Today is the last day of 2021 and The Grandma wants to say goodbye to
this difficult year, talking about an ancestral Catalan tradition, L'Home dels nassos.
Joan Amades i Gelats (Barcelona, 23 July 1890-17 January 1959), was an eminentCatalan ethnologist and folklorist.
An autodidact, he worked at the historical archive of the city of Barcelona and at the Museum of Industry and Popular Arts of the same city.
From 1956 onwards, he collaborated with UNESCO. He was also an important promoter of Esperanto and founded the Federació Esperantista Catalana (Catalan Esperanto Association).
Perhaps the most important book in his large bibliography is Costumari Català (acollection of Catalan customs), the main work for the study of Catalan popular culture.
-Les diades populars catalanes (1932–1949) (The Catalan popular feasts)
-Les cent millor cançons populars (1949) (The 100 best folk songs)
-Refranyer català comentat (1951) (Commented collection of Catalan sayings)
-Les cent millors rondalles populars (1953) (The 100 best popular fairy tales)
-Costumari Català (1950–1956) (Collection of Catalan customs)
-Guia de les festes tradicionals de Catalunya. Itinerari per tot l'any (1958) (Guide to traditional feasts in Catalonia. Itinerary for the whole year)
Home dels nassos, Man of the noses in English, is a character in Catalanmyths and legends.
The legend says that this man has as many noses as the year has days, and loses one every day and can only be seen on December 31st.
In this way, children of Catalonia are led to believe that there is a man with 365 noses, and they are asked to search him on last day of the year. Being the last day of the year, he has only one nose remaining, the rest have been already lost.
This moves me to respectfully propose, in the Obra del Cançoner Popular de Catalunya the publication more or less immediate of small volumes of songs within reach of all pockets, for the song to return to the village.
Today, The Grandma is relaxing at home. She has decided to watch some TV series and she has chosen Agatha Christie's Poirot, one of her favourite ones.
Poirot (also known as AgathaChristie'sPoirot) is a British mystery dramatelevisionprogramme that aired on ITV from 8 January 1989 to 13 November 2013.
David Suchet starred as the eponymous detective, AgathaChristie's fictional HerculePoirot.
Initially produced by LWT, the series was later produced by ITV Studios. The series also aired on VisionTV in Canada and on PBS and A&E in the United States. The programme ran for 13 series and 70 episodes in total; each episode was adapted from a novel or short story by Christie that featured Poirot, and consequently in each episode Poirot is both the main detective in charge of the investigation of a crime, usually murder, and the protagonist who is at the centre of most of the episode's action.
At the programme's conclusion, which finished with Curtain: Poirot's Last Case(based on the 1975 novel Curtain, the final Poirot novel), every major literary work by Christie that featured the title character had been adapted.
Clive Exton in partnership with producer Brian Eastman adapted the pilot. Together, they wrote and produced the first eight series. Exton and Eastman left Poirot after 2001, when they began work on Rosemary & Thyme. Michele Buck and Damien Timmer, who both went on to form Mammoth Screen, were behind the revamping of the series.
The episodes aired from 2003
featured a radical shift in tone from the previous series. The humour of
the earlier series was downplayed with each episode being presented as
serious drama and saw the introduction of gritty elements not present in
the Christie stories being adapted.
Recurrent motifs in the additions
included drug use, sex, abortion, homosexuality, and a tendency toward
more visceral imagery. Story changes were often made to present female
characters in a more sympathetic or heroic light, at odds with
Christie's characteristic gender neutrality.
The visual style of later episodes was correspondingly different: particularly, an overall darker tone; and austere modernist or Art Deco locations and decor, widely used earlier in the series, being largely dropped in favour of more lavish settings (epitomised by the re-imagining of Poirot's home as a larger, more lavish apartment).
The series logo was redesigned (the full opening title sequence had not been used since series 6 in 1996), and the main theme motif, though used often, was usually featured subtly and in sombre arrangements; this has been described as a consequence of the novels adapted being darker and more psychologically driven. However, a more upbeat string arrangement of the theme music is used for the end credits of Hallowe'en Party, The Clocks and Dead Man's Folly. In flashback scenes, later episodes also made extensive use of fisheye lens, distorted colours, and other visual effects.
Series 9-12 lack Hugh Fraser, Philip
Jackson and Pauline Moran, who had appeared in the previous series
(excepting series 4, where Moran is absent).
Series
10 (2006) introduced Zoë Wanamaker as the eccentric crime novelist
Ariadne Oliver and David Yelland as Poirot's dependable valet, George -a
character that had been introduced in the early Poirot novels but was
left out of the early adaptations to develop the character of Miss
Lemon. The introduction of Wanamaker and Yelland's characters and the
absence of the other characters is generally consistent with the stories
on which the scripts were based. Hugh Fraser and David Yelland returned
for two episodes of the final series (The Big Four and Curtain), with
Philip Jackson and Pauline Moran returning for the adaptation of The Big
Four. Zoë Wanamaker also returned for the adaptations of Elephants Can Remember and Dead Man's Folly.
Clive
Exton adapted seven novels and fourteen short stories for the series,
including The ABC Murders and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which
received mixed reviews from critics.
Anthony Horowitz was another prolific writer for the series, adapting three novels and nine short stories, while Nick Dear adapted six novels. Comedian and novelist Mark Gatiss wrote three episodes and also guest-starred in the series, as have Peter Flannery and Kevin Elyot. Ian Hallard, who co-wrote the screenplay for The Big Four with Mark Gatiss, appears in the episode and also Hallowe'enParty, which was scripted by Gatiss alone.
