Adriana and Gil are seen above walking together in the movie “Midnight in Paris.” Adriana was a fictional character who was Picasso’s mistress in the film. Earlier she had been Modigliani’s mistress and later Georges Braque’s mistress before moving on to Picasso according to the film story line. Actually Picasso had taken girls from others quite often in the past. Picasso’s blue period was during a time when he moved into his best friend’s apartment and took up with his girl after his best friend’s suicide.

I am in the process of going through all the characters from Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris.”  Today I am spending time on Modigliani.

Modigliani, Picasso and André Salmon.jpg

Amedeo Modigliani was born in Livorno (Leghorn) on 12 July 1884 into a rich merchant family. Versed in literature and art at an early age, Modigliani took his first lessons in drawing and painting between 1898 and 1900 at Guglielmo Micheli’s studio. Amedeo Modigliani was particularly fond of the Italian Early Renaissance.
In 1902 Modigliani shared a studio in Florence with Oscar Ghilia and became a pupil at the free school for drawing from the nude. A year later Modigliani transferred to the Venice Academy, where he spent a great deal of time studying the works of the Old Masters and became familiar with international movements in art.
Amedeo Modigliani went to Paris in 1906 to study at the private Colarossi Academy. In 1907 he met a young physician, Paul Alexandre, who was the first person to promote his work. Alexandre not only bought paintings and drawings of Modigliani’s; he also helped to arrange the artist’s first commissions.
That same year Modigliani showed work at the Salon d’Automne and a year later at the Salon des Indépendents. The few pictures by Amedeo Modigliani to have survived from that period reveal the influence of the Fauves, Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso and Cézanne.
Paul Alexandre introduced Modigliani to the sculptor Constantin Brancusi and Modigliani began to sculpt under his influence but he gave up sculpture in 1914-15 to devote himself to painting.
The same salient features are common to both Modigliani’s sculpture and his painting: despite mask-like stylization, a poignant grace and spirituality inform Modigliani’s heads. His lasting fame rests on the portraits of artists he did after 1914.
On the outbreak of the First World War, Amedeo Modigliani volunteered for service but was exempted for health reasons: two severe attacks of tuberculosis had left him weakened for the rest of his life. Modigliani began to work with the art dealer Paul Guillaume and was also supported by the Polish poet Léopold Zborovski and his wife, doing many portraits of both.
Modigliani’s first one-man show was opened by the Galerie Berthe Weill on 3 December 1917 but was closed after only a few hours because his nudes caused a public scandal. Modigliani left Paris while it was under German siege in 1918 and went to Nice with his mistress, Jeanne Hébuterne. There he did some of his best known pictures and some of his few landscapes. A daughter was born to him in Nice. In May 1919 Modigliani returned to Paris and went to England several times, thus ensuring the successful sale of his work there.
Early in 1920, however, Amedeo Modigliani again fell ill of tuberculosis and died in Paris on 24 January.

Amedeo Modigliani: Portrait of a Woman

No swearing. No car crashes. No special effects. In an adult movie? “Finally,” sighed one premieregoer after the AFI Associates’ screening of Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris, a love poem to the City of Light. He’s a born romantic, proof positive being Woody’s alluring visions of New York and London and Barcelona that fill the screens. As he has with his last five movies and their montages of that become beguiling travelogues. Like a five-course dinner at Laperouse, Midnight In Paris is to be savored.

Welcoming the SRO audience at the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre, AFI president and CEO Bob Cassaleannounced that Midnight In Paris, starring Owen Wilson as a lonely night-time wanderer and Rachel McAdams as his feisty fiancee, is Woody’s 50th movie. Archivists beg to differ, that this is his 4lst or 44th. Bob reminded about Woody’s clever jab at Los Angeles – “I could not live in a city where the only cultural advantage is making a right turn on a red light.” Woody’s also said, “Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.”

