Paris – Montparnaisse, 1920s & 1930s

{ August 3, 2009 @ 8:06 am } · { Art, Culture, Music, Uncategorized }
{ Tags: Paris 1920 - 1940 }

EXPATRIOT AMERICAN ARTISTS IN 1920s & 1930s PARIS

Why so many Americans left the U.S. – Problems at home“Many Americans who settled in Paris in the twenties [believed] their native land was a cultural sink”.

Here are some of the reasons:Prohibition

July 16, 1920, the beginning of the “Roaring Twenties,” was marked by the passage of the Volstead Act – i.e. Prohibition. Even one half-ounce of the “Demon Rum” was outlawed, and proponents imagined empty jails and happy homes in a society where alcohol, the root of all evil, would be no more.“Many Americans who settled in Paris in the twenties [believed] their native land was a cultural sink”. Here are some of the reasons:CensorshipThe early twenties also saw the introduction of a move toward censorship in the movie industry. “The new sexual freedom [was] condemned as un-American” Scandals of sex and drugs off the screen and scenes with similar content on the screen caused an outcry among certain circles of society, and their champion was Will Hays. He created the Production Code (“Hays Code”), which attempted to “enforce a moral authority over Hollywood films”

RacismThe landmark film Birth of a Nation premiered in 1915, both reflecting and strengthening existing racism. The Ku Klux Klan had been active only sporadically in the South following the Reconstruction in the 1870s. The enormous popularity of the film, and its endorsement by President Woodrow Wilson, signaled a resurgence in the North and theSouth, and provided ipso facto permission for even more heinous acts of racism.Anti-Immigrant Sentiment

The study of eugenics and IQ testing provided support for those in fear of all the “foreigners” finding their way to our shores. “Between 1900 and 1917, nearly 14.3 million people arrived in the United States…In 1920…there were nearly 14 million foreign-born people out of a population of 105, 700,000A Troubled EconomyAmerica

in the twenties had an economy poised for cataclysm. People ran up debts greater than ever before due to various factors. It became easier and easier to buy on credit: What made Paris a place where these writers and many others could find inspiration, distance, and the freedom to work in their creative fields? How did the intellectual and artistic community provide what was needed? Montparnasse was a community where creativity was embraced with all its oddities, each new arrival welcomed unreservedly by its existing members. When Tsuguharu Foujita arrived from Japan in 1913 not knowing a soul, he met Soutine, Modigliani, Pascin and Legervirtually the same night and within a week became friends with Juan Gris, Pablo Picassoand Henri Matisse. In 1914, when the English painter Nina Hamnett arrived in Montparnasse, on her first evening the smiling man at the next table at La Rotondegraciously introduced himself as “Modigliani, painter and Jew”. They became good friends, Hamnett later recounting how she once borrowed a jersey and corduroy trousers fromModigliani, then went to La Rotonde and danced in the street all night.

The cafés and bars of Montparnasse were a meeting place where ideas were hatched and mulled over. The cafés at the centre of Montparnasse’s night-life were in the Carrefour Vavin, now renamed Place Pablo-Picasso. In Montparnasse’s heyday (from 1910 to 1920), the cafés Le Dôme, La Closerie des Lilas, La Rotonde, Le Select, and La Coupole—all of which are still in business— were the places where starving artists could occupy a table all evening for a few centimes. If they fell asleep, the waiters were instructed not to wake them.

Arguments were common, some fuelled by intellect, others by alcohol, and if there were fights, and there often were, the police were never summoned. If you couldn’t pay your bill, people such as La Rotonde’s proprietor, Victor Libion, would often accept a drawing, holding it until the artist could pay. As such, there were times when the café’s walls were littered with a collection of artworks, that today would make the curators of the world’s greatest museums drool with envy.Probably the most famous of all the literary haunts, Les Deux Magots is a very, very short stumble away from Café de Flore. So steeped in literary history is this place, that there are photos of various artists sitting in Les Deux Magots as well as signs telling you who sat where. We were in Sartre’s seat. The café was originally founded in 1812 near the Rue de Buci – Rue de Seine intersection (incidentally right near where I live now), but moved to its current Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés location in 1873. Pretty much everyone hung out here, including Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus (before their fight), Rimbaud, Verlaine, Picasso, Hemingway, Giraudoux and Mallarmé.

