White Dog

White Dog is a 1982 American drama film based on Romain Gary's 1970 novel of the same name.

The film depicts the struggle of a dog trainer named Keys (Paul Winfield), who is black, trying to retrain a stray dog found by a young actress (Kristy McNichol), that is a "white dog"—a dog trained to make vicious attacks upon, and to kill, any black person. Fuller uses the film as a platform to deliver a message against racism as it examines the question of whether racism is a treatable problem or an incurable condition.

The film's theatrical release was suppressed for a week in the United States by Paramount Pictures out of concern over negative press after rumours began circulating that the film was racist. Prior to the date, it was released internationally in France in July 1982.

Critics praised the film's hard-line look at racism and Fuller's use of melodrama and metaphors to present his argument, and its somewhat disheartening ending that leaves the impression that while racism is learned, it cannot be cured.

Reviewers consistently questioned the film's lack of wide release in the United States when it was completed and applauded its belated release by Criterion.

Pierre et Gerdy

Peter Smeitink is a professional pianist and piano teacher who has embraced the accordion as a second instrument. 

Peter is a very experienced musician with a great love for ensemble playing in pop and jazz. His modesty makes him an excellent listener and a sought-after accompanist.

Together with singer and songwriter Gerdy van der Graaf he forms the duo Pierre et Gerdy.

All their passions come together in the French chansons: poetry, song and the French language. Pierre et Gerdy embody la joie de vivre!

Richard Ray Whitman

Richard Ray Whitman is an internationally acclaimed artist and photographer. His work has been exhibited at museums and galleries internationally - with highlights including the Artrain nationwide tour, and a solo exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian Heye Gallery in NY. 

His work has been published in magazines including Native Peoples and American Indian Art, and featured in books including Aperture's Strong Hearts.

As an actor, he has appeared in movies including Lakota Woman, American Indian Graffiti, and the award-winning Oklahoma production Four Sheets to the Wind.

Whitman previously participated in the Artist in Residence program from the late 1980s through the 90s, completing residencies in numerous public and alternative schools statewide. Prior to his work with the Oklahoma Arts Council, Whitman taught art through the Indian Youth Council and the youth at risk program at the Native American Center in Oklahoma City. Whitman has also worked with youthful offenders, teaching art as rehabilitative therapy as a visiting artist in several state corrections institutions.

As a Yuchi tribal member, he is enrolled in the Muscogee/Creek Nation. He grew up in Gypsy, OK and graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM in 1970.

The New Boinas Pampa!

New at South Pacific Berets: the Boinas Pampa by Arandú!

Arandú’s Guarda Pampa boinas in raw merino wool are the quintessential gaucho berets.

Made of pure Argentinian merino wool, easy to stretch and adjust to size and shape, warm and comfortable to wear and looking great.

The motive is an old Mapuche design, symbolizing the High Andes mountains reflecting in the glacier lakes.

In limited supply at South Pacific Berets @ $50.00.

Honfleur

Honfleur is a city in the department of Calvados, in northern France's Normandy region. It's on the estuary where the Seine river meets the English Channel. 

The Vieux-Bassin (old harbor), lined with 16th- to 18th-century townhouses, has been a subject for artists including Claude Monet and native son Eugène Boudin. Nearby is 15th-century St. Catherine's Church, a vaulted timber structure erected by shipbuilders.

Enjoy this silent film, with many berets, of 1945. 

Max Anger

Two cities. One conspiracy. A love story powerful enough to change history.

Max Anger is a former member of the Swedish military who has put his warrior days behind him. He is in love with Pashie, a Russian researcher whom he works with at the Swedish firm, Vektor. Committed to building democracy in the East, Vektor’s current focus is Russia. Pashie is on the verge of exposing a massive Russian conspiracy targeting Sweden when she uncovers indications that Max’s personal history is somehow connected. Before she can tell anyone she suddenly disappears.

When Pashie goes missing Max is left with evidence that she has been working as a Russian spy. Who is telling the truth? And how will they find one another? One thing is for certain: only Max can find her.

