Today, The Grandma has been reading about Richard Gere,the American actor who was born on a day like today in 1949, and his struggle in a favour of the TibetanIndependence Movement.
Richard Tiffany Gere (born August 31, 1949) is an American actor.
He began in films in the 1970s, playing a supporting role in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) and a starring role in Days of Heaven (1978). He came to prominence with his role in the film American Gigolo (1980), which established him as a leading man and a sex symbol. He has starred in many films, including An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), The Cotton Club (1984), Pretty Woman (1990), Sommersby (1993), Primal Fear (1996), Runaway Bride (1999), I'm Not There (2007), Nights in Rodanthe (2008), Arbitrage (2012) and Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer (2016). For portraying Billy Flynn in the musical Chicago (2002), he won a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award as part of the cast.
Richard Tiffany Gere was born in Philadelphia on August 31, 1949. The eldest son and second child of housewife Doris Ann and NMIC insurance agent Homer George Gere.
Gere was raised Methodist in Syracuse, New York. His paternal great-grandfather, George Lane Gere (1848-1932), changed the spelling of his surname from Geer. One of his ancestors, also named George, was an Englishman who came from Heavitree and settled in the Connecticut Colony in 1638. Both of Gere's parents were Mayflower descendants, and his ancestors include Pilgrims such as John Billington, William Brewster, Francis Eaton, Francis Cooke, Degory Priest, George Soule, and Richard Warren.
In 1967, he graduated from North Syracuse Central High School, where he excelled at gymnastics and music and played the trumpet. He attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst on a gymnastics scholarship, majoring in philosophy; after two years, he left and did not graduate.
Gere first worked professionally at the Seattle Repertory Theatre and the Provincetown Playhouse on Cape Cod in 1969, where he starred in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. His first major acting role was in the original London stage version of Grease, in 1973. He was one of the first notable Hollywood actors to play a homosexual character, starring as a gay Holocaust victim in the 1979 Broadway production of Bent, for which he earned a Theatre World Award.
Gere began appearing in Hollywood films in the mid-1970s. Originally cast in a starring role in The Lords of Flatbush (1974), he was replaced after fighting with his co-star Sylvester Stallone.
Gere regularly visits Dharamshala, the headquarters of the Tibetan government-in-exile. He is an advocate for human rights in Tibet and is a co-founder of the Tibet House US, creator of the Gere Foundation, and Chairman of the Board of Directors for the International Campaign for Tibet. Because hesupportsthe Tibetan Independence Movement, he is permanently banned from entering China.
Today, The Grandma has been reading about Maksymilian Faktorowicz,the Polish-Americanbusinessman, beautician, entrepreneur and inventor, who died on a day like today in 1938.
Maksymilian Faktorowicz (September15, 1877-August 30, 1938), also known as Max Factor Sr., was a Polish-American businessman, beautician, entrepreneurand inventor.
As a founder of the cosmetics giant MaxFactor & Company, he largely developed the modern cosmetics industry in the United States and popularized the term make-up in noun form based on the verb.
He is also known for doing makeovers for starlets and giving them their signature looks; his most iconic works include Jean Harlow's platinum hair, Clara Bow's bob, Lucille Ball's false lashes and red curls, and Joan Crawford's Hunter's Bow, or overdrawn lips.
Factor, of Polish-Jewish descent, was born in Zduńska Wola to Abraham Faktorowicz (1850/52-before 1938) and Cecylia Wrocławska.
By the age of eight years, Factor was working as an assistant to a dentist and pharmacist. At the age of nine, he was apprenticed to a wig maker and cosmetician in Łódź, in central Poland. That experience enabled him to gain a position at Anton's of Berlin, a leading hairstylist and cosmetics creator. By the age of fourteen, he was working at Korpo, a Moscow wig maker and cosmetician to the Imperial Russian Grand Opera. He spent the years from age eighteen to twenty-two undertaking his compulsory military service in the Imperial Russian Army, where he served in the Hospital Corps.
Upon his discharge, he opened his own shop in the town of Ryazan, selling hand-made rouges, creams, fragrances, and wigs. He became well known when a traveling theatrical troupe wore Factor's cosmetics to perform for Russian nobility.
The Russian nobility appointed Factor the official cosmetics expert for the royal family and the Imperial Russian Grand Opera, an honor which led to him being closely monitored.
By 1904, concerned about the increasing anti-Jewish persecution developing in the Russian Empire, he and his wife decided to follow his brother Nathan and uncle Fischel to America. They settled in St. Louis, Missouri.
He sold his rouges and creams at the 1904 World's Fair, operating under the newly re-spelled name Max Factor. His partner in the venture stole all of his stock and the profits. With assistance from his brother and uncle, Factor recovered and opened a barber's shop.
Factor moved his family to Los Angeles, California, when he saw an opportunity to provide made-to-order wigs and theatrical make-up to the growing film industry. Initially, he established a shop on South Central Avenue, and advertised the business as Max Factor's Antiseptic Hair Store.
After the foundation of Max Factor & Company in 1909, he soon became the West Coast distributor of Leichner and Minor, two leading theatrical make-up manufacturers. Greasepaint in stick form -although the accepted make-up for use on the stage- could not be applied thinly enough, nor were the colors appropriate, to work satisfactorily on the screen during the early years of movie-making.
Factor began experimenting with various compounds in an effort to develop a suitable make-up for the new film medium.
By 1914, he had perfected the first cosmetic specifically created for motion picture use -a thinner greasepaint in cream form, packaged in a jar, and created in 12 precisely-graduated shades. Unlike theatrical cosmetics, it would not crack or cake.
With this major achievement to his credit, Max Factor became the authority on cosmetics for film making. Soon, movie stars were eager to sample the flexiblegreasepaint, while movie producers sought Factor's human hair wigs.
