HBO, BBC and SPQR*

Gladiator was on cable last week and I'd forgotten that Derek Jacobi featured so prominently in the movie. Jacobi is cemented in my mind with I, Claudius, the risqué and influential BBC drama (it played here as a Masterpiece Theater) that was an illicit thrill to a certain 7th grader at the time. Gladiator prompted me on to do some 'Claudian' research, and, yesterday, a browsing expedition to the library, which yielded the awkwardly-titled "Mammoth Book of Eyewitness Ancient Rome."** All that was then joined by my weekly Rome viewing. I've been on a veritable Roman Holiday.

Periodically I go crazy over some tv show or other— watch religiously, pore over details obsessively, proselytize— and right now I love HBO's Rome. (above, images of the Rome set at Cinecitta, Rome's --the city-- famed studio, and apparently the world's largest standing set). The series has a rankness, a gutter naturalism, that's a vibrant contrast to the white marble pomp one is used to seeing. There are several scenes in fetid graffiti-marked alleys and two and three story wooden tenement houses. From the finer points of animal sacrifice to the murky dimness of life by oil lamp to the blotting powder spread on a freshly written document, the small passing details of the lives of the working populace are the most fascinating aspect of the series for me.
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There is a good deal of blood, both human and animal, and just about every other body fluid as well being flung around by the bucketful. BBC News reported on the show's more lurid charms, with a comical mix of prurience and formality, in an early review:

"Rome drama generates shockwaves"..."Those who do not switch off in disgust will be treated to a flogging, a crucifixion, numerous deaths and an impalement."

I stand by my obsession and am crushed that the series isn't returning for a third season. It appears that the scope of the production just got out of hand. An astonishing tidbit I just picked up from the bbc site:

The Roman coins were all made at the Vatican mint, and have the likeness of the series' Caesar, Ciarán Hinds, stamped on them.

How perfect that Rome was brought down by excess.

Addendum: Somehow I neglected to mention the excellent "historian's blog" on the HBO/Rome site. Jonathan Stamp, an Oxford-educated BBC historian, was the historical consultant for the series. Here he's explaining the significance of "ambition."

images from the sets of Rome, from top: side street (wikipedia); "the spice market" and "view of the Basilica Giulia and the Temple of Jupiter" (HBO)
*SPQR-- Senatus Populusque Romanus "The Senate and the people of Rome" Used as an official signature of the government
** The book is a series of excerpts from various sources of the time. Here Suetonius, the Dominick Dunne of ancient Rome, gives some background material on Julius Caesar: "And that no man might have any doubt how infamous he was for sodomy and adulteries, Curio calls him, in one of his orations, 'Every woman's husband and every man's wife.'"

typeHigh, Hello (again)

: : : Stylish missives produce smiles upon the most snarling countenances : : :

Tasteful designs of the highest order now available for purchase on Etsy

Letterpress cards by typeHigh, hand printed on 19th-century platen presses.

the vibrant line

Top: April 13, 1929, Eduardo Garcia Benito; January 2007; 2nd row: March 1, 1949, Marcel Vertes; October 1, 1941, Carl Erickson; December 15, 1936, Jean Pages; 3rd row: December 15, 1932 Erickson; October 1, 1935, Benito; July 15, 1939, Erickson; Bottom: December 1, 1938, Benito
I stumbled on a limited but truly enthralling collection of Vogue covers in the Condé Nast Store. Images available are heavy on the 1920s and 30s, with nothing past the late 1950s, but the offerings are well worth a detour over.

I was quite familiar with the (beautiful) covers of the Twenties. I had studied fashion for a bit, interned briefly at the Met's Costume Institute, and I still have a few books of fashion art. However, nothing prepared me for the brilliant, daring, effortlessly vibrant art of the 30s and 40s covers. The covers in the second row above, especially, are amazingly risky: The strange spiky bird for "Spring," autumnal passing legs--shod in non-descript day wear no less!, and what looks like a pre-saging of Pearl Harbor but is in fact meant to evoke a cruise ship steaming its way toward glamorous shores for the "Resort Issue." Unusual vantage points, edgy color choices (brown! with fluorescent pink!) and not a celebrity in the bunch. How dull and and flaccid that Angelina Jolie cover is--merely a vehicle for the headline text and a wrapper for the ads. A predictable end product of demographic surveys, publicity campaigning, and marketing pronouncements.

I virtually never buy "women's" magazines anymore and I probably haven't picked up Vogue since the nineties. I do remember illustrators having quite a high profile in the eighties: Mats, Stavrinos, Antonio, Viramontes. What is happening today? And the oddly alienating and irrelevant drawings used in newspaper advertising for stores like Macy's and Lord & Taylor until, what 10 years ago? are they still being used? That was like the dry husk of fashion illustration. What I wonder is: Did true fashion illustration die without my noticing?

Highlights from the Collection (part 3)

Another in the sporadic series of posts that both showcase some of my "collections" and offer the easy way out when concentration fails. Here for review: ticket stubs, mostly parking. Note fins on left-hand car diagram; this was found in the mid-nineties.

