Paul Pulati

California-born Paul J. Pulati is a musician,  singer/songwriter and visual artist living in London since 2005.

As a visual artist, Paul’s paintings, drawings and sculptures are imaginative narratives, drawn from life,  using what one art critic described as “a glowing spectrum of erotic colour.”    Using simplification and stylisation, Paul’s work is representational, though not realistic.

Ralph Steadman

Ralph Steadman (1936) started out as a cartoonist and over time has become known as an artist, writer, sculptor, illustrator, satirical cartoonist and designer of labels for vintage wines. Ralph Steadman was born in 1936 in Wallasey, Cheshire. He attended East Ham Technical College and the London College of Printing and Graphic Arts during the 1960s, doing freelance work for Punch, Private Eye, the Daily Telegraph, The New Statesman, the New York Times and Rolling Stone. 

Steadman is known for his social and political caricatures and cartoons and also for his illustrations in picture books.

Louis Sohn

Louis B. Sohn (1914 – 2006) was born in Lemberg, in what was then Austria-Hungary, later Poland and now Ukraine. He earned his first law degree at John Casimir University in Lwow in 1939, escaping to the United States two weeks before the Nazi invasion of Poland. He was a longtime scholar of international law and advocate of international institutions.

He participated in the San Francisco Conference that established the United Nations, working on the statute of the International Court of Justice. 

In 1958, Professor Sohn was a co-author, with Grenville Clark, of World Peace Through World Law (Harvard University Press), which examined proposals to transform the United Nations into a world government. The book called for complete disarmament and the use of world judicial tribunals to solve international disputes. The plan also proposed a permanent world police force to enforce a prohibition on the use of force by states.

Upon Sohn's death in 2006, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan issued a statement noting Sohn's reputation as "a voice of reason and source of wisdom," and celebrating his "firm belief in the importance of the United Nations and of the rule of law in settling international disputes."

Brassaï

Brassaï (pseudonym of Gyula Halász) (1899 – 1984) was a Hungarian photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker who rose to international fame in France in the 20th century. He was one of the numerous Hungarian artists who flourished in Paris beginning between the World Wars. In the early 21st century, the discovery of more than 200 letters and hundreds of drawings and other items from the period 1940-1984 has provided scholars with material for understanding his later life and career.

Gyula Halász was born in Brassó, Transsylvania, Kingdom of Hungary (since 1920 Braşov, Romania), to an Armenian mother and a Hungarian father. He grew up speaking Hungarian. When he was three, his family lived in Paris for a year, while his father, a professor of French literature, taught at the Sorbonne.

As a young man, Gyula Halász studied painting and sculpture at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts (Magyar Képzomuvészeti Egyetem) in Budapest. He joined a cavalry regiment of the Austro-Hungarian army, where he served until the end of the First World War.

In 1948 Brassai married Gilberte Boyer, a French woman. She worked with him in supporting his photography. In 1949 he became a naturalized French citizen after years of being stateless.

In 1956, Brassai directed a film Tant qu'il y aura des bêtes (As long as there will be animals), shot at the Paris Vincennes Zoo. It won the "Most Original Film" award that year at the Cannes Film Festival. In the 1970s, he received French national awards for his artistic contributions and especially his photography.

Brassaï wrote 17 books and numerous articles, including the 1948 novel Histoire de Marie, published with an introduction by Henry Miller. Conversations with Picasso was translated into 12 languages. His Letters to My Parents (1980), from his 20-year correspondence with his parents during his younger years in Paris, was published in Bucharest with the collaboration of his father, younger brother Kálmán, and Andre Horváth. Both books were translated into English and published in the late 1990s by the University of Chicago Press (see below).

Rickie Lee Jones' album Pirates - a Brassaï photograph

After 1961, when he stopped taking photographs, Brassaï concentrated on sculpting in stone and bronze. Several tapestries were made from his designs based on his photographs of graffiti.

Back!

Yes, back in Wellington.Washed away at the East Cape by the tail of a tropical cyclone, but this also ensured a most relaxing holiday; playing games, reading books, no internet or cell phone cover and in between showers snorkeling and kayaking around the rocks of Lottin Point. 

And waiting at home the new stock from Argentina! A good restocking of familiar berets and also many new wares, like the boina Super Espinosa - an Espinosa of superior quality, with satin lining, headband and large embroidered label in 28cm diameter.