Florin Court in Charterhouse Square, London, was used as Poirot's fictional London residence, Whitehaven Mansions. The final episode to be filmed was Dead Man's Folly in June 2013 on the Greenway Estate, which was Agatha Christie's home, broadcast on 30 October 2013. Most of the locations and buildings where the episodes were shot were given fictional names.
Suchet was recommended for the part by Christie's family, who had seen him appear as Blott in the TV adaptation of Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape.
Suchet, a method actor, said that he prepared for the part by reading all the Poirot novels and every short story, and copying out every piece of description about the character.
Suchet told The Strand Magazine: What I did was, I had my file on one side of me and a pile of stories on the other side and day after day, week after week, I ploughed through most of Agatha Christie's novels about Hercule Poirot and wrote down characteristics until I had a file full of documentation of the character. And then it was my business not only to know what he was like, but to gradually become him. I had to become him before we started shooting.
During the filming of the first series, Suchet almost left the production during an argument with a director, insisting that Poirot's odd mannerisms (in this case, putting a handkerchief down before sitting on a park bench) be featured; he later said there's no question [Poirot's] obsessive-compulsive.
According to many critics and enthusiasts, Suchet's characterisation is considered to be the most accurate interpretation of all the actors who have played Poirot, and the closest to the character in the books.
In 2007, Suchet spoke of his desire to film the remaining stories in the canon and hoped to achieve this before his 65th birthday in May 2011. Despite speculation of cancellation early in 2011, the remaining books were ultimately adapted into a thirteenth series, adapted in 2013 into 5 episodes, from which Curtain aired last on 13 November.
A 2013 television special, Being Poirot, centred on Suchet's characterisation and his emotional final episode.
In 2013, Suchet revealed that Christie's daughter Rosalind Hicks had told him she was sure Christie would have approved of his performance.
Agatha Christie's grandson Mathew Prichard commented: Personally, I regret very much that she [Agatha Christie] never saw David Suchet. I think that visually he is much the most convincing and perhaps he manages to convey to the viewer just enough of the irritation that we always associate with the perfectionist, to be convincing!
In 2008, the series was described by some critics as going off piste, though not negatively, from its old format. It was praised for its new writers, more lavish productions and a greater emphasis on the darker psychology of the novels. Significantly, it was noted for Five Little Pigs, adapted by Kevin Elyot, bringing out a homosexual subtext of the novel. Nominations for twenty BAFTAs were received between 1989 and 1991 for series 1-3.
Today, The Grandma has been watching a film masterpiece, The Squaw Man by Cecil B. DeMille,who started filming this Hollywood's first feature film, on a day like today in 1913.
The Squaw Man, known as The White Man in the United Kingdom, is a 1914 American silentWestern film directed by Cecil B. DeMille andOscar C. Apfel, and starring Dustin Farnum.
It was DeMille's directorial debut and one of thefirst feature films to be shot in what is nowHollywood.
James Wynnegate (Dustin Farnum) and his cousin, Henry (Monroe Salisbury), are upper class Englishmen and trustees for an orphans’ fund.
Henry loses money in a bet at a derby and embezzles money from the fund to pay off his debts.
When war office officials are informed of the money missing they pursue James, but he successfully escapes to Wyoming. There, James rescues Nat-U-Ritch (Lillian St. Cyr), daughter to the chief of the Utes tribe, from local outlaw Cash Hawkins (William Elmer).
Hawkins plans to exact his revenge on James, but has his plans thwarted by Nat-U-Ritch, who shoots him, dead. Later, James has an accident in the mountains and needs to be rescued. Nat-U-Ritch discovers him and carries him back to safety. As she nurses him back to health, they fall in love and later have a child.
Meanwhile, during an exploration of the Alps, Henry falls off a cliff. Before he succumbs to his injuries, Henry signs a letter of confession proclaiming James' innocence in the embezzlement.
Before Henry's widow, Lady Diana (Winifred Kingston) and others arrive in Wyoming to tell James about the news, the Sheriff recovers the murder weapon that was used against Cash Hawkins in James and Nat-U-Ritch's home. Realizing their son is not safe, the couple sends him away, leaving them both distraught. Facing the possibilities of losing both her son and her freedom, Nat-U-Ritch decides to take her own life instead. The movie ends with both the chief of the Utes tribe and James embracing her body.
The only onscreen filmmaking credit is Picturized by Cecil B. DeMille and Oscar C.Apfel.
The film was adapted by DeMille and Apfel from the 1905 stage play of the same name by Edwin Milton Royle, and produced by DeMille, Apfel, and Jesse L. Lasky for the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, its first film.
This first screen version of the
story was the legendary DeMille's first movie assignment. It was also
the first feature-length film shot in California, partly in what became
Hollywood.
Film historians agree that shorts had previously been filmed in Hollywood, with D. W. Griffith's In Old California (1910) considered the earliest. DeMille rented what is now known as the Lasky-DeMille Barn at the southeast corner of Selma and Vine Streets to serve as their studio and production office; today it is home to the Hollywood Heritage Museum.
Shooting on The Squaw Man began December 29, 1913, and finished January 20, 1914.
DeMille wanted to emphasize the outdoors and wanted to shoot the movie in exotic scenery and great vistas. Initially he traveled to Flagstaff, Arizona to film the movie.
After seeing the vast amount of mountains near Flagstaff, the production was moved to Los Angeles. Harbor scenes were shot in San Pedro, California and the western saloon set was built beside railroad tracks in the San Fernando Valley.
