Benito Pérez Galdós

Benito Pérez Galdós (1843 –1920) was a Spanish realist novelist. He was the leading literary figure in 19th-century Spain, and some scholars consider him second only to Miguel de Cervantes in stature as a Spanish novelist.

Pérez Galdós was a prolific writer, publishing 31 novels, 46 Episodios Nacionales (National Episodes), 23 plays, and the equivalent of 20 volumes of shorter fiction, journalism and other writings. He remains popular in Spain, and is considered as equal to Dickens, Balzac and Tolstoy. Some of his works have been translated into English, as he has slowly become popular in the Anglophone world.

He came to be nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1912, but his anticlericalism caused him to be successfully boycotted by the most conservative sectors of Spanish society, represented in traditionalist Catholicism, who did not recognize his intellectual and literary value.

In 1918, he joined in a protest with Miguel de Unamuno and Mariano de Cavia against the encroaching censorship and authoritarianism coming from the putatively constitutional monarch.

Stanisław Andrzej Michalkiewicz

Not all boineros are rolemodels… Stanisław Andrzej Michalkiewicz (1947) is a Polish far-right political commentator, lawyer, former politician, opposition activist in the communist Polish People's Republic, and book author.

Michalkiewicz is a follower of ultra- Catholicism and  known for making antisemitic comments involving the Holocaust.

In 2018, Michalkiewicz caused outrage when he equated a rape survivor with a ‘whore’. The woman, who had been raped when she was 13 years old, won a 1 million złoty verdict against the religious order of the perpetrator priest Roman Behrendt who was also sentenced to eight years in jail. The rape victim later sued Michalkiewicz for defamation and won a 150,000 złoty verdict against him.

Dennis Danvers

Dennis Danvers (1947) is US author who concentrated on fantasy and horror for the first part of his career, which began with Wilderness (1991), an effective werewolf novel.

He began writing sf novels with the Circuit of Heaven sequence comprising Circuit of Heaven (1998) and End of Days (1999).

Later novels share many of the characteristics of this opening duo: sophisticated takes on Cybernetics and Nanotechnology and AIs; dream-like plotting; and – most clearly in The Fourth World (2000), which is set in a Mexico dominated by multi-national corporations gorging on its victims – a left-wing take on the cruel complexities of twenty-first-century life across the planet.

Keizō Kitajima

Keizō Kitajima (北島 敬三, 1954) is a Japanese photographer. Kitajima was a leading figure in the rise of Japanese photography in the 1970s and 1980s and first came to be known for his grainy black-and-white shots of people on the streets of Tokyo, at an American military base in Okinawa after the end of the Vietnam War, and in New York. Daido Moriyama, with whom Kitajima first studied photography, praised his talent as a gifted snapshooter by calling him ‘a street killer in broad daylight.’

This photo is of Nadia, an emigrant from Estonia to the United States in Habarovsk, Russia 24 May 1991.

Harley Weir

Harley Weir shoots advertising campaigns and lookbooks for major labels including Balenciaga, Céline, Stella McCartney and Jacquemus. 

She is known for her youth-focused fashion photography which challenges traditional attitudes to the female gaze through the intimacy of her images.

David Armstrong

David Bradley Armstrong (1954 –2014) was an American photographer based in New York.

Armstrong first exhibited his work in 1977 and had one-person shows in New York City, Boston, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Zurich, Düsseldorf, Lisbon, Munich, and Amsterdam. His work was included in numerous group museum exhibitions including Visions from America: Photographs from The Whitney Museum of American Art, 1940-2001 in 2003, Emotions and Relations at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1998, and the 1995 Whitney Biennial.

Christóforos Miliónis

Christóforos Miliónis (1932 - 2017) was a Greek writer.

He has published fifteen books of fiction in prose, including two novels and collections of short stories, five essays and a book of translations into modern Greek of ancient Greek and Latin texts.

The collection of short stories Kalamás and Acheron has been translated into English and German.

Karl H. Brox

Karl Henrik Brox (1946) is a Norwegian journalist and author.

He has been program secretary at NRK Trøndelag and a journalist at Adresseavisen for 40 years. Brox has been involved in several nature conservation and outdoor organisations. Brox has contributed to more than 50 books on subjects such as nature and outdoor life, biographies and military history.

In 2013, he was awarded the Trønder Nature and Environment Award by the Nature Conservation Association in Nord- and Sør Trøndelag.

Karl H. Brox is the father of Conservative politician Yngve Brox.

Marc Shanker

Marc Shanker (1946) trained as an Orientation and Mobility Instructor for the Blind but spent the greater part of his working life in administrative positions in the labour movement.

After college, Marc began to make art.  He rejected a formal art education preferring instead to struggle alone toward a realization of his own creative vision. 

Working "high and low", Marc uses humor, irony and paradox to reference existential questions, and issues regarding art, language and contemporary social problems. 

His subjects range from the Ladino proverbs of the Sephardic Jews to the complexities and absurdities of modern life. Marc works in a number of mediums, often in combination: paint, wax crayons, collage, pen & ink, intaglio and dry point.

In 2008 Marc founded Gravity Free Press to show, publish and distribute his artwork, books, broadsides, and to serve as a platform for collaborative projects with other artists, especially writers and poets.

My introduction to Marc‘s work is his beautiful book Tracesof Sepharad (Huellas de Sefarad), Etchings of Judeo-Spanish Proverbs, the proverbs of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, in Ladino.

Madame Nielsen

Madame Nielsen (1963) is a novelist, artist, performer, stage director and world history enactor, composer, and chanteuse, and is multigendered. 