I think I need help

I've begun to think that this blog is getting a too scattered. I've just been writing about things that I think about. period. Perhaps I'm "recording" too many "fancies"?

People looking for letterpress and discussions about onionskin paper (and you wouldn't believe how many people out there are searching for onionskin--what were they THINKING stopping production on that) come by and see posts about found photography. Ephemera collectors find the site and then run away from the (overwrought) philosophical noodling. Then there are the rants about "peaches" or bad architecture...and those abstruse German terms!

Those German terms probably send everyone running.

And to top it off, since I am a graphic designer after all, some friends refer to this as a 'design blog', when of course I haven't written once about graphic design...

I'd most likely do everyone a favor if I concentrated on some graspable topic (and preferably a topic I know something about). Perhaps something prescriptive-- like:

"I am a graphic designer and I've found this cool French site of "incongruités typographique", where, if you choose your links carefully, you can get free fonts!"

Then I'd have several nice pictures of foreign- looking and idiosyncratic French hand-painted signs.

Is that what I need to do? Is that what I need to do in order to keep readers after I get great mentions on ephemera, or things? In order to get some discussion going? I really need advice.
Hello? Is this thing on?

what if Domino magazine...

used this image for one of their "Can you make this outfit into a ROOM" stories? Inane? Yes! But fun...
I was lightly inspired by a recent conversation on finds and fixations with an interiors and design-savvy friend (brand new to the blog world), Mister Particular. Something about that Domino feature fascinates me, silly yet compelling: translating color, line, silhouette into furniture and mood.

I love this painting. I saw it 4 or 5 years ago at an exhibit in London's National Gallery and I was just dumbfounded –the hairdo, the articulated parasol, those shoes! That nose! It is the Portrait of Frau Wilhelmina von Cotta, of 1802, by Christian Gottleib Schick. She's like the Antimatter Universe Madame Recamier and I think she's just captivating.

It's unlikely they'll tackle this one, SO, here's my take:



I know-- the little red cabinet is not quite right (those legs, hmmm). I should have diaphanous muslin drapery, maybe a red cashmere floor pillow... But hey, this isn't an interior design blog|| Most of the items here are from Oly Studio, Mecox Gardens, Stella Christie Lighting, and Benjamin Storck. A wonderful array of Karl Blossfeldt images here, and stunning reproductions of Ernst Haeckel here. The adorable, albeit not-quite-right, curvy red cabinet can be found at anthropologie.

into the window (with Joseph Mitchell)

If I come across a particularly vivid old photograph, especially if it's a New York street scene, I find it thrilling--as though I've uncovered a bit of treasure. I find I can pore over it so intently, get drawn in so completely, that, if I allow myself, I can almost —almost—fantasize being in the image. It's sort of embarrassing.

To the extent that a photographic image, the rectangle, is a metaphorical window, its frame blocks the rest of the world that continues just beyond those edges. The "glass" is immovable, the "window" shut. I wonder, though, about what is to the left or the right. Or what connection there might be, in that photo of yesterday, to what I know today. The photographs here are part of a series of modern reprints I found in a drawer at Bowne. I believe they are a set of tax ID photographs taken in January and February of 1928 of the South Street area – in other words scenes right around Bowne. It shouldn't have been a surprise to see that the relatively tidy retail mall of today was rough, ragged-edged and tired-looking in the light of that day 79 years ago.


The dirtiness of the street, the worn and dusty clothes on the worker in the cap (click the details above for very large view), a horse drinking from a stone watering trough, the bundles of rags and paper scraps: the 19th century is palpable. Here, "the modern" is foreign. Seventeen years after these images were taken, Joseph Mitchell described these streets in Up in the Old Hotel:

I could distinguish the reek of the ancient fish and oyster houses, and the exhalations of the harbor. And I could distinguish the smell of tar, a smell that came from an attic on South Street, the net loft of a fishing-boat supply house, where trawler nets that have been dipped in tar vats are hung beside open windows to drain and dry. And I could distinguish the oak woody smell of smoke from the stack of a loft on Beekman street in which finnan haddies are cured; the furnace of this loft burns white oak and hickory shavings and sawdust. And tangled in these smells were still other smells— the acrid smoke from the stacks of the row of coffee-roasting plants on Front Street, and the pungent smoke from the stack of the Purity Spice Mill on Dover Street, and the smell of rawhides from The Swamp, the tannery district, which adjoins the market on the north.

After rereading more of the book, I discovered that the building above, left, in my photograph, 92 South Street, is the "Old Hotel." By the time Mitchell hung around the docks, the restaurant at 92 was called Sloppy Louie's (It was still John Barbagelata's place in 1928) and the locals stopped in for breakfast specialties like a shad-roe omelet or sea scallops and bacon. (The South Street Seaport of today does not say "sea" or "port" or "shad-roe" or anything marine to me at all, unfortunately...)

