Sunday Culture: Ignorance Is Darkness

Since the Iranian revolution, Iranian female solo vocalists are only permitted to perform for all-female audiences. Some women have also been allowed to conduct classes for female students in private homes. Female vocalists may perform for male audiences only as a part of a chorus, never individually.

The prominent classical singer Fatemeh Vaezi, has given concerts accompanied by a female orchestra. She has also performed widely in Europe and the United States. Parisa (Ms. Vaezi’s stage name) has also assembled a five-piece female orchestra.

After 1986 Maryam Akhondy, the classical trained singer from Teheran, started working with other Iranian musicians in exile. With Nawa and Tschakawak she performed in Germany and Scandinavia.

At the same time she founded Ensemble Barbad, another group of traditional Iranian art music, which has been touring all over Europe for the past years. In 2000 Maryam Akhondy created the all-female a cappella group named Banu as a kind of musical expedition to the different regions and cultures of Iran.

For this project Maryam Akhondy over years collected old folk songs, which were sung only in private sphere, where women are alone or among themselves: at the cradle, doing housework, working in the fields, and women’s celebrations.

Maryam Akhondy made it her business to bring traditional women’s songs back to life again. The well-known classical and folk singer. Sima Bina, who is also a visual artist, has taught many female students to sing. She has also been permitted to give concerts for women in Iran, and has performed widely abroad.

Qamar ol-Molouk Vaziri is believed to have been the first female master of Persian music to introduce a new style of music and receive a positive reputation among masters of Persian music during her own lifetime.

Several years later, Mahmoud Karimi trained several female students who later became masters of Persian traditional music.

Him [1927]

Him is a play in three acts that combines elements of vaudeville, the circus, and expressionism. The play was first produced at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York in 1928.

The idea of a dream play may have been suggested to Cummings by the Provincetown Playhouse’s production of Strindberg’s The Dream Play, which EEC characterized as having a “luminous existence” (Miscellany 144).

Strindberg’s play is more dream-like than Cummings’ Him and contains no circus or vaudeville scenes, but it does feature two minor characters named “He” and “She,” a character named “The Poet,” and a central female character (Indra’s daughter) who observes all the scenes and participates in many of them.

The Dream Play premiered January 20th, 1926 and was directed by the same James Light who directed Him (see Deutsch and Hanau 141-42, 158-62, and 285-287).

Him may also have benefited from the examples of John Dos Passos’ play The Garbage Man (1924) and John Howard Lawson’s Processional (1925). The drawing [above] appeared on the cover of the first edition and illustrates the passage in Act I, scene two when Him explains that being an artist is like performing a high-wire act in the clouds.

Jesus was born years earlier than thought, claims Pope

Telegraph (UK) – By Nick Squires

The ‘mistake’ was made by a sixth century monk known as Dionysius Exiguus or in English Dennis the Small, the 85-year-old pontiff claims in the book ‘Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives’, published on Wednesday.

“The calculation of the beginning of our calendar – based on the birth of Jesus – was made by Dionysius Exiguus, who made a mistake in his calculations by several years,” the Pope writes in the book, which went on sale around the world with an initial print run of a million copies.

“The actual date of Jesus’s birth was several years before.”

The assertion that the Christian calendar is based on a false premise is not new – many historians believe that Christ was born sometime between 7BC and 2BC.

But the fact that doubts over one of the keystones of Christian tradition have been raised by the leader of the world’s one billion Catholics is striking.

Dennis the Small, who was born in Eastern Europe, is credited with being the “inventor” of the modern calendar and the concept of the Anno Domini era.

He drew up the new system in part to distance it from the calendar in use at the time, which was based on the years since the reign of the Roman emperor Diocletian.

The emperor had persecuted Christians, so there was good reason to expunge him from the new dating system in favour of one inspired by the birth of Christ.

The monk’s calendar became widely accepted in Europe after it was adopted by the Venerable Bede, the historian-monk, to date the events that he recounted in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which he completed in AD 731.

But exactly how Dennis calculated the year of Christ’s birth is not clear and the Pope’s claim that he made a mistake is a view shared by many scholars.

The Bible does not specify a date for the birth of Christ. The monk instead appears to have based his calculations on vague references to Jesus’s age at the start of his ministry and the fact that he was baptised in the reign of the emperor Tiberius.

Christ’s birth date is not the only controversy raised by the Pope in his new book – he also said that contrary to the traditional Nativity scene, there were no oxen, donkeys or other animals at Jesus’s birth.

He also weighs in on the debate over Christ’s birthplace, rejecting arguments by some scholars that he was born in Nazareth rather than Bethlehem.

John Barton, Professor of the Interpretation of the Holy Scripture at Oriel College, Oxford University, said most academics agreed with the Pope that the Christian calendar was wrong and that Jesus was born several years earlier than commonly thought, probably between 6BC and 4BC.

“There is no reference to when he was born in the Bible – all we know is that he was born in the reign of Herod the Great, who died before 1AD,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “It’s been surmised for a very long time that Jesus was born before 1AD – no one knows for sure.”

The idea that Christ was born on Dec 25 also has no basis in historical fact. “We don’t even know which season he was born in. The whole idea of celebrating his birth during the darkest part of the year is probably linked to pagan traditions and the winter solstice.”

Victoria and Albert Museum

Light From The Middle East

13 November 2012 – 7 April 2013. The first major exhibition of contemporary photography from and about the Middle East, Light from the Middle East: New Photography features over 90 works by some of the most exciting artists from across the region.

Photography is a powerful and persuasive means of expression. Its immediacy and accessibility make it an ideal choice for artists confronting the social challenges and political upheavals of the Middle East today.

Light from the Middle East: New Photography presents work by artists from across the Middle East (spanning North Africa to Central Asia), living in the region and in diaspora.

The exhibition explores the ways in which these artists investigate the language and techniques of photography. Some use the camera to record or bear witness, while others subvert that process to reveal how surprisingly unreliable a photograph can be.

The works range from documentary photographs and highly staged tableaux to images manipulated beyond recognition. The variety of approaches is appropriate to the complexities of a vast and diverse region.

Light from the Middle East is divided into three sections, Recording, Reframing and Resisting, each of which focuses on a different approach to the medium of photography.

New Rolling Stones video released featuring Dragon Tattoo star Noomi Rapace

The Rolling Stones have released a new video for their single Doom and Gloom which features a topless Noomi Rapace.

