June 21

A native of New Jersey should know at least a little about the Channel Islands -- the British Crown Dependency consisting of Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, Sark, and some smaller islands. The islands are closer to France than to England, and have a fascinating hisory, including jurisdictionally, having never been part of the United Kingdom per se. They were occupied by the Germans during World War II, a history that forms the basis of Moira Buffini's play Gabriel, which recently had its New York premiere. According to her Wikipedia entry, Buffini "advocate[s] big, imaginative plays rather than naturalistic soap opera dramas, and is a founder member of the Monsterists, a group of playwrights who promote new writing of large scale work in the British theatre."

http://beta.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/2010/jun/01/gabriel/

http://moreintelligentlife.com/blog/isabel-lloyd/moira-buffini-and-strong-women

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moira_Buffini

The Channel Island of Sark only gave up feudalism in 2008 (insert "better late than never" joke) and was the intended target of a one-man invasion in 1990:

In August 1990 an unemployed French nuclear physicist named André Gardes attempted a singlehanded invasion of Sark, armed with a semi-automatic weapon. The night Gardes arrived he put up signs declaring his intention to take over the island the following day at noon. He was arrested while sitting on a bench, changing the gun's magazine and waiting for noon to arrive, by the island's volunteer Constable.

This all helps me understand why film director Peter Greenaway is fond of Sark and features it in The Tulse Luper Suitcases (the third part of which is called From Sark to the Finish).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sark

This charming, largely wordless Russian animated short, Dragonfly and Ant, directed by Nikolay Fedorov in 1960, is strongly reminiscent of the Fleischer Brothers' 1941 feature Mr. Bug Goes to Town (a commercial bust at the time, but now a cult classic).




http://www.animationblog.org/2010/06/nikolay-fedorov-dragonfly-and-ant-1961.html

The blog Classic TV History heralds the arrival of three television versions of Tennessee Williams one-act plays, directed by the great Sidney Lumet, that are included as an extra on the Criterion DVD of the Williams-based Lumet film The Fugitive Kind:

....the director....Sidney Lumet....had a nuanced understanding of Williams’s preoccupations and, crucially, his use of language.  All three of the plays are unapologetically verbose, and Lumet’s key contribution is to stage them so that nothing distracts from the almost unbroken exchanges of dialogue in each.

http://classictvhistory.wordpress.com/2010/06/23/three-plays-by-tennessee-williams/ 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Bug_Goes_to_Town

Dr. Tony Shaw devotes his uncommonly interesting blog to the more obscure reaches of literary history, as for example this post on the modern Charentais troubador Goulbeneze, born Evariste Poitevin (1877-1952):

http://tonyshaw3.blogspot.com/2010/06/goulebeneze-and-saintes-charente.html

Also of a pronounced regional flavor is an anthology of Rudyard Kipling's work focused on his adopted English county of Sussex:

http://acommonreader.org/review-a-sussex-kipling-david-arscott/

The anthologist, David Arscott, has also started a Sussex Book Club "to keep readers abreast on everything that's being written on a vast range of local themes." I love this kind of thing. I'm signing up!

http://www.room152.lewesonline.com/index.php

Neal Ascherson -- whose extraordinary geo-history Black Sea I heartily recommend -- blends an account of Charles de Gaulle's career with personal memories of his own intersections with that narrative:

....de Gaulle, this profoundly conservative  figure with “a certain idea of France”, an eternal France, went on to destroy for ever the old....political and social pattern which had defined France since about 1830, perhaps since the Great Revolution. He created the Fifth Republic. It was - still is - authoritarian, with heavy presidential powers. But it broke open doors in education, economic regulation, farming subsidies and much else, which meant that in the ten years between 1958 and 1968, France changed more than it had changed in the previous century.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/neal-ascherson/charles-de-gaulle-remembered

The painter Robert Rahway Zakanitch (b. 1935) has been exploring the floral world in a series entitled "From a Garden of Ordinary Miracles":

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/06/art-review-robert-rahway-zakanitch-at-samuel-freeman-gallery.html

http://www.samuelfreeman.com/nav/e_2010_03_zakanitch.html

Street photographer Leon Levinstein (1910-1988), much less famous than his peer Garry Winogrand, is receiving overdue attention as a result of a Metropolitan Museum show:

http://moreintelligentlife.com/blog/cheap-perfume-and-fried-chicken

http://www.economist.com/node/16374498

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/notebook/2010/06/28/100628gonb_GOAT_notebook_aletti

http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId={C9CE6916-DFEF-4B86-BDB0-EE290C523227}

http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/06/interview-jem-cohen-with-leon.html

Among notables born on this date are philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Reinhold Niebuhr, novelists Mary McCarthy, Ian McEwan, Francoise Sagan (France), Fyodor Gladkov (Russia), and Machado de Assis (Brazil), poets Anne Carson and Adam Zagajewski (Poland), cartoonist Berkeley Breathed, art critic Heinrich Wolfflin, painter Rockwell Kent, sculptor Medardo Rosso (Italy), architect Pier Luigi Nervi, composers Alois Haba, Philippe Sarde, and Lalo Schifrin, conductor Hermann Scherchen, singer/songwriter Ray Davies, cinematographer Conrad Hall, film director Larry Wachowski, politician Benazir Bhutto, and actors Judy Holliday, Maureen Stapleton, Joe Flaherty, Jane Russell, and Doug Savant. One of the best sets of illustrations for any classic novel -- really quite stunning -- are Rockwell Kent's for Moby Dick: