(what is this?)

not your grandma's Victorian

2012-01-29T21:16:00.001-05:00

perhaps a Josef Hoffman? No! its from 1867!

table by Godwin, 1876. those brass tipped legs!

It's not 1950s Blenko, its 1890 Dresser!

folding chair by Godwin, 1875

chair, Godwin, 1883

chair, Dresser, 1880-83

toast rack, Dresser, 1878

occasional table, Godwin, 1876

Christopher Dresser

Edward William Godwin

The other day I came upon a post about architect and design reformer Edward William Godwin (1833 – 1886) on an appealing interiors and design blog called Hunters & Gatherers at Home. I already knew about Godwin, but H&G’s post really reminded me of the revolutionary quality of some of his work. Also included here, the more famous polymath Christopher Dresser (1834–1904). I think these pieces are astonishing.

Godwin picked up architecture on his own. Dresser studied at the then brand new (and oddly fascist sounding) Government Schools of Design. Created in 1837 to better integrate science and art, the school's aim was to improve design for industry and manufacture. Can you imagine? In this country people were too busy displacing Indians, preserving slavery and clearing brush to care about something as rarefied as design. (Perhaps I overstate.)

Godwin steeped himself in Gothic Revival for a time but both he and Dresser really found themselves when they discovered Japanese crafts and decorative arts. Japan opened to trade with the West in 1853, and suddenly Japanese items flooded the market. All the design reformers, artists, and Aesthetic hipsters of the time went Japan-mad. It remained a cultural influence through the rest of the 19th century.//

Godwin created the crazy sideboard at top in 1867 for his own home. He explained:

"When I came to furniture I found that hardly anything could be bought ready-made that
was at all suitable to the requirements of the case. l therefore set to work and designed a lot of furniture...."

Lest you need reminding, this is the type of thing Godwin might have felt wasn't quite right:

cabinet, Herter Brothers, c. 1872

Fear of the Blank Page, addressed.

2012-01-22T14:07:00.000-05:00

It's been way too long since the last post! It’s been nagging at me.
I've been wrapped up in design for the Shelley exhibition which opens next month at the New York Public Library. Everything is coming together— but coming all at once: brochure, text panels, signage, back wall installation graphic, murals.... So I haven’t had a clear enough mind to post on readings or Ideas, in the grand sense.

I often get unduly anxious at starting a post that attempts to manifest/clarify some abstract pearl of wisdom that is rolling around in my head. What am I trying to say? I understand very well the proliferation of tumblrs with nice pictures and nothing else.

Here, some blank (or essentially so) pages that have been design inspiration in my Shelley work.

A pig, a bowl of food, and other visions for 2012

2012-01-01T00:30:00.000-05:00

Wiener Werkstatte New Years card by Mela Koehler, c. 1908-1914

New Years Eve, c 1935-43, Albert Abramowitz

Bowl of New Years Food, Teisai Hokuba, 1808

Times Square, New Years Eve (detail), c 1945, International News photo; MCNY

from “284 views of a party, New Year's Eve party at home of Robert Penn Warren" by Walker Evans,December 31, 1960

7am (New Years Day) c1930, Moholy-Nagy

All images except noted Metropolitan Museum of Art.

autochrome christmas

2011-12-24T08:00:00.000-05:00

MERRY CHRISTMAS

HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL.

thank you for reading or just stopping by!

Autochromes c. 1920s by Charles Zoller. Zoller(1854-1934) was a successful furniture dealer and prolific amateur photographer from Rochester, NY. On a trip to Europe in 1907 he became acquainted with the brand new autochrome process and started photographing in color. He documented life in Rochester and recorded journeys across the country and in Europe. The George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, in Rochester, houses approximately 3900 Zoller autochromes. While many betray Zoller's seeming fascination with photographing trees, flowers and close-up portraits of citrus fruit, the selection online will reward the patient viewer.

awkward

2011-12-18T16:31:00.000-05:00


The clumsy Chippendale crest shape is a spot-on evocation of the strenuous efforts of a journeyman sign maker, c 1780s.

This sort of lettering puts us squarely in the second quarter of the 19th century

As much as it appears otherwise at first glance, the signs here are not the stock of some high-end Americana dealer. They were all created by Heidi Howard, a Rhode Island School of Design graduate, in her Eastford, Connecticut studio. The boards are actual aged wood planks whenever possible, and the hand-painted and lettered signs are assembled with antique hand-cut nails. The whole duly aged and weathered and... We've entered dangerous territory here haven't we? A knowing, labor-intensive recreation of an ostensibly serendipitously found naive, ephemeral object? Kitsch or cuteness? I'm torn. I'm genuinely drawn to many of these—I love the awkwardness.* Taken individually, the aesthetic spirit conjured is quite beautiful. The decorative shapes and silhouettes look suitably like the earnest efforts of a rural journeyman sign maker c. 1800. The lettering, punctuation, and spacing is near pitch perfect. The research and historical knowledge is emphatically there. And yet I wouldn't be wholly surprised to find one in a Massachusetts TGI Fridays. Which makes me sad. // All signs by the undeniably talented Heidi Howard

* “naive” and primitive lettering and figures like this can be found on gravestones (see here and here). Several of Ms Howard's signs take cues from the spindly, hesitating lettering of early and mid 18th century, elsewhere she takes on the look of the “fat face” and decorative letters of the 1830s.

color me impressed

2011-12-15T09:10:00.000-05:00

This morning I woke up repeating "Stygian Black".
Stygian is the adjectival form for the mythological River Styx... as in the boundary of the Underworld. Scary sounding dream, right? EXCEPT in the dream I was saying it in the context of some fashion, color-naming brainstorming session. Thus, it was actually some sort of wish fulfillment... because I've always wanted to get paid to be a color namer for paint. Here, a good color (re)post from the archives:

I just read a book I'd gotten months ago and promptly forgot about, "Color: a natural history of the palette" by Victoria Finlay. The author, a British journalist living in Hong Kong, sets out to explore the origins--historical, cultural, physical-- of pigments and dyes. The book, organized loosely by color swatch, is sometimes weighted down with her travelogues of traipsing off to China for fabled greens or meandering through Afghanistan in search of ultramarine mines. But what, early on, had annoyed me to the point of putting the book on the shelf: the chatty, lady's magazine lightness proved to be less of an obstacle as the book wore on. I tend to like bits and pieces, historical oddities and unraveled edges and it certainly provides just that.

In the book, color, something we think of in benign almost frivolous terms (pink or blue case for your cellphone), takes on gritty physicality, volatility, even toxicity. Metals, stones, berries, bark, insects, shells are ground, smoked, burnt and acidified. Through distilling and decanting, arcane alchemical processes produce miraculous results.

The often harsh paradoxes of the material form of color are amazing. Velvety rich blacks rendered from oak gall, soot, and charred bone, brilliant reds from beetles, pristine white from a red dust. Fugitive and unstable, there's an almost spiteful nature to unfixed color-- saintly whites turn black, brilliant reds fade to sickly pink, and puritan blacks that turn a disturbing orange. The almost allegorical danger inherent in many of these colors is fascinating as well: lead white, used extensively in cosmetics and paint and prized for its transcendent luminosity, caused "plumbism" and slowly destroyed one's liver, kidneys and mind. Arsenic used to fashion Scheele's Green, which accented Napoleon's wallpaper on St. Helena, may have contributed to his death.

---
Here's where one can learn a bit about wonderful things like Gamboge, Mummy and Orpiment:
• Museum of Fine Art Boston: conservation and art materials encyclopedia
• Also, a paint-making site.---

images: I'm obsessed with paint color chips-- the typology aspects, the naming, the...prettiness. At top are some Benjamin Moores, below Farrow & Ball (a company I've written about before, in one of my favorite posts from a simpler time); a weaving color/pattern sample book made in 1763 by John Kelly of Norwich, England, from the Victoria & Albert Museum; powdered colors for painting on velvet, 1814, also from the V&A. The three bottles are labelled 'Ackermann's brilliant carmine', 'W H Edwards's lilac purple', and 'W H Edwards's sunflower yellow'.; three of five bottles of dye powder I found when a dye works was being dismantled on Spring and Thompson Streets around 1998, if you can believe. They are from 1951-54 and are labelled things like "Benzo Fast Yellow" from appealing, monolithically-named companies like General Dyestuff Corporation and National Aniline Division of the Allied Chemical and Dye Company.

Empire state of mind

2011-12-11T16:41:00.001-05:00

Samarkand

Bukhara

Bukhara.
(I see here some historical precedence for the Bukharan McMansions of Queens)

Armenian woman

carpet seller (detail)

fruit seller (detail)

Bukhara

above two, typical natives of Dagestan

Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky (August 30 1863 – September 27, 1944), the photographer behind all of these images, was a Russian of noble extraction who studied chemistry under Mendeleev (creator of the periodic table). Moving to Berlin for more study, Gorsky applied his scientific background to photo chemical processing. He developed a pioneering method of creating color slide film and color motion pictures, and eventually garnered patents in Germany, England, France and Italy.