Factor marketed a range of cosmetics to the public during the 1920s, and insisted that every girl could look like a movie star by using Max Factor cosmetics.
In the early years of the business, Factor personally applied his products to actors and actresses. He developed a reputation for being able to customize makeup to present actors and actresses in the best possible light on screen. Among his most notable clients were: Ben Turpin, Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Pola Negri, Jean Harlow, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Lucille Ball, and Judy Garland.
As a result, virtually all of the major movie actresses were regular customers of the Max Factor beauty salon, located near Hollywood Boulevard. Max Factor'sname appeared on many movie credits, and Factor appeared in some cameos.
In 1920, Max Factor gave in to Frank Factor's suggestion, and officially began referring to his products as make-up. Until then, the term cosmetics had been used, because make-up was considered to be used only by people in the theatre or of dubious reputation -not something to be used in polite society.
Factor died on August 30, 1938, at the age of 60, in Beverly Hills, California.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented Max Factor with an honorary Academy Award in 1929 for his contributions to the film industry. Additionally, Max Factor is honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Today, The Grandma has been watching Netflix, the American subscriptionstreaming service that was launched as an internet DVD rental service on a day like today in 1997.
Netflix, Inc. is an American subscription streaming service andproductioncompany based in Los Gatos, California. Founded on August 29, 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California, it offers a film and television series library through distribution deals as well as its own productions, known as Netflix Originals.
As of June 30, 2022, Netflix had 220.7 million subscribers worldwide, including 73.3 million in the United States and Canada, 73.0 million in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 39.6 million in Latin America and 34.8 million in the Asia-Pacific region.
It is available worldwide aside from Mainland China, Syria, North Korea, and Russia. Netflix has played a prominent role in independent film distribution, and it is a member of the Motion Picture Association (MPA).
Netflix can be accessed via web browsers or via application software installed on smart TVs, set-top boxes connected to televisions, tablet computers, smartphones, digital media players, Blu-ray players, video game consoles and virtual reality headsets on the list of Netflix-compatible devices. It is available in 4K resolution. In the United States, the company provides DVD and Blu-ray rentals delivered individually via the United States Postal Service from regional warehouses.
Netflix initially both sold and rented DVDs by mail, but the sales were eliminated within a year to focus on the DVD rental business.
In 2007, Netflix introduced streaming media and video on demand. The company expanded to Canada in 2010, followed by Latin America and the Caribbean.
Netflix entered the content-production industry in 2013, debuting its first series House of Cards. In January 2016, it expanded to an additional 130 countries and then operated in 190 countries.
The company is ranked 115th on the Fortune 500 and 219th on the Forbes Global 2000. It is the second largest entertainment/media company by market capitalization as of February 2022.
In 2021, Netflix was ranked as the eighth-most trusted brand globally by Morning Consult. During the 2010s, Netflix was the top-performing stock in the S&P 500 stock market index, with a total return of 3,693%.
Netflix is headquartered in Los Gatos, California, in Santa Clara County, with the two CEOs, Hastings and Ted Sarandos, split between Los Gatos and Los Angeles, respectively.
On August 29, 1997, Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings founded Netflix in Scotts Valley, California. Hastings, a computer scientist and mathematician, was a co-founder of Pure Atria, which was acquired by Rational Software Corporation in 1997 for $700 million, then the biggest acquisition in Silicon Valley history.
Netflix can be accessed via an internet browser on PCs, while Netflix apps are available on various platforms, including Blu-ray Disc players, tablet computers, mobile phones, smart TVs, digital media players, and video game consoles (including Xbox 360 and newer, and PlayStation 3 and newer). The Wii, Wii U, Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation 2 were formerly compatible with Netflix as well.
In addition, a growing number of multichannel television providers, including cable television and IPTV services, have also added Netflix apps accessible within their own set-top boxes, sometimes with the ability for its content (along with those of other online video services) to be presented within a unified search interface alongside linear television programming as an all-in-one solution.
4K streaming requires a 4K-compatible device and display, both supporting HDCP 2.2. 4K streaming on personal computers requires hardware and software support of the Microsoft PlayReady 3.0 digital rights management solution, which requires a compatible CPU, graphics card, and software environment. Currently, this feature is limited to 7th generation Intel Core or later CPUs, Windows 10, Nvidia GeForce 10 series and AMD Radeon 400 series or later graphics cards, and running through Microsoft Edge web browser, or the Netflix universal app available on Microsoft Store.
Today, The Grandma has received the wonderful visit of Joseph de Ca'th Lon, one of her closest friends.
Joseph loves Science, and they have been talking about Scientific American, the popular science magazine, whose first issue was published on a day like today in 1845.
Scientific American, informally abbreviated SciAm or sometimes SA, is an American popular sciencemagazine.
Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein, have contributed articles to it. Inprint since 1845,it is the oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the United States, although it did not become monthly until 1921.
Scientific American is owned by Springer Nature, which in turn is a subsidiary of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
Scientific American was founded by inventor and publisher Rufus M. Porter in 1845 as a four-page weekly newspaper.
The first issue of the large format newspaper was released August 28, 1845.
Throughout its early years, much emphasis was placed on reports of what was going on at the U.S. Patent Office. It also reported on a broad range of inventions including perpetual motion machines, an 1860 device for buoying vessels by Abraham Lincoln, and the universal joint which now can be found in nearly every automobile manufactured.
Current issues include a this date in history section, featuring excerpts from articles originally published 50, 100, and 150 years earlier. Topics include humorous incidents, wrong-headed theories, and noteworthy advances in the history of science and technology. It started as a weekly publication in August 1845 before turning into monthly in November 1921.
