Today is the 117th birthday of the photographer Brassaï.  I learned about him while researching some of his contemporaries on their birthdays and became fixated on his nighttime Paris photos, the thick fog, the lights fighting to do their jobs and the Parisians that continue to live and love inside of all of it.  The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Brassaï
OCCUPATION: Poet, Photographer, Sculptor
BIRTH DATE: September 9, 1899
DEATH DATE: July 8, 1984
PLACE OF BIRTH: Brasso, Hungary
PLACE OF DEATH: Eze, France
FULL NAME: Gyula Halász

BEST KNOWN FOR: Brassaï was a Hungarian-born French photographer, poet, and sculptor who became known for his photographs of Paris nightlife in the 1930s.

BRASSAI took his name from the town of his birth, Brasso, in Transylvania, then part of Hungary, later of Roumania, and famous as the home of Court Dracula. He studied art at the academies of Budapest and Berlin before coming to Paris in the mid-twenties. He was completely disinterested in photography, if not scornful of it, until he saw the work being done by his acquaintance Andre Kertesz, which inspired him to take up the medium himself.

In the early thirties he set about photographing the night of Paris, especially at its more colorful and more disreputable levels. The results this project — a fascinatingly tawdry collection of prostitutes, pimps, madams, transvestites, apaches, and assorted cold-eyed pleasure-seekers — was published in 1933 as Paris de Nuit, one of the most remarkable of all photographic books.

Making photographs in the dark bistros and darker streets presented a difficult technical problem. BRASSAI”s solution was direct, primitive, and perfect. He focused his small plate camera on a tripod, opened the shutter when ready, and fired a flashbulb. If the quality of his light did not match that of the places where he worked, it was, for BRASSAI, better: straighter, more merciless, more descriptive of fact, and more in keeping with BRASSAI’s own vision, which was as straightforward as a hammer.

When Paris de Nuit was published, the great photographer and theorist Dr.Peter Henry Emerson, then approaching eighty, wrote BRASSAI in care of his publisher, asking BRASSAI to please send his proper address, so that Emerson could send him the medal that he had awarded him for his splendid book. It is an interesting comment on the chaotic incoherence of photographic history that BRASSAI had never heard of Emerson.

come find me, i’m @

Today is the 88th birthday of Roddy McDowall. I think I first recognized him in a midnight movie called The Legend of Hell House, a not great mid-70’s supernatural horror film. I then couldn’t stop finding him in films, like recognizing an old friend in a photograph you had no idea they were in.  For example, he is in an episode of Hart to Hart. The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Roddy McDowall
OCCUPATION: Film Actor
BIRTH DATE: September 17, 1928
DEATH DATE: October 3, 1998
PLACE OF BIRTH: Herne Hill, London, England
PLACE OF DEATH: Studio City, California
AKA: Roddy McDowall
FULL NAME: Roderick Andrew Anthony Jude McDowall
REMAINS: Cremated (ashes scattered at sea)

BEST KNOWN FOR: Actor Roddy McDowall had a recurring role on the Batman television series, and played Cornelius in the film and TV versions of Planet of the Apes.

Actor and photographer Roddy McDowall was born Roderick Andrew Anthony Jude McDowall was born on September 17, 1928, in London, England. He was the only son of Thomas McDowall, a merchant seaman, and his wife, Winifred. As a child, Roddy appeared in a slew of British films, including Yellow Sands (1938) and Just William (1939).

In 1940, Roddy moved to America, with his mother and sister, to escape the World War II bombing of London. Thomas McDowall joined his family shortly thereafter. They settled in Hollywood, where Roddy was immediately contracted by 20th Century-Fox. In 1941, he gave a remarkable performance as the juvenile lead in John Ford’s Oscar-winning drama How Green Was My Valley. McDowall followed the film’s success with equally impressive roles in the children’s classics My Friend Flicka and Lassie Come Home (both 1943).

Like many child stars, McDowall found it hard to transition into adult film roles. Frustrated with dwindling opportunities in Hollywood, he turned to stage acting. He toured in vaudeville and in summer stock before moving to New York in 1954. He was featured in a succession of memorable Broadway productions, including Compulsion (1957) and The Fighting Cock (1959). For the latter, McDowall earned a Supporting Actor Tony Award.

In 1963, McDowall returned to film acting in the more mature role of Octavian in the extravagant feature Cleopatra, costarring with Richard Burton and longtime friend Elizabeth Taylor. Shortly after, he made his mark in television with a recurring role—as the miscreant Bookworm—on the 1966 Batman series, opposite Adam West. His role as The Bookworm, one of Batman’s nemeses—others included Julie Newmar’s Catwoman, Cesar Romero’s Joker and Vincent Price’s Egghead—made McDowall a household name with younger viewers.

In 1968, McDowall starred as the sympathetic scientist Cornelius in the seminal science fiction film Planet of the Apes. With undeniable camp appeal, the film spawned a number of sequels and earned McDowall a cult following. He reprised his role as Cornelius in the third installment, Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971). In the two subsequent releases, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), McDowall assumed the role of Cornelius’ son Caesar.

McDowall made a transition to the small screen with the Planet of the Apes TV series, appearing in a number of episodes in 1974. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he continued to direct his efforts toward television work. He acted in the TV movies The Rhineman Exchange (1977), The Martian Chronicles (1980) and Hollywood Wives (1985). During this period, McDowall’s most notable film credit was as a washed-up movie star in the acclaimed horror film Fright Night (1985).

Toward the end of his prolific career, McDowall lent his voice to a number of animated series, including the Darkwing Duck (1992) and The Adventures of Batman and Robin (1994). In 1998, he provided the voice of Mr. Soil in the Disney/Pixar animated feature A Bug’s Life, which marked his final film role.

McDowall was also an accomplished portrait photographer whose pictures of Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy and Mia Farrow appeared in Look and Life magazines. He published a series of books: Double Exposure (1966), Double Exposure, Take Two (1989), Double Exposure, Take Three (1992) and Double Exposure, Take Four (1993). An active and respected member of the Hollywood community, McDowall served on the executive boards of the Screen Actors Guild and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

McDowall died on October 3, 1998, in Studio City, California, after a long battle with cancer. He was 70 years old.

TELEVISION
The Pirates of Dark Water Niddler (1991-93)
Tales of the Gold Monkey Bon Chance Louie (1982-83)
The Fantastic Journey Dr. Jonathan Willoway (1977)
Planet of the Apes Galen (1974)

FILMOGRAPHY AS DIRECTOR
The Devil’s Widow (Dec-1970)

FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
A Bug’s Life (14-Nov-1998) [VOICE]
Something to Believe In (8-May-1998)
The Second Jungle Book: Mowgli & Baloo (16-May-1997)
Unlikely Angel (17-Dec-1996)
Dead Man’s Island (5-Mar-1996)
It’s My Party (11-Jan-1996)
Last Summer in the Hamptons (13-Sep-1995) · Thomas
The Grass Harp (10-Sep-1995)
Star Hunter (1995)
The Color of Evening (1994)
Double Trouble (14-Feb-1992) · Philip Chamberlain
Deadly Game (10-Jul-1991)
Shakma (1990) · Sorenson
Going Under (1990)
The Big Picture (15-Sep-1989)
Cutting Class (Jul-1989)
Around the World in 80 Days (16-Apr-1989)
Fright Night Part II (11-Jan-1989)
Doin’ Time on Planet Earth (1988)
Overboard (16-Dec-1987) · Andrew
Dead of Winter (6-Feb-1987)
GoBots: War of the Rock Lords (21-Mar-1986) [VOICE]
Alice in Wonderland (9-Dec-1985)
Fright Night (2-Aug-1985)
Class of 1984 (20-Aug-1982)
Mae West (2-May-1982)
Evil Under the Sun (5-Mar-1982) · Rex Brewster
Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen (Feb-1981)
The Return of the King (11-May-1980) [VOICE]
The Martian Chronicles (27-Jan-1980)
Scavenger Hunt (21-Dec-1979)
Circle of Iron (14-Dec-1978)
The Thief of Baghdad (23-Nov-1978)
The Cat from Outer Space (9-Jun-1978)
Rabbit Test (9-Apr-1978)
Laserblast (1-Mar-1978) · Dr. Mellon
Sixth and Main (1977)
Flood! (24-Nov-1976)
Embryo (21-May-1976)
Mean Johnny Barrows (Jan-1976)
Funny Lady (15-Mar-1975) · Bobby
Arnold (16-Nov-1973)
Battle for the Planet of the Apes (15-Jun-1973) · Caesar
The Legend of Hell House (15-Jun-1973) · Ben Fischer
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (18-Dec-1972)
The Poseidon Adventure (12-Dec-1972) · Acres
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (29-Jun-1972) · Caesar
Bedknobs and Broomsticks (11-Nov-1971)
A Taste of Evil (12-Oct-1971)
Escape from the Planet of the Apes (21-May-1971) · Cornelius
Pretty Maids All in a Row (28-Apr-1971)
Angel, Angel, Down We Go (19-Aug-1969)
Hello Down There (25-Jun-1969)
Midas Run (7-May-1969)
5 Card Stud (31-Jul-1968)
Planet of the Apes (8-Feb-1968) · Cornelius
The Cool Ones (12-Apr-1967) · Tony
The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin (3-Mar-1967)
It! (Nov-1966)
The Defector (20-Oct-1966) · Adams
Lord Love a Duck (21-Feb-1966) · Alan Musgrave
Inside Daisy Clover (17-Feb-1966) · Baines
That Darn Cat! (2-Dec-1965)
The Loved One (11-Oct-1965) · D. J. Jr.
The Third Day (4-Aug-1965)
The Greatest Story Ever Told (15-Feb-1965) · Matthew
Shock Treatment (22-Jul-1964) · Martin Ashley
Cleopatra (12-Jun-1963) · Octavian
The Longest Day (Sep-1962) · Pvt. Morris
The Power and the Glory (29-Oct-1961)
Midnight Lace (13-Oct-1960) · Malcolm
The Subterraneans (23-Jun-1960)
The Tempest (3-Feb-1960)
Killer Shark (19-Mar-1950) · Ted
Tuna Clipper (10-Apr-1949)
Kidnapped (28-Nov-1948) · David Balfour
Macbeth (1-Oct-1948)
Holiday in Mexico (15-Aug-1946) · Stanley Owen
Molly and Me (25-May-1945) · Jimmy Graham
Thunderhead: Son of Flicka (15-Mar-1945) · Ken McLaughlin
The Keys of the Kingdom (15-Dec-1944) · Francis Chisholm
The White Cliffs of Dover (11-May-1944) · John Ashwood II
Lassie Come Home (10-Oct-1943) · Joe Carraclough
My Friend Flicka (26-May-1943)
The Pied Piper (8-Jul-1942)
Son of Fury (29-Jan-1942) · Benjamin
Confirm or Deny (19-Nov-1941)
How Green Was My Valley (28-Oct-1941) · Huw
Man Hunt (13-Jun-1941) · Vaner
Saloon Bar (2-Nov-1940)
Just William (20-Jul-1940)

Source: Roddy McDowall – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: Roddy McDowall – Film Actor – Biography.com

Source: Roddy McDowall, 70, Dies; Child Star and Versatile Actor – The New York Times

Source: Roddy McDowall

come find me, i’m @

Today is the 92nd birthday of of the 39th president, philanthropist, human rights activist, and the one of the people I list when asked “who alive or dead would you like to invite to a dinner party?”:  Jimmy Carter.  The world is a better place because he is in it.  We all owe him a great amount of gratitude and should read everything we can about him and hope some of it rubs off on us.NAME: Jimmy Carter
OCCUPATION: U.S. President
BIRTH DATE: October 01, 1924
EDUCATION: Georgia Southwestern College, Georgia Institute of Technology, US Naval Academy
PLACE OF BIRTH: Plains, Georgia
US PRESIDENT (1977-81)
GOVERNOR OF GEORGIA (1971-75)
GEORGIA STATE SENATE (1962-66)
BETTER WORLD SOCIETY Trustee
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE 2002
PRESIDENTIAL MEDAL OF FREEDOM 1999
TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR 1976
ALBERT SCHWEITZER PRIZE FOR HUMANITARIANISM 1987
SILVER BUFFALO 1978
SECRET SERVICE CODE NAME: Dasher, Deacon, Lock Master

BEST KNOWN FOR: Jimmy Carter was the 39th president of the United States (1977-81) and later was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

James Earl “Jimmy” Carter, Jr. (born October 1, 1924) is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States (1977–1981) and was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office. Before he became President, Carter served as a U.S. Naval officer, was a peanut farmer, served two terms as a Georgia State Senator and one as Governor of Georgia (1971–1975).

As President, Carter created two new cabinet-level departments: the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. He established a national energy policy that included conservation, price control, and new technology. In foreign affairs, Carter pursued the Camp David Accords, the Panama Canal Treaties, the second round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II), and returned the Panama Canal Zone to Panama.

Throughout his career, Carter strongly emphasized human rights. He took office during a period of international stagflation, which persisted throughout his term. The end of his presidential tenure was marked by the 1979–1981 Iran hostage crisis, the 1979 energy crisis, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (at the end of 1979), 1980 Summer Olympics boycott by the United States of the Moscow Olympics and the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.

By 1980, Carter’s popularity had eroded. He survived a primary challenge against Ted Kennedy for the Democratic Party nomination in the 1980 election, but lost the election to Republican candidate Ronald Reagan. On January 20, 1981, minutes after Carter’s term in office ended, the 52 U.S. captives held at the U.S. embassy in Iran were released, ending the 444-day Iran hostage crisis.

After leaving office, Carter and his wife Rosalynn founded the Carter Center in 1982, a nongovernmental, not-for-profit organization that works to advance human rights. He has traveled extensively to conduct peace negotiations, observe elections, and advance disease prevention and eradication in developing nations. Carter is a key figure in the Habitat for Humanity project, and also remains particularly vocal on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In 1982, he established The Carter Center in Atlanta to advance human rights and alleviate unnecessary human suffering. The non-profit, nongovernmental Center promotes democracy, mediates and prevents conflicts, and monitors the electoral process in support of free and fair elections. It also works to improve global health through the control and eradication of diseases such as Guinea worm disease, river blindness, malaria, trachoma, lymphatic filariasis, and schistosomiasis. It also works to diminish the stigma of mental illnesses and improve nutrition through increased crop production in Africa. A major accomplishment of The Carter Center has been the elimination of more than 99% of cases of Guinea worm disease, a debilitating parasite that has existed since ancient times, from an estimated 3.5 million cases in 1986 to 3,190 reported cases in 2009. The Carter Center has monitored 81 elections in 33 countries since 1989. It has worked to resolve conflicts in Haiti, Bosnia, Ethiopia, North Korea, Sudan and other countries. Carter and the Center actively support human rights defenders around the world and have intervened with heads of state on their behalf.

FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
Countdown to Zero (25-Jan-2010) · Himself
Waiting for Armageddon (28-Jan-2009) · Himself
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (20-Jan-2008) · Himself
Escape from Suburbia: Beyond the American Dream (16-Sep-2007) · Himself
Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains (7-Sep-2007) · Himself
The Last Mogul: The Life and Times of Lew Wasserman (19-Mar-2005) · Himself
Tanner on Tanner (5-Oct-2004) · Himself
The Journey (13-Jun-2001) · Himself
Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (27-Nov-1992) · Himself

Source: Jimmy Carter

Source: Jimmy Carter – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: James Carter | whitehouse.gov

Source: Jimmy Carter – U.S. President – Biography.com

Source: Jimmy Carter Is Correct That the U.S. Is No Longer a Democracy | Huffington Post

Source: Jimmy Carter

come find me, i’m @

Today is the 129th birthday of the architect and designer Le Corbusier.  His designs are widely admired and even copied to this day.  His true talent was being able to create designs that have continued to feel modern and current.  The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Le Corbusier
OCCUPATION: Architect, Artist
BIRTH DATE: October 6, 1887
DEATH DATE: August 27, 1965
EDUCATION: École des Arts Décoratifs at La Chaux-de-Fonds
PLACE OF BIRTH: La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland
PLACE OF DEATH: Cap Martin, France
AKA: Charles Jeanneret-Gris
REMAINS: Buried, Cimetière de Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, Alpes Maritimes, France

BEST KNOWN FOR: Le Corbusier was a Swiss-born French architect who belonged to the first generation of the so-called International school of architecture.

Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris on October 6, 1887, Le Corbusier was the second son of Edouard Jeanneret, an artist who painted dials in the town’s renowned watch industry, and Madame Jeannerct-Perrct, a musician and piano teacher. His family’s Calvinism, love of the arts and enthusiasm for the Jura Mountains, where his family fled during the Albigensian Wars of the 12th century, were all formative influences on the young Le Corbusier.

At age 13, Le Corbusier left primary school to attend Arts Décoratifs at La Chaux-de-Fonds, where he would learn the art of enameling and engraving watch faces, following in the footsteps of his father.

There, he fell under the tutelage of L’Eplattenier, whom Le Corbusier called “my master” and later referred to him as his only teacher. L’Eplattenier taught Le Corbusier art history, drawing and the naturalist aesthetics of art nouveau. Perhaps because of his extended studies in art, Corbusier soon abandoned watchmaking and continued his studies in art and decoration, intending to become a painter. L’Eplattenier insisted that his pupil also study architecture, and he arranged for his first commissions working on local projects.

After designing his first house, in 1907, at age 20, Le Corbusier took trips through central Europe and the Mediterranean, including Italy, Vienna, Munich and Paris. His travels included apprenticeships with various architects, most significantly with structural rationalist Auguste Perret, a pioneer of reinforced concrete construction, and later with renowned architect Peter Behrens, with whom Le Corbusier worked from October 1910 to March 1911, near Berlin.

These trips played a pivotal role in Le Corbusier’s education. He made three major architectural discoveries. In various settings, he witnessed and absorbed the importance of (1) the contrast between large collective spaces and individual compartmentalized spaces, an observation that formed the basis for his vision of residential buildings and later became vastly influential; (2) classical proportion via Renaissance architecture; and (3) geometric forms and the use of landscape as an architectural tool.

In 1912, Le Corbusier returned to La Chaux-de-Fonds to teach alongside L’Eplattenier and to open his own architectural practice. He designed a series of villas and began to theorize on the use of reinforced concrete as a structural frame, a thoroughly modern technique.

Le Corbusier began to envisage buildings designed from these concepts as affordable prefabricated housing that would help rebuild cities after World War I came to an end. The floor plans of the proposed housing consisted of open space, leaving out obstructive support poles, freeing exterior and interior walls from the usual structural constraints. This design system became the backbone for most of Le Corbusier’s architecture for the next 10 years.

In 1917, Le Corbusier moved to Paris, where he worked as an architect on concrete structures under government contracts. He spent most of his efforts, however, on the more influential, and at the time more lucrative, discipline of painting.

Then, in 1918, Le Corbusier met Cubist painter Amédée Ozenfant, who encouraged Le Corbusier to paint. Kindred spirits, the two began a period of collaboration in which they rejected cubism, an art form finding its peak at the time, as irrational and romantic.

With these thoughts in mind, the pair published the book Après le cubisme (After Cubism), an anti-cubism manifesto, and established a new artistic movement called purism. In 1920, the pair, along with poet Paul Dermée, established the purist journal L’Esprit Nouveau (The New Spirit), an avant-garde review.

In the first issue of the new publication, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret took on the pseudonym Le Corbusier, an alteration of his grandfather’s last name, to reflect his belief that anyone could reinvent himself. Also, adopting a single name to represent oneself artistically was particularly en vogue at the time, especially in Paris, and Le Corbusier wanted to create a persona that could keep separate his critical writing from his work as a painter and architect.

In the pages of L’Esprit Nouveau, the three men railed against past artistic and architectural movements, such as those embracing elaborate nonstructural (that is, nonfunctional) decoration, and defended Le Corbusier’s new style of functionalism.

In 1923, Le Corbusier published Vers une Architecture (Toward a New Architecture), which collected his polemical writing from L’Esprit Nouveau. In the book are such famous Le Corbusier declarations as “a house is a machine for living in” and “a curved street is a donkey track; a straight street, a road for men.”

Le Corbusier’s collected articles also proposed a new architecture that would satisfy the demands of industry, hence functionalism, and the abiding concerns of architectural form, as defined over generations. His proposals included his first city plan, the Contemporary City, and two housing types that were the basis for much of his architecture throughout his life: the Maison Monol and, more famously, the Maison Citrohan, which he also referred to as “the machine of living.”

Le Corbusier envisioned prefabricated houses, imitating the concept of assembly line manufacturing of cars, for instance. Maison Citrohan displayed the characteristics by which the architect would later define modern architecture: support pillars that raise the house above the ground, a roof terrace, an open floor plan, an ornamentation-free facade and horizontal windows in strips for maximum natural light. The interior featured the typical spatial contrast between open living space and cell-like bedrooms.

In an accompanying diagram to the design, the city in which Citrohan would rest featured green parks and gardens at the feet of clusters of skyscrapers, an idea that would come to define urban planning in years to come.

Soon Le Corbusier’s social ideals and structural design theories became a reality. In 1925-1926, he built a workers’ city of 40 houses in the style of the Citrohan house at Pessac, near Bordeaux. Unfortunately, the chosen design and colors provoked hostility on the part of authorities, who refused to route the public water supply to the complex, and for six years the buildings sat uninhabited.

In the 1930s, Le Corbusier reformulated his theories on urbanism, publishing them in La Ville radieuse (The Radiant City) in 1935. The most apparent distinction between the Contemporary City and the Radiant City is that the latter abandoned the class-based system of the former, with housing now assigned according to family size, not economic position.

The Radiant City brought with it some controversy, as all Le Corbusier projects seemed to. In describing Stockholm, for instance, a classically rendered city, Le Corbusier saw only “frightening chaos and saddening monotony.” He dreamed of “cleaning and purging” the city with “a calm and powerful architecture”; that is, steel, plate glass and reinforced concrete, what many observers might see as a modern blight applied to the beautiful city.

At the end of the 1930s and through the end of World War II, Le Corbusier kept busy with creating such famous projects as the proposed master plans for the cities of Algiers and Buenos Aires, and using government connections to implement his ideas for eventual reconstruction, all to no avail.

Source: Le Corbusier

Source: Le Corbusier – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: Le Corbusier – Architect, Artist – Biography.com

come find me, i’m @

Today is the 96th birthday of the photographer Helmut Newton. Pushing the envelope is an understatement. He created images that were so unique, so provocative that they pushed everyone’s comfort zone. The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Helmut Neustädter
DATE OF BIRTH: October 30. 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH: Berlin, Germany
DATE OF DEATH: January 23, 2004
PLACE OF DEATH: West Hollywood, California, US
CAUSE OF DEATH: Car Accident
REMAINS: Buried, Städtischen Friedhof III, Berlin-Schöneberg, Germany

BEST KNOWN FOR: Helmut Newton was a German-Australian photographer. He was a “prolific, widely imitated fashion photographer whose provocative, erotically charged black-and-white photos were a mainstay of Vogue and other publications.”

Helmut Newton was born Helmut Neustaedter, in Berlin, Germany in 1920. His early studies were at the American School in Berlin; however by 1936, as his fascination with photography began and his disinterest in school waned, he left school and started an apprenticeship with then renowned photographer Elsie Simon, known as Yva. Celebrated for her elegant fashion, theatre and nude photographs, Yva inspired Newton throughout his career.

In 1938, Newton’s parents secured him a passage on a ship to China, fleeing Hitler’s vicious campaign against German Jews. Newton stopped in Singapore where he stayed until 1940; he then moved to Australia. Newton later joined the Australian army, serving five years.

In 1948, Newton married actress June Brunell, a fellow photographer who later would photograph Newton and work with him on his books. Brunell remained his partner for more than 55 years until his death. During this time, he changed his name to Newton, and opened a small photo studio in Melbourne. He was hired by Australian Vogue in the 1950s; by British Vogue in 1957-1958, and by French Vogue in 1961; a magazine that he stamped with his trademark images for a quarter century. Throughout the years, Newton contributed to magazines such as Playboy, Queen, Nova, Marie-Claire, Elle and the American, Italian, and German editions of Vogue.

After a nearly fatal heart attack in 1971, and with the encouragement of his wife, he began to photograph overtly sexual images. The cool statuesque, and sexually practiced women in Newton’s fashion and personal photographs were his most controversial creation. His photographs featured vignettes he staged, often of fraught moments heavy with overtones of voyeurism, fetishism, lesbianism, and sado-masochism, his women outraged some feminist viewers and satisfied others. His dramas stopped short of pornography, and most took place in European jet-set retreats. His black-and-white photographs combine the feel of 1930s noir photojournalism with aspects of New Wave films, reflecting his directorial mastery. Over the years, Newton’s work centred primarily on fashion, nudes, and portraits, with the three categories often mixing.

Newton challenged conventions, and created a provocative, hybrid photography that embraced fashion, erotica, portrait, and documentary elements, producing a highly stylized interpretation of elegant and decadent ways of life. Newton turned his attention to making powerful, confrontational nudes. He conceived witty, erotic picture stories for the American magazine Oui, and he gave his unique twist to the creation of pictures for Playboy.

Portraits of celebrities became an evermore important aspect of Newton’s work, and while these were at first mostly related to the world of fashion, over the years he broadened his portfolio to include countless people who intrigued him-artists, actors, film directors, politicians, industrial magnates, the powerful and the charismatic from all spheres. Many of these photos were published through the 1980s in Vanity Fair.

In 1975 Paris, Newton staged his first one-man exhibition. The following year he published his first book, White Women. Over the next twenty-five years he worked steadily and productively, publishing a series of books and creating countless exhibitions, the most impressive of which was surely the large-scale celebration of his career at the Neue National Galerie in Berlin on the occasion of his eightieth birthday in 2000, accompanied by the simply titled book, Work.

Newton was highly sought after until the end of his life. He died of injuries from a car accident at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, California in 2004. Shortly before his death he had established the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin, Germany, and donated approximately one thousand of his works to his native city.

Source: Helmut Newton

Source: Helmut Newton – Wikipedia

Source: Helmut Newton | artnet

Source: Your ultimate guide to Helmut Newton | Dazed

Source: Helmut Newton – View & Collect 65 Artworks | Artsy

come find me, i’m @

Today is the 62nd birthday of Adam Ant.  I love second acts, second chances, reinvention, determination and changes.  Adam Ant personifies all that for me.  He changed his everything and became the person he wanted to be and continues to morph and evolve.  We should all take a lesson from him.  The world is a lucky place to have him in it.

NAME: Adam Ant
BIRTH DATE: November 3, 1954
EDUCATION: Hornsey College of Art
PLACE OF BIRTH: London, England, United Kingdom

BEST KNOWN FOR: Adam Ant came to fame in the early 1980s as the lead singer of the New Wave band Adam and the Ants.

A post-punk, New Wave superstar, Stuart Leslie Goddard, better known as Adam Ant, was born on November 3, 1954 in London, England. An only child, his parents, Leslie Goddard and Betty Kathleen Smith, divorced when he was 7 years old.

Troubled by the divorce and affected by his father’s alcoholism and abusive nature, Goddard struggled in school and flashed his own temper, until a teacher took him under his wing and introduced him to the arts. Able to turn around his academic performance, Goddard graduated with high marks and enrolled at the prestigious Hornsey College of Art, where he planned to study graphic design.

While at Hornsey, Goddard met and fell in love with a fellow student, Carol Mills. By this time, he had jumped into music, playing bass for a band called Bazooka Joe. To support her young husband, Carol designed rubber outfits for him, an idea that Goddard had picked up from fetish magazines. But confusion greeted Goddard at college. He was unsure whether he should study art or music, and he was confused about his marriage. In his final year of college, he became anorexic. “I just didn’t eat,” he later said. “I wasn’t attempting to slim, I was attempting to kill myself.”

After overdosing on pills, Goddard was committed to a mental hospital in London. Upon his release, he changed his name to Adam Ant; Carol, who was entrusted to take care of Ant, became known as Eve. But their marriage was on the rocks, and in 1976, the couple divorced.

Committed to making music, Ant reconnected with a few former band mates after his release from the hospital and formed a new band, at first called The Ants. Later they renamed themselves, Adam and the Ants.

While the band’s original incarnation proved to be a flop, after a reshuffling of the lineup, the Ants, backed by the playing of new guitar player, Marco Pirroni, rose to the top of the charts, first in Britain and later, America. The group’s two albums, Kings of the Wild Frontier (1980) and Prince Charming (1982) that produced an astounding 16 hits and sole more than 15 million records.

In 1981 alone, the Ants had an astonishing seven singles, including Stand and Deliver, in the UK top 40 at the same time. As their popularity crossed the Atlantic, Adam, donning David Hemmings’ jacket from the 1968 film, The Charge of the Light Brigade, and a white stripe across his face, became the face of New Wave music.

The theatrical band arrived in New York by sailing up the Hudson River on a replica 18th century schooner. Ant embraced his celebrity with a deep commitment to his work and a zero-tolerance policy toward drug use. If he caught bandmates taking drugs, he fired them. Soon, however, the grind of touring—the group performed 300 gigs a year—took its toll, and in early 1982, Ant broke up the band.