Footage of cattle on the open range was shot at Keen Camp near Idyllwild, California, while snow scenes were shot at Mount Palomar. Cecil B. DeMille felt that lighting in a movie was extremely important and viewed it as the visual and emotional foundation to build his image. He believed that lighting was to a film as music is to an opera.
The Squaw Man went on to become the only movie successfully filmed three times by the same director/producer, DeMille.He filmed a silent remake in 1918, and a talkie version in 1931. The Squaw Man was 74 minutes long and generated $244,700 in profit.
The main character James Wynnegate played by Dustin Farnum, was cast as the hero for the film. Farnum was a notable Broadway star and his wife in real life Winifred Kingston was also a well-known actress. She played the English love interest.
Red Wing (real name Lillian St. Cyr) was born into the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska on the Winnebago Reservation, and she played the American Indian wife.
Non-Native American actor Joseph Singleton played the role of Tabywana, Nat-U-Ritch's father. Lillian St. Cyr of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska was cast to play the role of Nat-U-Ritch, a member of the Ute tribe. She is also known as "Princess Redwing". St. Cyr along with her husband James Young Deer, of the Nanticoke people of Delaware, have been regarded one of the first Native American power couple in Hollywood along with Mona Darkfeather and her husband director Frank E. Montgomery. DeMille had selected Lillian St. Cyr but his first choice had been Mona Darkfeather who was not available.
During the early silent film era, films based on Native Americans were popular. The central theme of this film was miscegenation. In the state of California, anti-miscegenation laws existed until 1948; however, while African Americans couldn't legally marry whites in California during filming, marriages between Native Americans and whites were permitted. Though there were Native American actors, whites were mostly cast as Indian characters.
During the early teens, Young Deer and his wife Lillian St. Cyr helped to transform how Native American characters were represented. The characters they created were sympathetic in complex ways, although other studios like Kalem were also attempting to accurately portray Natives in film. However, other scholars argue that Native American-themed silent films did not alter in any way the dominant perception of Indians themselves. Apparently, many films displayed the Native American experience from many different perspectives and did involve Native American writers, filmmakers, and actors during this time period.
Today, The Grandma has been reading some comics. She loves them and she has wanted to remember one of the greatest comic book write of all time, Stan Lee,father of some of the most incredible Marvel superheroes, who died on a day like today in 2018.
Stan Lee (December 28, 1922-November 12, 2018) was anAmerican comic bookwriter, editor, publisher, andproducer.
He rose through the ranks of a family-run business called Timely Publications which would later become Marvel Comics'primarycreative leader for two decades, leading its expansion from a small division of a publishing house to a multimedia corporation that dominated the comics and film industries.
In collaboration with others at Marvel-particularly co-writers/artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko -he co-created characters including superheroes Spider-Man, the X-Men, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, Ant-Man, the Wasp, the FantasticFour, Black Panther, Daredevil, Doctor Strange, Scarlet Witch, and BlackWidow.
These and other characters' introductions in the 1960s pioneered a more naturalistic approach in superhero comics, and in the 1970s Lee challenged the restrictions of the Comics Code Authority, indirectly leading to changes in its policies.
In the 1980s he pursued the development of Marvel properties in other media, with mixed results.
Following his retirement from Marvel in the 1990s, Lee remained a public figurehead for the company, and frequently made cameo appearances in films and television shows based on Marvel characters, on which he received an executive producer credit.
He continued independent creative ventures into his 90s until his death in 2018. Lee was inducted into the comic book industry's Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1995. He received the NEA's National Medal of Arts in 2008.
Stanley Martin Lieber was born on December 28, 1922, in Manhattan, New York City, in the apartment of his Romanian-born Jewish immigrant parents, Celia (née Solomon) and Jack Lieber, at the corner of West 98th Street and West End Avenue. Lee was raised in a Jewish household.
The Stan Lee Foundation was founded in 2010 to focus on literacy, education, and the arts. Its stated goals include supporting programs and ideas that improve access to literacy resources, as well as promoting diversity, national literacy, culture and the arts.
Lee donated portions of his personal effects to the University of Wyoming at various times, between 1981 and 2001.
In September 2012, Lee underwent an operation to insert a pacemaker, which required cancelling planned appearances at conventions. Lee eventually retired from convention appearances by 2017.
On July 6, 2017, Boocock, his wife of 69 years, died of complications from a stroke. She was 95 years old.
Lee died on November 12, 2018, at the age of 95, one month before his 96th birthday, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, after being rushed there in a medical emergency earlier in the day.
The pleasure of reading a story and wondering what will come next for the hero is a pleasure that has lasted for centuries and, I think, will always be with us.
Today, The Grandma has been reading about RadioCity Music Hall, the entertainment venue in New York City, that was opened on a day like today in 1932. She has also remembered her last visit and how it liked her.
Radio City Music Hall is an entertainment venue at 1260 Avenue of the Americas, within Rockefeller Center, inMidtown Manhattan, NewYork City. Nicknamed theShowplace of the Nation, it is the headquarters for the Rockettes, the precision dance company.
Radio City Music Hall was designed by Edward Durell Stone and DonaldDeskey in the Art Deco style.
Radio City Music Hall was built on a plot of land that was originally intended for a Metropolitan Opera House, although plans for the opera house were canceled in 1929. It opened on December 27, 1932, as part of the construction of Rockefeller Center.
