¿FORTUNY WAS SPANISH?

Am I the only one who didn’t know the dazzling Venetian fashion and textile wizard, the Prince of Pleats, the Virtuoso of Velvet, wasn’t even Italian, let alone Venetian? He was born Mariano Fortuny* y Madrazo in 1871, of a long line of artists, curators and collectors in the capital and last stronghold of Spain’s Moorish culture–Granada. 

He grew up in Paris surrounded by the works and collections of his ancestors and didn’t even settle in Venice until 1889, and then only because he was allergic to horses, not often encountered in a city dependent on water transport. 

1935

Fortuny’s mother, Cecilia de Madrazo, came from a family of artists and two directors of the Prado, who, along with the family fortune, were instrumental in putting the museum on the cultural map.

His father, Mariano Fortuny y Marsal, was, according to New York’s Queen Sofia Spanish Institute, “one of the most important artists in the history of Spanish art after Francisco Goya.”

A frequent traveler in Islamic lands, Fortuny y Marsal was fascinated by caftans, turbans, harem pants; he collected the fine fabrics and carpets, rare potteries and metal armor his son grew up surrounded by, in an artistic salon that his mother hosted.

 [ ] Ingres, painted by his friend Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz, who was Fortuny’s maternal grandfather and the second in the family to become Prado director. [ ] Arab Before Tapestry by Fortuny’s father, Mariano Fortuny y Marsal. [ ] Fortuny y Madrazo, himself, in silk turban and  Berber burnous. 

Fortuny’s 1896 Flower Maidens from Parsifal is one of his cycle of 46 Wagnerian mythologies on show in Leipzig to celebrate the composer’s 200th birthday. At the Klinger Forum through July 8 (and possibly Bayreuth thereafter). Palazzo Fortuny, Musei Civici, Venice,

Like much of the cultural elite of  his time, Fortuny was besotted with Richard Wagner’s “music dramas” as well as with Wagner’s ideal of the unification of all art forms into a single event. Tapped to work on costumes and scenery for the 1900 La Scala production of “Tristan und Isolde,” he recognized that theatrical lighting failed Wagner’s unified-arts goals. He conducted experiments to find a way for light to flow and change with the texture of the music, that quickly transforms to enhance shifts of mood and atmosphere.  He found that light reflected off various surfaces changes such properties as color and intensity, and patented a system  to achieve this in 1901. He engineered his next invention, the Fortuny Cyclorama Dome, to allow illusions of a more extensive sky and distant horizon than perspective and stage size could create on their own. “Theatrical scenery will be able to transform itself in tune with music, within the latter’s domain,” he reported. “That is to say in time whereas hitherto it has only been able to develop in space.”

Developed as a stage device, the Fortuny Moda floor lamp has become a residential favorite.

Luxuriously romantic silk hanging lamps, also Fortuny, also still available.

Because a combination of the dome and reflected light meant one stage set could provide several different visual and emotional effects, the costs of  scenery could be reduced, along with storage space and the danger of fire.

He applied the dome concept to a collapsible, portable lamp to re-create indoor lighting onstage; originally intended for theatrical use, the hi-tech appearance of the Fortuny Moda floor lamp has made it a lasting icon of residential lighting. He invented the dimmer switch.

The Delphos style is top-to-bottom uninterrupted pleats. Charleston Museum

The Peplos style has an attached overblouse.

All that experience with theatrical costumes and stage curtains, as well as experiments with the effects of light on fabric, fed into the art for which Fortuny is still best known: the figure-skimming, sleek, slinky, sophisticated, glowing, daring, No-Corsets-Need-Apply pleated silk gown, which actually has a patent behind it for the pleating tools as well as  for the style. What appears to be ruffling at the neckline and sleeve is not ornament at all but the visible result of lacing front to back with silk cords, which also run through the neckline. 

Silk cords lace front and back shoulders together.

 Between the cords and the pleats, the gowns can adapt to a range of sizes.  Murano glass beads strung on the cords around the armholes and down the sides–as well as around the shaped hem of the Peplos overblouse–keep the light silk pleats from gaping or ballooning or wandering off with the first stray breeze. The result is both simpler and richer than anything that had gone before. Every element is necessary. Nothing is extraneous. This may well be the first modern garment.

