Brian Meehl's Blog
April 29, 2022
MY FAVORITE HISTORY BOOKS TO PROVOKE “WHO KNEW?”
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April 29, 2021
April 2, 2021
BLOWBACK GOES #1 ON AMAZON!
In March, BLOWBACK ’07 & BLOWBACK ’94 Blasted To
’07 HIT
#1 in Teen & Young Adult Time Travel Books
#1 in Children’s Time Travel Books
#3 in Teen & Young Adult Literature
’94 WENT TO
#1 in Teen & Young Adult Time Travel Books
#2 in Historical Fantasy Fiction
#2 in Historical European Fiction
Make part of your “back to normal” grabbing a good sumner read.
For the young adult in everyone, the Blowback Trilogy will blow you to fantastic & faraway places!
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October 27, 2020
Blowback ’94 Goes Olympic!
CIPA EVVY BOOK AWARDS!
Silver in Young Adult
Bronze in Science Fiction
But don’t take CIPA’s word for it.
See what READERS and REVIEWERS are saying
about the climactic book in THE BLOWBACK TRILOGY at
Amazon.com
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May 21, 2020
BLOWBACK ’63 GIVEAWAY ON GOODREADS!
Win a signed copy (with Blowback bookmarks to boot) of the second book in the Blowback Trilogy, Blowback ’63.
Giveaway runs on Goodreads May-23-June 14.
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/307519-blowback-63
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BLOWBACK ’07 GIVEAWAY ON GOODREADS!
Win a signed copy (with Blowback bookmarks to boot) of the kickoff book in the Blowback Trilogy, Blowback ’07.
Giveaway runs on Goodreads through May 31.
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/307121?utm_medium=api&utm_source=giveaway_widget
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May 7, 2020
ENTER A BLOWBACK ’94 GIVEAWAY
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Goodreads Book Giveaway
Blowback ’94
by Brian Meehl
Giveaway ends May 17, 2020.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.
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May 6, 2020
EDGAR DEGAS & CHLOE FLAMANT
My name is Chloe Flamant. That’s me in a pastel Monsieur Degas made in 1894. The likeness of my backside is very good. Degas called it, After the Bath, woman drying her neck. I know, not the greatest title in the world; he saved his genius for the canvas.
In 1894, I was in the corps de ballet of the Paris Opéra Ballet. The girls in the corps were called “the little rats.” Degas was a little nicer about it; he called me his “little monkey girl.”
Ballet at the Paris Opera – 1877-1878
I posed for Degas more times than I can remember. My backside appears in many of his works. When I posed in his studio, Degas did what men do—especially artists—he talked about himself. His life story had some twists, some as contorted as the poses he put his models into.
After the Bath – 1896
After being raised in an aristocratic family—Degas’s father was a French-Italian banker, his mother was a French-Creole from a rich New Orleans family—Degas rebelled against belonging to the haute bourgeois. He wanted to be an artiste!
His first paintings were very realistic. My favorite of these is The Orchestra at the Opera with his friend Désiré Dihau in the foreground, the bassoonist at the Paris Opéra Ballet.
The Orchestra at the Opera – 1870
I like it because of the ballerinas in the background and what they foretell. Degas would soon push past the musicians, past the dancers on stage, and into the wings where he became fascinated by dancers and their backstage world.
Le foyer de la danse – 1872
One of his first backstage painting was Le Foyer de la danse. The large room in the opera house was a rehearsal space and a place for rich patrons on the prowl for mistresses.
Unlike the above painting showing a mother pimping her daughter to one of the “protectors,” Degas painted lurking protectors eyeing ballerinas from a different perspective in The Curtain.
The Curtain – 1880
In art and life, Degas looked at the world differently. He never married or had a mistress and avoided alcohol. Work was everything. His skewed take on life was why I liked him. He didn’t see the world in a proper Victorian frame, all front and center. He wanted to capture le tranche de vie—slice-of-life—the more slice-of-life, the more ordinary the better.