In 1982, Ant released his first solo album, Friend or Foe. Though Ant anticipated a successful solo career, the record and his subsequent work, including the albums Manners and Physique (1990) and Wonderful (1995), failed to match his earlier success. Shortly after 1985’s Live Aid concert, Ant distinguished himself as being the only performer whose record went down in the charts in the week following the show.

A later move to Hollywood saw Ant take a turn at acting. He landed supporting roles in several movies and in 1989, played his first lead in the film Trust Me.

Ant’s personal life has mirrored the rocky nature of his musical career. In 1997, a 42-year-old Ant married Lorraine Gibson, a 25-year-old intern to fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. The couple eventually had a daughter together, but their subsequent divorce pushed Ant into another mental crisis.

In 2002, police arrested Ant after he threw a car alternator through the window of a pub, and threatened people inside with a fake pistol.

In recent years, however, Ant’s life seems to have settled down. In a round of interviews in 2011, he excitedly discussed plans to make music again, even suggesting that there would be an Ants reunion. “I feel very grateful to be alive and well enough to make music,” he said. “Because for a time there, it was like the Alamo. It really was. It got a bit sticky.”

FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
Sweetwater (15-Aug-1999)
Lover’s Knot (12-Jul-1996)
Cyber Bandits (21-Nov-1995)
Desert Winds (Jan-1995)
Drop Dead Rock (1995)
Acting on Impulse (10-Jul-1993)
Love Bites: The Reluctant Vampire (1993)
Spellcaster (6-May-1992) · Diablo
Trust Me (Jan-1989)
World Gone Wild (22-Apr-1988)
Cold Steel (11-Dec-1987)
Slamdance (11-Sep-1987)
Nomads (7-Mar-1986) · Number One
Live Aid (13-Jul-1985) · Himself
Jubilee (Feb-1978)

Source: Adam Ant – Wikipedia

Source: Adam Ant – Singer – Biography.com

Source: Adam Ant

come find me, i’m @

Today is the 110th birthday of the original “It Girl” Louise Brooks.  Her style is often copied or emulated or desired, but never improved.Louise Brooks changed the world without saying a word.  She was an original then and an original now.  The world is a better place because she was in it and still feels the loss that she has left.

NAME: Louise Brooks
OCCUPATION: Film Actress
BIRTH DATE: November 14, 1906
DEATH DATE: August 08, 1985
PLACE OF BIRTH: Cherryvale, Kansas
PLACE OF DEATH: Rochester, New York

BEST KNOWN FOR: Louise Brooks was a silent-film actress known for bringing a sense of corrupt sensuality to her roles.

Mary Louise Brooks (November 14, 1906 – August 8, 1985), generally known by her stage name Louise Brooks, was an American dancer, model, showgirl and silent film actress, noted for popularizing the bobbed haircut. Brooks is best known for her three feature roles including two G. W. Pabst films: in Pandora’s Box (1929), Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), and Prix de Beauté (Miss Europe) (1930). She starred in 17 silent films and, late in life, authored a memoir, Lulu in Hollywood.

French film historians rediscovered her films in the early 1950s, proclaiming her as an actress who surpassed even Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo as a film icon (Henri Langlois: “There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is only Louise Brooks!”), much to her amusement. It would lead to the still ongoing Louise Brooks film revivals, and rehabilitated her reputation in her home country. James Card, the film curator for the George Eastman House, discovered Louise living as a recluse in New York City about this time, and persuaded her to move to Rochester, New York to be near the George Eastman House film collection. With his help, she became a noted film writer in her own right. A collection of her witty and cogent writings, Lulu in Hollywood, was published in 1982. She was profiled by the film writer Kenneth Tynan in his essay, “The Girl With The Black Helmet”, the title of which was an allusion to her fabulous bob, worn since childhood, a hairstyle claimed as one of the ten most influential in history by beauty magazines the world over.

“I found that the only well-paying career open to me, as an unsuccessful actress of thirty-six, was that of a call girl…and (I) began to flirt with the fancies related to little bottles filled with yellow sleeping pills.”

Brooks had also been a heavy drinker since age 14, but she remained relatively sober to begin writing about film, which became her second career. During this period she began her first major writing project, an autobiographical novel called Naked on My Goat, a title taken from Goethe’s Faust. After working on the novel for a number of years, she destroyed the manuscript by throwing it into an incinerator.

In an interview with James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio, Liza Minnelli related her preparation for portraying Sally Bowles in the film Cabaret: “I went to my father, and asked him, what can you tell me about thirties glamor? Should I be emulating Marlene Dietrich or something? And he said no, I should study everything I can about Louise Brooks.”

In 1991 the British new wave group Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark released a single named “Pandora’s Box” as a tribute to Brooks. The video for the single used extensive footage of Brooks from the movie and included a text intro which explained who Brooks was. And, for the 1988 Siouxsie and The Banshees album (Peepshow) and tour, singer Siouxsie Sioux sported a hairdo and costumes in Brooks’s style.

An exhibit titled “Louise Brooks and the ‘New Woman’ in Weimar Cinema” ran at the International Center of Photography in New York City in 2007, focusing on Brooks’ iconic screen persona and celebrating the hundredth anniversary of her birth.

On August 8, 1985, Brooks was found dead of a heart attack after suffering from arthritis and emphysema for many years. She was buried in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Rochester, New York.

Source: Louise Brooks – Wikipedia

Source: Classic Hollywood: Louise Brooks’ rise and fall – latimes

Source: Louise Brooks – Film Actress – Biography.com

Source: LOUISE BROOKS, PROUD STAR OF SILENT SCREEN, DEAT AT 78 – NYTimes.com

come find me, i’m @

Today is the 137th birthday of the artist Paul Klee.   His work is the type that I am organically drawn to.  I still remember the first time I saw his art:  It was on the beginning of every chapter of a textbook my first year of college.  I flipped ahead through the entire book, just looking for his next piece.  I have no memory of the class, it was either and English or a Sociology and I am only really sure of that because of the building it was in.  But his art has stuck with me all along.  It made me understand that there is skill in being simple, that making things seem easy is quite technical.  I am sure that has been adopted into my everyday life to some extent.  The world is a better place because Paul was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Paul Klee
OCCUPATION: Educator, Painter
BIRTH DATE: December 18, 1879
DEATH DATE: June 29, 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH: Münchenbuchsee bei Bern, Switzerland
PLACE OF DEATH: Muralto, Switzerland
REMAINS: Buried, Schosshalde Friedhof, Bern, Switzerland

BEST KNOWN FOR: Paul Klee is a Swiss and German painter whose highly individual style is best known by an often childlike perspective and spidery hieroglyph-like symbols.

Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a German and a Swiss painter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was, as well, a student of orientalism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually mastered colour theory, and wrote extensively about it; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are considered so important for modern art that they are compared to the importance that Leonardo da Vinci‘s A Treatise on Painting had for Renaissance. He and his colleague, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the German Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture. His works reflect his dry humour and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

A museum dedicated to Klee was built in Bern, Switzerland, by the Italian architect Renzo Piano. Zentrum Paul Klee opened in June 2005 and houses a collection of about 4,000 works by Paul Klee. Another substantial collection of Klee’s works is owned by chemist and playwright Carl Djerassi and displayed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Klee suffered from a wasting disease, scleroderma, toward the end of his life, enduring pain that seems to be reflected in his last works of art. One of his last paintings, “Death and Fire“, features a skull in the center with the German word for death, “Tod”, appearing in the face. He died in Muralto, Locarno, Switzerland, on 29 June 1940 without having obtained Swiss citizenship, despite his birth in that country. His art work was considered too revolutionary, even degenerate, by the Swiss authorities, but eventually they accepted his request six days after his death. His legacy comprises about 9,000 works of art. The words on his tombstone, Klee’s credo, placed there by his son Felix, say, “I cannot be grasped in the here and now, For my dwelling place is as much among the dead, As the yet unborn, Slightly closer to the heart of creation than usual, But still not close enough.” He was buried at Schosshaldenfriedhof, Bern, Switzerland.

Today, a painting by Klee can sell for as much as $7.5 million.

Source: Entartete Kunst Exhibition

Source: Paul Klee – Wikipedia

Source: Paul Klee Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works | The Art Story

Source: Paul Klee – 70 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy

Source: Paul Klee – Painter, Educator – Biography.com

Source: Paul Klee – 203 paintings, drawings and prints – WikiArt.org

Source: Paul Klee

come find me, i’m @

Today is the 108th birthday of the photographer Yousuf Karsh. The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Yousuf Karsh
OCCUPATION: Portrait Photographer
BIRTH DATE: December 23, 1908
DEATH DATE: July 13, 2002
PLACE OF BIRTH: Mardin, Ottoman Empire
PLACE OF DEATH: Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
REMAINS: Buried, Notre Dame Cemetery, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

BEST KNOWN FOR: Armenian–Canadian portrait photographer. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he is “one of the greatest portrait photographers of the twentieth century, [who] achieved a distinct style in his theatrical lighting.”

Yousuf Karsh was born in Mardin, a city in the eastern Ottoman Empire (present Turkey). He grew up during the Armenian Genocide where he wrote, “I saw relatives massacred; my sister died of starvation as we were driven from village to village.” At the age of 16, his parents sent Yousuf to live with his uncle George Nakash, a photographer in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. Karsh briefly attended school there and assisted in his uncle’s studio. Nakash saw great potential in his nephew and in 1928 arranged for Karsh to apprentice with portrait photographer John Garo in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. His brother, Malak Karsh, was also a photographer.

Karsh returned to Canada four years later, eager to make his mark. In 1931 he started working with photographer John Powls, in his studio on the second floor of the Hardy Arcade at 130 Sparks Street in Ottawa, Ontario, close to Parliament Hill. When Powls retired in 1933, Karsh took over the studio. Karsh’s first solo exhibition was in 1936 in the Drawing Room of the Château Laurier hotel. He moved his studio into the hotel in 1973, and it remained there until he retired in 1992.

Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King discovered Karsh and arranged introductions with visiting dignitaries for portrait sittings. Karsh’s work attracted the attention of varied celebrities and on 30 December 1941 he photographed Winston Churchill, after Churchill gave a speech to Canadian House of Commons in Ottawa.

The image of Churchill brought Karsh international prominence, and is claimed to be the most reproduced photographic portrait in history. In 1967, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and in 1990 was promoted to Companion.

Of the 100 most notable people of the century, named by the International Who’s Who [2000], Karsh had photographed 51. Karsh was also the only Canadian to make the list.

In the late 1990s Karsh moved to Boston and on July 13, 2002, aged 93, he died at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital after complications following surgery. He was interred in Notre Dame Cemetery in Ottawa.

Karsh was a master of studio lights. One of Karsh’s distinctive practices was lighting the subject’s hands separately. He photographed many of the great and celebrated personalities of his generation. Throughout most of his career he used the 8×10 bellows Calumet (1997.0319) camera, made circa 1940 in Chicago. Journalist George Perry wrote in the British paper The Sunday Times that “when the famous start thinking of immortality, they call for Karsh of Ottawa.”

Karsh had a gift for capturing the essence of his subject in the instant of his portrait. As Karsh wrote of his own work in Karsh Portfolio in 1967, “Within every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer it is my task to reveal it if I can. The revelation, if it comes at all, will come in a small fraction of a second with an unconscious gesture, a gleam of the eye, a brief lifting of the mask that all humans wear to conceal their innermost selves from the world. In that fleeting interval of opportunity the photographer must act or lose his prize.”

Karsh said “My chief joy is to photograph the great in heart, in mind, and in spirit, whether they be famous or humble.” His work is in permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, Bibliotheque nationale de France, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the National Portrait Gallery of Australia and many others. Library and Archives Canada holds his complete collection, including negatives, prints and documents. His photographic equipment was donated to the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa.

Karsh published 15 books of his photographs, which include brief descriptions of the sessions, during which he would ask questions and talk with his subjects to relax them as he composed the portrait. Some famous subjects photographed by Karsh were Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Muhammad Ali, Marian Anderson, W. H. Auden, Joan Baez, Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Humphrey Bogart, Alexander Calder, Pablo Casals, Fidel Castro, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, Winston Churchill, Joan Crawford, Ruth Draper, Albert Einstein, Dwight Eisenhower, Princess Elizabeth, Robert Frost, Clark Gable, Indira Gandhi, Grey Owl, Ernest Hemingway, Audrey Hepburn, Pope John Paul II, Chuck Jones, Carl Jung, Helen Keller and Polly Thompson, Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, Peter Lorre, The Marx Brothers, Pandit Nehru, Georgia O’Keeffe, Laurence Olivier, General Pershing, Pablo Picasso, Pope Pius XII, Prince Rainier of Monaco, Paul Robeson, the rock band Rush, Albert Schweitzer, George Bernard Shaw, Jean Sibelius, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Andy Warhol, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

The story is often told of how Karsh created his famous portrait of Churchill during the early years of World War II. Churchill, the British prime minister, had just addressed the Canadian Parliament and Karsh was there to record one of the century’s great leaders. “He was in no mood for portraiture and two minutes were all that he would allow me as he passed from the House of Commons chamber to an anteroom,” Karsh wrote in Faces of Our Time. “Two niggardly minutes in which I must try to put on film a man who had already written or inspired a library of books, baffled all his biographers, filled the world with his fame, and me, on this occasion, with dread.”

Churchill marched into the room scowling, “regarding my camera as he might regard the German enemy.” His expression suited Karsh perfectly, but the cigar stuck between his teeth seemed incompatible with such a solemn and formal occasion. “Instinctively, I removed the cigar. At this the Churchillian scowl deepened, the head was thrust forward belligerently, and the hand placed on the hip in an attitude of anger.”

The image captured Churchill and the Britain of the time perfectly — defiant and unconquerable. Churchill later said to him, “You can even make a roaring lion stand still to be photographed.” As such, Karsh titled the photograph, The Roaring Lion.

However, Karsh’s favourite photograph was the one taken immediately after this one where Churchill’s mood had lightened considerably and he is shown much in the same pose, but smiling. It was announced on 26 April 2013 by the Bank of England that the more well-known image would be used on the new £5 note, to be issued in 2016.

In 2009, in Ottawa, Yousuf Karsh’s life and work were celebrated during Festival Karsh, a collaboration between the Canada Museum of Science and Technology and the Portrait Gallery of Canada.

He was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

Canada Post honoured the 100th anniversary of the birth of Yousuf Karsh by releasing an artist’s series of three stamps depicting Karsh images. The famous Churchill portrait figures on the International Rate stamp and has a face value of $1.60CAN, a lithe side-profile taken in 1956 of Audrey Hepburn graces the American Rate stamp with a face value of $0.96CAN, and a self-portrait of Yousuf himself viewing photographic plates appears on the Domestic Rate stamp with a face value of $0.52CAN. A souvenir sheet set depicting an additional 24 Karsh portraits of some of the world’s most famous and interesting persons includes among others: Walt Disney, Muhammad Ali, Mother Teresa, Humphrey Bogart, Indira Gandhi, Sophia Loren, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ernest Hemingway, Nikita Khrushchev, Martin Luther King, Pope John XXIII, Pablo Picasso, Dizzy Gillespie, and Queen Elizabeth II, further confirming the range and scope of Karsh’s work.