Porter sold the publication to Alfred Ely Beach and Orson Desaix Munn a mere ten months after founding it. Until 1948, it remained owned by Munn & Company. Under Munn's grandson, Orson Desaix Munn III, it had evolved into something of a workbench publication, similar to the twentieth-century incarnation of PopularScience.
In the years after World War II, the magazine fell into decline. In 1948, three partners who were planning on starting a new popular science magazine, to be called The Sciences, purchased the assets of the old Scientific American instead and put its name on the designs they had created for their new magazine. Thus the partners -publisher Gerard Piel, editor Dennis Flanagan, and general manager Donald H. Miller, Jr.- essentially created a new magazine.
Miller retired in 1979, Flanagan and Piel in 1984, when Gerard Piel's son Jonathan became president and editor; circulation had grown fifteen-fold since 1948.
In 1986, it was sold to the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group of Germany, which has owned it until the Springer-Nature merger. In the fall of 2008, Scientific American was put under the control of Holtzbrinck's Nature Publishing Group division.
Donald Miller died in December 1998, Gerard Piel in September 2004 and Dennis Flanagan in January 2005. Mariette DiChristina became editor-in-chief after John Rennie stepped down in June 2009, and stepped down herself in September 2019. On April 13, 2020, Laura Helmuth assumed the role of editor-in-chief.
Scientific American published its
first foreign edition in 1890, the Spanish-language La America
Cientifica. Publication was suspended in 1905, and another 63 years
would pass before another foreign-language edition appeared: In 1968, an
Italian edition, Le Scienze, was launched, and a Japanese edition,
Nikkei Science, followed three years later.
Today, Scientific American publishes 18 foreign-language editions around the globe: Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian (discontinued after 15 issues), Polish, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish.
From 1902 to 1911, Scientific American supervised the publication of the Encyclopedia Americana, which during some of that period was known as The Americana.
In March 1996, Scientific American launched its own website that included articles from current and past issues, online-only features, daily news, special reports, and trivia, among other things. The website introduced a paywall in April 2019, with readers able to view a few articles for free each month.
Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence.
The Grandma loves dogs and she has been remembering one of her best friends, a beautiful Pomeranian who shares his life with her during a short time.
The Pomeranian, often known as a Pom, is a breed of dog of the Spitz type that is named for the Pomerania region in north-west Poland and north-east Germany in Central Europe.
Classed as a toy dog breed because of its small size, the Pomeranian is descended from larger Spitz-type dogs, specifically the German Spitz. It has been determined by the Fédération Cynologique Internationale to be part of the German Spitz breed; and in many countries, they are known as the Zwergspitz, Dwarf Spitz.
The breed has been made popular by a number of royal owners since the 18th century. Queen Victoria owned a particularly small Pomeranian and consequently, the smaller variety became universally popular.
During Queen Victoria's lifetime alone, the size of the breed decreased by half. Overall, the Pomeranian is a sturdy, healthy dog. The most common health issues are luxating patella and tracheal collapse. More rarely, the breed can have Alopecia X, a skin condition colloquially known as black skin disease. This is a genetic disease which causes the dog's skin to turn black and lose all or most of its hair.
As of 2017, in terms of registration figures, since at least 1998, the breed has ranked among the top fifty most popular breeds in the United States, and the current fashion for small dogs has increased their popularity worldwide.
Pomeranians are small dogs weighing 1.36–3.17 kilograms and standing 20-36 cm high at the withers. They are compact but sturdy dogs with an abundant textured coat with a highly plumed tail set high and flat. The top coat forms a ruff of fur on the neck, which Poms are well known for, and they also have a fringe of feathery hair on the hindquarters.
The earliest examples of the breed were white or occasionally brown or black. Queen Victoria adopted a small red Pomeranian in 1888, which caused that color to become fashionable by the end of the 19th century.
In modern times, the Pomeranian comes in the widest variety of colors of any dog breed, including white, black, brown, red, orange, cream, blue, sable, black and tan, brown and tan, spotted, brindle, and parti, plus combinations of those colors. The most common colors are orange, black, or cream/white.
The merle Pomeranian is a recent colour developed by breeders. It is a combination of a solid base colour with a lighter blue/grey patch which gives a mottled effect. The most common base colours for the effect are red/brown or black, although it can also appear with other colours. Combinations such as brindle merle or liver merle are not accepted in the breed standard. In addition, the eye, nose and paw pad are marshmallow color, changing parts of the eye to blue and the color on the nose and paw pads to become mottled pink and black.
Pomeranians have a thick double coat. While grooming is not difficult, breeders recommend that it be done daily to maintain the quality of the coat and because of its thickness and the constant shedding, with trimming every 1-2 months. The outer coat is long, straight, and harsh in texture while the undercoat is soft, thick and short. The coat knots and tangles easily, particularly when the undercoat is being shed, which happens twice a year.
Pomeranians are typically friendly, lively and playful. They can be aggressive with other dogs and humans to try to prove themselves.
Pomeranians are alert and
aware of changes in their environment, and barking at new stimuli can
develop into a habit of barking excessively in any situation. They are
somewhat defensive of their territory and thus may bark when they hear
outside noises.
Pomeranians are intelligent,
respond well to training, and can be very successful in getting what
they want from their owners. They are extroverted and enjoy being the
center of attention, but they can become dominant, willful and stubborn
if not well trained and socialized. The use of toys can be an effective
tool in training Pomeranians to spend time alone.
The life expectancy of a Pomeranian is 12 to 16 years. A well-bred dog on a good diet with appropriate exercise will have few health problems; if kept trim and fit, the Pomeranian is a sturdy dog.
The Pomeranian is a small but energetic breed of dog. Although Pomeranians benefit from frequent attention, they need relatively little exercise: it is recommended to take them on several daily walks and let them run around an enclosed space.