The controversial video for new single Doom and Gloom comes complete with actress Noomi Rapace topless, vomiting and with her head exploding.

The film – to promote the band’s single Doom And Gloom, which came out last month – also shows her shooting the heads off zombies, flashing at motorists and with her teeth smeared with blood.

Swedish star Rapace found worldwide acclaim when she starred in the screen adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and its follow-ups.

 The video has been directed by fellow Swede Jonas Akerlund who made Madonna’s Ray Of Light video, as well as a controversial video for Prodigy hit Smack My Bitch Up.

Rapace is seen taking over vocal duties for the Rolling Stones from Sir Mick Jagger, as well as filling the drum stool alongside Charlie Watts.

The band filmed their section in a warehouse in Paris, where they had been staying during rehearsals for their handful of live shows which begin at London’s O2 Arena on Sunday.

The actress, who played abused Lisbeth Salander in the Dragon Tattoo films, based on Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, is seen playing a range of wild characters. In one scene in the Stones video she is topless on a bed of US bank notes.

The band released the single last month and their latest greatest hits album Grrr! is out this week. When the Rolling Stones take the stage at the O2 Arena in London on Sunday to celebrate their 50th anniversary, they will be joined by their longtime bassist, Bill Wyman, and the guitarist Mick Taylor, who played with them in the early 1970s, the band announced on its Web site today.

Jane Fonda Finally Apologizes

Front Page Magazine – By Ben Shapiro

It only took 40 years. But finally, actress-turned-workout-specialist Jane Fonda has apologized for sitting on a Viet Cong anti-aircraft gun during her 1972 visit to North Vietnam.

Fonda, who used her fame to push her radical leftism during her heyday, traveled to Hanoi in 1972 in solidarity with the Viet Cong. While there, she proceeded to blame the US for supposedly bombing a dike system, and did a series of radio broadcasts stating that US leaders were “war criminals.”

Those broadcasts were replayed for American POWs being tortured by the Viet Cong. Later, when POWs spoke about their experiences of torture, Fonda would call them “hypocrites and liars,” stating, “These were not men who had been tortured.

These were not men who had been starved. These were not men who had been brainwashed.” She explained that these POWs were “careerists and professional killers.”

Now, four decades removed, sitting in the lap of luxury, Fonda has decided that the pictures on the anti-aircraft gun were a mistake. Not the actual visit – she stands by that.

“I did not, have not, and will not say that going to North Vietnam was a mistake,” she said. “I have apologized only for some of the things that I did  there, but I am proud that I went.”

But when it comes to those gun photos, then she wishes she’d done something different: “Sitting on that gun in North Vietnam. I’ll go to my grave with that one.”

… Jane Fonda should rightly have been written off by America’s most powerful institutions four decades ago. Instead, she still kicking – and next, she’s playing Nancy Reagan, whom she brags she’ll prevent from looking “too mean.”

“I had to feel history in my bones”

Veteran Spanish journalist Enrique Meneses left his “sordid” country in the 1950s to rove the world, covering major events such as the Cuban revolution

EL PAÍS – By Víctor Núñez Jaime

Fast-forward to the present. Meneses is 83. His face sports insolent wrinkles etched by personal experiences, a thin-lipped mouth that keeps producing one story after another, blue eyes gazing out alertly from behind delicate glasses, a wide forehead, hair that refuses to turn white, and a nose permanently connected to an oxygen bottle. This proud face, now worn out from disease, belongs to one of the leading figures in contemporary Spanish journalism…

It was the afternoon of August 28, 1947 and a collective shiver ran down Spain’s spine when a bull named Islero gored the famous matador Manolete at Linares, in Jaén province. Meneses was in Madrid when he heard the news on the radio and he felt here was his big chance for his first journalistic adventure.

He went out, hailed a cab, and paid 450 pesetas (under three euros) for the 300-kilometer ride. It was night when he got there. He managed to see the doctor who treated Manolete, talked to a few people on the street. The bullfighter died in the early hours of the morning.

He was born on October 21, 1929, just when the New York Stock Exchange was crashing. The Spanish Civil War caught him in Biarritz in southern France, where he was vacationing with his family.

Because of their republican past, the Meneses went straight to Paris, where they would later experience the German occupation during World War II. Later still they moved to Portugal, and when Enrique was a teenager they returned to Spain.

“It was a sordid country, with a very plain, provincial kind of journalism that only discussed three things: soccer, bullfighting and soap operas. Maybe that is why I went for the Manolete story.”

Maybe that is also why he decided to leave. In 1954, after two years at the Spanish edition of Reader’s Digest, Meneses went to Marseille and bought a one-way ticket to Alexandria.

He explored Egypt and made a living teaching French and Spanish, and dubbing tourist documentaries. Then, one day, he thought he would see Africa “from Cairo to Cape Town.”

He covered 27,000 kilometers in four months, returning to Cairo just in time for the Suez Crisis. This was the beginning of his freelance work for the prestigious magazine Paris-Match.

Back in Madrid in 1957, he decided to go to Costa Rica to stop an arranged marriage between his cousin and a “very important man.”

Before that, he thought he would stop in Cuba to check out rumors about a “little revolution” being prepared in the Sierra Maestra mountains by a “bunch of bearded fellows.” Paris-Match thought it was a good idea.

Sending his photo equipment inside a crate of whisky and then flying down to Santiago, he managed to penetrate the sierra, succeeding where many had failed and becoming the first journalist to meet the revolutionaries.

He met Fidel Castro, his brother Raúl, Ernesto Che Guevara and 100 other members of the Cuban revolution. For one month, his exclusive reports made headlines across the globe and have since become prized historical material…

“Wherever history was being made, I wanted to be there to feel it in my bones. There are thousands and thousands of faces that I have committed to memory, like shadows of a life full of joy and sorrow, of silliness and suffering, of pettiness and heroism,” he wrote in his 2006 memoir, Hasta aquí hemos llegado (or, This is as far as we’ve got).

“I regret nothing that I did, but I do regret what I could have done but did not.”

Plenty of Gods, but Just One Fellow Passenger

NYT – By A. O. SCOTT

It is spoiling nothing to disclose that Pi Patel, the younger son of an Indian zoo owner, survives a terrible shipwreck during a storm in the Pacific Ocean.

That much you know from the very first scenes of “Life of Pi,”Ang Lee’s 3-D film adaptation of the wildly popular, arguably readable novel by Yann Martel.