Uncorseted Fortuny.

Corseted S-bend

Around the turn of the 20th century, a simpler, more comfortable silhouette began to be discussed, and even showed up here and there in haute couture, but the preferred female profile was still the “S-Bend,” low breasts balanced by a modified bustle, all achieved with specialized corseting and strategic padding. A day dress would be long-sleeved, high-necked, and be worn with a large-brimmed feathered hat pinned to a mass of upswept hair. For evening, it could be sleeveless or short-sleeved, and would have a decidedly low neckline. An over-the top hat may have been appropriate for evening, depending on the event.

Poiret evening gown, 1910, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Hobble-skirt  1912 by Cummings, St. Louis  

Fortuny was an early advocate of liberating  garments, but his contemporary, Paul Poiret, usually gets the credit. Poiret’s styles, however, were fussy and often required corsets to the knee; he also popularized–and may have invented—the hobble skirt. So much for easy movement.

Way off-topic: the 2,500-year-old Charioteer of Delphi has glass eyeballs and copper eyelashes. Delphi Archaeological Museum, Delphi, Greece.

Fortuny, on the other hand, used his patented tools create sharply pleated fine silk that stood on its own as structure and decoration, style and substance. Called the Delphos, the garment was based on the chiton worn by the Charioteer of Delphi, a famous 5th-century-B.C. Greek bronze that had been discovered in 1896.

A chiton was a cloth cylinder made by piecing  together a number of woven rectangles, joining them at the shoulders, and holding them in place with a girdle that formed a loosely pleated effect. Fabric was not easily come by in ancient times, so the material had to remain in reusable rectangles. 

The Greeks did not cut necklines or armholes into the fabric, but left gaps for the head and arms when they joined front and back at the shoulders. University of Nebraska, Omaha.

Fortuny did the Greeks one better by setting almost permanent knife-edge pleats in his rectangles of fine, light silk–the silk for flow, the pleats for structure. 

Alfred Stieglitz’s 1907 autochrome of his sister, Selma Schubart, in a Fortuny–and a cardigan! (Some think Edward Steichen shot the picture.) Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1955, Metropolitan Museum, NYC.

Fortuny painted his wife Henriette Negrin adjusting the silk cords and Murano beads in her own gown. She named the Delphos and is said to have played a major role in creating it. Note the absence of foundation garments. Museo del Traje, Madrid. 

No pattern-making was needed, no cutting, tailoring, dressmaker details, darts, gores, gussets or any of the other slicing-and-dicing techniques typically used to give form to fabric.  Even care is easy:  simply twist the gown into coils and pop it into a little 9-in-dia box, ready for storage or travel.

1920s MetMuseum.Org

The pleats are virtually permanent, but if a gown should sag a bit at the seat or knees, it would be returned to Venice for a touch-up–no one but Fortuny himself ever knew the secret of the silk pleats, and all efforts to replicate them seem to have failed. Heat and moisture were involved, but how much of each? When did the patented mechanisms come into play? What about chemicals?  An assistant recalled having to painstakingly remove a kind of egg glue from the fabric. 

Fortuny didn’t consider himself  a couturier, didn’t hold fashion shows, didn’t feel obliged to follow trends or chase originality. Over the 40-odd years the Delphos and Peplos were produced, he might nod to the times with higher or lower hems, jewel tones or naturals, a spaghetti strap here, a little shoulder pad there, perhaps some scissor work to create a permanent scoop or V-neck. From the corseted Edwardian Era to the bound-breast Flapper period to Dior’s girdled New Look to the buff-bodied present, the Fortuny gown never went out of style. After he died in 1949, no more gowns were made, yet women lucky enough to find them at auction (up to $20,000) continue to collect them, cherish them, and wear them.

Lauren Hutton in a 1930s Peplos and Coptic cape, shot by Richard Avedon for Vogue.

1940s

Every woman should be issued a Fortuny gown along with her Medicare card.

1910-1920

Sotheby

Knife-sharp silk pleats also make a discreet appearance as insets in the sleeves and sides of his sumptuous printed, painted and stenciled silk-velvet gowns. Once again, silken cords and  Murano glass beads coursing down the sides can be used to loosen or tighten  the gown to size, while  the pleats expand or contract as needed. Fortuny’s velvets are so soft that they follow the body comfortably no matter the number of adjustments.                            