At 75, Woody’s creativity percolates, a rich brew with his poetic original style laced with that famously sly humor and slapdash wit. His Midnight In Paris cast is top-drawer, as he weaves us into a time-travel lovefest of icons from the ’20s, when artists and writers flocked to Paris for inspiration.

Here’s Ernest Hemingway in a standout performance from Corey Stohl, Gertrude Stein played by Kathy Bates, who’s equally wonderful, as are Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali, and Marion Cottilard as a flirtatious French beauty in love with La Belle Epoque.

Here’s Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso, Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Toulouse-Lautrec, Man Ray, and Cole Porter singing and playing the piano with his melodies.

All the while, Woody and his director of photography Darius Khondji capture landmarks such as Montmartre, Place de la Concorde, the flea market, Notre Dame Garden Square, Maxim’s, Laperouse, the Shakespeare & Co. book store. Threaded throughout is the saxophone music of expatriate Sidney Bechet, Woody being a fan of vintage jazz. A dreamscape for Francophiles.

While in pre-production, Woody and wife Soon-Yi Previn breakfasted with French president Nicolas Sarkozy and First Lady Carla Bruni at the Elysee Palace. Woody suggested Carla appear in a cameo, promising she’d work for only two days. Overnight, Carla was written into a scene as a Rodin Museum guide, embarassed by pompous professor Michael Sheen, who hasn’t any clue of what he’s talking about.

Woody still writes on an Olympia portable typewriter that he bought for $40 when he was 16, and keeps a wrinkled brown bag in his closet to store ideas and jokes. Says that he fell in love with Paris in 1964 during the eight months when his screenplay, What’s New Pussycat, was being filmed. “The movie was a mess. I wanted to stay, didn’t have the guts to leave New York, and sometimes wish I had.” (An aside about Paris: Samuel Morse bedded there “to paint,” was quite accomplished, and ended up inventing the telegraph and the code; Paris has a way of ambushing its visitors.)

Very good news: Midnight In Paris raked in $579,000 during its opening weekend with only six theaters. Two in L.A., and four in New York, and opens wider this weekend. Thanks to Sony Pictures Classics presidents Michael Barker and Tom Bernard for their smarts to buy and distribute Midnight In Paris, which rates amongst Woody’s finest.

Next up for Woody is Rome, where he’s filming Bop Cameron with Penelope Cruz, Jesse Eisenberg, Alec Baldwin, Judy Davis, Ellen Page and Roberto Benigni. Is or isn’t this a cast that’s as good as it gets? Any actors out there that would bypass the chance of working with Woody? Doubtful.

Ischia, idyllic Ischia, that summertime haunt of Truman Capote, is an island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, near Capri, and not far from the Gulf of Naples. Our twenty-something friends, India Irving and Mario Rivelli, will be there in July with their charming fifteen-minute movie, Mont Reve, that will open Ischia’s Global Film and Music Festival.

India and Mario created the story of Mont Reve, a name for an imaginary private school in Europe where “the sons and daughters of royals, along with the children of tycoons” are enrolled. India’s the daughter ofLynn von Kersting and Richard Irving, who’ve given us the fabled Ivy restaurants, also Lynn’s stylish Indigo Seas shop, where Ralph Lauren and photographer Bruce Weber shop whenever they’re in town.

An award-winning writer, India met Mario, a champion athlete and the son of Naples’ former mayor, at school. They graduated with honors at USC’s School of Theatre, and co-star in Mont Reve, which India’s written. Lynn von Kersting and Rocky Collins directed, with Lynn producing and serving as music supervisor. Gene Nagata was the director of photography.

Lynn reveals that financing’s now available to begin production for a feature, with European investors pleased that several languages are spoken, which will enhance the global market. Both India and Mario are fluent in Italian, French, Spanish, all in the dialogue of Mont Reve. For years, India summered in Capri, helping with errands at the Grand Hotel Quisisana. She also clerked in Paris at Shakespeare & Co., established on the rue Bucherie in 1919 by heiress Sylvia Beach, who published James Joyce’s Ulysses, which was banned in the U.S.

