#1934 Maria

[tina-aumont]

Very interesting and beautiful undated photo of Maria. My guessing is that it was taken circa 1934, but I cannot be sure. It seems it comes from a book, but this photo is not printed in "María Montez: su Vida" by Margarita Vicens nor in "María Montez La Reina del Tecnicolor" by Antonio Pérez Arnay. This photo was posted at Listal two years ago.

Any information given on it (story, photographer, publication, year...) will be much welcomed and credited!!

Thank you very much!!

[weirdlookindog]

Bela Lugosi and Maria Alba in The Return of Chandu (1934)

[belalugosi1882]

Bela Lugosi, Maria Alba and Clara Kimball Young in The Return Of Chandu 1934 (serial)

[postcard-from-the-past]

12th-century Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere in Rome, Italy

Italian vintage postcard, mailed in 1934 to France

[lamarchesacasati]

1934 Francis Hastings, 16th Earl of Huntingdon, Portrait of Marchesa Luisa Casati. 

Lord Huntingdon's (Francis Hastings, 16th Earl of Huntingdon) first marriage was to Cristina Casati, daughter of Camillo, Marquis Casati Stampa di Soncino by his wife, the artistic muse Marchesa Luisa Casati, in 1925; they had one daughter Lady Moorea Hastings.  

There is a portrait of Luisa painted by Hastings in 1934. Definitely Cristina's idea to break the ice between mother and son-in-law. I wonder what kind of relationship Luisa had with her daughter. Aside from their tempered characters and lack of love, they had nothing in common. Family patterns are made to be reproduced. Luisa revived Cristina, and Cristina Moorea, the childhood of loneliness and abandonment from which they had suffered so much. I don't like Hastings' painting. She holds a crystal ball and, behind her veil, her gaze is that of a slightly stultified witch. As long as the painter has talent, a painting does not lie. If Luisa didn't love her son-in-law, he would return it to her. » lx)

[carbone14]

The Return of Chandu - Film fantastique américain en 12 épisodes réalisé par Ray Taylor - 1934

Personnages principaux :

Béla Lugosi as Frank Chandler, aka Chandu the Magician

Maria Alba as Princess Nadji

Clara Kimball Young as Dorothy Regent

[onenakedfarmer]

Current;y Playing

Dmitri Shostakovich LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK, Op. 29

Maria Ewing

Aage Haugland, Sergej Larin, Philip Langridge, Anatoly Kotcherga, Heinz Zednik, Kurt Moll, Elena Zaremba

Myung-Whun Chung Orchestre et Chœurs De L'Opéra Bastille

[sgtpeppers]

Happy Birthday, Brian Epstein (b. 19th September, 1934)

"However much I socialise with the great and famous, I would prefer a quiet afternoon with George Martin and Judy, making a bob or two at Lingfield Park races. And best of all and far beyond anything money can buy, I love to lean on my elbows at the back of the stalls and watch the curtain rise on John, Paul, George and Ringo, Gerry, Billy, Tommy, Michael - or the wonderful songbird daughter of a Liverpool docker and christened Priscilla Maria Veronica White who will stun the world as Cilla Black. Tomorrow? I think the sun will shine tomorrow. " - A Cellarful of Noise, Brian Epstein.

[asoftepiloguemylove]

sometimes i forget how much i didn't want to survive

Fariha Róisín How to Cute a Ghost / Ocean Vuong Prayer for the Newly Damned / @/litarnes (on instagram) / Anna Akhmatova The Last Toast / Mary Szybist Incarnadine: Poems / unknown / Anaïs Nin Fire: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934-1937 / unknown / Carmen Maria Machado In the Dream House / Langston Hughes Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

A Nazi rally held in Madison Square Garden, February 20th 1939

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 21, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Oct 22, 2024

On Saturday, September 7, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump predicted that his plan to deport 15 to 20 million people currently living in the United States would be “bloody.” He also promised to prosecute his political opponents, including, he wrote, lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, and election officials. Retired chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is “a fascist to the core…the most dangerous person to this country.” 

On October 14, Trump told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that he thought enemies within the United States were more dangerous than foreign adversaries and that he thought the military should stop those “radical left lunatics” on Election Day. Since then, he has been talking a lot about “the enemy from within,” specifically naming Representative Adam Schiff and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, both Democrats from California, as “bad people.” Schiff was the chair of the House Intelligence Committee that broke the 2019 story of Trump’s attempt to extort Volodymyr Zelensky that led to Trump’s first impeachment. 

Trump’s references to the “enemy from within” have become so frequent that former White House press secretary turned political analyst Jen Psaki has called them his closing argument for the 2024 election, and she warned that his construction of those who oppose him as “enemies” might sweep in virtually anyone he feels is a threat.

In a searing article today, political scientist Rachel Bitecofer of The Cycle explored exactly what that means in a piece titled “What (Really) Happens If Trump Wins?” Bitecofer outlined Adolf Hitler’s January 30, 1933, oath of office, in which he promised Germans he would uphold the constitution, and the three months he took to dismantle that constitution.