His process used a camera that took a series of three monochrome pictures in sequence, each through a different-colored filter. By projecting all three monochrome pictures using correctly colored light, it was possible to reconstruct the original color scene. (wikipedia)

Around 1905 Gorsky started devising a plan to systematically document the vast diversity of the Russian empire. Accomplished and well-connected, he was invited in 1909 to make a photographic demonstration for Tsar Nicholas and his family. The presentation went over so well that the ill-fated monarch gave Gorsky a specially equipped railroad-car darkroom, two skeleton key permits granting him access to restricted areas around the empire and cooperation from the far-flung bureaucracy. Suddenly, his herculean project became possible. Gorsky documented the Russian Empire from 1909 through 1915, and gave photo lectures thereafter. He eventually fled the country shortly after the Revolution, with the authorities confiscating about half his archive because of purportedly “sensitive material”.

After settling in Paris, Gorsky stored the remainder of his photographs and fragile glass plates in the basement of his apartment building. A few years after his death, in 1948, the US Library of Congress purchased the material from his heirs for $3500–$5000. Outside the Library of Congress collection, nothing else of Gorsky's work has yet been found.

Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky in 1912

Tuesday with Mori

2011-11-29T11:24:00.000-05:00

Oh sorry, that title's a really bad pun.

I came across the Farber Gravestone Collection, a photographic resource of 13,500 images documenting the carving on old gravestones and my heart did a leap. Oh so long ago I made a little book about gravestone carving for my senior project. It was mainly a graphic design exercise on the changing iconography of gravestones, but the text came out of a paper I wrote for a history class. What a help this collection would have been! The photos existed (most images the Farbers, a husband and wife team, took were from the 1970s and 80s) but they were on a shelf somewhere in the American Antiquarian Society and without the power of the internets, I was Farberless.
I knew that formally, Colonial graves had headstones and footstones, like a bed for the occupants' everlasting repose. This idea also lent the markers their distinctive headboard shape. What I learned was that they typically had carving on the outer sides of the stones, so the visitor-reader would not tread on the grave. Also, graves were positioned with occupants' feet to the East, so that come Judgment they would stand to face the rising sun.

Skulls, Death's heads, cherubs, hourglasses-- the symbols were often copied directly from engravings that came over from England. These were then copied again and again by dedicated stonemasons or itinerant carvers, mostly without the benefit of reference to the original design. Changed, embellished, streamlined and mutated by skilled intent or by lesser hands, the imagery is at once repetitive and wildly divergent. Truly bizarre figures emerge. Wings become decorative swirls, collars, mustaches. Leering Death's heads become benign cyphers, cherubs morph into strange stupefied-looking sexless trophy heads. Once the Puritan ethic loosens its grip, attempts at portraiture get added into the mix and things got really interesting. When the fashion for Neo-classicism trickled down to the gravemarker, winged messengers were supplanted by urns, willows, swags and often, a disembodied hand pointing skyward.
The inscriptions, too, can be fascinating in all their mangled phonetics and "ye Olde"-iness. Sometimes creepily elliptical ("RB. di'd 1712"), or filled with florid religious boilerplate, they can sometimes stop your heart with personal, real, specificity. At top, little Aaron Bowers, aged 2 years 10 months, was "instantly kill'd by a stack of boards" on September 12, 1791. And there he is, splayed out behind two planks.

My Trembling Heart with Grief overflows,
While I Record the death of Those;
Who died by Thunder Sent from Heaven,
In Seventeen hundred and Seventy Seven

Abraham Rice
struck by lightening
1777
Framingham, Massachusetts

can you hear me now?

2011-11-28T21:00:00.000-05:00

Oh, it's taking me forever to write my next post!
In the mean time, a repost, with updates:
Recently I said to a friend that I found the recorded subway stop voices disappointing. Granted, the announcements are audible and intelligible but still. The hyper-enunciating, the shaky emphasis: these are not New York voices! Each time the "Q" and "B" woman in Brooklyn swallows "'DEE-kulb' Avenue" I grit my teeth. (It's "de-KALB" or "DEE-KALB" for emphasis.) Its like the staff of some mid-West hotel got into the control room. Keep local color in NYC!

Does anyone remember when taxis started playing announcements in the mid-nineties? The very first debut recording of these was in circulation for only a few months but it was a doozy. It incorporated a voice of such stupendous color, such unaffected Outer Boroughness, such unintended hilarity that it is seared into my brain. (I regret there isnt an audio file I could find):

"Please make shoo-aw ta take awl of yaw belawngings, and dohn fuget to get a receipt frum tha dry-vuh."

The woman behind the voice (a secretary at the place that made taxi meters) was pressed into service in a move of stunning naivete and sheer serendipitous brilliance. She became a brief pre-social media celebrity. If that happened today she'd have fan pages, followers and a reality series contract. //

I was barely reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about cell phone problems when, in a section about sound quality, I came across the intriguing term “Harvard sentences.” Evidently cellular systems engineers actually travel around the country testing signal quality-- somewhat like the familiar Verizon "can you hear me now" guy-- by sending out aural snippets known as Harvard sentences:

a collection of phonetically balanced sentences that measure a large range of different qualities in the human voice. These were originally published in 1969 as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers recommended practice for speech quality measurements.

The sentences go a little something like this (in random selection):

"She has a smart way of wearing clothing. These days a leg of chicken is a rare dish. Cars and buses stalled in snow drifts. Both lost their lives in the raging storm. The pencils have all been used. The stale smell of old beer lingers. The beetle droned in the hot June sun. A gold ring will please most any girl. When the frost has come it is time for turkey..."

Sort of open-mic beatnik free verse, no? I have the mental image of someone in a fluorescent-lit cubicle reciting all 200 sentences with overly precise diction into a large reel to reel tape recorder. No indication as to how they were named but I would guess Harvard is the stand-in for the concept of a precise ideal.

So I started thinking about pronunciation and the classic tone and phrasing found in movies and newsreels of the 1930s and 40s. Listen to Katherine Hepburn, William Powell, Cary Grant, and notably, FDR whose "fear" was rendered as "fee-ah." Where did that manner came from, and more importantly, where did it go? I've found that what I've been talking about here is called "Mid-Atlantic English" according to wikipedia:

a style of speech formerly cultivated by actors for use in theatre, and by news announcers...institutions cultivated a norm influenced by the Received Pronunciation of southern England as an international norm of English pronunciation. According to William Labov, the teaching of this pronunciation declined sharply after the end of World War II.

It's a little New England, a little gin & tonic at the yacht races, with a dash of "thee-ay-tuh."

Little Edie Beale in Grey Gardens and any appearance by William F Buckley were probably the last times I heard a version of this pronunciation. And what about its socio-economic and narrative opposite, the Toity-toid an' Toid /James Cagney New York Gangsterese? Hearing them creates as much a sense of temporal distance ("This is not now, I'm listening and watching something from the past") as the b/w of old footage or the style of period clothes...///

Amazing sound resource here
A civil war soldier remembers his experience on the morning Abraham Lincoln died.

recent acquisitions*

2011-11-11T15:21:00.001-05:00

Saranac Lake, Adirondack Mountains, NY, c. 1905
I love crude old color lithography—
the kind that is made up from visible dots of poorly registered color.
With its oddball woody frame I think this might be one of my favorite postcards ever...
/// /// ///

I've convinced myself that the mounted photos, below, are fairly interesting.
I plucked them from a big pile of mess, along with a few klunkers (on further consideration)
and couple mangled prints for $20 total. The lady was actually surprised that I just handed over the bill
without a protest, so maybe I overpaid. ha.

"Seneca"
Who knew Seneca looked like a haggard beggar?
I guess dealing with Nero and being forced to commit suicide will take its toll.

"Balbo figlia, Museo di Napoli" by Roberto Rive (embossed stamp), c 1870s
Marcus Nonius Balbus was a governor of Herculaneum—and this must be the family!I find it funny that this kid's head is so inflated. A bulbous Balbo.

The Pantheon, Paris, and detail, by Albert Mansuy, c1860s
This site, which is selling this exact same albumen print for 32 euros, says,
"Albert Mansuy had a little studio in Paris and sold his work to Martinet retailer, rue Hautecoeur, Paris.
Scarce, rarer than Quinet, Levy, Neurdein & other studios."
The details are pretty great—Its 4:15 and the advertising kiosk features chocolate and "toothache" remedies

Pluto and Proserpina (Bernini)

*If you'd like, see other "Highlights from the Collection": A sporadic series of posts focusing upon some object or series chosen from amongst the piles in my apartment. A spotlight thrown on things curious or engaging in their unremarkableness.

Astuguevieille

2011-11-07T09:30:00.001-05:00

Saulorme chair

Moiste chair

limited edition mirror for Couturelab

two images above, Elle Decor Spain

Tactoris commode, 2008

image by Diane Pernet— from her wonderful fashion world blog

image by Diane Pernet

he also does sculpture in bisque for Sevres!

black painted cotton rope and raffia on wood

cotton rope on wood with gold leaf (I believe)

I just read a wonderful piece on the New York Times T style site about artist Christian Astuguevieille. I'd never heard of him before but I now believe I love him. Except for the fact that he is perhaps a tad senior for me, is in another country, and is gay—he's my ideal man. He is a furniture designer, sculptor, collector, and the "nose" behind many of the intriguing fragrances produced by Comme des Garçons. (I have Avignon, from the Incense series, described as Gothic, "tapestries imbued with centuries of incense... with an almost eye-smarting, gloriously smoky and resinous heart") As a bonus, he seems partial to crisp white shirts (nice!) and his house in the south west of France appears to be fairly enchanting as well.

