Grey Gardens is a 1975 American documentary film by Albert and David Maysles. The film depicts the everyday lives of two reclusive, upper-class women, a mother and daughter both named Edith Beale, who lived in poverty at Grey Gardens, a derelict mansion at 3 West End Road in the wealthy Georgica Pond neighborhood of East Hampton, New York.  Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer also directed, and Susan Froemke was the associate producer.  The film's editors are credited as Hovde (who also edited Gimme Shelter and Salesman), Meyer and Froemke.  In 2010, the film was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", and in the 2014 Sight and Sound poll film critics voted Grey Gardens the tenth-best documentary film of all time.  In November 2012, it topped the list of 100 greatest documentary films of all time by PBS through public voting.  Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (1895–1977), known as "Big Edie", and her daughter Edith Bouvier Beale (1917–2002), known as "Little Edie", were the aunt and the first cousin, respectively, of former US First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.  The two women lived together at the Grey Gardens estate for decades with limited funds in increasing squalor and isolation.  The house was called Grey Gardens because of the color of the dunes, the concrete garden walls, and the sea mist.   Throughout the fall of 1971 and into 1972, their living conditions—their house was infested by fleas, inhabited by numerous cats and raccoons, deprived of running water, and filled with garbage and decay—were exposed as the result of an article in the National Enquirer and a cover story in New York Magazine after a series of inspections (which the Beales called "raids") by the Suffolk County Health Department.  With the Beale women facing eviction and the razing of their house, in the summer of 1972 Jacqueline Onassis and her sister Lee Radziwill provided the necessary funds to stabilize and repair the dilapidated house so that it would meet village codes.  Albert and David Maysles became interested in their story and received permission to film a documentary about the women, which was released in 1976 to wide critical acclaim.  Their direct cinema technique left the women to tell their own stories. Jerry Torre, the teenage handyman shown in the documentary (nicknamed "The Marble Faun" by "Little Edie"), was sought by the filmmakers for years afterward, and was found by chance in 2005 driving a New York City taxicab.  A 2011 documentary, The Marble Faun of Grey Gardens by Jason Hay and Steve Pelizza, showed that he was then a sculptor at the Art Students League of New York.  In 2006, Maysles made available previously unreleased footage for a special two-disc edition for the Criterion Collection.  It included a new feature titled The Beales of Grey Gardens, which also received a limited theatrical release.  Previously lost footage shot in 1972, using 16mm film, featuring Lee Radziwill visiting with the Beales, was released in 2017 as That Summer.  The documentary, and the women's story, were adapted as a full-length musical, Grey Gardens, with book by Doug Wright, music by Scott Frankel and lyrics by Michael Korie. Starring Christine Ebersole and Mary Louise Wilson, the show premiered at Playwrights Horizons in New York City in February 2006.  The musical re-opened on Broadway in November 2006 at the Walter Kerr Theatre, and was included in more than 25 "Best of 2006" lists in newspapers and magazines.  The Broadway production closed on July 29, 2007.  It was the first musical on Broadway ever to be adapted from a documentary.  Grey Gardens, an HBO film, stars Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as the Edies, with Jeanne Tripplehorn as Jacqueline Kennedy, and Daniel Baldwin as Julius Krug.  Directed and co-written (with Patricia Rozema) by filmmaker Michael Sucsy, filming began on October 22, 2007, in Toronto.  It flashes back and forth between Little Edie's life as a young woman and the actual filming/premiere of the 1975 documentary.  First aired on HBO on April 18, 2009, the film won six Primetime Emmys and two Golden Globes.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_Gardens   Ellen Hovde, Grey Gardens documentarian, died at 97 on July 10, 2023.   

rigmarole  noun  "a long, rambling discourse; incoherent harangue," 1736, apparently from an altered, Kentish colloquial survival of ragman roll "long list, roster, or catalogue" (c. 1500).  The origins of this are in Middle English rageman "document recording accusations or offenses," also "an accuser" (late 13c.).  For this, Middle English Compendium compares Old Norse rogs-maðr "a slanderer," from older *vrogs-mannr.  With folk-etymology alterations along the way.  By late 14c. rageman was the name of a game involving a long roll of verses, each descriptive of personal character or appearance.  In Anglo-French c. 1300 Ragemon le bon, "Ragemon the good," is the heading on one set of verses, suggesting a characterization.  The sense was transferred to "foolish activity or commotion" generally by 1939.  https://www.etymonline.com/word/rigmarole  Thank you, Muse reader!    

Milan Kundera, the Czech writer who became one of the 20th century’s most influential novelists, but spent much of his life in seclusion rarely engaging with the public, died on July 11, 2023 at the age of 94.  Kundera is among the world’s most translated authors.  He spent the rest of his life in exile in Paris, becoming a French citizen in 1981.  It was in Paris that Kundera’s literary career truly blossomed, with the publication of his three most acclaimed works, “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “Immortality.”  He scrutinized translations of his work and banned all adaptation of his books following the 1988 film based on “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”  Kundera served as a consultant on the movie, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche, but later said the picture had little in common with the spirit of the book.  During the late 1960s his first novel, “The Joke,” was published. “Immortality” was the last novel he wrote in his native Czech language before switching to French–a move that underlined Kundera’s complicated relationship with his homeland following his exile.  He returned rarely and when he did, he traveled incognito, booking into hotels under a pseudonym.  While his Czech citizenship was restored in 2019, he was by then a French author whose home was in France.  Ivana Kottasová  https://www.cnn.com/style/article/milan-kundera-obituary-intl/index.html    

Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe.  For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid.  There are no absolute continuums.  There are no surfaces.  There are no straight lines.  R. Buckminster Fuller, engineer, designer, and architect (12 July 1895-1983)  A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2695  July 12, 2023