Virtually penniless painters, sculptors, , poets and composers came from around the world to thrive in the creative atmosphere and for the cheap rent at artist communes such as La Ruche. Living without running water, in damp, unheated “studios”, seldom free of rats, many sold their works for a few francs just to buy food. Jean Cocteau once said that poverty was a luxury in Montparnasse. First promoted by art dealers such as

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, today works by those artists sell for millions of euros.  They came to Montparnasse from all over the globe, from Europe, including Russia and Ukraine, from the United States, Canada, Mexico,Central and South America, and from as far away as Japan. Manuel Ortiz de Zárate, Camilo Mori and others made their way from Chilewhere the profound innovations in art spawned the formation of the Grupo Montparnasse in Santiago. A few of the other artists who gathered in Montparnasse were Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Ossip Zadkine, José Maria Decrefft, Carmelo Gonzalez,Julio Gonzalez,Gines Parra, Joaquín Peinado, Moise Kisling, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, Marios Varvoglis, Marc Chagall, Nina Hamnett, Jean Rhys, Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, Chaim Soutine, Michel Kikoine, Pinchus Kremegne, Amedeo Modigliani, Ford Madox Ford, Toño Salazar, Ezra Pound, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti, Henri Rousseau, Constantin Brancusi, Paul Fort,Juan Gris, Diego Rivera,Federico Cantú,Angel Zarraga, Marevna, Tsuguharu Foujita, Marie Vassilieff, Léon-Paul Fargue, Alberto Giacometti,René Iché, André Breton,Alfonso Reyes, Pascin, Salvador Dalí, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Joan Miró and, in his declining years, Edgar Degas.

Montparnasse was a community where creativity was embraced with all its oddities, each new arrival welcomed unreservedly by its existing members. When Tsuguharu Foujita arrived from Japan in 1913 not knowing a soul, he met Soutine, Modigliani, Pascin and Legervirtually the same night and within a week became friends with Juan Gris, Pablo Picassoand Henri Matisse. In 1914, when the English painter Nina Hamnett arrived in Montparnasse, on her first evening the smiling man at the next table at La Rotondegraciously introduced himself as “Modigliani, painter and Jew”. They became good friends, Hamnett later recounting how she once borrowed a jersey and corduroy trousers from Modigliani, then went to La Rotonde and danced in the street all night.

Between 1921 and 1924, the number of Americans in Paris swelled from 6,000 to 30,000. While most of the artistic community gathered here were struggling to eke out an existence, well-heeled American socialites such as Peggy Guggenheim, and Edith Wharton from New York City, Harry Crosby from Boston and Beatrice Wood from San Francisco were caught in the fever of creativity. Robert McAlmon, and Maria and Eugene Jolas came to Paris and published their literary magazine Transition. Harry Crosby and his wife Caresse establish the Black Sun Press in Paris in 1927, publishing works by such future luminaries as D. H. Lawrence, Archibald MacLeish, James Joyce, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker and others.  As well, Bill Bird published through his Three Mountains Press until British heiress Nancy Cunard took it over.

Djuana Barnes

A Freer Society

Donald Pizer spoke of “the Paris moment.” Virgil Thomson said, “France was more than just another country…but a miracle spot like ancient Greece…” (Toll) Paris of the twenties was a “fertile moment” in time and place that brought all the right elements together to attract and inspire the artistic mind. Paris did not suffer from the same puritanical restrictions as the U. S. “Artists and intellectuals migrated to the “City of Light,” finding there a freedom of existence and anexhilaration of thought unlike anywhere else in the world. ‘It’s not so much what France gives you,’ said expatriate Gertrude Stein from her flat on the Rue de Fleurus, ‘It’s what itdoesn’t take away’”. The importance of the sense of freedom for the artist was not to be underestimated. It governed not only the behavior of the artist, but personal expression in their works of art. “The image of Paris as the city of light aptly renders the intellectual openness and intensity that earlier generations of Americans abroad had associated with the city. But for the expatriates of the twenties and thirties, Paris was above all a world of sexual freedom —a place where the writer could feel desire, could translate (if he or she wished) desire into action, and could write about desire”

.