Karsh has influenced many other photographers in different styles to become more independent and further motivate other artists.

On December 3, 1959, Karsh appeared as a guest challenger on the TV panel show To Tell the Truth.

In 2005, the city of Ottawa established the Karsh Prize, honoring Ottawa photo-based artists, in honor of Yousuf and Malak Karsh. Karsh also photographed the Canadian rock band Rush for their 1984 album Grace Under Pressure. Geddy Lee of Rush has referred to the picture as a typical bar mitzvah photo.

In 2015, the International Astronomical Union and the Carnegie Institution for Science revealed the winners of a public competition to name five geologically significant impact craters on the planet Mercury imaged by the MESSENGER probe. By rule of the IAU, craters on Mercury are named after figures of historical significance in the world of art. In recognition of Yousuf Karsh’s outstanding contributions to portrait photography, one of the five impact craters was named Karsh.

Author of books:
Faces of Destiny (1946, photography)
Portraits of Greatness (1959, photography)
In Search of Greatness (1962, photography)
Karsh Portfolio (1967, photography)
Faces of Our Time (1971, photography)
Karsh Portraits (1976, photography)
Karsh Canadians (1978, photography)
Karsh: A Sixty-Year Retrospective (1996, photography)

Source: Yousuf Karsh – Wikipedia

Source: Yousuf Karsh | Armenian-Canadian photographer | Britannica.com

Source: Yousuf Karsh

come find me, i’m @

Today is the 295th birthday of Madame de Pompador, arguably one of the first fashion icons and one of the most influential women of the 18th century.  The world is a better place because she was in it and still feels the loss that she has left.

NAME: Madame de Pompadour
OCCUPATION: Singer, Theater Actress
BIRTH DATE: c. December 29, 1721
DEATH DATE: April 15, 1764
EDUCATION: Convent of the Ursuline Order, Club de l’Entresol
PLACE OF BIRTH: Paris, France
PLACE OF DEATH: Versailles, France
AKA: Madame de Pompadour, Jeanne-Antoinette Le Normant d’Etiolles, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson
FULL NAME: Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour

BEST KNOWN FOR: Madame de Pompadour became the mistress of French King Louis XV in the mid-1700s. She greatly influenced French culture during this time, including decorative arts, architecture and statecraft.

Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, better known as Madame de Pompadour, was born sometime at the end of December in 1721 (the date is often fixed at December 29 because she was baptized in the church of Saint-Eustache on December 30 of that year). Her mother, Madeleine de La Motte, was known as a beauty; her father, François Poisson, a financier, fled the country a few years after her birth to avoid being put to death for fraud. François Poisson later returned, but during his absence, tax collector Charles Le Normant de Tournehem, who paid for Jeanne-Antoinette’s education, was frequently assumed to be her real father.

Jeanne-Antoinette was well-educated, first in an Ursuline convent, then with excellent private tutors in voice and elocution from the Parisian opera and theatre (she memorized entire plays). She was later educated at the Club de l’Entresol, an exclusively male political and economic think-tank.

At age 19, Tournehem married Jeanne-Antoinette off to his nephew, furnishing them with an opulent estate at Etoiles. She bore him two children, a son who died in infancy, and a daughter nicknamed “Fanfan.” Jeanne-Antoinette’s beauty, intelligence and passion for the arts led her to instigate “salons” that attracted a varied circle of painters, sculptors, philosophers and writers, including Voltaire.

Jeanne-Antoinette entered the glittering life of the court at the Clipped Yew Tree Ball in 1745. She dressed as a shepherdess, and was determined to meet the magnetic King Louis XV, adorned as the tree. When their paths crossed, their fates were sealed—her carriage was reportedly seen outside of his apartment the next morning.

Louis XV was moody, sometimes languishing in the shadow of his great-grandfather, Louis XIV, the “Sun King.” He was fond of his Polish queen (with whom he would have 10 children); he had been through several mistresses by this time, but “Madame de Pompadour”—a title that Jeanne-Antoinette was soon given, along with an estate—became his chief mistress within a year. Her “office” came with castle apartments beneath the king’s own, as well as an annual income.

A talented seductress, actress and singer, Madame de Pompadour dazzled Louis XV with lively theater productions that she organized and performed in. She also adored the king, so even after their sexual liaison had run its course, she continued to be his loyal companion, and was accorded unprecedented political influence.

So devoted was the king to Madame de Pompadour, he became the stepfather of Fanfan, rushing doctors to her side when she fell ill. Sadly, the little girl died before turning 10; Fanfan’s grandfather, who adored the child, died shortly afterward. Madame de Pompadour is said to have never recovered from the dual loss.

Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour shared an appreciation for architecture and other decorative arts, and of animals, amassing a menagerie that included monkeys, birds and more domestic constant companions: her little dog and his white angora cat. Madame de Pompadour’s romantic ardor waned first, and her maid reported that she lived on a diet of “vanilla, truffles and celery” to stimulate passions for the king.

Madame de Pompadour eventually provided substitutes for herself in the boudoir while engaging Louis XV’s passions in other areas; she had her brother appointed director of buildings and, together, the trio planned and built chateaux, pavilions and palaces, including the Petit Trianon in Versailles. Each construction included extravagant detail and decoration by France’s premier artists, such as painter Francois Boucher. Madame de Pompadour also kick-started the Sèvres porcelain factory, and employed the Rococo style copiously in art and decor; a deep pink popular in this décor became known as “Pompadour Pink.”

Additionally, Madame de Pompadour became a patron to men of science and letters, encouraging the king to hire Voltaire as the court historiographer, and championing the first French encyclopedia. Her personal library held more than 3,500 volumes.

Eventually, Madame de Pompadour was involved in everything from designing the Place de la Concorde in Paris, to court affairs and foreign policy. Careers rose and fell with her favor and she maintained her lofty position, despite many enemies at court, until her death in 1764.

Madame de Pompadour’s weakened health, from several miscarriages and a painful struggle with tuberculosis, brought about her death on Easter Day in 1764 (April 15, 1764), at the Palace of Versailles. She was buried two days later, beside her daughter at the Chapel of the Capuchin Friars in Place Vendome.

Considered one of the three most powerful women of the 18th century, along with Catherine the Great of Russia (Catherine II) and Maria Theresa of Austria, Madame de Pompadour certainly went through fortunes in her zeal for unique and beautiful surroundings. Her enemies blamed her for France’s failure in the Seven Years’ War and its subsequent economic shoals.

However, respect for her vibrant wit, varied interests and keen intelligence has given Madame de Pompadour a better reputation over the years. A British regiment became known as “The Pompadours” for using a shade of purple that is said to have been her favorite. Also named after her are flowers, kitten heels, the hairstyle known as “the Pompadour” and the starship SS Madame de Pompadour—a vessel in the British Dr. Who series; Madame de Pompadour is even portrayed in one episode of Dr. Who, “Girl in the Fireplace.”

Source: Madame de Pompadour – Wikipedia

Source: Madame de Pompadour – Theater Actress, Singer – Biography.com

come find me, i’m @

Today is the 92nd birthday of Paul Newman.  I think (at least hope) that we all have a similar desire for our life, a sort of State Park approach to humanity and the world:  to leave it better than we found it.  Paul Newman absolutely did.  The work he did on film has made the world a more beautiful place and the work his charities continue to do is a legacy that we will all benefit from for generations.  The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left it.

NAME: Paul Newman
OCCUPATION: Film Actor, Theater Actor, Television Actor, Race Car Driver, Entrepreneur
BIRTH DATE: January 26, 1925
DEATH DATE: September 26, 2008
EDUCATION: Kenyon College, Yale School of Drama
PLACE OF BIRTH: Cleveland, Ohio
PLACE OF DEATH: Westport, Connecticut
REMAINS: Cremated
HEIGHT: 5′ 10″
OSCAR (honorary) 1986
OSCAR for Best Actor 1987 for The Color of Money
GOLDEN GLOBE 1957 for Most Promising Newcomer, Male
GOLDEN GLOBE 1964 for World Film Favorite, Male
GOLDEN GLOBE 1966 for World Film Favorite, Male
GOLDEN GLOBE 1969 Best Director for Rachel, Rachel
FOUR FREEDOMS MEDAL
KENNEDY CENTER HONOR 1992
HOLLYWOOD WALK OF FAME 7060 Hollywood Blvd.

BEST KNOWN FOR: Paul Newman came to be known as one of the finest actors of his time. He also started the Newman’s Own food company, which donates all profits to charity.

Paul Leonard Newman was born on January 26, 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio. Newman grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, with his older brother Arthur and his parents, Arthur and Teresa. His father owned a sporting-goods store and his mother was a homemaker who loved the theatre. Newman got his first taste of acting while doing school plays, but it was not his first love at the time. In high school, he played football and hoped to be a professional athlete.

Graduating high school in 1943, Newman briefly attended college before enlisting in the U.S. Navy Air Corps. He wanted to be a pilot, but he was told that he could never fly a plane as he was colorblind. He ended up serving as a radio operator and spent part of World War II serving in the Pacific.

After leaving the military in 1946, Paul Newman attended Kenyon College in his home state of Ohio. He was on an athletic scholarship and played on the school’s football team. But after getting into some trouble, Newman changed course. “I got thrown in jail and kicked off the football team. Since I was determined not to study very much, I majored in theater the last two years,” he told Interview magazine in 1998.

After finishing college in 1949, Newman did summer stock theater in Wisconsin where he met his first wife, actress Jacqueline Witte. The couple soon married, and Newman continued to act until his father’s death in 1950. He and his wife moved to Ohio to run the family business for a time. Their first child, a son named Scott, was born there. After asking his brother to take over the business, Newman and his family relocated to Connecticut, where he studied at the Yale School of Drama.

Running out of money, Newman left Yale after a year and tried his luck in New York. He studied with Lee Strasberg at the famed Actor’s Studio alongside Marlon Brando, James Dean and Geraldine Page.

Newman made his Broadway debut in William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy Picnic in 1953. During rehearsals he met actress Joanne Woodward, who was serving as an understudy for the production. While they were reportedly attracted to each other, the happily-married Newman did not pursue a romantic relationship with the young actress.

Around this time, Newman and his wife welcomed their second child together, a daughter named Susan. Picnic ran for 14 months, helping Newman support his growing family. He also found work on the then-emerging medium of television.

In 1954, Paul Newman made his film debut in The Silver Chalice for which he received terrible reviews. He had better success on Broadway in the Tony Award-winning The Desperate Hours (1955), in which he played an escaped convict who terrorizes a suburban family. During the run of the hit play, he and his wife added a third child — a daughter named Stephanie — to their family.

A winning turn on television helped pave the way for Newman’s return to Hollywood. Working with director Arthur Penn, he appeared in an episode of Philco Playhouse, “The Death of Billy the Kid,” written by Gore Vidal. Newman teamed up with Penn again for an episode of Playwrights ’56 for a story about a worn-down and battered boxer. Two projects became feature films: Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) and The Left-Handed Gun (1958).

In Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), Newman again played a boxer. This time he took on the role of real-life prizefighter Rocky Graziano — and demonstrated his considered acting talents to movie-goers and critics alike. His reputation was further magnified with Penn’s The Left-Handed Gun, an adaptation of Gore Vidal’s earlier teleplay about Billy the Kid.

That same year, Paul Newman starred as Brick in the film version of Tennessee Williams‘ play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), opposite Elizabeth Taylor. He gave another strong performance as a hard-drinking former athlete and disinterested husband who struggles against different types of pressures exerted on him by his wife (Taylor) and his overpowering father (Burl Ives). Once dismissed as just another handsome face, Newman showed that he could handle the challenges of such a complex character. He was nominated for his first Academy Award for this role.

The Long Hot Summer (1958) marked the first big-screen pairing of Newman and Joanne Woodward. The two had already become a couple off-screen while he was still married to his first wife, and they wed in 1958 soon after his divorce was finalized. The next year, Newman returned to Broadway to star in the original production of Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth. The production saw Newman acting opposite the great Geraldine Page, and was directed by Elia Kazan.

Newman continued to thrive professionally. He starred in Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960) about the founding of the state of Israel. The following year, he took on one of his most famous roles. In The Hustler (1961), Newman played Fast Eddie, a slick, small-time pool shark who takes on the legendary Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason). For his work on the film, Paul Newman received his second Academy Award nomination.

Taking on another remarkable part, Newman played the title character — an arrogant, unprincipled cowboy — in Hud (1963). The movie posters for the film described the character as “the man with the barbed wire soul,” and Newman earned critical acclaim and another Academy Award nomination for his work as yet another on-screen antihero.

In Cool Hand Luke (1967), Newman played a rebellious inmate at a southern prison. His convincing and charming portrayal led audiences to cheer on this convict in his battle against prison authorities. No matter how hard they leaned on Luke, he refused to bend to their will. This thoroughly enjoyable and realistic performance led to Paul Newman’s fourth Academy Award nomination.

The next year, Newman stepped behind the cameras to direct his wife in Rachel, Rachel (1968). Woodward starred as an older schoolteacher who dreams of love. A critical success, the film earned four Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture.

A lesser-known film from this time helped trigger a new passion for the actor. While working on the car racing film, Winning (1969), Newman went to a professional driving program as part of his preparation for the role. He discovered that he loved racing and started to devote some of his time to the sport.

That same year, Newman starred alongside Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). He played Butch to Redford’s Sundance, and the pairing was a huge success with audiences, bringing in more than $46 million domestically. Recapturing their on-screen camaraderie, Newman and Redford played suave con men in The Sting (1973), another hit at the box office.

During the 1980s Newman continued to amass critical praise for his work. In Sydney Pollack’s Absence of Malice (1981), he played a man victimized by the media. The following year he starred as a down-and-out lawyer as The Verdict (1982). Both films earned Newman Academy Award nominations.

While he was widely considered one of the finest actors of his time, Paul Newman had never won an Academy Award. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided to correct this error by giving Newman an honorary award for his contributions to film in 1985. With his trademark sense of humor, Newman said in his acceptance speech that “I am especially grateful that this did not come wrapped in a gift certificate to Forest Lawn [a famous cemetery].”

He returned to the character of Fast Eddie from The Hustler in 1986’s The Color of Money. This time around, his character was no longer the up-and-coming hustler, but a worn-out liquor salesman. He is drawn back in the world of pool by mentoring a young upstart (Tom Cruise). For his work on the film, Paul Newman finally won the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Approaching his seventies, Newman continued to delight audiences with more character-driven roles. He played an aging, but crafty rascal who struggles with renewing a relationship with his estranged son in Nobody’s Fool (1994).