The 5,960-seat Music Hall was the larger of two venues built for Rockefeller Center's Radio City section, the other being Center Theatre. It was largely successful until the 1970s, when declining patronage nearly drove the Music Hall to bankruptcy.
Radio City Music Hall was designated a New York City Landmark in May 1978, and the Music Hall was restored and allowed to remain open. The hall was extensively renovated in 1999.
One of the more notable parts of the Music Hall is its large auditorium, which was the world's largest when the Hall first opened. The Music Hall also contains a variety of art. Although Radio City Music Hall was initially intended to host stage shows, within a year of its opening it was converted into a movie palace, hosting performances in a film-and-stage-spectacle format through the 1970s, and was the site of several movie premieres. It now primarily hosts concerts, including by leading pop and rock musicians, and live stage shows such as the Radio City Christmas Spectacular.
The Music Hall has also hosted televised events including the Grammy Awards, the Tony Awards, the Daytime Emmy Awards, the MTV Video Music Awards, and the NFL Draft.
The
construction of Rockefeller Center occurred between 1932 and 1940 on
land that John D. Rockefeller Jr. leased from Columbia University.The
Rockefeller Center site was originally supposed to be occupied by a new
opera house for the Metropolitan Opera.
By
1928, Benjamin Wistar Morris and designer Joseph Urban were hired to
come up with blueprints for the house. However, the new building was too
expensive for the opera to fund by itself, and it needed an endowment,
and the project ultimately gained the support of John D. Rockefeller Jr.
The planned opera house was cancelled in December 1929 due to various issues, but Rockefeller made a deal with RCA to develop Rockefeller Center as a mass media complex with four theaters. This was later downsized to two theaters.
Construction on Radio City Music Hall started in December 1931, and the hall topped out in August 1932. Its construction set many records at the time, including the use of 24,000 km of copper wire and 320 km of brass pipe.
In November 1932, Russell Markert's précision dance troupe the Roxyettes, later to be known as the Rockettes, left the Roxy Theatre and announced that they would be moving to the Music Hall. By then, Roxy was busy adding music acts in preparation for the hall's opening at the end of the year.
The Music Hall opened to the public on December 27, 1932, with a lavish stage show featuring numbers including Ray Bolger, Doc Rockwell, Martha Graham, The Mirthquakers, and Patricia Bowman.
The
opening was meant to be a return to high-class variety entertainment.
However, the opening was not a success: the program was very long,
spanning from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. of the next day, and a multitude of acts
were crammed onto the world's largest stage, ensuring that individual
acts were lost in the cavernous hall. As the premiere went on, audience
members, including John Rockefeller Jr, waited in the lobby or simply
left early.
Through
the 1960s, the Music Hall was successful regardless of the status of
the city's economic, business, and entertainment sectors as a whole. It
remained open even as other theaters such as the Paramount and the Roxy
closed. Even so, officials had intended to close down Radio City Music
Hall in 1962, in what would become one of several such unheeded
announcements.
By
1964, the Radio City Music Hall was projected to have 5.7 million
annual visitors, who paid ticket prices of between 99 cents and $2.75,
equivalent to between $6 and $18 in 2019.
The hall had evolved to show fewer adult-oriented films, instead choosing to show films for general audiences. However, the Music Hall'soperatingcosts were almost twice as high as those of smaller performance venues. In addition, with the loosening of regulations on explicit content, the MusicHall's audience was mostly relegated to families.
By January 1978, the Music Hall was in debt, and officials stated that it could not remain open after April. Alton Marshall, president of Rockefeller Center, announced that due to a projected loss of $3.5 million for the upcoming year, Radio City Music Hall would close on April 12.
Plans for alternate uses for the structure included converting the theater into tennis courts, a shopping mall, an aquarium, a hotel, a theme park, or the American Stock Exchange.
Upon hearing the announcement, Rosemary Novellino, Dance Captain of the Radio City Music Hall Ballet Company, formed the Showpeople's Committee to Save Radio City Music Hall. The Committee consisted of an alliance between performers, the media, and political allies including New York lieutenant governor Mary Anne Krupsak.
The public also made hundreds of calls to Rockefeller Center, and The New York Times described that the callers jammed the switchboards there. The Rockettes also protested outside New York City Hall.
Following the closure announcement, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) designated the interior as a city landmark on March 29. This designation was contested, and Rockefeller Center Inc. unsuccessfully filed a lawsuit to try to reverse the landmark designation.
On April 8, four days before the planned closing date, the Empire State Development Corporation voted to create a nonprofit subsidiary to lease the Music Hall. One month later, on May 12, Radio City Music Hall was placed onthe National Register of Historic Places.
After its near-closure and subsequent reopening, Radio City Music Hall diversified its selection of shows and performances. Time slots were set aside for movie screenings, but the Music Hall had mostly turned to stage shows.
By January 1980, the Music Hall was hosting shows such as the stage adaptation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the Rockettes Spectacular. However, the theatrical shows proved to be unpopular, so in 1983, the Radio City Music Hall shifted to creating music concerts and participating in the production of films and TV shows.
The parent company, Radio City Music Hall Productions (a subsidiary of Rockefeller Center Inc.), started creating or co-creating films and Broadway shows such as Legs and Brighton Beach Memoirs.
In 1985, Radio City Music Hall finally recorded its first profit in three decades, with a net gain of $2.5 million that year. This was partly attributed to the addition of music concerts, which appealed toward younger viewers. The Music Hall also started hosting televised events including the Grammy Awards, the Tony Awards, the Daytime Emmy Awards, the MTV Video Music Awards, and the NFL Draft.
