Bring Back Cocktail Parties

From The Huffington Post:

I remember being aghast when the price of a cocktail hit $11 -- and now we live in the era of the $15 martini. Even dives are raising their prices. Of course, I'm in the NYC region, where the cost of living has replaced pickpockets as the thing most likely to take all your money. Even still, when you think about a budget martini and the dubious ingredients mingling in the glass, wouldn't it be much better to get one bottle of really good gin, rather than spend that money on bad drinks?...

In our grandparents' day, people dressed up to go to a friends' house for cocktails. Would it kill us to raise the bar on everyday dress now and then? No. But I digress. In the comfort of home, you can comfortably dress up or dress down. No hobbling down the sidewalk in heels. No self-consciousness because you're one of those people who would rather wear flip-flops everywhere. It works for all types. (Read more.)

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Eight Chivalric Gestures

From James M. Sama:

As gentlemen in modern times, you automatically stand out from the crowd. These points above are easy and free, but one would be surprised how rarely they actually occur. For those of us who naturally make it part of our daily lives, it’s difficult to picture how someone else couldn’t. But – it happens.

The new era of chivalry is not rooted in the chauvinistic mindset of the past. We have evolved past performing these acts for women because “they can’t do it themselves.”

The new gentleman performs these acts for the right reasons – love, caring, and respect. (Read more.)

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Archduchess Antonia

I think this is a portrait of Marie-Antoinette before her marriage since she is shown with the archducal crown. Share

Ukraine: The End of the Beginning?

From The Economist:

On February 27th, four days after the end of the Sochi Olympics, Russia in effect occupied Crimea, part of the sovereign territory of Ukraine, under the pretence of protecting its Russian-speaking population. Russian forces based at various installations on the peninsula seized airports, government buildings and broadcasters within hours, and blockaded Ukrainian military bases. In Sebastopol, home to Russia’s Black Sea fleet, local people celebrated their liberation in the central square, waving Russian flags to the accompaniment of Cossack songs, a Soviet-era pop group, and the fleet’s choir.

There was only one thing missing: the enemy. Everyone in Crimea. and now across eastern Ukraine, is talking about Ukrainian fascists, but nobody has actually seen one. “We have not seen them here yet, but we have seen them on television,” said Stanislav Nagorny, an aide to the leader of a local “self-defence” force in Sebastopol. The confusion was understandable: Russian television had unleashed a propaganda campaign impressive in both its intensity and cynicism, stoking ethnic hatred and exacerbating historical divides, mixing half truths with outright lies. Right-wing extremists and nationalists did take part in the revolution, but they do not control the government.

Russia struck when Ukraine was at its weakest—mourning the deaths of those who died on the Maidan, Kiev’s Independence Square, during an abortive crackdown by Mr Yanukovych, and struggling to form a new government. The Kremlin was greatly assisted in its task by Ukraine’s parliament which, despite the obvious tension between the Russian-speaking east of the country and the Ukrainian-speaking west, irresponsibly passed a bill (later dropped) that repealed the status of Russian as an official language on a par with Ukrainian. Parliament also failed to bring politicians from eastern Ukraine into the government. (Read more.)

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Disposable Families

The fruits of the sexual revolution. From The Washington Times:

That revolution championed a culture in which rules, responsibility and the traditional family were disposable. Building strong families is inexorably tied to eradicating poverty. Unfortunately, the revolution of the ‘60s has more effectively shaped our culture than the war on poverty.

Today, we are living in a world where most of the professed goals of the sexual revolution have been realized. We have experienced true sexual freedom. The millennials have coined the term “friends with benefits.” They can and do hook up at will. Unfortunately, we have found that what was supposed to bring freedom has instead shackled us to activity without meaning.

The seeming meaninglessness that accompanies sex without intimacy has entirely shifted our collective understanding of the most fundamental unit in our society — the family. Family has become disposable. Is it overreaching to link the breakdown of the family to a generation of teens that has become so jaded that they can take pleasure in so-called games like “Knockout” — knocking out a random stranger on the street with one punch? We think not.

It has been the most vulnerable, in particular children and the economically disadvantaged, who have borne the brunt of the consequences of this societal upheaval. According to the National Fatherhood Initiative, children from father-absent homes are significantly more likely to be poor and most at risk. This is the price of freedom without restraints. In this light, it becomes painfully clear that the casualties of the sexual revolution are still being counted. (Read more.)

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Marie-Louise of Austria

Great-niece of Marie-Antoinette and first cousin once-removed of Madame Royale. She was married to Napoleon Bonaparte. (Via Tiny-Librarian.) Share

First Nazi Euthanasia Victim

From The Telegraph:

German historians have identified the family whose request to Adolf Hitler that their disabled son be "put to sleep" was the catalyst for the Nazi euthanasia programme. The five-month-old boy, who was given a lethal drug after Hitler sent his own doctor to examine him, has been named as Gerhard Kretschmar, the son of a farm hand. The case was to provide the rationale for a secret Nazi decree that led to "mercy killings" of almost 300,000 mentally and physically handicapped people. The Kretschmars wanted their son dead but most of the other children were forcibly taken from their parents to be killed.