KIKI OF MONTPARNASSE

Alice Ernestine Prin (October 2, 1901 – April 29, 1953), was a French artists’ model, nightclub singer, actress, and painter. Her chosen name was simply Kiki, but she also was referred to as Reine de la Montparnasse, the Queen of Montparnasse, and Kiki de Montparnasse. She flourished in, and helped define, the liberated culture of Paris in the 1920s.

Kiki became a fixture in the Montparnasse social scene and a popular artists’ model, posing for dozens of artists, including Chaim Soutine, Tsuguharu Foujita, Francis Picabia, Jean Cocteau, Arno Breker, Alexander Calder, Per Krohg, Hermine David, Pablo Gargallo, Mayo, and Tono Salazar. Moise Kisling painted a portrait of Kiki titled Nu assis, one of his best known.

Man Ray, her companion for most of the 1920s, made hundreds of portraits of her.  She is the subject of some of his best-known images, including Le violon d’Ingres and Noire et blanche.

No figure better embodies the heady, freewheeling artistic culture of 1920s Montparnasse than the legendary model, painter and cabaret singer Kiki. This show documented her nearly ubiquitous presence in that period of creative ferment, surveying portraits of Kiki by Man Ray and others, and presenting selections of her own paintings; a vitrine  of publications included her memoir (with an introduction by Ernest Hemingway), written when she was only 28.

Her paintings exhibit an intentionally naive style characterized by a posterlike flatness and graphic simplicity. Some are cheerful genre scenes of Parisian life, such as the Seurat-inspired, brightly colored image of an umbrella-spinning tightrope walker performing before a smiling crowd, or the painting of two happy flower sellers posed against a backdrop of cafe and advertising signs. Others are playfully salacious and more in keeping with Kiki’s liberated spirit: a cartoon drawing shows a dog jumping over a hurdle formed by two men joined together by large erect penises, and a painting depicts a sailor standing in profile before a prostitute (a likeness of Kiki) who looks out at the viewer as she sits in just her black knee-stockings on a vermilion bed.

JOSEPHINE BAKER

Baker’s success coincided (1925) with the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, which gave us the term “Art Deco“, and also with a renewal of interest in ethnic forms of art, including African. Baker represented one aspect of this fashion. She was very creative and loved sequins and feathers.

In later shows in Paris she was often accompanied on stage by her pet cheetah, Chiquita, who was adorned with a diamond collar. The cheetah frequently escaped into the orchestra pit,

where it terrorized the musicians, adding another element of excitement to the show.

After a short while she was the most successful American entertainer working in France. Ernest Hemingway called her “… the most sensational woman anyone ever saw.” In addition to being a musical star, Baker also starred in three films which found success only in Europe: the silent film Siren of the Tropics (1927), Zouzou (1934) and Princesse Tam Tam (1935). Although Baker is often credited as a movie star, her starring roles ended with Princesse Tam Tam in 1935.

At this time she also scored her most successful song, “J’ai deux amours” (1931) and became a muse for contemporary authors, painters, designers, and sculptors including Langston Hughes,

Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Christian Dior.

At this time she also scored her most successful song, “J’ai deux amours” (1931) and became a muse for contemporary authors, painters, designers, and sculptors including Langston Hughes,

Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Christian Dior. In the words of Shirley Bassey, who has cited Baker as her primary influence, “… she went from a ‘petite danseuse sauvage’ with a decent voice to ‘la grande diva magnifique’ … I swear in all my life I have never seen, and probably never shall see again, such a spectacular singer and performer.”

