Hurdy gurdy

The hurdy gurdy is a stringed instrument that produces sound by a crank-turned, rosined wheel rubbing against the strings. The wheel functions much like a violin bow, and single notes played on the instrument sound similar to those of a violin. Melodies are played on a keyboard that presses tangents — small wedges, typically made of wood — against one or more of the strings to change their pitch. Like most other acoustic stringed instruments, it has a sound board to make the vibration of the strings audible.

Most hurdy gurdies have multiple drone strings, which give a constant pitch accompaniment to the melody, resulting in a sound similar to that of bagpipes. For this reason, the hurdy gurdy is often used interchangeably or along with bagpipes, particularly in French and contemporary Hungarian and Galician folk music.

The hurdy-gurdy tradition is well developed in Eastern Europe, particularly in Hungary, Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. In Ukraine it is known as the lira or relia. It was and still is played by professional, often blind, itinerant musicians known as lirnyky. Their repertoire has mostly para-religious themes. Most of it originated in the Baroque period. In Eastern Ukraine the repertoire includes unique historic epics known as dumy and folk dances.

Lirnyky were categorised as beggars by the Russian authorities and fell under harsh repressive measures if they were caught performing in the streets of major cities until 1902, when the authorities were asked by ethnographers attending the 12th All-Russian Archaeological conference to stop persecuting them.

In the 1930s this tradition was almost totally eradicated by the Soviet authorities when some 250-300 lirnyky were rounded up for an ethnographic conference and executed as a socially undesirable element in the new progressive contemporary Soviet society.

Citizen Smith

Citizen Smith is a British television sitcom. 

Citizen Smith starred Robert Lindsay as "Wolfie" Smith, a young Marxist "urban guerrilla" living in Tooting, South London, who is attempting to emulate his hero Che Guevara. 

'Wolfie' is a reference to the Irish revolutionary Wolfe Tone who used the pseudonym Citizen Smith in order to evade capture by the English. Wolfie is the self-proclaimed leader of the revolutionary Tooting Popular Front (the TPF, merely a small bunch of his friends), the goals of which are "Power to the People" and "Freedom for Tooting". 

In reality, he is an unemployed dreamer and petty criminal whose plans fall through because of laziness and disorganisation.

International Women's Day

Mounted Berets

 So called Health&Safety Regulations forbid the riding of horses without a helmet in quite a few countries (similar to riding a bike, but that's another story).

What would the pampa of Patagonia look like if Argentina and Chile enforced these regulations on gauchos?

No better riding gear than a beret; it keeps the head warm and dry, doesn't blow of in the wind, no peak that gets in the way and with a bit of flight, no sun in the eyes.

 Some 90% of Bonigor's (non-military) beret production goes to gauchos, farmers and peasants. I can't think of any other group this size that is so faithful to the beret, or boina. 

Gaúcho da Fronteira

Gaúcho da Fronteira, stage name of Heber Artigas Armúa Fróis (1947), is a singer and musician from Uruguay, but now a naturalized Brazilian. He is one of the most popular performers of gaucho regional music .

 He began playing guitar , accordion and bandoneon as a child and in 1968 he joined the group "Os Vaqueanos" with whom he recorded numerous albums.

In 1975 he recorded his first solo album, titled "Gaúcho da Fronteira"  and reaffirmed himself as a representative of the traditional music of the Pampas.

In the 1980s his songs became popular throughout Brazil. In the 1990s he returned to playing at traditional Brazilian music events  and in 1999 released the CD "Forronerão" with the group ‘Embers do Forró’.

My Fair Ad-Man

The great Mad magazine ran an amusing musical parody piece in 1960 or thereabouts, right when Don Draper and his Sterling Cooper colleagues were establishing a beachhead. 

Based on Lerner and Leowe’s My Fair Lady, “My Fair Adman” was a dryly cynical comment about Madison Avenue values in which Cary Grant was more or less Henry Higgins, Charles Laughton played a version of Colonel Pickering and Frank Sinatra was Eliza Doolittle (i.e., “Irving Mallion,” a Greenwich Village beatnik with a beret and a Van Dyke).

Sir Hubert Ferdinand Opperman

Sir Hubert Ferdinand Opperman, (1904 – 1996), referred to as Oppy by Australian and French crowds, was an Australian cyclist and politician, whose endurancecycling feats in the 1920s and 1930s earned him international acclaim.