Also, more colours in the cotton boina Tolosa Tupida range and more Tolosa Tupida berets with headband: wool berets in black and maroon, cotton berets in sun-washed blue, red and black; Plato Grandes in cotton in sizes 59, 60 and 61.

Last, more choice in the smaller diameter berets: boina Espinosas in 24cm in black and red and more colours in the cotton Espinosa range. 

What I wore during these three weeks absence? Two berets: a Basco Roma when kayaking and otherwise my Basco Francia - ideal and most comfortable berets in humid, warm weather.

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Holidays

That's right: Holidays! I'm off, from 24 December through somewhere mid-January.

That means only a daily picture on The Beret Project instead of a "real post" and also www.SouthPacificBerets.com and www.SouthPacificCowboy.com will be closed for business.
Saying that, I'll try to answer emails whenever possible and all orders will be shipped out first thing on the 9th of January.


After three years of daily blogging on berets, I look forward to a bit of a break (Waiheke Island for Xmas, Hicks Bay for the first week of the new year). 

Time to think up new posts, collect material, photographs and anecdotes related to the beret, while working on my tan, growing my beard and showing off exotic berets. Back on 9 January.

All readers and customers: enjoy the holidays, have a wonderful New Year and be faithful to the beret!

Last Post for 2011: The Bangditos - Street Theater

In a loud and smoking blowup, a tiny, French-made car called the "Ente" breaks down. 

When two French tourists lose their way in the street and, with charming enthusiasm, involve one and all in their precarious distress, none of the amused onlookers can imagine that this daft duo could ever find their way back to Paris.

With grandiose fervor, situations become more complicated, streets more labyrinthine, and passers-by more hectic. But their "deux minutes" calms down any situation even when it takes 45 minutes.

1 2CV, 2 actors and up to 500 spectators. Anytime and anywhere - worldwide!

The German Series #19 - Henry lalane

Following yesterday's post, today a story from the other side. Henry Lalane came from the small village of Guinarthe-Parenties, halfway between Pau and Bayonne, in the south of France.

 After the German occupation of France in 1940, Lalane was made a forced labourer, a farmhand at the Maurer's farm in Berschweiler. Father Willi Maurer had died, so widow Maurer and her 5 and 6 year old sons could well do with the help. Lalane was treated as a member of the family, only having to return to the parish hall at night to sleep with fellow forced labourers. He was familiar with the work on the farm; feeding the animals, ploughing the fields, get firewood from the forest and harvesting the crops.  

March 1945 his long-term captivity ended and Henry returned home, to France. All the Maurer family had to remember him by was a photograpph, Basque beret on his head, cigarette hanging from his mouth and the two boys at his hands.

Until 2010...

Read the full story here (in German).

The German Series #18 - Hermann Eller

Hermann Eller (1925 - 2009) was a portrait and lanscape painter from Deggendorf, Germany. Born as Hermann Rott, he was adopted by the Eller family in Natterberg.

 Self portrait with Brown Beret

Hermann Eller started at a young age, winning numerous art competitions, until the war stopped him perfecting his skills. Drafted into the navy in 1943, he was taklen prisoner the next year and spent the remainder of the war as a forced labourer in a French mine. It was only in 1947 that Eller returned from captivity and back to art.

His first charcoal drawing was called  Baskenmütze mit Drillichjoppe, and the brown beret became his trademark since then.

The German Series #17 - TOX Girls

It's like the famous calendar of Pirelli tires; I never quite understand what young, sexy, nude girls have to do with the tires of a car.

German company TOX specializes in all sorts of fixings, heavy-duty anchors and hook screws combined with fixings, according to it's catalogue. 

Not the sort of business you'd instantly associate with scarcely dressed young women, and even more, scarcely dressed women with beret! Beats me...

Running of the Bulls, no, Nudes

Pamplona is the historical capital city of Navarre in Spain, the former Kingdom of Navarra.

The city is famous worldwide for the San Fermín Festival. from 6 - 14 July, in which the running of the bulls is the main attraction. 

This festival was first brought to widespread attention by Ernest Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises. Another time, other ethics...

Ernest Hemingway with a bull (with beret), 1927

While living in Europe, I hardly new of this antiquated event, but in the NZ daily papers photo's get on the front page year after year - 1000's of Kiwi's, Aussies's and Americans travel to Spain for the event every year - not to protest, but to participate, preferably donning a red beret.

These days there is no excuse for cruelty to animals for the amusement of people; tourists, most of them. PETA initiated the Running of the Nudes, as an alternative that in my humble opinion, wins on all fronts.