June 2nd, 1973:
Led Zeppelin’s performance at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco — “There were two cages behind the amps on stage, each containing six white doves […] Robert Plant’s a real hippy at heart, so the idea was that at the end of Stairway to Heaven, we’d release the doves and they’d fly off into the air as a homage to peace and love. But when the cages opened, the birds flew out and one did a low pass over the audience, then must have taken too deep a breath of the San Francisco air – remember, this was 1973 and there was a high chance of being dosed by some deadhead.
Anyway, it turned back to the stage and Robert stuck out his hand. The dove landed on it, purely by chance – this was not a trained bird. It was there for about five seconds."
Widely regarded to be the most famous and influential short film ever made, “Un Chien Andalou” (“An Andalusian Dog”) was released in Paris on this day in 1929, ninety-four years ago today.
The film was a collaboration between Surrealist artists Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, then in their 20s and determined to be provocateurs and artistic revolutionaries. The idea for the film came while Buñuel was visiting Dalí (both men were Spaniards, then living in Paris). He told Dalí about a dream he’d had of the moon slicing through a cloud “like a razor blade slicing through an eye.” Dalí responded by describing a weird dream of his own—featuring ants crawling out of a man’s hand. We should make a film, Dalí suggested. Buñuel agreed, borrowed the shoestring budget from his mother, and the rest is history.
“Un Chien Andalou” has no plot and no logical sequence of events. As was generally the case with Surrealist art, it has a dreamlike (in this case nightmarish) quality and was not intended to entertain or amuse the audience, but rather to shock it. The unexpected popularity of the approximately 20-minute silent film (it ran for eight months in a Paris theater) seemed to disappoint its creators, who had rather hoped it would offend the audience, if not provoke them to riot.
By contemporary standards, it’s all pretty tame stuff now. There is violence and nudity, but modest in comparison to what the film industry regularly cranks out these days. “Un Chien Andalou” is available on YouTube and elsewhere across the internet, for any who want to see it. It probably wouldn’t get an R rating if released today.
Because of the film Buñuel and Dalí were accepted into the inner circle of the Surrealists. Both men would go on to live long lives, and to enjoy successful and influential careers, Buñuel as an avant garde filmmaker, and Dalí as the most famous and enduring of the Surrealist painters.
By the way, there is no dog in the film, Andalusian or otherwise, but there are two dead donkeys lying on pianos.
The image is a still from one of the most memorable (and disturbing) scenes in the film.
@MissAdventurous Thanks for that groovy Robert Plant pic!
Fact Slap 👋
During the Tudor period, the average farm worker would consume 8 pints of Ale and 1 2lb loaf of bread a day.
Ale was the drink of choice as it was safer than water, it was served in all walks of life including schools. This was called soft ale and had a low alcohol content.
This diet was pure carbohydrates and provided the energy these people needed to tend the fields and livestock. Vitamins would come from fruits found in the hedgerows or the occasional cabbage in a potage including meat on special days.
To cater for this vast need of wheat and barley, it works out that each person in England needed 6 acres of land per year to produce the rations. It’s also worth remembering that Tudor era English commoners were some of the healthiest in Europe.
Hedy Lamarr was a Hollywood actress in the 40s and 50s, and was considered "the most beautiful woman in the world" during her time.
She began her acting career in Austria and became notorious for being the first woman to simulate an orgasm on screen in 1933. It was during this time that she also got married to Vienna-based arms dealer, Friedrich Mandl who had ties to Mussolini and later, Hitler.
The marriage did not last long as she writes, "I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife. ... He was the absolute monarch in his marriage. ... I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded—and imprisoned—having no mind, no life of its own." According to her autobiography she disguised herself as one of the maids and managed to flee to Paris. Others say she convinced her husband to wear all of her jewelry for a dinner party and then disappeared afterwards.
She eventually booked a liner to New York where she met the head of MGM who was impressed enough to get her a $500 a week contract to work as an actress. In 1938, she arrived in Hollywood and went on to star in several movies, working with the likes of Clark Gable and James Stewart.
Beyond her acting, Lamarr was also a scientist and went on to co-patent spread-spectrun technology during World War 2 to stop the Nazis from jamming navy torpedoes. However, her invention was rejected and wouldn't be implemented until the Cold War in 1962. The technology would eventually also be used in developing Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology.
Scottish Heroine Agnes Randolph, Countess of Dunbar (1312-1369), also known as ‘Black Agnes.’ The wife of Patrick 9th Earl of Dunbar, Agnes was the daughter of Thomas Randolph Earl of Moray, nephew and companion-in-arms of King Robert the Bruce, and Isabel Stewart daughter of Scottish Knight John Stewart of Bonkyll.