A new golden curtain was installed at the main stage in January 1987. The curtain was the third one to be installed since the Music Hall's opening in 1932; it had last been replaced in 1965. Because of the Radio City Music Hall's historic status, the curtain had to be the same style, texture, and color as the previous curtains.
In 1997, Radio City Music Hall was leased to the Madison Square Garden Company, then known as Cablevision. This move provided funding to keep the Rockettes and the Christmas Spectacular at the Music Hall; in addition, Cablevision would be able to renovate and manage the hall.
Radio City Music Hall was closed on February 16, 1999, for a comprehensive renovation. During the closure, many components were cleaned and modernized. The curtains were replaced, seats were reupholstered, carpets were relaid, and doorknobs and light fixtures were replaced.
Radio City Music Hall is on the east side of Sixth Avenue between 50th and 51st Streets. Located in a niche partially under the neighboring 1270 Avenue of the Americas, the Music Hall is housed under the building's first setback on the seventh floor.
Its exterior is notable for a long marquee sign that wraps around the corner of Sixth Avenue and 50th Street, as well as narrower, seven-story-high signs on the north and south ends of the marquee's Sixth Avenue side; both signs display the hall's name in neon letters.
The main entrance to the Music Hall was placed at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 50th Street, underneath the marquee. The entrance's location, which was enhanced by the amount of open space in front of that corner, ensured that the hall could easily be seen from the Broadway theater district a block to the west.
An entrance to the New York City Subway's 47th-50th Streets-Rockefeller Center station, served by the B, D, F, <F>, and M trains, is located on Sixth Avenue directly adjacent to the north end of the marquee, within the same structure that houses Radio City Music Hall.
When a movie opened -if you lived in New York, you would see it at Radio City Music Hall where it would play a couple of weeks, and then you moved on to the next movie.
Today, The Grandma has been reading about the Paris-Dakar, a controversial rally whose first race started on a day like today in 1979.
The Dakar Rally or simply TheDakar;formerly known as the Paris–DakarRallyis an annual rally raid organised by the Amaury Sport Organisation.
Most events since the inception in 1978 were staged from Paris, France, to Dakar, Senegal, but due to security threats in Mauritania, which led to the cancellation of the 2008 rally, events from 2009 to 2019 were held in South America.Since 2020, the race has been entirely in Saudi Arabia. The rally is open to amateur and professional entries, amateurs typically making up about eighty per cent of the participants.
The rally is an off-road endurance event. The terrain that the competitors traverse is much tougher than that used in conventional rallying, and the vehicles used are typically true off-road vehicles and motorcycles, rather than modified on-road vehicles.
Most of the competitive special sections are off-road, crossing dunes, mud, camel grass, rocks, and erg among others. The distances of each stage covered vary from short distances up to 800–900 kilometres per day.
The race originated in December 1977, a year after Thierry Sabine got lost in the Ténéré desert whilst competing in the 1975 Côte-Côte Abidjan-Nice rally and decided that the desert would be a good location for a regular rally, on the lines of the 1974 London-Sahara-Munich World Cup Rally, the first automobile race to cross the Sahara Desert.
In 1971, ex-Cream drummer Ginger Baker used the unproven Range Rover to drive from Algeria to Lagos, Nigeria to set up a recording studio and jam with Fela Kuti. Predating the Paris-Dakar Rally the subsequent documentary is replete with such terrain, and documents the vehicle's endurance.
182 vehicles took the start of the inaugural rally in Paris, with 74 surviving the 10,000-kilometre trip to the Senegalese capital of Dakar. Cyril Neveu holds the distinction of being the event's first winner, riding a Yamaha motorcycle. The event rapidly grew in popularity, with 216 vehicles taking the start in 1980 and 291 in 1981.
The privateer spirit of early racers defying the desert with limited resources encouraged such entrants as Thierry de Montcorgé in a Rolls-Royce and Formula 1 driver Jacky Ickx with actor Claude Brasseur in a Citroën CX, in the 1981 race won by two-time winner Hubert Auriol.
In 1982, there were 382 racers, more than double the amount that took the start in 1979.
The 2008 event, due to start in Lisbon, was cancelled on 4 January 2008 amid fears of terrorist attacks in Mauritania following the 2007 killing of four French tourists. Chile and Argentina offered to host subsequent events, which were later accepted by the ASO for the 2009 event.
The ASO also decided to establish the Dakar Series competition, whose first event was the 2008 Central Europe Rally, located in Hungary and Romania, which acted as a replacement for the cancelled 2008 edition of the Dakar.
The 2009 event, the first held in South America with a respectable 501 competitors, saw Volkswagen take its first win in the Dakar as a works entrant courtesy of Giniel de Villiers.
The rally is held in Saudi Arabia since 2020.
When the race was held in Africa, it was subject to criticism from several sources, generally focusing on the race's impact on the inhabitants of the African countries through which it passed. Some African residents along the race's course in previous years have said they saw limited benefits from the race; that race participants spent little money on the goods and services local residents can offer. The racers produced substantial amounts of dust along the course, and were blamed for hitting and killing livestock, in addition to occasionally injuring orkilling people.
After the 1988 race, when three Africans were killed in collisions with vehicles involved in the race, PANA, a Dakar-based news agency, wrote that the deaths were insignificant for the [race's] organisers. The Vatican City newspaper L'Osservatore Romano called the race a vulgar display of power and wealth in places where men continue to die from hunger and thirst.
During a 2002 protest at the race's start in Arras, France, a Green Party of France statement described the race as colonialism that needs to be eradicated.