“Altering and deforming the original use of things is important to me.” Astuguevieille's work is informed by Japanese wabi-sabi (which I've briefly touched on a couple times before) and furoshiki (the art of wrapping objects in cloth bundles), but also tribal and cycladic forms. Now I'd like to know how to correctly pronounce his name.
see more at Franziska Kessler gallery and Holly Hunt

Halloween scenes

2011-10-29T15:32:00.002-04:00

"I eated his brain"

Halloween portraits, except second and last, from the notable collections of Geoffrey Hudson.

Second and last taken in Cold Spring, NY 2008.

ADDENDUM: Oh good Lord, how did I miss this? Haunted Air.
Found photos dating from 1875 to 1955, compiled by the evocatively named Ossian Brown.
With a forward by David Lynch.

Dancing Dogs and Posture Masters

2011-10-24T10:02:00.001-04:00


There's no date on this but it looks to be about 1790s. It looks exactly like Barnum's Feejee Mermaid exhibited about 50 years later! It seems the mermaid had been in circulation for quite a while...

Anthony Maddox, English posture-master

Dancing Dogs: I rather like "A Lady in her Equipage" and "2 Dogs with Milk Pails"

Margaret Finch, Queen of the Norwood Gypsies, died aged 108

Mr. Makeen, Equestrian Hero

Finds from the collection of 18th Century Entertainment Ephemera at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

ice cream and architectural loss

2011-10-14T19:07:00.000-04:00

image from Jim in Times Square

image from Plan 59

images from Host of the Highways; more HoJos here
Note the Trylon and Perisphere of the 1939-40 World's Fair in the background

Photographs of demolition, March, 1974 by Jeffrey Morris

At the Museum of the City of New York there is an exhibit on the Colonial Revival style in architecture and decor. I only recently paid any attention to Colonial Revival. It's rather ubiquitous in architecture of a certain era, and showed up on a lot of banks and public building. Also, there are many perfunctory examples around so its a style that's easy to be blind to. While I havent gone to the museum, I happened to discover that one of the buildings discussed in the show was the Howard Johnson's on Queens Boulevard I used to go to as a child. Wow. I hadn't realized it was a flagship restaurant. Built in 1940 in an inflated Federal style, it cost a reputed $600,000, a tremendously high figure for that time. As you can see from the images above there was a grand staircase, murals, porticoes, chandeliers, broken pediments and dormers. Graceful, lovely, and with unbelievable (and rather patrician) style in which to serve fried clams and ice cream sundaes to the masses, it could supposedly accommodate 1000 patrons. A contemporary description was rapturous:

The three dining rooms are so restfull (sic) and so attractive that at first we miss some of the details which go to make their perfection ... the thick soft carpets ... the glittering chandeliers ... the blue green Venetian blinds, the maroon leather upholstery ... the restrained use of color in walls and draperies ... the charm of a light-fountain playing in the Empire Room.

I'm sure it must have lost some of its luster by the time I went. Sadly, I dont have much of a memory of the building beyond the vague notion that it was big and nice and I liked it. I do remember the peppermint stick ice cream pretty well, though: gooey bits of candy cane leaving red spots as they "melted" in a pale pink ice cream suspension.

In another incidence of aesthetic tragedy so common in the borough of Queens, this is what replaced the Howard Johnsons.

mid century line art

2011-10-11T23:08:00.001-04:00

Several images above from my copy of the New York Art Directors Club Annual for Advertising and Editorial Art 1952. Anonymous ad for Davis Delaney Printers, David Stone Martin, Ben Shahn from Love and Joy About Letters, Arden Poole for Lucien Lelong, Pat Prichard, Miroslav Sasek from This is Paris 1959, Ben Shahn book jacket 1962, "Andrew Warhol" for CBS Radio, Ronald Searle, Olle Eksell drawing on the cover of a Swedish magazine 1949, Ben Shahn, Arno Schuele book jacket

Somewhere around mid century a style of spidery line art emerged and went on to become ubiquitous in commercial art. Hand lettering too— some of it influenced by the rediscovery of 19th century ornamented wood type (see the Shahn book cover above). The pen and ink style was spindly and almost brittle— sometimes the lines incorporated ink blobs as though the pen scratched and stuttered its way across the paper. As you can see from the few samples above, big names like Ben Shahn and Ronald Searle worked in it, and relatively unknown illustrators like "Andrew Warhol" adapted it too. I recall a few Bugs Bunny cartoons from the 1950s that had some of it going on, and even Edward Gorey, in his early book jacket work, seemed to be influenced by it. It lasted organically as a popular style through the 1960s with some holdouts (like Searle and Saul Steinberg) simply continuing into the 70s and beyond in what had always been their personal style. I wish I understood better where it came from...

Dead|Sexy

2011-09-21T14:15:00.000-04:00

At your leisure, please check out my new site.

I know this “Sexy Dead Guys” meme is completely pervasive and zeitgeisty right now (viz. Bangable Dudes in History, My Dageurreotype Boyfriend, et al.), and it may be difficult for you to believe, but my first flicker of this idea began a few years ago. Way back when I still bought the newspaper I came across an image of Anton Chekhov. “That is one surprisingly appealing dead author,” I thought and reflexively cut out the photograph. I felt sort of odd and shallow because I’d never actually read any Chekhov, but here I was saving his photo like he was Rob Pattinson and I was Sweet Sixteen. That led me to keep a clipping file of truly attractive men so I could recognize someone like that if he ever came along. (Read about my pivotal "all the guys I like are dead or fictional" self-realization here!).

I never did much with this guy file save for a couple of related posts on this very blog. So, getting my act together a bit late, I missed out on bringing this to book form (congratulations Bangable Dudes). I might as well put up that tumblr now, right?//

Everybody Apache Dance

2011-09-15T19:15:00.000-04:00

Apache dancers, c. late 1920s?

This couple look really hard core. I'm guessing early 1950s but I could be wrong.
Above and top from French CanCan

"Prada Candy....pure pleasure wrapped in impulsive charm... a new facet of femininity
where more is more and excess is everything."
She's doing the Apache Dance.

You can see how they filmed the commercial here


Le Bateau Lavoir, a ramshackle area in Montmartre, 1900——> Apache territory!

"The Apache is the plague of Paris", 1907

Krazy Kat as an Apache dancer, 1930.
watch the cartoon at Uncle John's Crazy Town

Apaches, 1911

"A Tough Dance"-- 1902

La Danse Apache - Alexis Et Dorrano 1934

Prada's got a new perfume: Candy. Normally I wouldn't rush to post about that but when I heard they'd hired gnomish photographer-director Jean Paul Goude to create an over-the-top visual match for the perfume's "excess is everything" PR I thought I'd investigate. (I liked some of his work with Grace Jones and loved that iconic Chanel Egoiste commercial....) In the new video, a French ingenue music student jumps her piano teacher and launches into an exuberant terpsichorean frolic. The acrobatic dance sequence is a revival of the Apache Dance.

Pronounced “ah-PAHSH” (remember, it's French!) the Apaches were a late 19th century Parisian street gang—or rather, they were reputed to be "as violent as wild Apaches" and they thought that sounded pretty good and the name stuck. Later, "Apache" became a general reference term for a thug or a pimp. The Apache Dance—became popular just after the turn of the century. By 1908 they were doing it on stage at the Moulin Rouge (it was revived and adapted in movies and by teens up through the 1950s). Part tango, part stage combat—the original Apache Dance fit in perfectly with the other "rough" and "degenerate" dances so popular in those years: Grizzly Bear, Turkey Trot, Boston Dip. The whole schtick is that it mimicks a violent encounter between pimp and prostitute:he "slaps" her, tosses her around, and drags her by the hair. Actually, it all sounds rather like an old Snoop Dogg video...

Greek specials

2011-09-13T17:51:00.000-04:00

"(To) Asclepius and Hygeia, Tyche gives thanks"

pair of eyes, bronze, marble, quartz, obsidian, c. 400 BCcarved marble shell, c.400 BC

akroterion, or architectural decorative device, c. 350 BC

bronze statue of a man, c 100 BC

bronze horse, c. 700BC

terracotta statuette of a siren, c 500BC

cuirass, c 300BC

Terracotta keras (drinking horn) in the form of a lobster claw

Archaic drinking cup, c. 550BC

limestone votive ear with earring, Cypriot, c. 300BC

Herewith, a few atypical Greek artifacts—no white marble youths, no urns, no parthenons. The Ancients obviously had creativity, sensitivity, and humor. What is going on with those people today? (I'm Greek so I'm allowed to say "those people"). Greeks have always squabbled amongst themselves (viz. Sparta<-->Athens) but with the entire European Union doing a face-palm over Greece and her debts I just hope they can get it together.

Fashion musing and arithmetic*

2011-09-05T15:41:00.000-04:00

So we've gone from cajoling women to dress like children, and ogling children dressed like adults, to actually using children as "fashion muses". (Above, 14 year old actress Hailee Steinfeld as the new face of Miu Miu, and 13 year old Elle Fanning modelling for Marc Jacobs.) I'm not clear why this annoys me so much: is it the "exploitation" of underage girls? No, no, no. Is it the gimmick-novelty of using children in serious fashion? Possibly. But this gimmick has far less épater la bourgeoisie strenuousness than, say, parading supermandels Andrej Pejic or Lea T. No, I think it's only because I find the child-muse marketing so boring.//

I had just been formulating my thoughts about this when I saw the piece in the New York Times about 15 year old fashion wunderkind/industry insider Tavi Gevinson. For those of you who might not keep up with such things, Style Rookie is her blog, Rookie is her new magazine, she's written for Harper's Bazar and if you have any further questions talk to her publicist. Tavi was profiled last year in the New Yorker where, in an exquisitely sadistic moment, she was prompted to worry about her future relevance as she grows up.