A middle-aged Pi (the reliably engaging Irrfan Khan) tells the tale of his earlier life to a wide-eyed Canadian novelist (Rafe Spall), so we know that he made it through whatever ordeal we are about to witness…

Until the Bengal tiger shows up, and thank the divinity of your choice for that. Or, rather, thank Mr. Lee and the gods of digital imagery, who conjure up a beast — named Richard Parker, for mildly amusing reasons — of almost miraculous vividness.

His eyes, his fur, the rippling of his muscles and the skeleton beneath his skin, all of it is so perfectly rendered that you will swear that Richard Parker is real.

What is and isn’t real — what stories can be believed and why — turns out to be an important theme of “Life of Pi,” albeit one that is explored with the same glibness that characterizes the film’s pursuit of spiritual questions. But Mr. Lee and his screenwriter, David Magee, have the good sense to put all of that aside for a while and focus on the young man, the tiger and the deep blue sea…

 The movie invites you to believe in all kinds of marvelous things, but it also may cause you to doubt what you see with your own eyes — or even to wonder if, in the end, you have seen anything at all.

Piedmont officer is fired over public urination ticket

NewsOK – By Robert Medley

A police officer who wrote a $2,500 ticket to a mother on a public urination complaint against her 3-year-old son has been fired, City Manager Jim Crosby said Tuesday.

Crosby said he fired officer Ken Qualls on Friday, following a hearing Nov. 14.

Prosecutors at the Canadian County district attorney’s office declined to pursue the case against the mother, Crosby said.

Police Chief Alex Oblein said the ticket was written to the mother for public urination, and the complaint was amended to contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Crosby said Piedmont City Council members received emails about the ticket from as far away as Canada, England and Australia.

“Of course we did receive a lot of notoriety over that,” he said.

Qualls plans to appeal the decision, Crosby said. A hearing will be scheduled before a Piedmont personnel board.

Ken Qualls is 45 years old. Qualls has been in Piedmont over a year and has about 18 years experience in law enforcement, said Police Chief Alex Oblein.

Qualls’ attorney Jarrod Leaman said Qualls is a member of the Oklahoma Police Pension and Retirement System and is looking at options to appeal his termination in Piedmont. A hearing has not been set.

Qualls issued the ticket Nov. 4 to Ashley Warden after he saw her son, Dillan, drop his pants in the front yard of the family home at 4505 Ryan Drive.

Crosby said Qualls didn’t see the boy urinate in the yard, but reported seeing a teenager in the Warden family lead the boy to a spot in the yard.

Oblein said the ticket given to the mother did not fit the situation. It could have resulted in a fine of up to $2,500, he said.

Sunday Culture: The Hollow Men…

The Broken Men – Rudyard Kipling

For things we never mention,
For Art misunderstood –
For excellent intention
That did not turn to good;
From ancient tales’ renewing,
From clouds we would not clear –
Beyond the Law’s pursuing
We fled, and settled here.

We took no tearful leaving,
We bade no long good-byes.
Men talked of crime and thieving,
Men wrote of fraud and lies.
To save our injured feelings
‘Twas time and time to go –
Behind was dock and Dartmoor,
Ahead lay Callao!

Note: Dartmoor is the name of a notorious prison on the moor of that name, in Devon in the west of England.  Callao a port in Peru at that time one of the overseas havens for persons wanted by the law in Britain.

‘Anna Karenina,’ Rushing Headlong Toward Her Train

NPR – Ella Taylor

… Tolstoy gave good ballroom, too, and for all his reputation as the ultimate realist writer, he deployed an array of literary strategies in Anna Karenina— including a section written from the point of view of a dog. But his prose wasn’t forever blaring, “Look, Ma, no hands!”

And given that Anna’s adventures in extramarital romance famously end in tears, there are (or should be) limits to how long you can sustain the jaunty tone; Wright keeps at it, alas, until it’s too late for tragedy, even considering the endlessly foreshadowing grind of giant train wheels presumably meant to remind us that this is not a caper.

The best that can be said of Knightley is that she’s puppy-eyed eye candy, in vibrant reds and blacks with fur trims to die for. But that’s window dressing, and under her glossy surface, Anna Karenina is a woman of many passionately conflicting parts — reluctant temptress, ardent lover, loving mother, an urban sophisticate who’s also deeply insecure and hungry for approval. She’s a modern woman way before her time…

Valerie Eliot, keeper of the TS Eliot flame

Valerie Eliot, who died this week, devoted her life to guarding her husband’s legacy. Did she do more harm than good?

Guardian – By Aida Edemariam

In her subtle and authoritative 1998 book The Imperfect Life of TS Eliot, Lyndall Gordon argues that the poet’s second marriage, entered into when he was 67 years old, was a symbolically as well as personally satisfying final chapter: “For him, paradise followed purgatory with the same logic that purgatory had followed the hell of his first marriage.”

Valerie Eliot, who died this week, put it more earthily – if, on closer reading, slightly disturbingly: “He obviously needed to have a happy marriage. He wouldn’t die until he’d had it. There was a little boy in him that had never been released.”

Ever since the age of 14, when she heard John Gielgud’s recording of “Journey of the Magi”, her life was geared towards meeting Eliot; she was 38 when he died, eight years after they married, and she spent nearly 50 years guarding, burnishing and managing his memory…

Cats took £1.4bn in world-wide box office, £130m in London alone, a good proportion of which went to Valerie and the Eliot estate and then to various prizes and charities. It also made Faber’s financial position much more secure. Initially, Eliot wanted no correspondence published at all, but she “appreciated its importance and fascination” and teased him into compliance of a sort: letters could only be published if she did the selecting and the editing.

She spent years editing the first volume, tracking down letter after letter, citation after citation; the second volume took 11 years to appear; alongside a revised first volume, which by this time had acquired a co-editor, Hugh Haughton.

The third volume appeared this July, and covers one year, 1926-27. Eliot died in 1965; many of the intervening 38 years of letters – the boxes and boxes that were in her private possession, for instance – will probably not be properly accessible for years.

When Valerie Fletcher finally achieved her dream – announced to her headmistress when she left public school – of becoming Eliot’s secretary, she hid her love so successfully that Eliot wasn’t even sure she liked him…

They quickly settled into happy domesticity. “We used to stay at home and drink Drambuie and eat cheese and play Scrabble,” Valerie once said. “He loved to win at cards, and I always made a point of losing by the time we went to bed.” Every Sunday night he left a love letter by her bed; “I have kept every one and would want them to be published after I die.”

