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Page decorations by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale for Poems by Alfred Tennyson (1905).

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Rudolph Valentino’s Ring

Rudolph Valentino was considered one of the greatest silent film actors in Hollywood. In the 1920s, during the peak of his success, he bough a ring from a jeweler that ended up changing his life. Legend has it that Valentino showed the ring to one of his friends, his friend had a vision of Valentino as pale and lifeless.

The next few movies that he did, all flopped in the box office and 6 years later he died. Valentino’s lover became ill after wearing the ring, which derailed her career for years to come. Russ Colombo, who played Valentino in a biography about his life, wore the ring and died in a shooting accident just a few days later. Finally, a man named Joe Casino bought the ring but decided not to wear it until he thought the curse was lifted. But even after waiting several years to put it on, the curse remained. Casino died within a week of putting on the ring. 

Today, the whereabouts of the cursed ring are unknown.

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london, 1954

photo by marc riboud/ magnum photos

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Imaan Hammam on IG

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Mamie Van Doren in Guns Girls and Gangsters (1959)

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On twitter I’m seeing dozens of threads from Black activists warning people against burnout, giving all sorts of useful tips about preventing and managing it for the sake of a long-term, sustainable effort.

On tumblr I’m seeing a hell of a lot of young white kids yelling at anyone who actually follows those steps, and acting like burnout is a moral falling rather than a well-proven psychological phenomenon.

Be careful who you get your information from. Don’t let guilt lead you to make choices that will harm both you and the movement.

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Exlibris (c. 1700).

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Willy Pogány illustration from The tale of Lohengrin, knight of the swan - 1914 - via Internet Archive

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“I love too many things, and my heart, dressed like the dead, overflows toward the universe.”

— Miguel Hernández, tr. by Robert Bly, from The Selected Poems; “Death,” (via violentwavesofemotion)

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Frankenstien  (1910)

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The ‘Mud Angel’ volunteers rescue artworks in the Piazza della Signoria, Florence, 1966

“Overnight on 4 and 5 November 1966, the River Arno broke over its banks and flooded Florence, leaving one ton of mud for every person in the city and devastating the Renaissance city’s artistic and historical treasures. Churches, museums and libraries, all filled with works of art, were inundated with mud, to a depth in some places of 22ft. Young people, arriving from across the Continent, immediately began showing up to help. They became known to the Florentines as gli angeli del fango, ‘the Mud Angels’.

Throughout the winter of 1966-67, young volunteers kept arriving to help clean up Florence. Many of these were Italian, but a significant number came from further afield. They cleaned mud out of the Basilica di Santa Croce, carried priceless paintings out of the Uffizi galleries and brought food and fresh water to the elderly Florentines trapped in their upper-floor apartments. These youthful workers were not organised, nor had they been recruited. They simply turned up. Young Europeans dropped what they were doing and boarded trains or drove south. Many had already been on the road, backpacking around Europe, and simply rearranged their itinerary to spend time in Tuscany.

There was a tremendous turnover in the winter months. Some Mud Angels stayed a few days, others a few weeks. They listened to the latest music while working, smoked cigarettes on their breaks and had only a little energy left for carousing at night. Because of the polyglot nature of the young workers, the archivists and preservationists had to devise a colour-coded card system to track and process each item. It is unclear just how many Mud Angels there were in total, or even exactly where they had come from. There were probably only a few thousand of them at most, yet, given their mythic status in Italy, one would think the number was ten times that.

Mireille Bazin from the northern French city of Reims came down with 30 other art students during their holiday break. Another French visitor, William Michaut, commented that ‘despite the language barrier, we lived in intense communion’. Ignacio Serrano Garcia from Valladolid in Spain said that he and the other Mud Angels came to Florence out of a sense of duty to its great cultural heritage, while Riccardo Lanza from Milan recalls the harmony among the young cohorts: ‘It was something already present in our generation … with more or less means, [we] had travelled in Italy and abroad and had often relied on the solidarity between us.’

The Mud Angels of 1966 were an expression of the internationalist instincts, transnational travel and generational solidarity that had developed out of the new-found postwar mobility of the youth of western Europe. In the decade and a half after the Florentine Mud Angels, mass youth travel in Europe developed into the kind of cultural form of travel that flourishes today, complete with rail passes, guidebooks and backpacks. Contact between young Europeans grew, helping to build new connections across borders.” [source]

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Josephine Baker, Gardner, 1938 

Josephine Baker tending her garden at the Chateau des Milandes, her home from 1937 to 1969

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