By March, she notes,  the concentration camp Dachau was open. Its first prisoners were not Jews, but rather Hitler’s prominent political opponents. By April, Jews had been purged from the civil service, and opposition political parties were illegal. By May, labor unions were banned and students were burning banned books. Within the year, public criticism of Hitler and the Nazis was illegal, and denouncing violators paid well for those who did it.

Bitecofer writes that Trump has promised mass deportations “that he cannot deliver unless he violates both the Constitution and federal law.” To enable that policy, Trump will need to dismantle the merit-based civil service and put into office those loyal to him rather than the Constitution. And then he will purge his political opponents, for once those who would stand against him are purged, Trump can act as he wishes against immigrants, for example, and others.

Ninety years ago, as American reporter Dorothy Thompson ate breakfast at her hotel in Berlin on August 25, 1934, a young man from Hitler’s secret police, the Gestapo, “politely handed me a letter and requested a signed receipt.” She thought nothing of it, she said, “But what a surprise was in store for me!” The letter informed her that, “in light of your numerous anti-German publications,” she was being expelled from Germany.

She was the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany, and that expulsion was no small thing. Thompson had moved to London in 1920 to become a foreign correspondent and began to spend time in Berlin. In 1924 she moved to the city to head the Central European Bureau for the New York Evening Post and the Philadelphia Public Ledger. From there, she reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler. She left her Berlin post in 1928 to marry novelist Sinclair Lewis, and the two settled in Vermont.

When the couple traveled to Sweden in 1930 for Lewis to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature, Thompson visited Germany, where she saw the growing strength of the fascists and the apparent inability of the Nazi’s opponents to come together to stand against them. She continued to visit the country in the following years, reporting on the rise of fascism there, and elsewhere. 

In 1931, Thompson interviewed Hitler and declared that, rather than “the future dictator of Germany” she had expected to meet, he was a man of “startling insignificance.” She asked him if he would “abolish the constitution of the German Republic.” He answered: “I will get into power legally” and, once in power, abolish the parliament and the constitution and “found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below.” She did not believe he could succeed: “Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights,” she wrote in apparent astonishment.

Thompson was back in Berlin in summer 1934 as a representative of the Saturday Evening Post when she received the news that she had 24 hours to leave the country. The other foreign correspondents in Berlin saw her off at the railway station with “great sheaves of American Beauty roses.” 

Safely in Paris, Thompson mused that in her first years in Germany she had gotten to know many of the officials of the German republic, and that when she had left to marry Lewis, they offered “many expressions of friendship and gratitude.” But times had changed. “I thought of them sadly as my train pulled out,” she said, “carrying me away from Berlin. Some of those officials still are in the service of the German Government, some of them are émigrés and some of them are dead.” 

Thompson came home to a nation where many of the same dark impulses were simmering, her fame after her expulsion from Germany following her. She lectured against fascism across the country in 1935, then began a radio program that reached tens of millions of listeners. Hired in 1936 to write a regular column three days a week for the New York Herald Tribune, she became a leading voice in print, too, warning that what was happening in Germany could also happen in America. 

In an echo of Lewis’s bestselling 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, she wrote in a 1937 column: “No people ever recognize their dictator in advance…. He always represents himself as the instrument for expressing the Incorporated National Will. When Americans think of dictators they always think of some foreign model. If anyone turned up here in a fur hat, boots and a grim look he would be recognized and shunned…. But when our dictator turns up, you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.” 

In less than two years, the circulation of her column had grown to reach between seven and eight million people. In 1939 a reporter wrote: “She is read, believed and quoted by millions of women who used to get their political opinions from their husbands, who got them from [political commentator] Walter Lippmann.” The reporter likened Thompson to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, saying they were the two “most influential women in the U.S.”

When 22,000 American Nazis held a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden in honor of President George Washington’s birthday on February 20, 1939, Thompson sat in the front row of the press box, where she laughed loudly during the speeches and yelled “Bunk!” at the stage, illustrating that she would not be muzzled by Nazis. After being escorted out, she returned to her seat, where stormtroopers surrounded her. She later told a reporter: “I was amazed to see a duplicate of what I saw seven years ago in Germany. Tonight I listened to words taken out of the mouth of Adolf Hitler.” 

Two years later, In 1941, Thompson returned to the issue she had raised when she mused about those government officials who had gone from thanking her to expelling her. In a piece for Harper’s Magazine titled “Who Goes Nazi?” she wrote: “It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi,” she wrote. “By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.”

Examining a number of types of Americans, she wrote that the line between democracy and fascism was not wealth, or education, or race, or age, or nationality. “Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi,” she wrote. They were secure enough to be good natured and open to new ideas, and they believed so completely in the promise of American democracy that they would defend it with their lives, even if they seemed too easygoing to join a struggle. “But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis,” she wrote. “Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi.”

In Paris following her expulsion from Berlin, Thompson told a reporter for the Associated Press that the reason she had been attacked was the same reason that Hitler’s power was growing. “Chancellor Hitler is no longer a man, he is a religion,” she said.