Baker was so well known and popular with the French that even the Nazis, who occupied France during World War II, were hesitant to cause her harm. In turn, this allowed Baker to show her loyalty to her adopted country by participating in the Underground, smuggling intelligence to the resistance in Portugal coded within her sheet music. After the war, for her underground activity, Baker received the Croix de Guerre, the Rosette de la Résistance, and was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur by General Charles de Gaulle. She helped mount a production in Marseilles on the south coast of France to give herself and her like-minded friends a reason for being there. She helped quite a lot of people who were in danger from the Nazis get visas and passports to leave France. Later in 1941, she and her entourage went to the French colonies in North Africa; the stated reason was Baker’s health (since she really was recovering from another case of pneumonia) but the real reason was to continue helping the Resistance. From a base in Morocco, she made tours of Spain and pinned notes with the information she gathered inside her underwear (counting on her celebrity to avoid a strip search) and made friends with the Pasha of Marrakesh.

JAMES JOYCE ^
Antonin ArtaudRIMBAUDHENRY MILLERBELLA BARTOKBELOW: THE BALLET RUSSE / includes NIGINSKI & NIGINSKA


Simone’s birthday today – (Capricorn with moon in Pisces ), photo above by Cartier-Bresson in front of her home.
Before Germaine Greer there was Simone de Beauvoir. Her book
“The Second Sex” caused a sensation, later some feminists found her wanting because her slavish devotion to Sartre betrayed her Feminism.SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

KRAZY KAT – The cartoon by George HarrymanJEAN PAUL SARTREJOYCE, KAY BOYLE, e. e. cummingsDuring her years in France, Boyle was associated with several innovative literary magazines and made friends with many of the writers and artists living in Paris around Montparnasse. Among her friends were Harry and Caresse Crosby and Eugene and Maria Jolas. In 1929 the Crosbys’ Black Sun Press published Boyle’s first book of fiction titled Short Stories. Kay Boyle also wrote for transition, one of the preeminent literary publications of the day. A poet as well asa novelist, her early writings often reflected her lifelong search for true love as well as her interest in the power in relationships between men and women.In the States, Boyle and her husband were victims of early 1950s McCarthyism. Her husband was dismissed by Roy Cohn from his post in the Public Affairs Division of the U.S. State Department, and Boyle lost her position as foreign correspondent for The New Yorker, a post she had held for six years. She was blacklisted by most of the major magazines. During this period, her life and writing became increasingly political.

Boyle was a writer in residence at the New York City Writer’s Conference at Wagner College in 1962 and then, in 1963, accepted a creative writing on the faculty of San Francisco State College where she remained until 1979. During this period she became heavily involved in political activism. She traveled to Cambodia in 1966 as part of the “Americans Want to Know” fact-seeking mission. She participated in numerous protests, and in 1967 was arrested twice and imprisoned. In her later years, s

Boyle was a writer in residence at the New York City Writer’s Conference at Wagner College in 1962 and then, in 1963, accepted a creative writing on the faculty of San Francisco State College where she remained until 1979. During this period she became heavily involved in political activism. She traveled to Cambodia in 1966 as part of the “Americans Want to Know” fact-seeking mission. She participated in numerous protests, and in 1967 was arrested twice and imprisoned. In her later years, she became an active supporter of Amnesty International and worked for the NAACP.

MAX ERNST – “Collage” above, “Self-Portrait” immediately above

MAGRITTE

MARCEL DUCHAMP as Rrose Selavey

Duchamp’s friend Picabia connected with the Dada group in Zürich, bringing to New York the Dadaist ideas of absurdity and “anti-art”. A group met almost nightly at the Arensberg home, or caroused in Greenwich Village. Together with Man Ray, Duchamp contributed his ideas and humor to the New York activities, many of which ran concurrent with the development of his Readymades and The Large Glass. They also worked on the concept of “found art”.

The most prominent example of Duchamp’s association with Dada was his submission of Fountain, a urinal, to the Society of Independent Artists exhibit in 1917. Artworks in the Independent Artists shows were not selected by jury, and all pieces submitted were displayed. However, the show committee insisted that Fountain was not art, and rejected it from the show. This caused an uproar amongst the Dadaists, and led Duchamp to resign from the board of the Independent Artists.

