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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

Aid from the Padre



Aid from the Padre June 4, 1962 by  Hector Rondón Lovera. Priest and Navy chaplain, Luis Padilla, gives last rites to dying soldiers fatally wounded during a government revolt in Venezuela against President Betancourt in June 1962. More than 200 were killed before rebels were beaten. Venezuelan photographer Héctor Rondón Lovera covered the many compelling scenes during the short-lived conflict  “I found myself in solid lead for forty-five minutes… I was flattened against the wall while bullets were flying, when the priest appeared. The truth is, I don’t know how I took those pictures, lying on the ground.”  The photograph,  won a Pulitzer prize in 1963.








Jean Sibelius – Finlandia, Op. 26

Edited from Wikipedia

Finlandia, Op. 26, is a tone poem by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. 


It was written in 1899 and revised in 1900.
The piece was composed for the Press Celebrations of 1899, a covert protest against increasing censorship from the Russian Empire, and was the last of seven pieces performed as an accompaniment to a tableau depicting episodes from Finnish history.
A typical performance takes between 7½ and 9 minutes depending on how it is performed.
Most of the piece is taken up with rousing and turbulent music, evoking the national struggle of the Finnish people. Towards the end, a calm comes over the orchestra, and the serene and melodic Finlandia Hymn is heard. Often incorrectly cited as a traditional folk melody, the Hymn section is of Sibelius' own creation.
Sibelius later reworked the Finlandia Hymn into a stand-alone piece. This hymn, with words written in 1941 by Veikko Antero Koskenniemi, is one of the most important national songs of Finland. Today, during modern performances of the full-length Finlandia, a choir is sometimes involved, singing the Finnish lyrics with the hymn section.


Alexandra Danilova: beauty grace and discipline

Aleksandra Dionisyevna Danilova was a Russian prima ballerina who became an American citizen.





American Folk: Doc Watson

Doc Watson - Wikipedia



Kamasi Washington.j







Manners by Elizabeth Bishop


   For a Child of 1918

My grandfather said to me
as we sat on the wagon seat,
"Be sure to remember to always
speak to everyone you meet."

We met a stranger on foot.
My grandfather's whip tapped his hat.
"Good day, sir. Good day. A fine day."
And I said it and bowed where I sat.

Then we overtook a boy we knew
with his big pet crow on his shoulder.
"Always offer everyone a ride;
don't forget that when you get older,"

my grandfather said. So Willy
climbed up with us, but the crow
gave a "Caw!" and flew off. I was worried.
How would he know where to go?

But he flew a little way at a time
from fence post to fence post, ahead;
and when Willy whistled he answered.
"A fine bird," my grandfather said,

"and he's well brought up. See, he answers
nicely when he's spoken to.
Man or beast, that's good manners.
Be sure that you both always do."

When automobiles went by,
the dust hid the people's faces,
but we shouted "Good day! Good day!
Fine day!" at the top of our voices.

When we came to Hustler Hill,
he said that the mare was tired,
so we all got down and walked,
as our good manners required.



I can't get enough of this stuff


                                     


                           Atlas to guard the Temple of Zeus in Sicily again

AGRIGENTO, Italy – The Valley of the Temples archaeological park in Agrigento, Sicily, announced that the statue of Atlas will rise again at the Temple of Zeus.
“The re-installment of the statue of Atlas is the culmination of a more comprehensive restoration,” says Roberto Sciarratta, director of the Valley of the Temples archaeological park. Sciarratta added that “it is an extraordinary project, which belongs to the world but which was born here in the Valley of the Temples.”
The Valley of the Temples is located on Sicily’s southern coast in the area the Romans called Magna Graecia, or “Greater Greece,” a region that ran from the western tip of Sicily to modern-day Apulia at the “heel of the boot” formed by the Italian peninsula. Settlers brought Hellenic civilization to the region around 800 years BCE. The local Italic peoples became Hellenised and adopted Greek culture. Greek is still spoken in parts of Italy because of the Hellenic diaspora.


