The Syrian Dream
Have you ever witnessed it fall
Like a bloodstained leaf at the end of Spring?
Have you ever heard its desperate call
Being silenced by bombs never stopping to sing?
Please tell me you did not stand there
Observing cruelty crush it with her dark hands?
Can't you recognize in the burning air
The scent of ashes piling up on perished lands?
Please now watch its wandering owner
lonely as a ghost in a distant place
That forbade him ever to find another.
Lisa Gillet
1ère Euro
Monday, February 19, 2018
Monday, February 5, 2018
Sunday, December 17, 2017
Music before jazz
Here is one example of popular American music that preceded jazz. Listen to this and then the examples of jazz from the twenties that I am posting. Compare the difference in the feelings conveyed by the music, the instruments, the tempo and the lyrics.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Tuesday, December 5, 2017
Attention
Class is canceled for Wednesday the 6th! I have a "conseil de classe" which starts at 14:00, so I can't give the class. Nevertheless, I am attaching a short extract from the film It that we were going ot watch. We will discuss Clara Bow and the role she plays and how she personifies the "new woman" of the 20's. I am posting a link for the full film if you should so care to watch it. I highly recommend it! If nothing else, watch the first 20 minutes of the film to get a feel for the era.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4MOQSRC_bM
See you in class Wednesday the 13th.
Mrs Buckley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4MOQSRC_bM
See you in class Wednesday the 13th.
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
Music that preceeded the '20s
1925 Article entitled "Flapper Jane"
"Flapper Jane"
by Bruce Bliven
Published in New
Republic, September 9, 1925.
1920s flapper ad
Jane's a flapper. That is a quaint, old-fashioned
term, but I hope you remember its meaning. As you can tell by her
appellation, Jane is 19. If she were 29, she would be Dorothy; 39,
Doris; 49, Elaine; 59, Jane again--and so on around. This Jane, being
19, is a flapper, though she urgently denies that she is a member of
the younger generation. The younger generation, she will tell you, is
aged 15 to 17; and she professes to be decidedly shocked at the
things they do and say. That is a fact which would interest her
minister, if he knew it--poor man, he knows so little! For he regards
Jane as a perfectly horrible example of wild youth--paint,
cigarettes, cocktails, petting parties--oooh! Yet if the younger
generation shocks her as she says, query: how wild is Jane?
Before we come to this exciting question, let us take
a look at the young person as she strolls across the lawn of her
parents' suburban home, having just put the car away after driving
sixty miles in two hours. She is, for one thing, a very pretty girl.
Beauty is the fashion in 1925. She is frankly, heavily made up, not
to imitate nature, but for an altogether artificial effect--pallor
mortis, poisonously scarlet lips, richly ringed eyes--the latter
looking not so much debauched (which is the intention) as diabetic.
Her walk duplicates the swagger supposed by innocent America to go
with the female half of a Paris Apache dance. And there are, finally,
her clothes.
These were estimated the other day by some
statistician to weigh two pounds. Probably a libel; I doubt they come
within half a pound of such bulk. Jane isn't wearing much, this
summer. If you'd like to know exactly, it is: one dress, one step-in,
two stockings, two shoes.
A step-in, if you are 99 and 44/1OOths percent
ignorant, is underwear--one piece, light, exceedingly brief but
roomy. Her dress, as you can't possibly help knowing if you have even
one good eye, and get around at all outside the Old People's Home, is
also brief. It is cut low where it might be high, and vice versa. The
skirt comes just an inch below her knees, overlapping by a faint
fraction her rolled and twisted stockings. The idea is that when she
walks in a bit of a breeze, you shall now and then observe the knee
(which is not rouged--that's just newspaper talk) but always in an
accidental, Venus-surprised-at-the-bath sort of way. This is a bit of
coyness which hardly fits in with Jane general character.
Jane's haircut is also abbreviated. She wears of
course the very newest thing in bobs, even closer than last year's
shingle. It leaves her just about no hair at all in the back, and 20
percent more than that in the front--about as much as is being worn
this season by a cellist (male); less than a pianist; and much, much
less than a violinist. Because of this new style, one can confirm a
rumor heard last year: Jane has ears.
The corset is as dead as the dodo's grandfather; no
feeble publicity pipings by the manufacturers, or calling it a "clasp
around" will enable it, as Jane says, to "do a Lazarus."