The Romantic-era philosopher and essayist Johann Gottfried von Herder created the term Einfühlung, which is often translated as "empathy." Not that I know very much about Herder (as I've said before I know a little about a lot of things, just enough to be annoying) but when I first came across this word I recognized it and identified with it as putting a name to a complicated, elusive and for me, enjoyable, state of mind.

... a "feeling into," [Einfuhlung is] projecting one’s mind into the object of one’s contemplation, of seeing and thinking and experiencing from its perspective and so coming to understand it better, of turning it into a subject and oneself into the object of its gaze.– Robert Daly (SUNY Buffalo)

Herder's intent may be different from my reading of it, but I'm satisfied to have it defined in my own mind.

When I look at these photographs above, I think about being on those streets with horse-drawn wagons and automobiles and the last shadows of the 19th century, and then I think of Flappers and the Chrysler building, Hollywood and Art Deco, and I can almost see it happening at the same time, just beyond the frame.

zugzwang!* schlimmbesserung!*

This isn't an actual photo of my old television, but almost: the rounded corners, the double- decker dials, the on/off/volume knob are all spot-on. It had a small sticker in back that said "manufactured: March, 1987" and it might possibly have been one of the last appliances made with the gesture of faux walnut cabinetry. Over the years I spray painted the cabinet, first gold metallic, more recently white. People would say, "Wow, a B/W tv?!" but it was actually a full fifteen inches of glorious cathode ray color. That recent glossy white coat actually gave it an almost Verner Pantonesque flair, like set decoration for a *Wallpaper shoot. I never really had any problem with it, or with reception (it had a rabbit ears antenna) and the image was just fine until the very end. I finally replaced it, with a new flat screen, shortly after its 19th birthday.

In researching for my next tv purchase I had been told that new(er) television sets were more "sensitive." Sleek, sliver-like, highly attuned, they picked up ambient interference, electromagnetic fluctuations and the like that the old(er) sets, stolid and workmanlike, did not. No longer could I just plug the thing into the wall and go-- I would need cable. I was enabling a neurasthenic intelligentsia to take over from the lumpen proletariat.

{eight ensuing months}

As I began this post, a gossamer sprinkling of snow glittered in the street lights outside, but my flat screen remains dark. The cable box flashes an insistent 7:15, but it is after 9. My friends in cable repair are coming to visit again! But I need to wait 3 days.

*zugzwang-- (from chess) A position where one is forced to make an undesirable move.
*schlimmbesserung - literally means, "an improvement which makes things worse."

four things i can do without this year

No, this is not some vow of self-abnegation. This is some time-honored peevish blogging!

1. deer heads
It pains me to say because I'm partial to all things surreal and macabre-- and these started out as such. But they've gone cute. Some heads and horns out there are still appealing, though. This one from local Brooklyn design emporium Matter has a nice Baroque kitsch sensibility, but the formerly (and formally) wonderful ceramic antler chandelier, also at Matter, has been tainted by the rest of the herd. They are still proliferating, like here and here, but the deer-head-as-coat-rack is dead.

2. public privates
This makes me positively shiver with hatred. To what depths of mindless skank has this country sunk? We're down at (warning: link NSFW) crotch level documenting a rash of "celebrity" front bottom airings.
3. ornamental kale
They have been sprouting in patches of bare dirt in front of countless office buildings like alien mold spores. There is just no reason for this.

4. lists
"What do you mean?" I hear you think, "isn't this, right here, a list?" Well, yes. (I could have just updated my beloved opinion circle.) But listmaking has become some knee-jerk, dumbed-down, commercially manipulable, ADD-oriented excuse for content. Ten years ago, during my time at sidewalk.com (the antecedent to citysearch), someone on staff introduced a new feature, something like "Weekend Top Ten." It was a list of the top grossing films of the weekend and how much they made. I remember thinking, "what is that? why on earth would someone be interested in that? That's going nowhere..." Quaint, huh?

reading old postcards

I'm experiencing some unfortunate blogger technical difficulties so my 'special New Years post' is not ready for viewing. So here's an evergreen from the pipeline:
I collect postcards sporadically. Most of my favorites are peculiar Christmas cards or those of the highly sentimental "pleasant thoughts for a dear friend" sort, the more sugary the better. Some people will buy only blank, unused cards. When I can I'd rather have the entire, completed journey: chosen, written, sent, postmarked, and, implicitly, saved. Some cards may not, on first view, be all that compelling visually, but reveal themselves on closer consideration. Many of the cards showcase abysmal grammar skills: "Best Wishes to yous all," "we are well. Hoping you and your husband is the same." That aside, reading the cards can pay off with some important (well, in a relative sense) tidbits. This Venice scene, postmarked August, 1906, is certainly pretty but hardly extraordinary. But the inscription at top caught my eye. It reads, in part, "... it is very hot at mid day but cool at night. The girls are "crazy about it" as they say..." "Crazy about it" was put in quotation marks. Significant because it indicates the phrase was new as an expression or was considered kids' slang, but yet it had to have been common enough that the author was confident that the reader would understand. Kind of like if I were to write my Aunt Helen saying, oh, 'the "bitches are down with it."' Obviously "bitches" (as a term of, uh, bonhomie) and "down with it" have been around for quite a while in Black slang, not as long in general slang. Still my Aunt Helen might get what I'm saying because the phrases have had currency long enough already for someone like me to write them. So when my American Slang Dictionary puts its citation for "crazy about it" at 1914, I just happen to know, from my 50¢ postcard, it must have been kicking around a fair bit earlier.