The Valley of the Temples is the result of massive efforts by the 100,000 or so local inhabitants, whom Plato would describe as building like they would live forever and partying like it was their last day. The building in the Valley – which might be better referred to as a ridge – represents some of the best-preserved examples of art and architecture surviving from Magna Graecia, despite ancient attacks by Carthage.
The archeological site was re-discovered in the 19th century, and it remains a site of excavation and study.


The Valley contains seven temples with Doric columns, including temples to Asclepius, Castor and Pollux, Concordia, Heracles, Hephaestus, and Juno Lacinia, along with the Temple of Olympian Zeus. There were also temples of Demeter and Athena, as well as chthonic gods.
The Temple of Concordia is the best preserved of the temples, likely because it was converted to a church around 600 CE. The site was not only ravaged by ancient wars but also exploited as a source of brick and stone for building early parts of the surrounding city and a nearby Roman marina, now the harbor at modern Porto Empedocle about three miles southwest of Agrigento. During the Roman period, Agrigento was called Girgenti, and prior to that, Akragas.
The Temple of Olympian Zeus is the largest of the set and was never completed. It was likely founded to memorialize the Battle of Himera in 460 BCE, when the cities of  Akragas and Syracuse defeated the Carthaginians.
Architecturally different than the other temples, the Temple of Olympian Zeus – regrettably, now mostly rubble along the Olympieion field – was the largest in the complex, being about 570 feet (112 meters) by 184 feet (56 meters) in size. It did not have freestanding Doric columns. Instead, because of the size and weight of the bands over the columns, continuous stone curtains were used to support the weight. The columns were immense, as high as 63 feet (19 meters) tall.
While the temple is still being excavated, there appears to have been a succession of gates at the temple site, as well as at the main sanctuary and a series of smaller sanctuaries to various other gods. There appears to have been a paved sacellum, the holy enclosure, as well as a tholos, a central rounded structure built upon steps that might serve as a central stage.
Giant Atlases supported the weight of the curtain columns from the exterior. They were sculpted in the form of a man and were used in-between columns to help reinforce the temple structure. The Atlases appear to have appear to have been recessed along the temple curtains’ edges. The Atlases alternated between bearded and clean-shaven, all nude with their arms outstretched above their heads forming the support. The statues bear the name of Titan who holds up the sky.


The Atlases have seen damage from both weather and human attack over the centuries, and they have not survived in complete form. One of the Atlases will soon be reconstructed and placed at the entrance of the temple park during the coming year.
Sciaretta said that it has taken some ten years to get to the point that the Atlas can be displayed again. “In the last decade, we’ve recovered and cataloged numerous artifacts that were once a part of the original structure,” he said. “The goal is to recompose piece-by-piece the trabeation [post and lintels] of the Temple of Zeus to restore a portion of its original grandeur.”
Sciaretta said, “The idea is to reposition one of these Atlases in front of the temple, so that it may serve as a guardian of the structure dedicated to the Father of the Gods.”

Interesting



The Latin verb relinquere, meaning "to leave behind," left behind a few English derivatives, including derelict. Another descendant of relinquere is relinquish so is the word Relic. Relics , in the original sense of the term, referred to things treasured for their association with a saint or martyr—that is, objects saints and martyrs had left behind.


I can't, for a second, imagine having this sort of skill, talent, discipline

A blade-Sharpener  (Arrotino)  Roman marble, copied from a Hellenistic original 1st century BCE. Discovered in the  early 16th century (Rome) Currently at Uffizi Gallery

The real Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin, (1927).





How Winnie-the-Pooh Became a Household Name
The true story behind the new movie, “Goodbye Christopher Robin”