Absinthe – 1876
His painting, Absinthe, was a huge scandal for that reason. The critics called it ugly, disgusting, and a blow to Victorian morals. Degas disagreed. He saw beauty in small moments. He found humanity in the mundane. It’s why he insisted he was a “realist” and not an “impressionist.”
Fate disagreed. In his 40s, Degas began to slowly go blind. His failing eyesight robbed him of his sense of line and detail. It turned him from painting with oil to pastels. Like fancy crayons, pastels became the magic wands that allowed him to create what he saw best: light and color.
Dancer Tilting – 1883
Dancer friends of mine, who also posed for Degas, said that his bad eyesight was God’s punishment for hating women. I didn’t agree, even though I once heard Degas say to a fellow artist, “I have perhaps too often considered woman as an animal. I show them without their coquetry, in the state of animals cleaning themselves.”
The Tub – 1886
I knew better. It was Degas trying to sound tough, the monk who had taken a vow of celibacy and had to insult what he denied himself. To me, Degas was more like a woman than a man. When he worked, he was like a mother with all five senses locked on her baby. With each stroke of his pastel, he gave his “animals” life.
I believe it was his fixation on the quietist attitude and smallest human gesture that led him from the backstage world of ballerinas to the tinier stage of the basin and tub where women perform a more primitive dance.
The Tub – 1886
Around the time I met Degas, his skewed point of view was taking its strangest twist. He no longer looked us in the eye. He turned our faces away and rendered our backsides. It was as if he was looking at the world through a keyhole. My nickname for him was “Saint Voyeur.”
After the Bath (Woman Drying Herself)– 1895-1900
When I last saw Degas before he died in 1917, he told me that only one of his works hung in a museum. It was an early, realistic painting: A Cotton Office in New Orleans. He had painted it while visiting his mother’s family in America. He joked that if all of his work disappeared except for that one piece, his dying wish would come true. He would be remembered as a realist.
A Cotton Office in New Orleans – 1873
Thank God Saint Voyeur didn’t get his wish. In 1919, when a large body of Degas’s work went to auction, it sold at exorbitant prices. Like it or not, Degas became a famous impressionist.
In French, we have a word: flâneur. A flâneur is someone who strolls the boulevards of Paris and takes in the human circus. Degas was the flâneur of flâneurs who took flâneurism one step further. His work makes us stop and take a close, intimate look at our fellow “animals.” The blind man shows us how to drink with our eyes.
If you’d like to be a flâneur in 1894 Paris, and walk with the likes of Degas, me, and the naughty Toulouse-Lautrec, you can find us in Blowback ’94. And I promise, you’ll get to watch Saint Voyeur create his pastel of me, After the Bath, woman drying her neck.
Edgar Degas – 1895
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April 23, 2020
TOULOUSE-LAUTREC: GIANT OF LITTLE-KNOWN FACTS
We all know his short physique and his art. But here’s what you may not know about Henri Toulouse-Lautrec.
1. Was his stunted growth caused by a riding accident when he was young?
No. It was a trifecta of bad luck. 1) By no fault of his own, his parents were first cousins, leaving him with genetic issues and bad health. 2) At thirteen, a fall left him with a broken thighbone. 3) At fourteen, another fall broke his other femur and his legs stopped growing. He topped out at four feet eleven.
2. How was he introduced to the bohemian world of Montmartre, the setting that inspired his art?
Homework. After 17-year-old Toulouse-Lautrec moved to Paris to study art, his teachers sent him to the nights spots up on Montmartre to sketch the patrons. Montmartre not only became the young Lautrec’s garden of earthly delights, it became the Eden from which this misshapen Adam plucked a rib from his side, spun it into a paintbrush, and created a cast of debauched Eves.
3. Was he a well-regarded painter?
Moulin Rouge, La Goulue
Not at all. He was a lowly poster artist doing work for the clubs on Montmartre. His first notoriety came in 1891 with a poster for the Moulin Rouge featuring one of its most notorious dancers, La Goulue (the Glutton). When it came to “bottoms up,” La Goulue double dipped. When she danced, she not only liked to grab patrons’ drinks and drain them, she sometimes chose not to wear undergarments.