some belated thoughts about "You"

For a while now I've been mulling over the hollowness of "You"-- the purported prime mover in the consumer chain. Design your own personal sneaker, Hummer, pizza. Express your personality through the oxymoronic doublespeak of "mass customization." The escalating illusion is that now, with technology at one's fingertips, the power is in your hands. As with niche marketing, innovations with just your slice of demographic in mind, one is told many times over, "you deserve it." You're so busy/ important/overworked/ worthy, you deserve 500 channels of 24-hr HD sports (or whatever), you deserve soup in a go-cup, a good night's sleep with AmbienCR. Here's a fat-free fudge-dipped caramel bite with extra calcium created expressly for your over-40 bones. Coach or L.L. Bean in your Lincoln Navigator? Your choice! This proliferation of specious choice-- the so-called American ethos of individualism ("freedom") distorted through a lens of consumption. All of this disingenuous catering (pandering?) to "you." And then last week Time made "you" the Person of the Year in one of the most oleaginous essays I've read recently:

And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software. ...Who has that time and that energy and that passion? The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

What about me? Despite both designations having to do with the individual, presumed solipsism, and implied atomization, the "Me" of the Me Generation (I believe it was Tom Wolfe who christened the 70s the Me Decade, with "generation" being an extrapolation from that.) strikes me as a different concept. At its most elementary level, the term is subjective: me, I. And I read the term, at very least, as active --seeking out self-definition, though not necessarily through consumption. This "You" moment conveys an object observed and defined by others: what you buy, what you own, your 'audience.' The you as consumer defined by age/income/race/ demographic...
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I only just recently saw the Frontline show "The Persuaders" on the web, although the episode is more than 2 years old. It is a disturbing and utterly fascinating overview of the current culture of marketing and advertising and its societal influences. The web site for the episode is dense with interviews, transcripts, commentary--it is a must. Someone there (cant remember which person sums it up) distilled for me what had been ill-defined complaints and ravings: the danger of an atomized populace in a completely immersive, consumer-driven society is that there is no longer a recognition of "the common good," or civic duty; democracy itself comes apart. Media critic Mark Crispin Miller (whom I had not heard of before) delivers some of the most devastating commentary.

Consumers are feeders. All consumers do is consume. ...They're being manipulated to think only about the grass that they're chewing and nothing else, and manipulated into thinking about ways to get more grass. They're not operating on a sufficiently high level to participate in a democracy…

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So the Burger King "have it your way" campaign of circa 1974 (?) was a brilliant precursor to the mass customization model...

a new world christmas

While I gather my thoughts and work on the several posts sitting in the "draft" line I'll put up 3 cards from my Christmas collection. At top is the very curious "Christmas Greetings from the New World." The reverse says the card was "printed in Saxony," obviously in English, though it was sent "To Willie, from Harold" entirely within the confines of Brooklyn. It is postmarked, 8 pm, December 21, 1911. The bottom two, polka dot sleigh ride and manic circular Yuletide, match, by happenstance, in warm red and silver, and are from c.1930.

typeHigh wrap-up

UPDATE Perhaps I should state the following reminder: these posts are my thoughts, not those of typeHigh or my business partner or anyone else. Aesthetic commentary aside, we certainly benefited from participating in the sale and I could have been more gracious about that. Also, I should have made clear the "Iraqi" comment below referenced a story in the Times that day that made a point about fluorescent lights.

At the risk of being tedious: a quick overview fr om the sale. TypeHigh managed a respectable showing at the Center for Book Arts sale despite the fact we were out of our element aesthetically. Thanks to Doug's ingenious handiwork we had a professional display rack and many of the trappings of a real business. Most importantly, people (strangers, even!) will be writing and sending our cards. Amazing.

The tenor of the event was more clogs and rainbows than I'm comfortable with and the room, a ragged loft space awash in fluorescent light, said to me 'Iraqi detention center' a lot more than 'Happy Holidays.' We were made acutely aware of the need to find the correct audience.

Our "Lucky" magnets--vintage wooden Bingo pieces-- were a surprise hit. (Though when people asked why they were lucky I was tempted to just say "'cause I said so." They're Bingo pieces, people, they won't help you get a new job). The type on the tag was hand set in a great metal face from the Bowne collection called Samoa. Its got a quasi-"oriental"/Art Nouveau flourish to it. A little Googling finds that Samoa became a US territory in 1900, and I'm guessing the type was issued around then.

Trying to catch a cab after the show on Twenty-seventh and Broadway was far more dicey than I would have imagined. Clusters of what in another decade might have been termed hoodlums gathered in darkened doorways. A guy selling garish pink and blue fur pelts was talk-yelling animatedly. Was it heavily accented english? Something else entirely? Raised voices could have meant people having a good time or a fight about to break, and there was no easy way to tell.

