A Berlin-based photographer has captured the beauty of forgotten buildings from the communist era. Ex-Soviet hospitals and dried-up German breweries are among the dilapidated settings for the stunning series of photos.
The Orpheum Theatre opened on April 15, 1912 – the same day the Titanic sank. Located on Water Street in New Bedford, Massachusetts, it was part of a Beaux-Arts building that was built in 1910 by a French-Canadian group known as Le Club des Francs-Tireurs (The French Sharpshooters Club).
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Painting by Max Jacob, “Orpheus Attacked by the Brigands,” 1928, Philadelphia Museum of Art
For Jacob, an openly gay apostate Jew, the myth also carried personal significance. When Orpheus loses his wife Eurydice in the Underworld, he renounces women for the love of men, thus providing Jacob with an affirming image of homosexuality from classical antiquity.
Picasso said: ‘There’s only one man in Paris who knows how to dress and that is Modigliani.’ He didn’t say that as a joke. Modigliani, poor as he was, even to the extent of having to borrow three sous for the underground to go to the literary evenings at the Closerie des Lilas, was not only refined, but had an eclectic elegance. He was the first man in Paris to wear a shirt made of cretonne.
1876-1944. Met Picasso in 1901 and for some time shared a studio with him. Afterward, and for many years to follow, he lived three doors away from the artist on the Rue Ravignan. One of the key members of the group that formed around Apollinaire. A painter as well as poet, Jacob lived in extreme poverty, working at all manner of jobs throughout his life. Although born a Jew, he converted to Catholicism in 1915, six years after having a vision of Christ. In 1921 he moved from Paris to the small village of Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire, close to a Benedictine church, where he remained until his arrest by the Nazis in February 1944. He died the following month in the concentration camp at Drancy. (via)
Update: Max and Picasso were both so poor they shared the same overcoat, hat and gloves in winter. There was one bed. One went out and used the coat, the other stayed in and used the bed. What resolve! (via email thanks to Janet Paparelli.)
Love Is Such an Old-Fashioned Word – by Blaire Broussa (Via the Walrus)
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world” — Ludwig Wittgenstein
Read this delightful story here
When Felix Bronislav met Helen Ferapont in 1937, she was already an expert in Panini’s sutras on Sanskrit grammar. She was working on her dissertation under Nikolai Trubetzkoy in Prague, and her Ph.D. thesis was to be a discussion of the deification of speech found in Hindu Scripture. (continue here)
Helen went to revolutionary China to study both Mandarin and the praying-mantis school of Tai-Chi in Shandong province, writing verbose and melancholy letters back to Felix, ending each epistle with luxurious postscripts in a calligraphy that dripped libidinously off the page:
Edwin Parker “Cy” Twombly Jr was born in Lexington, Virginia. Both his parents came from Maine. His father was a sports instructor and former baseball player whom Twombly admiringly described as still doing back flips at the age of 40: he was known as “Cy” after the legendary pitcher “Cyclone” Young. Twombly inherited his father’s nickname but not his athleticism.
Each line he made, he said, was “the actual experience” of making the line, adding: “It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.” Years later he described this more plainly. “It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture.”
Herman Hesse Statue at Calw
On Monday 2nd July 1877 at 18:30 Hermann Hesse was born in a flat on the second floor of Marktplatz 6, Calw, opposite the town hall, and lived there for the greater part of his youth.
“Gluck” means… luck, fortune, happiness. ‘The very sound of it’, Hesse says, ‘brings forth that feeling of lightness, life and joy.’
To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, young man, and possibly a tragic one. HERMANN HESSE, The Glass Bead Game
The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught – HERMANN HESSE, The Glass Bead Game
Ninon Hesse – an art historian who married Hesse and became very important in his life (photos here)
Peter Falk, who died Friday at age 83, was an actor of great and invisible skill who played many parts over a five-decade career. He was a late bloomer but quickly embraced on the stage and screens big and little — by 1962, he had been Oscar-nominated twice, for gangsters respectively chilling and comical in “Murder, Inc.” and “A Pocketful of Miracles,” and won an Obie playing Eugene O’Neill opposite Jason Robards. Later, he acted troublesome characters for director John Cassevetes in “Husbands” and “A Woman Under the Influence,” was brilliantly funny as a reckless CIA agent in “The In-Laws,” and narrated, grandfather-to-grandson, “The Princess Bride.”
The In-Laws, The Husband, The Detective, The Scriptwriter, Friend of angels, Just One More Thing (Previous post)
In 1918, his art was to change dramatically as a direct consequence of Germany’s economic, political and military collapse at the end of the First World War.
“In the war, things were in terrible turmoil. What I had learned at the academy was of no use to me and the useful new ideas were still unready…. Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz. It was like a revolution within me, not as it was, but as it should have been.
Review of Nowhere boy
Artist Sam Taylor-Wood surprises us with an old-fashioned, affecting film exploring John Lennon’s early years, writes Philip French
Sam Taylor Wood follows the examples of artists Julian Schnabel and Stev McQueen of crossing over to make mainstream films.
Happy birthday Michael Cacoyannis.. found this film, Women in Black, I have not seen. Life is Trouble, Death is Not from Zorba the Greek (this many of us have seen).
Previous post (Michael Cacoyannis with Jacques Cousteau)
Richard Strauss birthday too. (June 11) – ( A Space Odyssey 2001)
Malalai is one of the only police women in Kandahar. Unlike other women in the region, Malalai works alongside men, apprehending criminals and restoring justice in one of the most dangerous cities in the nation. When working outside her home and office she is always armed beneath her burka.
The story goes that Frederico Garcia Lorca (the pilot here) erroneously believed that the film by Dali and Bunuel Un Chien Andalou (an Andalucian Dog) referred to him, coming from Granada, having recently fallen out with his surrealist friends. This to my mind seems doubly pained paranoia if you have seen the film. And who needed Dali as a friend anyway? (Walt Disney actually).
One reader of my blog pointed out to me the word APOCRYPHAL is a perfect anagram of HAPPY LORCA. I took this as a sign that my examination of the apocryphal Lorcas of American poetry and poetics was ultimately a felicitous one.
“I offer myself to be devoured by Spanish peasants,” writes the poet Federico García Lorca in a newly-discovered manuscript of a poem from his portrait of the United States during the Great Depression, Poeta en Nueva York (Poet in New York).