The Pomeranian is considered to be descended from the German Spitz. The breed is thought to have acquired its name by association with the area known as Pomerania which is located in northern Poland and Germany along the Baltic Sea. Although not the origin of the breed, this area is credited with the breeding which led to the original Pomeranian type of dog. Proper documentation was lacking until the breed's introduction into the United Kingdom.
An early modern recorded reference to the Pomeranian breed is from 2 November 1764, in a diary entry in James Boswell's Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland. The Frenchman had a Pomeranian dog named Pomer whom he was mighty fond of. The offspring of a Pomeranian and a wolf bred by an animal merchant from London is discussed in Thomas Pennant's A Tour in Scotland from 1769.
Two members of the British Royal Family influenced the evolution of the breed. In 1767, Queen Charlotte, Queen-consort of King George III of Great Britain, brought two Pomeranians to England. Named Phoebe and Mercury, the dogs were depicted in paintings by Sir Thomas Gainsborough. These paintings depicted a dog larger than the modern breed, reportedly weighing as much as 14–23 kg, but showing modern traits such as the heavy coat, ears and a tail curled over the back.
Queen Victoria, Queen Charlotte's granddaughter, was also an enthusiast and established a large breeding kennel. One of her favoured dogs was a comparatively small red sable Pomeranian which she possibly named Windsor's Marco and was reported to weigh only 5.4 kg. When she first exhibited Marco in 1891, it caused the smaller-type Pomeranian to become immediately popular and breeders began selecting only the smaller specimens for breeding. During her lifetime, the size of the Pomeranian breed was reported to have decreased by 50%.
Queen Victoria worked to improve and promote the Pomeranian breed by importing smaller Pomeranians of different colours from various European countries to add to her breeding program. Royal owners during this period also included Joséphine de Beauharnais, the wife of Napoleon I of France, and King George IV of the United Kingdom.
The first breed club was set up in England in 1891, and the first breed standard was written shortly afterwards. The first member of the breed was registered in the United States to the American Kennel Club in 1898, and it was recognized in 1900.
In 1912, two Pomeranians were among only three dogs to survive the sinking of RMS Titanic. A Pomeranian called Lady, owned by Miss Margaret Hays, escaped with her owner in lifeboat number seven, while Elizabeth Barrett Rothschild took her pet to safety with her in lifeboat number six.
Glen Rose Flashaway won the Toy Group at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in 1926, the first Pomeranian to win a group at Westminster. It would take until 1988 for the first Pomeranian, Great Elms Prince Charming II, to win the Best in Show prize from the Westminster Kennel Club.
In the standard published in 1998, the Pomeranian is included in the German Spitz standard, along with the Keeshond, by the Fédération Cynologique Internationale. According to the standard Spitz breeds are captivating and have a unique characteristic, cheeky appearance.
Today, The Grandma has been reading some poetry. She has chosen GuillaumeApollinaire,one of her favourite poets, who was born on a day like today in 1880.
Guillaume Apollinaire (26 August 1880-9 November 1918) was a Frenchpoet, playwright, shortstory writer, novelist, and art critic of Polish-Belarusian descent.
Apollinaire is considered one of the foremost poets of the early 20th century, as well as one of the most impassioned defenders of Cubism and a forefather of Surrealism.
He is credited with coining the term Cubism in 1911 to describe the emerging art movement, the term Orphism in 1912, and the term Surrealism in 1917 to describe the works of Erik Satie. He wrote poems without punctuation attempting to be resolutely modern in both form and subject.
Apollinaire wrote one of the earliest Surrealist literary works, the play TheBreasts of Tiresias (1917), which became the basis for Francis Poulenc's 1947 opera Les mamelles de Tirésias.
Influenced by Symbolist poetry in his youth, he was admired during his lifetime by the young poets who later formed the nucleus of the Surrealist group (Breton, Aragon, Soupault). He revealed very early on an originality that freed him from any school of influence and made him one of the precursors of the literary revolution of the first half of the 20th century.
His art is not based on any theory, but on a simple principle: the act of creating must come from the imagination, from intuition, because it must be as close as possible to life, to nature, to the environment, and to the human being.
Apollinaire was also active as a journalist and art critic for Le Matin, L'Intransigeant, L'Esprit nouveau, Mercure de France, and Paris Journal.
In 1912 Apollinaire cofounded Les Soirées de Paris, an artistic and literary magazine.
Two years after being wounded in World War I, Apollinaire died during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 and was recognized as Mort pour la Francebecause of his commitment during the war.
Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki was born in Rome, Italy,and was raised speaking French, Italian, and Polish. He emigrated to France in his late teens and adopted the name Guillaume Apollinaire.
Apollinaire eventually moved from Rome to Paris in 1900 and became one of the most popular members of the artistic community of Paris, both in Montmartre and Montparnasse. His friends and collaborators in that period included Pablo Picasso, Henri Rousseau, Gertrude Stein, Max Jacob, André Salmon, André Breton, André Derain, Faik Konitza, Blaise Cendrars, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Pierre Reverdy, Alexandra Exter, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, Ossip Zadkine, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp and Jean Metzinger. He became romantically involved with Marie Laurencin, who is often identified as his muse. While there, he dabbled in anarchism and spoke out as a Dreyfusard in defense of Dreyfus's innocence.
Metzinger painted the first Cubist portrait of Apollinaire. In his Vie anecdotique (16 October 1911), the poet proudly writes: I am honoured to be the first model of a Cubist painter, Jean Metzinger, for a portrait exhibited in 1910 at the Salon des Indépendants. It was not only the first Cubist portrait, according to Apollinaire, but it was also the first great portrait of the poet exhibited in public, prior to others by Louis Marcoussis, Amedeo Modigliani, Mikhail Larionov and Picasso.