A highlight of the evening was a chance to see Robert (Warner's) basement workshop in the Village (There's Robert in the mirror, above, left). Though there was a little hesitation on his part-- too many people? delicate sensibilities likely to be offended? embarrassing things left in view? rat poison? -- we prevailed. Down the stairs, through a door, along a narrow dilapidated corridor, right, through another door, out into a small rear courtyard and to the left, by the wooden stairs. We all crowded into the workshop past jars of lamp black and springs, boxes marked "marbles" or "better photographs", piles of papers, Howdy Doody heads, books, toy eyeglasses, drawers open and quietly exploding, and an ample sprinkling of glitter.

When we'd taken in all we could, we went back, around, up and out for some Pan Asian cuisine at a sprightly little restaurant in the shadow of the Jefferson Market clock tower.

typeHigh, hello!

One might think it a happy coincidence that the Sunday Times reports on the resurgence of letterpress printing just when my friend Doug and I debut our line of hand-printed cards. One could think so. But if one were me, one would know better. Everybody and their uncle is churning out letterpress these days and furthermore if you're reading about it in the Times, it's already gathering momentum on the long slide to "over."

In any case, Doug and I have lavished absurd amounts of time on the venture we're calling typeHigh. I probably would have preferred to wrangle over the name a bit more, but luckily Doug is a decision maker. (If it were just me, I'd be tempted to call myself 'negative space press') Type high means, simply, something at the same level as the face or printing surface of the metal type (see the diagram, above, from the very informative briar press). Some of the cards are based on 19th century type specimens, others are just free-wheeling experiments, all incorporate some 19th ornament. Despite the grand intentions, and generous donation of much-discussed onion skin paper, we never did manage to line our envelopes. (I regret not being able to add that detail but years would have gone by, I'd be a bitter, ink-stained crone and we'd have worn out the super-human generosity of Robert Warner at Bowne & Co. And as I think about it, it would most likely have been just a bit de trop) Most of the cards are 3 or more colors which means we fed the card through the press once for each color plus another for the imprint and another, still, for scoring. And these are brawny 19th-century foot-powered machines, no sissy power- or Vandercook presses! My leg muscles are now comically over-developed.

We will be sharing a miniscule portion of Robert's abundant table of wonders (typeHigh and piled high. AH hahaha) attempting to sell our wares at the Center for Book Arts Holiday Sale. Look for our panicked, clueless faces at the

Center for Book Arts Sale
Friday 12/15 ($10 benefit), 6-9 pm
Saturday 12/16 (free), 11 am to 5pm
28 West 27th Street, 3rd Floor

jersey shore

I think I will make "Highlights" a regular feature here.
Inspired by a great found-photo site I came across the other day, Square America, I'm hauling a few of my acquisitions out of storage.
From top: Sacred Snakes of India. Aside from the great banner and imposing pavilion, what got me to part with my $2 or whatever were those penants flying atop the cupolas. Obviously some sort of carnival going on. I would say 1890-1900. A sideshow sensibility to a snake attraction I think, rather than state fair. No hint of beach or I would hazard Coney Island.
Creepy Family. Rather Dust Bowl/Grapes of Wrath/American Gothic, no? Farm worker family portrait c 1930, perhaps. I read a lot of helpless befuddlement and resignation in Father's face. He's actually rather handsome (and note the meerschaum/calabash pipe), unfortunately the children inherited all their genes from Mother who appears to be part woman, part bull terrier.
Revelers. I like the cheeky gaiety of the set up but I found something very peculiar about the perspective in this shot. Is it a composite? No, but the "Equestrienne", the Joycean man and the Roadster Couple don't seem to sit in the same plane. It's particularly nice the way the car seems to be driving out of the frame at left. Eight people, c. 1918, out on a lark, as they might have said. I think I could have been friends with them.
Little Bear. A new acquisition. He sort of reminded me of Arne Svenson's Sock Monkeys. Oddly, the inscription on back reads, " Nov.1944/ autograph dog/ To Bob/From Snook McCloskey" I Googled Snook McCloskey, hoping to find something. Alas, no documents returned on that search.

Next time: antique buttons-on-cards? or perhaps my as-yet-very-limited "old library card" collection. Let's vote.

Bowne & Co.

Almost every Sunday for the past few months I've been at Bowne & Co, Stationers. My friend Doug and I have eagerly spent an absurd amount of time planning, designing, printing, second-guessing, amending, scoring and folding a series of letterpress notecards loosely based on 19th century type specimens and ornament. We still have wrapping and packaging (and selling!) to go. More on the cards next time.

I've come upon Bowne unexpectedly, through Doug, who started volunteering there. On stepping into the shop the first time I was almost giddy. Cluttered, dim, with wooden displays and shelves lining the walls, the place appeared reasonably authentic on first view, but I knew, in New York, that was impossible. I was only slightly deflated to confirm it was a recreation. Bowne & Co. was founded in 1775; this store is a 1975-vintage evocation of a printing "job shop," c. 1875. (Bowne, the company, still exists, as a global financial printer.) The shop has an amazing collection of type both metal and wood, an assortment of curious machines of obscure purpose, many wooden cabinets and drawers, mostly askew, and fantastical piles of oddments.