Agnes is famously renowned for her heroic defence of Dunbar Castle against an English siege led by William Montagu, 1st Earl of Salisbury during the Anglo-Scottish wars. She successfully defended the castle from January 1338 to June 1338.
The Earl of Salisbury’s first attempt at taking siege of the castle began with huge rocks being catapulted, and lead shots fired against the walls of Dunbar Castle. Unperturbed, Agnes was reputed to have one of her ladies dust off the ramparts with her handkerchief.
Next, the Earl of Salisbury brought a ‘sow,’ a war engine used for throwing rocks to knock down castle walls. Black Agnes saw the sow advancing and ordered a huge rock to be positioned over the castle gate. When the ‘sow’ was under the gate the rock was released crushing the roof of the sow, and causing its roof to collapse. The English soldiers ran out and were shot down by arrows.
As the Earl brought up fresh engines, and set stones against the castle walls, Agnes stood there and disdainfully wiped the fragments of the broken battlements away with her handkerchief.
Following this, Agnes sent one of her men into the English Camp who pretended to betray the castle. The unsuspecting Earl of Salisbury advised him to leave the gate open for the English to enter, or to enable the castle to be easily broken into. As the plan was underway, and the English were about to enter, one of Salisbury’s men pushed passed him. At that moment Agnes’s men lowered the portcullis trapping the English inside and Salisbury outside of the castle. Agnes shouted to Salisbury, ‘Farewell, Montague, I intended that you should have supped with us, and assist us in defending the Castle against the English.’
Agnes defended the castle for several months. Finally, Sir Alexander Ramsay of Dalhousie brought forces to support Agnes. He approached the castle by sea and his troops charged out of the castle. These Scotsmen surprised Salisbury's army and pushed them all the way back to their camp. The Earl of Salisbury admitted defeat and lifted the siege of Dunbar Castle on 10 June 1338.
The triumph of a Scotswoman over an English army was written into a ballad, in which Salisbury says:
‘The brawling, boisterous Scottish Wench Kept such a stir in towers and trench That came I early or came I late I found Black Agnes in the gate…’ 🌹
References: John Cassell’s illustrated history of England (1873)
One day when construction on Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean was nearing completion in 1966, Walt Disney was chatting with some of the Pirates construction crew. Walt learned that one of the workers was from the bayou of Louisiana, and he invited the worker to walk the length of the attraction with him to see what he thought. 🤯
The worker and Walt Disney walked through the attraction once, and Walt waited the entire time for a response from the man. None came. Walt asked, "Well, what do you think?? Is it realistic? Does it remind you of where you grew up, in the bayou??" The worker said (and I'm paraphrasing here but using quotes because I'm telling this one from memory) "It's really good. Something is missing, though. Can we walk through again?" ❤️
So this unnamed construction worker walked through Pirates of the Caribbean AGAIN, backwards, with Walt Disney! They reached the part of the attraction inside the Blue Bayou again with the swamp and the old man playing the banjo on the porch of the shack and the guy snapped his fingers, "That's it! Fireflies! You're missing the fireflies from the swamp back home!" A few days later, electric fireflies were buzzing around Walt's bayou with their lights all aglow. ❤️🏴☠️
This one comes from the book "Walt's Disneyland" by Jim Denney.
Not sure this works as a quote, but I liked it and wanted to share...
Françoise Gilot, the accomplished painter whose art was eclipsed by her relationship with Pablo Picasso, has died at 101. She made celebrated paintings exhibited at the Met and MoMA, and wrote a best-selling account of her years with Picasso. By Harrison Smith
The Washington Post: Françoise Gilot had just finished dinner at Le Catalan, a Left Bank bistro in Paris, when Pablo Picasso approached her table with a bowl of cherries. He was 61, a master artist who had already reinvented himself several times over. She was 21 and, like the friend accompanying her that night in May 1943, starting out as a painter.
“That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all day,” Picasso told the two elegant young women upon learning they were artists. “Girls who look like that can’t be painters.” In fact, Gilot’s work had just appeared in an exhibition for the first time; one of her canvases was a veiled swipe at the city’s Nazi occupiers, showing a taxidermied hawk with the Eiffel Tower rising in the background.
She would continue to paint through the tumultuous years that followed, as she became Picasso’s mistress, model and muse, the mother of two of his children and, by his account, the only woman who ever left him. Ms. Gilot, who was 101 when she died June 6 at a hospital in Manhattan, achieved a distinguished career as a painter, with her work shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art and Centre Pompidou in Paris. She also published graceful, incisive memoirs and poetry collections, even as she spent decades battling with those who sought to define her by the men in her life, including Picasso, her friend Henri Matisse and her second husband, American virologist Jonas Salk, who helped eradicate polio.