Top left: loosely adjusted gown. 

‘Right: tightly adjusted to hug the figure.

Left: Inset pleats keep sleeve supple.

                           

These velvets reflect their Venetian origins not only in the hues created when the canals mirror changes in the sky, but also in the long  history of magnificent textiles produced in the region. From medieval times, Venice was a crossroads of East and West–think Marco Polo–as well as, for several hundred years, the only place self-respecting kings, emperors, cardinals and merchant princes from all over Europe could obtain opulent, innovative velvets with which to intimidate one another.

1910

Venice extended privileges and tax exemptions to innovators, and acknowledged the dyers guild’s critical economic by routinely overlooking such pollution violations  as the use of urine as a color fixative. In the 14th century, taking velvet skills from Venice to another city could result in the confiscation of property and a death sentence.

Tintoretto, the Venetian artist known for glowing color and the amazing light and shadow in his treatment of textiles, was the son of a dyer.In fact, Venetian artists from Bellini to Titian, Carpaccio, Georgione, Veronese and Tiepolo were often noted more for the fabric in their paintings than they were for faces, buildings and landscapes. 

To this heritage, Fortuny added influences from China, Japan, India, Persia, Turkey, and Northern Africa, Coptic legends and Kufic calligraphies,  paleochristian sculptural motifs and Irish manuscript illuminations.

 Marcel Proust described Fortuny as “faithfully antique but powerfully original,” and mentioned him at least sixteen times in “Remembrance of Things Past,” where he was the only real character

Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

Gift of Mrs. Norbert A Bogdan, 1974. MetMuseum.org

 not a fictional composite of several others. Fortuny’s fans have included Isadora Duncan, Gloria Vanderbilt (Anderson Cooper’s mother), Sarah Bernhardt, Peggy Guggenheim, Nijinsky, Lillian Gish, and Orson Welles.  And thereby hangs a mystery.

Museo del Traje, Madrid

Some accounts have Fortuny designing the costumes for Welles’ 1952 movie, “Othello.” Others say Welles had the costumes made of  Fortuny fabric; doublets have been mentioned, and “three coats.” One tale has Welles bursting in on Fortuny shortly before the designer died in 1949 and modeling some kind of fur-lined item.

Welles himself recalled learning, while preparing to shoot in a small Moroccan city, that his Italian costume–maker was bankrupt. He immediately shifted one scene to a Turkish bath to justify filming male actors naked from the waist up, and hired local tailors to make costumes based on pictures of Renaissance paintings.

 In the end, Welles claimed to have had an army clad in armor made of sardine tins, but what of the main characters? Did any of them get to wear Fortuny? Some grainy old black-and-white stills from this black-and-white movie show Welles in a costume that looks as though it conceivably could include this fur-trimmed multi-color coat, left.

Did any Fortuny make it into the film?

Anyone?

*Thanks to Fred Plotkin, master of all things opera, food and Italy, for dissuading me from pronouncing it “FORchinny” and encouraging the use of “ForchOOny”instead.

© Judith Davidsen and jdavidsen.wordpress.com, 2010-2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Judith Davidsen and jdavidsen.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Praising with Not-So Faint Damn

“Why Design Now?” at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum to January 9, brings a kind of joy to the soul.

[ ] Barrel roof tiles that are actually solar panels.

Sole’ solar roof in shape of barrel tiles

[ ] A multi-story urban farm that shares floors with housing units.

[ ] Carbon-negative concrete that utilizes CO₂ from power plants in its creation but produces none of its own.

[ ] A computer-guided robotic concrete extrusion system—a scaled-up version of rapid prototyping–with the potential of building a house in one day.

[ ] A neonatal incubator that can be repaired by rural mechanics using car parts.

Neonature Car-parts Incubator

[ ] Armadillo protective gear for people who detect landmines for a living–lightweight and comfortable enough to help them avoid the temptation to further risk their lives by removing it.

[ ] A prosthetic arm, courtesy of the Department of Defense, that employs neural-integration strategies to create the speed and dexterity of a natural limb.

[ ] A cart easily configured to carry three different types of cargo, pulled by bicycle and said to give Indian women “approximately five extra hours a day to increase their incomes.”

