Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Cameo. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Cameo. Sort by date Show all posts

Wednesday, January 17, 2024

Cameo

Cameo (pronounced kam-ee-oh)

(1) A technique of engraving upon a gem or other stone, as onyx, in such a way that an underlying stone of one color is exposed as a background for a low-relief design of another color.

(2) A gem or other stone so engraved; a medallion, as on a brooch or ring, with a profile head carved in relief

(3) A literary sketch, small dramatic scene, or the like, that effectively presents or depicts its subject.

(4) As "cameo, "cameo role" or "cameo appearance", a minor part played by a prominent performer in a single scene of a production, originally un-credited yet deliberately obvious (a la Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980)).  In modern use, the sense has extended to any brief appearance, credited or not.

(5) In commercial use, a color of creamy neutral ivory, the name an allusion to the hue most associated with the jewelry.

(6) The industry slang for "cameo lighting", a technique used on stage or set usually by restricting the output of a spotlight to a narrower beam and the reverse effect of "silhouette lighting" (a complementary chiaroscuro technique).  

1375–1425: From the Italian cam(m)eo from the Old French camaieu, of uncertain origin; replacing late Middle English camew & cameu both direct borrowings from the Old French.  The ultimate root is held usually to be the Medieval Latin cammaeus (later camaeus), of unknown origin but both the Arabic qamaa'il (flower buds) and the Persian chumahan (agate) have been suggested as the source.  Cameo is a noun & verb and cameoed & cameoing are verbs; the noun plural is cameos or cameoes.

In the early fifteenth century, kaadmaheu, camew, chamehieux and many other spellings, all from the early thirteenth century in Anglo-Latin circulated, all meaning "engraving in relief upon a precious stone with two layers of colors" (such as onyx, agate, or shell and done so as to utilize the effect of the colors).  These fell soon from use as the words derived from the Medieval Latin cammaeus and the Old French camaieu prevailed.  By the nineteenth century, use extended to other raised, carved work on a miniature scale.  The transferred sense of "small character or part that stands out from other minor parts" in a plays etc is from 1928, a derivation from the earlier meaning "short literary sketch or portrait", first noted in 1851, a transferred sense from cameo silhouettes.  A cameotype was a small, vignette daguerreotype mounted in a jeweled setting, the first examples of which were produced in 1864.

Cameo & Silhouette

A classic, simple silhouette (left), a nineteenth century hardstone cameo in 18 karat yellow gold in the mid-nineteenth century Etruscan Revival style (centre) and a  silhouette with the detailing which became popular in the late 1700s (right).

As artistic representations, there's obviously some overlap between a silhouette and a cameo but they are different forms.  A silhouette is inherently a two dimensional rendering of a shape (typically a portrait but they can be of any scene or object) which classically were simple and of a solid colour (usually black) on a contrasting (usually white or cream) background.  Originally, there was no detailing of features but that soon became common.  Silhouette portraits were highly popular in the eighteenth & nineteenth centuries and the form was especially popular with untrained (indeed unskilled) amateurs because of the cheapness and simplicity of the form, a finished work requiring little more than two sheets of paper (black & white), a pair of scissors and a pot of glue.  A cameo differs in that it is three-dimensional, an embossed or raised piece, usually in relief.  The most prized antique cameos are those engraved on semi-precious gemstones, agate, forms of onyx, shells and lava but in modern use synthetic materials are not uncommon and, being small and able to be rendered in a single piece, can be 3D printed although the quality of these doesn’t (yet) match something hand-carved.

Cameo.com

Launched in March 2017, cameo.com is a US-based distribution & content-sharing website, its niche being a platform on which celebrities and others can sell personalized video messages to fans or anyone else prepared to pay, the site claiming more than thirty-thousand sources are available.  The price per clip is said to extend from US$5 to US$3000 and operates as a dynamic supply and demand curve, the price said to rise or fall in response to elasticity in demand, all determined by an AI algorithm which is predictive (able to anticipate a rise in demand and adjust prices accordingly).

For US$400 (or US$20 for a DM), one can receive a personalized video message from Lindsay Lohan.  The service limits the text to two-hundred and fifty (250) characters so economy of language is encouraged.  The client is able to request the theme and possible topics might include relationship counselling, fashion advice, career management & international relations.  In most cases, it seems not necessary to approach this with undue urgency, many of the celebrities available on Cameo.com "for a limited time!" have been listed for some years.