By Patrick Sauer

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
NOVEMBER 6, 2017

In the main branch of the New York Public Library, there lives a group of wild animals that call the children’s section home. Together, in one cage, are a young pig, a donkey, a tiger, a kangaroo, and a bear known the world over as Winnie-the-Pooh. The bear is not the red-shirted “tubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff” found in cribs around the world, more a regular ole’ fuzzy variety, a simple knock-around bear. But he’s still Pooh, a bit matted down, a bit overly loved, but in great shape considering he’ll soon be 100 years old. The original Pooh is amazingly still alive, well into the 21st-century, in both literary and animated forms.
The NYPL’s Winnie-the-Pooh was the real-life inspiration for the original A.A. Milne stories, which continue to co-exist alongside the better-known Disney juggernaut. The characters from 1928’s smash bestseller The House on Pooh Corner live side-by-side with the cartoon iterations in a way very few originals and their Disney-fied versions do. Consider poor Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” which most kids only know via the $400-million box office adaptation, Frozen, or, for that matter, Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” What’s amazing about Pooh’s modern cartoon-y familiarity is that as big as the Magic Kingdom is, the original not only survives, but thrives as a continued source of fascination.
“If you write a very good book, and someone makes a very good film about it, the book just disappears. Nobody really reads Mary Poppins or Pinocchio because the films are so accomplished they’ve supplanted the source,” says Frank Cottrell-Boyce, co-screenwriter of Goodbye Christopher Robin, the new movie about the story-behind-the-Milne-stories.

The sweet, oft-befuddled bear actually evolved out of Milne’s decidedly unquiet time on the Western Front during World War I. He was injured at the First Battle of Somme in 1916, and his time in the trenches left Milne with “shellshock” (what we now call PTSD). Following the war, he uprooted his family, moving from London to the quieter country retreat of Crotchford Farm. Milne and his only child, Christopher Robin, who went by the nickname “Billy Moon,” spent countless hours exploring the woodlands of the Ashdown Forest, often accompanied by his son’s stuffed animal collection. Prior to World War I, Milne was a successful essayist, humorist, and editor at Punch, and following the war, he was a successful playwright, with works like Mr. Pim Passes By (adapted as a silent picture in 1921.) It was the time spent with Billy Moon, and his wild imagination, though, that made Milne world-famous.
Fatherhood inspired Milne’s first foray into children’s literature through poetry. Published in Vanity Fair in 1923, “Vespers” includes the line “Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.” He followed that up in Punch with the poem “Teddy Bear,” which mentions a “Mr. Edward Bear,” soon re-named by Christopher Robin after a visit to the London Zoo, where a black bear rescued from Winnipeg—“Winnie,” of course—made its home. And in Milne’s popular 1924 poetry book When We Were Very Young, the author tells of his son explaining how he would feed a swan in the morning, but if the bird wouldn’t come, the boy would say “‘Pooh!’ to show how little you wanted him.’”
Thus on Christmas Eve, 1925, in the London Evening News, A.A. Milne’s short story “The Wrong Sort of Bees” gave readers the holiday gift of Winnie-the-Pooh, the newly renamed bear who is dragged down the stairs by Christopher Robin, bumping his head all the way. Christopher Robin asks his father to make up a tale about Pooh and the yarn he spins established the Pooh the world knows and loves today. The hungry hero comes up with a plan to steal honey from some tree-dwelling bees. He rolls around in mud to disguise himself as a raincloud, then floats up to the hive with a blue balloon, making up songs to pass the time. Pooh failed to acquire honey, but the silly slow-witted but oh-so-lovable character succeeded in becoming a sensation.
All of Milne’s children’s works, starting with “Vespers” were accompanied by Ernest H. Shepard’s elegant monochromatic pencil illustrations. The prose and drawings of the Hundred Acre Wood animals, and their young human friend, were a perfect match, capturing the wide-eyed innocence and thrills of childhood, but with an underlying bit of melancholy and sadness. The working relationship between combat veterans Milne and Shepard deepened over time, and they truly developed the Winnie-the-Pooh world together. A primary example is that while the stories were based on Billy Moon’s real-life experiences, the famous early black-and-white drawings were closer to the friendlier-looking plushie owned by Shepard’s son, a bear named Growler.
The story collection Winnie-the-Pooh was published in October 1926, introducing the characters to a bigger global audience. It was a huge hit at home and abroad. The original English version sold a whopping-for-the-time 32,000 copies, while in the United States, 150,000 copies were nestled on nightstands by year’s end. The Harry Potter-level success of the Pooh books would be both a blessing both and a curse for Billy Moon. Still a young boy, he was dwarfed by his fictional “Christopher Robin” counterpart.
“Christopher Robin is actually on record that he quite liked being famous as a child, the damage and resentment came later,” says Ann Thwaite, whose 1990 biography of A.A. Milne won the prestigious Whitbread Award and serves as a primary source for the film. She has a new adaption, Goodbye, Christopher Robin, out now. “But Milne was always extremely interested in his son, even though the boy was mainly looked after by his nanny Olive Rand, whom Christopher was devoted to.”
The books provided Billy Moon everything a boy could ever want, but also deprived him of the simpler anonymous childhood he’d known. He missed the ample time he and his father had spent exploring the woods, which of course, led to the Pooh books in the first place. The boy was thrust into the spotlight, making public appearances, doing readings and audio recordings, and being photographed again and again for all the fans wanting a piece of the real Christopher Robin. Milne seemed to grasp his role in exploiting his son, later writing that he felt “amazement and disgust” at his son’s fame.
The Pooh series ended after a mere four books with The House at Pooh Corner, but Billy Moon's fame would come back to haunt the family. In boarding school, the merciless bullying he received drove him to prove his manhood by volunteering to fight following the outbreak of WWII. Billy Moon failed a medical examination, but coerced his famous father into using his influence to secure a military position. In 1942, he was commissioned, serving with the Royal Engineers in Iraq, Tunisia, and Italy. Billy Moon contacted malaria and took shrapnel to his head, a gut punch to his father, who became a devoted pacifist following his military career.
Milne's son returned safely from World War II and eventually made peace with his childhood celebrity and fictional doppelgänger.  He didn’t have much of a choice, though—it wasn’t as if the characters were fading away. The sales of Pooh books have been phenomenal for 90 years. They’ve never been out-of-print and have sold some 20 million copies in 50 languages. A 1958 Latin translation by Alexander Lenard, Winnie ill Pu, is the only book in Latin to ever become a New York Times bestseller.
The original books, however, will always have a special place in British literary lore. Published following the brutality of World War I, they provided a much-needed solace in a time of great sadness, a connection to the innate wonder of childhood, and a specifically British sensibility.
“English World War I posters featured the rural woodlands, domain of Robin Hood, because that’s what we were fighting for. The woods are part of the software of the English psyche, and Milne captures it better than anyone,” says Cottrell-Boyce. “Although, I’ve also heard Russians think it’s about them because Pooh is a big sleeping bear, what it says to me is the amazing stories and beautiful sentences are universal.”
Over the last near-century, those four slim Winnie-the-Pooh volumes sprouted a massive honey pot of cash. But the billions of dollars in annual receipts brought in by Pooh merchandise, ranking him with royalty like princesses, superheroes, and Mickey Mouse, isn't something Disney can take all the credit for.
In 1930, a producer named Stephen Slesinger took Pooh off the page and into the burgeoning arena of pop culture mass marketing. The American and Canadian licenses to Pooh were secured from Milne by Slesinger for $1,000 and later, 66 percent of broadcast royalties.