Mont Reve was filmed in an astounding two days at Lynn and Richard’s estate, the previous residence of the late director George Cukor, which we christened Villa Abondanza in our article in Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. Inspired interiors that Baroness Pauline de Rothschild would have admired, along with the thousand rosebushes, fragrant flowers and vegetable gardens.

Throughout the filming, the Ivy’s favored owner/chef Richard Irving took over as the Craft Services, cooking delicious meals for the ecstatic staff and crew. Would that we could have been there!

Other posts with Woody Allen:

Leviathan: the Fire-Breathing Dragon: Kent Hovind [6 of 7]

Everybody is trying to get info on this subject. Here is what the Bible has to say about it.

Mace Baker wrote the aritcle, “Sea Dragons – The Institute for Creation Research,” and here is the third portion of that article: 

Pterosaurs were the flying reptiles of the ancient world. Why would they wind up in an ichthyosaur’s stomach? This was more than likely due to the immense amount of volcanism that was going on during the Flood year. These would have put large volumes of volcanic gases and ash into the atmosphere, which in many cases would have suffocated birds and pterosaurs. As they fell into the sea, some of them would have been quickly eaten by large fish or marine reptiles.

In some cases we not only have articulated bones of the ichthyosaur skeletons but carbonized skin impressions as well. This is even acknowledged by the authors who talk about slow and gradual covering of these reptiles with fine muds, “Carbonized skin impressions have been found around the skeletons of ichthyosaurs in the black shales at Holzmaden, Germany.” (Op. cit., p. 234.)

Evolutionists today teach that these creatures became extinct 65 million years ago, a number which has grown in magnitude historically. For example, in 1905 Nature magazine reporting on dinosaurs says, “It is almost an appalling thought that the skeleton of a creature which lived at least several million years ago should have come down in such marvellous preservation to our own day.” (———, “The New Diplodocus Skeleton,” Nature, May 25, 1905, p. 83.) According to the time reckoning in 1905, the dinosaurs lived only “several” million years ago. Now, today’s paleontologists are “sure” that they became extinct 65 million years ago and lived on the earth as many as 220 million years ago. (This time parameter, of course, applies to the dinosaurs, sea dragons, and pterosaurs.)

However, sea monsters or sea dragons have been referenced in many secular sources throughout human history. Modern paleontologists hold to the idea that the sea “dragons” are only mythological in nature, but refer at times to fossil ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs as “sea dragons,” i.e., “They were thought to belong to the euryapsid group of reptiles along with other sea dragons such as nothosaurs and plesiosaurs.” (Steve Parker, Age of the Dinosaur, p. 116.) The late Carl Sagan titled his book that includes information on dinosaurs, The Dragons of Eden. Further, Christopher McGowan, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and Professor of Zoology at the University of Toronto, gave his book on dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and marine reptiles the title, Dinosaurs, Spitfires, and Sea Dragons.

The Scriptures indicate very clearly that sea dragons were part of the original creation and are mentioned as being alive and flourishing even after the time of Noah’s flood. For instance, in Psalm 74:13 we read, “Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength: thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters.” The Hebrew word used here for dragons is “tannim.” This is the same Hebrew word which refers to the land dragons (dinosaurs) in a variety of Scriptures including, for instance, in Malachi 1:3 which reads, “And I hated Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness.”

Clearly, it is important for Christians to realize in this age when the doctrine of Creation has been undermined by the teaching of evolution, that God has been careful to reference all the major animal groups that He created, as well as an account of a global flood of judgment which made it possible for animals of the ancient world to be fossilized. If it was not for this great watery catastrophe that covered the entire earth, we would not find articulated fossil remains of animals on every continent. In the Scriptures, the Lord God has documented the fact that many of these creatures lived for an extended period of time after the Flood. During this time, they were also referenced by navigators who encountered them during their sea travels. The Biblical and secular accounts of the land dragons (dinosaurs) and sea dragons (ichthyosaurs) enable us who live in a time of great apostasy and unbelief to have strong confidence in the reliability of the Scriptures

An article from Biography.com below. I am currently going through all the personalities mentioned in Woody Allen’s movie “Midnight in Paris.” Today I am spending time on Coco Chanel. Picasso’s fictional mistress, Adriana, tells Gil that she originally came to Paris to model for Coco Chanel but later got involved with the painters Modigliani, Braque and then Picasso.

