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Featured review
A Rose Is A Rose Is A Rose....
Cocteau, Dos Passos, Gerald Murphy, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Satie, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Pound, Cummings, Joyce, Picasso, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, MacLeish, Malcom Cowley, Josephine Baker, Man Ray, all were there on the Left Bank in the 1920, coming and going, leaving behind their previous lives along with disillusions and prohibition.
It was all art, mostly avant-garde if not totally nihilistic. It's still a little unnerving. You have to see an ordinary tea cup on its saucer with a teaspoon by its side -- all covered with rabbit fur.
Not all of it was Paris. That was the acknowledged center of it all, but tentacles reached out to places like the summer Riviera. Well, why not? The dollar was all powerful in the 1920s in France and you could do well on one hundred dollars a month. F. Scott Fitzgerald's royalties made it possible for him and Zelda to set up house at the Ritz and dine on beluga caviar. On my humble income I could have blossomed. I could have flourished. I could have lived like a Turkish Pasha, taken baths in gold coins.
You might expect a program like this to be a story all about one of the Lost Generation's most popular members, Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway fighting in World War I, Hemingway shaking off the stifling morality o the Midwest and finding his calling in Paris, but it's not that at all. It's more like a tribal ethnography describing a self-conscious collectivity and brushing in a little greater detail the activities of its better-known members. Hemingway is only one among many, as story writing is only one of many arts.
It ended with the stock market crash of 1929. If you want an idea of how bad things could get, read George Orwell's autobiographical "Down and Out in Paris and London." Most of the American exiles return home but carried with them a different set of sensibilities acquired in Europe.
It's a nicely done program, comprehensive and engaging. It uses a handful of experts and friends, newsreel footage, stills, and photos of documents like letters and colorful book covers.
It was all art, mostly avant-garde if not totally nihilistic. It's still a little unnerving. You have to see an ordinary tea cup on its saucer with a teaspoon by its side -- all covered with rabbit fur.
Not all of it was Paris. That was the acknowledged center of it all, but tentacles reached out to places like the summer Riviera. Well, why not? The dollar was all powerful in the 1920s in France and you could do well on one hundred dollars a month. F. Scott Fitzgerald's royalties made it possible for him and Zelda to set up house at the Ritz and dine on beluga caviar. On my humble income I could have blossomed. I could have flourished. I could have lived like a Turkish Pasha, taken baths in gold coins.
You might expect a program like this to be a story all about one of the Lost Generation's most popular members, Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway fighting in World War I, Hemingway shaking off the stifling morality o the Midwest and finding his calling in Paris, but it's not that at all. It's more like a tribal ethnography describing a self-conscious collectivity and brushing in a little greater detail the activities of its better-known members. Hemingway is only one among many, as story writing is only one of many arts.
It ended with the stock market crash of 1929. If you want an idea of how bad things could get, read George Orwell's autobiographical "Down and Out in Paris and London." Most of the American exiles return home but carried with them a different set of sensibilities acquired in Europe.
It's a nicely done program, comprehensive and engaging. It uses a handful of experts and friends, newsreel footage, stills, and photos of documents like letters and colorful book covers.
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- rmax304823
- Nov 11, 2017
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