A few days after Gerhard died in 1939, 15 psychiatrists were summoned to Hitler's Chancellery and told that a secret euthanasia programme - dreamed of by Hitler for more than a decade - was to be put into effect. Until this month, the boy was referred to only as "Case K", the term used by Nazi doctors when the programme was launched and at the subsequent Nuremberg war-crimes trials. Now, Gerhard's name heads the first comprehensive list of victims of the euthanasia killings, unveiled in Berlin this month as a permanent and chilling reminder of one of Hitler's lesser-known extermination programmes. It was compiled over three years after painstaking research by German government archivists into 740 previously unknown files relating to the euthanasia programme. The files, originally taken from Hitler's Chancellery, were uncovered in archives of the Stasi, the East German secret police.

It was during his trial at Nuremberg that Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal doctor, revealed that an unnamed infant had provided the Nazis with the excuse to embark on creating a master race. The baby's father, Richard Kretschmar, from the small Saxony town of Pomssen, near Leipzig, had written to Hitler's office in early 1939 asking for permission to kill his blind and deformed son. In his testimony, Dr Brandt said: "The father of a deformed child wrote to the Fuhrer with a request to be allowed to take the life of this child or this creature. Hitler ordered me to take care of this case. The child had been born blind, seemed to be idiotic, and a leg and parts of the arm were missing."

The boy is believed to have been given luminal in the form of a dissolving tablet, causing unconsciousness and death after three to five days. The drug was later used on other victims of the euthanasia programme. Only a month after the baby's killing, in August 1939, Hitler's Interior Ministry issued the decree ordering the systematic annihilation of mentally and physically disabled children.

The new report contains the most comprehensive analysis yet of Nazi records, including the hundreds of hospitals and clinics that took part in the Third Reich's programme to wipe out the lives of people considered "unworthy of living". It contains names and case details of 200,000 of the programme's estimated 275,000 victims. (Read more.)

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Lithograph of the Temple

A picture of the last prison of the French Royal Family. (Via Anna Gibson.) Share

Beneath the Stars

Ava Gardner and Barbara Stanwyck in East Side, West Side, 1949

The New York Review of Books discusses two Hollywood legends. To quote:

In 1949, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio that boasted “more stars than there are in the heavens,” released one of its typical productions. Based on a soap-opera-ish novel by Marcia Davenport, East Side, West Side put MGM’s assets on show: Cyd Charisse (in a non-dancing role), Nancy Davis (soon to be Mrs. Ronald Reagan), James Mason (at his most suave), and Gale Sondergaard and Van Heflin (both Oscar winners). The headliners were Barbara Stanwyck and Ava Gardner, appearing together for the first and only time. They portrayed the two women in Mason’s life, wife (Stanwyck) and lover (Gardner), and they were given a single scene to confront the situation. Stanwyck, the elder of the two, has the larger role of a wealthy Park Avenue woman: chic, well-mannered, cultured. Gardner gets the showier part as a trashy babe (a role Stanwyck might have played in her younger years).

Gardner, dressed in stark white with suitable cleavage, roams around the room like a restless tiger. She does most of the talking, warning Stanwyck that Mason will be available “only when I don’t want him…. I’ll call him and he’ll come running.” She tells Stanwyck to watch out because she knows men. Stanwyck stays calm. She doesn’t move a muscle, standing ramrod straight in a prim suit, matching hat and gloves, and double strand of pearls. When they are done deciding Mason’s fate (the female prerogative), Stanwyck sweeps confidently out the door, and then, alone and rattled, she starts to cry. This was Stanwyck’s famous trump card, her ability to make a rapid shift from tough to vulnerable. This was what you once got for your money from Hollywood: glorious junk enlivened by two fabulous and unique stars who knew what an audience wanted from them and who earned every cent they were paid.

Moviegoers had little trouble believing that Ava Gardner and Barbara Stanwyck might fight over a husband. Gardner’s next movie in 1949 was The Bribe, and it costarred her with Stanwyck’s real-life second husband, Robert Taylor. Very quickly, Gardner and Taylor, two of the most beautiful people in movies, were having a hot romance. “Our love affair lasted three, maybe four, months,” Gardner wrote in her autobiography, Ava: My Story, adding that it was “a magical little interlude.” (What Stanwyck thought about it went unrecorded.) East Side, West Side’s conflict between wife and lover mirrored the conflict between the same two women off-screen. Here lies a challenge for the movie-star biographer: Where does East Side, West Side end and real life begin? It’s difficult for anyone to know, sometimes including the stars themselves. (Read more.)

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