake are made up of simpleton’s and morons. This is not surprising and all of this plays into our notion of this noxious vile group. Especially nasty is the character of the overweight dumb wife of one of the leaders of the group, an easy target for us to hate and revile.

Lee plays with our emotions and much of the film is very upsetting to watch. He has Stallworth forming a love interest (made up) with Patrice Dumas the president of the local black power student group, and this allows for lots of afro hair styles and more simplistic and obvious scenes of group meetings, police harassment and a good dance number at a black nightclub.

There is also a lovely montage of good looking students (black is beautiful is underlined in this scene) listening to Stokeley Carmichael now known as Kwame Ture giving a fiery speech to them. Lee who knows his movie history opens the film with a clip of the brilliant overhead shot of Vivien Leigh as Scarlet O’ Hara wandering among the dead and wounded confederates in the railroad depot as the camera sways to a tattered confederate flag, and then clips from “Birth Of A Nation” which repeats itself later on in the movie at a showing of the film in which members of the klan eat popcorn and holler and hoot it up as the blacks (white actors in blackface) are tormented by the early klan on horseback.

The “Gone With The Wind” shot is later recalled later in the film as Stallworth secretly visits a klan shooting range where he comes upon a target which we see is a metal cutout full of bullet holes of a black man in silhouette running away, a mockery of a Kara Walker work perhaps and as the camera pulls away we see many of these targets as the music swells and we are left with a feeling of repulsion and sadness. Lee himself over the years has been accused of being both anti-Semitic and homophobic in some of his films including “School Daze” and “Mo Better Blues” but I would have to withhold any judgments until I see these films again.

In the meantime we have his KKK movie and there is no doubt about where he stands, ending the film with actual footage from the Charlottesville disaster, (even more frightening on the large screen) and the traitorous corrupt criminal fake president spewing out his stupidity on the event, which is frightening on any size screen.

The movie and Lee are being praised by most of the white critical club, but various black voices are angry and upset over the film including the controversial gay black film critic Armond White who gave a scathing review of the film in the conservative National Review and the African American filmmaker Boots Riley who wrote a 4pg attack on the truth and non-truth of the film and of Ron Stallworth himself which is getting a lot of attention on the internet. Both of these pieces should be read. Lee can be easy and obvious as in the terrible forced scene where the one bad cop (or so it seems) is taken down in an unbelievable way, that brought cheers from the audience. Lee doesn’t know when to stop. Still the film should be seen.