In 1911 he joined the Puteaux Group, a branch of the Cubist movement soon to be known as the Section d'Or. The opening address of the 1912 Salon de la Section d'Or -the most important pre-World War I Cubist exhibition- was given by Apollinaire.
On 7 September 1911, police arrested and jailed him on suspicion of aiding and abetting the theft of the Mona Lisa and a number of Egyptian statuettes from the Louvre, but released him a week later.
The theft of the statues had been committed in 1907 by a former secretary of Apollinaire, Honoré Joseph Géry Pieret, who had recently returned one of the stolen statues to the French newspaper the Paris-Journal.
Apollinaire implicated his friend Picasso, who had bought Iberian statues from Pieret, and who was also brought in for questioning in the theft of the Mona Lisa,but he was also exonerated.
The theft of the Mona Lisa was perpetrated by Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian house painter who acted alone and was only caught two years later when he tried to sell the painting in Florence.
Apollinaire wrote the preface for the first Cubist exposition outside of Paris; VIII Salon des Indépendants, Brussels, 1911. In an open-handed preface to the catalogue of the Brussels Indépendants show, Apollinaire stated that these new painters accepted the name of Cubists which has been given to them. He described Cubism as a manifestation nouvelle et très élevée de l'art, non-point un système contraignant les talents, and the differences which characterize not only the talents but even the styles of these artists are an obvious proof of this.
The artists involved with this new movement, according to Apollinaire, included Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay,Fernand Léger, and Henri Le Fauconnier.
By 1912 others had joined the Cubists: Jacques Villon, Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Francis Picabia, Juan Gris, and Roger de La Fresnaye, among them.
The term Surrealism was first used by Apollinaire concerning the ballet Parade in 1917. The poet Arthur Rimbaud wanted to be a visionary, to perceive the hidden side of things within the realm of another reality. In continuity with Rimbaud, Apollinaire went in search of a hidden and mysterious reality. The term surrealism appeared for the first time in March 1917 (Chronologie de Dada et du surréalisme, 1917) in a letter by Apollinaire to Paul Dermée: Tout bien examiné, je crois en effet qu'il vaut mieux adopter surréalisme que surnaturalisme que j'avais d'abord employé.
He described Parade as une sorte de surréalisme when he wrote the program note the following week, thus coining the word three years before Surrealism emerged as an art movement in Paris.
Apollinaire served as an infantry officer in World War I and, in 1916, received a serious shrapnel wound to the temple, from which he would never fully recover. He wrote Les Mamelles de Tirésias while recovering from this wound. During this period he coined the word Surrealism in the programme notes for Jean Cocteau's and Erik Satie's ballet Parade, first performed on 18 May 1917. He also published an artistic manifesto, L'Esprit nouveau et les poètes.
Apollinaire's status as a literary critic is most famous and influential in his recognition of the Marquis de Sade, whose works were for a long time obscure, yet arising in popularity as an influence upon the Dadaand Surrealist art movements going on in Montparnasse at the beginning of the twentieth century as, The freest spirit that ever existed.
The war-weakened Apollinaire died at the age of 38 on 9 November 1918 of influenza during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 ravaging Europe at the time, two years after being wounded in World War I.
Due to his military service for the duration of the war, he was declared Mort pour la France by the French government. He was interred in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris.
In 1900 he wrote his first novel Mirely, ou le petit trou pas cher (pornographic), which was eventually lost.
Apollinaire's first collection of poetry was L'enchanteur pourrissant (1909), but Alcools (1913) established his reputation. The poems, influenced in part by the Symbolists, juxtapose the old and the new, combining traditional poetic forms with modern imagery.
In 1913, Apollinaire published the essay Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques on the Cubist painters, a movement which he helped to define. He also coined the term orphism to describe a tendency towards absolute abstraction in the paintings of Robert Delaunay and others.
In 1907, Apollinaire published the well-known erotic novel, Les Onze Mille Verges. Officially banned in France until 1970, various printings of it circulated widely for many years.
Apollinaire never publicly acknowledged authorship of the novel. Another erotic novel attributed to him was Les exploits d'un jeune Don Juan, in which the 15-year-old hero fathers three children with various members of his entourage, including his aunt.
Apollinaire's gift to Picasso of the original 1907 manuscript was one of the artist's most prized possessions. The book was made into a movie in 1987.
Shortly after his death, Mercure de France published Calligrammes, a collection of his concrete poetry (poetry in which typography and layout adds to the overall effect), and more orthodox, though still modernist poems informed by Apollinaire's experiences in the First World War and in which he often used the technique of automatic writing.
In his youth Apollinaire lived for a short while in Belgium, mastering the Walloon dialect sufficiently to write poetry, some of which has survived.
Today, The Grandma has received thewonderful visit of one of her closestfriends, Joseph de Ca'th Lon.
Joseph loves Astronomy and they have been talking about the Spitzer SpaceTelescope, that was successfully launched into space on a day like today in 2003.
The Spitzer Space Telescope,formerly the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF), was an infraredspace telescope launched in 2003. Operations ended on 30 January 2020.
Spitzer was the third space telescope dedicated to infrared astronomy, following IRAS (1983) and ISO (1995-1998). It was the first spacecraft to use an Earth-trailing orbit, later used by the Kepler planet-finder.
The planned mission period was to be 2.5 years with a pre-launch expectation that the mission could extend to five or slightly more years until the onboard liquid helium supply was exhausted. This occurred on 15 May 2009. Without liquid helium to cool the telescope to the very low temperatures needed to operate, most of the instruments were no longer usable. However, the two shortest-wavelength modules of the IRAC camera continued to operate with the same sensitivity as before the helium was exhausted, and continued to be used into early 2020 in the Spitzer Warm Mission.
