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I was thinking about the kids the other day, missing them from so far away over here, and yet with the benefit of distance, amazed by each of them, and by the special relationship they have invented with each other.
The result was this:
Those guys really know how to have fun, each according to their interests.
Maybe it will be the first in a series?
Enjoy!
william
My new neighborhood in Belgrade is called Dorćol.
It is not far from the Danube and it has a kind of "On The Waterfront" quality of old streets and industrial warehouses common to riverside living.
This is my street. What, can't read the cyrillic street sign?
Here's my apartment building. It has a wrought iron gated entrance and the stairway looks a bit industrial/spartan but the place is really nice and light and airy.
This is my corner store of the Mom and Pop variety featured worldwide. Nelson Algren could have written about Lefty Bicek going there to get a "Bottle Of Milk For Mother".
Some buildings remind me of Old Havana with their crumbling facades and interesting architectural details.
There is a green market a few blocks away. It must be radish season as the place was a riot of endless bunches of red radishes. I hear some people like radishes. I am not one of them. But I was glad to wander this farmer's market and find some fresh produce for healthy eating in the new pad.
More importantly, I was glad to discover that my new neighborhood also featured a bookie joint and a strip bar, just in case I was getting too Mr. Natural for what is, after all, Eastern Europe.
At first glance Striptis sounded like a throat lozenge brand, until I was able to translate its neon sign to "striptease".
Back in the '90's NATO bombs fell here, but now there is evidence everywhere of a different kind of "bomber" - the graffiti artists who are tagging the old city. I liked this woman's portrait and the urban landscape it graces.
Today was my first day to wander around after the 24/7 rigors of preparing the movie the last few weeks since I arrived. I feel like I have only barely scratched the surface of my new neighborhood, but so far it reminds me of certain parts of Chicago back in the old days, maybe in the back streets around Goose Island!
No coincidence that Chicago is said to have the second largest Serbian population outside of Belgrade!
Enjoy!
william
I have been to Rome many times.
At the turn of the last century, I was involved in making three movies there over the course of a few years - (now that was a fun sentence to write!) But this weekend, thanks to my old friend and co-worker on The Talented Mr. Ripley, Laura Luchetti, I got to visit another side of Rome that I had not seen before, the neighborhood of Pigneto, once made famous by Pier Paulo Pasolini in films like Accattone!, always literally and figuratively the other side of the tracks, and now a slowly emerging gentrifying area of artists and cafes and bohemian vibrations.
The long walk from Rome's Termini Station to Pigneto was hard on the old still-suffering foot, but it was a fascinating landscape unlike a typical touristic view of the city. I had not been back to Rome for a number of years, but this street felt more like the existential landscape that Antonioni favored back in the '60's.
The Piazza di Pigneto is across the train tracks that give the area a natural border or boundary, and it definitely felt like crossing over into another world, a neighborhood that has had a more violent recent past, like Venice Beach back in the '80's, or certain areas of the Chicago I grew up in.
Pasolini's Accattone!
Hidden away on the Via Fanfulla da Lodi, which was not on the map and quite hard to locate with my incredibly rusty and limited Italian, was this nice outdoor cafe from 1924, Trattoria Necci, which is a kind of nexus of the artistic life of the area, and a place that Pasolini himself used to frequent (before his own violent and untimely demise, murdered by being run over by his own car in Ostia in 1975, a case that is still unsolved as to the actual perpetrators and motive.)
It was such a pleasant afternoon that our conversation and thoughts strayed far away from any Pasolini-esque quality of our experience, but I left motivated to rewatch and rediscover this artist, poet, journalist and filmmaker and his own view of the other side of Rome.
Enjoy!
william
I enjoy the effort that the NYC subway system has made to incorporate art work into the experience of riding the rails.
It is not quite the '80's heydey of unofficial art when Keith Haring was drawing his little outline figures everywhere, and graffiti artists were bombing the trains.
Now it is a bit more sanctioned and tasteful.
But fun nonetheless.
These figures on their way somewhere are only a few inches tall, like they escaped from "The Secret World of Arietty"!
Enjoy!
william
Original paintings made for the covers of pulp magazines from the 1930's were treated as disposable commercial art-for-hire in their time, and therefore are quite rare today.
One of the masters of the medium was Norman Saunders, so it was quite a treat to stumble upon a small exhibit of the original vintage paintings of some of his now famous work at an out-of-the-way gallery run by Syracuse University on a recent trip to New York.
One of Saunders many employers was Hugo Gernsback, the editor of Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories, Science-Wonder Stories and many of the other seminal pulp fiction publications that introduced writers like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells to the world. In fact, he is often known as the Father of Science Fiction, and the annual award for the best in science fiction writing, The Hugo, is named after him. I had never seen a picture of him at work, but they had a cool one in the exhibit.
Although not painted by Saunders, I liked this poster from one of the most successful pulp characters, spawning radio shows, comics, movies, and books for generations:
Norman Saunders knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men, and women, and he painted them luridly, and beautifully.
Enjoy!
william
Here are two rare covers by the genius comics artist Alex Raymond from an Italian large format comic from 1965 that I uncovered recently at one of those increasingly rare "yesteryears" comic book and nostalgia type shops during my stint in NYC.
As can be said about many things in life: "for those of you who know, no further explanation is necessary, for those who don't, know explanation will suffice."
But for the curious you can read more about Raymond's life and work here.
Like many 20th century artistic icons, he died too young, in a car accident at 47. Hs work as the creator of Flash Gordon was part of the dreamscape of generations of Americans, but it was fun to suddenly imagine a little raggazi on the streets of Milan or Roma cracking open this book in the mid-sixties too.
Enjoy!
william