Most of the oddments belong to Robert Warner the "master printer", curator, and character of the shop (that's him printing, above, on the shop's 1901 Golding press). Almost Seussian (or is it more Felix with his bag of tricks?) he is focussed, jovial, fond of puns, and has an air of the surreal about him. Robert is a fascinating collage- and correspondence artist and describes himself as a 'gatherer.' He scours eBay for odd lots of antique wallpaper, ancient ledgers, disbound books, 1930s catalogs, cabinet cards and other paper ephemera and he most certainly has an exuberant way with the detritus of bygone eras. I'm jealous of his inventory. He also appears to acquire people, like a set of identical twin sisters from somewhere mid-country with whom he corresponds. The twins definitely veer more toward the Tim Burtonesque: identical clothing and hair style, theatrically prim, and obsessively creative. I've not actually seen these girls in person, but they do make a very intriguing cameo in this engagingly quirky film about Robert's art.

The store is a working printing office. It is also under the auspices of the South Street Seaport Museum and as such it has the mission to 'demonstrate' the arcane processes and 'educate' the unwary public that wanders in, however few they might be. Thankfully Bowne doesn't wholly ascribe to the Colonial Williamsburg school of 'living history' and there is no "authentic" printer outfit to wear, save for a very real printer's apron. Though one person did tell Robert, who is partial to overalls and caps, she liked his "costume." I think he enjoyed that. And so, by default, for these past many Sundays, I've been part of the show.
top photo from the South Street Seaport Museum, the rest by me!

architectural salvage: the slasher movie

My friend Noel and I went up to Demolition Depot, an architectural salvage outfit on 125th and third Avenue. Four stories of remnants– many, many doors, sinks and toilets– waiting in darkness (lights are on motion detectors). All are obsessively catalogued; each item tagged with a number one looks up on a computer for a price, each entry documented with a photo. Areas on each floor are designated with small hanging signs saying things like, "swinging kitchen door section" or "full set French door section." The peculiarity of the place comes through in certain inventory choices: there may be a stunning, unusual item, say, a 4-foot tall wooden Art Deco chandelier nestled amongst rows of graceful early twentieth century oval sinks and then a small, corroded, emphatically not-special mirror, each tagged, photographed and recorded.

All items appear to be in the exact state in which they were found and ripped from the bowels of origin. Small traces of lives remained. A door with children's stickers, another with a sad accretion of locks and chains. Toilets dressed in furry colored seat covers. Medicine cabinets with rust rings--documents of the last can or two of shaving cream?

We got the sense that Evan, the owner, never truly wanted to part with anything. N inquired about a large, handsome print of the Singer building propped up against the counter. It was met with "That's.... [pause]... mine. Not for sale." The small, corroded, emphatically not-special mirror mentioned above, used by us as a price gauge, was $75. To visit the fireplace annex across the street one needed to be escorted. When we asked and waited for our escort we were interrogated more than once: "Are you looking for fireplaces? Are you shopping for mantels?" Ultimately we were discouraged from venturing over, fearing what a, "just looking" might incur.

Ominously we were reminded that, if we didn't see something we wanted, we should call them since they were "always taking down buildings." Always taking down buildings. That conveyed a bit more active intent than I was comfortable with. My wistful admiration and odd sense of gratitude that someone "rescued" these items began to falter. In the Stephen King novel of Demolition Depot, Evan, sinking ever deeper into his acquisitional mania and cataloging delusions, would resort to subterfuge, landmark infringement and-- murder!--in order to take down buildings and salvage items, large and small. Then they'd remain in perpetuity on those four dark floors or "over in the warehouse."

the opinion circle

Favorite Thing

I love diners. They are one of the truly great things in this country. For all my anglophilia, British caffs don't even come close. They are, to be fair, fascinating in their own right but exist in a wholly different realm-- one that conjures pre-'Cool Britannia' insular Britain, resignation and strange notions of comfort food borne of privation (see: beans on toast). Perhaps I'd put them in the same continuum as the urban coffee shop but way at the other end. Very generally speaking American diners are about abundance.

People fetishize the iconic chrome diner (one of my sentimental favorites: the Cutchogue) unfortunately to the exclusion of the many other incarnations and details of diners of all stripes. The comically grandiose Outer Borough variety (I come at this from an acutely NYC-centric perspective) in stucco and smoked mirror, are usually free-standing buildings, and are remodeled and updated periodically. You will find (9.5 times out of 10) Greek souvenir kitsch, a lively atmosphere, voluminous menus, a motorized rotating dessert display, and if you're very lucky, paper placemats of cocktail recipes that include things like Sprite. In the city, there is the corner coffee shop. It is increasingly rare to find one that retains a Hopperesque urban melancholy but I still try, having many a tuna melt around town in the process. (Andrew's Coffee Shop, Madison and 33rd, is not very Hopperesque, but it does make the best tuna melt I've encountered yet, above, the secret being the grilled toast.) Another Andrew's that closed a year or two ago on Fifth Avenue near 20th Street, was a bit closer to capturing that sensibility though not literally. Bright and beige and open-planned in a quietly 1960s way, it had an extended horseshoe counter and stools where a regular scattering of patrons was always alone together. Waitresses offered newspapers from behind the counter to those who felt stranded, not knowing what to do with themselves, or where to look, while they ate.

