JOAN MIRÓ, URBAN SURREALIST PICTORIAL LANGUAGE

Jordi & The Grandma in Can Mercader, Cornellà

Yesterday, The Grandma celebrated Christmas Day on her own. She is not a believer although she enjoys this day in a cultural way.

In the morning, she went to homage her past relatives and friends in a quiet and large place in the most popular Jewish mountain of the city. In the same place, she also could homage other people who died on a day like yesterday, like Francesc Macià and Joan Miró.

After this emotive visit, The Grandma went to The Miró Foundation where she had a private visit to enjoy on a closed day for the public but open for her and her closer friends.

Christmas is a time where you receive news from people who you remember but one day you lost his/her clue until they appear again in your life. The Grandma received some news from Jordi, an excellent writer interested in environment, who shared some wonderful moments with The Grandma and other unforgettable friends, learning English under some amazing palm trees in the city of Cornelianus.

In the afternoon, The Grandma studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 53).

More information: Pronouns 1 I & II

Joan Miró i Ferrà (20 April 1893-25 December 1983) was a Catalan, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in his adoptive city of Palma in 1981.

Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride. In numerous interviews dating from the 1930s onwards, Miró expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeois society, and declared an assassination of painting in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established painting.

Joan Miró

Born into a family of a goldsmith and a watchmaker, Miró grew up in the Barri Gòtic neighbourhood of Barcelona. The Miró surname indicates Jewish roots, the terms marrano or converso describe Iberian Jews who converted to Christianity.

His father was Miquel Miró Adzerias and his mother was Dolors Ferrà. He began drawing classes at the age of seven at a private school at Carrer del Regomir 13, a medieval mansion. To the dismay of his father, he enrolled at the fine art academy at La Llotja in 1907.He studied at the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc and he had his first solo show in 1918 at the Galeries Dalmau, where his work was ridiculed and defaced. Inspired by Fauve and Cubist exhibitions in Barcelona and abroad, Miró was drawn towards the arts community that was gathering in Montparnasse and in 1920 moved to Paris, but continued to spend his summers in Catalonia.

Miró initially went to business school as well as art school. He began his working career as a clerk when he was a teenager, although he abandoned the business world completely for art after suffering a nervous breakdown. His early art, like that of the similarly influenced Fauves and Cubists, was inspired by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne. The resemblance of Miró's work to that of the intermediate generation of the avant-garde has led scholars to dub this period his Catalan Fauvist period.

More information: Fundació Joan Miró

A few years after Miró’s 1918 Barcelona solo exhibition, he settled in Paris where he finished a number of paintings that he had begun on his parents’ summer home and farm in Mont-roig del Camp. One such painting, The Farm, showed a transition to a more individual style of painting and certain nationalistic qualities. Miró annually returned to Mont-roig and developed a symbolism and nationalism that would stick with him throughout his career. Two of Miró’s first works classified as Surrealist, Catalan Landscape (The Hunter) and The Tilled Field, employ the symbolic language that was to dominate the art of the next decade.

In 1924, Miró joined the Surrealist group. The already symbolic and poetic nature of Miró’s work, as well as the dualities and contradictions inherent to it, fit well within the context of dream-like automatism espoused by the group.

Joan Miró

Much of Miró’s work lost the cluttered chaotic lack of focus that had defined his work thus far, and he experimented with collage and the process of painting within his work so as to reject the framing that traditional painting provided.

This antagonistic attitude towards painting manifested itself when Miró referred to his work in 1924 ambiguously as x in a letter to poet friend Michel Leiris. The paintings that came out of this period were eventually dubbed Miró’s dream paintings.

Miró married Pilar Juncosa in Palma (Majorca) on 12 October 1929. Their daughter, María Dolores Miró, was born on 17 July 1930.

In 1931, Pierre Matisse opened an art gallery in New York City. The Pierre Matisse Gallery, which existed until Matisse's death in 1989, became an influential part of the Modern art movement in America. From the outset Matisse represented Joan Miró and introduced his work to the United States market by frequently exhibiting Miró's work in New York.

More information: Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró

Until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Miró habitually returned to Catalonia in the summers. Once the war began, he was unable to return home. Unlike many of his surrealist contemporaries, Miró had previously preferred to stay away from explicitly political commentary in his work. Though a sense of Catalan nationalism pervaded his earliest surreal landscapes and Head of a Catalan Peasant, it was not until Spain's Republican government commissioned him to paint the mural, The Reaper , for the Spanish Republican Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exhibition, that Miró’s work took on a politically charged meaning.

In 1939, with Germany’s invasion of France looming, Miró relocated to Varengeville in Normandy, and on 20 May of the following year, as Germans invaded Paris, he narrowly fled to Spain, now controlled by Francisco Franco, for the duration of the Vichy Regime’s rule.

More information: The Art Story

In Varengeville, Palma, and Mont-roig, between 1940 and 1941, Miró created the twenty-three gouache series Constellations. Revolving around celestial symbolism, Constellations earned the artist praise from André Breton, who seventeen years later wrote a series of poems, named after and inspired by Miró's series. Features of this work revealed a shifting focus to the subjects of women, birds, and the moon, which would dominate his iconography for much of the rest of his career.

