Bust of a Boinero

This bust of a modern day boinero in a red leather jacket with black beret I found for sale on an auction site. 

Vigo's Murals

Vigo is a city and municipality in Spain, part of the autonomous community of Galicia, located in the Northwest of the Iberian Peninsula.

Mon Devane's murals are a tribute to Galician tradition and culture. The faces of two elderly men as they drink a cup of wine cover two huge walls, against a magenta background.

The paintings are based on the photographs of Óscar Vífer, portraying the people of the neighborhood and meanwhile bringing out a smile to everyone who passes by.

Sallah Shabati

Sallah Shabati is a 1964 Israeli comedy film about the chaos of Israeli immigration and resettlement. 

This social satire placed the director Ephraim Kishon and producer Menahem Golan among the first Israeli filmmakers to achieve international success. It also introduced actor Chaim Topol (Fiddler on the Roof) to audiences worldwide.

The film begins with Sallah Shabati, a Mizrahi Jewish immigrant, arriving in Israel with his family. Upon arrival he is brought to live in a ma'abara, or transit camp. He is given a broken-down, one-room shack in which to live with his family and spends the rest of the movie attempting to make enough money to purchase adequate housing. 

His money-making schemes are often comical and frequently satirize the political and social stereotypes in Israel of the time.

Chaim Potok

Herman Harold Potok was born in Bronx, New York, to Jewish immigrants from Poland.

He was the oldest of four children, all of whom either became or married rabbis. After reading Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited as a teenager, he decided to become a writer.

In 1967 Potok published The Chosen, which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award and was nominated for the National Book Award.

The Chosen was made into a film released in 1981, which won the most prestigious award at the World Film Festival, Montreal.

His work was significant for discussing the conflict between the traditional aspects of Jewish thought and culture and modernity to a wider, non-Jewish culture.

 He taught a highly regarded graduate seminar on Postmodernism at the University of Pennsylvania from 1993 through 2001.

Cabane de l'A Neuve

The Cabane de l'A Neuve is a mountain hut in the Swiss Alps at 2,735 metres above sea level open for visitors.

The Cabane de l'A Neuve was built as 'Cabane Dufour a La Neuvaz', in 1927 with a legacy from Mr. Edouard Dufour and had a capacity of 22 beds at the time. As of 2014, it has 28 beds.

The hut can be reached from the Val Ferret. The hut lies below the Grand Darray (3,514 m) on the south side in the Mont Blanc Massif. Other summits close to the hut are the Tour Noir (3,835 m), the Grande Lui (3,509 m) and the Mont Dolent (3,823 m).

The hut is owned by the Diablerets (Lausanne) section of the Swiss Alpine Club (SAC). It is the starting point for alpine tours in the Swiss part of the Mont Blanc massif. It is located on a small rocky spur with a view of the dwindling Glacier de l'A Neuve.

Photos are from it’s 75^th anniversary.

Escargot

Dashka Slater is a journalist, a bestselling young adult writer, and a middle grade and picture book author. 

Escargot is a beautiful French snail who wants only two things:

1. To be your favorite animal.
2. To get to the delicious salad at the end of the book.

But when he gets to the salad, he discovers that there's a carrot in it. And Escargot hates carrots. But when he finally tries one―with a little help from you!―he discovers that it's not so bad after all.

Pierre Jamet

Pierre Jamet (1910-2000) was a singer (the tenor voice in Les Quatre Barbus), active outdoorsman, and above all – the gifted photographer who so brilliantly captured young French people enjoying their country’s hillsides, lakes, and seashore during the 1930s.

Pierre Jamet would photograph children and families on the roads of France, in youth hostels and summer resorts, during the leftist political period of the Popular Front, late 1930s.

Jamet actively participated in Léon Blum’s anti-fascist Popular Front, which swept to power in 1936.

The Popular Front and the youth hostel movement sought a “renewal of liberal political practice at the grassroots level in response to the rise of far right movements and the economic crisis in the early 1930s. The Popular Front was a combined revolt of the working class against and the youth against a social order that prevented them from playing any significant political role. The idea of youth, expressed through the ever-important word Jeunesse, was endowed with a number of meanings, both symbolic and real, and played a fundamental role in the orientation of the Popular Front’s policies.”

The hostels challenged pre-existing social and political structures, questioning patriarchy, gender, race, religion and national identifications in a concerted effort to reject fascism.

Gabriela Mistral

Lucila Godoy Alcayaga (1889 –1957), known by her pseudonym Gabriela Mistral, was a Chilean poet-diplomat, educator and humanist.

In 1945 she became the first Latin American author to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature, "for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world". Some central themes in her poems are nature, betrayal, love, a mother's love, sorrow and recovery, travel, and Latin American identity as formed from a mixture of Native American and European influences.

Her portrait also appears on the 5,000 Chilean peso bank note.

Flea-market Zwolle

The beret (or in Dutch "alpinopet") may not be part of the regular street scene in the Netherlands, it sure dominates at the flea market in Zwolle.
Photographs by my brother Emile, the Beret Spy.

Emile, the Beret Spy (again)

The latest harvest of photos of boineros/as in the wild by my brother Emile, the Beret Spy:

Utrecht railway station, Netherlands

Recycle Shop in Heerlen, Netherlands

Weesperplein station, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Court House, Den Bosch, Netherlands

Strassbourg, France

Arthur H

Arthur Higelin (1966), better known under his stage name Arthur H, is a French pianist, songwriter and singer. He is best known in France for his live performances—four of his albums were recorded live.

Arthur H is an acrobat. He knows how to combine the most demanding poetry with the energy of rock and the jubilation of pop. It takes a lot of elegance, a lot of application, a lot of intuition. Arthur likes to take risks. He takes pleasure in it. He searches for what has not yet been domesticated in us.

Patrick Larcebal (4)

Last post in the serie on Basque photographer/painter Patrick Larcebal. 

I am sorry to say it, but these photos show one shortcoming of a (small plateau) beret: the eyes are not shielded from the sun!

Patrick Larcebal (3)

Last week I posted on the paintings by French Basque artist Patrick Larcebal, known for his people portraits and street scenes in the Basque Country. 

His photos too depict typical scenes in the French Basque Country (Bayonne); the old men congregating in the street, cattle markets, chatting and smoking.

John Sadovy

Czech-born John Sadovy was sent to Budapest by Life magazine and photographed three days of the Hungarian revolution.

When Life magazine released six of his pictures to the Associated Press, they were run by hundreds of newspapers across the United States.

Later that year the images won the Robert Capa Award for “superlative photography requiring exceptional courage and enterprise abroad”.