Slesinger was a pioneer in licensing and merchandizing characters, bringing color to the Hundred Acre Wood—most notably in 1932, on an RCA Victor record, where Pooh’s typically uncovered belly now featured a red shirt—and taking the characters beyond dolls, to jigsaw puzzles, radio shows, a “Colorful Game” from Parker Brothers, and later, this nightmare-inducing puppet version on the Shirley Temple Show. Slesinger was a bridge between the English page and the American marketplace, helping further cement the whole Hundred Acre Wood gang—Piglet, Eyeore, Kanga, Owl, Tigger, and so on—as kiddie icons available to bring into homes in all kinds of formats.
Slesinger died in 1953, and his wife continued developing the characters until deciding to license the rights to Walt Disney Productions in 1961. Walt himself coveted Pooh thanks to his daughters, who loved Milne’s stories. (Long after Disney passed away, there were Slesinger Inc. royalty lawsuits based on unforeseen future technologies like the VCR.) The Disney studios released its first animated Pooh short in 1966, and there have been a steady stream of movies, TV shows, video games, and amusement park rides ever since. In 2006, Pooh Bear himself received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but the glitz and glamour of the character’s post-Milne age hasn’t lessened the love of the original works. The books have flourished right alongside their Disney counterparts, and still offer surprises to 21st-century readers.
“I grew up with the books, Milne’s words and Shepard’s illustrations are the fabric of British life, Disney’s Pooh is not definitive,” says Simon Vaughn, a Brit as well as the other co-writer on Goodbye Christopher Robin.
The heart of Goodbye Christopher Robin is about what it means for a parent to raise a child under extraordinary circumstances, but Cottrell-Bryce believes there is a simple basic human reason why Milne and Shepard’s masterworks remain essential in everyday parental life, even in the face of the Disney.  In those early cartoons, Winnie-the-Pooh was memorably voiced by Sterling Holloway, but even his warm cuddly characterizations are no match for mom and dad.
“The Pooh books were written for the nursery, to be read intimately to a little child,” says Cottrell-Bryce. “The books offer a deep moment between child and parent at bedtime. It’s primal and comes from love.”

As Milne wrote back in 1926, Sing Ho! for the life of a Bear!

The home of Claude Richards also the architect, Saint-Quentin, France 1966.





Ahhhh


László Moholy-Nagy



László Moholy-Nagy (July 20, 1895 – November 24, 1946) was a Hungarian painter and photographer and educator, who was relentlessly experimental in pioneering work in painting, drawing, photography, collage, sculpture, film, theater, and writing. Throughout his career, he became proficient and innovative in the fields of photography, typography, sculpture, painting, printmaking, film-making, and industrial design, however, his main focuses was photography; starting in 1922, he had been initially guided by the technical expertise of his first wife and collaborator Lucia Moholy.


He coined the term Neues Sehen (New Vision) for his belief that the camera could create a whole new way of seeing the outside world that the human eye could not. This theory encapsulated his approach to his art and teaching.


Moholy-Nagy was the first interwar artist to suggest the use of scientific equipment such as the telescope, microscope, and radiography in the making of art. He experimented with the photogram; the process of exposing light-sensitive paper with objects laid upon it. His teaching practice covered a diverse range of media, including painting, sculpture, photography, photomontage, and metalworking.


*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***




Spooky Action Theater New Works in Action
Send us your most impossible short play. Do you have a brilliant idea for a play but you think can never be put onstage? We are looking to present digitally streamed readings of plays that still fit in the magic realism genre but include a certain epic or unbelievable element. Therefore, we are calling Round 13 “THE IMPOSSIBLE PLAY CYCLE.”


***
Brave New World Repertory Theatre is seeking new play submissions for Brave New Works: Ditmas Park 2021 Reading Series. This season, we are building upon our 2019 Brave New Works theme of “Race in America” and are specifically seeking plays that address police brutality. We are especially looking to feature work from Black playwrights. 


***
New World Theatre seeks monologues for publication
This is an open call to black writers to submit monologues that reflect their personal experience of living while black. The selected works will be published in an anthology entitled, 08:46.


*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***


*** THEATER LAWSUITS  ***

Seventeen alumni served lawsuits, accusing Children’s Theatre of abuse. Their cases reveal more than was publicly known about the company's 50-year history, as well as how many of its former tribe prefer to leave that past untilled.

II. The Village Storyteller

In 1961, John Clark Donahue was 23 and an art teacher at Carl Sandberg Middle School when he was convicted of molesting a 17-year-old boy. Police suspected the teen was being traded in an underage pornography ring. Donahue served three months in jail and went to work as a set designer for a south Minneapolis children’s theater troupe called the Moppet Players.

More...

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The biggest commercial theater presenters in San Francisco are trying to block productions of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and “Dear Evan Hansen” from opening at a competing venue.

Nederlander of San Francisco, which operates that city’s Orpheum and Golden Gate theaters, this week asked a judge to prevent an ally-turned-rival, the producer Carole Shorenstein Hays, from staging the shows at the nearby Curran Theater, which she owns and has lavishly restored and ambitiously programmed.

The shows at stake are two of the hottest in contemporary theater — critically acclaimed, commercially lucrative and attractive to adolescents and young adults who rarely attend theater.

