Anna Freud, born today in 1895, Sigmund and Martha's sixth and last, but the only one to follow them directly into the field of psychology (I could very easily make the case for several later Freuds, Lucian in particular, as having been indirectly significant in that field). Her speciality was children, but mostly ego at any age.
Jean-Luc Godard, French film director, born today in 1930. In the second half of the 20th century, cinema replaced books and music halls and concert halls and theatres as the principal reflector of a society's mores, values, aspirations, self-opinions. Hollywood and Bollywood, Ealing Comedies and Eisenstein, Hammer House of Horror and... I spent an entire year in France watching movies, for the first and last time that I ever found that medium compelling. Actors of the calibre of Isabelle Huppert and Jean Seberg (ok she was American, but she lived half her life in France), Gérard Depardieu and Alain Delon, directors from the Nouvelle Vague - François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, but no one in the league of Godard. I must have seen "A Bout De Soufle" at least three times, and anything, anything at all with Jean-Paul Belmondo...
Peter Hall's comment, after seeing "Waiting For Godot" in London in 1955, seems to me the explanation of that last paragraph, and I only realised it when I came to this one:
"Today in 1947, 'A Streetcar Named Desire' opened on Broadway".
"Cinema is simile", was Hall's remark, but, thanks to Beckett "theatre is once again metaphor". Tennessee Williams knew exactly how to do simile, like every TV drama, like every piece of pulp fiction: tell a story about made-up people, so that it resembles life. But something about Blanche and Stanley and Stella, exactly the same in Terence Rattigan's very English telling of the same tale, "The Deep Blue Sea"... their story runs deeper than just what the neighbours are up to on the other side of the wall, it functions as culture rather than mere entertainment, because every phrase they utter is imbued with deeper meanings, and what they are is not just three human beings, but a metaphorical triangle.
Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer, Godard, all did the same; and likewise, at that epoch, on British television, Dennis Potter, Alan Plater, Tom Stoppard, David Mercer, Harold Pinter. I wonder what an edition of Blue Bloods or Poldark might be like, screenplay by Dennis Potter, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, with Marlon Brando rather than Tom Selleck, and Eddie Romayne rather than Aidan Turner, in the title roles.
Amber pages
The first successful human heart transplant, surgical team led by Dr. Christian Barnard, today in 1967
Pioneer 10 made the first flyby of Jupiter, today in 1973. An American spaceship this time
And I almost skipped this next one, thinking: who really cares about the first steam-powered boat when I've just witnessed Pioneer 10 flying past Jupiter? But then I double-took the date: "1787, first steam-powered boat demonstrated". 1787! When was the first steam-powered train? The first steam-powered kitchen boiler? (The first steam-powered recipe, I happen to know, is in the Bible, Exodus 23:19: לֹא תְבַשֵּׁל גְּדִי בַּחֲלֵב אִמּוֹ - Lo tevashel gedi ba chalev imo - you may not boil a kid goat in its mother's milk: the starting-point of all that milk-and-meat debate amongst those who wish to keep kosher. A lot of steam about nothing!)
The first successful human heart transplant, surgical team led by Dr. Christian Barnard, today in 1967
And I almost skipped this next one, thinking: who really cares about the first steam-powered boat when I've just witnessed Pioneer 10 flying past Jupiter? But then I double-took the date: "1787, first steam-powered boat demonstrated". 1787! When was the first steam-powered train? The first steam-powered kitchen boiler? (The first steam-powered recipe, I happen to know, is in the Bible, Exodus 23:19: לֹא תְבַשֵּׁל גְּדִי בַּחֲלֵב אִמּוֹ - Lo tevashel gedi ba chalev imo - you may not boil a kid goat in its mother's milk: the starting-point of all that milk-and-meat debate amongst those who wish to keep kosher. A lot of steam about nothing!)
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