During the warm mission, the two short wavelength channels of IRAC operated at 28.7 K and were predicted to experience little to no degradation at this temperature compared to the nominal mission. The Spitzer data, from both the primary and warm phases, are archived at the Infrared Science Archive (IRSA).
In keeping with NASA tradition, the telescope was renamed after its successful demonstration of operation, on 18 December 2003. Unlike most telescopes that are named by a board of scientists, typically after famous deceased astronomers, the new name for SIRTF was obtained from a contest open to the general public.
The contest led to the telescope being named in honor of astronomer Lyman Spitzer, who had promoted the concept of space telescopes in the 1940s.
Spitzer wrote a 1946 report for RAND Corporation describing the advantages of an extraterrestrial observatory and how it could be realized with available or upcoming technology. He has been cited for his pioneering contributions to rocketry and astronomy, as well as his vision and leadership in articulating the advantages and benefits to be realized from the Space Telescope Program.
The US$776 million Spitzerwas launched on 25 August 2003 at 05:35:39 UTC from Cape Canaveral SLC-17B aboard a Delta II 7920H rocket.
It was placed into a heliocentric as opposed to a geocentric orbit trailing and drifting away from Earth's orbit at approximately 0.1 astronomical units per year, an Earth-trailing orbit.
The primary mirror is 85 centimeters in diameter, f/12, made of beryllium and was cooled to 5.5 K. The satellite contains three instruments that allowed it to perform astronomical imaging and photometry from 3.6 to 160 micrometers, spectroscopy from 5.2 to 38 micrometers, and spectrophotometry from 55 to 95 micrometers.
By the early 1970s, astronomers began to consider the possibility of placing an infrared telescope above the obscuring effects of Earth's atmosphere.
In 1979, a report from the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, A Strategy for Space Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 1980s, identified a Shuttle Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF) as one of two major astrophysics facilities to be developed for Spacelab, a shuttle-borne platform. Anticipating the major results from an upcoming Explorer satellite and from the Shuttle mission, the report also favored the study and development of... long-duration spaceflights of infrared telescopes cooled to cryogenic temperatures.
Today, The Grandma has received news from Mayte, one of her closest friends. Mayte has visited Gràcia, one of the most popular neighbourhoods of Barcelona, and has shared her memories and photos with TheGrandma.
Gràcia is a district of the city of Barcelona, Catalonia.
It comprises the neighbourhoods of Vila de Gràcia, Vallcarca i els Penitents, El Coll, La Salut and Camp d'en Grassot i Gràcia Nova.
Gràcia is bordered by the districts of Eixample to the south, Sarrià-Sant Gervasi to the west and Horta-Guinardó to the east. A vibrant and diverse enclave of Catalan life, Gràciawas an independent municipality for centuries before being formally annexed by Barcelona in 1897 as a part of the city's expansion.
Gràcia was established in 1626, by a Novitiate of Carmelites, who established a convent there, called Nostra Senyora de Gràcia.
Following the War of the Spanish Succession, Gràcia remained an independent municipality in the direction of the Serra de Collserola mountains (north/northwest) from central Barcelona.
Passeig de Gràcia, the street which is today home to the most high-end international fashion brands and posh hotels , was back then a country road linking the town to the larger city, through the plain of Barcelona.
During the mid-1800s, Barcelona was rapidly industrialising and significantly expanding its borders from those of the Roman walls and old city. The advent of new industry was drawing Catalans by the thousands to abandon their farms and move to the city, spurring a shift from an agriculturally based, rural economy to an urban economy focused on manufacturing and trade.
In 1897, Barcelona formally annexed the town of Gràcia, and it has existed since as a neighborhood of the Catalan capital. Although no longer independent, Gràcia has long maintained a distinct identity as a unique district of the diverse, larger metropolis to which it belongs.
Gràcia is both the smallest district by area, at 4.2 km2, and the second most densely populated neighbourhood in Barcelona. One of the hippest, most cosmopolitan areas in the city, Gràcia's intimate, close-packed streets and predominately low-rise, Mediterranean architecture give it a distinct feel. Its old, one-way streets are organized around a series of plazas, including Plaça de Vila de Gràcia, Plaça del Sol and Plaça de la Virreina. Old-world charm abounds.
To the northern end of Gràcia on El Carmel mountain lies Park Güell, arguably the most famous work of Catalonia's most famous architect, Antoni Gaudí.
On Carrer de les Carolines, between Plaça Lesseps and Fontana, lies CasaVicens, Gaudí's first major work of architecture and a staple in his canon of modernist design. An occupied house for decades, Casa Vicens only recently became a tourist attraction on November 15, 2017. The building was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005.
Casa Fuster, a fabled, grand modernist-style hotel that lies at the edge of Gràcia's southern end on the Plaça de Nicolás Salmerón. Designed by Catalan master architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner between 1908 and 1910, the ornate house was converted to a hotel in 2004.
In the Plaça de la Vila de Gràcia, the bell tower marks the old administrative centre of the former independent municipality. The tower, a 33-meter-high octagonal figure, was built by Rovira i Trias between 1862 and 1864. A legend describes the Campana de Gràcia and its role in local conflicts from 1870.
Mercè Rodoreda's most important novel, La Plaça del Diamant, is set mainly in Gràcia at the time of the Second Spanish Republic and the Spanish Civil War.
The Gràcia population is a mix of young professionals and artists and a growing elderly population, with a significant portion of older Catalans who came of age as Franco came to power. Catalan flags adorn many a Gràcia window or terrace, symbols of the neighbourhood's fiercely pro-independence politics.
The most notable event in Gràcia is the Festes de Gràcia, which goes on for eight days every August.
The largest neighbourhood festival in Barcelona, the Festa Major de Gràcia began in 1817 as a celebration of the neighbourhood itself, at the time still an independent town.
