Month: October 2018

Madame Blanchard

Artist Unknown, “Mort de Madame Blanchard”, 1819, Newsprint Illustration

While not the first female hot air balloonist, Madame Blanchard was the most well-known: King Louis XVIII, after seeing her performance, named her the “Official Aeronaut of the Restoration”. She was the first female to pilot her own hot air balloon, and the first to make ballooning her career.

Unfortunately, several years after her husband, also a balloonist,  died in a ballooning accident, Madame Blanchard was also killed. During a demonstration for a large crowd in Tivoli Gardens, she lit several fireworks, which ignited the gasses within her craft, causing her to fall to the ground and sustain fatal injuries.

Calendar: October 12

A Year: Day to Day Men: 12th of October

Ole! Ole!

October 12, 1932 marks the birthdate of comedian an civil rights activist Dick Gregory.

Born in Saint Louis, Missouri, Richard Claxton Gregory, while at Summer High School, earned a track scholarship to Southern Illinois University, where he set records as a half-miler and miler. In 1954 his education was interrupted for two years when he was drafted into the United States Army, It was in the army that Gregory got his start in comedy, entering and winning several talent shows.

Dick Gregory, after his military discharge in 1956, moved to Chicago with the hope of becoming a professional comedian. He opened at the Apex Club nightclub in 1958; however, the club failed. The next year Gregory landed a job as Master of Ceremonies at the Roberts Show Club, becoming one of the first black comedians to gain widespread acclaim while performing for white audiences. In 1961 he was spotted by Hugh Hefner, who hired Gregory to work at the Chicago Playboy Club.

Early in his career, Dick Gregory was offered an engagement on the Tonight Show Starring Jack Parr. Parr’s show was well known for helping entertainers achieve their goals in their careers. Dick Gregory declined several invitations to perform on the show, until producers agreed to allow him to stay after his performance to sit and do an interview with Parr on the air. This was the first time in the show’s history that black comedians were to do that, spurring conversations across America.

Dick Gregory became part of a new generation of black comedians In America that included Nipsey Russell, Bill Cosby and Godfrey Cambridge, all of whom broke with the traditional black minstrel characters. Gregory’s no-hold-barred comedy sets, mocking bigotry and racism created controversy in some circles. In one instance, he was barred from performing at the University of Tennessee until students sued and won the case in court. This led to the university adopting and open-speaker system, and Gregory performed there in April of 1970.

Dick Gregory was at the forefront of political activism in the 1960s, protesting racial injustice, social inequalities, and the Vietnam War. He was arrested multiple times and went on many hunger strikes. Gregory later became a speaker and an author, primarily promoting spirituality and healthy living. A week prior to his death, Dick Gregory was hospitalized in Washington DC with a bacterial infection. He died at the hospital of heart failure on August 19,2017 at the age of 84.

Daniel Mendelsohn: “There is Only Looking and Finding”

Photographers Unknown, There is Only Looking and Finding

“I did and do believe, after all that I’ve seen and done, that if you project yourself into the mass of things, if you look for things, if you search, you will, by the very act of searching, make something that would not otherwise have happened, you will find something, even something small, something that will certainly be more than if you hadn’t gone looking in the first place, if you hadn’t asked our grandfather anything at all…There are no miracles, no magical coincidences. There is only looking and finally seeing, what was always there.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

Jia Peng Fang

Jia Peng Fang, “Night of Beijing” From the Album “Rainbow”,2000

Jia Peng Fang specializes in the erhu, a Chinese stringed instrument that resembles the range and sounds of the human voice. He was born in the Helong Jiang Province of China, and got his first erhu at the age of eight in 1965. When he was sixteen, he was helped to ravel to Beijing to study with professional erhu players.

In 1997, Jia Peng Fang’s brilliant co-performance with the orchestra at Carnegie Hall in New York solidified his position in the world of music. Also in June of 1998, he made his debut album “River” with the Pacific Moon label, which blended Western music with the Chinese folk instrument. The high quality of the work won him a high acclaim in Japan and abroad, as well as proving to be a commercial success.