The petticoat is even more defunct. Not even a snicker can be raised
by telling Jane that once the nation was shattered to its foundations
by the shadow-skirt. The brassiere has been abandoned, since 1924.
While stockings are usually worn, they are not a
sine-qua-nothing-doing. In hot weather Jane reserves the right to
discard them, just as all the chorus girls did in 1923. As stockings
are only a frantic, successful attempt to duplicate the color and
texture of Jane's own sunburned slim legs, few but expert
boulevardiers can tell the difference.
1920s ad for necklaces
These which I have described are Jane's clothes, but
they are not merely a flapper uniform. They are The Style, Summer of
1925 Eastern Seaboard. These things and none other are being worn by
all of Jane's sisters and her cousins and her aunts. They are being
worn by ladies who are three times Jane's age, and look ten years
older; by those twice her age who look a hundred years older. Their
use is so universal that in our larger cities the baggage transfer
companies one and all declare they are being forced into bankruptcy.
Ladies who used to go away for the summer with six trunks can now
pack twenty dainty costumes in a bag.
Not since 1820 has feminine apparel been so frankly
abbreviated as at present; and never, on this side of the Atlantic,
until you go back to the little summer frocks of Pocahontas. This
year's styles have gone quite a long step toward genuine nudity. Nor
is this merely the sensible half of the population dressing as
everyone ought to, in hot weather. Last winter's styles weren't so
dissimilar, except that they were covered up by fur coats and you got
the full effect only indoors. And improper costumes never have their
full force unless worn on the street. Next year's styles, from all
one hears, will be, as they already are on the continent, even More
So.
Our great mentor has failed us: you will see none of
the really up-to-date styles in the movies. For old-fashioned,
conservative and dowdy dressing, go and watch the latest production
featuring Bebe, Gloria or Pola. Under vigilant father Hays the
ensilvered screen daren't reveal a costume equal to scores on Fifth
Avenue, Broadway--or Wall Street.
Wall Street, by the way, is the one spot in which the
New Nakedness seems most appropriate.
Where men's simple passions have the lowest boiling
point; where the lust for possession is most frankly, brazenly
revealed and indeed dominates the whole diurnal round--in such a
place there is a high appropriateness in the fact that the
priestesses in the temple of Mammon, though their service be no more
than file clerk or stenographer, should be thus Dionysiac in
apparelling themselves for their daily tasks.
Where will it all end? do you ask, thumbing the page
ahead in an effort to know the worst. Apologetically I reply that no
one can say where it will end. Nudity has been the custom of many
countries and over long periods of time. No one who has read history
can be very firm in saying that It Never Can Happen Again. We may of
course mutter, in feeble tones of hope, that our climate is not
propitious.
Few any more are so naive as not to realize that
there are fashions in morals and that these have a limitless capacity
for modification. Costume, of course, is A Moral. You can get a rough
measure of our movement if you look at the history of the theatre and
see how the tidemark of tolerance has risen. For instance:
- 1904--Performance of Mrs. Warren's Profession is halted by police.
- 1919--Mrs. Warren O.K. Town roused to frenzy by Aphrodite, in which one chorus girl is exposed for one minute in dim light and a union suit.
- 1923--Union suit O.K. Self-appointed censors have conniption fits over chorus girls naked from the waist up.
- 1925--Nudity from waist up taken for granted. Excitement caused by show in which girls wear only fig leaves.
Plotting the curve of tolerance and projecting it
into the future, it is thus easy to see that complete nudity in the
theatre will be reached on March 12, 1927. Just what will the
appalling consequences be?
Perhaps about what they have been in the theatres of
several European capitals, where such displays have long been
familiar. Those who are interested in that sort of thing will go.
Others will abstain.
At this point Billy Sunday, discussing this theme,
would certainly drop into anecdotage. Were we to do the same, we
might see Jane on the sun porch talking to a mixed group of her
mother's week-end guests. "Jane," says one, "I hear
you cut yourself in bathing."
"I'll say I did," comes crisply back.
"Look!" She lifts her skirt three or four inches, revealing
both brown knees, and above one of them a half-healed deep scratch.
Proper murmurs of sympathy. From one quarter a chilly silence which
draws our attention to the enpurpled countenance of a lady guest in
the throes of what Eddie Cantor calls "the sex complex."
