SOHO. HOW TO ENJOY ARTS, TRADES & ENTERTAINMENT

Today, The Winsors and The Grandma have visited Soho, one of the most popular neighbourhoods in London's West End. The family has had breakfast with Rosalía, who is working here on the arrangements of her new musical project, and they have talked about cultural fusion and Nubian community.

Before this wonderful and exciting meeting, the family has studied some English grammar with Adverbs of Manner and Relative Pronouns.

More information: Adverbs of Manner

More information: Relative Pronouns

Download Jobs & Degrees

More information: Ancient Nubia, Enjoy Travelling across the Nile

Soho is an area of the City of Westminster in the West End of London. Originally a fashionable district for the aristocracy, it has been one of the main entertainment districts in the capital since the 19th century.

The area was developed from farmland by Henry VIII in 1536, when it became a royal park. It became a parish in its own right in the late 17th century, when buildings started to be developed for the upper class, including the laying out of Soho Square in the 1680s.  

St Anne's Church was established during the late 17th century, and remains a significant local landmark; other churches are the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory and St Patrick's Church in Soho Square. The aristocracy had mostly moved away by the mid-19th century, when Soho was particularly badly hit by an outbreak of cholera in 1854.

For much of the 20th century Soho had a reputation as a base for the sex industry in addition to its night life and its location for the headquarters of leading film companies. Since the 1980s, the area has undergone considerable gentrification. It is now predominantly a fashionable district of upmarket restaurants and media offices, with only a small remnant of sex industry venues. London's most prominent gay village is centred on Old Compton Street in Soho.

Soho's reputation as a major entertainment district of London stems from theatres such as the Windmill Theatre on Great Windmill Street and the Raymond Revuebar owned by entrepreneur Paul Raymond, and music clubs such as the 2i's Coffee Bar and the Marquee Club. Trident Studios was based in Soho, and the nearby Denmark Street has hosted numerous music publishing houses and instrument shops from the 20th century onwards.

The independent British film industry is centred around Soho, including the British headquarters of Twentieth Century Fox and the British Board of Film Classification offices. The area has been popular for restaurants since the 19th century, including the long-standing Kettner's which was visited by numerous celebrities. Near to Soho is London's Chinatown, centred on Gerrard Street and containing several restaurants and shops.

The name Soho first appears in the 17th century. The name is derived from a former hunting cry. James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth, used soho as a rallying call for his men at the Battle of Sedgemoor on 6 July 1685, half a century after the name was first used for this area of London.

Soho has never been an administrative unit with formally defined boundaries; it is about 2.6 km2 in area, and is usually considered to be bounded by Shaftesbury Avenue to the south, Oxford Street to the north, Regent Street to the west, and Charing Cross Road to the east. Apart from Oxford Street, all of these roads are 19th-century metropolitan improvements. The area to the west is known as Mayfair, to the north Fitzrovia, to the east St Giles and Covent Garden, and to the south St James's. Soho is part of the West End electoral ward which elects three councillors to Westminster City Council.

The nearest London Underground stations are Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus, Tottenham Court Road, Leicester Square and Covent Garden.

In fiction, Robert Louis Stevenson had Dr. Henry Jekyll set up a home for Edward Hyde in Soho in his novel, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Charles Dickens referred to Soho in several of his works; in A Tale of Two Cities, Lucie Manette and her father Dr. Alexandre Manette live on Soho Square, while Golden Square is mentioned in Nicholas Nickleby, in which Ralph Nickleby has a house on the square, and the George II statue in the centre is described as mournful. Joseph Conrad used Soho as the home for The Secret Agent, a French immigrant who ran a pornography shop. Dan Kavanagh (Julian Barnes)'s 1980 novel Duffy is set in Soho.

More information: Soho London

 Soho has got to be at its centre.
It's got such a history for rock, pop, poetry, jazz, writers,
all those things, and I think it should be valued as such,
and protected as this centre for bohemia.

Marc Almond

THE FOSTERS, THE PATRONS OF THE NEW MOCO MUSEUM

Today, The Fosters and The Grandma have received wonderful news from Marta Foster, who is following her dream as a prospector.

The Fosters are the patrons of the new Moco Museum in London, and they have planned how this amazing cultural place is going to be.

