“There is no cry of pain without, at its end, an echo of joy”
—Ramón de Campoamor (September 24, 1817 – February 11, 1901)  was a Spanish realist poet and philosopher. Wikipedia

The world’s leading deception researcher, Dr. Cal Lightman, studies facial expression, body language and tone of voice to determine when a person is lying and why, which helps law enforcement and government agencies uncover the truth. Interspersed with fun video shots of celebrity and historical figures exemplifying the facial expressions, body language, microexpressions, and tone of voice being talked about.

“Evolution generally takes millennia but change in a lifetime, now that’s something to see.”
–Tim Roth as Dr. Cal Lightman

Federico García Lorca  (5 June 1898 – 19 August 1936) was a Spanish poet, playwright, and theatre director.

García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of ’27, a group consisting of mostly poets who introduced the tenets of European movements (such as symbolism, futurism, and surrealism) into Spanish literature. He was executed by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. His body has never been found. In 2008, a Spanish judge opened an investigation into Lorca’s death. The García Lorca family eventually dropped objections to the excavation of a potential gravesite near Alfacar, but no human remains were found.

According to Spanish naming customs, a person usually uses their father’s surname as their main surname. As García is a very widely used name, García Lorca is often referred to by his mother’s less-common surname, Lorca. However, by Spanish rules, his name should always be alphabetized under “G”.

Early years

García Lorca was born on 5 June 1898, in Fuente Vaqueros, a small town a few miles west of Granada, southern Spain. His father, Federico García Rodríguez, was a prosperous landowner with a farm in the fertile vega (valley) surrounding Granada and a comfortable villa in the heart of the city. García Rodríguez saw his fortunes rise with a boom in the sugar industry. García Lorca’s mother, Vicenta Lorca Romero, was a teacher. After Fuente Vaqueros, the family moved in 1905 to the nearby town of Valderrubio (at the time named Asquerosa). In 1909, when the boy was 11, his family moved to the regional capital of Granada; their best known residence there is the summer home known as the Huerta de San Vicente, on what was then the outskirts of the city of Granada. For the rest of his life, he maintained the importance of living close to the natural world, praising his upbringing in the country. All three of these homes—Fuente Vaqueros, Valderrubio, and Huerta de San Vicente—are today museums.

In 1915, after graduating from secondary school, García Lorca attended the University of Granada. During this time his studies included law, literature and composition. Throughout his adolescence he felt a deeper affinity for music than for literature. When he was 11 years old, he began six years of piano lessons with Antonio Segura Mesa, a harmony teacher in the local conservatory and a composer. It was Mesa who inspired Federico’s dream of developing a career in music. His first artistic inspirations arose from the scores of Claude Debussy, Frédéric Chopin and Ludwig van Beethoven. Later, with his friendship with composer Manuel de Falla Spanish folklore became his muse. García Lorca did not begin a career in writing until Segura died in 1916, and his first prose works such as “Nocturne”, “Ballade” and “Sonata” drew on musical forms. His milieu of young artists gathered in El Rinconcillo at the cafe Alameda in Granada. During 1916 and 1917, García Lorca traveled throughout Castile, León, and Galicia, in northern Spain, with a professor of his university, who also encouraged him to write his first book, Impresiones y Paisajes (Impressions and Landscapes – printed at his father’s expense in 1918). Don Fernando de los Rios persuaded García Lorca’s parents to let him move to the progressive, Oxbridge-inspired Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid in 1919, while nominally attending classes at the University of Madrid.

As a young writer

At the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid García Lorca befriended Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí and many other creative artists who were, or would become, influential across Spain. He was taken under the wing of the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, becoming close to playwright Eduardo Marquina and Gregorio Martínez Sierra, the Director of Madrid‘s Teatro Eslava. In 1919–20, at Sierra’s invitation, he wrote and staged his first play, The Butterfly’s Evil Spell. It was a verse play dramatising the impossible love between a cockroach and a butterfly, with a supporting cast of other insects; it was laughed off the stage by an unappreciative public after only four performances and influenced García Lorca’s attitude to the theatre-going public for the rest of his career. He would later claim that Mariana Pineda, written in 1927, was, in fact, his first play. During the time at the Residencia de Estudiantes he pursued degrees in law and philosophy, though he had more interest in writing than study.

