A fine art, film, history and literature site oriented to, but not exclusively for, the gay community. Please be aware that there is mature content on this blog. Information on images and links to sources will be provided if known. Enjoy your visit and please subscribe.
Photographer Unknown, (Fifty-Five Degrees East)
“It was a pity that there was no radar to guide one across the trackless seas of life. Every man had to find his own way, steered by some secret compass of the soul. And sometimes, late or early, the compass lost its power and spun aimlessly on its bearings.
―
Photographer Unknown, The Trailer in the Pines
“There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. In a way, it would hardly matter.”
―
A Year: Day to Day Men: 16th of July
Summer Heat
July 16, 1911 was the birthdate of actress, dancer and singer Ginger Rogers.
Ginger Rogers had two films in the 1933 that have now become classics. The public was enamored by her in the song and dance “Gold Diggers of 1933”, She did not have top billing but the public remembered her beauty and voice. One song she popularized in the film was the now famous “We’re in the Money”. Rogers played the character of Ann Lowell in “42nd Street”, a musical film with big stage choreography by Busby Berkeley. The film became one of the most profitable ones of the year and received two Academy Award nominations.
Ginger Roger’s real stardom occurred when she was teamed up with actor and dancer Fred Astaire becoming one of the best cinematic couples ever to hit the silver screen. They first appeared in the 1933 “Flying Down to Rio”, a film with marvelous dance numbers, including a breathtaking dance number on the exterior of a formation of airplanes flying over the audience.
Rogers and Astaire did two films in 1935. The first was “Roberta”, an RKO production costarring Irene Dunne and Randolph Scott. The second film of that year was probably the best remembered of her films, “Top Hat”, a screwball musical comedy with a music score by Irving Berlin and the famous dance scene with Rogers wearing a white ostrich-feather dress.
Ginger Rogers made several dramatic pictures; but it was the 1940 “Kitty Foyle” that won her an Academy Award for portrayal in the title role of Kitty Foyle, a working girl facing life-changing decisions. Rogers followed this film with a comedy in 1941 “Tom, Dick, and Harry”. playing a woman who has to decide which of three men she wants to marry. Through the rest of the 1940s and early 1950s she continued to make movies but none of them near the caliber of those before World War II.
After “Oh Men, Oh Women” with David Niven in 1957, Ginger Rogers didn’t appear on the silver screen for seven years. In 1965, she had appeared for the last time in the film “Harlow”, a Paramount production about the life of Jean Harlow. Afterward, she appeared on Broadway and other stage plays traveling in Europe, the U.S. and Canada. After 1984, she retired and wrote an autobiography in 1991 entitled, “Ginger, My Story” recounting her more than sixty films including those with Fred Astaire. On April 25, 1995, Ginger Rogers died of natural causes in Rancho Mirage, California. She was 83.
Photographers Unknown, A Dose of Daydreams for Your Workweek
“Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that’s not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream. And daydreams return me to my original sense of things and I luxuriate in these fervid primary visions until I am entirely my unalloyed self again.”
– Pond
Augustin Pajou, “Mercury of the Trade”, 1780, Marble, 196 x 85 x 82 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris
Segundo De Chomon, “La Grenouille (The Frog)”, 1908, Pathé Films
“La Grenouille” is a short early silent film that was released in France in 1908. It was created and directed by Segundo De Chomon. The story follows a magical frog and a young woman whom upon climbing unto a fountain rock initiates a series of spectacles. It was a rather unusual film for the era; it employed film illusion techniques used only by a few directors at that time of early filmmaking .
Segundo Víctor Aurelio Chomón y Ruiz was born on October,17 in 1871, He was a pioneering Spanish film director who produced many short films in France while working for Pathé Frères. De Chamon has been compared to Georges Méliès, due to his frequent camera tricks and optical illusions.
The soundtrack is contemporary, not the original score.
The Photograpy of Rui Palha
Rui Palha is a street photographer born in April 1953 in Portugal. He is now living and working in Lisbon. Photography was his hobby since the age of fourteen; now since 2001 he has devoted almost all his time to street photography.
In 1992, Palha won a sivler medal in the Salão Nacional de Arte Fotográfica, He won a gold medal in the black and white category at the 4º Salão Internacional CAF Internet SICAFI in 2003.
“Photography is a very important part of my space…it is to discover, it is to capture giving flow to what the heart feels and sees in a certain moment, it is being in the street, experiencing, understanding, learning and, essentially, practicing the freedom of being, of living, of thinking.” – Rui Palha
Diego Rivera, “The Maize Festival”, 1923-1924, Fresco Mural, Secretariat of Public Education Main Headquarters, Mexico City, Mexico.
