DENNIS HOPPER: A VISUAL TRIBUTE

 http://artslope.com/?s=Dennis+Hopper&x=0&y=0&=Go  Dennis Hopper & The New Hollywood. Contributions by Pierre Evil, Bernard Marcade, Matthiew Orlean and Jean-Baptiste Thoret Hardcover, 192 pages, 230 color & b&w illustrations Published by Flammarion (distributed by Rizzoli through Random House)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/autumnsensation/4344820404/

‘Rebel Without a Cause ‘ (1955). Hopper at top of picture. http://www.salmineo.com/reviews/rebel2.jpg

Giant’ (1956) ‘www.efitnessnow.com/news/2010/01/12/dennis-hopper-in-final-stages-of-prostate-cancer/

Dennis Hopper as Johnny Drake in Night Tide (1961), Curtis Harrington's eerie psychodrama. Night Tide was Hopper's first lead, in which he played lovestruck sailor Johnny Drake, whose new girlfriend may be a cursed modern sea siren, luring men to their deaths. "We made that film for $28,000 and it was in Time magazine's 10 Best Pictures to See for the whole year but nobody saw it because we did it non-union and the projectionists were all union and we didn't have a (union) stamp on the print so no theatre would screen it," Hopper says. http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/film/changing-lanes/2009/02/05/1233423380602.html?page=fullpage

Dennis Hopper as Peter Vollmer in The Twilight Zone’s "He’s Alive" (1963)http://factoidz.com/ten-best-dennis-hopper-movie-and-television-roles/

Dennis Hopper: Photographs 1961-1967  Shafrazi, Tony (Editor)
Shafrazi, Tony / Hopps, Walter / Hundley, Jessica
Hardcover + Box, 33 x 44 cm (13 x 17.3 in.), 546 pages, £ 650.00

See the excellent Taschen video here.

www.tonyshafrazigallery.com/index.php?ode=artists&object_id=15&view=images

 

‘Easy Rider’ (1969)

 www.classieux.fr/tag/easy-rider/

http://www.whosdatedwho.com/topic/7993/dennis-hopper-life-magazine-19-june-1970.htm

 

Andy Warhol Screen Test (1970)                                                              Stills: www. flickr.com/photos/gracie_neverland/2646518317/  Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTwtMronb4U

Photo: Andy Warhol http://westernsallitaliana.blogspot.com/2010/05/rip-dennis-hopper.html

Portrait of Dennis Hopper by Andy Warhol (1971)http://ceciletom.wordpress.com/2009/01/16/

http://www.acmi.net.au/hopper_new_hollywood.aspx

Douglas Kirkland took this iconic photograph of the multi-talented actor/director Dennis Hopper in 1970. www.legendecelebrityart.com/tag/douglas-kirkland/

Douglas Kirkland’s photo of Dennis Hopper, directing "The Last Movie", 1970  www.usa.canon.com/dlc/controller?act=GetArticleAct&articleID=1306&displayMode=print

Dennis Hopper working on ‘The Last Movie’ (1971)

http://www.vintageamps.com/plexiboard/viewtopic.php?f=16&p=902776

Hopper was arrested after he fled from a traffic accident that he caused in Taos, Mexico. He was charged with careless driving, fleeing the accident and not informing police of the accident. He received a $250 fine and spent 20 minutes in jail. http://gurn.wordpress.com/2008/10/14/back-of-the-meat-wagon-u-mug-pt-2/

 

Dennis Hopper as Daniel Morgan in ‘Mad Dog Morgan’ (1976)http://www.horrorphile.net/mad-dog-morgan/

 

‘The American Friend ‘ (1977) directed by Wim Wenders www.flixster.com/photos/dennis-hopper-rumble-fish-matt-dillon--dennis-hopper-10882593 

Apocalypse Now’ (1979) ‘ www.hotflick.net/pictures/979AEN_Dennis_Hopper_002.html

http://liveforfilms.wordpress.com/2010/04/08/dennis-hopper-the-middle-word-in-life-video-essay-by-matt-zoller-seitz/