Evans, who arrived at Faber the year before Eliot died, and left in 2002, says that she was “incredibly supportive and kind, a very loyal and good shareholder”. Stephen Page is the current publisher and chief executive (both men stress that her death changes nothing at Faber, financially).

He remembers meetings at her flat where, an Epstein bust of Eliot peering over her shoulder, she served tea and “nice biscuits”, and they discussed a trolley-full of new books set carefully between them. Little had been changed in the flat since Eliot’s death. “It was extraordinary working on the correspondence,” Haughton says. “One could be sitting at Eliot’s desk, with his crucifix on the wall, his books around you, his editions of Aristotle or of Indian texts…

“I think that the dedication to the collecting and publication of the letters will be the most important and greatly positive thing she did,” Haughton says. He believes that even after Eliot died, Valerie did what she had always done; at some profound level, she “continued, as it were, to take dictation”.

“But as keeper of the flame and shielding Eliot from the attention of biographers – that will be the question mark over her legacy. Her refusal to countenance biography has I think been very unhelpful.”

“Inevitably, there was some harm done to his reputation in the absence of access and permission, but it won’t be lasting harm,” Schuchard believes. “On balance I think she took the right, hard course over the long haul.

Eliot’s work will stand for itself; he needs no apologists.” Having said that, “The new editions of his letters, poetry, prose and drama will dramatically change the way we see him.”

And she brought something to the books she edited that very few others could. “She loved poetry, and she loved Eliot’s work,” Gordon says. “She saw that there was a simplicity to Eliot in spite of the apparent difficulty.

She saw him in the best light, and he probably was at his best with her. I think she honestly saw the very good side of him and that was her good fortune.”

The White Shadow (1924) (Video)

Film stills are no substitute for moving pictures, but even static images from The White Shadow convey a sense of Alfred Hitchcock’s early gift for creating drama by purely visual means. Betty Compson’s impish smile and half-open eyes framed by a jauntily angled hat and a wreath of artfully positioned smoke; the motley crew of men at the poker table she effortlessly controls; Clive Brook’s steely gaze set off by a slash of light across an otherwise dark background; the graceful shading of an ivy-draped window framing a wistful face. These and many other images confirm Hitchcock’s precocious talent for silent storytelling.

They also indicate why Hitchcock advanced so rapidly in the British film industry. Although he broke into the business as a designer of title-cards conveying plot information and dialogue, he knew that one eloquent picture is worth a dozen printed texts. Learning to conceptualize and create such pictures was the project he successfully completed during his two-year tenure as assistant director for Graham Cutts, with whom he worked on five movies, starting with Woman to Woman in 1923. All were made on economical six-week schedules. The first three were vehicles for Compson, an important star at Paramount who came to England when Balcon-Saville-Freedman, the enterprising production company that employed Cutts and Hitchcock, offered her a dazzling salary of a thousand pounds a week.

Hitchcock said later that Woman to Woman was “the first film that I had really got my hands onto,” and it proved to be a major hit. Reviews were good too; it was deemed the “best American picture made in England” by the Daily Express critic, who shared the British consensus that Hollywood movies were livelier and more entertaining than English ones. Woman to Woman was among the very few British films to do excellent business in the United States, and it also fared well in Germany, where previous British exports had sunk under the weight of lingering resentments from the world war.

Dazzled by their own success, producers Michael Balcon and Victor Saville rushed a second Compson picture into production — The White Shadow — and whisked it to theaters with a conspicuously clunky advertising tag: “The same Star, Producer, Author, Hero, Cameraman, Scenic Artist, Staff, Studio, Renting Company as Woman to Woman.” It also had the same Paris setting, and again Hitchcock’s scenario was based on a work by Michael Morton, this time his unpublished novel Children of Chance. The box-office results were definitely not the same, however: “It was as big a flop,” Balcon wrote in his memoir, “as Woman to Woman had been a success.” This notwithstanding, plans proceeded for three more Cutts-Hitchcock pictures, commencing with The Passionate Adventure in 1924.

The financial failure of The White Shadow was regrettable, but it paradoxically helped advance Hitchcock’s career. The film’s British distributor was C.M. Woolf, who owned the “rental company” referred to in the promotional tag. Woolf was famous for despising “artistic” moviemaking, and thanks to Cutts and Hitchcock, The White Shadow was far too artistic for his taste. Seeing its poor financial performance as proof of his wisdom, he used the occasion to withdraw his investment in Balcon-Saville-Freedman, which subsequently went out of business. Balcon then set up Gainsborough Productions, which went on to become one of England’s most respected, successful — and, yes, artistic — production companies.

Among its first ventures were two Cutts-Hitchcock films: The Blackguard, also known as Die Prininzessin und der Geiger, shot at Germany’s great UFA studio for release in 1925, and The Prude’s Fall, also known as Dangerous Virtue, released in 1924. Soon thereafter, Gainsborough and two German companies would coproduce Hitchcock’s first film as director, the 1925 romance The Pleasure Garden. Two years later, again with Gainsborough’s backing, Hitch made the thriller he regarded as “the first true Hitchcock film” — The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog — and Woolf, still at war with artistic moviemaking, did his best to keep it out of distribution. Fortunately for Hitchcock and for us, he failed.

Cutts was fourteen years older than Hitchcock, and he had a complicated love life that distracted him considerably during the younger man’s apprenticeship, leading to rivalry and envy on Cutts’s part. He belittled Hitchcock behind his back, according to Hitchcock biographer Patrick McGilligan, and matters didn’t improve when The Prude’s Fall turned out so badly that moviegoers “practically hooted it from the screen,” as a Variety critic wrote. Hitchcock had limited amounts of sympathy for Cutts — he later said he was “running even the director” when they worked together — but in the 1930s, when Hitchcock was a rising star and Cutts was looking for any work he could get, Hitchcock quietly helped him out.