In 1999, the concept of blending western with Chinese folk music was further developed in the Pacific Moon album “Rainbow.” It proved to be even more successful than the first album, both in Japan and abroad. His third album from Pacific Moon, “Faraway…”, was released in January of 2001.

A Towel and a Nietzsche Quote

Two Matching Towel Sets and a Quote from Nietzsche

“Oh, these men of former times knew how to dream and did not find it necessary to go to sleep first. And we men of today still master this art all too well, despite all of our good will toward the day and staying awake. It is quite enough to love, to hate, to desire, simply to feel–and right away the spirit and power of the dream overcome us, and with our eyes open, coldly contemptuous of all danger, we climb up on the most hazardous paths to scale the roofs and spires of fantasy–without any sense of dizziness, as if we had been born to climb, we somnambulists of the day! We artists! We ignore what is natural. We are moonstruck and God-struck. We wander, still as death, unwearied, on heights that we do not see as heights but as plains, as our safety.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Paul Kolnik’s Photo of Chase Finlay

Paul Kolnik, “Chase Finlay as Apollo”, 2011, The George Balanchine Trust Studio

Dancer Chase Finlay played the title role in Balanchine’s 1928 ballet “Apollo”.   It was the third performance at the New York City Ballet on the night of May 5th of 2011, proceded by the Balanchine-Stravinsky 1960 “Monumentum Pro Gesualdo”  and the 1963 “Movements for Piano and Orchestra”.

Iain Faulkner

Iain Faulkner, “Morning Coffee”, 2003, Oil on Canvas

Iain Faulkner was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1973 where he was raised and educated. As a child Faulkner was encouraged and guided by his father, an electrical engineer, for whom drawing was both job and pastime. Faulkner went on to Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 1996 with a BA (Honours) Degree in Fine Art. Faulkner is, however, largely self-taught and from the start of his professional career chose to follow the difficult and demanding path of figurative painting.

Source: allotherthingsintheworld

Calendar: October 11

A Year: Day to Day Men: 11th of October

Two Silver Rings

October 11, 1634 marks the night of the Burchardi Flood that struck the North Sea coast of North Frisia and Dithmarschen, now modern day Germany.

The Buchardi flood hit the northern-most coast of Germany during a weak economic time. A plague epidemic had spread across the land in 1603. Fighting had occurred between the inhabitants and the troops of Frederick III during the Thirty Years’ War, leading to the inhabitants defeat in 1629. This fighting caused great damage to the coastal protections against heavy weather.

Several floods had hit the coastline before the Burchadi incident. Large floating pieces of winter ice had already caused major damage to the dikes by 1625. The losses from the war and lack of ready resources led to insufficient maintenance of the dikes; even in the summer the dikes were failing.

The weather had been calm for weeks before the flood; however a strong storm began on the evening of October 11, 1634, heading ashore from the east. The winds turned southwest during the evening, developing into a extratropical cyclone from the northeast. The sea rose to the top of the dikes. Rain washed away soil from under houses, destroying them and washing away its occupants. Ships were left stranded on roadways.

The first dike broke in the Stintebull Parish on Strand Island at ten o’clock in the evening. By two o’clock in the morning, the water had reached its peak level, about thirteen feet above mean high tide levels. During the night the dikes broke at several hundred locations along the North Sea coastline of Schleswig-Holstein. Estimations of fatalities range from 8,000 to 15,000 people; however, there was an undetermined number of foreign workers in the area who could not be accounted for after the flood.

On Strand Island alone, at least 6,000 people lost their lives, two-thirds of the population of the island. Fifty thousand livestock were lost; the water destroyed 1,300 houses and 30 of the island’s mills. All twenty-one of the churches were heavily damaged, with seventeen completely destroyed. The entire new harvest was destroyed; and the island of Strand was torn apart into smaller islands, with two major portions of the island’s previous land submerged.