Madame Nielsen is the author of numerous literary works, including a trilogy (The Suicide Mission, The Sovereign, and Fall of the Great Satan), the bildungsroman The Invasion, The Supreme Being, and, most recently, The Endless Summer. 

Madame Nielsen is translated into nine languages and has received several literary prizes. 

The autobiographical novel My Encounters with the Great Authors of Our Nation was published in 2013 under her boy’s-name, Claus Beck-Nielsen, and was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2014.

Russel-Aurore Bouchard

Russel-Aurore Bouchard (born Russel Bouchard, 1948) is a Quebec writer and historian living in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region.

She specialized in the history of this region and produced numerous publications on this subject.

From 1975 to 1978, she was curator of the Regional Museum of Saguenay. In 1979 — 1980, she worked as a curator in heraldic arts as well as in sigillography at the National Archives of Quebec.

In November 2006, she was received as "official historian" of the East-West Métis Union as a reward for the book “The Long March of the Forgotten People... Ethnogenesis and Cultural Spectrum of the Métis People of Borealie”.

New Orleans Story

These I-Phone spy pictures were taken by my friend Cliff, while visiting a coffee bar in New Orleans.

A great, wordless, story.

Thanks, Cliff

The Beret Project in Numbers

The Beret Project  started on Sunday 5 April, 2009, opening with the wise text that peaked caps are for people who don't dare to wear a beret (still the moto of TBP almost 15 years later).

Since then , more than 5500 post on berets, beret-wearers and manufacturers have been published. 

The TBP audience fluctuates constantly; there are days with just 200-300 visitors and exceptional days of close to 100.000 visitors.

Like South Pacific Berets' customers, most visitors are US based, followed by France. Interestingly, both Russia and Ukraine score high too in visitor numbers and, especially the last few years, countries like Singapore, India and Japan.

All time favourite post is How To And How Not To; an early (2009) post, actually offering very little information. 

Disillusioning I find it how the highest scoring posts all involve nude, female boineras. Sex sells... 

The Tox Girls were viewed 25700 times; Appropriate? 13400 times. 

John Butler #2

At 86, a British farmer has become a YouTube star and inspired millions of people. In his videos, John Butler shares his thoughts on life, and each of his videos is gaining millions of views.

John Butler loves being alone. Every day at 5 o'clock in the morning he comes to the old church and prays and meditates for two hours. Then until the evening he is engaged in farming, because half a century ago he became one of the first "organic" farmers and since then has been exploring the possibilities of nature "without additives". In the evenings, he records his videos, which, according to the audience, "help to cope with any problems."

John's popularity can hardly be called accidental - before his appearance on the Web, he had already managed to write and publish several books on spiritual development. One day, a television producer found these books at a village charity fair and invited then 79-year-old John to record several videos for the Conscious Television YouTube channel, which had an audience of over 2 million subscribers. John simply answered the host's questions, talked about his life, and these interviews gained a huge number of views.

In his 80s, John decided he wanted to reach out to people directly and started his own channel, Spiritual Discovery with John Butler.

Vanda Juknaitė

 Vanda Juknaitė (1949) is a Lithuanian writer, playwright, and essayist.

After studying Lithuanian language and literature at Vilnius University, she taught first at the Klaipeda Conservatory and, from 1975, at the University of Educational Science. She has worked in the area of social pedagogy dealing with homeless, disabled and street children.

One of her more notable works, the memoir Išsiduosi. Balsu: esė, pokalbiai, published in Lithuania in 2002 was translated into English as My Voice Betrays Me. It presents the joys and difficulties of Lithuania's transition from communism to democracy.

Another work of note is Šermenys (1990), a novel describing the mass deportations of men to Siberia leaving the women to safeguard Lithuanian society.

Juozas Miltinis

Juozas Miltinis (1907– 1994) was a Lithuanian theatre director, actor, and founder of the Juozas Miltinis Drama Theatre in Panevėžys.

From 1932 on, Miltinis studied in Paris, in the school of theatrical art conducted by Charles Dullin. After his return to Kaunas, Miltinis organized here his own theatrical studio and propagated the main tenets of his teachers, Charles Dullin and Jacques Copeau. In 1937-38 he studied in London.

The Panevėžys Drama Theatre was founded in 1940 and Miltinis was appointed as its chief art director. The main body of the young theatre was made up from the pupils of this studio.

February 15, 1954, he was dismissed from the Theatre directors position for ideological reasons, and returned to the position only in 1959. Miltinis began to implement his ideas that he brought from Paris. New concept of theatre and the hero of the play was applied. Militnis retired in 1980.

Vytautas Paukšte

Vytautas Paukšte was a Lithuanian theatre and movies actor. He played over 50 roles in movies and over 90 in theatre.

After he finished middle school in 1953, he studied Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre 1953-1957. After studies worked in Marijampole drama theatre 1957-1962 after that in Klaipedos drama theatre. Since 1971 until 1986 he was Lithuania Klaipeda Conservatory faculty teacher.

Barbie

I have published on this blog about Nazis, dictators, (war) criminals and all sort of boineros/as of questionable nature, but it took me a bit to write about Barbie. Being the father of 3 daughters, I certainly have had my share of Barbie in life, but just when you think that things can't get worse, this movie appears!

Sure, tastes differ and who am I to judge? However, what gets to me is the sale pitch of this being a feminist movie(!), whereas it is one massive advert for extreme consumption in every shape.

Barbie dolls and Mattell, of course. But how much did Chevrolet, Chanel, TAG Heurer et al contribute to the films marketing budget? The $150.000.000 budget that exceeded the cost of making the film.

I am not 100% sure about Laulhère, but I can guarantee anyone concerned that South Pacific Berets did not pay any dollars for beret exposure!

We do have some cool pink berets in stock though...