These things said, it would be a mistake to think of Hitchcock as a self-assured young genius butting heads with a directorial hack whose time had come and gone. Hitchcock surely profited from his close observation of Cutts, who had entered cinema in 1909 as an exhibitor — dubbed “the master showman of the North” by producer-director Herbert Wilcox — and had made his own directorial debut as recently as 1922, when his melodrama The Wonderful Story was praised by Kinematograph Weekly for its “truth, realism and perfect acting.” His films of the 1920s, including many that he made after Balcon put him and Hitchcock onto separate paths, were known for “spectacular production values, experimental virtuosity of camerawork and lighting and the intense performances… of his actors,” in film historian Christine Gledhill’s words. There can be no doubt that Hitchcock would have mastered cinema technique and discovered his own inimitable voice under almost any circumstances — as critic Andrew Sarris has remarked, he and filmmaking were born for each other, and at almost the same moment — but Cutts was far from the worst senior partner he might have had.

Hitchcock also got to practice and refine a considerable number of skills while making The White Shadow: he was assistant director, film editor, set designer, and scenario writer, and this alone made the production a valuable asset to his budding career. Indeed, his experiences as a “general factotum” on this and other silent films never stopped paying artistic dividends. His goal as a mature filmmaker was to create “pure cinema,” meaning cinema that blends story, style, and technique into an expressive, suspenseful whole. As film scholar Sidney Gottlieb has definitively shown, the lessons Hitch learned from silent film never faded in importance for him. Even decades later and a continent away, he energized his greatest Hollywood pictures with lengthy stretches of unadulterated visual storytelling — think of the crop-dusting scene in North by Northwest (1959) and Scottie shadowing Madeleine in Vertigo (1958) and Jefferies spying on the killer in Rear Window (1954) and the extended sequence showing Marion’s fatal shower and Norman’s obsessive clean-up in Psycho (1960). These are only a few examples from a career that produced as many heart-pounding, soul-stirring visual sequences as any in the history of film.

Reviewers found the story of The White Shadow far-fetched, and they had a point. The plot synopsis filed for copyright purposes is amusingly hard to untangle, and shamelessly melodramatic to boot. But this didn’t stop critics from applauding the acting, the style, and the look of the production — precisely the elements that meant most to Hitchcock even at this early period. The outdoor scenes at Nancy’s home are spaciously composed and gracefully staged; the jazzy atmosphere of The Cat Who Laughs café is introduced with a striking — and startling — close-up of the eponymous statuette, then fleshed out with elaborately detailed long shots of the bohemian dive in full swing; the scene of misrecognition between father and daughter unfolds in close-ups that evince strong emotion with marvelous restraint. These and other sequences are exemplary of their kind.

Watching the surviving reels of The White Shadow with an audience vividly illustrates the natural gifts of the young Hitchcock as well as the enduring power of silent cinema. When the film comes to a halt in the middle of a bravura staircase shot, you’re likely to hear an audible sigh of disappointment from those around you, and from yourself as well. I began by evoking the richness of the film’s individual images, and I’ll close by praising the rhythmic vitality and superbly choreographed movement of these moving pictures when the projector brings them alive. “Just as the sun casts a dark shadow,” the opening intertitle tells us, “so does the soul throw its shadow of white, reflecting a purity that influences the lives of those upon whom the white shadow falls.” The spirited whites, somber darks, and intriguing shades of grey created and orchestrated by Cutts, Hitchcock, and their talented crew will be enjoyed by cinephiles for years to come. The return of The White Shadow is a triumph of film preservation, a bonanza for scholars, and a thrill for movie buffs, showing both Hitchcock and his chosen medium on the threshold of their fullest powers. We are in a better position than ever to study and assess his monumental creativity when it was first crystallizing in his imagination.

—Contributed by David Sterritt
Chairman, National Society of Film Critics

Voyage into the Far-Out Mind of Tomi Ungerer, Renegade Children’s Book Author and Illustrator

Media Bistro – By Stephanie Murg

With a career that began with acclaimed children’s books, surged into iconic 1960s protest posters, blossomed into lavish books of erotica, and included dalliances with architectural design, advertising, and sculpture, Tomi Ungerer evades easy description. (Reader, he has published almost as many books as Steven Heller!) The Alsatian-born illustrator gets his close-up in Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story, a documentary that makes its U.S. premiere tomorrow at the DOC NYC film festival.

Jean-Thomas “Tomi” Ungerer (born 28 November 1931) is an award-winning illustrator and a trilingual author. He has published over 140 books ranging from his much loved children’s books to his controversial adult work. He is famous for his sharp social satire and his witty aphorisms and he ranges from the fantastic to the autobiographical.

Tomi Ungerer was born in Strasbourg, France, the youngest of four children of Alice (Essler) and Theo Ungerer. The family moved to Logelbach, near Colmar, after the death of Tomi’s father, Theodore — an artist, engineer, and astronomical clock manufacturer — in 1936. Ungerer also lived through the German occupation of Alsace and the requisitioning of the family home by the Wehrmacht.

As a young man, Ungerer was inspired by the illustrations appearing in The New Yorker magazine, particularly the work of Saul Steinberg. Ungerer moved to the United States in 1956. The following year, he published his first children’s book for Harper & Row, The Mellops Go Flying. He also did illustration work for such publications as The New York Times, Esquire, Life, Harper’s Bazaar, The Village Voice, and for television during this time, and began to create posters denouncing the Vietnam War.

Upon the publication of Ungerer’s children’s book Moon Man in 1966, Maurice Sendak called it “easily one of the best picture books in recent years.”

After Allumette; A Fable, with Due Respect to Hans Christian Andersen, the Grimm Brothers, and the Honorable Ambrose Bierce in 1974, he ceased writing children’s books, focusing instead on adult-level books, many of which focused on sexuality. He eventually returned to children’s literature with Flix 1998. Ungerer donated many of the manuscripts and artwork for his early children’s books to the Children’s Literature Research Collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia.

In 1998, Ungerer was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Award for illustration.

One consistent theme in Ungerer’s illustrations has been his support for European construction, beginning with Franco-German reconciliation in his home region of Alsace, and in particular European values of tolerance and diversity. In 2003, he was named Ambassador for Childhood and Education by the 47-nation Council of Europe.

In 2007, his home town dedicated a museum to him, the Musée Tomi Ungerer/Centre international de l’illustration.

Ungerer currently divides his time between Ireland (where he and his wife moved in 1976), and Strasbourg. In addition to his work as a graphic artist and ‘drawer’, he is also a designer, toy collector and “archivist of human absurdity.”

Tomi Ungerer describes himself first and foremost as a story teller and satirist. Prevalent themes in his work include political satire such as drawings and posters against the Vietnam War and against animal cruelty, eroticism, and imaginative subjects for children’s books.

