The biggest holiday shopping day of the season. That’s why they call it “Black Friday”. Why fight the crowds? Relax at home and quietly browse the great deals at Amazon. Today’s sale items are here.
By the way, Amazon is offering a 30-day trial of its Amazon Prime membership where you get:
Unlimited free two-day shipping
No minimum order size
Upgrades to one-day shipping for $3.99/item
After your free trial, Amazon Prime is just $79/year.
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And hey, if you decide you don’t want to sign up after 30 days, you can get this year’s holiday gifts shipped free!
“Children should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.”
“The Legend of Pale Male is the true account of one of the most surprising and remarkable love stories in the history of New York City. It begins in 1993, when a young man from Belgium looking to change his life has an unexpected encounter in Central Park. He meets a hawk. Not just any hawk, but a wild Redtail, a fierce predator that has not lived in the City for almost a hundred years. Affectionately known to New Yorkers as Pale Male, the hawk becomes a magnificent obsession — a metaphor for triumph against all odds. His nest, perched high on a posh Fifth Avenue co-op, starts out as a novel curiosity to a handful of avid birdwatchers but becomes an international tourist destination — a place of pilgrimage. Then, without warning, one December afternoon the building manager dismantles Pale Male’s nest. The act unites an unlikely family of birdwatchers, movie stars, poets, children, dogs, reporters, and celebrities, including Mary Tyler Moore and David Letterman. What unfolds next could only happen in New York.”
The film has already been recognized with several awards, including Santa Barbara International Film Festival – Audience Award, Palm Beach International Film Festival – Audience Award, International Wildlife Film Festival – Best of Festival, and Best Human Wildlife Interactions.
Pablo Picasso’s journey to Italy in January of 1917 offered one of the most significant but least investigated influences on his art. It was in Italy where he began his second rose period and absorbed the powerful spirit of Renaissance, Classical, and Mannerist art, as well as Italian culture.
Picasso designed the curtains and sets for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes production of Parade, a one act avant-garde ballet written by Jean Cocteau, scored by Eric Satie, and choreographed by Diaghilev’s lover Léonide Massine. Parade was to be performed in Paris that May, so in the meantime Picasso and Cocteau joined Diaghilev and Massine in Rome where the Ballets Russes was headquartered during World War I. Picasso accompanied the Ballets Russes to Venice and Florence where he visited Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel.
It was the Farnese marbles in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples that would have the most profound effect on Picasso’s art. Over the years the inspiration from these classical Greek and Roman masterpieces burned deep in Picasso’s sculpture. They also propelled him closer toward Neoclassicism in his painting, eventually serving to “classicize his work far more effectively than the antiquities he had studied in the Louvre,” as John Richardson notes in the epic third installment of his seminal Picasso biography “Picasso: The Triumphant Years.”
Back in Rome, Picasso continued meeting artists while making the requisite tourist stops. He got to know members of the Italian Futurist movement, including Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero, and visited the Vatican Museums with Enrico Prampolini who commented on the “pleasure with which [Picasso] contemplated the Sistine frescoes and, still more, Raphael’s Stanze and the Vatican museums of sculpture.”
It was here where he also found a new sujet d’art: Olga Khokhlova, a 25-year-old Russian ballerina, who became his first wife.
In the book The Italian Journey 1917-1924, editors Jean Claire and Odile Michel explore the fascinating ties between Picasso’s work and his experiences in Italy:
He also brought back enough memories to affect his imagery for several decades, as readers discover in this 367-page book. There are 13 essays here, such as Jean Clair’s “Notes on the Iconography of Harlequin,” Anne Baldassari’s “Pompeian Fantasy: a Photographic Source of Picasso’s Neoclassicism,” and Ornella Volta’s “Picasso and Italy: the Last Memories of His Journey.” The book is filled with large color plates reproducing Picasso’s paintings, drawings, and prints, including many that are only rarely seen, such as a group of caricatures of his companions, including Diaghilev and Léon Bakst. The book also includes dozens of reproductions of period photographs, mementos Picasso collected on his travels, and art that affected him – Pompeiian wall paintings, ballet dancers, and classical painting. Readers will find much food for thought, as well as some priceless quotes from the master. When Picasso went to the Sistine Chapel, for example, he found the Raphaels wanting. “Good, very good,” he remarked, “but it can be done, don’t you think?” Then, turning to the Michelangelo’s Last Judgment: “Now this is more difficult.”
“The happiness and unhappiness of the rational, social animal depends not on what he feels but on what he does – just as his virtue and vice consist not in feeling but in doing.”