Samarth Bicycle Trailer in open position to carry long items

Samarth Bicycle Trailer closed to protect earthenware, chickens, etc.

Samarth Bicycle Trailer arranged for seating

[ ] Textiles made of discarded cocoon fiber by retired Japanese silk workers, who, in the process, formed a social network.

[ ] An LED lamp powered by the metabolism of the biological life in soil.

Soil Lamp

Two floors filled with such stuff, created to address urgent needs by real design professionals—graphic, industrial and interior designers,  architects, planners, engineers . . . O joy O rapture, really. This is the kind of stuff  you could easily get misty-eyed over.

In the past, the Cooper-Hewitt has frustrated the daylights out of me with its name-rank-serial number approach to display, with captions something along the lines of “brass, alligator toenails, Austrian, early 20c”—move along, folks, there’s nothing more to see here. But there is: design is social. For the decorative items I normally associate with the museum, I want to know what they were used for and how they worked. What did they cost? How did that relate to the value of money at the time? Who was likely to own one? What was it about that time and place that gave rise to these particular objects? (Being me, I also want to know how the owners came by their money and did they love their wives.)

For the current exhibit, of products, prototypes and concepts developed over just the past three years, there is vastly more information; after all, having asked “Why?” the museum had an obligation to try at least to explain itself.

The attempts succeed to varying degrees. The “Improved Clay Stove,” in its simplicity one

Improved Clay Stove

of the truly lovable projects, is a clay basin that holds a cooking fire and is molded to fit snugly around existing cooking vessels, greatly reducing the smoke—and resulting respiratory illnesses and early deaths—caused by traditional cooking over open flames. Fuel is fed in through a side vent, not by removing the cook pot—that maneuver would let in too much oxygen, which would burn up the firewood too quickly, and lead to the environment-degrading need for yet more firewood, and longer and more dangerous treks to find it. Most of this information is not in the display captions, but comes from the catalog—which is available both in the print catalog  and online  http://www.cooperhewitt.org/EXHIBITIONS/triennial/why-design-now.asp —and a bit from my own guesswork. What is not clear, from any of these sources, is what exactly is improved about this particular stove, or why (be still, my inner 11-year-old) donkey dung is part of the clay mix, or whether the women in the Darfur camps who make the stoves produce them for personal use or also for sale.

Nonetheless, there is enough information to convince me that this stove can save lives in both the short and long terms, but H20tel, the Dutch hotel all of whose energy is said to come from water?  There’s a video demonstration of a cup of water slowly draining into a thing called an oxyhydrogenator and then what looks like a soldering iron striking sparks off what looks like a bar of metal while a translation of the Dutch voiceover claims that the process produces 6200 degrees F, enough energy to melt tungsten, and therefore, it would appear, to power an entire hotel.  I desperately want to believe this but, beyond some repetitions of the word “hydropower”—there’s a waterfall in the basement?—we never hear about it again.

Like an awful lot of architectural communication, there’s too many gaps and holes in the telling. At the Carabanchel social housing development in Spain, “its bamboo skin adapts to shield residents from the sun,” leading me to assume it’s on some kind of sensors. After studying the images for a long, long time, I came to the conclusion that this just means that residents can open and close the floor-to-ceiling bamboo shutters to suite their needs at any given time, pretty much what all of Spain does, but not so stylishly, with their horizontal, pull-down shutters. Or maybe there is another explanation. Who knows? And without a floor plan, it’s hard figure out how 88 apartments distributed among five stories could all be floor-through.

It’s been said that architects need to learn to write—and, apparently, to make videos with words in them—but why is it possible to get to the point at almost the speed of haiku when describing not only bamboo carts but also neural integration strategies? Are the architects holding out on the museum’s writers? Do the writers feel obliged to uphold some kind of architectural mystique? This devotion to vagueness makes it possible to imply that design alone saved the infamous drug city of Medellin, Columbia, as though the gangsters’ killing each other off had nothing to do with it.

Although I’ve been writing about design for over 20 years, I come to this show as a fairly ordinary person in off the street, faced with the output of any number of design disciplines and their languages and jargons, plus confusing or missing data. Does feeling stupid, and guilty of not reading Science Times on a regular basis, cause fatigue? Or is the exhaustion just a by-product of a too-big show? A museum this small should not be this tiring. Maybe weeding out some items would make time and space to present a more comprehensive grasp of the remainder.