The rally was criticised before 2000 for crossing through the disputed territory of Western Sahara, which has been occupied by Morocco since 1975, without the approval of the Polisario Front independence movement, which considers itself the representative of the indigenous Sahrawi people. After the race officials gained formal permission from the Polisario from 2000 onwards this ceased to be an issue.
The environmental impact of the race has been another area of criticism. This criticism of the race is the topic of the song 500 connards sur la ligne de départ, 500 Arseholes at the Starting Line, on the 1991 album Marchand de cailloux by French singer Renaud.
In 2014, the Dakar rally was criticized for damage done to archaeologicalsites in Chile.
The move to Saudi Arabia for the 2020 Dakar Rally was under heavy criticism because of the situation of Human rights in Saudi Arabia and the positionof women in that country.
Despite the criticism from human rights organizations against the choice of host country for the 2020 season, the Dakar Rally was organized in Saudi Arabia for another consecutive year. While it was being denounced as an attempt ofsportswashing by Saudi Arabia, the organizers defended the decision.
Today, The Grandma have been watching classical films. She has chosen some interpreted by Humphrey Bogart, the American actor and cultural icon, who was born on a day like today in 1899.
Humphrey DeForest Bogart (December 25, 1899-January 14, 1957), nicknamed Bogie, was an Americanfilm and stage actor.
His performances in Classical Hollywood cinema films made him an Americancultural icon.
In 1999, the American Film Institute selected Bogart as the greatest malestar of classic American cinema.
Bogart began acting in Broadway shows, beginning his career in motion pictures with Up the River (1930) for Fox and appeared in supporting roles for the next decade, sometimes portraying gangsters. He was praised for his work as Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1936) but remained secondary to other actors Warner Bros. cast in lead roles.
His breakthrough from supporting roles to stardom came with High Sierra (1941) and The Maltese Falcon (1941), considered one of the first great noir films.
Bogart's private detectives, Sam Spade (in The Maltese Falcon) and Phillip Marlowe (in 1946's The Big Sleep), became the models for detectives in other noir films. His most significant romantic lead role was with Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca (1942), which earned him his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Forty-four-year-old Bogart and 19-year-old Lauren Bacall fell in love when they filmed To Have and Have Not (1944).
In 1945, a few months after principal photography for The Big Sleep, their second film together, he divorced his third wife and married Bacall. After their marriage, they played each other's love interest in the mystery thrillers Dark Passage (1947) and Key Largo (1948).
Bogart's performances in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and In aLonely Place (1950) are now considered among his best, although they were not recognized as such when the films were released.
He reprised those unsettled, unstable characters as a World War II naval-vessel commander in The Caine Mutiny (1954), which was a critical and commercial hit and earned him another Best Actor nomination. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of a cantankerous river steam launch skipper opposite Katharine Hepburn's missionary in the World War I African adventure The AfricanQueen (1951).
Other significant roles in his later years included The Barefoot Contessa (1954) with Ava Gardner and his on-screen competition with William Holden for Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina (1954). A heavy smoker and drinker, Bogart died from esophageal cancer in January 1957.
Humphrey DeForest Bogart was born on Christmas Day 1899 in New YorkCity, the eldest child of Belmont DeForest Bogart (1867–1934) and Maud Humphrey (1868–1940). Belmont was the only child of the unhappy marriage of Adam Welty Bogart (a Canandaigua, New York, innkeeper) and Julia Augusta Stiles, a wealthy heiress.
The name Bogart derives from the Dutch surname, Bogaert. Belmont and Maud married in June 1898. He was a Presbyterian, of English and Dutch descent, and a descendant of Sarah Rapelje, the first European child born in New Netherland. Maud was an Episcopalian of English heritage, and a descendant of Mayflower passenger John Howland. Humphrey was raised Episcopalian, but was non-practicing for most of his adult life.
With no viable career options, Bogart enlisted in the United States Navy in the spring of 1918, during World War I, and served as a coxswain. He recalled later, At eighteen, war was great stuff. Paris! Sexy French girls! Hot damn!
Bogart was recorded as a model sailor, who spent most of his sea time after the armistice ferrying troops back from Europe.
Bogart left the service on June 18, 1919 at the rank of Boatswain's Mate Third Class. During the Second World War, Bogart attempted to reenlist in the Navy but was rejected due to his age. He then volunteered for the Coast Guard Temporary Reserve in 1944, patrolling the California coastline in his yacht, the Santana.
Bogart resumed his friendship with Bill Brady Jr. (whose father had show-business connections), and obtained an office job with William A. Brady's new World Films company.
Although
he wanted to try his hand at screenwriting, directing, and production,
he excelled at none. Bogart was stage manager for Brady's daughter
Alice's play ARuined Lady. He made his stage debut a few months later
as a Japanese butler in Alice's 1921 play Drifting (nervously delivering
one line of dialogue), and appeared in several of her subsequent plays.
Bogart
signed a contract with the Fox Film Corporation for $750 a week. There
he met Spencer Tracy, a Broadway actor whom Bogart liked and admired,
and they became close friends and drinking companions.
In 1930, Tracy first called him Bogie. Tracy made his feature film debut in his only movie with Bogart,John Ford's early sound film Up the River (1930), in which they had the two leading roles as inmates. Tracy received top billing, but Bogart's picture appeared on the film's posters. He was billed fourth behind Tracy, Claire Luce and Warren Hymer but his role was almost as large as Tracy's and much larger than Luce's or Hymer's. Despite being close friends, Tracy and Bogart made only one movie together, Up the River. A quarter of a century later, the two men planned to make The Desperate Hours together. Both insisted upon top billing, however; Tracy dropped out, and was replaced by Fredric March.
