Literally dancing out Christmas, some Swedish communities are celebrating Knut’s Day (previously) as the end of the holiday season by “plundering” the tree of its ornaments and ceremoniously tossing it out on this twentieth day (imagine that carol) of Yule—Tjugondag jul—set aside as Knut’s name day (see also).
A consortium of Parisien museums have gifted the world a cache of over three-hundred thousand works to peruse and with over half of the collection already public domain, use however one sees fit. A running tally tracks the growing collection that includes van Dyck, Rembrandt, Cézanne, da Vinci and gives purchase for a constellation of lesser known artists to be discovered. The fourteen participating institutions count among themselves the Museum of Modern Art and the estates of Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac. Much, much more to explore at the portal here.
Though we could not recite this disclaimer from memory, it’s certainly familiar to all of us, having been driven into the audience’s psyche as a cinematic preamble for any work of pure or historical fiction. From a litigious perspective, we understand we the distributors are coming from but did not realise until thanks to Miss Cellania, it stemmed from one specific 1932 character defamation lawsuit—involving no less than Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin.
The MGM studio debuted the film Rasputin and the Empress (the only movie starring all three of the Barrymore siblings together) which suggested that one of the princess characters was raped by the charismatic advisor to the House of Romanov and that particular portrayal was intended to be Princess Irina Alexandrovna, surviving the Bolshevik revolution as the sole niece of Tsar Nicholas II. The princess and her husband, Count Felix Felixovich Yusupov whom also participated in the assassination of Rasputin, successfully sued the production company for libel and an additional out of court settlement. The feature began with the introductory claim that “This concerns the destruction of an empire… A few of the characters are still alive—the rest having met their death by violence,” a statement that was completely overhauled to own that it was not a historically accurate portrayal of events at all. To avoid further lawsuits, it was removed from circulation for decades until Irina Alexandrovna’s death in 1970. Be sure and visit the link up top to hear the rest of the story and its legacy.
We are presented with the verdant, vertical urban forest concept of the architectural firm of Stefano Boeri to be built in the near future on a tract of land just outside of Cancún that was formerly zoned for development as a sprawling shopping centre.
Happily the area will instead be home to new model city (see previously), one hundred and thirty thousand human residents cohabitating with some seven million carbon-sequestering plants. Project leaders plan for the settlement, campus to become a showcase hub of research and education with facilities focused on redressing coral reef degradation, lessening the impact of agriculture as well as demonstrating the integration of mobility, robotics and renewables into civil engineering and urban planning, backwards planning to bring these reforms and innovations to communities and infrastructure already extant. Much more to explore at the link up top.
Historian, hagiographer and diarist with some rather explosive confessions for his time and station (supported by contemporary biographers), the feast day of Aelred of Rievaulx is observed on this day, marking his death in 1167 (*1110) at his abbey in Yorkshire.
The monk and abbot rather a folk saint have not been formally vetted by the canonisation process—though venerated in both the Catholic and Anglican faiths—is the patron for kidney stone sufferers (confined to bed in his later years from this affliction and arthritis) and has been adopted by several LGBTQIA+ organisations as the champion for his frank admission of conscious homosexual orientation and how its consenting exercise was a profound expression of Christian theology, laid out in his expansive treatise “On Spiritual Friendship.” While never censored per se, until the twentieth century, Aelred’s reputation as a historian—writing the vita of Saint Edward, King and Confessor among others—was emphasised over his theological work.
First shown in theatres on this day in 1970 after twelve-months of production and with the titles The House that Screamed and The Boarding School for foreign markets, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s set the standard for Spanish Gothic horror and was quite a commercial success. A nineteenth century French home for troubled, wayward girls experiences a series of sinister-seeming but rather innocuously explained (given the administration and the character of their charges) away disappearances, only with the denouement revealing that the head-mistress’ (portrayed by highly accomplished German/Hollywood actress Lilli Palmer, whom despite having passed in 1986 has a final credit in the 2018 Orson Welles’ experimental The Other Side of the Wind made finally after considerable delays) overbearing manner had spillover effects for her son she was raising as a single-mother, passing on to him unrealistic expectations of the ideal woman that he deserved.