The show is both stupendous and sloppy—for instance, the Z-20 concentrated solar-power system on display

Z-20 Concentrated Solar Power System

is missing the small generators that the parabolic mirrors are supposed to concentrate reflected solar energy on, leaving the huge mirrors looking like something that could blind you at 20 paces, bring down jet planes and possibly burn their very own hole in the ozone layer. If an exhibit this large and demanding exhausts the visitor, what might it have done to the people organizing and setting it up?

At least a third of the 130-odd displays could have been eliminated with no loss. I’d begin by jettisoning the fashions, a number of which are based on reviving and supporting traditional crafts and are quite simply not beautiful enough to justify the 21^st century costs of handwork or the upkeep involved. I can see rich people buying these things out of a kind of progressive noblesse oblige and not noticing they’ve drifted to the closet floor, but there’s nothing here to inspire the rest of us to save our pennies to buy and then meticulously care for.  The designers should have done better by their artisans.

And what to make of Maison Martin Margiela’s Artisanal line, represented here by a dress made of shoelaces and a scratchy-looking  “fur” jacket made of garment-label fasteners, both created with the stated goal of “Breathing new life into worn-out, abandoned clothing and found objects.” Did they go door to door collecting the 400 worn-out yet pristine shoelaces for the dress? And the jacket’s 29,000 pesky plastic thingies that attach labels to garments—to get any kind of production going, you’d have to station an inspector in every household in the land in the hopes of capturing maybe a handful per consumer per year.

Issey Miyake’s spring 2009 line appears to have had no social, economic, political, or environmental justification whatsoever, unless you believe that colors derived from a trip to the Peruvian jungle give it a pass. Am I the only one who remembers a time, maybe 20 years ago, when corporations could claim environmental good will by coloring petroleum-based household furnishings green?

I would also ditch the downers. While most of the show identifies problems and suggests solutions, there are a few exhibits that just wallow in how bad it all is. The cleverly named Risk Watch, for instance, “reports information about current dangers, such as the political stability of the country the wearer is in or the current risk of contracting the H1N1 swine flu virus . . . The watch employs the normal language of design to comment on the cultural effects of secrecy, security, and fear.”  Or the Artificial Biological Clock, a commentary on modern woman’s reliance on information about her physical, mental and financial well-being, rather than “instinct” (i.e., her parents and partner, according to the catalog and website) to tell her when she’s ready to become a mother.

Anything that claims to be a comment would have to go, not just the Risk Watch and the Artificial Biological Clock, but also the Posterwall for the Twenty-first Century, which could be a very useful constantly changing display of event announcements, but, no, it’s a digital “comment on the ubiquitous texture of digital media.” Celebrity Wallpaper is a one-off repetitive  collage of celebrity

Mieke Gerritzen’s Celebrity Wallpaper

portraits “that enacts the obsessive logic of celebrity, with its relentless broadcast of familiar faces.” It’s creator believes “everyone  can become a designer by taking charge of communications tools—if not, they risk being designed themselves by the constant barrage of sales and marketing messages.”

I could have sworn we’d learned to avoid this kind of talk towards the end of the last century, but I guess we’re going to need a law against design-as-comment (unless it’s really, really good, like Princess Hijab, who was last seen adding head scarves and face veils to Dolce & Gabbana men’s underwear ads in the Paris Metro http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2010/09/15/princess-hijab-casts-a-veil-over-paris/).

The scaremongering video for the L.A. Earthquake: Get Ready Campaign opens and closes with the notice that it depicts the “realistic outcome of  a hypothetical but plausible magnitude 7.8 earthquake” in Southern California” – projected deaths, injuries, property and infrastructure damage, raging fires, disrupted utilities, inadequate government response, the individual as the first line of defense, all this with an anxiety-building sound track. Only about 25 percent of the video focuses on action: bolt house to foundation, get fire extinguisher and first aid kit, store three days worth of water per person (the introduction says there will be no water for weeks or months) and “secure your possessions” by buying property insurance, “secure” being a strange word that somehow implies insurance will save the illustrated Chinese vase from physical damage, insurance as the new styrofoam peanuts. This is called empowerment. No advice on what to do when, as portrayed in the introduction, little Jimmy is under a desk in school on one side of the San Andreas Fault and Mom is out on the streets on the other side, dodging debris and trying to get to him.

