Shrinking Violette profile picture

Shrinking Violette

I am here for Friends and Networking

About Me


Well, it's a long story... Lazy, spontaneous, inventive, intuitive and capricious. Love art, history, philosophy, theology, linguistics and fluffy cats. On gloomy rainy days prefer to console myself with music, good books, early cinema, French and German literature, Japanese or Lebanese food. Or just forget it all and abandon myself to the scented vapours of the steam room after a good swim.


Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent

Ch. Baudelaire

My Interests

echoing anfilades of my soul, "the images that yet fresh images beget", history, history of art, languages, raqs sharqi, Syriac, Levant, Greece, saints, icons and iconography, Christianity, Byzantium, Isadora Duncan's dancing technique,

joie de vivre, dolce farniente, Novalis and Jena Romantics, Vienna, Turner, Venice - "inspiration of all our consolations" ,

Baron de Meyer's photographs,

Marchesa Casati, "World of Art" and Diaghilev's Saisons Russes,
Rene Lalique

poetry, opera, France, ars nouveau, symbolism,

ballet, Nijinsky,
strolling around, Jazz Age,

flappers,

creativity and TRAVEL!

I'd like to meet:


Friends, kindred spirits, interesting people I can talk with about art, literature, philosophy, music, theatre etc...


Psyche



The Butterfly the ancient Grecian's made

The soul's fair emblem and its only name

But of the soul escaped the slavish trade

of mortal life ! for in this earthly frame

Ours is the reptile lot, much toil much pain

Manifold motion making little speed

And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed .

S.T.Coleridge



Music:

Nina Simone, Billie Holliday, Cole Porter, Noel Coward, Mistinguette, Chet Baker, Antonio Bononcini, Arturo Bernedetti Michelangeli, Fritz Kreisler, Haendel's operas, Henry Purcell,Mozart, Rita Streich, Elisabethan Music, Alfred Deller,Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Piazzola, Carlos Gardel, Cecilia Bartoli, Radu Marian, Allegri's Miserere, Guilbert& Sullivan, Anouar Brahem, Natacha Atlas, Russian Spiritual Chants, Chopin, Amy Winehouse, Emilie Simon, Mika, Dresden Dolls etc.

Movies:

Howl's Moving Castle, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Le Maitre de Musique,les Enfants du Paradis, Gigi, Viktor and Viktoria, Muenhhausen, L'Orphee, Jeeves and Wooster, The Devil Wears Prada, My Fair Lady, Valentino, Ninotscka, Grand Hotel, Il Gattopardo, Derek Jarman's Caravaggio, Orlando, Comedian Harmonists, Somewhere in Time, The House of Mirth, Metropolis, the Monty Python films, A Man with a Movie Camera, The Lady Vanishes, Faust by F. Murnau, Mae West films, early b/w cinema

Television:

Life's too short to waste it!

Books:

Zuleika Dobson + other Beerbohm's works, Shaw and Wilde, of course, PG Wodehouse in general and Jeeves and Wooster in particular, The Book of the Courtier by Baldessare Castiglione, The Letters of Lord Chesterfield, George Etheridge'comedies, R.M.Rilke, W.B.Yeates, Dante's Vita Nuova, Goethe, Pasternak, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Lev Karsavin and lots of others.

Heroes:

Your absence makes us melancholy... Otherwise -- Winston Churchill, Duke Wellington, Egeria, Heloise, Greta Garbo, Stephen Fry, Madame Recamier, Des Essaintes.

My Blog

Beauty is radiance which surrounds it

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this li...
Posted by Shrinking Violette on Sun, 18 Nov 2007 06:50:00 PST

I am not copying -- just emulating ;-)

..> Suddenly discovered a parallel between a Parisian photo of mine made this spring and an old photo made in 30-s. So amusing! Old photo made in 1930-s:    Two photos made in April...
Posted by Shrinking Violette on Fri, 02 Nov 2007 06:23:00 PST

Quotation I rather Like

I believe in aristocracy, though-- if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power... but of the sensitive, the considerate... Its members are to be found in all n...
Posted by Shrinking Violette on Thu, 25 Oct 2007 05:46:00 PST

Silly Test but amuzing

What Classic Pin-Up Are You? You're Lili St. Cyr!Take this quiz!Quizilla | Join | Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code...
Posted by Shrinking Violette on Mon, 18 Jun 2007 03:51:00 PST

Flamenco

Went to see Joaquin Cortes at the Royal Albert Hall  yesterday. Beautiful hands and incredible sense of  rhythm. I'm smitten with his dancing and play on the musical instruments.
Posted by Shrinking Violette on Tue, 29 May 2007 07:01:00 PST