Jane's knees have thrown her all a-twitter; and mistaking the
character of her emotion she thinks it is justified indignation. She
is glad to display it openly for the reproof thereby administered.
"Well, damn it," says Jane, in a subsequent
private moment, "anybody who can't stand a knee or two,
nowadays, might as well quit. And besides, she goes to the beaches
and never turns a hair."
"The Flapper," Life magazine cover, 1922
Here is a real point. The recent history of the Great
Disrobing Movement can be checked up in another way by looking at the
bathing costumes which have been accepted without question at
successive intervals. There are still a few beaches near New York
City which insist on more clothes than anyone can safely swim in, and
thereby help to drown several young women each year. But in most
places- -universally in the West--a girl is now compelled to wear no
more than is a man. The enpurpled one, to be consistent, ought to
have apoplexy every time she goes to the shore. But as Jane observes,
she doesn't.
"Jane," say I, "I am a reporter
representing American inquisitiveness. Why do all of you dress the
way you do?"
"I don't know," says Jane. This reply means
nothing: it is just the device by which the younger generation gains
time to think. Almost at once she adds:
"The old girls are doing it because youth is in.
Everybody wants to be young, now--though they want all us young
people to be something else. Funny, isn't it?
"In a way," says Jane, "it's just
honesty. Women have come down off the pedestal lately. They are tired
of this mysterious-feminine-charm stuff. Maybe it goes with
independence, earning your own living and voting and all that. There
was always a bit of the harem in that cover up-your-arms-and-legs
business, don't you think?
"Women still want to be loved," goes on
Jane, warming to her theme, "but they want it on a 50-50 basis,
which includes being admired for the qualities they really possess.
Dragging in this strange-allurement stuff doesn't seem sporting. It's
like cheating in games, or lying."
"Ask me, did the War start all this?" says
Jane helpfully.
"The answer is, how do I know ? How does anybody
know?
"I read this book whaddaya-call-it by Rose
Macaulay, and she showed where they'd been excited about wild youth
for three generations anyhow--since 1870. I have a hunch maybe
they've always been excited.
"Somebody wrote in a magazine how the War had
upset the balance of the sexes in Europe and the girls over there
were wearing the new styles as part of the competition for husbands.
Sounds like the bunk to me. If you wanted to nail a man for life I
think you'd do better to go in for the old-fashioned line: 'March' me
to the altar, esteemed sir, before you learn whether I have limbs or
not.'
"Of course, not so many girls are looking for a
life meal ticket nowadays. Lots of them prefer to earn their own
living and omit the home-and-baby act. Well, anyhow, postpone it
years and years. They think a bachelor girl can and should do
everything a bachelor man does."
"It's funny," says Jane, "that just
when women's clothes are getting scanty, men's should be going the
other way. Look at the Oxford trousers!--as though a man had been
caught by the ankles in a flannel quicksand."
Do the morals go with the clothes? Or the clothes
with the morals? Or are they independent? These are questions I have
not ventured to put to Jane, knowing that her answer would be "so's
your old man." Generally speaking, however, it is safe to say
that as regards the wildness of youth there is a good deal more smoke
than fire. Anyhow, the new Era of Undressing, as already suggested,
has spread far beyond the boundaries of Jane's group. The fashion is
followed by hordes of unquestionably monogamous matrons, including
many who join heartily in the general ululations as to what young
people are coming to. Attempts to link the new freedom with
prohibition, with the automobile, the decline of Fundamentalism, are
certainly without foundation. These may be accessory, and indeed
almost certainly are, but only after the fact.
That fact is, as Jane says, that women to-day are
shaking off the shreds and patches of their age-old servitude.
"Feminism" has won a victory so nearly complete that we
have even forgotten the fierce challenge which once inhered in the
very word. Women have highly resolved that they are just as good as
men, and intend to be treated so. They don't mean to have any more
unwanted children. They don't intend to be debarred from any
profession or occupation which they choose to enter. They clearly
mean (even though not all of them yet realize it) that in the great
game of sexual selection they shall no longer be forced to play the
role, simulated or real, of helpless quarry. If they want to wear
their heads shaven, as a symbol of defiance against the former fate
which for three millenia forced them to dress their heavy locks
according to male decrees, they will have their way. If they should
elect to go naked nothing is more certain than that naked they will
go, while from the sidelines to which he has been relegated mere man
is vouchsafed permission only to pipe a feeble Hurrah!
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