Before, the family has practised some English grammar with the Relative Pronouns (Who/Which/That), and have explained their future plans to Marta.

Finally, they have been reading Oscar Wilde's The Ghost of Canterville.

More information: Relative Pronouns

The Moco Museum (Modern Contemporary Museum) is an independent museum located in Amsterdam and Barcelona, dedicated to exhibiting modern and contemporary art. 

The museum was founded with the mission of attracting broader and younger audiences, and making art accessible to the public.

Moco Museum in Amsterdam is situated on Museumplein, in the historic Villa Alsberg, a townhouse designed in 1904 by Eduard Cuypers the nephew of Pierre Cuypers, designer of Amsterdam Central Station and the Rijksmuseum. The townhouse was one of the first privately owned residencies on Museumplein and remained so until 1939. Moco Museum opened its doors in April 2016.

Moco Museum in El Born, Barcelona is in the historic Palau Cervelló-Giudice, formerly the private residence of the noble Cervelló family until the 18th century. The building incorporates parts of a previous construction from the 15th century, evidenced by the interior courtyard, arched staircase with columns, capitals, and Renaissance-type mouldings. Furthermore, Palau Cervelló displays an impressive Gothic facade entryway.

Plans to open a new outlet in London, UK was approved on 3 October 2023.

More information: MOCO Museum

Contemporary art is the art of today, produced in the second half of the 20th century or in the 21st century. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse, and technologically advancing world. Their art is a dynamic combination of materials, methods, concepts, and subjects that continue the challenging of boundaries that was already well underway in the 20th century.

Diverse and eclectic, contemporary art as a whole is distinguished by the very lack of a uniform, organising principle, ideology, or -ism. Contemporary art is part of a cultural dialogue that concerns larger contextual frameworks such as personal and cultural identity, family, community, and nationality.

In vernacular English, modern and contemporary are synonyms, resulting in some conflation and confusion of the terms modern art and contemporary art by non-specialists.

Some define contemporary art as art produced within our lifetime, recognising that lifetimes and life spans vary. However, there is a recognition that this generic definition is subject to specialized limitations.

The classification of contemporary art as a special type of art, rather than a general adjectival phrase, goes back to the beginnings of Modernism in the English-speaking world. In London, the Contemporary Art Society was founded in 1910 by the critic Roger Fry and others, as a private society for buying works of art to place in public museums.

A number of other institutions using the term were founded in the 1930s, such as in 1938 the Contemporary Art Society of Adelaide, Australia, and an increasing number after 1945. Many, like the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston changed their names from ones using Modern art in this period, as Modernism became defined as a historical art movement, and much modern art ceased to be contemporary.

The definition of what is contemporary is naturally always on the move, anchored in the present with a start date that moves forward, and the works the Contemporary Art Society bought in 1910 could no longer be described as contemporary.

Contemporary artwork is characterised by diversity: diversity of material, of form, of subject matter, and even time periods. It is distinguished by the very lack of a uniform organizing principle, ideology, or - ism that is seen in many other art periods and movements.

The focus of Modernism is self-referential. Impressionism looks at our perception of a moment through light and color, as opposed to the attempt to reflect stark reality in Realism. Contemporary art, on the other hand, does not have one, single objective or point of view, so it can be contradictory and open-ended.

There are nonetheless several common themes that have appeared in contemporary works, such as identity politics, the body, globalization and migration, technology, contemporary society and culture, time and memory, and institutional and political critique.

More information: The Collector

 I used to encourage everyone I knew to make art;
I don’t do that so much anymore.

Bansky

'WE SHALL OVERCOME', THE SONG THAT CRIES RIGHTS

Today, The Grangers & The Grandma have been talking about one of the most popular songs of the American civil rights movement, We shall overcome.

Before, they have been preparing their Cambridge Exam. They have studied Relative Pronouns and Shall.

More information: Relative Pronouns

More information: Shall

We Shall Overcome is a gospel song which became a protest song and a key anthem of the American civil rights movement. 

The song is most commonly attributed as being lyrically descended from I'll Overcome Some Day, a hymn by Charles Albert Tindley that was first published in 1901.

The modern version of the song was first said to have been sung by tobacco workers led by Lucille Simmons during the 1945–1946 Charleston Cigar Factory strike in Charleston, South Carolina. 

In 1947, the song was published under the title We Will Overcome in an edition of the People's Songs Bulletin (a publication of People's Songs, an organization of which Pete Seeger was the director), as a contribution of and with an introduction by Zilphia Horton, then-music director of the Highlander Folk School of Monteagle, Tennessee (an adult education school that trained union organizers). Horton said she had learned the song from Simmons, and she considered it to be her favorite song. According to Horton, one of the stanzas of the original hymn was 'we will overcome'. ... It sort of stops them cold silent.

She taught it to many others, including Pete Seeger, who included it in his repertoire, as did many other activist singers, such as Frank Hamilton and Joe Glazer, who recorded it in 1950.

The song became associated with the civil rights movement from 1959, when Guy Carawan stepped in with his and Seeger's version as song leader at Highlander, which was then focused on nonviolent civil rights activism. 

It quickly became the movement's unofficial anthem. Seeger and other famous folksingers in the early 1960s, such as Joan Baez, sang the song at rallies, folk festivals, and concerts in the North and helped make it widely known. Since its rise to prominence, the song, and songs based on it, have been used in a variety of protests worldwide.

The U.S. copyright of the People's Songs Bulletin issue which contained We Will Overcome expired in 1976, but The Richmond Organization asserted a copyright on the We Shall Overcome lyrics, registered in 1960.

In 2017, in response to a lawsuit against TRO over allegations of false copyright claims, a U.S. judge issued an opinion that the registered work was insufficiently different from the We Will Overcome lyrics that had fallen into the public domain because of non-renewal. 

In January 2018, the company agreed to a settlement under which it would no longer assert any copyright claims over the song.

Most people know that Pride Month is in June, however, many don't realize that's because on June 28, 1969, the catalyst for the LGBT movement occurred in riot form at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. The Stonewall Inn was a well-known, mafia-run gay night club which hosted an array of illegal activities from an absent liquor license and prostitution to dealing drugs. While the bar owners were normally tipped off about police raids, on the night of the 1969 riot, they weren’t told anything would be happening. The police barricaded the 200+ patrons and employees in the bar and began to arrest all the transvestites they could find.

As the cops were arresting patrons, to their surprise, bystanders began to push back against the heavy police presence in the form of verbal taunts and thrown bottles. At that point, raids on gay bars were becoming routine and, for the LGBT community, the raid on the Stonewall Inn was the last straw. As police were dragging people into their paddy wagon, the crowd began to boil and violence soon erupted. Bricks and bottles were being thrown at the cops as more people from around the neighborhood began to join in on the protest, forcing the police into a rare retreat. While some of the crowd turned violent, many others committed to nonviolence in the form of jokes, kick-lines and songs.

As an unstable riot occurred all around, the protest hymn We Shall Overcome echoed through the streets long into the night. For days following the Stonewall riot, more protests, mostly nonviolent, began to pop up all around the city. A gay community began to form and within six months two gay activist organizations were established in New York.

The movement was given legs, and by June 28 of the following year, the first gay pride marches took place in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco to commemorate the anniversary of the riots.  

We Shall Overcome was a vital tool used to demonstrate nonviolence throughout each protest.

More information: The Kennedy Center

We shall all be free, we shall all be free,
We shall all be free someday.
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We shall overcome someday.

Charles Albert Tindley

JOAQUÍN S. LAVADO "QUINO", MAFALDA'S FATHER DIES

Today, The Stones have continued studying their English classes. They have reviewed Relative Pronouns, some State Verbs and Let's go expressions.

They continue in Manchester working in their new project about Brauny's home and they have received some sad news about Quino, the Argentine cartoonist known by his comic strip Mafalda. He has passed away and The Stones want to pay homage to him talking about him and his cartoons.

Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón, better known by his pen name Quino (17 July 1932-30 September 2020), was an Argentine cartoonist. His comic strip Mafalda (which ran from 1964 to 1973) is popular in many parts of the Americas and Europe and has been praised for its use of social satire as a commentary on real-life issues.

Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón was born in Mendoza, Argentina, on 17 July 1932 to emigrant Andalusian parents from Fuengirola, Málaga. Because of their limited social circle, he spoke with an Andalusian accent until the age of six. He retained an affection for his parents' Spanish culture and flamenco into later life. He obtained Spanish citizenship in 1990 and remained a dual citizen of Spain and Argentina.

He was called Quino since childhood, to distinguish him from his uncle, the illustrator Joaquín, who helped to awaken his vocation of cartooning at an early age.

In 1945, after the death of his mother, he enrolled and started his studies at Escuela de Bellas Artes de Mendoza. Shortly after, his father died in 1948 when Quino was 16 years old. A year later he abandoned his studies, with the intent to become a cartoonist. Soon he would sell his first illustration, an advertisement for a fabric store.

More information: Relative Pronouns & State Verbs

His first humor page was published in the weekly magazine, Esto Es, which led to the publication of other works in many other magazines: Leoplán, TV Guía, Vea y Lea, Damas y Damitas, Usted, Panorama, Adán, Atlántida, Che, the daily Democracia.

In 1954, his cartoons became regulars in Rico Tipo, Tía Vicenta, and Dr. Merengue.

His first compilation book, Mundo Quino, was published in 1963. At the same time he was developing pages for an advertising campaign for Mansfield, an electrical household appliance company, for which he created the character of Mafalda, basing her name on the same sounds as in the Mansfield brand name.

The advertising campaign never was executed, which led to the publication of Mafalda's first story in Leoplán. Subsequently, it appeared regularly in the weekly magazine Primera Plana, since the director of the magazine was a friend of Quino.

Between 1965 and 1967 it was published in the newspaper El Mundo; soon after the first compilation book was released, it began to be published in Italy, Spain where, on account of Franco-era censorship, it was tagged as for adults only, Portugal, and many other countries.

Mafalda was created as an irreverent and non-conformist six-year-old who hated fascism, militarism and soup, and loved The Beatles.

The character attempted to reflect the world of adults as seen through the eyes of a smart child. Her friends reflected different personalities like the insecure but studious Felipe, the gossip-girl Susanita, the sturdy but dim-witted Manolito, the naive Miguelito, the rebel and witty Libertad and Mafalda's baby brother Guille. The character and the series has been compared to Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts comic series.

Quino abandoned the story of Mafalda on 25 June 1973, claiming that he wanted to avoid repeating himself; in later years, however, he said that the changing political landscape in Latin America had also influenced his decision: If I had continued drawing her, they would have shot me.

Following the 1976 coup d'état in Argentina, he moved to Milan, Italy, where he continued to create humor pages. Although he never returned to Mafalda and her friends in a comic strip format, he did use the character at certain specific moment: to illustrate the Declaration of the Rights of the Child for UNICEF. Argentine producer Daniel Mallo converted 260 Mafalda strips into a TV show in 1965.

In 2008, at the initiative of the Museo del Dibujo y la Ilustración, the company Subterráneos de Buenos Aires created a mural of Mafalda in the Perú metro station at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires.

In 2009, Quino participated with an original Mafalda work, created for El Mundo, in the Bicentennial: 200 years of Graphic Humor that the Museo del Dibujo y la Ilustración held at the Eduardo Sívori Museum of Buenos Aires.

More information: Quino

While Mafalda continued to be used for human rights campaigns in Argentina and abroad, Quino dedicated himself to writing other editorial-style comics. The comics were published in Argentina and abroad. Since 1982, the Argentine newspaper Clarín has published his cartoons weekly.

After a visit with Cuban cartoon director Juan Padrón, the two produced a series of cartoons. Between 1986 and 1988, they made six Quinoscopio cartoons through the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos, none of which were longer than six minutes.

In addition, the pair worked on 104 short Mafalda cartoons in 1994. Quino eventually retired in 2006. While Mafalda concentrated on children and their innocent, realistic view of the world, his later comics featured ordinary people with ordinary feelings.

The humor is characteristically cynical, often poking fun at real-life situations, such as marriage, technology, authority, and food. This cynical humor is attributed as one of the reasons for his success throughout Latin America and much of the world outside Latin America.

His cartoons of aporteñado Argentine topic of the 1960s and 1970s have been edited and translated into 26 different languages apart from the original Rioplatense Spanish. Collected in numerous volumes by Argentine publisher Ediciones de la Flor, these comics are readily available.

Quino died on 30 September 2020 from a stroke, at the age of 88.

More information: Instagram @MafaldaDigital

 La vida debería ser al revés;

Se debería empezar muriendo y así ese trauma está superado;

luego te despiertas en una residencia mejorando día a día…

después te echan de la residencia porque ya estás bien,

y ¡lo primero que haces es cobrar tu pensión!

Luego en tu primer día de trabajo te dan un reloj de oro…

Trabajas 40 años hasta que seas lo bastante joven

como para disfrutar de tu retiro laboral;

entonces vas de fiesta en fiesta, bebes, practicas el sexo

y te preparas para empezar a estudiar.

Luego empiezas el colegio, jugando con tus amigos

sin ningún tipo de obligación, hasta que seas bebé.

Y te pasas los últimos nueve meses flotando tranquilo,

con calefacción central, servicio de habitaciones...

Y al final abandonas este mundo en un gran orgasmo!

 

Quino

THE JONES MEET ÉDITH PIAF, L'HYMNE À L'AMOUR

Memories of Merche Jones in Ponferrada, El Bierzo

Today, The Jones have revised some English Grammar like Future Simple, Present Simple vs. Continuous, Relative Pronouns, the Comparative and the Superlative. The family has talked about some women who were the best in their professions: Édith Piaf, the best French singer; Audrey Hepburn, the best Belgian actress and Mercè Rodoreda, the best Catalan writer.

More information: Future Simple vs. Future Continuous

Merche Jones has talked about Ponferrada and its wonderful Templar castle and The Grandma has taken profit to talk about the Templar Order and its influence in all the Mediterranean, from Malta to Aragon, from Rhodes to Jerusalem, from Catalonia to Syria, from Campania to Sicily firstly and other lands in the Atlantic like France, England or Scotland later.

More information: Present Simple vs. Present Continuous I, II & III

Templar Knights helped all the pilgrims who need protection to escape or to exile until Friday, October 13, 1307 when French Templars were simultaneously arrested by agents of King Philip, following the order of the Pope Clement, later to be tortured into admitting heresy and other sacrilegious offenses in the Order and killed. It has been a terrific story that has explained the origins of the legend of Friday, 13 as a day plenty of misfortune.

More information: Comparative vs. Superlative I & II

This afternoon, The Jones are going shopping in the best and the most luxurious Parisian shops in Avenue Montaigne before travelling to Euro Disney to spend this next weekend.

More information: Templar History & Real Mof History

In tough times, we all hope for knights in shining armor, 

or the cavalry, to show up and effect change. 

Dean Devlin

Édith Piaf (1915-1963), nee Édith Giovanna Gassion, was a French singer, songwriter, cabaret performer and film actress noted as France's national chanteuse and one of the country's widely known international stars.

Piaf's music was often autobiographical and she specialized in chanson and torch ballads about love, loss and sorrow. Her most widely known songs include La Vie en rose, Non, je ne regrette rien, Hymne à l'amour, Milord, La Foule, L'Accordéoniste and Padam, padam.

Édith Piaf

Much of Piaf's life is unknown. She was born Édith Giovanna Gassion in Belleville, Paris. Legend has it that she was born on the pavement of Rue de Belleville 72, but her birth certificate cites that she was born on 19 December 1915 at the Hôpital Tenon, a hospital located at the 20th arrondissement.

She was named Édith after the World War I British nurse Edith Cavell, who was executed for helping French soldiers escape from German captivity. Piaf –slang for sparrow– was a nickname she received 20 years later.

In 1935, Piaf was discovered in the Pigalle area of Paris by nightclub owner Louis Leplée, whose club Le Gerny's off the Champs-Élysées was frequented by the upper and lower classes alike.

More information: Biography

Piaf's career and fame gained momentum during the German occupation of France. She performed in various nightclubs and brothels, which flourished during the 1940–1945 Années Erotiques. She lived above the L'Étoile de Kléber, a famous nightclub and bordello close to the Paris Gestapo headquarters.

Piaf was deemed to have been a traitor and collaboratrice. She had to testify before a purge panel, as there were plans to ban her from appearing on radio transmissions. However, her secretary Andrée Bigard, a member of the Résistance, spoke in her favour after the Liberation. Piaf was quickly back in the singing business and then, in December 1944, she went on stage for the Allied forces together with Montand in Marseille.

Edith Piaf's Homebirth

Although she was denied a funeral Mass by Cardinal Maurice Feltin because of her lifestyle, her funeral procession drew tens of thousands of mourners onto the streets of Paris and the ceremony at the cemetery was attended by more than 100,000 fans.  

Charles Aznavour recalled that Piaf's funeral procession was the only time since the end of World War II that he saw Parisian traffic come to a complete stop.

In 1973 the Association of the Friends of Édith Piaf was formed followed by the inauguration of the Place Édith Piaf in Belleville in 1981. Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Georgievna Karachkina named a small planet, 3772 Piaf, in her honor.

In Paris, a two-room museum is dedicated to her, the Musée Édith Piaf. On 10 October 2013, fifty years after her death, the Roman Catholic Church gave her a memorial Mass in the St. Jean-Baptiste Church in Belleville the parish into which she was born.

More information: History Today

Singing is a way of escaping. It's another world. 

I'm no longer on earth. 

Édith Piaf

Mercè Rodoreda i Gurguí (1908-1983) was a Catalan novelist, who wrote in Catalan. She is considered by many to be the most important Catalan novelist of the postwar period. Her novel La plaça del diamant, translated as The Time of the Doves (1962) has become the most acclaimed Catalan novel of all time and has been translated into over 30 languages.

She was born at 340 carrer de Balmes, Barcelona, in 1908. In 1928, just 20 years old, she married her uncle Joan Gurguí, 14 years her senior, and in 1929 she had her only child, Jordi. 

Grandma's memories with Mercè Rodoreda

She began her writing career with short stories in magazines, as an escape from her unhappy marriage. 

She then wrote psychological novels, including Aloma which won the Crexells Prize, but even with the success this novel enjoyed, Rodoreda decided to remake and republish it some years later since she was not fully satisfied with this period of her life and her works at that time.

At the start of the Spanish Civil War, she worked for the Generalitat de Catalunya, the autonomous Government of Catalonia. She was exiled in France and later Switzerland, where in 1957 she broke her silence with the publication of her book Twenty-Two short stories, which earned her the Víctor Català Prize.

 More information: Fundació Mercè Rodoreda (IEC)

With El Carrer de les Camèlies (1966) she won several prizes. In the 1970s, she returned to Romanyà de la Selva in Catalonia and finished the novel Mirall trencat in 1974.

Amongst other works came Viatges i flors and Quanta, quanta guerra in 1980, which was also the year in which she won the Premi d'Honor de les Lletres Catalanes. During the last period of her lifetime, her works developed from her usual psychologic style to become more akin to symbolism in its more cryptic form.

In 1998 a literature prize was instituted in her name: the Mercè Rodoreda prize for short stories and narratives. She was made a Member of Honour of the Associació d'Escriptors en Llengua Catalana, the Association of Writers in Catalan Language. 

She died in Girona and interred in the cemetery of Romanyà de la Selva.

More information: Visat

I write because I like to write. If I did not look exaggerated 
I would say that I write to please me.

Mercè Rodoreda

THE JONES IN NOTRE-DAME: SECRETS WILL BE REVEALED

Gypsies are an amazing culture

Today, The Jones have said goodbye to Noelia Jones, the member of the family who has decided to return to Scotland. 

Before the last goodbye, the family has revised some aspects of the English Grammar like the Future Simple and the Relative Pronouns.

The Jones have read another chapter of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and they have received a surprise when MJ has appeared to talk about calendars, exams and other proposals.

 More information: Future Simple

After this interesting visit, The Grandma has explained a long story that connects two amazing cultures -Gypsy and Occitan- and one target: secrets to be revealed. She has talked about poetry, metric, music and about the capacity of guessing the future using 22 interesting cards.

An Occitan troubadour in the royal court

She has also remembered Frederic Mistral, the Occitan Nobel Prize and Victor Hugo, one of the best writers in the universal literature, the author of The Miserables and The Hunch of Notre-Dame.