Newman played a crime boss in Road to Perdition (2002), which starred Tom Hanks as a hit man who must protect his son from Newman’s character. This role brought him another Academy Award nomination — this time for Best Supporting Actor.

In his later years, Paul Newman took fewer acting roles, but was still able to deliver impressive performances. He earned an Emmy Award for his nuanced depiction of a lay-about father in the television miniseries Empire Falls (2005), which was adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Richard Russo novel. The miniseries also provided him the opportunity to work with his wife, Joanne Woodward.

Around this time, Paul Newman scored his first racing victory at a Connecticut track in 1972. He went on to win a national Sports Car Club of America title four years later. In 1977, Newman made the leap and became a professional racer. In 1995, Newman served as part of the winning team at the Rolex 24 at Daytona. With his victory, Newman became the oldest driver to win this 24-hour-long race.

Newman started his own food company in the early 1980s. He started out the business by making bottles of salad dressing to give out as gifts for Christmas one year with his friend, writer A. E. Hotchner. Newman then had an unusual idea as to what to do with the leftovers — he wanted to try selling the dressing to stores. The two went on to found Newman’s Own, whose profits and royalties are used for educational and charitable purposes. The company’s product line now extends from dressings to sauces to snacks to cookies. Since the inception of Newman’s Own, over $250 million has been donated to thousands of charities worldwide.

Newman’s other charitable foundations include the Scott Newman Center, which he founded in 1978, after his only son died of an accidental overdose of alcohol and prescription drugs. The group seeks to stop drug abuse through educational programs. He also established the Hole in the Wall Camps to give children with life-threatening illnesses a memorable, free holiday. In 1988, the first residential summer camp was opened in Ashford, Connecticut. There are now eight camps in the United States, Ireland, the United Kingdom and France. Some of the funds raised by Newman’s Own have gone to support the Hole in the Wall Camps.

Known for his love of race cars, Newman lent his distinctive voice to the 2006 animated film Cars, playing the part of Doc Hudson — a retired racecar. He also served as the narrator for the 2007 documentary The Price of Sugar, which explored the work of Father Christopher Hartley and his efforts to help the workers in the Dominican Republic’s sugar cane fields.

That same year, Newman announced that he was retiring from acting. “I’m not able to work anymore as an actor at the level I would want to,” he said during an appearance on Good Morning America. “You start to lose your memory, your confidence, your invention. So that’s pretty much a closed book for me.”

Newman, however, wasn’t going to leave the business entirely. He was planning on directing Of Mice and Men at the Westport Country Playhouse the following year. But he ended up withdrawing from the production because of health problems, and rumors began to circulate that the great actor was seriously ill. Statements from the actor and his representatives simply said he was “doing nicely” and, reflective of Newman’s sense of humor, being treated “for athlete’s foot and hair loss.”

A private man, Newman chose to keep the true nature of his illness to himself. He succumbed to cancer at his Westport, Connecticut home on September 26, 2008. This is where he and his wife had lived for numerous years to get away from the spotlight and where they chose to raise their three daughters, Nell, Melissa and Clea.

As the news of his death spread, praise and tributes began pouring in. “There is a point where feelings go beyond words. I have lost a real friend. My life — and this country — is better for his being in it,” friend Robert Redford said after learning about Newman’s death.

Paul Newman will be long remembered for his great films, his vibrant lifestyle and his extensive charitable works, and his relationship with Joanne Woodward will always be regarded as one of the most successful and enduring love stories in Hollywood history.

FILMOGRAPHY AS DIRECTOR
The Glass Menagerie (19-Sep-1987)
Harry and Son (2-Mar-1984)
The Shadow Box (Sep-1980)
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (20-Dec-1972)
Sometimes a Great Notion (19-Jan-1972)
Rachel, Rachel (26-Aug-1968)

FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
The Price of Sugar (11-Mar-2007) · Narrator
Cars (14-Mar-2006) [VOICE]
Roving Mars (27-Jan-2006)
Empire Falls (28-May-2005)
Tell Them Who You Are (11-Sep-2004) · Himself
Road to Perdition (12-Jul-2002) · John Rooney
Where the Money Is (14-Apr-2000)
Message in a Bottle (12-Feb-1999)
Twilight (6-Mar-1998) · Harry Ross
Super Speedway (1997) · Himself [VOICE]
Nobody’s Fool (23-Dec-1994) · Sully
Baseball (18-Sep-1994) · Himself
The Hudsucker Proxy (11-Mar-1994) · Sidney J. Mussburger
Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (23-Nov-1990)
Blaze (13-Dec-1989)
Fat Man and Little Boy (20-Oct-1989) · Gen. Leslie R. Groves
The Color of Money (17-Oct-1986) · Eddie
Harry and Son (2-Mar-1984)
The Verdict (8-Dec-1982) · Frank Galvin
Absence of Malice (19-Nov-1981) · Gallagher
Fort Apache the Bronx (6-Feb-1981)
The Day the World Ended (28-Mar-1980)
Quintet (16-Feb-1979) · Essex
Slap Shot (25-Feb-1977) · Reggie
Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (24-Jun-1976)
Silent Movie (16-Jun-1976) · Himself
The Drowning Pool (Jul-1975)
The Towering Inferno (10-Dec-1974) · Doug Roberts
The Sting (25-Dec-1973) · Henry Gondorff
The Mackintosh Man (25-Jul-1973)
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (18-Dec-1972)
Pocket Money (1-Feb-1972)
Sometimes a Great Notion (19-Jan-1972) · Hank
WUSA (19-Aug-1970)
King: A Filmed Record… Montgomery to Memphis (24-Mar-1970) · Himself
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (23-Sep-1969) · Butch Cassidy
Winning (22-May-1969) · Capua
The Secret War of Harry Frigg (29-Feb-1968)
Cool Hand Luke (1-Nov-1967) · Luke
Hombre (21-Mar-1967) · John Russell
Torn Curtain (14-Jul-1966) · Prof. Michael Armstrong
Harper (23-Feb-1966) · Lew Harper
Lady L (17-Dec-1965) · Armand Denis
The Outrage (7-Oct-1964) · Juan Carrasco
What a Way to Go! (12-May-1964) · Larry Flint
The Prize (25-Dec-1963) · Andrew Craig
A New Kind of Love (30-Oct-1963)
Hud (28-May-1963) · Hud Bannon
Adventures of a Young Man (18-Jul-1962)
Sweet Bird of Youth (21-Mar-1962) · Chance Wayne
Paris Blues (27-Sep-1961) · Ram Bowen
The Hustler (25-Sep-1961) · Eddie Felson
From the Terrace (15-Jul-1960) · Alfred Eaton
Exodus (27-Mar-1960) · Ari Ben Canaan
The Young Philadelphians (21-May-1959) · Anthony Judson Lawrence
Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys! (23-Dec-1958) · Harry Bannerman
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (18-Sep-1958) · Brick Pollitt
The Left Handed Gun (7-May-1958) · Billy the Kid
The Long, Hot Summer (3-Apr-1958)
Until They Sail (8-Oct-1957) · Capt. Jack Harding
The Helen Morgan Story (2-Oct-1957)
The Rack (2-Nov-1956)
Somebody Up There Likes Me (3-Jul-1956) · Rocky Graziano
The Silver Chalice (20-Dec-1954) · Basil

Source: Paul Newman – Wikipedia

Source: Paul Newman obituary | Film | The Guardian

Source: Paul Newman – Film Actor, Race Car Driver, Theater Actor, Television Actor – Biography.com

Source: Paul Newman

come find me, i’m @

Today is the 173rd birthday of the man with a vision to bring reasonably priced quality merchandise to rural America. Well before Sears created their catalog, Montgomery Ward was fulfilling the needs and wishes of those outside of major towns and cities. I loved the Montgomery Ward catalog, it was like looking into a different family’s life, not that they seemed happier or better, but they did wear a lot of brightly colored clothing, were constantly having some sort of party and were entertained by toys and games I didn’t really see the excitement around. My grandparents had several old Montgomery ward catalogs on the stairs up to their third floor, I would look through them often and loved how vintage they seemed. I had to just assume that was how it was in 1968, that life was exactly like an episode of “Gidget.” It seemed just fine to me. The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Aaron Montgomery Ward
BIRTHDATE: February 17, 1844
PLACE OF BIRTH: Chatham, NJ
DATE OF DEATH: December 7, 1913
PLACE OF DEATH: Chicago, IL
REMAINS: Rosehill Cemetery, Chicago, IL

BEST KNOWN FOR: American entrepreneur based in Chicago who made his fortune through the use of mail order for retail sales of general merchandise to rural customers. In 1872 he founded Montgomery Ward & Company, which became nationally known.

Aaron Montgomery Ward was born on February 17, 1844, in Chatham, New Jersey, to a family whose forebears had served as officers in the French and Indian War as well as in the American Revolution. When he was about nine years old, his father, Sylvester Ward, moved the family to Niles, Michigan, where Aaron attended public schools until he reached the age of fourteen. He was one of a large family, which at that time was far from wealthy. When he was fourteen, he was apprenticed to a trade to help support the family. According to his brief memoirs, he first earned 25 cents per day at a cutting machine in a barrel stave factory, and then stacking brick in a kiln at 30 cents a day. He noted that the experience greatly increased his knowledge. Energy and ambition drove him onward, and he left the confining bonds of the mechanic’s work to seek employment for himself to give wider scope to his energy and ability. He followed the river to Lake Michigan, went to the town of St. Joseph, a market for outlying fruit orchards, and went to work in a shoe store. This was the initial step toward the project that later sent his name across the United States. Being a fair salesman, within nine months he was engaged as a salesman in a general country store at six dollars per month plus board, a considerable salary at the time. He rose to become head clerk and general manager and remained at this store for three years. By the end of those three years, his salary was one hundred dollars a month plus his board. He left for a better job in a competing store, where he worked another two years. In this period, Ward learned retailing.

In 1865 Ward located in Chicago, and worked for Case and Sobin, a lamp house. He traveled for them, and sold goods on commission for a short time. Chicago was the center of the wholesale dry-goods trade, and in the 1860s Ward joined the leading dry-goods house, Field Palmer & Leiter, forerunner of Marshall Field & Co. He worked for Field for two years and then joined the wholesale dry-goods business of Wills, Greg & Co. In tedious rounds of train trips to southern communities, hiring rigs at the local stables, driving out to the crossroads stores and listening to the complaints of the back-country proprietors and their rural customers, he conceived a new merchandising technique: direct mail sales to country people. It was a time when rural consumers longed for the comforts of the city, yet all too often were victimized by monopolists and overcharged by the costs of many middlemen required to bring manufactured products to the countryside. The quality of merchandise also was suspect and the hapless farmer had no recourse in a caveat emptor economy. Ward shaped a plan to buy goods at low cost for cash. By eliminating intermediaries, with their markups and commissions, and drastically cutting selling costs, he could sell goods to people, however remote, at appealing prices. He then invited them to send their orders by mail and delivered the purchases to their nearest railroad station. The only thing he lacked was capital.

None of Ward’s friends or business acquaintances joined in his enthusiasm for his revolutionary idea. Although his idea was generally considered to border on lunacy and his first inventory was destroyed by the Great Chicago Fire, Ward persevered. In August 1872, with two fellow employees and a total capital of $1,600, he rented a small shipping room on North Clark Street and published the world’s first general merchandise mail-order catalog with 163 products listed. It is said that in 1880, Aaron Montgomery Ward himself initially wrote all catalog copy. When the business grew and department heads wrote merchandise descriptions, he still went over every line of copy to be certain that it was accurate.

The following year, both of Ward’s partners left him, but he hung on. Later, Thorne, his future brother-in-law, joined him in his business. This was the turning point for the young company, which grew and prospered. Soon the catalog, frequently reviled and even burned publicly by rural retailers who had been cheating the farmers for so many years, became known fondly as the “Wish Book” and was a favorite in households all across America.

The Montgomery Ward catalog’s place in history was assured when the Grolier Club, a society of bibliophiles in New York, exhibited it in 1946 alongside Webster’s dictionary as one of one hundred American books chosen for their influence on life and culture of the people.

Ward’s catalog soon was copied by other enterprising merchants, most notably Richard W. Sears and Alvah C. Roebuck, who mailed their first general catalog in 1896

Montgomery Ward died December 8, 1913, at the age of 69. His wife bequeathed a large portion of the estate to Northwestern University and other educational institutions. Today, more than a century later, Montgomery Ward & Co. adheres to the philosophy of “satisfaction guaranteed.” This was an unheard-of policy when Ward announced it in 1875. Ward has been called “the first consumerist.”

Source: Aaron Montgomery Ward – Wikipedia

Source: Montgomery Ward | American merchant | Britannica.com

come find me, i’m @

Today is the 128th birthday of the actress and activist Pearl While. The world is a better place because she was in it and still feels the loss that she has left.

NAME: Pearl White
OCCUPATION: Women’s Rights Activist, Film Actress
BIRTH DATE: March 4, 1889
DEATH DATE: August 4, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH: Green Ridge, Missouri
PLACE OF DEATH: Neuilly-sur-Seine, France
REMAINS: Buried, Cimetière de Passy, Paris, France
HOLLYWOOD WALK OF FAME 6838 Hollywood Blvd.

BEST KNOWN FOR: Pearl White was an American silent film actress best known for her role in The Perils of Pauline, in which she did her own stunt work.

White was born in Green Ridge, Missouri to Edgar White, a farmer, and Inez White. She had four brothers and sisters. The family later moved to Springfield, Missouri. At age 6, she made her stage debut as “Little Eva” in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When she was 13 years old, White worked as a bareback rider for the circus.

She began performing with the Diemer Theater Company, located on Commercial Street, while in her second year of high school. Against the wishes of her father, White dropped out of high school and, in 1907 at age 18, she went on the road with the Trousedale Stock Company, working evening shows while keeping her day job to help support her family. She was soon able to join the company full-time, touring through the American Midwest. White played minor roles for several years, when she was spotted by the Powers Film Company in New York. She claimed she had also performed in Cuba for a time under the name “Miss Mazee”, singing American songs in a dance hall. Her travels as a singer took her to South America, where she performed in casinos and dance halls. In 1910, White had trouble with her throat, and her voice began to fail from the nightly theatrical performances. She made her debut in films that year, starring in a series of one-reel dramas and comedies for Pat Powers in the Bronx. It was at Powers Films that White honed her skills at physical comedy and stunt work. She became a popular player with the company and caught the attention of Pathé Frères.