“Readymades” were found objects which Duchamp chose and presented as art. The first such object was Bicycle Wheel, an inverted bicycle wheel mounted on a stool, which Duchamp assembled in 1913. However, he did not coin the term “readymade” until 1915.

In 1919, Duchamp made a parody of the Mona Lisa by adorning a cheap reproduction of the painting with a mustache and goatee. To this he added the rude inscription L.H.O.O.Q., a pun which, when read out loud in French, sounds like “Elle a chaud au cul”. This can be translated as “She has a hot ass”, implying that the woman in the painting is in a state of sexual excitement and availability. It may also have been intended as a Freudian joke, referring to Leonardo da Vinci‘s alleged homosexuality.

According to Rhonda Roland Shearer, the apparent Mona Lisa reproduction is in fact a copy modeled partly on Duchamp’s own face. Research published by Shearer also speculates that Duchamp himself may have created some of the objects which he claimed to have been “found”.

MARCEL DUCHAMP (1887-1968), the painter and mixed

media artist, was associated with Cubism, Dadaism and

Surrealism, though he avoided any alliances. Duchamp’s

work is characterized by its humor, the variety and

unconventionality of its media, and its incessant probing

of the boundaries of art. His legacy includes the

insight that art can be about ideas instead of worldy

things, a revolutionary notion that would resonate

with later generations of artists.

LEE MILLER

Elizabeth ‘Lee’ Miller (23 April 1907 – 21 July 1977) was an American photographer.Born in Poughkeepsie, New York State in 1907, she was a successful fashion model in New York City in the 1920s before going to Paris where she became an established fashion and fine art photographer. During the Second World War, she became an acclaimed war correspondent for Vogue magazine covering events such as the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau.

In 1929 she traveled to Paris with the intention of apprenticing herself to the Surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray. Although, at first, he insisted that he did not take students, Miller soon became his photographic assistant, as well as his lover and muse.

While she was in Paris, she began her own photographic studio, often taking over Man Ray’s assignments to enable him to concentrate on his painting. In fact, many of the photographs taken during this period and credited to Man Ray were actually taken by Lee. Together with Man Ray, she rediscovered the photographic technique of Solarisation. S he was an activeparticipant in the Surrealist movement, with her witty and humorous images.

JEAN RHYS

AKA Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams

Born: 24-Aug-1890

Birthplace: Roseau, Dominica, British West Indies

Died: 14-May-1979

Location of death: Exeter, Devon, England

Cause of death: unspecified

Gender: Female

Race or Ethnicity: Multiracial

Sexual orientation: Straight

Occupation: Novelist

Nationality: West Indies

The Left Bank (1927, short stories)

Postures (1928, novel, aka Quartet)

After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931, novel)

Voyage in the Dark (1934, novel)

Good Morning, Midnight (1939, novel)

Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (1979, memoir, posthumous)

Jan Rhys Letters 1931-1966 (1984, letters, posthumouse)

FORD MADDOX FORD

By the time of the dedicatory letter, he had been through

his seismic affair with Jean Rhys in Paris. This was an

event of literary as well as emotional consequence, producing in quick succession three novels – Rhys’s “Quartet”, Ford’s When the Wicked Man, and Sous les Verrous by Rhys’s Dutch husband Jean Lenglet. The most clear-minded of the quartet was Bowen, whose description of Ford in her autobiography, Drawn from Life (1941), is both affectionate and(rare in this company) truth-telling. Ford, she writes there, had “a genius for creating confusion and a nervous horror of dealing with the results”. She also notes wisely – wisely, at least, for anyone who had any emotional dealings with Ford – that “falling out of love is as delicate and important a business, as necessary to the attainment of wisdom, as the reverse experience . . . I think that the exhilaration of falling out of love is not sufficiently extolled.” She realised that the affair with Rhys meant theend; Ford preferred to continue in emotional dreamland.