More...


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It was a standing room-only crowd as supporters of Stephen Buescher, the plaintiff in a discrimination lawsuit against his former employer American Conservatory Theater (ACT), gathered Wednesday evening to discuss racism in the theater world.

In a complaint filed a day prior, Buescher alleges that ACT, where he held faculty and creative roles for ten years until 2018, created a racially hostile environment and systematically discriminated against black artists, staff and students.

The event in the 92-seat theater at Pianofight in San Francisco was billed “#LiftTheCurtain on Racial Inequity in the Arts.” For more than an hour, Buescher, current staff and students at American Conservatory Theater and other theater figures passed a microphone to share their frustrations with being typecast, tokenized and silenced as black artists.

It began with poems from Jerrie Johnson, one of several ACT graduate students present, followed by Buescher. Choking up, he called his experience at the company a “long, silent, lonely road” before saying that, in the wake of the lawsuit, he’s heard from many theater figures with similar accounts. Most of the following speakers said they now felt emboldened.

More...


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Indiana Repertory Theatre closed its doors in March as part of a wave of shutdowns to slow the spread of the coronavirus. "Murder on the Orient Express" ended midrun. The widely anticipated "Paper Dreams of Harry Chin" and "Sense and Sensibility" were canceled.

The loss of ticket sales, sponsors, concessions, theater rental fees and other items added up to more than $1 million, managing director Suzanne Sweeney said. So the theater filed a business interruption claim with its insurer to recoup income loss due to the pandemic. 

But The Cincinnati Casualty Co., the Ohio company that insures the theater under a commercial property policy, denied the claim. Like other businesses, performingarts organizations are finding that their definition of direct physical "loss” and “damage” is different from what insurance companies say. 

More...


***
“This is one of the most extraordinary sites I’ve worked on. After nearly five hundred years, the remains of the Red Lion playhouse, which marked the dawn of Elizabethan theatre, may have finally been found,” said Stephen White of Archaeology South-East, part of University College London’s Institute of Archaeology, in a press statement. “The strength of the combined evidence–archaeological remains of buildings, in the right location, of the right period, seem to match up with characteristics of the playhouse recorded in early documents. It is a privilege to be able to add to our understanding of this exciting period of history.”

...The site unearthed by White and colleagues is modest in size (just 40 feet by 31 feet) and closely mirrors descriptions of the venue, an open-roofed wooden structure, mentioned in two late 16th-century lawsuits between Brayne and the laborers hired to build the playhouse. The dimensions of the stage, in fact, are an exact match.

In addition to the timber remains of the Red Lion, archaeologists unearthed drinking vessels, coins, and fragments of what are believed to be green-glazed glass boxes that were used to collect admission fares at Tudor-era theaters.

More...


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Lawsuits contend that three community theaters failed to stop a technical director from sexually abusing aspiring teenage actors and a production assistant.
The allegations prompted Little Theatre of Manchester, where Daniel Checovetes was paid technical director, to cut ties with him on Thursday.

Three young women, who were ages 14, 16 and 17 when the alleged abuse occurred, accuse theater staff of failing to watch and supervise Checovetes, giving him free reign to abuse minors working on shows and plays. Checovetes is named as a defendant in the suits filed in Waterbury Superior Court, along with Landmark Community Theatre, Inc. of Thomaston, Naugatuck Teen Theater, LLC and Northwest Connecticut Association for the Arts and Warner Theatre of Torrington.

More...


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A Christian actress is suing her former agency and the theatre where she had a starring role in the musical, The Colour Purple, before being let go over Facebook comments expressing a biblical view of homosexuality.


On 14 March, Seyi Omooba was awarded the lead role of Celie in Leicester Curve and Birmingham Hippodrome's co-production of the play, based on Alice Walker's classic American novel.  

A day after her casting was announced, she was tagged on Twitter by Hamilton actor Aaron Lee Lambert with a screenshot of a Facebook post she had written over four years ago on 18 September 2014 in which she said that she did not believe people could be "born gay" and that Christians should stand up for what they believe in. 

More...

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Haey!