Those men certainly influenced and inspired her, Ms. Gilot said. But there was no reason to view her as a supporting figure rather than a leading one. “Lions mate with lions,” she told Mirabella magazine. “They don’t mate with mice.”
The only child of a wealthy agronomist, Françoise Gilot was born in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine on Nov. 26, 1921. As a child, she borrowed paintbrushes from her mother, a homemaker who worked with watercolors and ceramics. Her father, who pined for a son and dressed Ms. Gilot in boys’ clothing, pushed her toward international law.
Gilot graduated from the Sorbonne at 17, in 1938, with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. She was studying law when the Germans invaded France in 1940. “After that,” she told TV interviewer Charlie Rose, “I thought, ‘Well, you know, I don’t know how long we will remain alive. So I’m going to do what I want.’ ”
She dropped out of law school at the Sorbonne, an event that marked the beginning of a years-long estrangement with her father, and was studying at the Académie Julian art school when she began visiting Picasso’s studio in 1943 after their initial encounter at the bistro. By then, Picasso had separated from his first wife, Russian dancer Olga Khokhlova, and taken up with photographer Dora Maar. He soon abandoned her for Ms. Gilot.
Their relationship, she wrote in a best-selling memoir, “Life With Picasso” (1964), was “a catastrophe I didn’t want to avoid” — a passionate romance that was intellectually and artistically fulfilling but marred by episodes of physical and emotional abuse. The couple lived together for nearly a decade, spending much of their time at a Riviera villa known as La Galloise, where Picasso introduced Ms. Gilot to friends including the existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the filmmaker and artist Jean Cocteau, and the painters Georges Braque and Matisse. The latter “acted like a visa on my passport to the realm of art,” Ms. Gilot said. Picasso incorporated Gilot and their two children, Claude and Paloma, into sculptures, paintings, ceramics and lithographs.
But Gilot’s own work drew more from Matisse, whose brightly colored, emotionally reserved style she preferred over Picasso’s expressionistic technique. When their work was exhibited together in 2012 at the Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan, Picasso biographer John Richardson declared that “Picasso took from her rather more than she took from him.”
Reviewing her 1965 solo exhibition at the Findlay Gallery in Manhattan, New York Times art critic Stuart Preston wrote that Ms. Gilot “is an artist very much in her own right … "Without any self-indulgent interest in sensuous or ‘interesting’ textures, she has a feeling for the quality of paint itself and for the mysteriously effective relationship of color and shape that lends her paintings, large and small, a genuinely authoritative air.”
In 1970, she married Salk, perhaps the most famous physician in the world for his work on polio two decades earlier. He was running a lab in San Diego when a mutual friend introduced him to Ms. Gilot.
Salk knew next to nothing about painting; she knew little of science. The couple remained together until his death in 1995. Gilot eventually sold all the Picasso works she owned, including “La Femme-Fleur,” because of the “bad luck” that seemed to trail him — including the suicides of his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, his wife Roque and his grandson Pablito.
Gilot chaired the fine arts department at the University of Southern California. She also wrote books including “Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art” (1990) and “About Women” (2015), with Lisa Alther, and was appointed an officer in France’s Legion of Honor in 2009. Despite losing vision in her left eye, she continued painting into her 90s.
June 3, 1967 - The Doors 'Light My Fire' was released in the US. When The Doors were booked to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show they were asked to change the line "girl, we couldn't get much higher", as the sponsors were uncomfortable with the possible reference to drug-taking.
The band agreed to do so, and did a rehearsal using the amended lyrics; however, during the live performance, Jim Morrison sang the original lyric, after which they were informed they would never appear on the Ed Sullivan show again.
“The expectations of Men, should not be the expectations of mankind. “
Maids making sandwiches for night shift workmen at Consolidated Aircrafts. This is in a boarding house for single men. The men are given room and board - two meals every day and a lunch consisting of three sandwiches, fruit, and cake for eight dollars a week. San Diego, California in 1941.
The image, information in the caption, location, and date are from the Library of Congress and can be found at the link below. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017789592/
80 years ago this week…
1939 was a year that would go down in history for a number of reasons. It was, of course, the year when Hitler would begin World War II by invading Poland. It also happened to be the year when Gone With the Wind would take the cinematic world by storm. Leslie Steiner, a Jewish man of Hungarian descent, born in London, would play a significant role in both events.
You see, we know him better as Leslie Howard, the actor to whom Scarlett crooned, “Ashley, Ashley…” He was already a veteran of stage and screen and a heartthrob, but Gone With the Wind catapulted him to mega stardom.
Leslie Howard walked away from it all in 1940, buying out his contract and forfeiting royalties in favor of writing and producing anti-Nazi propaganda films for the British government. This move earned him the enmity of the Nazi leadership in general, but especially that of Joseph Goebbels, the German propaganda minister.