By the way, I know that some of you are wondering how many posts I will have before I am finished. Right now I have plans to look at Modigliani, Matisse, Luis Bunuel, Josephine Baker, Van Gogh, Picasso, Man Ray, T.S. Elliot and several more.

Coco Chanel Biography 

popular name of Gabrielle Chanel 

( 1883 – 1971 ) 

Fashion designer. Born on August 19, 1883, in Saumur, France. With her trademark suits and little black dresses, Coco Chanel created timeless designs that are still popular today. She herself became a much revered style icon known for her simple yet sophisticated outfits paired with great accessories, such as several strands of pearls. As Chanel once said,“luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury.”

Her early years, however, were anything but glamorous. After her mother’s death, Chanel was put in an orphanage by her father who worked as a peddler. She was raised by nuns who taught her how to sew—a skill that would lead to her life’s work. Her nickname came from another occupation entirely. During her brief career as a singer, Chanel performed in clubs in Vichy and Moulins where she was called “Coco.” Some say that the name comes from one of the songs she used to sing, and Chanel herself said that it was a “shortened version of cocotte, the French word for ‘kept woman,” according to an article in The Atlantic.

CoCo Chanel and Vera Bate Lombardi -Scotland

Around the age of 20, Chanel became involved with Etienne Balsan who offered to help her start a millinery business in Paris. She soon left him for one of his even wealthier friends, Arthur “Boy” Capel. Both men were instrumental in Chanel’s first fashion venture.

Opening her first shop on Paris’s Rue Cambon in 1910, Chanel started out selling hats. She later added stores in Deauville and Biarritz and began making clothes. Her first taste of clothing success came from a dress she fashioned out of an old jersey on a chilly day. In response to the many people who asked about where she got the dress, she offered to make one for them. “My fortune is built on that old jersey that I’d put on because it was cold in Deauville,” she once told author Paul Morand.

In the 1920s, Chanel took her thriving business to new heights. She launched her first perfume, Chanel No. 5, which was the first to feature a designer’s name. Perfume “is the unseen, unforgettable, ultimate accessory of fashion. . . . that heralds your arrival and prolongs your departure,” Chanel once explained.

In 1925, she introduced the now legendary Chanel suit with collarless jacket and well-fitted skirt. Her designs were revolutionary for the time—borrowing elements of men’s wear and emphasizing comfort over the constraints of then-popular fashions. She helped women say good-bye to the days of corsets and other confining garments.

:Hugh Grosvenor, Duke of Westminster und Coco Chanel.jp

Another 1920s revolutionary design was Chanel’s little black dress. She took a color once associated with mourning and showed just how chic it could be for eveningwear. In addition to fashion, Chanel was a popular figure in the Paris literary and artistic worlds. She designed costumes for the Ballets Russes and for Jean Cocteau’s play Orphée, and counted Cocteau and artist Pablo Picasso among her friends. For a time, Chanel had a relationship with composer Igor Stravinsky.

Another important romance for Chanel began in the 1920s. She met the wealthy duke of Westminster aboard his yacht around 1923, and the two started a decades-long relationship. In response to his marriage proposal, she reportedly said “There have been several Duchesses of Westminster—but there is only one Chanel!”

The international economic depression of the 1930s had a negative impact on her company, but it was the outbreak of World War II that led Chanel to close her business. She fired her workers and shut down her shops. During the German occupation of France, Chanel got involved with a German military officer, Hans Gunther von Dincklage. She got special permission to stay in her apartment at the Hotel Ritz. After the war ended, Chanel was interrogated by her relationship with von Dincklage, but she was not charged as a collaborator. Some have wondered whether friend Winston Churchill worked behind the scenes on Chanel’s behalf.