García Lorca’s first book of poems was published in 1921, collecting work written from 1918 and selected with the help of his brother Francisco (nicknamed Paquito). They concern the themes of religious faith, isolation and nature that had filled his prose reflections. Early in 1922 at Granada García Lorca joined the composer Manuel de Falla in order to promote the Concurso de Cante Jondo, a festival dedicated to enhance flamenco performance. The year before Lorca had begun to write his Poema del cante jondo (“Poem of the Deep Song”, not published until 1931), so he naturally composed an essay on the art of flamenco, and began to speak publicly in support of the Concurso. At the music festival in June he met the celebrated Manuel Torre, a flamenco cantador. The next year in Granada he also collaborated with Falla and others on the musical production of a play for children, adapted by Lorca from an Andalucian story. Inspired by the same structural form of sequence as “Deep song”, his collection Suites (1923) was never finished and not published until 1983.

Over the next few years García Lorca became increasingly involved in Spain’s avant-garde. He published poetry collections including Canciones (Songs) and Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Ballads, 1928), which became his best known book of poetry. It was a highly stylised imitation of the ballads and poems that were still being told throughout the Spanish countryside. García Lorca describes the work as a “carved altar piece” of Andalusia with “gypsies, horses, archangels, planets, its Jewish and Roman breezes, rivers, crimes, the everyday touch of the smuggler and the celestial note of the naked children of Córdoba. A book that hardly expresses visible Andalusia at all, but where the hidden Andalusia trembles”. In 1928, the book brought him fame across Spain and the Hispanic world, and he only gained notability as a playwright much later. For the rest of his life, the writer would search for the elements of Andaluce culture, trying to find its essence without resorting to the “picturesque” or the cliched use of “local colour”.

His second play, Mariana Pineda, with stage settings by Salvador Dalí, opened to great acclaim in Barcelona in 1927. In 1926, García Lorca wrote the play The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, which would not be shown until the early 1930s. It was a farce about fantasy, based on the relationship between a flirtatious, petulant wife and a hen-pecked shoemaker.

From 1925 to 1928 he was passionately involved with Dalí. The friendship with Lorca had a strong element of mutual passion, but Dalí rejected the erotic advances of the poet. With the success of “Gypsy Ballads”, came an estrangement from Dalí and the breakdown of a love affair with sculptor Emilio Soriano Aladrén. These brought on an increasing depression, a situation exacerbated by his anguish over his homosexuality. He felt he was trapped between the persona of the successful author, which he was forced to maintain in public, and the tortured, authentic self, which he could only acknowledge in private. He also had the sense that he was being pigeon-holed as a “gypsy poet”. He wrote: “The gypsies are a theme. And nothing more. I could just as well be a poet of sewing needles or hydraulic landscapes. Besides, this gypsyism gives me the appearance of an uncultured, ignorant and primitive poet that you know very well I’m not. I don’t want to be typecast”. Growing estrangement between García Lorca and his closest friends reached its climax when surrealists Dalí and Luis Buñuel collaborated on their 1929 film Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog). García Lorca interpreted it, perhaps erroneously, as a vicious attack upon himself. At this time Dalí also met his future wife Gala. Aware of these problems (though not perhaps of their causes), García Lorca’s family arranged for him to take a lengthy visit to the United States in 1929–30.

In June 1929, García Lorca travelled to America with Fernando de los Rios on the RMS Olympic, a sister liner to the RMS Titanic. They stayed mostly in New York City, where Rios started a lecture tour and García Lorca enrolled at Columbia University School of General Studies, funded by his parents. He studied English but, as before, was more absorbed by writing than study. He also spent time in Vermont and later in Havana, Cuba. His collection Poeta en Nueva York (A Poet in New York, published posthumously in 1942) explores alienation and isolation through some graphically experimental poetic techniques and was influenced by the Wall Street crash which he personally witnessed. This condemnation of urban capitalist society and materialistic modernity was a sharp departure from his earlier work and label as a folklorist. His play of this time, El Público (The Public), was not published until the late 1970s and has never been published in its entirety, the manuscript lost. However, the Hispanic Society of America in New York City retains several of his personal letters.