Anyway, I left a fairly cranky comment on the Times piece about, among other things, Tavi's style sense. Gah! I'm insulting teenagers now. Afterward I realized that bile was misdirected: I have no issue with the girl— she's got a lot of what people long ago used to call Moxie. In fact, if I'd stumbled on her blog myself I'd be sort of enchanted: she's droll and enviably self-possessed. No, my bitter pearls were directed at the marketing juggernaut of publicists, mom-managers, product tie-ins, exclusive wedding-rehearsal-dinner-photo-sellers and ass X-ray takers that flogs things relentlessly and indiscriminately in order to corral my 1 millimeter of mental bandwidth and drain my wallet.//

If peevish-and-in-one's-40s ever becomes fashionable I am your new muse.//

*Anna Piaggi + Michelle Williams = Tavi Gevinson

age 15-16: a playlist

2011-08-29T19:25:00.001-04:00

edgier selections

I remember hearingthis on the John Peel Show while in London. I never owned their record
I still think she's extraordinary

sillier selections

I think they hold up for me. Really fun, and their schtick was amazingly thorough.
Another John Peel Show find that, for me, existed on homemade cassette only.

Not having a good day today, so I decided to seek comfort by regressing and spent the last few hours rifling through Youtube. I did this once before and posted with a slightly earlier playlist. I have to say my music tastes in those years (12-14) were pretty damn impressive, but by this age (15-16), having already given up on the Clash, I was starting to succumb to questionable choices. But, hey, anything's interesting 30 years on, from an anthropological point of view at least. I went down hill from here, falling precipitously in college (eg. Thompson Twins, Scritti Politti).

Reading list: The Face (a brilliant magazine, nothing like it in the US at the time), New Musical Express, and I-D once in a while. Wish I still had those magazines...

Me, Myself, and Irene

2011-08-27T18:12:00.001-04:00

top: Library of Congress, rest: nypl digital

chronophages and trade cards

2011-08-24T16:19:00.000-04:00

What a great job title: Drawing Master

"Rose, Fancy Ruling and Graduating Engines"— geometric lathes that produced the ornamental designs and sets of fine lines
used on the border of this card and the ones above

"Dealer in Natural and Artificial Curiosities..."
My God, think of the things an antiques dealer in 1801 must have had...

Haberdasher at the Three Pidgeons in Long-Acre, near Drury-Lane, London.
Sells all Sorts of Threads,
Thread and Inkle Tapes,
Manchester & Beggars Tapes,
Boot Strappings,
Quality Bindings,
Silk Ferrets & Galloons,
Silk & Worsted Gartering,
best Silk and Cotton Laces,
Stay Strapping & Silver Twist,
drawn Pockets,
Borders and Huzzeys,
Ticken Pockets & Stomachers,
Shirt & Waistcoat Buttons,
best London Pins and Whitechapel Needles,
Thimbles,
Manchester & Irish Ticks,
Russils and Tabbies of all Sorts,
Paduasoy, Taffaty & Sattin Ribbons,
best Belladine Silk, of all Colours,
Whalebone and Whalebone Busks,
Hooks & Eyes,
Silesia & Scotch Cloth,
Shagreens and Sar[?]
Wadding & Hair Cloths,
Pocket Fustians

Coates of Arms, Seals, Cyphers, Shop-cards, Bills of Parcels, Circulary Letters, to imitate hand-writing,
Benefit, Concert, Masquerade cards

Several years ago I was chatting with an Italian friend whose English had been heavily inflected to begin with, and after a few years living in Paris it was downright mysterious. He complained of some activity that was "a true chronophage..."

What?

"What is in English? Very time consuming"

"Chronophage" = literally "time eating." Yes!

Herewith the results of some of my chronophageous pasttimes (looking at old ephemera online; gathering word lists): 18th and early 19th century British trade cards from the exhaustive collection in the British Museum. As per my previous post on Brooklyn trade cards, what has been interesting me most these days is the wording: The lists of strange and exotic items available, the curious and arcane services proffered.

I love the fact that these items were as common as today's supermarket list of low-fat yogurt, BBQ sauce, and lighter fluid, but I have little or no clue what any of them are.

Flambeaux and Links
Gallipoly Oil
Gum Arabic and Dragon
Hartshorn shavings
Neats-foot oil

Pearl ashes
Salt Prunelles

Scouring sand
Smalts
Tea Papers
Tobacco Marks
White Chamber oil

Imbeciles, Crackers and Misfit Parlors

2011-08-19T14:55:00.000-04:00

This fantastic card was composed and printed letterpress specifically for Smith &amp; Pressinger,
unlike many common trade cards. It features some beautiful type and a stock engraving of
a well-dressed, laughing black guy which I actually think is fun and sensitively drawn. Am I wrong?

Metal type in 8 faces plus one size change and ornament

The caption on the front, lower right, says "Imbeciles!"

"Brooklyn Cracker Works"
What I wouldn't give for a corporate T-shirt from that place

What on was the prescription to be taken in a glass of hot milk? Chloral hydrate? Bromide? Oreo?

"with neatness and dispatch."

A tasteful and Aesthetic-style card that surely spoke to all the "Chinamen", classical statuary
and palm trees on Fulton Street...

I practically swooned when I first saw a card for a "Misfit Parlor."
They are establishments selling what we'd call "seconds" or "irregulars"

I am especially interested in the phrasing of old trade cards:
"unusual advantages in our balcony" sounds appealingly flirtatious to me

Its all about the name here: Flesh, Food, Toilet

Hidden by the Witchery of Art

I've been trolling around looking at old trade cards and these here are in many respects an unremarkable assortment of them. The most vital facts about these cards are that they're all from businesses that were on Fulton Street in Downtown Brooklyn, and that they currently reside at the Brooklyn Public Library's Fulton Trade Card Collection. Most of the cards in the Fulton collection are typical of late 19th century style business notices: generic preprinted chromolithographed artwork that was imprinted by letterpress job printers and personalized for the business. And as was commonly the case, most of the colorful/humorous/picturesque artwork used on the business card had absolutely nothing to do with the business. [Read more about that in the Handy Book of Artistic Printing.]

Most people love trade cards for the chromo- artwork: the bouquets, gamboling cherubs and baskets of kittens that the well-known Louis Prang (see the NYPL collection) specialized in. Not me. While I like and admire the artwork, especially the Aesthetic style scenes of "Chinamen", sphinxes and Japanese storks, I've lately been focusing on the wording of the cards. The naive taglines, awkward names, overly intrusive punctuation and the incredible lists of goods and services on offer are what interest me the most right now. The lists—O the lists! I love word lists and when the these are made from items strange, arcane, outlandish and antique— all the better. More on this type of card, of which the below is a pale, enervated descendant, in next post.

Addendum: I found a really nice overview of illustrated trade cards worth a perusal.

Jersey Shore: the Pantone series

2011-08-05T21:29:00.002-04:00

with props to Doug Clouse

cringe-worthy part II

2011-08-05T14:42:00.004-04:00

I've written about word aversion before— words that when spoken or read give one's viscera a toss.

Language Log, a group blog about language and linguistics originally started at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the UPenn (so they really mean business!), makes a distinction between word aversion and word rage.

"Note that we are NOT talking about "word rage" ....where people get angry at jargon or slang... or upset because a word or phrase is felt to be incorrectly used, or annoyed at language that they perceive as redundant, overly complicated, pretentious, a cliché, trendy, or politically incorrect. Rather, [word aversion is] where someone finds a word "revolting", "ugly", "disgusting" in itself."

I realize it is often difficult to separate words from their associations, if not actual meanings. Previously I wrote

"words that make me wince are veggies and yummy. I also hate tummy*... I recently got an email from a potential date that used the word "tummy" prominently and it nearly made me physically ill. I still get a shiver of disgust just thinking about it. ...."

In truth, I probably just dislike the associations of those words rather than the sounds themselves because "gummy" doesnt bother me at all.

Since my earlier post, a few other offending words have accrued in my mental list: jegging, webinar, zumba, hubby, tootsies, gastropub, urethra, zesty. A friend adds: orgasm, classy, smegma, phlegm. Who's to argue with that list? Oh and she agrees with me on webinar ("so inelegant!"). I add, as an aside, the store Shoegasm literally makes me avert my eyes.

My cousin made an unusual submission of words he dislikes because of their semantic imprecision— their "first impression is not what they really mean." Among them: degustation, deracinated, exiguous, phlegmatic. This list is perhaps too lorgnettes-and-lace-pocket-squares for this post, Bob, but thanks for being a sport. (Ironically, I actually like the way these sound.)

Interestingly, I discovered Huffpost had a piece on Words So Disgusting That It's Hard To Hear just a few days ago. Perhaps revulsion is simply in the air.

