Mari Andriessen

Mari(e) Silvester Andriessen (1897 - 1979) was a Dutch sculptor. He was a member of the second generation of the Group of figurative abstraction, also known as De Groep (“The Group”).

The years up to and including the war were difficult for him and other sculptors, as there were few assignments. The 1940-45 period gave a decisive twist to his life and work. 

Andriessen, as 'Aryan artist', had to become a member of the Nederlandsche Kultuurkamer, which was based on National Socialist philosophy, which he refused. Because of this he received no commissions and was not allowed to exhibit. Andriessen held Jewish people in hiding in his house and the resistance had a weapons depot in Andriessen's studio.

When the war ended, many municipalities wanted to have a war memorial. Few knew what such a monument should look like. Andriessen had learned from his teacher Bronner that an image had to be clear, clean and well-organized. He was inspired by Belgian and French realists (Constantin Meunier, Aimé-Jules Dalou and Auguste Rodin).

His best-known works are De Dokwerker (“The Docker”), Anne Frank and “Man for the firing squad”. De Dokwerker on Amsterdam's Jonas Daniël Meijerplein commemorates the February strike of 1941.

Gijs Jacobs van den Hof (2)

Gijsbert Jan "Gijs" Jacobs van den Hof (1889 - 1965 ) was a Dutch sculptor.

One of his most well known sculptures is that of "De Gele Rijder" ("The Yellow Horseman") in Arnhem, Netherlands. This horseman was a member of the oldest corps within the Dutch military, a field artillery regiment established in 1793.

Freek Verhoeven & De Colonjes

After his retirement, Freek Verhoeven turned his love for wine into a serious hobby. As an amateur winemaker he planted a first hectare of vines in 2001 and soon got his brother involved as well. Not being youngsters anymore they realized soon they needed some help.

Adam Dijkstra was at the right place at the right moment. His intention was to follow a winemaking study in South Africa. While his bags were already packed, he decided to make a different choice and follow a viticulture education in Germany instead. The opportunity to help continue this winery was one that you do not get every day.

Wijnhoeve De Colonjes is now one of the largest wineries in the Netherlands. The vineyards are situated in three locations around Groesbeek. From the beginning Freek’s mission was to work as sustainable as possible.

The obvious choice was to plant hybrid grape varieties like Johanniter, Solaris, Muscaris, Helios and Cabernet Blanc to produce white wines. They even had the honor to name a new hybrid after their vineyard, the Cabernet Colonjes. Red wines are produced from Regent, Pinotin and Cabernet Cortis.  What started merely as a hobby in 2001 has now become a 13 hectares winery.

Hendrik Valk

Hendrik Valk (1897-1986) wasn’t satisfied with common depictions of reality. Along with many other artists during the early twentieth century, he was looking for the ‘being’ inside the work of art. Life and art had to be harmoniously brought together; art and the artist would then be able to obtain a new, central position.

Photo for Life Magazine; Valk and his students

Reviewers were especially interested in Valk’s graphical talent. His distinct style, featuring sharp divides and simplified depictions, regularly reminded them of designs for stained glass windows. However, the influence of contemporaries like Bart van der Leck (1876-1958) is also undeniable.

Hendrik Valk also become very involved in the world of the theatre. As a result, he also designed various scenery pieces and costumes for groups such as the East Dutch Theatre, which was led by Albert van Dalsum.

Drawings of costumes for Shakespeare’s ’The Merchant of Venice; Premiered in 1922

After retiring in 1973, exhibitions of Valk’s work followed each other in quick succession for several years, and interest in his oeuvre continued to exist for years after his death in 1986.

Roberto Parada

Roberto Parada (1909–1986) was a Chilean actor, theater director and teacher with a long career of more than 50 years on the stage, and also was a standout militant communist. Parada was married to the actress and deputy of the Communist Party of Chile and the Party for Democracy, María Maluenda. 

They had two children, Maria Soledad and the sociologist José Manuel, who while working for the Vicariate of Solidarity, was assassinated by agents of the DICOMCAR (Directorate of Communications of Carabineros), the repressive organ of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

The political persecution led him to leave the country with his wife, heading to Buenos Aires and then to Moscow, where he died on November 20, 1986.

Hiroshi Fujimoto

Hiroshi Fujimoto was one of the moving spirits in the great surge of enthusiasm in Japan for manga magazines, books, and movies. 

He worked in tandem with a close friend from schooldays, Abiko Motoo, born like Hiroshi in Toyama Prefecture. His date of birth made him only three months Hiroshi's junior. They used the pen-name of Fujio-Fujiko and lived together in the same small apartment in downtown Tokyo until their success as cartoonist storytellers allowed them to marry and buy palatial adjoining residences for their families.

Fujio-Fujiko first achieved fame with the children's comic tale Obake no Kyutaro, popularly called "Oba-Q". After it appeared in February 1964 in Shonen Sande ("Shonen Sunday") magazine, its success was so meteoric, the publisher changed his magazine from a monthly to a weekly, starring the strange amorphous figure of Oba-Q which soon began to turn up everywhere as toys and on posters and children's clothes.

This success was followed by Ninja Hattorikun, an amiable idiot and above all the greatest children's icon ever since the Seventies, Doraemon.

It is hard to explain to Westerners the perverse fascination of this atomic-powered robotic cat. It far surpasses in originality the (Western) insufferable cat Garfield.

The bicephalic authors first unleashed Doraemon in the pages of Shogakkan, a comic weekly of the standard 300-page format, in 1970. In a typical childhood fantasy, the little boy Nobita, a bookish, bespectacled nerd, discovers this cute, cool, magical cat in the drawer of the desk at which all Japanese children slave over their homework. 

Doraemon is smart, with three spiky whiskers on either side of a capacious mouth, and a sort of kangaroo pouch from which he produces all kinds of astonishing things, including a miniature helicopter that enables him to zoom around the room and the countryside.

He is surely a small child's dream-fulfilment fantasy of an all-powerful protector in a harsh adult world of endless swotting and school bullying.

Bernhard Süßbauer

The focus of German artist Bernhard Süßbauer’s work is the human body.

Süßbauer’s intention is to make a greater reality visible, tangible from a piece of matter, a section of wood or stone. The greater part should unfold through the creative act and confront us.

The material says, "give me a shape - I'll give you the truth. Recognize me, touch me and I caress your soul”.

As a blossom unfolds in nature, the work - following a higher idea - arises largely without purpose in a creative process and makes the difference between truth and reality clear.

The viewer can then engage in the created form and its mode of presentation because it stands in front of him naked.

Bavand Behpoor

Bavand Behpoor is an Iranian performance artist who holds a master’s in architecture from Shiraz University and has exhibited his works and installations internationally.

He has taught courses on Iranian contemporary art at universities such as FU Berlin, LMU Munich, Tehran Art University and Sooreh Universities in Shiraz and Tehran. His writings have appeared in English, German, French, Italian and Farsi in journals such as Third Text, ARTMargins, Critique d'art and Memar.

Currently he lives and works in Tehran-Iran, he is also a PHD candidate at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU).

How To And How Not To (#2)

The June 2009 post 'How To And How Not To' is one of the most read posts on this blog with some 25.000 views!

It definitely shows there is a desire for guidance on how to wear a beret, also shown by the many videos on YouTube on the subject.

Although my adage still is: wear your beret any way that makes you feel comfortable wearing it, some notes could be useful here.   
There was a time that leaning your beret to the left marked your affiliation with leftist politics and v.v. for the right.

Patch released by FDJ (the communist youth German Democratic Republic) in memory of Tamara Bunke

Muslims in the former Yugoslavia that took to berets as an acceptable head cover (wearing the traditional fez or skull cap was not recommended in Tito's socialist Yugoslavia, while berets were associated with WWII partisans) typically pulled the beret back over the head, keeping the forehead free.

Bosnian Muslim from Lukomir

The typical peasants and farmers in France pulled a peak to the from of the beret, shielding the eyes from sun. 

Then there are the likes of Benny Hill, Michael Crawford and André van Duin who pulled the beret right over their head, creating a comical "village idiot" look. 

So many ways to style your beret, but in essence, it doesn't matter... One of the great things about a beret is its versatility and, in good association with many of its famous adepts, the freedom it represents to do what you feel is good.

Frank Squirrel

Cherokee Nation Color Guard member Frank Squirrel (1933 – 2013) retired from the U.S. Army after serving more than 30 years, in which he served in the Special Forces and earned the right to wear the prestigious Green Beret. He was also a member of the retired Special Forces Association.

A CN Communications release stated that Frank Squirrel was the most recognizable face of the color guard and the member who always carried in the eagle staff. He represented the tribe at events large and small. He even marched in the New York City Veteran’s Day Parade.

Korean War veteran and member of the Cherokee Nation Color Guard at the annual Veterans Day parade November 11, 2009 in New York City

Michael Casteel

When Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin signed HB 1124 into law in May 2017 it was yet another strike against Native Americans and the entire nationwide working class of which they are a part – a strike against the 99 percent.