Erotic novel removed from iTunes store due to cover, says publisher

The Proof of the Honey, by Syrian author Salwa Al Neimi, pulled by Apple due to ‘inappropriate’ cover featuring naked bottom

Guardian – By Alison Flood

A publisher has claimed that Apple has removed Salwa Al Neimi’s erotic novel The Proof of the Honey from the iTunes store because its cover – which features part of a woman’s naked back and bottom – is “inappropriate”.

Europa Editions said in a statement on its Facebook page that The Proof of the Honey was pulled from the Apple shop. Apple, said the publisher, cited the “inappropriateness of the cover”. The novel is not currently available in the Apple store in its English edition, although a French edition, La preuve par le miel – featuring the same cover – is still in the shop.

Banned in many Arab countries, The Proof of the Honey tells of the erotic adventures of a Syrian scholar in Paris. The narrator has, she says at one point, “a physical need for water, semen, and words. The three things I need in life. I cannot exist without them.” Europa Editions describes it as “a stirring novel about the place afforded sex in modern Arabic society and its relationship to the long, rich tradition of Arabic erotica”; Reuters says that the Syrian-born Al Neimi, who moved to Paris in the mid-1970s, “announces the end of a taboo in the Arab world: that of sex!”

“The author is Syrian-born. Is it too much to think that this might have something to do with their decision?” wrote Europa Editions on Facebook. The publisher also highlighted the lack of consistency in Apple’s move. “One would assume, then, they would also consider classical nudes by Ingres, Renoir and Botticelli, not to mention photography by Man Ray inappropriate,” it wrote. “What about New York Book Review editions of Dud Avocado, Tyrant Banderas, or our very own The Days of Abandonment? NOPE! All are available in the iTunes bookstore.”

Earlier this autumn, Apple censored the title of Naomi Wolf’s new book Vagina, starring out part of the title. After readers protested – “Are Apple worried that people are going to discover that ‘lady parts’ have a name?” wrote one on the online store – the novel’s title is now visible in all its glory in the Apple store.

Apple had not responded to a request for comment by press time.

In Memory Of The Fallen…

Sunday Culture: Protecting Treasures…

Vivian Maier (February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009) was an American amateur street photographer who was born in New York but grew up in France, and after returning to the U.S., worked for about forty years as a nanny in Chicago. During those years she took about 100,000 photographs, primarily of people and cityscapes most often in Chicago, although she traveled worldwide, taking pictures in each location.

Her photographs remained unknown and mostly undeveloped until they were discovered by a local historian in 2007. Following Maier’s death her work began to receive critical acclaim. Her photographs have appeared in newspapers in Italy, Argentina, and England, and have been exhibited alongside other artists’ work in Denmark and Norway; her first solo exhibition is running at the Chicago Cultural Center from January to April 2011.

Many of the details of Maier’s life are still being uncovered. Initial impressions about her life indicated that she was born in France, but further searching revealed that she was born in New York, the daughter of Maria Jaussaud, who was French, and Charles Maier, who was Austrian. Vivian moved between the U.S. and France several times during her childhood, although where in France she lived is unknown. Her father seems to have left the family for unknown reasons by 1930. During the census that year, the head of the household was listed as award-winning portrait photographer Jeanne Bertrand, who knew the founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

In 1951, at 25 years old, Vivian Maier moved from France to New York, where she worked for some time in a sweatshop. She made her way to the Chicago area‘s North Shore in 1956 and became a nanny on and off for about 40 years, staying with one family for 14 of them. She was, in the accounts of the families for whom she worked, very private, spending her days off walking the streets of Chicago and taking photographs, most often with a Rolleiflex camera.

John Maloof, curator of Maier’s collection of photographs, summarizes the way the children she nannied would later describe her:

She was a Socialist, a Feminist, a movie critic, and a tell-it-like-it-is type of person. She learned English by going to theaters, which she loved. She wore a men’s jacket, men’s shoes and a large hat most of the time. She was constantly taking pictures, which she didn’t show anyone.

Between 1959 and 1960, Maier traveled to Los Angeles, Manila, Bangkok, Beijing, Egypt, Italy, and the American Southwest, taking pictures in each location. The trip was probably financed by the sale of a family farm in Alsace. For a brief period in the 1970s, Maier worked as a nanny for Phil Donahue‘s children. As she got older, she collected more boxes of belongings, bringing them with her to each new post. At one employer’s house she stored 200 boxes of materials. Most were photographs or negatives, but Maier collected other objects, such as newspapers, and sometimes recorded audiotapes of conversations she had with the people she photographed.

Towards the end of her life, Maier may have been homeless for some time. She lived on Social Security checks and may have had another source of income, but the children she had taken care of in the early 1950s bought her an apartment and paid her bills. In 2008, she slipped on ice and hit her head. She did not fully recover and died in 2009 at the age of 83.

Maier’s images depict street scenes in Chicago and New York in the 1950s and 1960s. An article in The Independent characterizes her photographs thus:

The well-to-do shoppers of Chicago stroll and gossip in all their department-store finery before Maier, but the most arresting subjects are those people on the margins of successful, rich America in the 1950s and 1960s: the kids, the black maids, the bums flaked out on shop stoops.

Maier’s photographic legacy, in the form of some 100,000 negatives — a large portion in the form of undeveloped rolls — was discovered by 26-year-old real estate agent John Maloof, also president of the Jefferson Park Historical Society in Chicago. While working on a book about the Chicago neighborhood of Portage Park, Maloof bought 30,000 prints and negatives from an auction house that had acquired the photographs from a storage locker that had been sold off when Maier was no longer able to pay her fees. After purchasing the first collection of Maier photographs in 2007, Maloof acquired the rest from another buyer at the same auction.

Maloof discovered Maier’s name at an early stage of his discovery, but was unable to find out more about her until just after her death, when he found an obituary notice in the Chicago Tribune. Her work was first published on the internet in July of 2008 by Ron Slattery who had also purchased a good deal of her work at auction. In 2009, Maloof started to post some of Maier’s photographs on a blog, and later he announced his intention to publish a photo book of Maier’s photography. The book is scheduled to be released in fall 2011, and a feature-length documentary film about Maier and Maloof’s discovery of her work, titled Finding Vivian Maier, is scheduled for release in 2012.

Maier’s photographs, and the way they were discovered, received international attention in mainstream media.