Joan Miró

In 1974, Miró created a tapestry for the World Trade Center in New York City together with the Catalan artist Josep Royo. He had initially refused to do a tapestry, then he learned the craft from Royo and the two artists produced several works together. His World Trade Center Tapestry was displayed at the buildingand was one of the most expensive works of art lost during the September 11 attacks.

In 1977, Miró and Royo finished a tapestry to be exhibited in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

In 1981, Miró's The Sun, the Moon and One Star -later renamed Miró's Chicago- was unveiled. This large, mixed media sculpture is situated outdoors in the downtown Loop area of Chicago, across the street from another large public sculpture, the Chicago Picasso. Miró had created a bronze model of The Sun, the Moon and One Star in 1967. The maquette now resides in the Milwaukee Art Museum.

In 1979 Miró received a doctorate honoris causa from the University of Barcelona. The artist, who suffered from heart failure, died in his home in Palma (Majorca) on 25 December 1983. He was later interred in the Montjuïc Cemetery in Barcelona.

More information: Artsy

His early modernist works include Portrait of Vincent Nubiola (1917), Siurana (the path), Nord-Sud (1917) and Painting of Toledo. These works show the influence of Cézanne, and fill the canvas with a colorful surface and a more painterly treatment than the hard-edge style of most of his later works. In Nord-Sud, the literary newspaper of that name appears in the still life, a compositional device common in cubist compositions, but also a reference to the literary and avant-garde interests of the painter.

Starting in 1920, Miró developed a very precise style, picking out every element in isolation and detail and arranging them in deliberate composition. These works, including House with Palm Tree (1918), Nude with a Mirror (1919), Horse, Pipe and Red Flower (1920), and The Table-Still Life with Rabbit (1920), show the clear influence of Cubism, although in a restrained way, being applied to only a portion of the subject. For example, The Farmer's Wife (1922–23), is realistic, but some sections are stylized or deformed, such as the treatment of the woman's feet, which are enlarged and flattened.

Maria del Mar Bonet & Joan Miró

The culmination of this style was The Farm (1921–22). The rural Catalan scene it depicts is augmented by an avant-garde French newspaper in the center, showing Miró sees this work transformed by the Modernist theories he had been exposed to in Paris.

The concentration on each element as equally important was a key step towards generating a pictorial sign for each element. The background is rendered in flat or patterned in simple areas, highlighting the separation of figure and ground, which would become important in his mature style.

Miró made many attempts to promote this work, but his surrealist colleagues found it too realistic and apparently conventional, and so he soon turned to a more explicitly surrealist approach.

In 1922, Miró explored abstracted, strongly coloured surrealism in at least one painting.  From the summer of 1923 in Mont-roig, Miró began a key set of paintings where abstracted pictorial signs, rather than the realistic representations used in The Farm, are predominant. In The Tilled Field, Catalan Landscape (The Hunter) and Pastoral (1923–24), these flat shapes and lines, mostly black or strongly coloured, suggest the subjects, sometimes quite cryptically. For Catalan Landscape (The Hunter), Miró represents the hunter with a combination of signs: a triangle for the head, curved lines for the moustache, angular lines for the body. So encoded is this work that at a later time Miró provided a precise explanation of the signs used.

More information: Fem Turisme

Through the mid-1920s Miró developed the pictorial sign language which would be central throughout the rest of his career.

In Paris, under the influence of poets and writers, he developed his unique style: organic forms and flattened picture planes drawn with a sharp line. Generally thought of as a Surrealist because of his interest in automatism and the use of sexual symbols , for example, ovoids with wavy lines emanating from them, Miró's style was influenced in varying degrees by Surrealism and Dada, yet he rejected membership in any artistic movement in the interwar European years. André Breton described him as the most Surrealist of us all.

Miró's surrealist origins evolved out of repression much like all surrealist and magic realist work, especially because of his Catalan ethnicity, which was subject to special persecution by the Franco regime. Also, Joan Miró was well aware of Haitian Voodoo art and Cuban Santería religion through his travels before going into exile. This led to his signature style of art making.

In the final decades of his life Miró accelerated his work in different media, producing hundreds of ceramics, including the Wall of the Moon and Wall of the Sun at the UNESCO building in Paris. He also made temporary window paintings, on glass, for an exhibit. In the last years of his life Miró wrote his most radical and least known ideas, exploring the possibilities of gas sculpture and four-dimensional painting.

More information: The Guardian

The works must be conceived with fire in the soul

but executed with clinical coolness.

Joan Miro

CHRISTMAS EVE: CAGANER, TIÓ & EL CANT DE LA SIBIL·LA

The Grandma listens to El Cant de la Sibil·la

Today is Christmas Eve and The Grandma is going to go to listen to El Cant de la Sibil·la, The Song of the Sibyl, in Barcelona sung by Maria del Mar Bonet one of her favourite singers.

The Grandma goes to this event every year. She has the opportunity of listening a beautiful song with medieval origins that is recognized by the UNESCO as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2010.

