The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, May 1

Jim Burroway

May 1st, 2012

Today is May Day, otherwise known as the International Workers Day. But that’s the dull version. Long before it was a national labor holiday in more than 80 countries around the world, it was among the most popular spring festivals throughout Europe. It’s still celebrated in Scandinavia and pockets of Germany and the UK with maypoles, ribbons, May Queen crowning, all-night revelry — so explain to me: how is it that none of this is gay? In Edinburgh, Scotland, May Day is celebrated with the Beltane Fire Festival on the city’s Calton Hill. Maypoles and bonfires are also a feature of rural German celebrations on May Day eve. May Day is reputed to be the only carnival-style festival in all of Finland. And if it can make the Finns smile, it’s probably not a bad holiday to keep around.

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Premiere of “American Transgender”: Nat Geo TV. The National Geographic’s cable channel tonight will premiere the hour-long documentary “American Transgender,” which examines the lives of three transgender people and their families. According to NGTV:

American Transgender takes us firsthand into the daily lives of three individuals—Clair, Jim, and Eli—who each identify with a different gender from the one in which they were born and raised. We witness their struggles and triumphs, and experience their hopes and fears. How do they manage at work, build careers, maintain friendships, and nurture lasting, intimate partnerships? Each of the characters in the film tells their story in their own words as we follow them through life’s daily battles and victories, both large and small.

You can read a brief Q&A with Clair, Jim and Eli here. The documentary airs tonight at 8:00 PM EST/PST.

Romaine Brooks, Self Portrait, 1923.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Romaine Brooks: 1874. The American painter worked mostly in France, where she was surrounded by the brilliant colors of Fauvism and the decompositional attitudes of cubism, but her work harkened back to the style of James Whistler. She was born Beatrice Romaine Goddard, and in 1903 she married John Ellingham Brooks. He was gay, but he couldn’t take her gender-bending manner of dress and hairstyle. Their marriage lasted only a year, but she wound up keeping his name. The following year, she discarded the bright colors of her works which were so fashionable and adopted the darker, more subdued colors which would become her trademark. she took a string of unconventional lovers, including the American heiress Winnaretta Singer and Lord Alfred Douglas (Oscar Wilde’s former lover), and the Russian ballerina Ida Rubinstein, who Brooks pained more than any other subject. Her paintings were almost all portraits, and very nearly all of them of women. By 1925, she had been featured in several successful solo exhibitions in Paris, London and NEw York, but after that year she produced only four more paintings. She briefly took up line drawing in 1930, but dropped that by 1935. Her longtime partner, Natalie Barney, also became her manager and continued to arrange shows for her. But after the Second World War, Brooks became increasingly reclusive and paranoid. By 1969, Brooks’s paranoia led her to stop communicating with Barney entirely. Brooks died in 1970 at the age of 96.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?

tavdy79

May 1st, 2012

May Day is a seasonal festival – it’s one of the greater sabbats, the four major festivals of the Pagan year (Samhain/Hallowe’en, Imbolc, Beltane/May Day, and Lughnasadh/Lammas). Each is at the approximate mid-point between the minor sabbats (Yule/Midwinter, Eostre/Ostara, Litha/Midsummer and Mabon) which fall on the equinoxes and solstices. Because the sabbats are seasonal and linked to the equinoxes and soltices, the southern festivals take place six months out of synch with the northern ones, so today is Samhain in the southern hemisphere, and southern Beltane is actually Oct 31st/Nov 1st. Also, the pagan day, like the Jewish day, begins at sunset (just as the pagan year begins on Samhain, the first day of Winter) so where I live (East Anglia) May Day actually began at about 8.20 last night. In somewhere further south, like Los Angeles, it would have begun an hour or more earlier.

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