Matt Dillon & Dennis Hopper  as Rusty James and Father in ‘Rumble Fish’ (1983) www.flixster.com/photos/dennis-hopper-rumble-fish-matt-dillon--dennis-hopper-10882593

Blue Velvet (1986) http://filmdrunk.uproxx.com/2010/01/dennis-hoppers-dying-wish-a-divorce

‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2’ (1986) http://babyjanehudson.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/aint-nothin-like-taintin-a-beautiful-thing/

Leonardo DiCaprio and Dennis Hopper - Red Rock West party, New York City, April 2, 1994. Photo: Steve Eichner/WireImage.com www.tvguide.com/celebrities/dennis-hopper/photos/147085/110512

‘Waterworld’ (1995) ‘www.sodahead.com/entertainment/dennis-hopper-legendary-actor-died-what-are-your-favorite-film-memories-of-him/question-1037149/ 

Dennis Hooper in front of Julian Schnabel’s plate painting

http://theforestry.wordpress.com/2010/04/07/dennis-hopper-the-new-hollywood/

Basquiat (1996) Jeffrey Wright, David Bowie, Gary Oldman, Dennis Hopper | Photography | © Jean-Michel Basquiat http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/artist/jean-michel-basquiat/biography/images/2/

DENNIS HOPPER AND ALLEN GINSBERG
San Francisco 1996

Dennis Hopper and Allen Ginsberg are having a discussion at the opening of the Whitney Museum of American Art's exhibit Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965 at the H. M. de Young Museum in San Francisco. www.emptymirrorbooks.com/keenan/m1996-3.html

Dennis Hopper and Johnny Brenden at CineVegas 2005 http://gallery.brendentheatres.com/johnny/cinevegas2005/

http://justjared.buzznet.com/2009/09/30/dennis-hopper-rushed-to-hospital/

Image: Cor Mulder/EPA http://www.fadwebsite.com/2010/04/22/dennis-hopper-to-get-art-retrospective/

Dennis Hooper’s Last Interview, with Bob Colacello for Vanity Fair www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/06/dennis-hoppers-last-interview-his-accomplishments-divorces-and-career.html

Dennis Hopper laid to rest in simple Native American burial after memorial service attended by Jack Nicholson and Val Kilmer

The Native American-style burial mound in the Jesus Nazareno Cemetery in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, is believed to have been the Easy Rider star's final request.

Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1283918/Dennis-Hopper-laid-rest-Native-American-burial-memorial-service-attended-Jack-Nicholson-Val-Kilmer.html#ixzz0siWiBjuv

ODDMENTS

Mechanical Hopper - OAK Windup Sculpture

Using the insides of a windup tin toy for the body, I sculpted the head to balance the weight. The head is sculpted in polymer clay and is painted in acrylic. The hair is wool. www.etsy.com/listing/39498734/mechanical-hopper-ooak-windup-sculpture

Video of his motion here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzdsRU-Ni7g

http://starsunmasked.wordpress.com/ http://www.mariesgourmetbakery.com/gallery.php?category_id=85&parent_id=11

THE INFOGRAPHIC REVOLUTION

The Generalist has been interested in diagrams, maps and informational graphics since the days of An Index of Possibilities and our discovery of the work of Edward R. Tufte, described by the New York Times as the Leonardo of the subject.

Edward Tufte is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Statistics, and Computer Science at Yale University. He wrote, designed, and self-published ‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information’, ‘Envisioning Information’, ‘Visual Explanations’, and ‘Beautiful Evidence’. He has recently been appointed by President Obama to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel, whose Mission Statement is: To promote accountability by coordinating and conducting oversight of Recovery funds to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse and to foster transparency on Recovery spending by providing the public with accurate, user-friendly information."  It is the latter in which Tufte excels and is the acknowledged pioneer.