A word about terminology: luncheonette, which I find to be more a written, rather than spoken, word, is a small diner: a counter with stools and maybe one row of tables or booths. Eisenberg's sandwich shop, an interesting and enigmatic hold out on Fifth Avenue, is a luncheonette. The evocatively shabby Grand Luncheonette, left, wedged under a decaying theater marquee on 42nd Street, was in fact one of the last of the dying breed of lunch counter, consisting of only the open kitchen and serving counter with stools. (Photo c. 1997 by Robert Wright.) There used to be a large Woolworth's on east 14th street that closed about the same time as the Grand and it had an iconic double-horseshoe lunch counter complete with pies on stands under glass domes. Sort of like a real-life Wayne Thiebaud.

I imagine New York City of the 1950s filled with lunch counters.

One of the best incarnations of all however is the random road side find--chrome or otherwise-- preferably with some mysteriously named local specialty...

reasons to be cheerful*

Although it hasn't stopped me from planning a trip in February, I've been preoccupied with what I call, somewhat loosely, the end of the world. I find myself scanning news headlines obsessively, salting away tidbits and references in my mental eschatological clipping file: environmental catastrophes, genetically modified foods, religious extremism, obesity, technological singularity (that's a new one for me and, boy, its a doozy), heck, throw in zebo, and the decline of civility. From the absurd to the epic, it's all become a kind of drone that I'm always tuning in to. Perhaps that's why I found Niall Ferguson's piece in Vanity Fair, arguing that the decline of the West is not imminent-- its here, perversely gratifying. It won't win many (other) liberal hearts and minds, making sloppy shorthand of it all in equating NASCAR, illegal immigration, and, yes even tattoos, with signs of The End:

Shame has gone; so has civility. On Friday and Saturday nights, most English city centers become no-go zones where drunken, knife-wielding youths brawl with one another and the police. Another striking symptom of this new primitivism is the extraordinary surge in the popularity of tattoos, once associated with the unruly Picts of the Far North. In this modern decline and fall, it seems, at least some of the barbarians come from within the empire.

But I don't do him justice by merely quoting that, there's much more reasoned content. Somehow I found his cross-referenced kitchen sinkism compelling.

And what about the byzantine and loony mental machinations of Daniel Pinchbeck? I've got a reserve on The Return of Quetzalcoatl at the library! From a piece in LA Weekly:

In 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, his part memoir, part anthropological journey through many things spiritual, metaphysical and just plain eerie, Pinchbeck illuminates not the world’s end but the many ways in which our social structures are disintegrating. “What I’m trying to show is that we’re already in a process of accelerated transformation,” he told me. “And I find that a reason to be hopeful.”

More salient is this comment (from a recent Rolling Stone hatchet job)

"We have to fix this situation right fucking now, or there's going to be nuclear wars and mass death, and it's not going to be very interesting. There's not going to be a United States in five years, OK?"

I think I'm with him on that...
A few months ago I saw a BBC documentary about Isaac Newton, 'outing' him as a religious obsessive, apocalyptic thinker and alchemist. He is said to have calculated AD 2060 as the time when there would be

a dramatic transition to a millennium of peace. In other words: the end of the secular world and the beginning of the Kingdom of God.

2012? 2045? 2060? Whichever date you choose to give credence to, something seems to be coming soonish.

---
Kurt Anderson made an excellent observation in his End Days trend piece in New York magazine

I don’t think our mood is only a consequence of 9/11 (and the grim Middle East), or climate-change science, or Christians’ displaced fear of science and social change. It’s also a function of the baby-boomers’ becoming elderly. For half a century, they have dominated the culture, and now...I think their generational solipsism unconsciously extrapolates approaching personal doom: When I go, everything goes with me, my end will be the end.

The "Me Generation" indeed.

* "Why don't you get back into bed
Why don't you get back into bed
Why don't you get back into bed...
Reasons to be cheerful part 3"

(image from: Morse Library, Beloit College)

looks like a genocide, quacks like a genocide...

France has initiated a parliamentary bill to make it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide of 1915 and now Turkey is stamping its foot and giving Europe the evil eye. I'm aware that I can sometimes be appallingly uninformed and simplistic when it comes to political history, but --why can't the Turks just own up to their episode and everyone can move on? Germany's managed to! Twice! One can't be a Holocaust Denier, why can one be a Genocide Denier? Why do the Turks make it a criminal act to even speak about it in Turkey, but cry loss of freedom of speech with this bill? And (and!) the EU doesn't even require Turkey to acknowledge 1915 for its proposed membership, but Turkey is issuing blustery warnings anyway. Perhaps someone can explain this to me?

