http://www.style.com/vogue/feature/2009_December_Hansel_And_Gretel/
Click to see the slide show of Annie Leibovitz’s photographs of a fashion fairy tale.
Month: November 2009
“The Red Shoes” on Screen
Here’s Maureen Dowd on the stunning film version of Andersen’s “The Red Shoes.” Pressburger and Powell’s brilliant film brings Andersen’s story into the twentieth century, with a doomed heroine torn between love and ballet. Here’s Dowd on the Andersen story:
“The Red Shoes” is based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the same name about a little girl who becomes vain about her red shoes and gets confused about her priorities. As in the movie, the shoes force the girl to dance day and night, and then she dies. But the fable has an even grimmer coda: The girl asks an executioner to cut off her feet.
Interesting that Dowd left out an important element in Andersen’s tale: the girl’s conversion experience at the end–her recognition that piety and prayer are superior to beauty and mobility.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/opinion/08dowd.html
Reading Faces and Minds
The image is unsettling, but more disturbing is the first paragraph, which tells us about “one ancillary benefit” of research carried out by Charles A. Nelson III at Harvard. Nelson evidently outfoxed a Boston car salesman by reading his facial expressions and discovering that he was bluffing. (When was the last time you figured out that a car salesman was “bluffing”? Did you have to watch his eye movements and facial features to figure it out?)
I suppose that research of this kind might be able to tell us about the workings of the child’s mind, but I wonder exactly to what end these children are being fitted with plastic-sponge sensors. And what about the question of consent? “Parents receive a nominal $10 fee, and each child receives a toy.”
http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2009/11/10/boston_lab_explores_childrens_complex_lessons_in_reading_faces/
Brother Blue Tells His Last Story
The Boston Globe reports the death of Dr. Hugh Morgan Hill. I don’t think many locals imagined that Brother Blue had ever gone by any other name–he had become the spirit of storytelling, keeping traditional tales alive in a lively, street-smart way. I envision him now as one of those beautiful butterflies he wore when he told stories, and I feel sure that he is fluttering in the breezes of southern climes right now, returning north next summer in his new incarnation as the soul of storytelling. His last tale was a love story, told to his wife.
We will miss his broad smile, his warmth, his generosity, and his love of good stories.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/11/brother_blue_a.html