Thanks Frans

Francisco Mateos

Francisco Mateos (1894—1976) was a Spanish expressionist draftsman, painter, printmaker and cartoonist.

Between 1931 and 1936 he exhibited at the Ateneo de Madrid and the Museum of Modern Art in Madrid. In 1933 he joined the Constructive Art Group and in 1937 he was one of the artists present in the Spanish Pavilion of the International Exhibition in Paris.

After the coup d'état in Spain in July 1936, he joined the Cartoonists Section of the UGT, working in organizations such as "Speaker of the Front" and  the Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals. In March 1939 he flees to Valencia, where he is arrested and interned in the Porta Coeli prison, later being transferred to Miranda de Ebro (Burgos) from where he was released in March 1940.

Back in Madrid, he gets a job at the British Embassy "as an illustrator of drawings to be published in America in campaigns against totalitarianism". He was arrested in November 1941 and imprisoned in the Conde de Peñalver prison in September 1942. Once the case was dismissed, he was released in 1943.

Three years before his death, the old Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art organized an Anthological Exhibition in Madrid. He died in 1976, at the age of 82.

Woggle Hopping

From the archives of the BBC: sprightly septuagenarian, 'Jumping' George Corner, demonstrated the art of 'woggle-hopping'.

June, 1971.

John De Vlieger

John De Vlieger turned 70 last year and thought it was time to end his career as a journalist. For 45 years he followed the news in Deinze (Belgium) and surroundings closely.

One of the events that John will never forget is the factory fire at NV De Boog in 1980. "De Boog was a very beautiful textile factory, a lot of people worked there. A fire started there in the evening. I was there as one of the first and the fire brigade was on the roof but there was too little pressure on the water. This made it difficult for the fire brigade to extinguish everything. Then you feel the powerlessness and you better understand that they sometimes have to work in difficult circumstances ", says De Vlieger.

John De Vlieger is now retiring, but won't rest that much. He will focus more on his other passion: traveling. He regularly goes out to guide at home and abroad. Closer to home, he has also mapped out various walking and cycling routes for Tourism East Flanders, Tourism Leie Region and Westtoer.

Eddie Balchowsky

Edward (Eddie) Balchowsky was an American poet, artist, musician, composer who served in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. Although he lost a hand, in Spain, Balchowsky became an important figure in the Chicago Arts Scene. 

Four well-known singer-songwriters wrote songs inspired by Balchowsky, Jimmy Buffett, Loudon Wainwright, Utah Phillips and Dion Dimucci. Interviews with Balchowsky were included in multiple films about Americans who had served in Spain.

Robert O Campbell

 

Robert O Campbell wearing the black beret of the Royal Canadian Armoured Corps in Italy 1944. 

Werner ‘Jacky’ Jackson

Werner ‘Jacky’ Jackson (né Werner Isaacsohn, 1904–1984) was a lauded student at the Bauhaus from 1924 to 1928, before the devastating fracture of his emerging professional life. 

A promising career in advertising and graphic design in Berlin, that most culturally progressive city before the rise of National Socialism, was suddenly and emphatically denied. And whereas many creative disciplines might form a student’s arsenal of skills prior to selecting one profession, Jacky employed numerous talents as he sought to establish himself in Britain, while occupying the uncertain position of a refugee. 

Lotte Laserstein

Lotte Laserstein (1898 –1993) was a German-Swedish painter. She was an important artist of figurative paintings in Germany's Weimar Republic.

Lotte Laserstein, Portrait of a Lady, around 1940

Berlin in the 1920s was a center of cultural production as well as political and economic struggle. Laserstein painted cadavers to illustrate textbooks to obtain cash during the period of hyperinflation.[1] During this time women were growing in independence and were increasingly entering the workplace. Laserstein depicted contemporary women of many stripes and fashions, including New Woman types, who adopted a more masculine look, and female nudes. As a single professional woman, Laserstein herself embodied the New Woman, and her androgynous look is evident in her many self-portraits.