Suggesting her expulsion was because of her old article disparaging Hitler, in her own article about her expulsion she noted: “My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime against the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people…. To question this mystic mission is so heinous that, if you are a German, you can be sent to jail. I, fortunately, am an American, so I merely was sent to Paris. Worse things can happen….” 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[margotfonteyns]

Janet Newbold as Maria Josepha of Saxony, Dauphine of France, for a Louis XV era pageant at the second Metropolitan Opera Ball. Photo by Cecil Beaton for Vogue, June 1934.

[tina-aumont]

María África Gracia Vidal (on screen she will became Maria Montez) pictured with her younger sister Consuelo in Barahona, Dominican Republic in 1934.

This photo comes from Pinterest but it has been printed in Margarita Vicens book "María Montez, Su vida - edición especial del Centenario" (Dirección General de Cine de la República Dominicana, 2012.

[weirdlookindog]

The Return of Chandu (1934)

[belalugosi1882]

Bela Lugosi and Maria Alba (Spanish actress) in The Return Of Chandu 1934 (Serial)

[citizenscreen]

Marlene Dietrich and daughter Maria Riva at the Polo Matches, Hollywood, August 1934.

[gay-otlc]

"Trans people can be heterosexual, but they can't be straight" is a stupid fucking take because not only does it misgender transhets, it's also just not the way language works.

The argument tends to be that "straight" refers to having a "normative" or "socially acceptable" sexuality, which heterosexuality tends to be seen as, but isn't in the case of transhet people.

It's true that "straight" has historically been used that way. For example, Transgender Warriors (1996) includes the line "The trans population is a reminder that not everyone who is heterosexual is straight!" (page 92). At this point, straight had a meaning that was distinct from heterosexual, with straight meaning "not queer" and heterosexual meaning "attracted to the opposite gender."

However, straight (in reference to sexuality) and heterosexual have both had a lot of different meanings over time, and it's pretty stupid to pick one at random and go yes, this is the true correct meaning.

The terms "heterosexual" and "homosexual" appear in a letter by Karl Maria Kertbeny in 1869. Homosexual refers to erotic acts between two men or two women, and heterosexual refers to erotic acts between women and men. But Kertbeny still considered heterosexuals to be degenerates, as they engaged in nonprocreative sexual acts. (The Invention of Heterosexuality, pg. 33)

In 1892, Dr. James G. Kiernan used the word "heterosexual" in a Chicago medical journal. In this case, heterosexual referred to people who felt "inclination to both sexes." The hetero- prefix didn't refer to being attracted to a different gender than one's own, but to being attracted to two different genders. (The Invention of Heterosexuality, pg. 21)

Then, in 1893, Richard von Krafft-Ebing published Psychopathia Sexualis, where he used the term "hetero-sexual" to refer to sexual desire or "sexual love" between men and women, and is used to mean a "normal" sexuality. (The Invention of Heterosexuality, pg. 22)

In 1901, a medical dictionary defined "heterosexuality" as "Abnormal or perverted appetite toward the opposite sex." (The American illustrated medical dictionary, pg. 300)

In 1923, Merriam Webster defined "heterosexuality" as "morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex." Then, in 1934, the definition was changed to "manifestation of sexual passion for one of the opposite sex." (Merriam Webster's New International Dictionary, pg. xcii; Webster's New International Dictionary Second Edition, pg. xcvi

For much of the early history of the term "heterosexual," it was used interchangeably with the term "normal-sexual." (Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, pg. 14)

The use of "straight" in reference to sexual orientation was defined in the 1941 book Sex Variants "To go ‘straight’ is to cease homosexual practices and to indulge--usually to re-indulge--in heterosexuality." It didn't refer to people whose innate sexual orientation was to be attracted to a different gender than their own, it referred to "ex-gays," or gay people who had recloseted themselves. (Origin of Everything, around 2:56)

From there, "straight" evolved to mean non-queer (as we saw in the Transgender Warriors quote), and now it's pretty much synonymous with heterosexual, being attracted to a different gender/the other binary gender from your own.*

*this isn't a perfect definition ofc because no sexuality can be defined perfectly, but it's better than "opposite gender"

So, over time, straight has meant "ex-gay," recloseted gay, non-queer, and heterosexual (as we know it today), and heterosexual has meant degenerate attraction between women and men, bisexuality as we know it today, abnormal/perverted attraction to the opposite sex, normal sexuality, and finally, attraction to a different gender/other binary gender.

And with all those meanings, it's kind of ridiculous to insist transhets are heterosexual but not straight based on just one of the many ways each word has been used. I could just as easily say that transhets who identified as gay before transitioning are straight because straight has been used to mean "ex-gay," and cishets who have never identified as gay aren't straight. Or that cis people attracted exclusively to the opposite binary gender aren't heterosexual, because heterosexual has been used to mean attraction to two different genders.

All that aside, both "heterosexual" and "straight" came into use with cis as the assumed default, without making the distinction between gender identity and sexual orientation that we have today. Transhets have no obligation to adhere to the definitions of either of those terms that operate under the assumption that everyone is cis.

And again- saying that transhets aren't straight is misgendering us. That should be the only thing that matters, but since clearly it doesn't, maybe it'll matter that enforcing "normative (cis) sexuality" as a universal definition for straight is bullshit.