Hubert rode a bicycle from the age of eight until his 90th birthday, when his wife Mavys, fearing for his health and safety, forced him to stop. His stamina and endurance in cycling earned Opperman the status of one of the greatest Australian sportsmen.

Opperman's career ended with World War II when he joined the Royal Australian Air Force. He served from 1940 to 1945 and rose to flight lieutenant. He raced briefly after the war but retired in 1947.

Beret belonging to Hubert Opperman, 1928. Photo: National Museum of Australia

Opperman joined the Liberal Party of Australia after the war and in 1949 was elected to the Parliament of Australia for the Victorian electorate of Corio centred on Geelong. He beat a senior Labour minister, J. J. Dedman and held the seat for 17 years before appointment to High Commissioner for Malta.

Gustaf Håkansson, aka Steel Grandpa

An usual long post for The Beret project (but well worth reading!).

In 1951 Gustaf Håkansson signed up for an endurance race traversing virtually the entirety of Sweden, only for his submission to be rejected because of his age. It was determined that the 66-year old had neither the strength nor stamina to compete with the fifty other racers half his age. Nevertheless, having ridden 600 miles to get to the starting line, Gustaf was there on race day in the saddle of his roadster complete with mudguards, a headlamp (which is what eventually helped him emerge victorious) and panniers.

Due to the volume of racers, Gustaf crossed the starting line about twenty seconds after the race had started. He had donned a home-made bib with the number ‘0’, probably to indicate to the officials he wasn't joking and that he was indeed expecting to be treated as a participator. This was however dependant on them seeing the bib under the old man’s rather impressive long flowing beard.

Five days, five hours and 1,000 miles later, spectators waiting to cover the winner in eternal glory spotted a figure rounding the last corner. Amidst their cheers they went to greet him and offer him food and water, so exhausted he must be after such an arduous slog through Sweden. Expecting to embrace a twenty or thirtysomething slender man bending over the handlebars during the last push, the receiving crowd were understandably more than a little perplexed to watch a frail old gentleman wobble over the line on a rusty old roadster with a flat tyre, and a full day ahead of the next rider.

Truth is, Håkansson cheated. Well, he didn’t actually cheat seeing as he wasn’t an official competitor, but he did neglect one rule the others were enforced to follow.

Gustaf didn’t sleep. As part of race regulations, competitors were expected to meet and stop at a checkpoint at the end of the day to recharge and restart the next morning. Instead, Gustaf took an hour to rest before setting off again in the middle of the night. The time allowed him to make up for the 10 miles he was behind to put, after 300 miles, a 20 mile gap between him and the rest of the pack.

After three days and only five hours’ sleep, Gustaf was leading the field by more than 120 miles. At one point the police tried to persuade him to stop for a medical examination, but he only laughed – and pedalled on.

Eventually, with only 800 yards or so to go, ‘Steel Grandpa’ (as he became known by the folk of the villages he’d passed through) came to an abrupt halt. But it wasn’t sheer exhaustion that had stopped him – the old man’s bicycle had suffered its first and only flat tyre. Unperturbed, Gustaf dismounted and set towards the finish line where, with only a few yards to go, remounted to cross the line at 2:15 on July 7, 1951.

Despite the albeit unofficial victory, a subsequent audience with the King of Sweden and generally being showered in fame and honour, Gustaf’s greatest satisfaction came from proving wrong the doctors who had thought he was better suited in a rocking chair than he was in a saddle. The Steel Grandpa continued to ride bicycles until his death in 1987 at the age of 102.

Thanks, Stu

Pablo Picasso's Influence on British Art Students

Pablo Picasso’s influence on Britain was sartorial as well as artistic, according to a new book that reveals the high number of berets handed in to lost property during his Institute of Contemporary Arts show in the 1950s.

Never-before-published documents from the early years of the institution show that London’s young art enthusiasts were keen to adopt the fashion tips of the Spanish painter, who at that time was known for his distinctive headgear.

The institute, which was founded in 1946, featured his work in its first exhibition – “40 Years of Modern Art 1907 to 1947” – and staged two Picasso solo shows in the 1950s.

“Among the monthly internal bulletins was lost property,” said Anne Massey, an art historian and  co-author of History of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the first history of the early years of the ICA. “One revealed that berets were left behind around the time of the Picasso show. He wore one and everyone was trying to copy him.”