At heart is the Plains All American Pipeline which has been protested several times in Norman, Oklahoma. The law is designed to harshly penalize protesters. The protest movement uses hashtag #NoPlainsPipeline to document their concerns.

Members of several federally recognized Oklahoma tribes will be impacted by the project. That list includes the Absentee Shawnee, Citizen Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Sac and Fox, and Chickasaw nations.

An American Indian Movement (AIM) chapter in Oklahoma is actively still protesting the Plains All American Pipeline in Oklahoma. Mike Casteel, the red-bereted director of AIM-Indian Territory said, “We cannot sit idly by — our ancestors died along this trail, and we have many unmarked graves there,” Casteel said in a media release. “We no longer accept poisoning for profit by any government or private corporation.”

Anselmo “Chemo” Candelaria

Anselmo “Chemo” Candelaria was a charismatic and controversial leader of the Chicano Movement in San Jose during the turbulent 1960s.

“He was a commanding figure,” said Arturo Villareal, a professor of ethnic studies and anthropology at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose. “Once he started talking, he had your attention. He’d start slow and easy and end up with a bang.”

His speeches went that way but his life and political activism followed the opposite trajectory. Candelaria burst upon the scene in 1959 when he started the militant Black Berets for Justice and ended quietly April 7 2012 after he had embraced his Native American identity and spirituality and become a respected elder and speaker.

“He was a community activist to the end,” said his widow, Teresa Candelaria, of Peoria, Ariz., where the couple had lived after leaving San Jose in the late 1990s. “He just wanted liberty for our people and for indigenous people everywhere to be treated as human beings with full rights.”

Carlos Montes

Carlos Montes is a nationally respected leader in the Chicano, immigrant rights, and anti-war movements. He was a co-founder of the Brown Berets, a Chicano working-class youth organization in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s. The Brown Berets were inspired by and often compared to the Black Panther Party. 

Montes (with beret and sunglasses) in an LAPD photo taken during the 1968 Roosevelt High School protest

Montes was one of the leaders of the Chicano Blowouts, a series of walkouts of East Los Angeles high schools to protest racism and inequality in Los Angeles-area high schools. He is portrayed by Fidel Gomez in the 2006 HBO movie Walkout.

Montes, flanked by Brown Beret leaders Fred Lopez, David Sánchez, and Ralph Ramírez, in 1968

He has been facing charges since 2011 on a firearms violation that he and supporters insist is unsubstantiated and politically motivated, intended to stifle dissent.

La Causa tribute after Montes went underground

Montes has been organizing against unnecessary FBI raids which tend to focus on dismantling and preventing activist group activity through intimidation.

Montes alongside with other members of the Legalization for All Network announced their support for the Dump Trump protest. This continues Montes work to support the anti-war movement as well as to continue his fight towards equality and justice for all. His announcement came along with a powerful statement, "Dump Trump and his racist attacks must be our call to action! His rhetoric of hate is blaming immigrants, especially Latinos, for the suffering of the working people. This suffering is in fact caused by the billionaire class that Trump represents. We say, 'Dump Trump' and march on the RNC", that reassures the fight against oppression and inequality.

Photos by Herbert E Striner

Man in black beret using a camera, Zermatt, Switzerland 

Man in black beret holding onto wooden railing

Zbigniew Hubert Cybulski

Zbigniew Hubert Cybulski (1927 –1967) was a Polish actor, one of the best-known and most popular personalities of the post-World War II history of Poland.

Cybulski died in an accident at a Wrocław Główny railway station on 8 January 1967, on his way from the film set. As he jumped on the speeding train (as he often did), he slipped on the steps, fell under the train, and was run over.

Cybulski remains a legend of the Polish cinema. His style of acting was revolutionary at the time, as was his image (leather clothes and big sunglasses). He was often referred to as "the Polish James Dean". Like Dean, he played nonconformist rebels, and like him he died young.

Tezuka Osamu

Tezuka Osamu was born the eldest son of three children on November 3rd, 1928, in Toyonaka City, Osaka. 

An extremely witty and imaginative boy, he grew up in a liberal family exposed to manga and animation.
As a boy he also had a love for insects reminiscent of Fabre, and, reflecting the level of his interest in the insect world, later incorporated the ideogram for "insect" into his pen name.

Having developed an intense understanding of the preciousness of life from his wartime experience, Tezuka Osamu aimed to become a physician and later earned his license, but ultimately chose the profession he loved best: manga artist and animated film writer.