Large parts of the coastal land were flooded for weeks and months. Due to tidal currents, the breaches in the dikes increased and several dikes completely washed into the sea. Saline sea water submerged the fields, rendering them useless for agriculture. According to the Nordstrand dike law, any tenant who could not secure the land against the sea with dikes forfeited their right of owning land. Thus many of the surviving and now destitute farmers lost the right to their homes.

Gaston Velle, “La Metamorphose du Papillon”: Film History Series

Gaston Velle, “Métamorphoses du Papillon (The Butterfly’s Metamorphosis)”, 1904,  Silent Hand-Colored Nitrate Film, Running Time Two Minutes, Pathé Frères, Collection of the AMCI 

Born in Rome, Italy in 1868, Gaston Velle was a French silent film director and a pioneer in the field of special effects. He was a prominent figure in both French and Italian cinema in the early twentieth-century.

Gaston Velle was the son of Hungarian entertainer Joseph ‘Rrofessor’ Velle, a magician who traveled throughout Europe preforming for the nobility. He began his career as a traveling magician; however when the opportunity presented itself, he entered the developing world of cinematography where he employed his illusionist skills. Velle worked under the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis Jean, who were using the newly patented Cinematograph system to make short silent films. Velle nest served as the head of production for the Italian studio Società Italiana Cines, both a producer and distributor of films.

Velle created more than eighty films between 1903 and 1911. He is best known for those works produced at Pathé Frères, a business founded by the four Pathé brothers in 1896. By the early 1900s, this company developed into the world’s largest film equipment and production company, as well as, a major producer of phonographs and their cylinder and disc records. Velle produced for Pathè short films designed to feature special effects; these were intended to rival those of film director Georges Méliès, France’s leading pioneer of special effects films. 

One of Gaston Velle’s earliest directorial works was the 1904 short silent crime film “Les Devaliseurs Nocturnes (Night Burglars)”. Some of Velle’s films pioneered techniques which have been used by others over the years. His 1906 “Les Invisibles” is the first known invisible man film. Valle also created some of the first Féerie films known for their fantasy plots, visual effects and lavish scenery. These films used a fairy-tale design to combine theater with dance, mime and acrobatics.

Velle collaborated with other directors on film projects, including Spanish director Segundo de Chomón, who previously did the cinematography on Velle’s “Night Burglars”, and French director Ferdinand Zecca, who as a Pathé director set up the Pathé pavilion at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle. Among these collaborative efforts were such silent film classics as the 1905 “Réve à la Luna (The Moon Lover)”, the 1906 “L’ecrin du Rajah (The Rajah’s Casket)” and the 1905 “La Poule aux Oeufs d’Or (The Hen Who Laid the Golden Egg)”. Director Martin Scorsese inserted “La Poule aux Oeufs d’Or”  into his 1997 Academy Award nominated film “Kundun”. 

Gaston Velle retired from the film industry in 1913. There is little information available about the last decades of his life. He still remained part of a prominent cinematic family as his son Maurice Velle, a cinematographer, married and had a family with screenwriter Mary Murillo. Gaston Velle died in Paris on the eighth of January in 1953 at the age of eighty-five. 

Gaston Velle’s 1904 “Métamorphoses du Papillon (The Butterfly’s Metamorphosis)” is a hand-colored, silent nitrate print film with a running time of less than two minutes. The film follows a caterpillar’s change into a butterfly which later morphs into a female dancer. It is currently housed in the collection of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, ACMI, at Federation Square in Melbourne. Additional information, as to cinematographer and the actress portraying the dancer, is not known. The full length film can be seen on several online venues including YouTube.  

Second Insert Image: Gaston Velle, “Voyage Autour d’Une Étoile (Voyage Around a Star)”, 1906, Short Silent Film, Pathé Frères

Bottom Insert Image: Gaston Velle, “La Poule aux Oeufs d’Or”, 1905, Short Silent Film, Pathé Frères