Bogart then had a supporting role in Bad Sister (1931) with Bette Davis.
Bogart shuttled back and forth between Hollywood and the New York stage from 1930 to 1935, out of work for long periods. His parents had separated; his father died in 1934 in debt, which Bogart eventually paid off. He inherited his father's gold ring, which he wore in many of his films. At his father's deathbed, Bogart finally told him how much he loved him.
Bogart's second marriage was rocky; dissatisfied with his acting career, depressed and irritable, he drank heavily.
On August 21, 1938, Bogart entered a turbulent third marriage to actress Mayo Methot, a lively, friendly woman when sober but paranoid and aggressive when drunk. She became convinced that Bogart was unfaithful to her (which he eventually was, with Lauren Bacall, while filming To Have and Have Not in 1944).
High Sierra (1941, directed by Raoul Walsh) featured a screenplay written by John Huston, Bogart's friend and drinking partner, albeit adapted from a novel by W. R. Burnett, author of the novel on which Little Caesar was based.
Now regarded as a classic film noir, The Maltese Falcon (1941) was John Huston's directorial debut. Based on the Dashiell Hammett novel, it was first serialized in the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1929 and was the basis of two earlier film versions; the second was Satan Met a Lady (1936), starring Bette Davis.
Producer Hal B. Wallis initially offered to cast George Raft as the leading man, but Raft, far more established than Bogart, had a contract stipulating he was not required to appear in remakes. Fearing that it would be nothing more than a sanitized version of the pre-Production Code The Maltese Falcon (1931), Raft turned down the role to make Manpower with director Raoul Walsh, with whom he had worked on The Bowery in 1933. Huston then eagerly accepted Bogart as his Sam Spade.
Bogart played his first romantic lead in Casablanca (1942): Rick Blaine, an expatriate nightclub owner hiding from a suspicious past and negotiating a fine line among Nazis, the French underground, the Vichy prefect and unresolved feelings for his ex-girlfriend. Bosley Crowther wrote in his November 1942 New York Times review that Bogart's character was used to inject a cold point of tough resistance to evil forces afoot in Europe today. The film, directed by Michael Curtiz and produced by Hal Wallis, featured Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, Paul Henreid, Conrad Veidt, Peter Lorre and Dooley Wilson.
Howard Hawks introduced Bogart and Lauren Bacall (1924-2014) while Bogart was filming Passage to Marseille (1944). The three subsequently collaborated on To Have and Have Not (1944), a loose adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel, and Bacall's film debut.
Months after wrapping To Have and Have Not, Bogart and Bacall were reunited for an encore: the film noir The Big Sleep (1946), based on the novel by Raymond Chandler with script help from William Faulkner.
The suspenseful Dark Passage (1947) was Bogart and Bacall's next collaboration.
Riding high in 1947 with a new contract which provided limited script refusal and the right to form his production company, Bogart rejoined with John Huston for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: a stark tale of greed among three goldprospectors in Mexico.
Bogart, a liberal Democrat, organized the Committee for the First Amendment (a delegation to Washington, D.C.) opposing what he saw as the House Un-American Activities Committee's harassment of Hollywood screenwriters and actors. He later wrote an article, I'm No Communist, for the March 1948 issue of Photoplay magazine distancing himself from the Hollywood Ten to counter negative publicity resulting from his appearance and save his career. Bogart wrote, The ten mencited for contempt by the House Un-American Activities Committee were notdefended by us.
Bogart created his film company, Santana Productions (named after his yacht and the cabin cruiser in Key Largo), in 1948.
Outside Santana Productions, Bogart starred with Katharine Hepburn in the John Huston-directed The African Queen in 1951.
Bogart dropped his asking price to obtain the role of Captain Queeg in Edward Dmytryk's drama, The Caine Mutiny (1954).
For Sabrina (1954), Billy Wilder wanted Cary Grant for the older male lead and chose Bogart to play the conservative brother who competes with his younger, playboy sibling (William Holden) for the affection of the Cinderella-like Sabrina (Audrey Hepburn).
Bogart was a founding member and the original leader of the HollywoodRat Pack. In the spring of 1955, after a long party in Las Vegas attended by Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, her husband Sidney Luft, Michael Romanoff and his wife Gloria, David Niven, Angie Dickinson and others, Bacall surveyed the wreckage and said: You look like a goddamn rat pack.
Bogart had already been diagnosed with terminal cancer when shooting The Harder They Fall, a boxing drama with Rod Steiger in a supporting role. Steiger later mentioned Bogart's courage and geniality during his final performance.
December, 24 and The Grandma continues practising one of her most favourite cultural events, The Song of the Sybil. Due to the COVID19, this year is not possible to listen to this liturgical drama in Barcelona, but The Grandma wants to talk again about it, and about its great meaning and cultural importance.
The Song of the Sibyl, in Catalan El Cant de la Sibil·la, is a liturgical drama and a Gregorian chant, the lyrics of which comprise a prophecy describing the Apocalypse, which has been performed in churches on Mallorca in Balearic Islands, Alghero in Sardinia, and some Catalan churches, in the Catalan language on Christmas Eve nearly uninterruptedly since medieval times.
It was declared a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO on 16 November 2010.
Today, The Grandma has received sad news. JoanDidion, the Americanwriter,has died in Manhattan today at 87. The Grandma wants to talk about her life and her career.