Lotte Laserstein, "Woman with a red beret", around 1931

The National Socialist regime and its anti-Semitism forced her to leave Germany in 1937 and to emigrate to Sweden. In Sweden, she continued to work as a portraitist and painter of landscapes until her death. The art works she created during the 1920s and 1930s in the context of New Objectivity in Germany constitute the highpoint of her career.

Brush Shiels

Brendan Francis "Brush" Shiels (1945) is an Irish musician from County Dublin, best known for being the frontman of Gary Moore's first band, Skid Row.

Brush Shiels had a TV show on RTÉ called Off yer Brush. He now appears regularly providing musical accompaniment on the Joe Duffy Liveline radio programme on RTÉ and still performs live around venues in the UK and Ireland.

Brush also enjoyed a brief spell as a footballer representing Bohemian F.C. in the 1960s.

In 1971 Billboard praised Shiels, Bridgeman and Moore for their album 34 Hours suggesting the "lads will travel far". Shiels played at such internationally known music venues such as Fillmore West and Whisky a Go Go. and in 1986 played at the Self Aid benefit concert for unemployed in Ireland.

In 2013, Brush was one of the legends from the Irish entertainment business to perform at the Philip Chevron testimonial.

Danny Clifford's Shane MacGowan (Shane Guevara)

Shane MacGowan (Shane Guevara)

As a world-renowned Rock and Roll photographer, Danny Clifford has spent his career as a 'fly on the wall' to the most iconic musical artists of the last 40 years. From his big break, aged 20, as Bob Dylan's official photographer in the late 1970s, through his close working relationships with Queen, The Who, The Rolling Stones and Amy Winehouse the stories he has amassed over the years are just as vivid, colourful and dramatic as his photographs.

Mark Rylance

Sir David Mark Rylance Waters (1960) is an English actor, theatre director, and playwright.

After training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, Rylance made his professional debut at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow in 1980. He appeared in the West End productions of Much Ado About Nothing in 1994 and Jerusalem in 2010, winning the Olivier Award for Best Actor for both. He was the first artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe in London.

Rylance is a patron of the London-based charity Peace Direct which supports grassroots peacebuilders in areas of conflict, and of the British Stop the War Coalition.

Rylance has long been an enthusiastic supporter of Conscience: Taxes for Peace not War, which works to change British tax law to allow Conscientious objectors the right to redirect that portion of their taxes which would usually go to the military into non-violent methods of conflict resolution.

Happy 2022

A toast on a very good 2022 in every respect to all boineros and boineras; it can only get better!

Happy New Year to you All!

Sabine Weiss

Pioneering photographer Sabine Weiss, who was the last surviving member of France's celebrated humanist school, has died aged 97,  28 December 2021, at her home in Paris.

Although she had stopped taking pictures, Weiss was actively involved in her archive until her death. Born in Switzerland, she learned her art in Geneva, moving to Paris after World War Two. She became renowned particularly for her images on the streets of Paris, and for 70 years remained at the heart of French photography.

Weiss began taking pictures when she was 18. Sabine Weiss opened a Paris studio in 1950. She immortalised day-to-day life in Paris and much of her work featured the lives of children. Weiss said once that her aim was to capture "snotty-nosed kids... beggars... and the little piss-takers".

In 1952, she met the photographers Robert Doisneau and Edward Steichen and joined their Rapho photo agency. During the 1950s and early 1960s she worked widely for international publications. Among her clients were Newsweek, Time, Life, Esquire and Paris Match.

Boineros from Around the Globe

Boinero lighting up on a bench in Bilbao, Spanish Basque Country

Egyptian policeman looking out over River Nile farmland and distant city skyline of Cairo

 A Hindu Brahmin in Dehradun, India

Boinero on the streets of Mitrovica, Kosova

Steward at the Chester Pride Festival, UK

An elderly Cuban boinero poses for a street portrait on The Prado, Havana, Cuba.

 Boinero with old fashioned plate camera, Santillana, Spain