Smile

A smile is a facial expression formed primarily by flexing the muscles at the sides of the mouth. Some smiles include a contraction of the muscles at the corner of the eyes, an action known as a "Duchenne smile". Smiles performed without the eye contraction can be perceived as "fake".

Among humans, smiling is an expression denoting pleasure, sociability, happiness, or amusement. It is distinct from a similar but usually involuntary expression of anxiety known as a grimace. Although cross-cultural studies have shown that smiling is a means of communication throughout the world, there are large differences between different cultures, with some using smiles to convey confusion or embarrassment.

Historical background

Primatologist Signe Preuschoft traces the smile back over 30 million years of evolution to a "fear grin" stemming from monkeys and apes who often used barely clenched teeth to portray to predators that they were harmless. The smile may have evolved differently among species and especially among humans. Apart from Biology as an academic discipline that interprets the smile, those who study kinesics and psychology such as Freitas-Magalhaes view the smile as an affect display that can communicate feelings such as love, happiness, pride, contempt, and embarrassment.

Smile! (novel)

Smile! is a children's book by Geraldine McCaughrean. In 2004 it won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize Bronze Award.

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Smile (The Beach Boys album)

Smile (occasionally typeset as SMiLE) was a projected album by American rock band the Beach Boys intended to follow their 11th studio album Pet Sounds. After the group's songwriting leader Brian Wilson abandoned large portions of music recorded between 1966 and 1967, the band recorded and released the dramatically scaled-down Smiley Smile album in its place. Some of the original Smile tracks eventually found their way onto subsequent Beach Boys studio and compilation albums. As more fans learned of the project's origins, details of its recordings acquired considerable mystique, and it was later acknowledged as the most legendary unreleased album in the history of popular music.

Working with lyricist Van Dyke Parks, Smile was composed as a multi-thematic concept album, existing today in its unfinished and fragmented state as an unordered series of abstract musical vignettes. Its genesis came during the recording of Pet Sounds, when Wilson began recording a new single: "Good Vibrations". The track was created by an unprecedented recording technique: over 90 hours of tape was recorded, spliced, and reduced into a three-minute pop song. It quickly became the band's biggest international hit yet; Smile was to be produced in a similar fashion. Wilson touted the album "a teenage symphony to God," incorporating a diverse range of music styles including psychedelic, doo-wop, barbershop singing, ragtime, yodeling, early American folk, classical music, and avant-garde explorations into noise and musical acoustics. Its projected singles were "Heroes and Villains", a Western musical comedy, and "Vega-Tables", a satire of physical fitness.

Alma (play)

Alma is an example of site-specific promenade theatre (or more precisely a "polydrama") created by Israeli writer Joshua Sobol based on the life of Alma Mahler-Werfel. It opened in 1996, under the direction of Austrian Paulus Manker, at a former Jugendstil sanatorium building designed by architect Josef Hoffmann located in Purkersdorf near Vienna; and subsequently toured to locations in Venice, Lisbon, Los Angeles, Petronell, Berlin, Semmering, Jerusalem, and Prague.

Protagonist Alma Mahler-Werfel was initmately connected to an astonishing list of the famous creative spirits of the 20th century. Not only was she married sequentially to composer Gustav Mahler, architect Walter Gropius, and poet Franz Werfel (“The Song of Bernadette”), but she had also fervent and sometimes notorious love affairs with the painters Oskar Kokoschka, Gustav Klimt, and several others.

The performance is not presented as a conventional theatre piece, but instead takes place throughout an entire building in simultaneous scenes highlighting the events and defining relationships of Alma's tumultuous life, with each playing area fully equipped with appropriate furniture and props.

Oswald de Andrade

José Oswald de Souza Andrade (January 11, 1890 – October 22, 1954) was a Brazilian poet and polemicist. He was born and spent most of his life in São Paulo.

Andrade was one of the founders of Brazilian modernism and a member of the Group of Five, along with Mário de Andrade, Anita Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral and Menotti del Picchia. He participated in the Week of Modern Art (Semana de Arte Moderna).

Andrade is very important too for his manifesto of critical Brazilian nationalism, Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto), published in 1928. Its argument is that Brazil's history of "cannibalizing" other cultures is its greatest strength, while playing on the modernists' primitivist interest in cannibalism as an alleged tribal rite. Cannibalism becomes a way for Brazil to assert itself against European postcolonial cultural domination. The Manifesto's iconic line is "Tupi or not Tupi: that is the question." The line is simultaneously a celebration of the Tupi, who had been at times accused of cannibalism (most notoriously by Hans Staden), and an instance of cannibalism: it eats Shakespeare. On the other hand, some critics argue that Antropofagia, as a movement) was too heterogeneous to extract overarching arguments from it and that often it had little to do with a post-colonial cultural politics (Jauregui 2018, 2012)

Alma (French automobile)

The Alma was a French automobile manufactured by Établissements Alma in Courbevoie, Seine, between 1926 and 1929.

Only a few cars of this marque were produced. The most significant model (maybe the only one) was a two-seater coupé called Alma6 or Alma Six, referring to the proprietary in-line six cylinder engine of 1642 cc. The relatively small engines with three valves to a cylinder were developed by an aero engineer named Henri Vaslin. The engine was so flexible that a 2 speed gearbox was used. Alma cars were equipped with four wheel brakes.

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