On June 1, 1943, Leslie Howard was one of 17 people aboard Flight 777, a civilian aircraft flying from neutral Portugal to Bristol. By mutual agreement, such civilian planes flew safely back and forth with great frequency. On that day, however, six fighters attacked the defenseless Douglas DC-3, causing it to crash in the Bay of Biscay and killing all aboard. All of Britain was shocked, but not so the Nazis.
Some say they believed Churchill to be aboard, but many historians believe it was Minister Goebbels himself who ordered the attack and delighted in the death of his nemesis. Leslie Howard died at age 50, a superstar, but one whose greatest role was not on the silver screen but in the theatre of life.
The Three Daughters of King O'Hara: An Irish Animal Bridegroom Tale
A King had three daughters. One day while he was away, the eldest put on a cloak of darkness and wished for the most beautiful man under the sun as a husband, and a beautiful man came and took her away.
The middle daughter saw this, and put on the cloak and wished for the best man in the world as her husband. The youngest put on the cloak and wished for a white dog, and they were each taken away.
When the king came home he was furious his youngest daughter had wished for a white dog and gone off with him.
The eldest daughter's husband asked her if she would like him to stay in his current form at night, or during the day. She asked for his human form in the daytime, and he was a seal at night. The same thing happened to the next sister.
The youngest wife asked for her husband to remain a white dog during the day, and at night he became a handsome man. After a time she bore a son, and her husband warned her, if anything happened to the child, she must not shed a tear. While her husband was gone, a great crow came and carried the week old baby away, and she did not shed a tear.
The same thing happened after she bore a second son. A little while later, she gave birth to a daughter. Despite the warning, when the crow carried her away, the wife shed one tear, and put it in her handkerchief. When her husband came home and realized she had shed a tear, he was very angry.
Some time later, the father invited his three daughters to stay with him. The white dog was in dread that he would not be allowed to stay in the palace, but his wife told him, "There is no danger to you, for wherever I am, you'll be, and wherever you go, I'll follow and take care of you."
Although the King did not want the dog in his castle, his youngest daughter did not listen to him, and insisted on staying with the white dog all evening. Later, when everyone was in their rooms, the Queen and the cook stole into her daughter's rooms, and was surprised to see her eldest daughters with seals, and her youngest with a handsome man. The Queen also found the white dog skin, and threw it in the fire.
The skin gave a crack that woke everyone in the castle, and everyone for miles around. The youngest daughter's husband was angry, and revealed that if he had spent three nights with his wife under her father's roof, he could have resumed his human form permanently; but if his skin was destroyed, he was forced to leave. But his wife followed him, even though he ran all night and the next day; she would not leave him.
On their journey, they encountered three houses. In the first lived a little boy who called her "mother", and the woman of the house gave her a pair of scissors that would cut rags and turn them into new gold clothes. In the second house the woman met another little boy who called her "mother," and was given a magical comb that would heal sores on people's heads and give them a head full of beautiful golden hair. In the third, she met a little girl with one eye. The mother had kept the handkerchief in which she had shed a tear, and the tear had turned into an eyeball; the mother took out the eye and fitted it into her daughter's head, and she could see out of it. At this home she was given a whistle which would bring birds to her aid.
Finally, the husband and wife came to a place where he had no power to stay on upper earth, but was forced to become the husband of the Queen of Tir na n-Og (the land of youth), and he disappeared. His wife followed down until she came to the lower land, where she befriended a poor washer woman, and helped her with her chores.
One of the local children came to the wife in rags, and she used the magic scissors to make her beautiful new clothes. News of this traveled to the Queen, who insisted on having the scissors for herself. The true wife traded the scissors for a night with the Queen's husband, where she tried to talk to him, but he slept all night.
Later, she used the comb to heal a little girl with sores all over her head, and when the Queen heard of the girl's beautiful golden hair, she traded the comb for a night with her husband, but the same thing happened.
The wife used the whistle to call the birds to her, and they told her how to kill the Queen: her husband must find her heart in an egg in a duck in a wether (a neutered male sheep-thanks, Sue Bursztynski!) in a holly tree in front of the castle, and destroy the egg, which contained her heart. The true wife wrote her husband a letter, telling him of their history and that the Queen was giving him sleeping potions, and how to kill the Queen. Once the Queen heard about the whistle, the true wife was able to strike the same bargain, but this time her husband was awake; he was able to obtain the egg and smash it, killing the evil Queen. He and his first wife are still living happily together in the Land of Youth.
Who knew - The bread was not a prop, it was real??
Lucille Ball wanted the scene to look realistic, so instead of using a fake prop, the producers had L.A.’s Union Mode Bakery whip up a giant loaf of rye, and the cast and crew literally broke bread together with the audience after the taping.