While not officially charged, Chanel suffered in the court of public opinion. Some still viewed her relationship with a Nazi officer as a betrayal of her country. Chanel left Paris, spending some years in Switzerland in a sort of exile. She also lived at her country house in Roquebrune for a time.

At the age of 70, Chanel made a triumphant return to the fashion world. She first received scathing reviews from critics, but her feminine and easy-fitting designs soon won over shoppers around the world.

In 1969, Chanel’s fascinating life story became the basis for the Broadway musical Coco starring Katharine Hepburn as the legendary designer. Alan Jay Lerner wrote the book and lyrics for the show’s song while Andre Prévin composed the music. Cecil Beaton handled the set and costume design for the production. The show received seven Tony Award nominations, and Beaton won for Best Costume Design and René Auberjonois for Best Featured Actor.

Coco Chanel died on January 10, 1971, at her apartment in the Hotel Ritz. She never married, having once said “I never wanted to weigh more heavily on a man than a bird.” Hundreds crowded together at the Church of the Madeleine to bid farewell to the fashion icon. In tribute, many of the mourners wore Chanel suits.

A little more than a decade after her death, designer Karl Lagerfeld took the reins at her company to continue the Chanel legacy. Today her namesake company continues to thrive and is believed to generate hundreds of millions in sales each year.

In addition to the longevity of her designs, Chanel’s life story continues to captivate people’s attention. There have been several biographies of the fashion revolutionary, includingChanel and Her World (2005) written by her friend Edmonde Charles-Roux.

Photographed in 1957, Coco Chanel is seen entering her boutique in Paris. According to LIFE, Coco is “…credited with either inventing or popularizing the short skirt, the flat chest, the sling pump, turtlenecks…” She is shown here in her “ever present” hat.
“ The only reason I wear my hat all the time is so I can tell people I don’t want to see that I am on my way out”.

In the recent television biopic, Coco Chanel (2008), Shirley MacLaine starred as the famous designer around the time of her 1954 career resurrection. The actress told WWD that she had long been interested in playing Chanel. “What’s wonderful about her is she’s not a straightforward, easy woman to understand.”

Stroll After “Midnight in Paris” with a Chanel Lambskin Shoulder Handbag

20MAY

Leviathan: the Fire-Breathing Dragon: Kent Hovind [4 of 7]

Everybody is googling this subject today. Here is a biblical perspective:

Mace Baker wrote the aritcle, “Sea Dragons – The Institute for Creation Research,” and here is the second portion of that article: 

One of the reasons that sea dragons were seen less frequently is because they were able to stay underwater for long periods of time made possible by the design of their ribs. The ribs of the right side were united to those of the left by a set of intermediate bones which came to be referenced as the “sterno-costal” arcs. “This structure was probably subservient to the purpose of introducing to their bodies an unusual quantity of air; the animal by this means being enabled to remain long beneath the water, without rising to the surface for the purpose of breathing.” (Ibid., p. 180.) Ichthyosaurs had both paddles (flippers) and fins. The fins probably were used for stabilization and steering and the paddles for lift, but neither were used for propulsion. This was accomplished by the tail, swishing back and forth rapidly which may have allowed it to swim at speeds up to 40 miles per hour.

Dr. Buckland commented that the design of these amazing creatures showed a “. . . union of compensative contrivances, so similar in their relations, so identical in their objects, and so perfect in the adaptation of each subordinate part, to the harmony and perfection of the whole; that we cannot but recognize throughout them all, the workings of one and the same eternal principle of Wisdom and Intelligence, presiding from first to last over the total fabric of the Creation.” (Ibid., p. 186.)

As competent paleontologists began to prepare and display these fossils, the more it became obvious that these creatures must have been fearsome predators of the ancient world’s warm, shallow seas. In fact, as more of these were reconstructed and displayed in museums, many began to wonder if they had been the terrible sea monsters the ancient and medieval mariners had talked about.