In 1910, White was offered a role by Pathé Frères in The Girl From Arizona, the French company’s first American film produced at their new studio in Bound Brook, New Jersey. She then worked at Lubin Studios in 1911 and several other of the independents, until the Crystal Film Company in Manhattan gave her top billing in a number of slapstick comedy shorts from 1912 to 1914. White then took a vacation in Europe. Upon her return, she signed with Eclectic Film Company, a subsidiary of Pathé in 1914.

Pathé director Louis J. Gasnier offered her the starring role in film serial The Perils of Pauline, based on a story by playwright Charles W. Goddard. The film features the central character of “Pauline” in a story involving considerable action, which the athletic Pearl White proved ideally suited for. The Perils of Pauline consisted of twenty, two-reel episodes that were released weekly. The serial proved to be a hit with audiences and made White a major celebrity, and she was soon earning $1,750 a week. She followed this with an even bigger box office hit, The Exploits of Elaine (1914-1915). Over the next five years, White would appear in the popular serials The New Exploits of Elaine (1915), The Romance of Elaine (1915), The Iron Claw (1916), Pearl of the Army (1916-1917), The Fatal Ring (1917), The House of Hate (1918), The Lightening Raider (1919) and The Black Secret (1919-1920). In these serials, White flew airplanes, raced cars, swam across rivers, and did other similar feats. She did much of her own stunt work until Pathé decided that they could not risk injuring one of their most popular stars (She had already injured her spine during the filming of The Perils of Pauline, an injury that would cause her pain for the rest of her life). A male stunt double wearing a wig would perform the majority of the more dangerous stunts in White’s later films. The public was largely unaware that White and other actors utilized stunt doubles because studios made a point to publicize that the actors did their own stunts. In August 1922, the public finally learned the truth. During the filming of White’s final serial Plunder, John Stevenson, an actor who was doubling for White, was supposed to leap from the top of a bus on 72nd Street and Columbus Avenue onto an elevated girder. He missed the girder and struck his head. Stevenson died of a fractured skull. After the filming of Plunder was complete, White traveled to Europe for another vacation.

By 1919, White had grown tired of film serials and signed with Fox Film Corporation with the ambition to appear in dramatic roles. Over the next two years, White appeared in ten drama films for Fox but her popularity had begun to wane.

Influenced by her French friends from Pathé Studios, White was drawn to the artistic gathering in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris. While living there, she made her last film for her friend, Belgian-born director Edward José, who had directed her in several serials. Silent films could be made in any country, and as White was a recognizable star worldwide, she was offered many roles in France. She made her final film, Terreur (released as The Perils of Paris in the United States), in France in 1924. White returned to the stage in a Montmartre production Tu Perds la Boule (You Lose the Ball). In 1925 she accepted an offer to star with comedian Max Wall in the “London Review” at the Lyceum Theatre in London where she earned $3,000 a week. She then retired from performing.

By the time she retired from films in 1924, White had amassed a fortune of $2 million. A shrewd businesswoman, she invested in a successful Parisian nightclub, a Biarritz resort hotel/casino, and a stable of ten race horses. White divided her time between her townhouse in Passy and a 54-acre estate near Rambouillet. She became involved with Theodore Cossika, a Greek businessman who shared her love of travel. Together they purchased a home near Cairo, Egypt, and White travelled with him throughout the Middle East and the Orient.

According to published reports after her death, White’s friends claimed that she intended to make a comeback in sound films. White later told friends that after she made a test for sound films in 1929, she was told that her voice was unsuitable. White made occasional visits to the United States in 1924, 1927 and 1937. On her last visit, White would tell reporters that she was not interested in making a comeback and mused that acting in silent films was more difficult than acting in the then-new “talkies” though she did praise Greta Garbo. By this time, White had gained a substantial amount of weight. She told reporters she did not like to be photographed as she felt that photos made her face look fat adding, “Why should I have my picture taken when I can get paid for it?”.

White was married twice and had no children. She married actor Victor Sutherland on October 10, 1907. They divorced in 1914. In 1919, she married for the second time to actor Wallace McCutcheon. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1921.

By 1937, White was dying of liver failure. The injury she sustained to her spine while filming The Perils of Pauline had continued to cause her pain which she eased with drugs and alcohol. A year before her death, White got her affairs in order, purchased a plot in Cimetière de Passy (Passy Cemetery) near her home and arranged her own funeral. In early July 1938, she checked herself into the American Hospital in the Paris suburb of Neuilly, due to issues with her liver. She slipped into a coma on August 3, 1938 and died the following day of what was identified in her obituaries as a “liver ailment” (likely cirrhosis due to years of heavy drinking). She was 49 years old. White was buried in Cimetière de Passy after a small, private funeral.

White left the majority of her fortune, including jewelery and property, to Theodore Cossika. She also bequeathed money to her father, nieces, and nephews, and willed $73,000 to charities.

Pearl White’s place in film history is important in both the evolution of cinema genres and the role of women. Like many silent film actors, many of White’s films are now considered lost. The Perils of Pauline is only known to exist in a reduced nine-reel version released in Europe in 1916, but The Exploits of Elaine survives and was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. All of her films were made at studios on the east coast of the United States, as White reportedly never visited Hollywood, California.

For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Pearl White has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6838 Hollywood Blvd.

The 1947 Paramount Pictures film The Perils of Pauline, starring Betty Hutton, is a fictionalized biography of Pearl White.

Source: Pearl White – Wikipedia

Source: Pearl White – Actress, Activist, Film Actor/Film Actress, Women’s Rights Activist, Film Actress – Biography.com

Source: Pearl White

come find me, i’m @

Today is the 94th birthday of the French mime Marcel Marceau.  The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Marcel Marceau
OCCUPATION: Actor, Artist
BIRTH DATE: March 22, 1923
DEATH DATE: September 22, 2007
EDUCATION: Ecole des Beaux-Arts
PLACE OF BIRTH: Strasbourg, France
PLACE OF DEATH: Cahors, France
ORIGINALLY: Marcel Mangel

BEST KNOWN FOR: Marcel Marceau was best known for his work as a mime artist in France.

Mime artist. Marcel Mangel was born March 22, 1923, in Strasbourg, NE France. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and with Etienne Decroux. In 1948 he founded the Compagnie de Mime Marcel Marceau, developing the art of mime, becoming himself the leading exponent. His white-faced character, Bip, based on the 19th-c French Pierrot, a melancholy vagabond, is famous from his appearances on stage and television throughout the world.

Among the many original performances he has devised are the mime-drama Don Juan (1964), and the ballet Candide (1971). He has also created about 100 pantomimes, such as The Creation of the World. In 1978 he became head of the Ecole de Mimodrame Marcel Marceau.

Marcel Marceau died on September 22, 2007 in Cahors, France.

FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story (8-Nov-2007) · Himself
Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin (11-Sep-2003) · Himself
Kinski Paganini (1989)
Silent Movie (16-Jun-1976) · Himself
Shanks (9-Oct-1974)
Barbarella (10-Oct-1968)

Source: Marcel Marceau

Source: Marcel Marceau – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: Marcel Marceau – Artist, Actor – Biography.com

come find me, i’m @

Today is the 109th birthday of of a rebel, a saint and a Righteous Gentile:  Oskar Schindler. How do you calculate the number of lives that exist today because he was brave enough to save the lives of 1,100 Jewish people from World War II. How many lives have been changed by his example of standing up for what is right? The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Oskar Schindler
OCCUPATION: Entrepreneur
BIRTH DATE: April 28, 1908
DEATH DATE: October 9, 1974
PLACE OF BIRTH: Svitavy [Zwittau], Austro-Hungarian Empire
PLACE OF DEATH: Hildesheim, West Germany

BEST KNOWN FOR: Oskar Schindler was a German industrialist during World War II who sheltered approximately 1,100 Jews from the Nazis by employing them in his factories.

Oskar Schindler was born April 28, 1908, in the city of Svitavy [Zwittau], in the Sudetenland, now part of the Czech Republic. The eldest of two children, Oskar’s father, Hans Schindler, was a farm-equipment manufacturer, his mother, Louisa, was a homemaker. Oscar and his sister, Elfriede, attended a German-language school where he was popular, though not an exceptional student. Forgoing the opportunity to attend college, he went to trade school instead, taking courses in several areas.

Oskar Schindler left school in 1924, taking odd jobs and trying to find a direction in life. In 1928, he met and married Emilie Pelzl and soon after was called into military service. Afterward, he worked for his father’s company until the business failed in the economic depression of the 1930s. When not working, Schindler excelled at drinking and philandering, a lifestyle he would maintain throughout much of his life.

In the 1930s, the political landscape of Europe changed dramatically with the rise Adolf Hitler and the German Nazi Party. Sensing the shift in political momentum, Schindler joined a local pro-Nazi organization and began collecting intelligence for the German military. He was arrested by Czech authorities in 1938, charged with spying and sentenced to death but was released shortly thereafter, when Germany annexed the Sudetenland. Schindler would take advantage of this second chance.

In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, starting World War II. Schindler left his wife and traveled to Krakow, hoping to profit from the impending war. Looking for business opportunities, he quickly became involved in the black market. By October, Schindler used his charm and doled out “gifts of gratitude” (contraband goods) to bribe high-ranking German officers. Wanting to expand his business interests, Schindler obtained a former Jewish enamelware factory to produce goods for the German military.

Oskar Schindler renamed the factory Deutsche Emaillewaren-Fabrik (German Enamelware Factory) and started production with a small staff. Possessing a certain panache for business and engaging in influence peddling, Schindler secured numerous German army contracts for kitchenware. He soon met Itzhak Stern, a Jewish accountant, who connected Schindler with Krakow’s Jewish community to staff the factory.

Starting out with 45 employees, the company grew to more than 1,700 at its peak in 1944. Initially, Schindler hired Jewish workers because they were a less expensive Polish workforce. But as Nazi atrocities against the Jewish community increased, Schindler’s attitude changed. With the help of Stern, he found reasons to hire more Jewish workers, regardless of their abilities. By 1942, nearly half of his employees were Jewish and were known as Schindlerjuden (Schindler Jews). When the Nazis began to relocate Krakow’s Jews to labor camps, Itzhak Stern and several hundred other employees were among them. Schindler raced to the train station and confronted an SS officer, arguing that his workers were essential to the war effort. After several tense minutes of dropping names and making veiled threats, Schindler was able to free his workers and escort them back to the factory.

In early 1943, the Nazis implemented the liquidation of the Krakow Jewish population and opened up the Plaszow work camp, run by the notoriously sadistic commandant, Amon Göth. Schindler cultivated a relationship with Göth, and whenever any of his workers were threatened with deportation to a concentration camp or execution, Schindler managed to provide a black-market gift or bribe to save their lives.

In 1944, Plaszow transitioned from a labor camp to a concentration camp and all Jews were to be sent to the death camp at Auschwitz. Schindler requested Göth allow him to relocate his factory to Brnĕnec, in the Sudetenland, and produce war goods. He was told to draw up a list of workers he wanted to take with him. With Stern’s help, Schindler created a list of 1,100 Jewish names he deemed “essential” for the new factory. Permission was granted and the factory was moved. Not wanting to contribute to the German war effort, Schindler ordered his workers to purposefully make defective products that would fail inspection. The employees spent the remaining months of the war in the factory.

During the war, Emilie joined Oskar in Krakow, and by the war’s end, the couple was penniless, having used his fortune to bribe authorities and save his workers. The day after the war ended, Schindler and his wife fled to Argentina with the help of the Schindlerjuden to avoid prosecution for his previous spying activities. For more than a decade, Schindler tried farming, only to declare bankruptcy in 1957. He left his wife and traveled to West Germany, where he made an unsuccessful attempt in the cement business. Schindler spent the rest of his life supported by donations from the Schindlerjuden. He was named a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem in 1962, and after his death in 1974, at age 66, Oskar Schindler was interred in the Catholic cemetery on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. In 1993, Steven Spielberg brought the story of Oskar Schindler to the big screen with his film, Schindler’s List.

Source: Oskar Schindler – Entrepreneur – Biography.com

Source: Oskar Schindler

Source: Oskar Schindler – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

come find me, i’m @

Today is the 86th birthday of Carmen Dell’Orefice.  Not everyone can look like this at age 81, but everyone can be inspired to stay active and interested and be fearless. This woman has had a life.  We are lucky to have her.

NAME: Carmen Dell’Orefice
DATE OF BIRTH: June 3, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH: New York, NY, USA
OCCUPATION: Model
HEIGHT: 5 ft 10 in (1.78 m)
HAIR COLOR: Silver
EYE COLOR: Hazel

Carmen Dell’Orefice is an American model and actress, born in New York, NY. She is known within the fashion industry for being the world’s oldest working model as of the Spring/Summer 2012 season. She covered Vogue at the mere age of 15, and has been modelling ever since.

Carmen’s parents were Italian and Hungarian. They were constantly breaking up and getting back together. Because of this, Carmen lived in foster homes and sometimes with other relatives.

In 1942, Carmen reunited with her mother and moved to New York City. At the age of 13, while riding a bus to ballet class, she was approached to model by the wife of photographer Herman Landschoff. Her test photos, taken at Jones Beach, were a “flop” according to Carmen. Her godfather though introduced her to Vogue, where Carmen signed a contract for $7.50 per hour in 1946 at age 15. Carmen became a favoured model of photographer Erwin Blumenfeld who took her first Vogue cover in 1947. She appears in the December 15, 1947 issue of US Vogue as Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Cinderella along with supermodel Dorian Leigh, actors Ray Bolger and Jose Ferrer.

Despite modeling, Carmen and her mother were poor. They had no telephone and Vogue sent runners to their apartment to let Carmen know about modeling jobs. She roller-skated to assignments to save bus fares. Carmen was so malnourished that famed fashion photographers Horst P. Horst and Cecil Beaton had to pin back dresses and stuff her body with tissue. Carmen and her mother were also accomplished seamstresses and made extra money making clothes. One of their customers was Dorian Leigh. Carmen would later become best friends with Dorian’s younger sister, model Suzy Parker. Together they would be bridesmaids at Dorian’s second wedding to Roger Mehle in 1948.

In 1947, Carmen got a raise to $10–$25 per hour. She appeared on the October 1947 cover of Vogue, at age 16, one of the youngest Vogue cover models ever (along with Niki Taylor, Brooke Shields, and Monika Schnarre). Carmen was also on the November 1948 cover of Vogue. She worked with the most famous fashion photographers of the era including Irving Penn, Gleb Derujinsky, Francesco Scavullo, Norman Parkinson, and Richard Avedon. Carmen was photographed by Melvin Sokolsky for Harper’s Bazaar in 1960. The iconic image titled Carmen Las Meninas is world famous and has been collected internationally. Sokolsky also photographed Carmen for the classic Vanity Fair Lingerie campaign in which Carmen obscures her face with her hand. She also became Salvador Dalí’s muse.