The designers of the Etón FR 600 radio say its large-scale controls and compact, rugged styling, aim to “mitigate the emotion of fear,”  but the mere existence of this thing goes a long way to mitigating my own fear—it is a radio, a walkie talkie, a cell-phone charger, flashlight, siren, and SOS light beacon. It is powered by a hand-crank dynamo and a solar cell that works even in overcast situations. It could save my life. It could even reunite Mom and little Jimmy, or at least keep Mom out of the range of falling debris while she tries to find out if he’s okay. Take that, L.A. earthquake!

For all my carping, this is a show that, had we known, could have saved enormous summer-camp fees—there’s enough

Hope Solar Tower

here to have kept an averagely curious kid engaged at a home or  library computer for the entire season just tracking down tantalizing missing or confusing information. For instance, I may have my doubts about the Hope Solar Tower, a mammoth tube of a chimney twice the height of the Empire State Building seated on a solar collector six times the size of Central Park, the whole thing worthy of Albert Speer, Sr., with innards suitable for the next James Bond movie—but it should send reasonably inquisitive kids racing to their computers to find out how the thing works—hot air, cold air, turbines, transmission cables, power for hundreds of thousands of homes.

There are dye-sensitized solar cells performing a sort of artificial photosynthesis for use in agriculture as well as in solar panels. There’s the turbine-equipped M10 Kite-power System, “a tethered wing to fly at altitudes where the wind is both

M10 Kite-Power

stronger and more consistent.” The adult in me wants to know how the tether avoids decapitating people, but the kid loves dreaming up all the gory antisocial antics that could take place during the transmission of energy from kite to grid.

Biowave

There’s also the biomimetic system mounted discreetly on the seabed to harvest the energy of ocean waves, and said to be friendly to marine life, a claim I feel iffy about and would love to have a kid research for me.

HydroNet, a theoretical response to rising water levels over the next century, saves the San Francisco that we love while creating a network of fresh water, geothermal energy and algae-generated hydrogen fuel for hover cars. While I’m still questioning why a watery situation demands new high-density housing that resembles seaweed,  there are enough issues to inspire not only research but also the planning of one’s own future city.

HydroNet: San Francisco 2108

Health Map has the serious purpose of tracking worldwide health issues in near-real time, but also plays into the macabre side of all kids. Go to the website, click on a map pin and Wow! Schistosomiasis in Poyang. What’s schistosomiasis? Where’s Poyang? What kind of place is that—what do they do there? World Mapper resizes countries based on hundreds upon hundreds of criteria–things like national populations at different times in history, internet use, airline departures, cable TV and cellphones, rainfall, religion, ecological footprint, mopeds and motorcycles, mortality.

WorldMapper proportion of airline departures worldwide© Copyright SASI Group (University of Sheffield) 

WorldMapper distribution of moped and motorcycles© Copyright SASI Group (University of Sheffield)

In the end, all my whingeing and whining is about unrequited love. I love the Cooper-Hewitt and this show, but they don’t love me back. They won’t tell me why the chopsticks on display are angled.  They printed half the catalog pages for this huge undertaking in small black type on unreadable dark backgrounds. The captions for most of the over 100 displays are placed aesthetically—and back-breakingly—at shin height. After all this time, the deafening refrigerator unit in the café still hasn’t been fixed. It makes me want to stamp my feet, tear my hair out and holler, “Get out here and design this, NOW!”

(ADMISSION IS FREE DURING NATIONAL DESIGN WEEK, OCTOBER 9-17, 2010 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, 2 East 91st Street New York, NY 10128  Museum Hours: Monday–Friday: 10 a.m.–5 p.m. /Saturday: 10 a.m.–6 p.m. /Sunday: 11 a.m. –6 p.m.  212.849.8400   http://www.cooperhewitt.org/)

“Why Design Now?” is available to travel after it closes its New York run in January, so keep checking your arts & culture pages for possible dates.

© Judith Davidsen and jdavidsen.wordpress.com, 2010. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Judith Davidsen and jdavidsen.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.