Daily Painting

Karel Appel
CHILD WITH A SCOOTER (1964)

Watching

THE GORGON
Terence Fisher
UK, 1964

Watching

BLACK GOD, WHITE DEVIL
Glauber Rocha
Brazil, 1964

Watching

THE HOP-PICKERS
[STARCI NA CHMELU]
Ladislav Rychman
Czechoslovakia, 1964

Playing

The Miles Davis Quintet
MILES IN FRANCE 1963 & 1964
The Bootleg Series, Vol. 8

Daily Painting

Ibrahim El-Salahi
THE MOSQUE (1964)

Daily Painting

Ibrahim El-Salahi
THE LAST SOUND
1964

Playing

Thelonious Monk
LIVE AT THE JAZZ WORKSHOP - COMPLETE

Playing

Archie Shepp
FOUR FOR TRANE

Playing

Simon & Garfunkel
SOUNDS OF SILENCE

Reading

Adolfo Bioy Cesares
THE INVENTION OF MOREL AND OTHER STORIES

Translated by Ruth L. C. Simms

Playing

Brenda Lee
CHRISTMAS WITH BRENDA LEE

Daily Painting

Xaver Fuhr
CITY IN LIGHT (1964)

Watching

DANZA MACABRA
[US Version: CASTLE OF BLOOD]
Antonio Margheriti
Italy, 1964

Watching

ROBINSON'S PLACE
Jean Eustache
France, 1963

Daily Painting

Norman Rockwell
THE PROBLEM WE ALL LIVE WITH (1963)

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From The Kennedy Center website:

This is what actually happened to Ruby Bridges on her first day at William Franz Elementary School in New Orleans on November 14, 1960. Ruby was the first African American child to attend the school after a federal court ordered the New Orleans school system to integrate. The public outcry was so great that white parents withdrew their children from school so they would not have to sit with a Black girl. Ruby spent an entire year in a classroom by herself.

Artist and magazine illustrator Norman Rockwell is known for his idyllic images of American life in the twentieth century. But his work had a new sense of purpose in 1960s when he was hired by LOOK magazine. There, he produced his famous painting The Problem We All Live With, a visual commentary on segregation and the problem of racism in America. The painting depicts Ruby’s courageous walk to school on that November day. She dutifully follows faceless men—the yellow armbands reveal them to be federal marshals—past a wall smeared with racist graffiti and the juice of a thrown tomato. The canvas is arranged so that the viewer is at Ruby’s height, seeing the scene from her perspective.

Rockwell’s painting, created a few years after Ruby made her fateful entrance at school, was produced at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. It is now considered a symbol of that struggle. Bridges never met Rockwell, but as an adult, she came to admire his decision to tell her story: “Here was a man that had been doing lots of work, painting family images, and all of a sudden decided this is what I’m going to do…it’s wrong, and I’m going to say that it’s wrong…the mere fact that [Norman Rockwell] had enough courage to step up to the plate and say I’m going to make a statement, and he did it in a very powerful way…even though I had not had an opportunity to meet him, I commend him for that.”

Watching

BLACK GOD, WHITE DEVIL
DEUS E O DIABO NA TERRA DO SOL
[Literal translation: God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun]
Glauber Rocha
Portugal, 1964

BRIAN ALDISS
Greybeard

Perhaps that had been one of the ineradicable faults of mankind - for even a convinced atheist had to admit there were faults - that it was never content with a thing as a thing; it had to turn things into symbols of other things. A rainbow was never only a rainbow; a storm was a sign of celestial anger; and even from the puddingy earth came forth dark chthonian gods.

What did it all mean? What an agnostic believed and what the willowy parson believed were not only irreconcilable systems of thought: they were equally valid systems of thought because, somewhere along the evolutionary line, man, developing this habit of thinking of symbols, had provided himself with more alternatives than he could manage. Animals moved in no such channel of imagination - they copulated and they ate; but the the saint, bread was a symbol of life, as the phallus was to the pagan. The animals themselves were pressed into symbolic service - and not only in the medieval bestiaries, by any means.

Such a usage was a distortion, although man seemed unable to ratiocinate without it. That had been the trouble right from the beginning. Perhaps it had even been the beginning, back among the first men that man could never get clearly defined (for the early men, being also symbols, had to be either lumbering brutes, or timid noble savages, or to undergo some other interpretation). Perhaps the first fire, the first tool, the first wheel, the first carving in a limestone cave, had each possessed a symbolic rather than a practical value, had each been pressed to serve distortion rather than reality.

It was a sort of madness that had driven man from his humble sites on the edges of woods into towns and cities, into arts and wars, into religious crusades, into martyrdom and prostitution, into dyspepsia and fasting, into love and hatred, into this present cul-de-sac; it had all come about in pursuit of symbols. In the beginning was the symbol, and darkness was over the face of the Earth.

BRIAN ALDISS
The Dark Light Years

Civilisation is the distance that man has placed between himself and his own excreta.

Currently Watching

KING AND COUNTRY
Joseph Losey
UK, 1964