 Edward Tufte says this ‘may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn.’ Produced by French civil engineer Charles Joseph Minard (1781-1870)  a pioneer of the use of graphics in engineering and statistics, this flow map, published in 1869, shows Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign of 1812  The graph displays several variables in a single two-dimensional  - the army's location and direction, showing where units split off and rejoined; the declining size of the army (note the crossing of the Berezina river on the retreat); the low temperatures during the retreat. [Source: VisWiki]

The other book that had a big influence on me is, I believe, less well known: ‘The Telling Image: The Changing Balance Between Pictures and Words in a Technological age’ by Duncan Davies with Diana and Robert Bathurst. [Clarendon Press. Oxford. 1990]Davies died before the project was completed and the Bathursts stepped in; their Preface acknowledges  his foresight:

‘Duncan Davies saw that great and influential changes are taking place in society, as the balance of the means of communication tilts progressively from words and numbers towards pictures and images… [He] felt that too few people are aware of either the scale of the speed of this shift in the balance toward pictorial communication, or of the problems posed by the need to store and retrieve pictorial data, or of the possible consequences for the future. Adapting to this transformation would, he believed, require profound modification of attitudes, and of the ways in which we prepare the young through education.’

In the book’s first chapter, Davies summarises his historical perspective: ‘We have communicated with one another by sight and sound for several millions of years, also by touch, smell and taste… we have been able to record our experience, ideas, and messages, for only about thirty thousand years…’

Above: Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Below: Pictograms from the Beijing Olympics.

‘There were about 250 centuries when we had pictures alone and could not learn how to use them generally and effectively. Next there were 20 centuries where we learnt how to use formalised pictures (pictograms and ideograms) as message carriers. There followed some 15 centuries or so during which clerks made the great leap forward of alphabetic reading and writing. During the next 5 centuries, reading and writing thrust picture-communication into the background. However, over the last one-third of the century [with the advent of tv and computers] the picture has suddenly and expansively become the main means for ‘reading’ and learning…’

One page of the book’s Visual Index that indicates some of the range of graphic approaches and subject matters.

David McCandless is both an expert practitioner and cheerleader for this important development in human communication, which is set to expand exponentially in the coming historical period and will help transform education and public information systems.  ‘Information is Beautiful’ is a great place to begin to appreciate the vast possibilities offered by new graphic communication. McCandless also has a top-notch Information is Beautiful website  - that develops out of the book and keeps a tab on graphic information work being done around the webosphere. Highly recommended. Get with the program.

See Previous Post: THE INFORMATION REVOLUTION: THE FOURTH PARADIGM

See Also:  The Power of Visual Communication by Mike Parkinson

INSIDE DOPE: PABLO ESCOBAR

‘La muerte de Pablo Escobar’ by Fernando Botero from the Museo D’Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia

This iconic image by Botero of the most notorious drug lord of the modern era, gunned down on the rooftops of Medellin, a city he had made his own, is a fitting lead-in to a discussion of ‘My Father Pablo Escobar’ an extraordinary documentary by Nicholas Entel, to be released on DVD by Brightspark Productions on 12th July

Following Escobar’s death in 1993, his wife and only son have lived in virtual exile in Argentina. After a decade of silence, they have opened up their lives and family archive to speak of and show the extraordinary life story of the cocaine king who almost became President of Colombia.

We see intimate family portraits and home movies of the Escobar’s home life at his massive Hacienda Napoles, a place of bizarre luxury. One of Escobar’s obsessions was buying unusual animals for his private estate, often for millions, one of the few ways he could spend the vast ocean of lucre pouring in from his international industrial-scale cocaine business.

Pablo Escobar, dressed as his hero, the outlaw Pancho Villa, in an undated file photo. Source: Daily Mail

The footage of Escobar’s war against the Colombian government is chilling. Its one thing to read about these issues, quite another to see the ground truth - assassinations, car bombs, mutilation, extortion. Escobar’s attitude to the State was simple: accept money or face bullets. One of his most extraordinary manoeuvres was to first get the Colombian constitution changed to ensure he could not be extradited from the country, then to give himself up to the authorities, then to build his own prison for his incarceration – with luxurious quarters and facilities from which he continued to run his drug empire.

The story is narrated and driven by Escobar’s only son – Juan Pablo Escobar (now known as Sebastian Marroquin) -  who was just eight years old at the time of his father’s death. What makes the film so moving and what gives it such a powerful narrative drive, is Marroquin’s efforts to make contact with the families of the Colombian politicians that Escobar had murdered – Luis Carlos Galan and Rodrigo Lara Bonilla – to make his peace with them and break the cycle of revenge.