Lindsay Lohan at the Mean Girls (2024) premiere, New York, January 2024.

Lindsay Lohan’s cameo in the 2024 (musical) re-make of Mean Girls (2004) attracted comment for a number of reasons but what most impressed many was the fee, reported by entertainment industry magazine Variety as US$500,000.  While that sum is unverified, what has been confirmed is that her cameo (in the math competition scene) required four hours on set; given the simplicity of the math, Variety didn’t bother printing its calculation of the hourly rate but given the 2004 production was shot over three months for which Ms Lohan was paid a reputed US$1 million, it’s clear inflation alone doesn’t account for the differential.  Still, any commodity is worth only what a buyer is prepared to pay and it’s a specialized supply & demand curve because there’s only one Lindsay Lohan.

Thursday, October 24, 2024

Consigliere

Consigliere (pronounced kawn-see-lye-re)

(1) A member of a criminal organization or syndicate who serves as an adviser to the leader (associated historically with legal advisors in the Italian Mafia and similar structures in other places).

(2) In modern use, an advisor or confidant.

(3) A surname of Italian origin (originally occupational).

1969 (in common use in English): An un-adapted borrowing of the Italian consigliere (councilor) (the feminine form consigliera), from consiglio (advice; counsel), from the Latin cōnsilium (council) from cōnsulō, the construct being con- (from the preposition cum (with), from the Old Latin com, from the Proto-Italic kom, from the primitive Indo-European óm (next to, at, with, along).  It was cognate with the Proto-Germanic ga- (co-), the Proto-Slavic sъ (with) and the Proto-Germanic hansō.  It was used with certain words to add a notion similar to those conveyed by with, together, or joint or with certain words to intensify their meaning) + sulo (from the primitive Indo-European selh- (to take, to grab)). + -ium (the –ium suffix (used most often to form adjectives) was applied as (1) a nominal suffix (2) a substantivisation of its neuter forms and (3) as an adjectival suffix.  It was associated with the formation of abstract nouns, sometimes denoting offices and groups, a linguistic practice which has long fallen from fashion.  In the New Latin, as the neuter singular morphological suffix, it was the standard suffix to append when forming names for chemical elements).  Consigliere is a noun, the noun plural is consiglieri or (in English) consiglieres.

Because of the way Google harvests data for their ngrams, they’re not literally a tracking of the use of a word in society but can be usefully indicative of certain trends, (although one is never quite sure which trend(s)), especially over decades.  As a record of actual aggregate use, ngrams are not wholly reliable because: (1) the sub-set of texts Google uses is slanted towards the scientific & academic and (2) the technical limitations imposed by the use of OCR (optical character recognition) when handling older texts of sometime dubious legibility (a process AI should improve).  Where numbers bounce around, this may reflect either: (1) peaks and troughs in use for some reason or (2) some quirk in the data harvested.

Consigliere entered general use in 1969 when it appeared in the novel The Godfather by Mario Puzo (1920–1999), the first of what became a series of five (not wholly sequential and the last co-authored) works revolving around a fictional Italian-American Mafia family.  Use spiked after 1972 when the first of three feature film adaptations was released.  Advisors and confidants of course exist in many parts of society but the significance of the use of “consigliere” is the historic baggage of it being associated with mafiosi (in the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure anyone a part of a criminal (mafia-like) association formed by three or more individuals).  So it’s a loaded word although in Italian there are notionally innocuous forms including consigliere comunale (town councillor), consigliere delegato (managing director) and consigliere d'amministrazione (board member).  It Italian, the related forms include the adjective consigliabile (advisable, the plural being consigliabili), the transitive verb consigliare (to advise, to suggest, to recommend, to counsel), the noun & verb consiglio (advise, counsel; council (in the senses of "an assembly", the plural being consigli)) and the adjective (and in Latin a verb) consiliare (board; council (as la sala consiliare used in the sense of "council chamber")

So a consigliere is a trusted advisor or counselor, historically associated with the Italian Mafia but later also with organized crime in general though the suggestion of a link with things Italian (not necessarily Sicilian) remained strong.  Within organized crime, not all consiglieri were legal advisors although in fiction that does seem to be a common role but all in some way offered “behind the scenes” strategic guidance.  Consigliere can be used metaphorically in a non-criminal context but because of connotations, if the individuals involved have some Italian ancestry, there can lead to accusations of “ethnic stereotyping” and the best neutral descriptors are probably adviser (or advisor) or councillor (counselor in US use) and there are also specific versions such as “legal counsel” “political advisor” etc.