Vivian Maier – Her Discovered Work

Photographer’s Talent Went Unknown Until Death

A painting by Bruegel animated 3D

Lech Majewski worked with art historian to interpret Christ Carrying the Cross painted in 1564.

Le Figaro FR (English Translation)

The auditorium of the Louvre will broadcast premiere on Feb. 2 as part of the fourth edition of the International Days of Films on Art, The Mill and the Cross of Lech Majewski.

This is not the first filmmaker flirting with the visual arts. In 1996 he produced and wrote the biopic Basquiat on the meteor New York. Besides the astonishing plastic beauty of the images and the presence of Rutger Hauer, Charlotte Rampling and Michael York, the interest of this work lies in a completely original design. Everything is indeed based on a single table in which the viewer will be immersed.

Become a text script

This is the port cross Pieter Bruegel the Elder executed in 1564 during the brutal occupation of Flanders by the Spanish. The oil of 1.70 m by 1.24 m is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The art historian Michael F. Gibson extensively analyzed and its text became scenario. “Why the painter he concealed the central figure of Christ among a crowd of peasants? he asked.

Why, in a Renaissance landscape, he gave considerable importance to an improbable mill perched on an enigmatic rock? Why are policemen who flank the procession are they red uniform? What does the archaic style of the holy women? Past and future, life and death, destiny and freedom shape this teeming fresco, which has at least five hundred characters heading toward Golgotha. In Vienna we can not enjoy the thousand sketches and anecdotes with a magnifying glass and a stool. All are significant. “

His essay published by Noesis in 1996 is bright. It explains why the particular artist imagines the Passion in the sixteenth century: “Brueghel’s approach is to use the immediate political situation to understand the history of the messiah in not taking the story of Christ to condemn the atrocities in Spain.

But the movie that flows from his reading, combining analog and synthetic imagery to 3D, producing a manner equivalent to the visual interpretation, book an extra sense. For example, it is only during the shooting, Michael F. Gibson was able to discern the different perspectives structuring the composition. There are seven A magic number.

In A Small Corner Of YouTube, A Web Star Is Born

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Sunday Culture: Remembrance Of Things Past

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (French pronunciation: [maʁsɛl pʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past). It was published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927.

Proust was born in Auteuil (the southern sector of Paris’ then-rustic 16th arrondissement) at the home of his great-uncle, two months after the Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian War. His birth took place during the violence that surrounded the suppression of the Paris Commune, and his childhood corresponds with the consolidation of the French Third Republic. Much of In Search of Lost Time concerns the vast changes, most particularly the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle classes that occurred in France during the Third Republic and the fin de siècle.

Proust’s father, Achille Adrien Proust, was a prominent pathologist and epidemiologist, responsible for studying and attempting to remedy the causes and movements of cholera through Europe and Asia; he was the author of many articles and books on medicine and hygiene. Proust’s mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil, was the daughter of a rich and cultured Jewish family from Alsace. She was literate and well-read; her letters demonstrate a well-developed sense of humour, and her command of English was sufficient for her to provide the necessary assistance to her son’s later attempts to translate John Ruskin.

By the age of nine, Proust had his first serious asthma attack, and thereafter he was considered a sickly child. Proust spent long holidays in the village of Illiers. This village, combined with recollections of his great-uncle’s house in Auteuil, became the model for the fictional town of Combray, where some of the most important scenes of In Search of Lost Time take place. (Illiers was renamed Illiers-Combray on the occasion of the Proust centenary celebrations.)

In 1882, at the age of eleven, Proust became a pupil at the Lycée Condorcet, but his education was disrupted because of his illness. Despite this he excelled in literature, receiving an award in his final year. It was through his classmates that he was able to gain access to some of the salons of the upper bourgeoisie, providing him with copious material for In Search of Lost Time.

Despite his poor health, Proust served a year (1889–90) as an enlisted man in the French army, stationed at Coligny Barracks in Orléans, an experience that provided a lengthy episode in The Guermantes’ Way, part three of his novel. As a young man, Proust was a dilettante and a social climber whose aspirations as a writer were hampered by his lack of discipline. His reputation from this period, as a snob and an amateur, contributed to his later troubles with getting Swann’s Way, the first part of his large-scale novel, published in 1913.

Proust had a close relationship with his mother. To appease his father, who insisted that he pursue a career, Proust obtained a volunteer position at the Bibliothèque Mazarine in the summer of 1896. After exerting considerable effort, he obtained a sick leave that extended for several years until he was considered to have resigned. He never worked at his job, and he did not move from his parents’ apartment until after both were dead.

Proust, who was homosexual, was one of the first European novelists to mention homosexuality openly and at length in the parts of À la recherche du temps perdu which deal with the Baron de Charlus.

His life and family circle changed considerably between 1900 and 1905. In February 1903, Proust’s brother Robert married and left the family home. His father died in November of the same year. Finally, and most crushingly, Proust’s beloved mother died in September 1905. She left him a considerable inheritance. His health throughout this period continued to deteriorate.

Proust spent the last three years of his life mostly confined to his cork-lined bedroom, sleeping during the day and working at night to complete his novel. He died of pneumonia and a pulmonary abscess in 1922. He was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Source:  Wiki

A castell is a human tower built traditionally in festivals at many locations within Catalonia. At these festivals, several colles castelleres or teams often succeed in building and dismantling a tower’s structure. On November 16, 2010, castells were declared by UNESCO to be amongst the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity

The tradition of building castells originated in Valls, near the city of Tarragona, in the southern part of Catalonia towards the end of the 18th century. Later it developed a following in other regions of Catalonia and, since 1981, when the first castell of 9 levels of the 20th century was built, it has become very popular in most of Catalonia and even Majorca. The only 5 teams that have built complex gamma extra castells are from Valls, Vilafranca del Penedès, Terrassa and Mataró. In Catalan the word castell means castle.

A castell is considered a success when stages of its assembling and disassembling, can be done in complete succession. The assembly is complete once all castellers have climbed into their designated places, and the enxaneta climbs into place at the top and raises one hand with four fingers erect, in a gesture said to symbolize the stripes of the Catalan flag. The enxaneta then climbs down the other side of the castell, after which the remaining levels of castellers descend in highest-to-lowest order until all have reached safety.

Aside from the people who climb to form the upper parts of the tower, others are needed to form the pinya, or bottom base of the castell, to sustain its weight. Members of the pinya (most often men) also act as a ‘safety net’ if the tower structure collapses, cushioning the fall of people from the upper levels.