GERTRUDE STEIN & ALICE B. TOKLAS

She nurtured literary genius Gertrude Stein with food and love but perhaps Alice B Toklas’s most enduring contribution to modernity is her hash cookie recipe. On her 125th birthday, John Baxter tracks down the formula’s real source.

Gertrude loved to eat. “Books and food, food and books; both excellent things,” she wrote. Since childhood, she had relished “the full satisfied sense of being

stuffed up with eating”. Alice was happy to gratify that urge as well as the sexual one. Often, the two desires seemed indivisible. Though they mostly called one

another Pussy and Lovey, Gertrude’s pet names for Alice included Cake and Lobster,while Alice called Gertrude Mount Fattie and Fattusk.

From “The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook”

“Haschich Fudge, which anyone could whip up on a rainy day.” By way of introduction he gushed, “This is thefood of Paradise…. it might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR…. Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extensions of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better.”

The active ingredient in the fudge was what Gysin called “canibus sativa,” more familiarly known as marijuana.

“Take 1 teaspoon black peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 average sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverized in a mortar. About a handful each of stone dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts: chop these and mix them together. A bunch of canibus sativa can be pulverized. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient. Obtaining the canibus may present certain difficulties….It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green.”

JEAN COCKTEAU – Black Orphius / Beauty and the Beast

Langston Hughes was one of the few black writers of any consequence to champion racial consciousness as a source of inspiration for black artists. His African-American race consciousness and cultural nationalism would influence many foreign black writers, such as Jacques Roumain, Nicolás Guillén, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire. With Senghor and Césaire and other French-speaking writers of Africa and of African descent from the Caribbean like René Maran from Martinique and Damas from French Guiana in South America, the works of Hughes helped to inspire the concept that became the Négritude movement in France where a radical black self-examination was emphasized in the face of European colonialism. Langston Hughes was not only a role model for his calls for black racial pride instead of assimilation, but the most important technical influence in his emphasis on folk and jazz rhythms as the basis of his poetry of racial pride.

LANGSTON HUGHES (1902-1967), a prolific writer, lived in Montmartre’s Hill six months, in 1924.

ENNUI

It’s such a

Bore

Being always

Poor.

Langston Hughes

Meret Oppenheim – Fur Teacup

Veiled erotic Meret Oppenheim 1933 by Man Ray

In 1920 Miro visited Paris where he became a member of the surrealist movement. His first exhibition was in 1921 at the La Licorne gallery. In 1928 along with a group of surrealists, Miro exhibited at the Pierre gallery. From the late 1920s early 1930s Miro became more involved in producing surrealist sculptures and this was a decade that saw his ‘tormented monsters’. Miro exeperimented with many artistic methods, including engraving, lithography, water colors, pastels, and painting over copper.

JEAN MIRO

Because he always lived in bad neighborhoods, ERIC SATIE was known to carry a large hammer in his pocket.

“BRICKTOP”

Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louise Virginia Smith (1894-1979), known under the name of “Bricktop”, entertainer, dancer, singer and nightclub owner. She lived in Paris-Pigalle from 1924 to 1939. Then lived in New York City, Mexico City (six years), Rome and went back to France in 1950.

(August 14, 1894 – February 1, 1984) was an American dancer, singer, vaudevillian, and self-described saloon-keeper who owned the nightclub Chez Bricktop in Paris from 1924 to 1961, as well as clubs in Mexico City and Rome. She has been called “…one of the most legendary and enduring figures of twentieth-century American cultural history. “By 1924, she was in Paris. Cole Porter hosted many parties, “lovely parties” as Bricky called them, where he hired her as an entertainer, often to teach his guests the latest dance craze such as the Charleston and the Black Bottom. In Paris, Bricktop began operating the clubs where she performed, including The Music Box andLe Grand Duc. In 1929 she relocated it to 66 rue Pigalle. Her headliner was a young Mabel Mercer, who was to    become a legend in cabaret.

In her book “Spy in the House of Love,” I remember half a quote by Ninn, saying that at orgasam is “like an arora boreallis in the blood.”

ANAIS NINN quote

DJANGO REINHARDT – France’s most influential Jazz guitarist.