Consulente di moda Kim Kardashian (left) with the client Lindsay Lohan (right).  The consulente di moda (fashion advisor) is a specialized fork of the consiglieri and before she became one of the internet’s more remarkable installations, Kim Kardashian (b 1980) was a “personal stylist” & “wardrobe consultant”, her clients including Paris Hilton (b 1981) and Lindsay Lohan (b 1986).

There are similar terms with their own connotations.  "Camarilla" describes a small, secretive group of advisors or influencers who manipulate decisions behind the scenes and is often used in a political context; notable members can be described as an “éminence grise”.  The term "grey eminence" was from the French éminence grise, (plural eminences grises or eminence grises and literally “grey eminence” and the French spelling is sometimes used in the English-speaking world).  It was applied originally to François Leclerc du Tremblay (1577–1638), also known as Père Joseph, a French Capuchin friar who was the confidant and agent of Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642), the chief minister of France under Louis XIII (1601–1643; King of France 1610-1643).  The term refers to du Tremblay’s influence over the Cardinal (cardinals in the Roman Catholic Church enjoying the honorific “your eminence”), and the colour of his habit (he wore grey).  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) sub-titled his biography of Leclerc (L'Éminence Grise (1941)): A Study in Religion and Politics and discussed the nature of both religion & politics, his purpose being to explore the relationship between the two and his work was a kind of warning to those of faith who are led astray by proximity to power.  Use of the term éminence grise suggests a shadowy, backroom operator who avoids publicity, operating in secret if possible yet exercising great influence over decisions, even to the point of being “the power behind the throne”.

In this a gray eminence differs from a king-maker or a svengali in that those designations are applied typically to those who operate in the public view, even flaunting their power and authority.  Probably the closest synonym of the grey eminence is a “puppetmaster” because of the implication of remaining hidden, and although never seen, the strings they pull are if one looks closely enough.  The svengali was named for the hypnotist character Svengali in George du Maurier’s (1834–1896) novel Trilby (1894); Svengali seduced, dominated and manipulated Trilby who was a young, half-Irish girl, transforming her into a great singer but in doing so he made her utterly dependent on him and this ruthlessly he exploited.

From the New York Post, 23 October 2024.

So given all that it was interesting in October 2024 to note the choice of words made by elements of the Murdoch press in reporting the latest legal setback suffered by Rudy Giuliani (b 1944), a politician and now disbarred (struck-off) attorney who first achieved worldwide fame was the mayor of New York City (1994-2001) at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.  That later would be turned into infamy with antics such as his later (unintended) cameo in a satirical film and his role as legal counsel to MAGA-era (Make America Great Again) Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021), notably his part in the matter of Dominion Voting Systems v Fox News (Delaware Superior Court: N21C-03-257; N21C-11-082) which culminated (thus far) in Fox settling the matter by paying Dominion some US$790 million, the alternative being to continue the case and allow more of Fox’s internal documents to enter the public domain.

In choosing to describe Mr Giuliani as Mr Trump’s “consigliere”, a person or persons unknown within the Murdoch press presumably pondered which noun to use and there certainly were precedents for others to appear, the corporation’s outlets at times having previously described him as “Mr Trump’s personal attorney”, “Head of the Trump legal team” and even “Donald Trump’s cybersecurity advisor”, the last engagement perhaps one of the less expected political appointments of recent decades.  What of course made the use “consigliere” interesting was (1) Mr Giuliani being the son of parents who both were children of Italian immigrants and (2) Mr Trump being a convicted felon so those not of a generous nature might suspect the New York Post was doing a bit of “ethnic stereotyping”.  However, it’s not a unique use because Mr Giuliani has been described as Mr Trump’s “consigliere” by publications which exist at various points on political spectrum including the New York Post (2016), Aljazeera (2018), the Washington Blade (a LGBTQQIAAOP newspaper) (2019), The Economist (2019), the Washington Post (2019), The Nation (2022), Vanity Fair (2022) and Salon.com (2023).  Whether the connotations of the word have become strengthened since Mr Trump gained his unique status as a convicted felon can be debated but the thoughts of the now homeless Mr Giuliani presumably are focused elsewhere.