* perhaps I hate the tinny quality of those words: Tinny and Woody words

Rockaway Frolics II

2011-08-01T08:30:00.003-04:00

Two friends and I explored more of Rockaway yesterday
(Mack Sennett Comedy girls, 1917)

We found 86th Street beach a bit more genteel

The facilities were pretty good!
We had delicious hamburgers, beers, and even a glass of rosé from Rippers.
(Brighton Beach 1900)

Police and National Parks Security patrolled periodically
(Sea Breeze beach, Florida, about 1905)

There were more food choices at 96th Street but it was a little crowded
(Atlantic City, 1900)

click for LARGE image! 1923

There were some crazy-looking people!

I wish I'd covered up more— I got a burn.
(Fashion show at Rockaway, 1913. Click for LARGE image! )

We searched for some original bungalows.
There were a few, but most were in sad shape...
(Rockaway Bungalows, 1910)

Percy Shelley: Atheist, Adulterer, Vampire* Poet

2011-07-28T15:11:00.003-04:00

Shelley was drawn to water and reflections of light on water; he drowned shortly before his 30th birthday.

He enjoyed telling Gothic horror tales and, essentially, freaking out the ladies...

William Blake seems to me to be a very apt match for Shelley, aesthetically and otherwise. Even the watery quality of his inks and paint seem right. I have no idea if Shelley knew of him or what he may have thought of Blake's work.

(Katie Sokoler/Gothamist)

Shelley paid to publish his "Declaration of Rights of Man" then sent a number of them aloft in homemade balloons...

photo of Lake Geneva by Damon Winter

"a bright planetary spirit enshrined in an earthly temple."

"a misunderstood nature, slain by ungenial elements"...

NB: It occurs to me that some readers passing through might not understand that I am working on the graphic and exhibit design of this show— that is: the typefaces, the colors, the display, light and text projections, banners, posters, etc. The exhibit is compiled and curated by the (very sharp and insightful) head of the Pforzheimer collection, and the equally perceptive visiting scholar from the Bodleian. Please know that my personal research, critical equitability and professional capabilities transcend any lightly tossed "hipster"/vampire comments I may present here.//

I am just starting work (as part of a team of 3) on the design of a small but significant exhibit at the New York Public Library on the life of Romantic poet and early hipster Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 4, 1792 – July 8, 1822). These are some of the mood images gathered to inspire the feel of the exhibit design—not necessarily directly representative of the mood of Shelley himself! The show is related to but quite different from Oxford University/Bodleian Library's Shelley's Ghost exhibit and catalog. Some of the items in the show will come from Oxford, but a majority will be pulled from the NYPL’s Pforzheimer Collection, one of the premier collections in the world for the study of English Romanticism.

I'm immersing myself in Shelley by reading two biographies: Richard Holmes' Shelley: The Pursuitand Being Shelley by Ann Wroe. The first a scrupulous and lively epic with tons of great information, the second an intriguing impressionistic collage of details and interpretations. Both books conjure a fascinating but (for me) manifestly irritating person. Intense, theatrical and self-dramatizing, he was almost insufferably myopic when it came to interpersonal relations and was ~~definitely~~ seemingly manic depressive.

Shelley has been described as radical, political agitator, atheist, vegetarian, adulterer, apostle of free love, brilliant poetic innovator and, once, *vampire (by his first wife Harriet). Seemingly unaware of his sometimes contradictory nature, he came across as hypocritical and perverse. Generous, he still left a string of unpaid debts (including those to friends) throughout his life. He had such empathy and "a horror of torturing animals it was impossible to express it" (he criticized Wordsworth for writing about the shining beauty of a caught trout), yet his insensitivity to the abandoned and pregnant Harriet contributed to her suicide. Still, even the most casual reader can't fail to be astonished by him.

The magic car moved on.
From the swift sweep of wings
The atmosphere in flaming sparkles flew;
And where the burning wheels
Eddied above the mountain's loftiest peak
Was traced a line of lightning.
Now far above a rock the utmost verge
Of the wide earth it flew,
The rival of the Andes, whose dark brow
Frowned o'er the silver sea.
Far, far below the chariot's stormy path,
Calm as a slumbering babe,
Tremendous ocean lay.
Its broad and silent mirror gave to view
The pale and waning stars,
The chariot's fiery track,
And the grey light of morn
Tingeing those fleecy clouds

That cradled in their folds the infant dawn.
The chariot seemed to fly
Through the abyss of an immense concave,
Radiant with million constellations, tinged
With shades of infinite colour,
And semicircled with a belt
Flashing incessant meteors.
—The Daemon of the World (1816)

keep your cool

2011-07-22T10:41:00.000-04:00

Snow Cap Burger, Arizona, Carol Highsmith

Iceman at Fulton Fish Market, 1959

ice harvesting in Minnesota, before 1885

Free Ice, New York City, c.1900

Momoyogusa, 1909

snow, December 1949, Eleanor Roosevelt

Licking Ice on a Hot Day, New York City, c.1900

Rockaway Frolics

2011-07-19T10:07:00.002-04:00

I like this guy's style

"Ladies Bangs Curled 15¢"

This main drag was called the Bowery

"A frolic at Rockaway Beach, 1903"

Featuring Quail or Squab on Toast, Oyster Omelet and 12 kinds of potatoes

"WANTED 500 men to eat Frankfurters"

Pristine white dresses, that exceptional flourish comme des garçcons and flirty little purses. Love

A disturbing entertainment pavilion, ca.1927

I'd wear this, sans hat.
1917

A truly monstrous architectural concatenation in Arverne, 1900.
Evidently developer-driven McMansion buildings have a precedent.

This establishment was called the Kuloff... Cool Off, geddit?

1920

A couple friends and I checked out Rockaway Beach this past weekend. We went armed with our iPhone GPSs, and New York Times articles charting hipster sightings and boardwalk culinary highlights, and hoping to scope out some appealing bungalow* real estate. We were not complete cultural tourists though since one of us could actually recount Rockaway excursions from high school, and I grew up in Queens, so that counted for something. We did have some street cred.

Rockaway— or The Rockaways— is the largest urban beach in the United States. It comprises Rockaway Beach, Rockaway Park, and Far Rockaway which sit along side Neponsit, Arverne, Belle Harbor, Breezy Point, and Edgemere on a peninsula of Long Island (that happens to be completely part of Queens). As Wikipedia winningly points out, Broad Channel is also "psychographically", if not strictly geographically, part of the Rockaways as well.

Once a summer retreat for the well-heeled in the early 19th century, successive campaigns of transportation upgrades (railroad, subway, and then bridges) made the area more accessible—and less exclusive. With Rockaway Playland opening in 1901 the area had its heyday as an egalitarian recreation spot in the vein of Coney Island around the 1910s.

After WWII city officials thought it was a good idea to raze everything you see above. They put in 13 story housing projects some of which became the Fort Apache—The Bronx kind, some were middle income, all were soul-deadeningly ugly.

A Rockaway housing project

*There is a great-looking documentary The Bungalows of Rockaway, about the vintage 1910s-1920s bungalows of the area that I'd love to see. Its criminal so many of them were demolished for the crap that replaced them.

Class 9 dependence

2011-07-14T09:09:00.001-04:00

The stunning images of the night sky, directly above, are by Alex Cherney a "hobbyist astronomer" in Melbourne Australia. They were taken in a national park on the south eastern coast of Australia, in the virtual absence of light pollution. They brought me back to this post, originally from 2007:

When the blackout occurred a several years ago (2003) I was not altogether unhappy with the thought of spending time by candlelight. The street was thrillingly dark that evening (the street light normally filling my apartment with an insistent yellow glare having been temporarily extinguished) and I was rather excited to get out the few candles I had, group them in front of a mirror, and try reading...

In the back of my mind, I'd always wondered about the centuries played out in relative darkness. What would life by candlelight or gaslight have been like? Before gaslight, once night fell, the vast majority of people lived tethered to a small circumscribed orbit of light. A light fueled by a list of substances that must have been frankly repellent in practice–animal fat, whale oil, bacon skimmings, dried manure, fish oil, kerosene. The smell and the wavering and sputtering flame and...dear God, the smell! An entire room would never never have been fully lit and the ceiling and corners would be perennially in shadow. What about color? Paintings, decor, textile--all had very different properties viewed under pre-incandescent light.

I came across a fascinating exhibit that was produced jointly by Carnegie Mellon and the Van Gogh Museum in Holland in 2001: "The exhibition displays Vincent Van Gogh’s Gauguin’s Chair (1888), consecutively lit with the spectra of daylight, an open gas flame, gas light with a mantle, and the light of an electric arc lamp, demonstrating how the different light sources alter our perception of the painting’s colors."

Blue, he remembered, takes on an artificial green tint by candlelight; if a dark blue like indigo or cobalt, it becomes black; if pale it turns to grey; and soft and true like turquoise, it goes dull and cold... The pearl greys lose their blue sheen and are metamorphosed into a dirty white; the browns become cold and sleepy... (Des Esseintes ponders the effects of light on color in Huysmans' Au Rebours)

Gas was introduced as public street lighting in London, on January 28, 1807, and it was a revolutionary thing. (Baltimore was the first US city to employ gas, in 1816.) It freed the night. Occasionally, I still notice the stubs of former gas "outlets" in Brooklyn brownstones and wonder what indoor life was like under those hissing fixtures.