This powerful story reminds us once more of the huge damage that the drug wars are causing to Latin America societies(see Previous Posts below). It is also a moving story about fathers and sons. Escobar’s last act was to make a desperate call to his family from his Medellin hideout. It was traced and within hours Escobar had been gunned down.

Source: www.cocaine.org/colombia/pablo-escobar.html

Other Movies:

Two movies were announced in 2007. Both are listed by IMDB as still being in development.

Killing Pablo   is based on Mark Bowden’s book Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw The cast for the film was reported to include Christian Bale.

Escobar  is based on the book "Mi Hermano Pablo" by Roberto Escobar Gaviria and is being directed Antoine Fuqua for a 2012 release. Producer is (or was) Oliver Stone.

See: Trailer for Medellin, directed by Billy Walsh and starring Vincent Chase as Escobar.

See: Johnny Depp talking about the movie Blow in which he plays the part of George, Escobar’s first drug contact in the US.

See: Extraordinary National Geographic film report on Escobar’s Hacienda Napoles today.

According to Wikipedia: ‘[Escobar] is regarded as the richest and most successful criminal in world history because, in the year 1989, Forbes magazine declared Escobar as the seventh richest man in the world, with an estimated personal fortune of US$ 25 billion. He owned innumerable luxury residences and automobiles and in 1986 he attempted to enter Colombian politics, even offering to pay off the nation's $10 billion national debt.’ [This last fact is repudiated in the film)

Previous Posts:

INSIDE DOPE: DRUG LAWS & DRUG WARS2

INSIDE DOPE: DRUG LAWS, DRUG WARS

IRANIAN BLOGGERS

Hubble Bubble in Ghahve Khaneh/ Ghahve Khane Azari-Vali Asr street before Raah Ahan square-Tehran. 4 June 2010. Excellent recent photo essay by Kamyar Adl entitled ‘Day Out in Tairish Tehran’.

The Generalist recently received a message from Nasrin Alavi, whose brilliant book on Iranian bloggers WE ARE IRAN we discussed at length on a Previous Post on 9 July 2006 

Read her recent article entitled ‘Iran in Darkness and Light’ published on the excellent Open Democracy site earlier this month.

There’s now a great directory of Iranian Blogs – from Iranians both inside and outside the country. Some are current, others serve as fixed traces of the turmoil of recent years. New posts in column on right.

According to Wikipedia:

Blogging in Iran operates under special circumstances because the government restricts certain views. Blogs in general tend to be unregulated compared to other forms of expression in Iranian society. This characteristic can account for the huge popularity of blogs especially among Iranian youths. As of October 2005, there are estimated to be about 700,000 Iranian blogs (out of an estimated total of 100 million worldwide, of which about 40,000-110,000 are active, mostly written in Persian, the Iranian language).

There are also many weblogs written by Iranians in English and other languages. Most of them, though, belong to expatriates who live in North America, Europe, Japan, etc. Iran is the third-largest country of bloggers in the world after the United States and China.^[1][2] With more than 700,000 Persian blogs, mostly based in Iran, the Persian language is ranked as the second-most-popular language in the entire blogosphere.^[3][4]

PREVIOUS POSTS

17 June 2009  IRAN: TECHNOLOGICAL DEJA VU

The map of the Iranian blogosphere was produced on 6th April 2008 by John Kelly and Bruce Etling for their paper, "Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere."

READING PLACES

These three novels I picked up second-hand. I was attracted to them by the fact that they were all set in cities that I have spent time in, have fond memories of, know and love. Thus reading all these books constantly triggered off my own thoughts and memories about my own adventures in these cities.

 

Barcelona is the setting for Gitana [Orion Books 2001] which I visited some three years ago, Much of the action occurs in the maze of streets surrounding the Ramblas. This is the third in a series of books  by author Dominic Martell featuring Pascual Rose, ‘a repentant ex-terrorist trying to make sense of his life after defecting and selling out his former comrades in the European terrorist underground of the 1980's.’  The book captures well the underground world of the gipsy barrios, the Catalan culture, and clusters of strange displaced outsiders.  Always on the move, constantly under threat, Pascual tries to stay ahead of the ghosts of his past and the forces of the law. Its a good read but I did get lost in some of the plot complexities near the end.