Despite early successes at a very young age, modeling agent Eileen Ford refused to represent her and Vogue lost interest in her. After doctors prescribed shots to start puberty, she instead started working for catalogs and lingerie, making $300 per hour. It was then that she joined Ford in 1953.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Carmen lost most of her money in the stock market. She was forced to auction off her famous modeling photographs from the 1940s-1980s through Sotheby’s.

In 1994, with what little money she had left, and with money from boyfriend Norman Levy, she invested with Bernie Madoff. For twelve years, Ruth and Bernie Madoff and Carmen and Norman Levy were a “foursome”, traveling and partying together on lavish yachts.

Levy died in 2005, at age 93, and Madoff was the executor of his will, which had $244 million in assets, according to Carmen. Madoff further used this money to lure in about 13,500 individuals and charities. She continued to regularly have dinner with the Madoffs after Levy’s death.

In December 2008 a 68-year-old friend, who invested her life savings with Madoff, telephoned Carmen to inform her that she too had been swindled. Carmen said, “For the second time in my life, I’ve lost all of my life savings.”.

In April 2009, Carmen was interviewed for Vanity Fair magazine’s story “Madoff’s World”. Photographs of Carmen and photographs she took of Madoff appear in this article.

Source: Carmen Dell’Orefice – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

come find me, i’m @

Today is the 111th birthday of the one and only Josephine Baker.  Her iconic everything has cemented her in a time and place forever:  Paris between the wars.  The first song of hers that I ever heard was J’ai Deaux Amors and I remember really listening to it and seeking out more of her music.  Her story is tremendous and her trajectory is that of no other.  She started life in St. Louis and by the time of her death, the entire world was in love with her.  Parisians named a swimming pool in her honor.  The world is a better place because she was in it and still feels the loss that she has left.

NAME: Josephine Baker
OCCUPATION: Civil Rights Activist, Dancer, Singer
BIRTH DATE: June 3, 1906
DEATH DATE: April 12, 1975
PLACE OF BIRTH: St. Louis, Missouri
PLACE OF DEATH: Paris, France

BEST KNOWN FOR: Josephine Baker was a dancer and singer who became wildly popular in France during the 1920s. She also devoted much of her life to fighting racism.

Josephine Baker was born Freda Josephine McDonald on June 3, 1906, in St. Louis, Missouri. Her mother, Carrie McDonald, was a washerwoman who had given up her dreams of becoming a music-hall dancer. Her father, Eddie Carson, was a vaudeville drummer. He abandoned Carrie and Josephine shortly after her birth. Carrie remarried soon thereafter and would have several more children in the coming years.

To help support her growing family, at age 8 Josephine cleaned houses and babysat for wealthy white families, often being poorly treated. She briefly returned to school two years later before running away from home at age 13 and finding work as a waitress at a club. While working there, she married a man named Willie Wells, from whom she divorced only weeks later.

It was also around this time that Josephine first took up dancing, honing her skills both in clubs and in street performances, and by 1919 she was touring the United States with the Jones Family Band and the Dixie Steppers performing comedic skits. In 1921, Josephine married a man named Willie Baker, whose name she would keep for the rest of her life despite their divorce years later. In 1923, Baker landed a role in the musical Shuffle Along as a member of the chorus, and the comic touch that she brought to the part made her popular with audiences. Looking to parlay these early successes, Baker moved to New York City and was soon performing in Chocolate Dandies and, along with Ethel Waters, in the floor show of the Plantation Club, where again she quickly became a crowd favorite.

In 1925, at the peak of France’s obsession with American jazz and all things exotic, Baker traveled to Paris to perform in La Revue Nègre at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. She made an immediate impression on French audiences when, with dance partner Joe Alex, she performed the Danse Sauvage, in which she wore only a feather skirt.

However, it was the following year, at the Folies Bergère music hall, one of the most popular of the era, that Baker’s career would reach a major turning point. In a performance called La Folie du Jour, Baker danced wearing little more than a skirt made of 16 bananas. The show was wildly popular with Parisian audiences and Baker was soon among the most popular and highest-paid performers in Europe, having the admiration of cultural figures like Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and E. E. Cummings and earning herself nicknames like “Black Venus” and “Black Pearl.” She also received more than 1,000 marriage proposals.

Capitalizing on this success, Baker sang professionally for the first time in 1930, and several years later landed film roles as a singer in Zou-Zou and Princesse Tam-Tam. The money she earned from her performances soon allowed her to purchase an estate in Castelnaud-Fayrac, in the southwest of France. She named the estate Les Milandes, and soon paid to move her family there from St. Louis.

In 1936, riding the wave of popularity she was enjoying in France, Baker returned to the United States to perform in the Ziegfield Follies, hoping to establish herself as a performer in her home country as well. However, she was met with a generally hostile, racist reaction and quickly returned to France, crestfallen at her mistreatment. Upon her return, Baker married French industrialist Jean Lion and obtained citizenship from the country that had embraced her as one of its own.

When World War II erupted later that year, Baker worked for the Red Cross during the occupation of France. As a member of the Free French forces she also entertained troops in both Africa and the Middle East. Perhaps most importantly, however, Baker did work for the French Resistance, at times smuggling messages hidden in her sheet music and even in her underwear. For these efforts, at the war’s end, Baker was awarded both the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honour with the rosette of the Resistance, two of France’s highest military honors.

Following the war, Baker spent most of her time at Les Milandes with her family. In 1947, she married French orchestra leader Jo Bouillon, and beginning in 1950 began to adopt babies from around the world. She adopted 12 children in all, creating what she referred to as her “rainbow tribe” and her “experiment in brotherhood.” She often invited people to the estate to see these children, to demonstrate that people of different races could in fact live together harmoniously.

During the 1950s, Baker frequently returned to the United States to lend her support to the Civil Rights Movement, participating in demonstrations and boycotting segregated clubs and concert venues. In 1963, Baker participated, alongside Martin Luther King Jr., in the March on Washington, and was among the many notable speakers that day. In honor of her efforts, the NAACP eventually named May 20th “Josephine Baker Day.”

After decades of rejection by her countrymen and a lifetime spent dealing with racism, in 1973 Baker performed at Carnegie Hall in New York and was greeted with a standing ovation. She was so moved by her reception that she wept openly before her audience. The show was a huge success and marked Baker’s comeback to the stage.

In April 1975, Josephine Baker performed at the Bobino Theater in Paris, in the first of a series of performances celebrating the 50th anniversary of her Paris debut. Numerous celebrities were in attendance, including Sophia Loren and Princess Grace of Monaco, who had been a dear friend to Baker for years. Just days later, on April 12, 1975, Baker died in her sleep of a cerebral hemorrhage. She was 69.

On the day of her funeral, more than 20,000 people lined the streets of Paris to witness the procession, and the French government honored her with a 21-gun salute, making Baker the first American woman in history to be buried in France with military honors.

Source: Josephine Baker – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: Josephine Baker – Civil Rights Activist, Dancer, Singer – Biography.com

Source: Josephine Baker | French entertainer | Britannica.com

Source: Josephine Baker

come find me, i’m @

Today is the 107th birthday of the modern-day explorer Jacques Cousteau. I remember watching reruns of his TV show The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau when I was a kid. He taught me about the world of the sea while his counterpart Marlin Perkins taught me about the world of the land on his show Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Jacques Cousteau
OCCUPATION: Filmmaker, Military Leader, Scientist, Photographer, Inventor, Explorer
BIRTH DATE: June 11, 1910
DEATH DATE: June 25, 1997
EDUCATION: Ecole Navale (French Naval Academy), Collège Stanislas
PLACE OF BIRTH: Saint-André-de-Cubzac, France
PLACE OF DEATH: Paris, France
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC GOLD MEDAL: 1961
OSCAR FOR BEST DOCUMENTARY: 1957, for Le Monde du Silence
OSCAR FOR SHORT FILM: 1959, for The Golden Fish
OSCAR FOR BEST DOCUMENTARY: 1965, for Le Monde sans Soleil
PRESIDENTIAL MEDAL OF FREEDOM: 23-May-1985

BEST KNOWN FOR: Jacques Cousteau was a French undersea explorer, researcher, photographer and documentary host who invented diving and scuba devices, including the Aqua-Lung. He also conducted underwater expeditions and produced films and television series, including the Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau was born in the village of Saint-André-de-Cubzac, in southwestern France, on June 11, 1910. The younger of two sons born to Daniel and Elizabeth Cousteau, he suffered from stomach problems and anemia as a young child. At age 4, Cousteau learned to swim and started a lifelong fascination with water. As he entered adolescence, he showed a strong curiosity for mechanical objects and upon purchasing a movie camera, he took it apart to understand how it operated.

Jacques Cousteau’s curiosity notwithstanding, he did not do well in school. At 13, He was sent to boarding school in Alsace, France. After he completed his preparatory studies, he attended Collège Stanislas in Paris and in 1930, Cousteau entered the Ecole Navale (French Naval Academy) at Brest, France. After graduation, as a gunnery officer, he joined the French Navy’s information service. He took his camera along and shot many rolls of film at exotic ports-o-call in the Indian and South Pacific oceans.

In 1933, Jacques Cousteau was in a major automobile accident that nearly took his life. During his rehabilitation, he took up daily swimming in the Mediterranean Sea. A friend, Philippe Tailliez, gave Cousteau a pair of swimming goggles, which opened him to the mysteries of the sea and began his quest to understand the underwater world. In 1937, Cousteau married Simone Melchior.

They had two sons, Jean-Michel and Phillipe. Both sons, in time, would join their father in underwater world expeditions. Simone died in 1990 and one year later, the senior Cousteau married Francine Triplet, with whom he had a daughter and son (born while Cousteau was married to Simone).

During World War II, when Paris fell to the Nazis, Jacques Cousteau and his family took refuge in the small town of Megreve, near the Swiss border. For the first few years of the war, he quietly continued his underwater experiments and explorations. In 1943 he met Emile Gagnan, a French engineer who shared his passion for discovery. Around this time, compressed air cylinders were invented and Cousteau and Gagnan experimented with snorkel hoses, body suits and breathing apparatus.

In time, they developed the first aqua-lung device allowing divers to stay underwater for long periods of time. Cousteau was also instrumental in the development of a waterproof camera that could withstand the high pressure of deep water. During this time, Cousteau made two documentaries on underwater exploration, Par dix-huit mètres de fond (“18 Meters Deep”) and Épaves (“Shipwrecks”).

During the war, Cousteau joined the French Resistance movement, spying on Italian armed forces and documenting troop movements. Cousteau was recognized for his resistance efforts and awarded several medals, including the Legion of Honor from France. After the war, Cousteau worked with the French navy to clear underwater mines. Between missions, he continued his underwater explorations performing various tests and filming the underwater excursions.

In 1948, Cousteau, along with Philippe Tailliez and expert divers and academic scientists, undertook an underwater expedition in the Mediterranean Sea to find the Roman shipwreck Mahdia. This was the first underwater archaeology operation using self-contained diving apparatus and marked the beginning of underwater archeology.

In 1950, Jacques Cousteau leased a one-time British minesweeper and converted it into an oceanographic research vessel he named Calypso.

After struggling for financing to conduct his voyages, Cousteau soon realized he needed to attract media attention to make people aware of what he was doing and why it was so important. In 1953, he published the book The Silent World, which was later made into an award-winning film.

This success allowed him to finance another expedition to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean sponsored by the French government and the National Geographic Society. During the rest of the decade, Cousteau conducted several expeditions and brought more attention to mysteries and attractions the underwater world.

In 1966, Jacques Cousteau launched his first hour-long television special, “The World of Jacques-Yves Cousteau” on the ABC television network. In 1968, he produced the television series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, which ran for nine seasons. Millions of people followed Cousteau and his crew traversing the globe presenting intimate exposés of marine life and habitat. It was during this time that Cousteau began to realize how human activity was destroying the oceans.

Jacques Cousteau also wrote several books, including The Shark in 1970, Dolphins in 1975, and Jacques Cousteau: The Ocean World in 1985. With his increased celebrity and the support of many, Cousteau founded the Cousteau Society in 1973, in an effort to raise awareness of the ecosystems of the underwater world. The organization quickly grew and soon boasted 300,000 members worldwide.

In the 1980s, Cousteau continued to produce television specials, but these had a more environmental message and a plea for stronger protection of oceanic wildlife habitat. In June 1979, tragedy struck when Cousteau’s son, Philippe Cousteau, was killed in a plane crash. According to a 1979 article by The Associated Press, Philippe had been flying the plane during a test flight, and when he attempted to land, the plane clipped a sandbank and crashed into Portugal’s Tagus River.

On January 8, 1996, Calypso was accidentally rammed by barge and sank in Singapore Harbor. Jacques Cousteau tried to raise money to build a new vessel, but died unexpectedly in Paris on June 25, 1997, at the age of 87. His estate and the foundation fell into dispute among his survivors. Most of the legal disputes were settled by 2000, when his son, Jean-Michel, disassociated himself from the Cousteau Society and formed his own organization the Oceans Futures Society.

FILMOGRAPHY AS DIRECTOR
World Without Sun (1964)
The Silent World (May-1956)

FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
The Silent World (May-1956) · Himself

AUTHOR OF BOOKS:
The Silent World (1952, with Frederic Dumas)
The Living Sea (1963, with James Dugan)
World Without Sun (1965)
The Shark: Splendid Savage of the Sea (1970, with Phillipe Cousteau)
Oasis in Space (1972)
The Ocean World of Jacques Cousteau (1973, twenty volumes)
Dolphins (1975)
The Cousteau Almanac: An Inventory of Life on Our Water Planet (1981)
Jacques Cousteau’s Amazon Journey (1984, with Mose Richards)
Whales (1988)
Jacques Cousteau’s Journey to Papua New Guinea (1984, with Mose Richards)
The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus (1996, posthumous; with Susan Schiefelbein)

Source: Jacques Cousteau – Filmmaker, Military Leader, Scientist, Photographer, Inventor, Explorer – Biography.com

Source: Jacques Cousteau – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: Jacques Cousteau | French ocean explorer and engineer | Britannica.com

Source: Cousteau Society

Source: Jacques Cousteau

come find me, i’m @

Today is the 117th birthday of the pilot and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. He wrote The Little Prince, a copy of which was given to me by a very good friend. His inscription is included below. The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
OCCUPATION: Pilot, Writer
BIRTH DATE: June 29, 1900
DEATH DATE: July 31, 1944
EDUCATION: École des Beaux-Arts
PLACE OF BIRTH: Lyon, France
PLACE OF DEATH: Marseille, France
REMAINS: Missing (body never recovered)
FRENCH LEGION OF HONOR 1929

BEST KNOWN FOR: French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry documented his adventures as a pilot in works such as ‘Wind, Sand and Stars‘ and ‘The Little Prince.’