Joan Didion (December 5, 1934-December 23, 2021) was an Americanwriter who launched her career in the 1960s after winning an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine.
Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the '60s and the Hollywood lifestyle. Herpolitical writing often concentrated on thesubtext of political and social rhetoric.
In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted.
In 2005, she won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography for The Year of Magical Thinking. She later adapted the book into a play, which premiered on Broadway in 2007.
In 2017, Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold,directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne.
Didion was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California, to Frank Reese and Eduene (née Jerrett) Didion. Didion recalled writing things down as early as the age of five, though she said that she never saw herself as awriter until after her work had been published. She identified as a shy, bookish child
who pushed herself to overcome social anxiety through acting and public
speaking. She read everything she could get her hands on. She spent her
adolescence typing out Ernest Hemingway's works to learn more about how
sentence structures work.
In 1956, Didion
received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of
California, Berkeley. During her senior year, she won first place in the
Prix deParis essay contest sponsored by Vogue,
and was awarded a job as a research assistant at the magazine, having
written a story on the San Francisco architect William Wurster.
During her seven years at Vogue, Didion worked her way up from promotional copywriter to associate feature editor.
In January 1960, Mademoiselle, published Didion's article Berkeley’s Giant: The University of California.
While at Vogue, and homesick for California, she wrote her first novel, Run, River (1963), about a Sacramento family as it comes apart. Writer and friend John Gregory Dunne helped her edit the book, and the two moved into an apartment together.
In 1968, she published her first work of nonfiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem,a collection of magazine pieces about her experiences in California. The New York Times referred to it as containing grace, sophistication, nuance, [and] irony.
Didion's novel Play It as It Lays, set in Hollywood, was published in 1970, and ABook of Common Prayer appeared in 1977.
In 1979, she published The White Album, another collection of magazine pieces that previously appeared in Life, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, The NewYork Times, and The New York Review of Books.
Didion's book-length essay Salvador (1983) was written after a two-week trip to El Salvador with her husband. The next year, she published the novel Democracy,the
story of a long but unrequited love affair between a wealthy heiress
and an older man, a CIA officer, against the background of the Cold War
and the Vietnam War.
Her 1987 nonfiction book Miami looked at the
different communities in that city.
In a prescient New York Review of Books piece of 1991, a year after the various trials of the Central Park Five had ended, Didion dissected serious flaws in the prosecution's case, becoming the earliest mainstream writer to view the guilty verdicts as a miscarriage of justice.
She suggested the Five were found guilty because of a sociopolitical narrative with racial overtones that clouded the court's judgment.
In 1992, she published After Henry, a collection of twelve geographical essays and a personal memorial for Henry Robbins, who was Didion's friend and editor from 1966 until his death in 1979.
In 1996, she published The Last Thing He Wanted, a romantic thriller. Dunne and Didion worked closely together for most of their careers. Much of their writing is therefore intertwined. They co-wrote a number of screenplays, including a 1972 film adaptation of her novel Play It as It Lays that starred Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld. They also spent several years adapting the biography of journalist Jessica Savitch into the Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer film Up Close &Personal.
Didion began writing The Year of Magical Thinking, a narrative of her response to the death of her husband and the severe illness of their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, on October 4, 2004, and finished the manuscript 88 days later on New Year's Eve.
Written at the age of seventy, this was her first nonfiction book that was not a collection of magazine assignments. She went on a book tour following the book's release, doing many readings and promotional interviews, and said that she found the process very therapeutic during her period of mourning.
In 2006, Everyman's Library published We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live,a compendium of much of Didion's writing, including the full content of her first seven published nonfiction books (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The WhiteAlbum, Salvador, Miami, After Henry, Political Fictions, and Where I Was From),with an introduction by her contemporary, the critic John Leonard.
In 2007, Didion began working with English playwright and director David Hare on a one-woman stage adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking.
Produced by Scott Rudin, the Broadway play featured Vanessa Redgrave.
Although she was hesitant to write for the theater, eventually she found
the genre, which was new to her, quite exciting.
Didion wrote early drafts of the screenplay for an HBO biopic directed by Robert Benton on The Washington Post
publisher Katharine Graham. It was untitled. Sources say it may trace
the paper's reporting on the Watergate scandal which led to President
Richard Nixon's resignation.
In 2011, Knopf published Blue Nights, a memoir about aging. The book focuses on Didion's daughter, who died just before The Year of Magical Thinking was published. It addresses their relationship with stunning frankness. More generally, the book deals with the anxieties Didion experienced about adopting and raising a child, and about the aging process.
In 2021, Didion published Let Me Tell You What I Mean, a collection of 12 essays she wrote between 1968 and 2000.
A photo of Didion shot by Juergen Teller was used as part of the Spring/Summer 2015 campaign of the luxury French brand Céline.
New Journalism seeks to communicate facts through narrative storytelling and literary techniques. This style is also described ascreative nonfiction, intimate journalism, or literary nonfiction. It is a popular moment in the long history of literary journalism in America.
Didion viewed the structure of the sentence as essential to her work. In the NewYork Times article Why I Write (1976), Didion remarked, To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed... The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind...The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what's going on in the picture.
Didion was heavily influenced by Ernest Hemingway, whose writing taught her the importance of how sentences work in a text. Her other influences included Henry James, who wrote perfect, indirect, complicated sentences, and George Eliot.
Didion died from complications of Parkinson's disease at her home in Manhattan on December 23, 2021, at the age of 87.
Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