‘Black Girl in Paris’ [The Women’s Press. 2000]  by Shay Youngblood is delightful, whether read as pure fiction or disguised autobiography. Born in Birmingham, Alabama in the US Deep South, Eden makes it Paris where she hopes to make it as a writer, following in the footsteps of Afro-American writers like Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and James Baldwin, who is still in the city and whom she tries to track down. She struggles to survive – working as an au-pair, artist’s model, poet’s assistant – and explores her sexual self., The story of her adventures are rendered in sensuous poetic prose. A moving memoir drenched in the sounds and textures of the City of Light.

Night Train to Lisbon [Atlantic Books. 2009]  is, simply put, a really great novel. This was the book I took with me on my journey to Ireland, and its story formed a second-level of narrative to my travels, a well as evoking strong memories of my several visits to Lisbon in the late 1990s. Sometimes you feel a book is speaking to you directly. This was certainly my experience.

The story concerns Gregorious, a teacher of ancient languages, whose life, which has been steady and regular for 3o years, is suddenly unhinged by a strange meeting with a Portugese woman on the bridge in Bern (the author’s birthplace). Captivated by the sound of her language, he then stumbles on a strange book by enigmatic Portugese author Amadeu de Prado, and sets out on a journey to investigate his story and in the process, goes through some major personal transformations.

The book works on many deep levels and requires close and measured reading. I found I had to slow right down and sometimes only read three pages at a time. Then suddenly, the unfolding plot would sweep me on through the next 50. Pascal Mercier, a professor of philosophy in Berlin, is not only a master storyteller but also a man of profound insight into the human condition.

 

Images from Glide-Lines blog. Text reads: ‘A peaceful revolution of militars with flowers on they're guns had return freedom of speech to the people’

The book is exceptionally interesting as it takes us into Portugese history, when the dictator Salazar and his brutal secret police ruled the roost and the Resistance were planning a revolution which, in real-life, was successful: The Carnation Revolution, led by a left-leaning military coup on 25th April 1974, returned the country back to a democracy.

Profound and powerful, this  book which took a strong grip on my imagination and made me question a lot of my own feelings and thoughts. The book is a journey of the soul on which I became a fellow passenger. I am 50 pages from the end and I am reluctant to finish it

[Not everyone agrees with my perspective. Check out a range of reactions on The Complete Review]

Pascal Mercier’s real name is Pieter Bieri

TFHE GENERALIST IS 5

This month marks the

5th       

Anniversary   of                   The Generalist.

I started the very first post on this blog, entitled ‘Memory Exercise’ with the following quote – a kind of mission statement which I still hang on to.

'Many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them - if you want to. Just as someday. if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful, reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry'
- J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher In The Rye

Thanks to you all.

IRISH TRIP1

Ralph Whistler May  [26 Nov 1885- 20 Oct 1959]. This photo was taken by Grosvenor Portraits in 1948 when Ralph was 62.

This series of posts is an account of a remarkable journey I have just made, in company with my son Alex, following in the footsteps of my father to the little island of Valentia off the extreme south-west tip of Ireland.

My father died when I was nine and ever since he has been a haunting absence in my life. My personal memories of him were limited  but thanks to a family tree researched by another member of the family, I had some factual details of his life and times. Further information came from my half-brother and half-sister (respectively 40 and 30 years older than me) who had been living in Australia since the early 1950s.

One of the things about my dad that interested me most was the fact that he had worked for the Western Union Cable Company from 1915 to 1945. My mother had told me that Ralph regularly travelled to Ireland but it was only a few years ago that I discovered where he went – Valentia Island. From that time on, I decided at some point that I would make a pilgrimage down there.

At my 60th birthday party I was stunned when my son Alex announced that, unbeknownst to me, he had been secretly conspiring with my friends to raise the money to send me on this trip.

What follows is a partial account of what proved to be a moving and profound journey.