This latter suggestion, of course, has been ridiculed by many in the scientific community, because they insist that these fossils were found in rocks that date back millions of years. They believe that the ichthyosaurs as well as many other creatures found in the sedimentary rocks were buried slowly and gradually. For example, with regard to the ichthyosaurs, one popular book on this subject states, “This unusually fine fossil preservation is probably due to the bottom waters at Holzmaden being inhospitable to life because of the absence of oxygen. Any ichthyosaur dying and sinking to the sea floor would lie undisturbed because of the absence of scavengers (crabs, small fish, etc.) picking the body apart. Fine mud would eventually cover the carcass, recording the delicate skin as a dark silhouette.” (The Ultimate Dinosaur, Editors: Byron, Preiss and Robert Silverberg, October, 1992, p. 234.) But animals which are in the ocean today are eaten by predatators or disintegrate in the salty ocean water whether floating to the surface or sinking to the bottom. They do not fall to the sea floor to become slowly and gradually covered with fine mud. Many ichthyosaurs are very well preserved. This would necessitate rapid (catastrophic) burial. And, indeed, a great many of them suffered this fate, “Hundreds of beautifully preserved skeletons, with the bones still joined, or articulated, as in life, have been found.” (Steve Parker, The Encyclopedia of the Age of the Dinosaurs, 2000. p. 119.)

The fossil record indicates, not the uniformitarian, but the catastrophic nature of the burial and preservation of the sea dragons. This is evident from the discovery of at least two ichthyosaurs that were covered with sediment so rapidly that their offspring were fossilized in the process of giving birth. In addition to this, several have been found with their last meal still in the stomach area, including parts of pterosaurs!

*Mace Baker is the author of the book, The Real History of Dinosaurs (2001).

Wikipedia reported:

Thomas Cullen Davis (born September 22, 1933 in Fort Worth, Texas^[1]) was an American oil heir. He was arrested for, and later acquitted of, the murders of his stepdaughter and his estranged wife’s boyfriend, then hiring a hitman to kill his estranged wife and a judge.

[edit]Criminal trials

In August 1976, Davis was charged with the murder of his estranged wife’s boyfriend and beau, Stan Farr, and her daughter, Andrea Wilborn. Davis’ wife, Priscilla Davis, had filed for divorce in 1974, but in 1976 the divorce proceedings were still ongoing and the divorce had not been made official.^[2] Farr and Wilborn had been shot dead, and Davis’ wife Priscilla injured, by a gunman who entered their home in Fort Worth on 2 August 1976.^[3] In November 1977, after what has been called “one of the most expensive murder investigations and trials in Texas history,”^[4] a jury found Davis not guilty.^[5] The children of Stan Farr later sued Davis for wrongful death and were awarded $250,000 in a settlement.^[6]

In 2004, Billy Vickers, a man sentenced to death in an unrelated case, claimed that he had been the one who murdered Farr and Wilborn.^[7]

In 1978, Davis was arrested again, this time for allegedly hiring a hitman to murder his wife Priscilla, as well as the judge overseeing their ongoing divorce litigation.^[8] The case hinged around a tape-recorded conversation between Davis and an undercover employee posing as a hitman, during which Davis was alleged to have asked the undercover employee to murder his wife; this trial, Texas v. Davis, has been called one of the first uses of forensic discourse analysis of tape-recorded evidence in a legal setting.^[9] A discourse analyst testified that Davis’ words in the tape did not constitute solicitation of murder;^[9] and Davis was ultimately acquitted.^[10]

[edit]Later life

According to truTV, Davis lost most of his oil fortune in the recession of the 1980s, and was eventually forced to sell his mansion and declare bankruptcy. Priscilla died of breast cancer in 2001.^[11]

According to the profile on Power, Privilege and Justice and on A&E’s American Justice, Cullen Davis became a born-again Christian and is now a Christian missionary.