An article in the New Yorker a couple months ago, "The Dark Side", discussed light pollution and the fact that most people, especially in the eastern US, have never truly experienced nighttime darkness. The "perfect" 'pre-industrial' night is designated Class 1 on something called the Bortle Dark Sky scale. That elusive state is described with this striking detail: "certain regions of the Milky Way cast obvious diffuse shadows on the ground." The Milky Way-- which I have never seen-- casting a shadow sounds magical and nearly impossible to visualize. In that setting I can imagine a full moon's light could be stunningly luminous-- which renders the nighttime landscape, above, as not all that fantastical. "The very darkest places in the continental United States today,"according to the New Yorker article, "are almost never darker than Class 2 ... The sky above New York City is Class 9." To see the night sky as Galileo knew it (or as anyone pre-1820s or so would have known it) one would have to travel to the mountains of Peru or the Australian outback....

And what about that evening during the blackout, when I lit my candles and put the mirror to clever use? I'd love to say I found it soothing and meditative. Instead I reflexively kept getting up to turn on a light. I ended that little experiment early and went to sleep feeling slightly claustrophobic with a hint of panic.

Addendum: New York Times reports on the renovated Wrightsman Galleries of French Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan, which sound amazing...

In some rooms the light is lowered to an almost nocturnal darkness in order to show how Rococo artists used reflective, shiny surfaces — gilded metal ornaments; gold-leafed, carved elements; mirrors; polished lacquer — not only as luxurious objects but also to make the most of candlelight.The darker rooms appear to be lighted only by candles, with realistically flickering bulbs in chandeliers and sconces.

images: Kersting, woman sewing, 1823; Heimbach, man with oil lamp; Degas, Interior, 1868/9; William Stott of Oldham, CMS Reading by Gaslight, 1884; La Tour, Magdalene, 1636; Heimbach, Men in a Studio; Hogarth, Night, 1738; Joseph Wright of Derby, Dovedale by Moonlight, 1784, Heimbach, Nighttime Banquet, 1640;

"Please write me real soon"

2011-07-10T16:54:00.002-04:00


photograph of book from BooksLoveLiza Click images for larger, readable sizes

New York City Museum of Complaint, in its incarnations as tabloid-sized newsprint giveaway in 2006 and beautifully produced full-fledged book, has made the rounds in the press (Times, NPR) but I only just recently heard about it. (Thanks Sam!) The book is a collection of about 132letters written to the Mayor of New York City between the (seemingly arbitrary) dates of 1751 and 1969, compiled by artist/curator Matthew Bakkom from the larger stores deep within the Municipal Archives. Shockingly naive, sarcastic, baroquely formal, or barely sentient, they address the city's mayor as part personal savior, part janitor.

In the days before the public forums of Facebook, twitter, and email petitions, the fine citizens and everyday wackos of this city had to get out the quill, ballpoint and typewriter and rant on paper in quiet seclusion. (Some drama queens even sent telegrams.) The letters chronicle issues real, imagined, laughable, or foreboding, from dead horses in the streets to lost dry cleaning, police brutality to matrimonial inquiries. Each missive is reproduced as full-sized facsimile — you can see the the uneven swells of ink and grain of the paper—with some tiny, quiet transcription text. Beautiful.

What a great idea for a book; so how in the world did someone agree to publish something like this? The key thing appears to be that Museum of Complaint was conceived as an "art project" rather than quirky non-fiction book. And Bakkom seems to be adept at getting artist's grants. He likely had to wade through each mayor's term archives looking for the letters: I'm envisioning far-flung boxes exhaling dust, all sorts of unfamiliar feathery paper weights and cottony textures, perhaps an antiquated paper fastener, crinkley onion skin documents unfolded for the first time in a century. That's purely conjectural archival porn, however, because the book's missing a proper essay or even some anecdotal tidbits. (And I find the author's statement very unsatisfying). Set the scene, tell me how we got here and how difficult it was to put this together. Perhaps I'm jealous because this is, to me, an ideal project: excavating obscure bits of historical material culture and giving them renewed life and relevance.

the end

2011-07-04T17:18:00.001-04:00

All end titles from the Movie Title Stills Collection by Christian Annyas

A child with explosives and other imagery of the day

2011-07-03T18:20:00.002-04:00

eagle engravings by Alexander Anderson

Happy Independence Day

Drinking Flip & Chasing Whales*

2011-07-01T18:25:00.000-04:00

sperm whale print, Sea Hag and Teratoma Press

blubber to be boiled in the tryworks

Captain William Davol of Westport, MA

different grades of whale oil

whale bone or baleen was used in hoops, crinolines, and corsets

most images from the New Bedford Whaling Museum

I'm in the midst of a passing obsessional interest in whaling history. I do that periodically—reading multiple books at the same time on a subject while googling images compulsively (past episodes have tackled Academic art, apple names, and the trompe l'oeil craze of the late 19th century)— and this particular bout was triggered by an abortive visit to New Bedford, MA, while on my Victorian architecture program. We stopped in town to tour buildings but weren't given time to see the magnificent Whaling Museum. So I've been making a virtual visit by personal research.

I have to admit I was one of the legions of people who romanticize whaling. Fascinated by the paraphernalia, lingo and artifacts, and swayed by my soft spot for scrimshaw, I conjured up visions of whaling voyages that were damp, isolating and uncomfortable at worst. Mental reference images were part "Master and Commander", part "Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym", mixed with a bit of Melvillean fervor and hoopla. Somehow I'd neglected to factor in the blood, blubber, guts, smoke, fires, filth, and stench. Even stories of shipwreck and cannibalism were mentally swabbed down.

Whales were hunted for sperm oil for lighting and manufacturing lubricant, and bone or baleen for corsets,while occasionally they also provided ambergris, for perfumes. All this is vividly and comprehensively explained in Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America by Eric Jay Dolan, which I am reading now and emphatically recommend. Descriptions of the cutting-in (stripping and dissecting the whale), trying-out (boiling blubber to extract oil) and bailing the case (emptying the whale's head—which sometimes required a man to get into the head and bail) are unforgettably harrowing.

"There is a murderous appearance about the blood-stained decks, and the huge masses of flesh and blubber lying here and there, and a ferocity in the looks of the men, heightened by the red, fierce glare of the fires..."— journalist J Ross Browne, 1846

“Everything,” a seaman wrote, “is drenched with oil. Shirts and trousers are dripping with the loathsome stuff. The pores of the skin seem to be filled with it. Feet, hands and hair, all are full. The biscuit you eat glistens with oil, and tastes as though just out of the blubber room. The knife with which you cut your meat leaves upon the morsel, which nearly chokes you as you reluctantly swallow it, plain traces of the abominable blubber. Every few minutes it becomes necessary to work at something on the lee side of the vessel, and while there you are compelled to breath in the fetid smoke of the scrap fires, until you feel as though filth had struck into your blood, and suffused every vein in your body. From this smell and taste of blubber, raw, boiling and burning, there is no relief or place of refuge.”

A general list of supplies for whalers ran to 48 pages with over 900 items and included 10 sizes of casks, 11 weights of sheathing copper, 27 forms of crockery, 58 varieties of food, 19 types of nails, 26 spare sails, 80 different types of whaling implements (harpoons, hooks, etc) ...

* " Rememb'ring all at Home... while we are Drinking Flip [beer, molasses, and rum] & Chasing Whales"—Peleg Folger, August 18, 1754.

radical graphics

2011-06-25T18:02:00.000-04:00

Revolutionary Film Posters: Aesthetic Experiments of Russian Constructivism, 1920-33

Tony Shafrazi Gallery, 544 West 26th Street through July 29, 2011.

Ninety-five stunning posters (some literally jaw-dropping in person) alongside restored footage from “The Man With a Movie Camera” (1929), and Eisenstein’s
“Battleship Potemkin” (1925) and “October” (1928).

Tell me, have you seen any film advertising collateral in the last decade
that approaches these?
I may have to go again.

fashion finds in History's closet

2011-06-24T18:31:00.000-04:00

crinoline frame, late 1860s

riding habit, 1910

pump, 1920

evening dress, 1924

pelerine, jet beads and silk, 1890

silk petticoat, 1860s

stockings, 1890s

carpet bag, 1860s

stockings, silk, 1890s

mourning fan

muff, feathers, early 19th century

sandals, about 1946

Delman wedges, 1936-39

Mainbocher cocktail apron, 1943

Elsa Schiaparelli jacket

Charles James evening jacket, 1951

fur jacket (monkey? goat?), late 1930s

All images from the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute

The Newport Architecture Diet

2011-06-18T21:45:00.001-04:00

Where I stayed

The Breakers (Vanderbilt summer house, 1895) was just down the block
(photo by galen frysinger)

Rosecliff (1902)

The Gilded Age was comically so.

Clouds Hill, 1870s Gothic Revival

ceiling stencil work

Ames Memorial Hall floor mosaic, HH Richardson, 1881

Ames Memorial Hall, HH Richardson, 1881

18th century Newport: the sleeper hit of the trip!

We toured people's private homes, too (Miramar, 1913)
David Ford's entry hall was approximately 3 times the size of my apartment

Beryl Slocum Powell talks about the Meissen china and whatnots

guest room in a garden folly

"El Paso Horse Show, 1914"

Bill Wilson, architect and vintner, talks about his 1863 Gothic/Stick Style home

Being able to ring for the correct maid: priceless

When I told friends I was going to spend 9 days in Newport RI taking the Victorian Society's summer program on architecture and decorative arts I got reactions ranging from indulgent smiles to blank looks. And there was the one memorable, "that sounds fucking boring." Actually, in some ways I've never had a better time.