The Song of Sibyl is a liturgical drama and a Gregorian chant, the lyrics of which compose a prophecy describing the Apocalypse, which has been performed at some churches of Majorca, Valencian Country, Alghero (Sardinia), and Catalonia, in Catalan language and in Naples in Neapolitan language, on Christmas Eve nearly uninterruptedly since medieval times.

Before going to the church tonight, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 52).

More information: Articles 2-Zero Article

The Grandma doesn't like Christmas a lot but she loves culture and traditions and there are two Catalan traditions that she adores, the Tió and the Caganer. Last December, 17, Jessica Jones wrote an interesting article on BBC titled Catalonia's beloved scatological Christmas custom. The Grandma wants to reproduce this full article to talk about these wonderful traditions.

Here it is...

In Catalonia, hidden among the traditional nativity characters is a little figure, trousers down, doing his business right in the middle of the holy scene.

A pessebre, a Catalan nativity scene, contains all the usual suspects. There’s Mary and Joseph gazing down lovingly at baby Jesus, sleeping in his manger. There are the oxen, gently lowing, and perhaps some shepherds. But look closer, and hidden among the traditional characters is a little figure, trousers down, doing his business right in the middle of the holy scene.

The caganer -literally ‘defecator’- is a staple of Christmas in Catalonia. The traditional figure depicts a peasant wearing black trousers, a white shirt and the classic red Catalan cap -the barretina. He may also be smoking a pipe and reading a newspaper.

“It’s like the funny part of something that is supposed to be very serious -the nativity,” laughed caganer collector Marc-Ignasi Corral, 53, from Barcelona. Yes, the figure is so popular it even has its very own society, the Friends of the Caganer Association (L’Associació d'Amics del Caganer), of which Corral is a proud member. Founded in 1990, the society has around 70 members -some from as far afield as the US -who meet twice a year.

The Caganer

Traditional caganers are made from clay, fired in a kiln of more than 1,000C, then hand-painted. As the industry has grown, the caganer has evolved; now there are many different kinds, both in design and material.

“I’ve got ones made of soap, I’ve got chocolate ones, but those are meant to be eaten of course,” said Corral, whose bookshelves are dotted with his collection of more than 200 caganers. “I’ve got glass ones… I’ve seen them made from Nespresso capsules.”

Firmly planted in folk tradition, the roots of the caganer are vague, but generally agreed to date from around the late 17th or early 18th Century when the prevailing Baroque tradition, both in Catalonia and beyond, focused on realism in art, sculpture and literature. In their book El Caganer, authors Jordi Arruga and Josep Mañà write: “This was a time characterised by extreme realism… all of which relied heavily on descriptions of local life and customs. Here, working conditions and homelife were used as artistic themes.”

One real-life depiction was the caganer.

The reason it has been passed down the generations, however, is clear: the idea of defecating has long been linked to everything from good luck to prosperity to good health.

“Excrement equals fertilisation equals money equals luck and prosperity. Or so say the anthropologists,” said historian Enric Ucelay-Da Cal, emeritus professor at Barcelona’s Pompeu Fabra University.

“It is said that to not put a caganer in the crib will bring bad luck,” added caganer maker Marc Alos Pla, whose family runs caganer.com, the world’s biggest caganer producer. This year he predicts sales will surpass 30,000.

And far from seeing the caganer as uncouth or even graphic, Catalans have a relaxed view of them as merely depicting a natural act.

“We don’t see it as rude. I mean as rude as when you go to the toilet,” Corral laughed. “We hide things – we’re in a society where we’re hiding everything. We hide death for instance.”

More information: Caganer.com

Furthermore, Catalans do not stop at one Christmas tradition.

Caga Tió, literally the ‘Defecating Log’ (also called the Tió de Nadal, the ‘Christmas Log’) is also a staple in many Catalan homes in the run-up to Christmas.

On the feast of the Immaculate Conception, on 8 December, families start ‘feeding’ Tió scraps of food. He is covered with a blanket to keep him warm until, on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, when he has had enough to ‘eat’, the children hit him with sticks while singing a song that encourages him to defecate:

Caga tió / Poo log!

Caga torró, avellanes i mató / Poo nougat, hazelnuts and mató (cheese)

Si no cagues bé / If you don’t poo well,

et daré un cop de bastó / I’ll hit you with a stick

Caga tió / Poo log!

For the log doesn’t produce any old excrement… he defecates Christmas presents.

Before hitting the Tió, children go to another part of the house to pray for him to bring them gifts, while their parents take the opportunity to stash small treats like Christmas sweets under the blanket.

The Tió

“The Tió seems to be a pretty old Christmas idea… in medieval times it was found all over Europe, from Scandinavia down to the Western Mediterranean: the idea of a ‘Yule Log’, which lasted until about World War Two,” Ucelay-Da Cal said.

 
What is it about these traditions, which in other parts of the world might be seen as explicit or rude, that attracts so many Catalans?

“I love the transgression of norms, the tradition they represent and the artwork in itself,” Corral explained, while Ucelay-Da Cal said the caganer “has a pleasantly subversive quality, naughty but nice, as it were.”

In fact, the themes of defecation are reserved not only for Christmas, but run like a common thread through Catalan culture, from idioms to art.

“This fits in with a Catalan taste for egalitarianism: everybody [poos], however important they may be,” said Ucelay-Da Cal.

When it comes to language, Catalan is filled with stool-related sayings and idioms. Where in English we might say two extremely close people are ‘as thick as thieves’ and in Spanish that phrase would be ‘como uña y carne’ (like [finger] nail and flesh), Catalans say two are people are like ‘cul i merda’ – backside and excrement.

“There is a cliché that Germanic languages are [full of] faecal metaphors, while Romance languages stress virility. Certainly the Catalan scatological custom -would deny this affirmation,” Ucelay-Da Cal said.

More information: The New York Times

Defecation has also appeared in Catalan art and literature going back hundreds of years.

In his book, Barcelona, which looks at Catalan history, art and culture, art critic Robert Hughes writes that the figure of the caganer “makes an unmistakable entrance into 20th-Century art” in the work of Joan Miró.

Look closely at Miró’s 1921-22 painting The Farm, and you will see what looks like a small child squatting close to his mother while she does the washing.

This boy, Hughes writes, “is none other than the caganer of Miró’s childhood Christmases. It may also be Miró himself, the future painter of Man and Woman in Front of a Pile of Excrement (1935).”

Catalan writers, too, have long depicted the scatological, with Hughes arguing that it is firmly entrenched in Catalan folk tradition. “…There has always been a vigorous strain of scatological humour in [Catalan] folk songs, folk poetry and educated verse,” he writes.

He cites one verse in particular, in the 13th-Century Versos Bruts (Coarse Poems), which recounts a discussion between two nobles in which they describe “One hundred noble ladies who went to sea in a boat and, becalmed, got back to shore by farting in chorus into its sails.”

One area of Catalan culture you might assume stays firmly away from the scatological is food -but, inevitably, you would be wrong. Feeling peckish, you might wander into a Catalan bakery and be confronted with a popular baked good known -rather unappetisingly- as a ‘pet de monja’, or ‘nun’s fart’.

William Windsor & Kate Middleton

And even Catalan politics has taken a toilet-humour turn, with the region’s strong independence movement reflected in recent caganer bestsellers.

Exiled former regional Catalan president Carles Puigdemont is a favourite, and in 2017, a Tweety Pie caganer sold out (when the Spanish government sent in extra police to control the 2017 independence referendum, they slept on a ship whose exterior featured a gigantic Tweety Pie).

In 2018, a caganer of a yellow ribbon sporting a pair of big eyes and a mouth depicting the symbol used in solidarity with Catalonia’s jailed independence leaders -is expected to be a bestseller.

“It’s a reflection of what is happening," said Corral. “The caganer is now turning into a way of keeping a memory of living history. It’s a reality. We have political prisoners.”

While caganers have not reached the worldwide ubiquity of the Christmas tree, they are becoming increasingly well known outside Catalonia. The figures have long been a tradition in areas of Portugal and Naples, Italy, and are also gaining fans further afield.

“In the caganer society we have members from Italy, Germany, Japan, the United States, so it’s an international society,” Corral said.

In fact, around 50% of caganer.com’s foreign sales are shipped to the US, according to Alos Pla, with popular figures including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Alos Pla predicts that Donald Trump and David Bowie will sell in large numbers this year.

Whether you give someone a caganer of someone they love or loathe is up to you -but many people take it as a compliment:

“For many famous people it has become an honour to have their own caganer,” said Alos Pla.

Corral is more blunt. “I mean if you don’t have a caganer, you are nobody nowadays.”

More information: BBC (Original Article)

Before the Judgement the Antichrist will come 

and will give suffering to everyone,
and will make himself be served like God,

and who does not obey he will make die.

The Song of the Sibyl

THE GRANDMA GOES TO THE CINEMA: 'MARY POPPINS'

Mary Poppins Returns

Today, The Grandma has received the visit of Tonyi Tamaki and Claire Fontaine and they have decided to go to the cinema to watch the new sequel of Mary Poppins. The Grandma loves this character. She remembers one of her wonderful families, an unforgettable one that Tonyi Tamaki knows very well.

Before going to the cinema, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 51).

More information: Articles 1

Mary Poppins is a 1964 American musical fantasy film directed by Robert Stevenson and produced by Walt Disney, with songs written and composed by the Sherman Brothers. The screenplay is by Bill Walsh and Don DaGradi, based on P. L. Travers's book series Mary Poppins.

The film, which combines live-action and animation, stars Julie Andrews in her feature film debut as Mary Poppins, who visits a dysfunctional family in London and employs her unique brand of lifestyle to improve the family's dynamic. Dick Van Dyke, David Tomlinson, and Glynis Johns are featured in supporting roles. The film was shot entirely at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California using painted London background scenes.

Mary Poppins was released on August 27, 1964, to critical acclaim. It received a total of 13 Academy Awards nominations, including Best Picture -a record for any other film released by Walt Disney Studios- and won five; Best Actress for Andrews, Best Film Editing, Best Original Music Score, Best Visual Effects, and Best Original Song for Chim Chim Cher-ee.

More information: Bustle

In 2013, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. Mary Poppins is considered Walt Disney's crowning live-action achievement, and is the only film that earned a Best Picture nomination in his lifetime.

In Edwardian London, 1910, Bert entertains a crowd as a one-man band when he senses a change in the wind. Afterwards, he directly addresses the audience, and gives them a tour of Cherry Tree Lane, stopping outside the Banks family's home. George Banks returns home to learn from his wife, Winifred, that Katie Nanna has left their service after Jane and Michael ran away again.

Mary Poppins

They are returned shortly after by Constable Jones, who reveals the children were chasing a lost kite. The children ask their father to help build a better kite, but he dismisses them. Taking it upon himself to hire a new nanny, Mr. Banks advertises for a stern, no-nonsense nanny.

Instead, Jane and Michael present their own advertisement for a kinder, sweeter nanny. Mr. Banks rips up the letter, and throws the scraps in the fireplace, but the remains of the advertisement magically float up, and out into the air.

The next day, a number of elderly, sour-faced nannies wait outside the Banks' home, but a strong gust of wind blows them away, and Jane and Michael witness a young nanny descending from the sky using her umbrella. Presenting herself to Mr. Banks, Mary Poppins calmly produces the children's restored advertisement, and agrees with its requests, but promises the astonished banker she will be firm with his children.

As Mr. Banks puzzles over the advertisement's return, Mary Poppins hires herself, and convinces him it was originally his idea. She meets the children, then helps them tidy their nursery through song, before heading out for a walk in the park.

Outside, they meet Bert, working as a screever; Mary Poppins uses her magic to transport the group into one of his drawings. While the children ride on a carousel, Mary Poppins and Bert go on a leisurely stroll. Mary Poppins later enchants the carousel horses, and participates in a horse race, which she wins. While being asked to describe her victory, Mary Poppins announces the nonsense word Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. However, the outing is ruined when a thunderstorm dissolves Bert's drawings, returning the group to London.

On another outing, the four meet Uncle Albert, who has floated up in the air due to his uncontrollable laughter; they join him for a tea party on the ceiling, telling jokes. 

More information: The Guardian

Mr. Banks becomes annoyed by the household's cheery atmosphere, and threatens to fire Mary Poppins. Instead, Mary Poppins inverts his attempt by convincing him to take the children to the bank for a day. Mr. Banks takes Jane and Michael to the bank, where they meet Mr. Dawes Sr, and his son. Mr. Dawes aggressively attempts to have Michael invest his tuppence in the bank, snatching it from him. Michael demands it back, causing other customers to misinterpret, and all demand their own money back, causing a bank run.

Jane and Michael flee the bank, getting lost in the East End until they run into Bert, now working as a chimney sweep, who escorts them home. The three and Mary Poppins venture onto the rooftops, where they have a song-and-dance number with other chimney sweeps, which spills out into the Banks' home.

Mr. Banks returns, and receives a phone call from his employers. He speaks with Bert, who tells him he should spend more time with his children before they grow up. Jane and Michael give their father Michael's tuppence in the hope to make amends.

Mr. Banks walks through London to the bank, where he is given a humiliating cashiering, and is dismissed. Looking to the tuppence for words, he blurts out Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!, tells one of Uncle Albert's jokes, and happily heads home. Dawes mulls over the joke, but finally gets it, and floats up into the air, laughing. 

Mary Poppins

The next day, the wind changes, meaning Mary Poppins must leave. A happier Mr. Banks is found at home, having fixed his children's kite, and takes the family out to fly it.

In the park, the Bankses meet Mr. Dawes Jr, who reveals his father died laughing from the joke, and re-employs Mr. Banks as a junior partner. With her work done, Mary Poppins flies away, with Bert bidding her farewell, telling her not to stay away too long.

More information: Vogue

Mary Poppins Returns is a 2018 American musical fantasy film directed by Rob Marshall, with a screenplay written by David Magee and a story by Magee, Marshall, and John DeLuca. Based on the book series of the same name by P. L. Travers, this sequel to 1964's Mary Poppins stars Emily Blunt as the eponymous character with Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ben Whishaw, Emily Mortimer, Julie Walters, Dick Van Dyke, Angela Lansbury, Colin Firth, and Meryl Streep in supporting roles. Set in 1930s London, three decades after the events of the original film, it sees Mary Poppins, the former nanny of Jane and Michael Banks, returning after a family tragedy.

Walt Disney Pictures announced the film in September 2015. Marshall was hired later that month, and Blunt and Miranda were cast in February 2016. Principal photography lasted from February to July 2017, and took place at Shepperton Studios in Surrey, England. Mary Poppins Returns held its world premiere at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on November 29, 2018, and was released in the United States on December 19, 2018, making it one of the longest gaps between film sequels in Disney history at 54 years.

The film received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised Blunt's performance, the musical score and numbers, visuals, production values, and sense of nostalgia, although some critics found it derivative of the first film. It was chosen by both the National Board of Review and American Film Institute as one of the top ten films of 2018 and received numerous award nominations, including four at the 76th Golden Globe Awards, including for Best Motion Picture-Musical or Comedy, nine at the 24th Critics' Choice Awards and a SAG Award nomination for Blunt at the 25th Screen Actors Guild Awards.

The Grandma doesn't want to explain the plot of this sequel. It's better for you to go to the cinema, if you are interested in it and discover it by yourself.

More information: Cosmopolitan

In every job that must be done, 

there is an element of fun.

Mary Poppins

THE GRANDMA REMEMBERS THE HOLMES,221B BAKER ST

Sherlock Holmes

Today, The Grandma has started to read a new story about Sherlock Holmes, written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Grandma has chosen this book because she loves Sherlock and his stories and because she wants to remember one of her beautiful families, The Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes has his headquarters in 221B Baker Street and The Grandma wants to talk about this amazing place. Before starting the new book, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 50).

More information: Prepositions and Adverbials of Place and Position

221B Baker Street is the London address of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, created by author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In the United Kingdom, postal addresses with a number followed by a letter may indicate a separate address within a larger, often residential building. Baker Street in the late 19th century was a high-class residential district, and Holmes' flat would probably have been part of a Georgian terrace.

At the time the Holmes stories were published, addresses in Baker Street did not go as high as 221. Baker Street was later extended, and in 1932 the Abbey National Building Society moved into premises at 219–229 Baker Street. For many years, Abbey National employed a full-time secretary to answer mail addressed to Sherlock Holmes.

In 1990, a blue plaque signifying 221B Baker Street was installed at the Sherlock Holmes Museum, situated elsewhere on the same block, and there followed a 15-year dispute between Abbey National and the Holmes Museum for the right to receive mail addressed to 221B Baker Street. Since the closure of Abbey House in 2005, ownership of the address by the Holmes Museum has not been challenged, despite its location between 237 and 241 Baker Street.

Sherlock Holmes

When the Sherlock Holmes stories were first published, street numbers in Baker Street did not go as high as 221. The section north of Marylebone Road near Regent's Park -now including 221 Baker Street -was known in Conan Doyle's lifetime as Upper Baker Street. In his first manuscript, Conan Doyle put Holmes' house in Upper Baker Street.

However, a British crime novelist named Nigel Morland claimed that, late in Conan Doyle's life, he identified the junction of Baker Street and George Street, about 500 metres south of the Marylebone Road, as the location of 221B. Sherlockian experts have also held to alternative theories as to where the original 221B was located and have maintained that it was further down Baker Street.

When street numbers were reallocated in the 1930s, the block of odd numbers from 215 to 229 was assigned to an Art Deco building known as Abbey House, constructed in 1932 for the Abbey Road Building Society, which the society and its successor, which subsequently became Abbey National plc, occupied until 2002.

More information: Sherlock Holmes Museum

Almost immediately, the building society started receiving correspondence from Sherlock Holmes fans all over the world, in such volumes that it appointed a permanent secretary to Sherlock Holmes to deal with it. A bronze plaque on the front of Abbey House carried a picture of Holmes and a quotation, but was removed from the building several years ago. Its present whereabouts are unknown. In 1999, Abbey National sponsored the creation of a bronze statue of Sherlock Holmes that now stands at the entrance to Baker Street Underground station.

The Sherlock Holmes Museum is situated within an 1815 townhouse very similar to the 221B described in the stories and is located between 237 and 241 Baker Street. It displays exhibits in period rooms, wax figures and Holmes memorabilia, with the famous study overlooking Baker Street the highlight of the museum. The description of the house can be found throughout the stories, including the 17 steps leading from the ground-floor hallway to the first-floor study.

Sherlock Holmes & Dr Watson

According to the published stories, 221B Baker Street was a suite of rooms on the first floor of a lodging house above a flight of 17 steps. The main study overlooked Baker Street, and Holmes' bedroom was adjacent to this room at the rear of the house, with Dr. Watson's bedroom being on the floor above, overlooking a rear yard that had a plane tree in it.

The street number 221B was assigned to the Sherlock Holmes Museum on 27 March 1990, replacing the logical address 239 Baker Street, when the Leader of Westminster City Council, Lady Shirley Porter, unveiled a blue plaque signifying the address of 221B Baker Street. She was invited to renumber the museum's building to coincide with its official opening and because the number 221B had not been included in the original planning consent for the museum granted in October 1989.

More information: Smithsonian

A long-running dispute over the number arose between the Sherlock Holmes Museum, the building society Abbey National, which had previously answered the mail addressed to Sherlock Holmes, and subsequently the local Westminster City Council. The main objection to the Museum's role in answering the letters was that the number 221B bestowed on the Museum by the Council was out of sequence with the other numbers in the street: an issue that has since vexed local bureaucrats, who have striven for years to keep street numbers in sequence.

In 2005, Abbey National vacated their headquarters in Baker Street, which left the museum to battle with Westminster City Council to end the dispute over the number, which had created negative publicity. Eventually the museum was granted special permission by the City of Westminster to bear the address of 221B Baker Street.

More information: Atlas Obscura

My name is Sherlock Holmes.

It is my business to know what other people don’t know.

Sherlock Holmes

JANE SEYMOUR FONDA, SOCIAL ACTIVISM IN CINEMA

Jane Fonda

December, 21. The Grandma has an intensive day of activities. Because of this, she wrote this post yesterday to be published today.

Political activism is necessary if you want to live in a society where freedom, democracy, justice, equality and civil rights are respected. Unfortunately, we have lots of examples today of false democracies which run under the appearance of true ones.

You must fight for your rights every day because if you are a passive citizen, you are going to lose them and you are not going to have enough time to recover them. It is a constant struggle, but perhaps, the most wonderful one, since the moment that you realize you are not alone fighting for your civil rights and you realize that if you work in community, you are fighting against one of the most terrible enemies of our century, the individualism, as Julius Caesar said: Divide et Impera, Divide and You Will Win.

Today, one of the best actresses and one of the strongest activists celebrates her birthday. She is someone who The Grandma admires a lot, as an actress and as an activist, and she has an intense life and some interesting opinions to be known.

Congratulations, Jane Fonda in your 81st anniversary!

Yesterday, before writing this post, The Grandma studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 49).

More information: Prepositions of Place and Movement

Jane Seymour Fonda, born December 21, 1937, is an American actress, writer, political activist, former fashion model and fitness guru. She is the recipient of various accolades including two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, the AFI Life Achievement Award, and the Honorary Golden Lion.

Born to actor Henry Fonda and socialite Frances Ford Seymour, Fonda made her Broadway debut in the 1960 play There Was a Little Girl, for which she received the first of two Tony Award nominations, and made her screen debut later the same year in Tall Story.

She rose to prominence in 1960s with such films as Period of Adjustment (1962), Sunday in New York (1963), Cat Ballou (1965), Barefoot in the Park (1967) and Barbarella (1968). Her first husband was Barbarella director Roger Vadim.

Jane Fonda

A seven-time Academy Award nominee, she received her first nomination for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969) and went on to win two Best Actress Oscars in the 1970s for Klute (1971) and Coming Home (1978). Her other nominations were for Julia (1977), The China Syndrome (1979), On Golden Pond (1981) and The Morning After (1986). Consecutive hits Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), California Suite (1978), The Electric Horseman (1979) and 9 to 5 (1980) sustained Fonda's box-office drawing power, and she won an Primetime Emmy Award for her performance in the 1984 TV film The Dollmaker.

In 1982, she released her first exercise video, Jane Fonda's Workout, which became the highest-selling VHS of all time. It would be the first of 22 workout videos released by her over the next 13 years which would collectively sell over 17 million copies.

Divorced from second husband Tom Hayden, she married billionaire media mogul Ted Turner in 1991 and retired from acting, following a row of commercially unsuccessful films concluded by Stanley & Iris (1990).

More information: Jane Fonda Official Site

Fonda divorced Turner in 2001 and returned to the screen with the 2005 hit Monster-in-Law. Though Georgia Rule (2007) was the star's only other movie during the 2000s, in the early 2010s she fully re-launched her career. Subsequent films have included The Butler (2013), This Is Where I Leave You (2014), Youth (2015), Our Souls at Night (2017) and Book Club (2018).

In 2009, she returned to Broadway after a 45-year absence from the stage, in the play 33 Variations which earned her a Tony Award nomination, while her major recurring role in the HBO drama series The Newsroom (2012–2014) earned her two Primetime Emmy Award nominations. She also released another five exercise videos between 2010 and 2012.

Fonda currently stars in the Netflix original series Grace and Frankie, which premiered in 2015 and has brought her nominations for a Primetime Emmy Award and two Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Jane Fonda

Fonda was a visible political activist in the counterculture era during the Vietnam War and later became involved in advocacy for women.

She was famously and controversially photographed sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun on a 1972 visit to Hanoi, during which she became widely known under the nickname Hanoi Jane. She has also protested the Iraq War and violence against women, and describes herself as a feminist.

In 2005, she, Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem co-founded the Women's Media Center, an organization that works to amplify the voices of women in the media through advocacy, media and leadership training, and the creation of original content. Fonda serves on the board of the organization.

More information: Women's Media Center

Jane Seymour Fonda was born in New York City on December 21, 1937. According to her father, their surname came from an Italian ancestor who immigrated to the Netherlands in the 1500s. There, he intermarried, and the family began to use Dutch given names, with Jane's first Fonda ancestor reaching New York in 1650. She also has English, Scottish, and French ancestry. She was named for the third wife of Henry VIII, Jane Seymour, to whom she is distantly related on her mother's side.

Fonda became interested in acting as a teenager, while appearing with her father in a charity performance of The Country Girl at the Omaha Community Playhouse.

Fonda's stage work in the late 1950s laid the foundation for her film career in the 1960s. She averaged almost two movies a year throughout the decade, starting in 1960 with Tall Story, in which she recreated one of her Broadway roles as a college cheerleader pursuing a basketball star, played by Anthony Perkins. Frequent collaborator Robert Redford also made his debut in that film.

Fonda attended the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, and Vassar College in Poughkeepsie. Before her acting career, she was a model, appearing twice on the cover of Vogue.

Jane Fonda

In 1963, she appeared in Sunday in New York. Newsday called her the loveliest and most gifted of all our new young actresses. Fonda's career breakthrough came with Cat Ballou (1965), in which she played a schoolmarm turned outlaw. This comedy Western received five Oscar nominations, with Lee Marvin winning best actor, and was one of the year's top ten films at the box office. It was considered by many to have been the film that brought Fonda to bankable stardom.