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born into an aristocratic family in Lyon, France, on June 29, 1900. His father died when he was a young boy, and his mother moved him and his four siblings to a relative’s château in the east. Saint-Exupéry enjoyed a mostly carefree and privileged life, and in 1912 took his first trip in an airplane—an experience that would have a profound and lasting impression on him.

Receiving his early education at Catholic schools in France, Saint-Exupéry was sent away to a boarding school in Switzerland after the outbreak of World War I. He returned to France in 1917 and briefly attended a college prep school in Paris before attempting to enter the naval academy. However, a historically poor student, Saint-Exupéry failed the examination and studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts instead.

Despite his disappointing rejection from the naval academy, in 1921 Saint-Exupéry was given the opportunity to realize his dreams of flying during his compulsory service in the military. Initially working as a mechanic in the army, he learned how to fly. Saint-Exupéry thus became a pilot in the air force the following year, based in North Africa. His engagement to a young woman resulted in Saint-Exupéry leaving the air force in 1922. But when their relationship failed shortly thereafter, Saint-Exupéry returned to his first love, flying, and developed a new passion as well—writing.

While working various jobs, Saint-Exupéry began to write stories inspired by his experiences as a pilot. He published his first work, “The Aviator,” in 1926, the same year that he returned to flying as a mail pilot with the aviation company Aéropostale in Toulouse, covering routes between France, Spain and North Africa. The remainder of Saint-Exupéry’s life would be defined by the intertwining of his dual occupations as aviator and author, with the former providing the inspiration for his literary work.

In 1927, Saint-Exupéry was placed in charge of an airfield in the Sahara. His experiences there informed his first novel, Southern Mail, which celebrated the courage of pilots and was published in 1929. His similarly themed Night Flight was published in 1931 after he returned from a two-year posting in Argentina, where he had helped to establish an air mail system. Night Flight would become his first true literary success, receiving the Prix Femina literary prize and later being adapted into a 1933 Hollywood film starring John Barrymore, Helen Hayes and Clark Gable.

In 1931, Saint-Exupéry also married for the first time, to Salvadoran writer and artist Consuelo Suncin. Though they would remain together, by all accounts their marriage was a troubled one due to Saint-Exupéry’s infidelities and frequent absences. Among the most eventful of these sojourns was his 1935 attempt to break the air-speed record between Paris and Saigon. En route, his plane crashed in the Sahara, and he and his copilot wandered the desert for days, nearly dying of exposure and dehydration before being rescued by a wandering Bedouin. Saint-Exupéry’s 1939 memoir Wind, Sand and Stars, which includes an account of the events, surpassed the success of his earlier works, winning the prestigious Grand Prize for Novel Writing from the Académie Française and the National Book Award in the United States.

But neither Saint-Exupéry’s growing literary success nor the disabilities resulting from several plane crashes could tear him away from his calling as a pilot. When World War II erupted, he became a military reconnaissance pilot until the German occupation forced him to flee France. Relocating to New York City, he lobbied the U.S. government to intervene in the conflict and also continued to document his adventures, publishing Flight to Arras in 1942 and Letter to a Hostage in 1943.

However, from a literary perspective, his most important work during this period was the children’s fable for adults, The Little Prince. The poetic and mystical tale of a pilot stranded in the desert and his conversation with a young prince from another planet, it was written and illustrated by Saint-Exupéry and published in both French and English in the United States in 1943, and later in more than 200 other languages. It is considered one of the greatest books in the 20th century and is one of the bestselling books of all time, becoming the subject of numerous adaptations, including a Grammy Winning children’s album featuring Richard Burton and a 1974 musical film featuring Gene Wilder and Bob Fosse.

In 2015, a new testament to the staying power of Saint-Exupéry’s cherished tale came in the form of a new 3D-animation adaptation with a star-studded cast that includes Jeff Bridges, Rachel McAdams, Paul Rudd, Marion Cotillard, James Franco, Benicio Del Toro, Ricky Gervais and Paul Giamatti. With the film already having played in overseas markets, The Little Prince was released in 2016.

Never one to rest on his laurels, in 1943 Saint-Exupéry returned to France and rejoined his squadron, insisting on flying despite his age and infirmities. On July 31, 1944, he left Corsica for a reconnaissance mission over occupied France. He never returned, and when neither he nor his plane was found, he was deemed killed in action. Saint-Exupéry’s mysterious disappearance made international news and was the cause of much speculation until 2000, when a scuba diver exploring the Mediterranean Sea near Marseille discovered the wreckage of a plane that was later raised and identified as Saint-Exupéry’s. Though evidence indicated that he had likely been shot down, the true cause of his death remains unknown.

Author of books:
Courrier-Sud (1929, novel, Southern Mail)
Vol de nuit (1931, novel, Night Flight)
Terre des hommes (1939, Wind, Sand, and Stars)
Pilote de Guerre (1942, Flight to Arras)
Lettre à un otage (1943, Letter to a Hostage)
Le Petit Prince (1943, novel, The Little Prince)
Citadelle (1948, notebook, The Wisdom of the Sands)

Source: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – Wikipedia

Source: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – Pilot, Writer – Biography.com

Source: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

come find me, i’m @

Today is the 123rd birthday of the author, Aldous Huxley.  I first started reading his books at Interlochen Center for the Arts the summer of 1989.  The library was in a stone building, cool in temperature and cool in aesthetics.  That summer, I read Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited.  I was transported.  Later, I read somewhere that his writing has inspired a lot of people that I find to be visionaries, it was great to understand a bit more of their inspirational foundations.  The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Aldous Huxley
OCCUPATION: Author
BIRTH DATE: July 26, 1894
DEATH DATE: November 22, 1963
EDUCATION: Eton, Balliol College
PLACE OF BIRTH: Godalming, United Kingdom
PLACE OF DEATH: Los Angeles, California

REMAINS: Buried, Compton Village Cemetery, Guildford, Surrey, England

BEST KNOWN FOR: Author Aldous Huxley expressed his deep distrust of 20th-century politics and technology in his sci-fi novel Brave New World, a nightmarish vision of the future.

Aldous Huxley, was a British writer. He was born on July 26, 1894 and died on November 22, 1963. He would become most specifically known to the public for his novels, and especially his fifth one, Brave New World, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Aldous Huxley was born on July 26th 1894 in Godalming in the Surrey county in southern England. He would be the son of the English schoolteacher and writer Leonard Huxley (1860 – 1933) and of Julia Arnold (1862 – 1908). More than literature, however, Aldous Huxley would in fact be born into a family of renowned scientists, with two of his three brothers, Julian and Andrew, who would be eminent biologists and a grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, who would be a famous, controversial naturalist in his time, nicknamed as “Darwin’s Bulldog”.

Aldous Huxley would come to be known mostly as a novelist and essayist but he would also write some short stories, poetry, travelogues and even film scripts. In his novels and essays Aldous Huxley would always play the role of a critical observer of accepted traditions, customs, social norms and ideals. Importantly, he would be concerned in his writings with the potentially harmful applications of so-called scientific progress to mankind.

At the age of 14 Aldous Huxley would lose his mother and he himself would subsequently become ill in 1911 with a disease that would leave him virtually blind. As if all of this was note enough, his other brother, Noel, would kill himself in 1914. Because of his sight he would not be able to do the scientific research that had attracted him earlier. Aldous Huxley would then turn himself to literature. It is important to note that in spite of a partial remission, his eyesight would remain poor for the rest of his life. This would not, however prevent him from obtaining a degree in English literature with high praises.

While continuing his education at Balliol College, one of the institutions at Oxford University in England, Aldous Huxley would not longer be financially supported by his father, which would make him having to earn living. For a brief period in 1918, he would be employed as a clerk of the Air Ministry, which would convince him that he does not want a career in either administration or business. As result, his need for money would lead him to apply his literary talents. It is around those days that he would become friends with the famous writer D.H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930) at Oxford.

Aldous Huxley would finish his first novel, which he would never publish, at the age of seventeen, and he would decisively turn to writing at the age of twenty. At that point he would publish poems and also become a journalist and art critic. This would allow him to frequently travel and mingle with the European intelligentsia of the time. He would meet surrealists in Paris and would as a result of all of this write many literary essays. Aldous Huxley were to be deeply concerned about the important changes occurring at the time in Western civilization. They would prompt him to write great novels in the 1930s about the serious threats posed by the combination of power and technical progress, as well as about what he identified as a drift in parapsychology: behaviorism (as in his Brave New World). Additionally he would write against war and nationalism, as in Eyeless in Gaza (1936), for example.

One of his most known novels, and arguably his most important, would be Brave New World. Aldous Huxley would write it in only four months. It is important to note that at that time Adolf Hitler (1889 – 1945) was not yet in power in Germany and that the Stalinist purges had not yet begun. Aldous Huxley had therefore not been able to tap into the reality of his time the dictatorial future he would have the foresight to write about before it had happened. Indeed here Aldous Huxley imagined a society that would use genetics and cloning in order to condition and control individuals. In this future society all children are conceived in test tubes. They are genetically conditioned to belong to one of the five categories of populations, from the most intelligent to the stupidest.

Brave New World would also delineate what the perfect dictatorship would look like. It would have the appearance of a democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be, as Aldous Huxley tells us, a system of slavery where, through entertainment and consumption the slaves “would love their servitude”. To many this would and still does resonate with the contemporary status quo. The title of the book comes from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610 – 1611), Act 5 Scene 1. Aldous Huxley’s novel would in fact eventually be made into a film in 1998. Although this one contains many elements from the book, the film would however portray a rather different storyline.

In 1937 he would write a book of essays entitled Ends and Means: an Enquiry Into the Nature of Ideals and Into the Methods Employed for Their Realization in which he would explore some of the same themes:

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.

In 1958 Aldous Huxley would publish Brave New World Revisited, a collection of essays in which he would think critically about the threats of overpopulation, excessive bureaucracy, as well as some hypnosis techniques for personal freedom. While Aldous Huxley’s early works would clearly be focused on defending a kind of humanism, he would become more and more interested in spiritual questions. He would particularly become interested in parapsychology and mysticism, which would be a subject matter on which he would also write a lot about. It is not really surprising, therefore, that in 1938 Aldous Huxley would become a friend of religious philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 – 1986), considered by some to be a mystique himself, largely because of his early association with the Theosophical Society, from which he would powerfully break away from. In any case, Huxley would become a great admirer of this one’s teachings and would encourage him to put his insights in writings. Aldous Huxley would even write the forward for Jiddu Krishnamurti’s The First and Last Freedom (1954). Tellingly, Huxley would state after having listened to one of Krishnamurti’s talks:

… the most impressive thing I have listened to. It was like listening to a discourse of the Buddha – such power, such intrinsic authority…

In 1937, the writer would move to California and became a screenwriter for Hollywood. At the same time he would continue writing novels and essays, including the satirical novel After Many a Summer (1939) and Ape and Essence (1948). In 1950 the American Academy of Arts and Letters would award him the prestigious Award of Merit for the Novel, a prize that had also been bestowed to illustrious writers such as Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961) and Thomas Mann (1875 – 1955). Aldous Huxley would also be the author of an essay on the environment that would greatly inspire future ecological movements.

The 1950s would be a time of experiences with psychedelic drugs for him, especially LSD and mescaline, from which he would write the collection of essays The Doors of Perception (1954), which would become a narrative worshipped by hippies. The book would also inspire the famous singer Jim Morrison (1943 – 1971), to call his band “The Doors”. Aldous Huxley himself had found the title of the book in William Blake’s (1757 – 1827) The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

By the end of his life Aldous Huxley would be considered by many as a visionary thinker. The so-called “New Age” school of thought would often quote his mystical writings and studies of hallucinogens, and in fact it continues to do so today. Considered one of the greatest English writers having written 47 books, Aldous Huxley would die at the age of 69 in Los Angeles on November 22 1963, the same day as President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Aldous Huxley would be cremated and his ashes would be buried in the family vault in the UK.

FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement (1-Nov-2007) · Himself

Author of books:
The Burning Wheel (1916, poems)
Jonah (1917, poems)
The Defeat of Youth and other poems (1918, poems)
Leda (1920, poems)
Crome Yellow (1921, novel)
Antic Hay (1923, novel)
On the Margin: Notes and Essays (1932, essays)
Those Barren Leaves (1925, novel)
Selected Poems (1925, poems)
Along The Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist (1925, travel)
Jesting Pilate: An Intellectual Holiday (1926, travel)
Essays New and Old (1926, essays)
Proper Studies (1927, essays)
Point Counter Point (1928, novel)
Arabia Infelix and other poems (1929, poems)
Do What You Will (1929, essays)
Brief Candles (1930, short stories)
Vulgarity in Literature (1930, essays)
Brave New World (1931, novel)
Music At Night (1931, essays)
The Cicadas and other poems (1931, poems)
Texts and Pretexts: An Anthology of Commentaries (1932, essays)
T. H. Huxley as a Man of Letters (1932, biography)
Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934, travel)
Eyeless in Gaza (1936, novel)
The Olive Tree and other Essays (1937, essays)
What Are You Going To Do About It? The Case for Reconstructive Peace (1936, essays)
Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideas and into the Methods Employed for Their Realization (1937, essays)
The Elder Peter Bruegel (1937, novel)
The Most Agreeable Vice (1938, essays)
After Many a Summer Dies The Swan (1939, novel)
Words and Their Meanings (1940, essays)
Grey Eminence: A Study in Religion and Politics (1941, essays)
The Art of Seeing (1942, essays)
The Perennial Philosophy (1942, essays)
Orion (1943, poems)
Time Must Have A Stop (1944, novel)
Science, Liberty and Peace (1946, essays)
Ape and Essence (1948, novel)
Food and People (1949, essays, with John Russell)
Themes and Variations (1950, essays)
A Day in Windsor (1953, essays, with J. A. Kings)
Doors of Perception (1954, essays)
The Genius and the Goddess (1955, novel)
Heaven and Hell (1956, essays)
Brave New World Revised (1958, novel)
On Art and Artists (1960, essays)
Island (1962, novel)
The Politics of Ecology: The Question of Survival (1963, essays)
Form and Substance (1963, essays)
New Fashioned Christmas (1968, essays, posthumous)
America and the Future: An Essay (1970, essay, posthumous)

Wrote plays:
The Discovery (1924)
The World of Light (1931)
The Gioconda Smile (1948)
The Ambassador of Captripedia (1965, posthumous )
Christmas Sketch (1972, posthumous)

Source: Aldous Huxley – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: Aldous Huxley – Author, Screenwriter, Writer – Biography.com

Source: Aldous Huxley

come find me, i’m @