Gràcia's residents compete for the crown of best street or square, selecting distinct themes and extensively decorating in Spanish carnival style, and organised by a number of local associations. The selected themes range from scenes of nature, to wild animals and creatures, to characters from popular culture.
Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance.
Today, The Grandma has been watching some movies. She has chosen Gene Kelly'sones, the American actor dancer, singer, filmmaker, and choreographer, who was born on a day like today in 1912.
Eugene Curran Kelly (August 23, 1912-February 2, 1996) was an American actor, dancer, singer, filmmaker, andchoreographer.
He was known for his energetic and athletic dancing style, his good looks, and the likable characters that he played on screen.
He starred in,choreographed, and co-directed with Stanley Donen, some of the most well-regarded musical films of the 1940s and 1950s.
Kelly is best known for his performances in An American in Paris (1951), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Singin' in the Rain (1952), which he and Donen directed and choreographed, and other musical films of that era such as Cover Girl (1944) and Anchors Aweigh (1945), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor.
On the Town (1949), which he co-directed with Donen, was his directorial debut. Later in the 1950s, as musicals waned in popularity, he starred in Brigadoon (1954) and It's Always Fair Weather (1955), the last film he directed with Donen. His solo directorial debut was Invitation to the Dance (1956), one of the last MGM musicals, which was not a commercial success.
Kelly made his film debut with Judy Garland in For Me and My Gal (1942), with whom he also appeared in The Pirate (1948) and Summer Stock (1950). He also appeared in the dramas Black Hand (1950) and Inherit the Wind (1960), for which he received critical praise.
He continued as a director in the 1960s, with his credits including A Guide for the Married Man (1967) and Hello, Dolly! (1969), which received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. He co-hosted and appeared in Ziegfeld Follies (1946), That's Entertainment! (1974), That's Entertainment, Part II (1976), That's Dancing! (1985), and That's Entertainment, Part III (1994).
His many innovations transformed the Hollywood musical, and he is credited with almost single-handedly making the ballet form commercially acceptable to film audiences.
Kelly received an Academy Honorary Award in 1952 for his career achievements; the same year, An American in Paris won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. He later received lifetime achievement awards in the Kennedy Center Honors (1982) and from the Screen Actors Guild and American Film Institute. In 1999, the American Film Institute also ranked him as the 15th greatest male screen legend of Classic Hollywood Cinema.
Kelly was born in the East Liberty neighbourhood of Pittsburgh. He was the third son of James Patrick Joseph Kelly, a phonograph salesman, and his wife, Harriet Catherine Curran.
After a fruitless search for work in New York, Kelly returned to Pittsburgh to his first position as a choreographer with the Charles Gaynor musical revue Hold Your Hats at the Pittsburgh Playhouse in April 1938. Kelly appeared in six of the sketches, one of which, La cumparsita, became the basis of an extended Spanish number in the film Anchors Aweigh eight years later.
His first Broadway assignment, in November 1938, was as a dancer in Cole Porter's Leave It to Me! -as the American ambassador's secretary who supports Mary Martin while she sings My Heart Belongs to Daddy.
Selznick sold half of Kelly's contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for his first motion picture: For Me and My Gal (1942) starring Judy Garland.
He achieved a significant breakthrough as a dancer on film when MGM lent him to Columbia to work with Rita Hayworth in Cover Girl (1944), a film that foreshadowed the best of his future work.
After Kelly returned to Hollywood in 1946, MGM had nothing planned and used him in a routine, black-and-white movie: Living in a Big Way (1947).
Then followed in quick succession two musicals that secured Kelly's reputation as a major figure in the American musical film. First, An American in Paris (1951) and -probably the most admired of all film musicals- Singin' in the Rain (1952).
In 1958, Kelly directed Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical play Flower Drum Song.
Kelly continued to make some film appearances, such as Hornbeck in the Hollywood production of Inherit the Wind (1960) and as himself in Let's Make Love (also 1960).
In 1966, Kelly starred in an hour-long musical television special for CBS titled, Gene Kelly in New York, New York.
Kelly continued to make frequent TV appearances. His final film role was in Xanadu (1980), a surprise flop despite a popular soundtrack that spawned five Top 20 hits by the Electric Light Orchestra, Cliff Richard, and Kelly's co-star Olivia Newton-John.
Kelly was a lifelong supporter of the Democratic Party. His period of greatest prominence coincided with the McCarthy era in the US. In 1947, he was part of the Committee for the First Amendment, the Hollywood delegation that flew to Washington to protest at the first official hearings by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
He was raised as a Roman Catholic and was a member of the Good Shepherd Parish and the Catholic Motion Picture Guild in Beverly Hills, California. However, after becoming disenchanted by the Roman Catholic Church's support for Francisco Franco against the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War, he officially severed his ties with the church in September 1939. This separation was prompted, in part, by a trip Kelly made to Mexico in which he became convinced that the church had failed to help the poor in that country. After his departure from the Catholic Church, Kelly became an agnostic, as he had previously described himself.
Kelly's health declined steadily in the late 1980s. In July 1994, he suffered a stroke and stayed in Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center hospital for seven weeks. In early 1995, he had another stroke which made him severely disabled.
Kelly died on February 2, 1996. His body was cremated without a funeral or memorial service.
There is a strange sort of reasoning in Hollywood that musicals are less worthy of Academy consideration than dramas. It's a form of snobbism, the same sort that perpetuates the idea that drama is more deserving of Awards than comedy.
Today, The Grandma has been reading about DorothyParker, the Americanpoet,writer, critic, and satirist, who was born on a day like today in 1893.
Dorothy Parker (née Rothschild; August 22, 1893-June 7, 1967) was anAmerican poet, writer, critic, and satirist based in New York; she was best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles.