4. What did Lautrec hide in the cane that helped him walk?
He hollowed his cane out and filled it with his go-to drink, absinthe. The hallucinogenic alcohol eased his physical and psychological pain. Not only did he have a “crutch” that did double duty, this bad Adam’s cane made him able.
5. Who was Lautrec’s greatest “Eve” and muse?
The unsmiling and enigmatic Jane Avril was compared to a governess who had accidently stumbled into the Moulin Rouge. Under a prim and prudish expression, she could dance like a woman possessed. Her nicknames:“Crazy Jane” and “Le Mélinite” (French dynamite) were well earned.
6. Why did Lautrec paint Jane Avril so much?
Besides being close friends, they had a bond; they were both damaged goods. While Lautrec was a misshapen misanthrope, Avril had been constantly beaten by her mother and at thirteen had contracted St. Vitus Dance, afflicting her with facial tics and spasms in her limbs. Despite being “cured” in a mental hospital, the illness inspired her dancing style. In an age that celebrated the grotesque, Lautrec and Avril were a perfect match.
7. Of all Lautrec’s lines—drawn, painted, or spoken—what was his most truthful?
When one of his Eves, Yvette Guilbert, complained about his minimal style of rendering her, Lautrec replied, “Ma chere, I don’t detail you, I totalize you.”
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April 15, 2020
JANE AVRIL: The First Break Dancer & Rockette!
You’ve seen her in the works of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. But who was this extraordinary young woman? And why should Lautrec’s favorite poster girl of the Moulin Rouge-era be considered the first break dancer?
She was born Jeanne Boudin to a prostitute and violently abusive mother. At 12-years-old, Jeanne ran away. Living on the streets, she contracted St. Vitus Dance, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary tics and jerks in the face and limbs. It landed her in a hospital treating patients for “hysteria” and madness. After two happy years there, she was “cured.” At a costume ball and goodbye party for Jeanne, she discovered her love of dance, complete with a herky-jerky style inherited from her illness.
Escaping her mother again, 15-year-old Jeanne found refuge in the dance halls of the Latin Quarter, where her dancing style of grace punctuated by “fits” of wild movements thrilled onlookers. With her reputation growing, Jeanne changed her name to Jane Avril—“Avril” means “April” in French—to avoid being found by her mother. Avril’s lithe figure, marmalade hair and green eyes led to her first nickname, “Silk Thread.”
She soon landed in the Moulin Rouge as one of the dancing girls in the Quadrille. The Quadrille—a stately precursor of square dance—involved four couples, but the Moulin Rouge jettisoned the men and the Quadrille became four women dancing the cancan.
Mark Twain, who most likely saw Avril dance, described the cancan: “The idea of it is to dance as wildly, as noisily, as furiously as you can; expose yourself as much as possible if you are a woman; and kick as high as you can…Heavens!” While Avril added contortions and backbends that brushed her shoulders to the floor, the cancan could end with a leg held high in the air, the splits, or kicking off a gentlemen’s hat.
JANE AVRIL
Avril’s cancan was unique in two ways. While the other women had to wear white undergarments, she insisted on wearing bright red bloomers, which caught the eye of Toulouse-Lautrec. He was enthralled by the bizarre contrast of her spins, kicks and explosive spasms and the sphinxlike calm of her face. (Love at first freakiness made them close friends.) Her possessed style earned her more nicknames: Crazy Jane and LeMélinite (a French explosive).
While the Moulin Rouge cancan was performed on the dance floor up close and personal (a precursor of the lap dance?) the Folies Bergère moved the cancan to the music-hall stage with a chorus of high-kicking demoiselles.
The Folies Bergère—still a fixture in Paris—exported the cancan to the U.S. in the form of Radio City’s Rockettes with their precision kick lines.
While Jane Avril is one of the grandmothers of the Rockettes, she wouldn’t approve of the cancan being stripped of its individual expression or the Rockettes’ frozen smiles.
Avril’s expression was—and always will be—aloof, mysterious, touched with melancholy. It was this paradox of her wild dancing and enigmatic face that made her so provocative. Her magnetic allure lives on in the works of her dear friend, Toulouse-Lautrec.
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