And another issue is why the US, UK and Israel acknowledge something went on but its sorta, maybe what other people might call "genocide." According to the BBC:

In May 1915, the Armenian minority, two or three million strong, was forcefully deported and marched from the Anatolian borders towards Syria and Mesopotamia (now Iraq). Many died en route...
Whether or not the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians during World War I amounted to genocide is a matter for heated debate. Some countries have declared that a genocide took place, but others have resisted calls to do so.

Perhaps for the US what happened in Asia Minor sounds a wee bit too familiar. (If displacing and death-marching an entire ethnic community is genocide, that opens a whole other can of worms...). So what is the UK's and Israel's issue?

Highlights from the Collection

By popular demand (ie. my friend Clay expressed passing interest in the Holcottsville souvenir) I am posting some more generic landscape postcards. Left, from top, Nature Lovers' Utopia, a Dextone Beauty Scene, "Indian Summer," a Dextone Beauty Scene, Untitled [imprinted "Greetings from Wurtsboro, New York"].

The card below, right, is worth quoting in its entirety, "A color symphony deep in the autumn woods, reflected by the shining, limpid waters in this Dextone Beauty Scene." Ektachrome by Thomas A. Dexter.

minor casualties of the 21st century

My friend Doug and I are making some letterpress notecards (who isn't these days?) and we're looking for something to print and line the envelopes with. Onion skin I thought. Kind of like the old air mail paper. Its mottled translucence, theoretically, could be interesting and it has that crinkley, unusual sound. Nice. So I started calling some stationery shops and got some chuckles on the other end of the line. One nice man mused, surely with some hyperbole, "we sold that about 40 years ago." Another said, with amusement, " you have to talk to Abe, he remembers that," and put me on hold. Alas, when Abe, evidently too busy to be troubled with memories of antiquated stock, picked up he simply said, "No, we don't got that." Todd Bielen over at Papertec Inc, which specializes in, well, "specialty papers," was very helpful. They had onion skin that, according to their site, "was approved for use by the US government and meets military spec P-157A... used in the production of military flares, munitions, and detonators." Unfortunately it was the cockle finish I was looking for and there was none left. Not only that, the "only mill in North America" that made onion skin had just ceased production. "So whatever's out there now," said Mr. Bielen with sympathy,"that's it."

I thought of something I'd read somewhere about a group of sound engineers in the 1970s who went around with microphones and reel-to-reels recording everyday sounds that were "endangered" like hand cranks and, presciently, telephone rings...

Doug and I have several options (we can try eBay, we can try Bible paper, we can go another route entirely) but I find it strangely sad.

Addendum: I've gotten an (relatively) outrageous amount of traffic from onion skin queryists. Now, in the comments for this post, The Paper Mill Store reports they have onion skin-- although I do not see any of the much-celebrated cockle finish...

Young Americans

The "Reverend Rollin Heber Neale" and "Unknown Woman in 9 Views" (both c. 1850) are from the magnificent book Young America, the Daguerreotypes of Southworth and Hawes. S&H were a daguerreotype studio "of the highest order" in Boston from the 1840s to early 60s and produced some of the finest examples of the process. In 10 to 30 second exposures, daguerreotypists attempted to represent the best likeness-- the 'inner soul'-- of the sitter. The daguerreotype fixed, on a highly polished silvered metal plate, a single unique image that, though exquisitely almost unnervingly detailed, would dissolve into an evanescent, shimmering mirror depending on the angle at which it was viewed. The French invention took hold in the US to such an extent that by 1851 the Americans took home all the gold medals in 'Works of Industry' at the Crystal Palace exposition and daguerreotypy became known as the "American process." About the same time the daguerreian mania hit US shores the Young America movement gained prominence -- a radical democratic/utopian spirit in the arts, and political thinking--bringing together a preening sense of superiority, idealism and expansionist fervor. Daguerreian process and product seemed to reflect, both literally and figuratively, the energy and nationalist and individualist spirit of the 1840s and 50s. At that time, America, and a good portion of Europe, really thought the "Great Experiment" would work. As Alan Trachtenberg relates in Young America:

Envisioning a continental "empire of liberty" Young America saw the American nationalist mission as the "hope of mankind." The prospects of the country seemed without parallel in human history

Looking at the many portraits in this book I feel oddly emotional. That type of boundless optimism, the sense that anything could be achieved, and anyone, anywhere, improved, with a little American Know-How is inconceivable... The earlier simplistic adolescent vigor, overreaching but potent and impressive, is now still-naive, still-overreaching (with a sense of entitlement to boot) but in its bloated Late Middle Age is not so "Great" anymore.
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I came across a haunting latin phrase: Vis consili expers mole ruit sua ("Strength without wisdom falls by its own weight")...
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The portrait of the Reverend Neale, shown at about age 42, is riveting. If it is possible to be swept off one's feet by someone who has been dead for 127 years, I have succumbed.