The castell is built in two phases. First, the pinya the base of the tower is formed. People forming higher levels of the tower move to a position from which they can easily get to their place in the tower. This is done slowly and carefully, and as subsequent base levels are completed the castellers in the pinya determine if their base is solid enough for construction to continue.

Then, when the signal to proceed is given, bands begin to play the traditional Toc de Castells music as a hush comes over spectators of the event. The upper layers of the tower are built as quickly as possible in order to put minimal strain on the lower castellers, who bear most of the weight of the castell. The disassembly of the castell, done amidst the cheering of the crowd, is often the most treacherous stage of the event.

There is a form of the Castell, generally referred to as ‘rising’, in which each successive layer is added from the bottom by lifting the castell into the air, stage by stage. It is held that this form takes even more skill and strength and a great deal of practice. Four levels complete have been observed and five attempted, but it is said that the record is six or perhaps seven.

Typically castellers wear white trousers, a black sash, a bandana and a coloured shirt often bearing the team’s emblem. A differently coloured shirt indicates which team a participant is in. Team Castellers de Barcelona wear red shirts while Castellers de Vilafranca wear green shirts.

The sash (faixa) is the most important part of their outfit, since it supports the lower back and is used by other castellers in the team as a foothold or handhold when climbing up the tower. This tasselled piece of cloth varies in length and width and depends on the casteller’s position inside the tower and also on choice.

The length of the sash ranges from 1.5 to 12 m, and usually is shorter for those higher up in the castell. Performing castellers usually go barefoot as to minimise injures upon each other as they climb to their position and also for sensitivity when balancing and to have better feel and hold each other.

The arrangement of castellers can be into a multi-tiered structure and the highest has a height spanning of nine or ten people from ground up. Accidents are seldom during the construction of a castell, however as in bull runs ambulance are stationed nearby just in case a person needs to be immediately taken to hospital. Fatal accidents do occur where on August 6, 2006, in Mataró a young casteller fell off the formation of a castell and died. Prior to this, the previous death of a participant was in 1981 in Torredembarra.

The motto of Castellers is “Força, equilibri, valor i seny” (Strength, balance, courage and reason).

• Strength: A casteller is usually a stocky person. The first castellers were peasants that were accustomed to holding great weights and were under much physical exertion.
• Balance: For supporting other above in the castell while relying on those below for support requires a strong sense of balance and trust.
• Courage: The most important characteristic for castellers, especially for young children forming the highest levels of the castell.
• Reason: Rehearsing and performing requires a great deal of planning and reasoning. Any error can cause the structure to fail and break apart.

Source:  Wiki

Related: A day in the life of a ‘castells’ climber earns two minutes of YouTube fame

How wrong could we be?

Architect and designer Oscar Tusquets wishes to apologize for a controversial 1960s manifesto

EL PAÍS – By OSCAR TUSQUETS BLANCA

In the early 1960s, while still a student, I was one of the instigators of a manifesto that opposed continuing work on the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. The text was unconditionally supported by the entire intelligentsia of the period, from Bruno Zevi to Julio Carlo Argan, Alvar Aalto and Le Corbusier. Although its publication triggered a strong reaction and construction work resumed with renewed vigor, we remained convinced that this was a mistake of monumental proportions.

But now the pope has consecrated the temple, it’s time to reconsider. My doubts actually began when I saw the majestic central nave going up. My rejection took an even bigger hit when Alfons Soldevila, an excellent architect, assured me that if only I got to know the temple in depth, I would change my mind. He said this was the most important building in the 20th century, and was willing to prove it. So I visited the temple from the bottom up (over 60 meters in height), and I was left speechless.

It is true that in the areas that Gaudí left unspecified, there are two serious problems: one is that the people who carried on the project lacked the talent to interpret Gaudí using his own language or to enter into a dialogue with him. This means that nearly all the details added after his death are an eyesore: stainless steel and glass handrails, harsh lighting, pavements, glass windows and in general, decorative elements that fail to live up to the structure as a whole. Still, these details do not take away from the immense quality of the monument, and could even be replaced in a desirable future.

The second, more serious problem is the challenge of finding contemporary artists able to carry out the maestro’s figurative projects. Gaudí meant to imitate medieval cathedrals by explaining the Holy Scriptures on the cathedral’s façade. This was no easy task in the early 20th century, but Gaudí’s genius came up with a solution that was borderline kitsch: the Fachada del Nacimiento features walls that wrinkle up to form figures, many of which were obtained using molds of real people and animals. The painful result on the Fachada de la Pasión reveals the true difficulty of pursuing this line of work. And there is still the main wall, the Fachada de la Gloria, left to do.

But our main objection to continuing the project was the fact that we did not know what Gaudí would have done, since he used to improvise and his blueprints were destroyed at the beginning of the Civil War. Any re-interpretation would amount to a betrayal, we thought. If project leaders had listened to us 50 years ago, this marvel would not exist in its present state. How many people would visit it? This temple never had economic support from the institutions; instead it lives off the donations of its two million yearly visitors. It is being financed like a true medieval cathedral. I don’t know if the completed work will be the best architectural project of the last century… but it will certainly be the greatest religious building of the last three.

HOW TO WATCH THIS VIDEO:. When you see text in white, stop the video ( ▌▌) and read it (it’s only presented for two seconds). When finished, press ‘play’ again (►). Simple comme bonjour!
The texts are quotations from Proust’s monumental novel: In Search of Lost Time (À la Recherche du Temps Perdu). To read the whole volume in English see: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300…

The scene of the duchess’s red shoes is characteristic for his work, and could form a good start reading the whole book (seven volumes!). For more on the red shoes of the duchess, see Yolande Jansen (academic stuff): http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/h.y.m.j…

The images are from Volker Schlöndorff’s movie (1984): Swann in Love (Un amour de Swann), starring Jeremy Irons (Charles Swann), Fanny Ardant (Duchesse de Guermantes), Jacques Boudet (Duke de Guermantes).
Music: Camille Saint-Saëns, Adagio of the Sonata for Piano and Violin no. 1 in D minor, op. 75. Proust scholars have speculated endlessly on what is the “real life” equivalent of Proust’s famous “little phrase”. The adagio is one of the suggestions. To download this music in mp3: http://www.gardnermuseum.org/music/ar…

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