The Maize Festiaval mural was painted on the south wall of the Ministry of Public Education in Mexico City. It was part of a series of paintings done between 1923 and 1928 by Diego Rivera in his first major large-scale mural project.
The themes center around workers, and the glorification of all things Mexican, especially the Mexican Revolution. Rivera named the two courtyards “Labor Courtyard” and the other the “Fiesta Courtyard” based on the themes he painted in each. Because he was affiliated with the Communist Party at the time, Rivera painted small hammers and sickles next to his signature on the panels in this building.
Reblogged with thanks to https://artist-rivera.tumblr.com
A Year: Day to Day Men: 15th of July
Sunflowers in Blue Vase
On July 15, 1799, French Captain Pierre-Francois Bouchard finds the Rosetta Stone.
The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite stele, inscribed with three versions of a decree issued at Memphis, Egypt in 196 BC on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian using the Hieroglyphic script and the Demotic script, respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek. As the decree had only minor differences between the three versions, the Rosetta Stone proved to be the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a larger stele; no additional fragments were found in later searches. Owing to its damaged state, none of the three texts is absolutely complete. This fragment of the stele is 3 feet 8 inches high at its highest point, 2 feet 6 inches wide and 11 inches thick. It weighs approximately 1,680 pounds. The front surface is polished smooth with the incised text; the sides are smooth; and the back is only roughly worked as this would not have been visible when erected.
The stone, carved in black granodiorite, similar to granite, is believed to have been originally in a temple, possibly at nearby Sais. It was moved during the medieval period, and was eventually used as building material in the construction of Fort Julien near the town of Rashid in the Nile Delta. During the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt, Pierre-Francois Bouchard discovered the stone and was immediately convinced of its importance. It was the first Ancient Egyptian bilingual text recovered in modern times; it aroused widespread interest with its potential to decipher previously untranslated hieroglyphic language.
Study of the decree was already under way when the first full translation of the Greek text appeared in 1803. It took another 20 years, however, before the transliteration of the Egyptian scripts was announced by Jean-Francois Champollion in Paris in 1822. It took longer still before scholars were able to read the Ancient Egyptian inscriptions and literature confidently.
The major advances in the decoding of the Rosetta Stone were: The recognition in 1799 that the stone offered three versions of the same text; It became known in 1802 that the demotic text used phonetic characters to spell foreign names; Thomas Young recognized in 1814 that the hieroglyphic text did so as well, and had pervasive similarities to the demotic text; Champollion saw in his 1822-1824 studies that. in addition to being used for foreign names, the phonetic characters were also used to spell native Egyptian words.
Parva Scaena (Brief Scenes): Set Four
“Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.”
― C.S.Lewis, Till We Have Faces
Diego Rivera, “The Sugar Mill”, Fresco, 1923, Secretariat of Public Education Main Headquarters, Mexico City, Mexico.
Reblogged with thanks to https://milkyger.tumblr.com
Robert Waddingham, Photograph from the Series “Mass Exorcisms in Ethiopa”
Born in the UK in 1978, Robert Waddingham is a self-taught photographer, based in Blackheath, London. His work focusses on different cultures worldwide and has been published by Lenswork Magazine and the Guardian. He has travelled widely in Africa, Asia and Central America.
Robert first visited Ethiopia in 2003 and has returned on many occasions since. He has travelled throughout the country, and loves getting off the beaten track to explore parts little visited by tourists. His photographs focus on the people and their varied cultures. This image was taken in Ethiopia’s Great Rift Valley at a church near Arba Minch where he captured stunning imagery of spiritual cleansing.
Photographer Unknown, “Ensoji Temple in Asakusa”
William Blake, “The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan, in Whose Wreathings Are Infolded the Nations of the Earth”, 1805-1809, Tempera on Canvas, 30 x 24 Inches, Tate Museum, London
William Blake occupies a unique position in art history in that he was both a major artist and a major poet. Often the two went hand-in-hand, his art illustrating his poetry, or if not his, the poetry of others. The subject is not drawn from any literary source, but from contemporary history.
The spiritual form of Nelson guiding Leviathan was first shown in Blake’s solo exhibition of 1809, held at his brother’s house in London’s Soho. Though the reviews were mostly negative, some of the paintings did sell, including this portrait of Admiral Nelson. Instead of a lifelike portrait, Blake painted Nelson’s “Spiritual” likeness.
Admiral Nelson is in the centre of a graphic explosion of colour, creating a corona of light around him. He is standing on top of the Biblical sea creature, Leviathan, whose body encircles him; he controls the beast with a bridle, attached to its neck, which he holds loosely in his left hand.
Trapped in, crushed under, or in one case, half-consumed within Leviathan’s coiled body, ten figures are arranged around the figure of Nelson. These represent the European nations defeated by the British during the Napoleonic Wars.
