Tag Archives: 1926

RIP Jan Morris (1926 – 2020)

Jan Morris (1926 – 2020) was a Welsh writer known for being one of the first celebrity transgenders in the West.

Conundrum

She wrote the book Conundrum about his sex reassignment surgery.

Two quotes from that book:

“I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.”

“The first man who ever kissed me, in a carnal way, after my return from Casablanca, was a London taxi-driver who drove me one morning to the recently opened Army museum in Chelsea. We chatted all the way across London, and when we reached the museum he got out of his cab to look at the new building with me. Quite suddenly, slipping his arm around my waist boldly on the pavement, he kissed me roughly and not at all disagreeably on the lips. ‘There’s a good girl,’ he said, patting my bottom and returning to his cab: and all I did was blush.”

RIP Jimmy Heath (1926 – 2020)

Jimmy Heath was an American jazz saxophonist, part of the Heath Brothers.

Like most Gen X melomaniacs who grew up with vinyl but switched to CDs (the musical fraud of the century), I discovered Mr. Heath on the Soul Jazz Love Strata-East (1994) compilation.

On that album is “Smiling Billy Suite Pt.II” (1975) from the album Marchin’ On (1975) by the Heath Brothers.

Here is that whole album:

Marchin’ On (1975)

RIP Juliaan Lampens (1926 – 2019)

Juliaan Lampens was a Belgian architect whose name has become associated with brutalism.

Photo: detail of one of the Lampens facades. photo by Pirre Pluymers.
Photo: detail of one of the Lampens facades. Photo by Pirre Pluymers.

Brutalism is architecture which makes ostentative use of béton brut (French for raw concrete).

The aesthetic is the last phase in modernist architecture (before the advent of postmodern architecture) and it was heavily criticized by Charles, Prince of Wales, author of A Vision of Britain: A Personal View of Architecture (1989).

For lovers of the style, which includes myself, a big part of the attraction is that the imprint of the wood grain from the formwork of the concrete can be seen on the exterior concrete of brutalist structures.

Juliaan Lampens’s most famous building is the Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Kapel van Kerselare in Edelare, which I visited in 2014 and 2019.

They also bless new cars there.

RIP Vlasta Chramostová (1926 – 2019)

Vlasta Chramostová was a Czech actress perhaps best-known for her part in The Cremator (1969), one of several Central European films that dealt with the Holocaust.

The Cremator is featured in Film as a Subversive Art (1974).

The Cremator (1969)

In this film, Vasta plays Lakmé, the wife of the delusional cremator who prepares for the endlösung.

Below is the OST by Zdeněk Liška.

OST to The Cremator (1969)