From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary works published in magazines, such as The New Yorker, and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed when her involvement in left-wing politics resulted in her being placed on the Hollywood blacklist.
Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a wisecracker. Nevertheless, both her literary output and reputation for sharp wit have endured. Some of her works have been set to music; adaptations notably include the operatic song cycle Hate Songs by composer Marcus Paus.
Also known as Dot or Dottie, Parker was born Dorothy Rothschild in 1893 to Jacob Henry Rothschild and his wife Eliza Annie (née Marston) (1851-1898) at 732 Ocean Avenue in Long Branch, New Jersey.
She sold her first poem to Vanity Fair magazine in 1914 and some months later was hired as an editorial assistant for Vogue, another Condé Nast magazine. She moved to Vanity Fair as a staff writer after two years at Vogue.
In 1917, she met a Wall Street stockbroker, Edwin Pond Parker II (1893-1933) and they married before he left to serve in World War I with the U.S. Army 4th Division.
Dorothy Parker filed for divorce in 1928. He later remarried, to Anne E. O’Brien, former probation officer of the Juvenile Court, and died at 39, following a dental procedure. It is disputed whether he died from an overdose of analgesic or sepsis resulting from multiple tooth extractions.
Dorothy Parker retained her married name, though she remarried the screenwriter and former actor Alan Campbell, and moved to Hollywood.
Parker's career took off in 1918 while she was writing theater criticism for Vanity Fair, filling in for the vacationing P. G. Wodehouse. At the magazine, she met Robert Benchley, who became a close friend, and Robert E. Sherwood. The trio began lunching at the Algonquin Hotel on a near-daily basis and became founding members of what became known as the Algonquin Round Table.
The Round Table numbered among its members the newspaper columnists Franklin Pierce Adams and Alexander Woollcott. Through their publication of Parker's lunchtime remarks and short verses, particularly in Adams' column The Conning Tower, Dorothy began developing a national reputation as a wit. When the group was informed that famously taciturn former president Calvin Coolidge had died, Parker remarked, How could they tell?
Parker's caustic wit as a critic initially proved popular, but she was eventually dismissed by Vanity Fair in 1920 after her criticisms too often offended powerful producers. In solidarity, Benchley resigned in protest.
Sherwood is sometimes reported to have done so as well, but in actuality he had been fired in December 1919. She soon started working for Ainslee's Magazine, which had a higher circulation. She also published pieces in Vanity Fair, which was happier to publish her than employ her, The Smart Set, and The American Mercury, but also in the popular Ladies’ Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post, and Life.
When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, Parker and Benchley were part of a board of editors established by Ross to allay the concerns of his investors. Parker's first piece for the magazine was published in its second issue.
Parker became famous for her short, viciously humorous poems, many highlighting ludicrous aspects of her many (largely unsuccessful) romantic affairs and others wistfully considering the appeal of suicide.
Parker published her first volume of poetry, Enough Rope, in 1926.
In 1932, Parker met Alan Campbell, an actor with aspirations to become a screenwriter. They married two years later in Raton, New Mexico. Campbell's mixed parentage was the reverse of Parker's: he had a German-Jewish mother and a Scottish father. She learned that he was bisexual and later proclaimed in public that he was "queer as a billy goat".
Parker occasionally participated in radio programs, including Information Please (as a guest) and Author, Author (as a regular panelist). She wrote for the Columbia Workshop, and both Ilka Chase and Tallulah Bankhead used her material for radio monologues.
Parker died on June 7, 1967, of a heart attack at the age of 73. In her will, she bequeathed her estate to Martin Luther King Jr., and upon King's death, to the NAACP.
Today, The Grandma has received the wonderful visit of Claire Fontaine, her closestfriend.
Together, they have visited the Monastery of Pedralbes, their favourite place to rest, contemplate and learn a lot about life in the Middle Age.
They have visited the Monastery and have honoured Elisenda de Montcada before reading about remedies and apothecariesduring the medieval period, an excellent exhibition that you can visit inside these amazing walls.
The exhibition proposes an exploration of the complex and elaborate science that evolved during the medieval period out of the basic principles of Greek and Roman medicine and the contributions of Arab-Islamic culture, and which used nature as the basis of its methodology.
This knowledge was transmitted through several books and treatises that were repeatedly copied, translated into several languages and discussed during centuries.
In medieval Barcelona, doctors and pharmacists not only had a deep knowledge of the healing properties of various animal and vegetable products but also of the medicinal remedies suitable for each disease, which could be purchased at apothecaries in the city.
The medieval Christian world recovered the knowledge of Greco-Roman medical science though Arab-Islamic culture, which had revived and perfected it. Authors such as Galen (c. 130 AD - 200 AD) and Pedanius Dioscorides (1st century AD) became the references for all medieval medical treatises.
Gallenic medicine was based on the theory of humours, according to which all living things are composed of four basic elements: air, water, earth and fire, arising from the combination of four fundamental properties formed by opposing pairs: heat and cold, dryness and humidity. In men, these four elements were identified with the four humours or substances: blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. When these fluids became unbalanced, illness arose.
The exhibition "Plants, Remedies and Apothecaries" is situated in three different areas of the Royal Monastery of St Mary of Pedralbes: the former pharmacy, the cloister and the old infirmary.
The bulk of the exhibition is located in a part of the cloister garden. This is a recreation of a medieval medicinal garden that presents fifty-one plants with medicinal properties, according to the knowledge extracted from the writings in Physica by the German abbess, mystic, composer and naturist Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) and a Catalan translation of The Book of Simple Medicines by the Andalusian physician Ibn al-Wafid (1007-1067).
They are some of the many plants that the nuns must have cultivated or acquired to cure their sick, as recorded in the oldest accounts books (14th century) that the community conserves in its historical archive.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)