Happy Yé-Yé Veterans Day from Les Idoles

This psychedelic musical satire serves as both a critique and inadvertently a celebration of French pop music and yé-yé culture in the sixties, which seemed to fuel the revolutionary spirit in French youth while also offering up easy escapism.  Watch the American Flag Freakout Dance below:

Les Idoles apparently received a warm reception in France when it debuted in 1968, but for one reason or another the movie was never released in the United States.  More Les Idoles film stills and info at Cinebeats.

Mondrian's Glasses and Pipe : Paris, 1926

By André Kertész

View the André Kertész collection at the National Gallery of Art

Boulevard Saint-Germain : 1957

Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg, Place St.-Germain-des-Pres, Paris, late 1957. c.Harold Chapman.

Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg in Lee Forest's room, Hotel de Londres, Paris, December 1957. c. Harold Chapman.

Peter Orlovsky & Allen Ginsberg, their room at 9 rue Git-le-Coeur, Paris December 1957. c. by Harold Chapman

From the Allen Ginsberg Project

The Substance of The Thing Felt : Edward Steichen

 

A portrait of photographer Edward Steichen by Yousuf Karsh (1965)

Triumph of the Egg (1921)

Loretta Young (1932)

View the Steichen photograph collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

Paul and Grace Hartman (1936)

 

 Heavy Roses, Voulangis, France (1914)

Sarah Moon by Martine Franck

French photographer and filmmaker Sarah Moon as photographed by Martine Franck in 1983 in Paris.  At the time, Moon was producing her book, Les Petit Chaperon Rouge (Little Red Riding Hood).

Plaster of Paris

Sixties Parisian street scene, 1963.

Secrets of Electricity with Jacques Rouxel

French animator Jacques Rouxel initiates us into the secrets of electricity!

Occupied Paris

Parisians under wartime occupation (1941-1944) by Andre Zucca

February Fashions of Paris | 1948

Parisian Fashion Show, 1948

Tous Mes Copains | Sylvie 1967

Sylvie Vartan and French Friends, 1967

Why So Syrias? | Intellectual Soldiers, 1940

French Foreign Legion soldiers at their Syrian Outpost, 1940.

Dirty Old Man | Henry Miller in Paris, 1969

Henry Miller in Paris, 1969

So we dance, to an ice-cold frenzied rhythm, to short waves and long waves, a dance on the inside of the cup of nothingness, each centimeter of lust running to dollars and cents. We taxi from one perfect female to another seeking the vulnerable defect, but they are flawless and impermeable in their impeccable lunar consistency. 

This is the icy white maidenhead of love's logic, the web of the ebbed tide, the fringe of absolute vacuity. And on this fringe of the virginal logic of perfection I am dancing the soul dance of white desperation, the last white man pulling the trigger on the last emotion, the gorilla of despair beating his breast with immaculate gloved paws. I am the gorilla who feels his wings growing, a giddy gorilla in the center of a satin-like emptiness; the night too grows like an electrical plant, shooting white-hot buds into velvet black space. I am the black space of the night in which the buds break with anguish, a starfish swimming on the frozen dew of the moon. 

I am the germ of a new insanity, a freak dressed in intelligible language, a sob that is buried like a splinter in the quick of the soul. I am dancing the very sane and lovely dance of the nostalgic gorilla. These are my brothers and sisters who are insane and unangelic. We are dancing in the hollow of the cup of nothingness. We are of one flesh, but separated like stars.

-Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

Men of Distinction | Parisian Cafe Scene, 1961

People having lunch at cafe in Paris, 1961.

Countess with Advanced Eyewear Style, 1947

Portrait of Countess Ludovica Gaetani d'Aragona wearing straw hat with veil outdoors at a Golf Club in Rome, 1947.

A countess is the wife of a nobleman in European countries. The word count came into English from the French comte, itself from Latin comes—in its accusative comitem—meaning "companion", and later "companion of the emperor, delegate of the emperor".

The Wild Beast | Raoul Dufy, 1951

French Fauvist Raoul Dufy, 1951.

I don't follow any system. All the laws you can lay down are only so many props to be cast aside when the hour of creation arrives.

Beatniks on the Banks | Paris, 1963

Parisian beatniks hanging out on bank of the Seine River, Paris 1963.

Say "nuh-BOE-kof" | Vladimir Nabokov, 1958

Novelist Vladimir Nabokov looking out of car window. He likes to work in the car, writing on index cards. Nabokov never learned how to drive, his wife Vera acted as his chauffeur.

Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.
-Vladimir Nabokov, Paris Review, Oct. 1967