Participants came from around the country, Spain, Uruguay, Australia and England. There were MA and PhD graduates, museum professionals, architects and teachers with the odd serious dilettante like me thrown in. Lectures, walking tours, and bus trips all day, with the promise of wine, cheese, and pate (or pizza) on many nights. (By the end of the trip, someone said, our personal pie charts would read 2/3 cheese and crackers, 1/3 pinot grigio.) Despite the cheese I lost 2-1/2 lbs. In part this was because it was about a 1 mile walk to the nearest good cup of coffee, but also the fact that we started at 8 or 9 each day and kept walking virtually until 6pm. I havent been as consistently engaged and challenged in years.

We visited many different types of buildings— moody mid 19th-century Gothic Revival gems, sophisticated 1880s Aesthetic Movement specimens, muscular Richardsonian Romanesque piles, pristine Georgian Revival confections. Also: an unexpected array of Colonial homes which were enchantingly intimate and often near the water. Its apparent that the Gilded Age behemoths completely overshadow the long history of Newport because I hadnt even realized there was such an extensive 18th century town to explore. In fact, the Newport Preservation Society was formed in 1946 to save the little Colonial boxes, the "vast blank white elephants"* be damned!

The program certainly gave a concentrated dose of late 19th century excess. Foremost exemplar: Vanderbilt summer house The Breakers. The seventy rooms of gilt, stained glass, marble, crystal, tapestry and bloated pomposity was once staffed with footmen in 18th century livery and wigs. (So much for "beachy-informal") The Elms, Rosecliff, Marble House, Ochre Court and many of the other really significant summer "cottages" were conceived in the waning years of the 19th century as America hit it's global stride. It was the era of the "American Renaissance" and there was the sense that this country had the power, money, and spit-shined gumption to take on anything. We were the new Athens, the modern colossus of Freedom, the shining beacon of human achievement. So what better way to manifest this sensibility of Democracy incarnate, the spirit of our own glorious Revolution and the simple nobility of our Federal heritage? Wholesale imitation of European palaces evidently. Many of the Newport mansion feature rooms literally ripped from French chateaux and reassembled. Sometimes the Newporters bought the art or books along with the room panelling housing them. (Instant collections). Sort of Ancien Regime meets Venetian palazzo with touches chinoiserie and Gothic. How did European friends or acquaintances keep a straight face?//

Edith Wharton wrote to a friend, "I wish the Vanderbilts didnt retard culture so very thoroughly. They are entrenched in a sort of Thermopylae of bad taste, from which apparently no force on earth can dislodge them."

* Henry James described the mansions of Newport as being "white elephants... their...owners roused from a witless dream, wonder what in the world is to be done with them. The answer to which, I think, can only be that there is absolutely nothing to be done; nothing but to let them stand there always, vast and blank for reminder to those concerned of the prohibited degrees of witlessness, and the peculiarly awkward vengeances affronted proportion and discretion."

off to Newport

2011-06-02T21:31:00.000-04:00

I had hoped to get another post up before my trip but it is not to be.
I will be on a program offered by the Victorian Society in America, in Newport, RI: the architectural and social history of Newport and the region, behind the scenes tours of gilded age "cottages", lectures, and the odd reception or two. I hope to have some good photos and info to share when I get back the 13th. Please address my mail care of Mr. Vanderbilt.

There's Something About Edna

2011-05-23T15:39:00.000-04:00

Rotograph postcards, 1905, courtesy of Missiles & Rockets

Sixty-six years of Mary*

2011-05-21T14:27:00.003-04:00

Heavy Metal Band name taxonomy by Doogie Horner.

I like lists. I also like unusual, historical, stupid, and exotic names. So it was with some interest I noted that Social Security released their annual list of popular baby names (Jacob, Isabella). The site provides some good browsing. For instance, I didn't know that Mary was the top girl's name from 1880 (first searchable year) through 1946? Sixty-six years of Mary! Mary was then displaced by Linda for 7 anomalous years before—miraculously— she returned to number one for another 9 years. Wow, there's something about Mary, indeed.

Like many people I've wondered about the disappearance of names like Ethel, Bertha, Mildred, Ida, et al. "Old fashioned" names, period names— names that cannot help but seem tied to another time and place. How did they drop off the list? What social/cultural vagaries came into play to annihilate names that were common and popular. Was it Hollywood and the rise of "movie stars" like Gloria Swanson, Louise Brooks, Joan Crawford that made Bessie, Ada, and Viola seem so last century? What about a name like Lisa— where did that come from? Its a part of today's standard roster of go-to names. It was number one several years in the early sixties, yet it wasn't even on the top 1000 list in say, 1930. There were Pearlines, Glennas, Floys, and Wandas, but not one Lisa.

Some "old fashioned" names have enjoyed a healthy resurgence. Emma has been going strong for years now, and I am personally familiar with some young Ivy, Hazel, Pearl and Mabels. (I personally hope that Britney, Brittany, Katelynne, Kaylee and all their unique-ified transcriptions do not resurface a 100 years from now as quaint, unusual revivals.)

When speaking of old fashioned, unusual, historical or stupid names, one has to turn to my favorite repository of onomastic pyrotechnics: Colonial New England. They drew upon a whole spectrum of fire, brimstone, saintly virtues, and obscure Old Testament references and came out with, what is to me, endlessly fascinating naming practices. If anyone is as interested as I am in early New England oddities I recommend Vast Public Indifference, a blog of gravestones and naming run by a Harvard grad student (several of the names below are from that blog). Also, Curiosities of Puritan nomenclature (1897) by Charles Wareing Endell Bardsley is a must for gaining knowledge about the Hope-stills and Fly-fornications of the past. And dont miss the amazing Farber Gravestone Collection.

Miss Asenath Tinkham
Obed Abbott
Ichabod Swaddle
Titus Frisbie
Eliphalet Gray
Titus and Eliphalet were Revolutionary War veterans from Brandford, CT
Mephibosheth "Fib" Adams
Miss Lobelia Scroggins

The Lobelia is also called pukeweed, and it represents malevolence in the Victorian language of flowers

Epaphroditus Ransom

(March 24, 1798– November 11, 1859) seventh Governor of Michigan

Onesiphorus Tileston
Miss Hazelelponi Willix
Miss Cozbi Hayden

Cozbi was the daughter of a Midianite king, and the name represents voluptuousnes and deceitfulness. There is seemingly incontrovertible evidence that early New Englanders were bible-obsessed but not always bible-literate.Either children were bestowed "cruel" names on purpose or parents were not always sticklers for getting the backstory.

Genubath Strong
Bezer Hill

"was killed by the upsetting of a cart"

Jehosheba Taft
Thurlow Weed
(November 15, 1797 – November 22, 1882) a New York newspaper publisher, politician, and party boss

* This post got deleted somehow and this second edition, rewritten, basically covers earlier territory.

Highlights from the Collection*

2011-05-16T21:11:00.002-04:00

*A sporadic series of posts focusing upon some object or series chosen from amongst the piles in my apartment. A spotlight thrown on things curious, or engaging in their unremarkableness.

the color fever *

2011-05-05T15:22:00.005-04:00

Léon Gimpel, Balloon show at the Grand Palais, 1907

Lt Col. Mervyn O'Gorman, his daughter Christina at Lulworth Cove, 1913
O'Gorman was also a pioneering aviator, motorist and Superintendent of the Royal Balloon Factory

Mrs. Benjamin F. Russell, Lady in a greenhouse, 1910
I cant find any further information about Mrs. Benjamin F. Russell
although she has some other unusual autochromes out there.

Alfred Stieglitz, his niece Flora Stieglitz Straus, ca 1915

Charles Zoller, Arnett YMCA interior, ca 1916

Charles Spaeth, woman in silk robe, ca 1915

Arnold Genthe, 1915


Jean-Baptiste-Tournassoud, girl in a hammock, 1909

Heinrich Kuhn (above three) ca 1910

Anonymous, ca 1915

Autochrome, invented by the Lumiere brothers, French moving picture pioneers, was the first industrial process for color reproduction. Thus true color images became next in the line of French landmark inventions beside the daguerreotype and, come to think of it, photography itself. On June 10, 1907 the autochrome became commercially available after Messrs. Lumiere made the first public demonstration. I believe it remained the only color process until the arrival of Kodachrome in 1935.

It was a rather complicated affair to create autochrome plates, and hence, expensive.

"Microscopic potato starch grains were separated into batches, dyed red, green and violet, mixed together and spread over a glass plate coated with a sticky varnish. Next, carbon black (charcoal powder) was spread over the plate to fill in any gaps between the colored starch grains. A roller submitted the plate to a pressure of five tons per square centimetre in order to spread the grains and flatten them out. Finally, the plate was coated with a panchromatic photographic emulsion....A summer landscape taken in the midday sun, required at least a one second exposure. In cloudy weather, this could be increased to as much as ten seconds or more. Spontaneous ‘snapshot’ photography was out of the question, and the use of a tripod was essential.”—The Royal Photographic Society

Professional photographers and artists were agape and took to autochrome's pointillist effects, which were in perfect step with the romanticized Pictorialist art sensibilities of the day. (Upper middle class hobbyists took to it too, producing floral still lifes ad nauseum.)//

Autochrome colors flicker between hazy indeterminancy and saturated flashes. The images have such an ethereal almost fleeting quality about them, like the partial recollection of a dream. The fugitive aspect is paradoxical of course since these images have been fixed, however precariously, for a hundred years...

