Vertigo Room

This room was painted in two days and nights at BUS in Stockholm. A collaboration between the Le Gun folks and the Swedes...The exhibition was curated by Emma Rendel.

Mary Nolan

Back on March 11, 1932

ACTRESS, HUSBAND SENTENCED TO JAIL

Los Angeles, Mar. 11 (UP)Mary Nolan, blonde film actress, and her husband, Wallace T. Macrery, Jr., to-day were sentenced to serve thirty days in the county jail for failure to pay wage claims.
Municipal Judge Clement D. Nye sentenced Miss Nolan to 750 days and her husband to 840 days but in each case he suspended all but thirty days.

Born Mary Imogene Robertson in Kentucky, Robertson's childhood was beset with hardship that included the death of her mother in 1908 and an absent father. As a child, she worked as a farm laborer, before moving to New York City in 1919 where she worked as a model. Before long, she was discovered by Florenz Ziegfeld, who hired her under the name Imogene Wilson (the first of three name changes she was to have) as a dancer in hisfollies. As a showgirl in New York she was called Bubbles.

She began a long and abusive relationship with comedian Frank Tinney, which would culminate in being hospitalised for injuries he inflicted on her during an argument. Because Tinney was married to another woman, the affair caused a scandal. Mary Robertson was fired from theZiegfeld Follies and subsequently moved to Germany for two years. While in Germany, she made a large number of films.

Moving back to the United States in 1927, Robertson adopted the stage name Mary Nolan and had a brief film career, starring in films such as The Foreign Legion, Shanghai Lady, and Docks of San Francisco. She made Sorrel and Son for United Artists in 1927, but her film career declined afterwards. In 1928 she co-starred with two great actors, Lon Chaney and Lionel Barrymore, inWest of Zanzibar in what is arguably today her most well-known and heartbreaking silent film role as Chaney's defiled daughter raised in the dives of an African coastal town. In 1933, she made her final screen appearance in File 113. The same year, she sued Hollywood producer Eddie Mannix for $500,000 in damages. She accused him of beating her. In 1937, Nolan was jailed for an unpaid dress bill.

She turned up "sick and broke" at the Actor's Fund Home in Amityville, New York. She regained her health and returned to Hollywood in 1939. She lived there in obscurity with her sister, Mrs. Mabel Rondeau.

Unable to gain work, she became addicted to heroin and died of cardiac arrest on Halloween day, October 31, 1948. She suffered from a chronic gall bladder ailment and had recently been discharged from Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. She was 42 and weighed only 90 pounds when she died in a small stucco bungalow at 1504 South Mansfield Avenue, Los Angeles, California.

Her tiny apartment was simply furnished except for a single possession. There was a huge antique piano formerly owned by Rudolph Valentino, which almost filled her living room. She bought it from the possessions which were once a part of Falcon Lair, Valentino's home. Nolan revered the deceased film actor and kept his photo on the music rack.

Nolan had only recently completed negotiations for the sale of her life story, in screenplay and novel form. She previously sold a similar account to a popular magazine, the second installment of which had only recently been printed.

...

nancy and david

nancy cunard's feathers

and

the a,b,c's of david lynch

with no formal training

Deborah Turbeville

self portrait

casa no name

Deborah Turbeville was born and brought up between Boston, 

Massachusetts and the rock bound coast of Maine. At the age of 20 she moved

 to New York City and began working for the avant garde designer Claire McCardell.  

With no formal schooling other than the advanced seminars she attended 

with Richard Avedon and art director Marvin Israel, she launched herself into a career photography.

a story of an unfortunate personality

i hate television. i hate it as much as peanuts.

but i can't stop eating peanuts.

In the mid-1950s, Welles began work on Don Quixote, initially a commission from CBS television. Welles expanded the film to feature length, developing the screenplay to take Quixote and Sancho Panza into the modern age. Filming stopped with the death of Francisco Reiguera, the actor playing Quixote, in 1969. Orson Welles continued editing the film into the early 1970s. At the time of his death, the film remained largely a collection of footage in various states of editing. The project and more importantly Welles's conception of the project changed radically over time. A version of the film was created from available fragments in 1992 and released to a very negative reception.

i feel i have to protect myself against things...

so i'm pretty careful to lose most of them.

[ 3 quotes- orson wells ]

play continually on loop

i would drive over to middle earth records about once a week 

and take all my allowance from chores and washing cars...

 spend hours looking for those hard to find albums.

one band that was tops on my list:

Wire.

sometimes i would buy both the album and 

cassette tape

so i could play it in my 1966 blue

karmann gia immediately upon leaving.

these sort of obscure

sounds would sometimes be played continually

over and over 

for days on end...

some of my friends would just look at me

and say under their breath-

'your weird.'

but then say-

'you make life fun.'

'i do my best..'

november day in the life of

yesterday i went to take my old jalopy

to the fix it shop...perhaps no wheels for a while.

then went over and got a street taco

at the san pedro farmers market

and picked up my art from the

skate shop.

they said two of them had fallen on the floor

and the glass broke.

and then over to storage- 

i came across some more of my vintage

bird masks and props in some random boxes

scenes form Judex kept coming into my mind

-a scene is from a wonderful movie

then today when i was checking messages and such...

i came across this picture of one of my old cloth bird masks

on a friend.

.

paperhome

      

i woke up in my home today

and i like my little place

your home reflects who you are

so they say

and my house is a mess

it's my fault though

moving back and forth

and everywhere else

i'm a mess

or so i say

they told me this might become a problem

thinking that the grass was greener

on the other side

that oz isn't over there

and i always knew that somehow

this is a film called 
Paperhouse


a young girl's private world becomes
far more real than everyone else's
day to day life...


astoundingly neglected, this exercise in
the horror genre is as disturbing as any
film with a flashier budget and special effects.
1988

Bay fog

suitcase packed

cleaned car

tank full

ready for drive

 a road trip

points up north

city by the bay

and listen to this on the way...

to be continued...

overlook

A little movie i made with a tiny

16mm camera 

on top of 

30 rock ... NYC

for me...

happy birthday to me!

dream machine

time is a great teacher...

but unfortunately it kills all it's pupils. 

chimney sweeps

last night i saw the most wonderful chimney sweep costume on a man out at disneyland for the halloween party. i didn't get a photo- but i have a splendid picture in my head...

and then

i'll start working on this costume...

here in the town of machine...

dead man and a few quotes :

coarse you can't put much stock in a man who spends most of a 

conversation talkin' to a bear...

talkin' to a goddamn bear.

look out the window...and doesn't it remind you of when you were 

in the boat?

look...

they are shooting buffalo, government says...

it killed a million of em' last year alone.

that doesn't explain why you've come all the way out here...

all the way out here to hell.

i make flowers out of paper,   smell...

what does it smell like?

paper.

it's better to be Nobody,  then He Who Talks But Says Nothing.

did you kill the white man that killed you?

i'm not dead,  am i?

old photos of people i happen to know

my father's sister, Ione

with a fancy man 

while traveling.

my grandmother, Hermione

in backyard

my great aunt margaret 

is holding the fish 

on the left