The Second Republic

García Lorca’s return to Spain in 1930 coincided with the fall of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and the establishment of the Second Spanish Republic. In 1931, García Lorca was appointed director of a student theatre company, Teatro Universitario La Barraca (The Shack). It was funded by the Second Republic’s Ministry of Education, and it was charged with touring Spain’s rural areas in order to introduce audiences to radically modern interpretations of classic Spanish theatre free of charge. With a portable stage and little equipment, they sought to bring theatre to people who had never seen any, with García Lorca directing as well as acting. He commented: “Outside of Madrid, the theatre, which is in its very essence a part of the life of the people, is almost dead, and the people suffer accordingly, as they would if they had lost their two eyes, or ears, or a sense of taste. We [La Barraca] are going to give it back to them”. His experiences traveling through impoverished rural Spain and New York (particularly amongst the disenfranchised African American population), transformed him into a passionate advocate of the theatre of social action. He wrote “The theatre is a school of weeping and of laughter, a free forum, where men can question norms that are outmoded or mistaken and explain with living example the eternal norms of the human heart”.

While touring with La Barraca, García Lorca wrote his now best-known plays, the Rural Trilogy of Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba, which all rebelled against the norms of bourgeois Spanish society. He called for a rediscovery of the roots of European theatre and the questioning of comfortable conventions such as the popular drawing room comedies of the time. His work challenged the accepted role of women in society and explored taboo issues of homoeroticism and class. García Lorca wrote little poetry in this last period of his life, declaring in 1936, “theatre is poetry that rises from the book and becomes human enough to talk and shout, weep and despair.”

Travelling to Buenos Aires in 1933 to give lectures and direct the Argentine premiere of Blood Wedding, García Lorca spoke of his distilled theories on artistic creation and performance in the famous lecture Play and Theory of the Duende. This attempted to define a schema of artistic inspiration, arguing that great art depends upon a vivid awareness of death, connection with a nation’s soil, and an acknowledgment of the limitations of reason.

As well as returning to the classical roots of theatre, García Lorca also turned to traditional forms in poetry. His last poetic work, Sonetos de amor oscuro (Sonnets of Dark Love, 1936), was long thought to have been inspired by his passion for Rafael Rodríguez Rapun, secretary of La Barraca. Documents and mementos revealed in 2012 suggest that the actual inspiration was Juan Ramírez de Lucas, a 19-year-old with whom Lorca hoped to emigrate to Mexico. The love sonnets are inspired by the 16th-century poet San Juan de la Cruz. La Barraca’s subsidy was cut in half by the rightist government elected in 1934, and its last performance was given in April 1936.

Lorca spent summers at the Huerta de San Vicente from 1926 to 1936. Here he wrote, totally or in part, some of his major works, among them When Five Years Pass (Así que pasen cinco años) (1931), Blood Wedding (1932), Yerma (1934) and Diván del Tamarit (1931–1936). The poet lived in the Huerta de San Vicente in the days just before his arrest and assassination in August 1936.

More at:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Garc%C3%ADa_Lorca

4chan – The Skeleton Key

It seems like a world organized around the ideas of Philip K. Dick as of late. Mind Parasites, and all. For anyone who has studied the deep well of thought and modal generation… this article clearly demonstrates what people, who on the main would be considered as perhaps deep sleepers, can produce, and empower.

G

The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.

–Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist. He developed the general theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics. Einstein’s work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. Wikipedia

“Good is not good, where better is expected”

― Thomas Fuller (1608 – August 16, 1661) was an English churchman and historian. He is now remembered for his writings, particularly his Worthies of England, published in 1662 after his death. Wikipedia

Feb 22, 2017
NASA Discovery Seven New Earths Full Press Conference