The following year, she had a starring role in The Chase opposite Robert Redford, in their first film together, and two-time Oscar winner Marlon Brando. The film received some positive reviews and they said that: Jane Fonda, as Redford’s wife and the mistress of wealthy oilman James Fox, makes the most of the biggest female role.

After this came the comedies Any Wednesday (1966), opposite Jason Robards and Dean Jones, and Barefoot in the Park (1967), again co-starring Redford.

Fonda won her first Academy Award for Best Actress in 1971, again playing a prostitute, the gamine Bree Daniels, in the Alan J. Pakula's murder mystery Klute.

Fonda announced that she would make only films that focused on important issues, and she generally stuck to her word. She turned down An Unmarried Woman because she felt the part was not relevant.

More information: Screen Daily

In 1978, Fonda was at a career peak after she won her second Best Actress Oscar for her role as Sally Hyde, a conflicted adulteress in Coming Home, the story of a disabled Vietnam War veteran's difficulty in re-entering civilian life.

In 1980, Fonda starred in 9 to 5 with Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton. The film was a huge critical and box office success, becoming the second highest-grossing release of the year. Fonda had long wanted to work with her father, hoping it would help their strained relationship. She achieved this goal when she purchased the screen rights to the play On Golden Pond, specifically for her father and her.

Jane Fonda

Fonda continued to appear in feature films throughout the 1980s, winning an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress for The Dollmaker (1984), and starring in the role of Dr. Martha Livingston in Agnes of God (1985). The following year, she played an alcoholic actress and murder suspect in the 1986 thriller The Morning After, opposite Jeff Bridges.

In the early 1990s, after three decades in film, Fonda announced her retirement from the film industry.

Fonda starred in her fourth collaboration with Robert Redford in the 2017 romantic drama film Our Souls at Night. The film and Fonda's performance received critical acclaim upon release.

In 2018, she starred opposite Diane Keaton, Mary Steenburgen, and Candice Bergen in the romantic comedy film Book Club.

During the 1960s, Fonda engaged in political activism in support of the Civil Rights Movement, and in opposition to the Vietnam War. Fonda's visits to France brought her into contact with leftist French intellectuals who were opposed to war, an experience that she later characterized as small-c communism. Along with other celebrities, she supported the Alcatraz Island occupation by American Indians in 1969, which was intended to call attention to the failures of the government with regards to treaty rights and the movement for greater Indian sovereignty.

More information: The Lily

She supported Huey Newton and the Black Panthers in the early 1970s, stating: Revolution is an act of love; we are the children of revolution, born to be rebels. It runs in our blood. She called the Black Panthers our revolutionary vanguard... we must support them with love, money, propaganda and risk." 

She has been involved in the feminist movement since the 1970s and dovetails her activism in support of civil rights.

In 1994, the United Nations Population Fund made Fonda a Goodwill Ambassador.

On February 16, 2004, Fonda led a march through Ciudad Juárez, with Sally Field, Eve Ensler and other women, urging Mexico to provide sufficient resources to newly appointed officials in helping investigate the murders of hundreds of women in the rough border city.

Fonda went to Seattle, in 1970 to support a group of Native Americans who were led by Bernie Whitebear. The group had occupied part of the grounds of Fort Lawton, which was in the process of being surplussed by the United States Army and turned into a park. The group was attempting to secure a land base where they could establish services for the sizable local urban Indian population, protesting that Indians had a right to part of the land that was originally all theirs. The endeavor succeeded and the Daybreak Star Cultural Center was constructed in the city's Discovery Park.

Jane Fonda

In addition to environmental reasons, Fonda has been a critic of oil pipelines because of their being built without consent on Native American Land.

In 2017, Fonda responded to American President Donald Trump's mandate to resume construction of the controversial North Dakota Pipelines by saying that Trump does this illegally because he has not gotten consent from the tribes through whose countries this goes and pointing out that the U.S. has agreed to treaties that require them to get the consent of the people who are affected, the indigenous people who live there.

Fonda argued that the military campaign in Iraq will turn people all over the world against America, and asserted that a global hatred of America would result in more terrorist attacks in the aftermath of the war.

More information: Flashbak

In 2015, Fonda expressed disapproval of President Barack Obama's permitting of Arctic drilling, Petroleum exploration in the Arctic, at the Sundance Film Festival. In July, she marched in a Toronto protest called the March for Jobs, Justice, and Climate, which was organized by dozens of nonprofits, labor unions, and environmental activists, including Canadian author Naomi Klein. The march aimed to show businesses and politicians alike that climate change is inherently linked to issues that may seem unrelated.

In addition to issues of Civil Rights, Fonda has been an opponent of oil developments and their adverse effects on the environment. In 2017, while on a trip with Greenpeace to protest oil developments, Fonda criticized Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau saying at the summit on climate change in Paris, known as the Paris agreement, Trudeau talked so beautifully of needing to meet the requirements of the climate treaty and to respect and hold to the treaties with indigenous people... and yet he has betrayed every one of the things he committed to in Paris.

More information: Time

I feel like my honesty gives people the freedom

to talk about things they wouldn't otherwise.

Jane Fonda