Finally, The Grandma has told how important is to pay attention about the lyrics of the poems and the songs, about the real meaning hidden in them, about the great quantity of secrets that can be revealed thanks to them and about the importance of the popular culture and the oral tradition to keep cultures alive and avoid their extinction. 

More information: Relative Pronouns & Do/Make List

Oral tradition is around us: in our lullabies, in our legends, in our popular songs, in our names and surnames, in the names of our streets and squares because something lives as time as the last person who remembers it. Don't forget your past because it's the key to understand your present and to try to fight a better future.

Download English Lullabies

 

Frédéric Mistral

Frédéric Mistral (1830-1914) was an Occitan writer and lexicographer of the Occitan language. 

Mistral received the 1904 Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of the fresh originality and true inspiration of his poetic production, which faithfully reflects the natural scenery and native spirit of his people, and, in addition, his significant work as a Provençal philologist. He was a founding member of Félibrige and a member of l'Académie de Marseille.

A troubadour, in Occitan trobador, was a composer and performer of Old Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages (1100–1350). Since the word troubadour is etymologically masculine, a female troubadour is usually called a trobairitz.

The texts of troubadour songs deal mainly with themes of chivalry and courtly love. Most were metaphysical, intellectual, and formulaic. Many were humorous or vulgar satires. Works can be grouped into three styles: the trobar leu (light), trobar ric (rich), and trobar clus (closed). Likewise there were many genres, the most popular being the canso, but sirventes and tensos were especially popular in the post-classical period, in Italy and among the female troubadours, the trobairitz.

 

Read, listen to and watch everything you can. 

Explore the corners of popular culture and the arts.

Tom Freston

Victor Marie Hugo (1802 -1885) was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. Hugo is considered to be one of the greatest and best-known French writers. Outside of France, his most famous works are the novels Les Misérables, 1862, and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, 1831. In France, Hugo is known primarily for his poetry collections, such as The Contemplations and The Legend of the Ages.

Download the Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo

Víctor Hugo

Hugo was at the forefront of the romantic literary movement with his play Cromwell and drama Hernani. Many of his works have inspired music, both during his lifetime and after his death, including the musicals Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misérables. He produced more than 4,000 drawings in his lifetime, and campaigned for social causes such as the abolition of capital punishment.

Though a committed royalist when he was young, Hugo's views changed as the decades passed, and he became a passionate supporter of republicanism; his work touches upon most of the political and social issues and the artistic trends of his time. He is buried in the Panthéon in Paris. His legacy has been honoured in many ways, including his portrait being placed on French currency.

Download the Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

This afternoon, The Jones are visiting Notre-Dame de Paris. This wonderful building, meaning Our Lady of Paris, is a medieval Catholic cathedral on the Île de la Cité in the fourth arrondissement of Paris. The cathedral is widely considered to be one of the finest examples of French Gothic architecture, and it is among the largest and best-known church buildings in the Catholic Church in France, and in the world. The naturalism of its sculptures and stained glass serve to contrast it with earlier Romanesque architecture.

The Jones on the top of Notre-Dame Cathedral

Many small individually crafted statues were placed around the outside to serve as column supports and water spouts. Among these are the famous gargoyles, designed for water run-off, and chimeras. 

The statues were originally colored as was most of the exterior. The paint has worn off. The cathedral was essentially complete by 1345. 

The cathedral has a narrow climb of 387 steps at the top of several spiral staircases; along the climb it is possible to view its most famous bell and its gargoyles in close quarters, as well as having a spectacular view across Paris when reaching the top.

In the 1790s, Notre-Dame suffered desecration in the radical phase of the French Revolution when much of its religious imagery was damaged or destroyed. An extensive restoration supervised by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc began in 1845. A project of further restoration and maintenance began in 1991.

More information: French Moments

Music expresses that which cannot be said 

and on which it is impossible to be silent.

Victor Hugo

CARLA & NOELIA JONES, THE BEST TRIUMPHS IN PARIS

Carla and Noelia Jones and their triumphs

Today, The Jones have had a day full of news. This morning, Noelia Jones has communicated to her family that she has decided to live in Urquhart Castle forever and don't continue travelling with the family.  