...........................................

this is a post about my cat

2011-04-28T08:44:00.002-04:00

my Francis Bacon triptych

boredom? irritation? its the way she looks every day

she's a jumper

a favorite sleeping position

stubborn

I think of this as her "token booth clerk" expression

First: I'm sorry. I vowed never to post about personal problems or about my cat. But, after quite a few years of blogging about Civil War dead, Picturesque ruins, the Eugenics Archive, word aversion, ephemera and punk music I listened to when I was 13, among other topics, I think its time I talked about Winkle. She's a handful and maybe some of you out there might have some insights.

Her face has a scrappy, street quality to it, sort of Eliza Doolittle before she becomes a Lady. Her typical demeanor is somewhere between mild contempt and complete uninterest. If I didnt know she was a she, I'd call her Bluto. She knows and (usually) answers to "Winkle" but her sense of self does not seem to encompass any interest in the creature she sees in the large floor-length mirror. (However, I might be several feet behind her in the room and catch her eye in the mirror. I wave and she invariably turns around to look at me. Does this mean she understands the spatial-reflection concept of a mirror? What's in front of her is really behind her?)

She's no talker—I dont think I've ever heard anything approaching "meow". Its more like a little bemused or surprised trill, "brrrrip?" She often makes a sound if she jumps up onto anything, "prrreeeep!

I got her as a month-old kitten or thereabouts, so I thought by hand-raising her surely she would become incredibly docile, and extra-loving— a lap cat. Not so much. If you hit her she will hit you back. She is also very vehement about her likes and dislikes:

-- She does not like to be picked up.
-- She does not like nail clippers, collars, carrying cases, doctors or certain food dishes.
-- Do not touch the feet!
-- She does not evince even passing interest in most food products produced for cats.
-- She understands the word "No" and does not like it. If she hears it repeated with some force, as when it obstructs her from going out and roaming the hallway, she will hiss and sometimes take a swipe at my feet as she runs away. (I don't mind letting her roam the hallway except that she sometimes parks herself on welcome mats and darts into unsuspecting neighbors' apartments.) When she hisses by the way it's with such robust full-throated deliberateness you can feel the tiny gust of air.

She DOES like

-- salmon sushi (but not tuna) (Counter intuitively, she likes tuna casserole.)
-- chewing wool
-- playing with rubber bands (flinging them into the air frisbee-like)
-- being brushed. Especially while eating.
-- the sight and sound of emery boards. If I hold one up and swipe it across my nail she will come over to sit on my lap and purr.
-- to lie between me and my book.
-- to sit on top of me and purr when I go to sleep. That's proven difficult for me and we're still working that out.

Romantic lighting

2011-04-22T16:57:00.000-04:00

Adolph Menzel, Balcony Room, 1845. Menzel was well known in his day for sweeping nationalistic paintings.
He apparently made delicate views like this as personal studies and never exhibited them.
I find this one exceptional—like a Degas 25 years before its time.

Constantin Hansen, Danish artists in Rome, 1837

Georg Friedrich Kersting, Couple at the Window, 1815

Georg Friedrich Kersting, Woman Embroidering, 1811. This seems to reference Vermeer

Léon Cogniet, The Artist in His Room at the Villa Medici, Rome, 1817

Caspar David Friedrich, View from the Artist's Studio–Window on the Right, 1805-6

Georg Friedrich Kersting, In Front of the Mirror, 1827

attributed to Martin Drolling, Interior with View of Saint-Eustache, ca. 1810

Martinus Rørbye, View from the Artist's Window, 1825

I couldnt resist adding a photo of one of my windows

Henry Fox Talbot, Latticed Oriel Window at Lacock Abbey, 1835
Talbot produced a negative when he made the image—this is a print from his original I believe.

Online I came across an exhibit on at the Metropolitan— I have not yet seen it but it looks fantastic: Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century (April 5—July 4, 2011). It examines the Romantic motif of the open window captured by German, Danish, French, and Russian artists of the first half of the 19th century. Introducing these works with reference to genre painting, which stretches back to the 16th century, the exhibit's web site defines the open window theme more specifically:

Juxtaposing near and far, the window is a metaphor for unfulfilled longing. Painters distilled this feeling in pictures of hushed, spare rooms with contemplative figures; studios with artists at work; and open windows as the sole motif. As the exhibition reveals, these pictures may shift markedly in tone, yet they share a distinct absence of the anecdote and narrative that characterized earlier genre painting.

Some of the images here are in the show, some are ones I gathered. There are differences here of framing and intent: some focus on the world beyond the room, some highlight the world at hand-- the room and its contents. Other images appear to be mostly about the light. I include one of the earliest photographs, made in 1835 by Henry Fox Talbot of a window in his home. By that time he would have been familiar with the Romantic conceit although I doubt that was what he was after when taking this.

I hope to update when I get to the show...

pink and its burdens

2011-04-14T17:20:00.001-04:00

The old man who lives here has been painting his house pink for decades. Its a particularly noxious shade.

I've always liked this building down on Grand Street. It's fate is in question.Below, random pinks

my classic pink bathroom

British paint company Farrow and Ball have an unusual take on pink.

From Color Standards and Nomenclature by Robert Ridgway, 1912

2 images of Jaipur "the Pink City"

delicate pale pink petit fours pass the aesthetic test

vintage wallpaper pattern from retrorenovation. Perhaps as an accent...

I love the idea of this color more than it's reality

Fuschia, the flower. There is also the Pink. I dont like either.

Mrs Lincoln's Solferino dinnerware, purchased at Haughwout's in NYC

I was thinking about pink. Its not a color I like particularly— or rather, there are just a few shades of pink that I actually like: pale pinks, coral pinks, grey pinks. Thus, having lost my slim black leather iPhone sleeve, it was galling to be forced into purchasing, for expediency's sake, an embarrassing 1980s-fuschia neoprene number. That was when I realized pink can be a particularly onerous color. It comes with a lot of baggage: Nazis, gay activism, indigestion, gum, cancer, lipstick, princesses, saccharine, porn and low-brow taste. There have been heated treatises on how social conditioning has corralled the sexes into blue/pink ghettoes. And isn't it always the pink house the neighbors complain about? That pink brownstone at the top of the page is right around the corner from me. It has been that way for so long even the landmarks commission looks the other way. Its famous (just google "pink building" and it'll be one of the top returns) so people don't really get too worked up now.

Not too long ago the New York Times had an article about how the pink bathroom, reviled relic of the late 1940s-1950s, is making a comeback. I happen to have a classic pink bathroom which I quite enjoy—its more of a warm blush or shell pink rather than the cold, dare I say more vulgar, cherry pinks I associate with the 1960s. The people behind SavethePinkBathrooms.com are not discriminating enough in my opinion.

Pink had one of it's heydays in the late 1970s/early 80s, with Fiorucci, New Wave and neon. In high school had a pair of neon pink ankle socks I wore with black pumps. Another high point for the color was in the 1930s with Elsa Schiaparelli's "shocking" pink. I would decline to wear either color these days.

Probably one of the biggest events in pinkdom was the "discovery" of the purplish pink Magenta and it's lesser known fraternal twin, the pinkish purple Solferino. Both, oddly, named after towns in Northern Italy that experienced exceptionally bloody battles (on June 4 and June 24, 1859, respectively) during the Italian war of Independence (Solferino alone seeing 40,000 casualties in a single day). The colors were created out of coal tar— or something like that— shortly after the battles and named in recognition. So during the early 1860s ladies were magenta mad, with even Mrs Lincoln buying a dining service in Solferino.

Pink is one of the few (the only?) colors that has changed color: at one time it designated a yellowish green. It is also one of the few names used as a verb (decorate with a perforated pattern or zigzag edge, cf. pinking shears), but that is from another etymological root of the word. In fact there are so many variations on the origin of pink— ships, winking, small size, perforations–its too much to go into here.

Photo-Lettering in the House!

2011-04-12T16:55:00.003-04:00

A design FYI: House Industries, those master purveyors of retro design, Planet of the Apes font packages and tiki glasses have come up with something that could turn out to be super exciting: customized, downloadable display type setting. The fact that this venture is based on the collection from the old Photo-Lettering type house—an industry mainstay from 1936 until 1997, officially, but really it gave up the ghost in the late 80s— makes it really appealing for typographers, type hipsters, and old-timers*. This was touted a couple years ago but I think it is only just now live.

Set your headline in one of the types offered on the site, pay a relative pittance et voila! download scalable vector files. You can even get subscription access for multiple settings and downloads. In 2003, House Industries purchased Photo-Lettering's files and holdings. They then digitized some of the 6000+ faces in the Photo-Lettering catalog and created the really clever interface—see directly above. You can alter widths and weights on certain types, choose colors for shaded or two-tone faces. Currently there are only about 42 faces available, however, far too few for my taste. Unless you really want to set a lot of type in "Kerpow".

Dont miss the history section for lots of pics and great info about the original Photo-Lettering.

*Speaking of old timers, I was just telling a type friend how the old brown and white Photo-Lettering catalog used to depress me at my first real design job. It sat on the shelf and exuded brownness. It was fluorescent lights and polyester in book form. It featured many of the somewhat vulgar typefaces (like Harry Fat or Mistral) that we—classically minded, tasteful, modernist-inflected designers for a Cultural Institution—weren't supposed to give the time of day to. Now that it has been resurrected, it all seems so fun and lively!