Chinese Gold Miners in Otago (NZ)

I discovered this painting of Chinese goldminers in Otago by Ben Ho, a Chinese New Zealand artist, and realized these miners are wearing berets. I started an extensive search to find more paintings, photographs, etc, but found very little. 

I did find this picture (above), again of goldminers in Otago, resting in front of their stone hut. It's a small picture unfortunately, but two of the men do appear to wear a beret. 

Beatniks from Wellington

From the Encyclopaedia of New Zealand:

This cartoon shows several bearded beret-wearing beatniks leaning against a lamp post outside a coffee bar on Lambton Quay, Wellington. The caricature reflected the fact that, following the example of beats in the United States and Britain, a few young people in Wellington and Auckland did adopt the beat lifestyle, which involved experimenting with marijuana.

Francis Jammes

Francis Jammes (1868 - 1938) was a French poet. Coming from an ancient family, he spent most of his life in his native region of Béarn and the Basque Country and his poems are known for their lyricism and for singing the pleasures of a humble country life (donkeys, maidens).

The young author's first poems began to be read in Parisian literary circles around 1895, and they were appreciated for their fresh tone which broke considerably from symbolist tendencies of the period. Jammes fraternised with other writers, including André Gide (with whom he travelled to Algeria in 1896), Stéphane Mallarmé and Henri de Régnier.

In 1905 Francis Jammes, influenced by the poet Paul Claudel with whom he became close, "converted" to Catholicism (in actuality a return to being a practising Catholic) and his poetry became more austere and occasionally more dogmatic.

In the eyes of Parisian literary circles, Francis Jammes was generally considered a solitary provincial who chose to live a life of retreat in his mountainous Pyrenees, and his poems never became entirely fashionable. The author sought nomination to the Académie française several times, but was never elected.

Jammes was known to have an ardent passion for field sports, especially game hunting. He was known to have also been a believer in the conservation of endangered species.

"Francis Jammes" - Spraypaint on canvas

Saint-Pol-Roux

Paul-Pierre Roux, called Saint-Pol-Roux (1861 - 1940) was a French Symbolist poet. He left the south of France of his childhood  to install himself in Paris. He particularly frequented the salon of Stéphane Mallarmé, for whom Saint-Pol-Roux had the greatest admiration. He won a certain notoriety, trying out several pseudonyms before finally becoming "Saint-Pol-Roux le magnifique". He even got one of his plays, La Dame à la faux, put on by Sarah Bernhardt, and was interviewed by Jules Huret as a member of the Symbolist movement. He perhaps participated in the Rosicrucian aesthetic of Péladan. Nevertheless, he wrote nothing on the movement or on its founder. Saint-Pol-Roux was doubtless interested in this audacious literary attempt, and had to leave it quickly.

 After his father's death, he moved to Camaret and made Britanny the center for his work. Living off the revenue he earned from his libretto for the opera Louise, he bought a house overlooking the ocean, above the Pen Had beach, on the road to pointe de Pen Hir, and transformed it into a manor in the Baroque style.

During the night of 22 to 23 June 1940, a drunken German soldier invaded the manor, killed the family's faithful governess, raped Saint-Pol-Roux's daughter Divine, and seriously injured her in the leg with a revolver bullet. Saint-Pol-Roux miraculously escaped death in the incident, but was later taken to hospital in Brest on October 14, where he died of a broken heart when he heard that the manor had burned down with his unpublished manuscripts inside.

Musician in the Rain

 "Musician in the Rain", one of the great photographs by Robert Doisneau. 

Not only that, it made a great inspiration for other musicians/photographers too.

Dean Martin - French Style

French Style is Dean Martin's first LP for Reprise Records. Recorded during February 1962, it features French-themed popular songs and Chansons arranged by Neal Hefti. Among them "C'est si bon", which frequently appears on Dean Martin compilation albums, a rendition of Edith Piaf's classic La Vie En Rose, the title song from the MGM classic Gigi (1958 film) and two classic Cole Porter tunes. Originally released as Reprise LP R(S)-6021 ('S' distinguishing the stereo pressing), the album's tracks made their CD debut as part of the chronologically sequenced Bear Family box set "Everybody Loves Somebody" (BCD 16343). A subsequent two-on-one CD (together with Martin's succeeding album Dino Latino) by Collectors' Choice restored the original running order.

Beret Portraits in Black & White