Noelia has reached her dream and the family are the happiest people around the world knowing that she is going to stay in Loch Ness and enjoy her life in Scotland.

Carla Jones has decided to travel to Bahamas Islands to live there forever with an old native Caribbean friend who is going to be her husband in a few days. Congratulations both girls, Carla and Noelia, you deserve the best in your lives.

After this news, the family has continued with their English classes. They have revised some Social English, The Superlative and the Relative Pronouns. They have also read another chapter of Oscar Wilde's The picture of Dorian Gray and they have been choosing transports and talking about their advantages and disadvantages.

More information: The Superlative

Finally, MJ has sent some bureaucratic papers to fill them and the family has been talking about some international holdings which had humble origins and nowadays they are important enterprises around the world.

More information: Relative Pronouns

This afternoon, The Jones are visiting the Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile, one of the most famous monuments in Paris, standing at the western end of the Champs-Élysées at the center of Place Charles de Gaulle, formerly named Place de l'Étoile -the étoile or star of the juncture formed by its twelve radiating avenues.

The Jones and their transports

The Arc de Triomphe should not be confused with a smaller arch, the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, which stands west of the Louvre. 

The Arc de Triomphe honours those who fought and died for France in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, with the names of all French victories and generals inscribed on its inner and outer surfaces. Beneath its vault lies the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from World War I.

As the central cohesive element of the Axe historique, historic axis, a sequence of monuments and grand thoroughfares on a route running from the courtyard of the Louvre to the Grande Arche de la Défense, the Arc de Triomphe was designed by Jean Chalgrin in 1806, and its iconographic program pits heroically nude French youths against bearded Germanic warriors in chain mail. It set the tone for public monuments with triumphant patriotic messages.

 Download Transport Vocabulary

Inspired by the Roman Arch of Titus, the Arc de Triomphe has an overall height of 50 metres width of 45 m, and depth of 22 m, while its large vault is 29.19 m, high and 14.62 m, wide. 

The Grandma in the funeral ceremony for Victor Hugo

The smaller transverse vaults are 18.68 m high and 8.44 m wide. Three weeks after the Paris victory parade in 1919, marking the end of hostilities in World War I, Charles Godefroy flew his Nieuport biplane under the arch's primary vault, with the event captured on newsreel.

The Arc is located on the right bank of the Seine at the centre of a dodecagonal configuration of twelve radiating avenues. It was commissioned in 1806 after the victory at Austerlitz by Emperor Napoleon at the peak of his fortunes.

Laying the foundations alone took two years and, in 1810, when Napoleon entered Paris from the west with his bride Archduchess Marie-Louise of Austria, he had a wooden mock-up of the completed arch constructed.

The architect, Jean Chalgrin, died in 1811 and the work was taken over by Jean-Nicolas Huyot. During the Bourbon Restoration, construction was halted and it would not be completed until the reign of King Louis-Philippe, between 1833 and 1836, by the architects Goust, then Huyot, under the direction of Héricart de Thury. 

Napoleon Bonaparte

On 15 December 1840, brought back to France from Saint Helena, Napoleon's remains passed under it on their way to the Emperor's final resting place at the Invalides. Prior to burial in the Panthéon, the body of Victor Hugo was displayed under the Arc during the night of 22 May 1885.

Beneath the Arc is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from World War I. Interred on Armistice Day 1920, it has the first eternal flame lit in Western and Eastern Europe since the Vestal Virgins' fire was extinguished in the fourth century. It burns in memory of the dead who were never identified, now in both world wars.

A ceremony is held at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier every 11 November on the anniversary of the armistice signed by the Entente Powers and Germany in 1918.

More information: Paris-Arc de Triomphe

In 1961, American President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy paid their respects at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, accompanied by French President Charles de Gaulle. After the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, Mrs Kennedy remembered the eternal flame at the Arc de Triomphe and requested that an eternal flame be placed next to her husband's grave at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. President Charles de Gaulle went to Washington to attend the state funeral, and witnessed Jacqueline Kennedy lighting the eternal flame that had been inspired by her visit to France.

More information: Elsa's Travel Blog

I am the man who accompanied 

Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, 

and I have enjoyed it. 

John F. Kennedy