Fun City

When I think of New York City, from about 1965 until, say, 1980, it is always mid-summer. Of course there were surely brisk autumns and snow and probably some beautiful springs but in my mind heat shimmers from the pavement, the news hisses from a tinny transistor somewhere nearby and the hydrants are always open. “New York is a Summer Festival” as the slogan used to say.

Hot town, summer in the city
Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty
Been down, isn't it a pity
Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city (Lovin' Spoonful, 1966)

Before anyone thought to heart New York, it was, officially, "Fun City." Blackouts, strikes, graffiti, potholes (does anyone think about “potholes” anymore?) — but no irony. Fun City was the New York of John Lindsay. Young, handsome, WASPy, Lindsay was the Kennedy of City Hall from 1966 til 1973.

Most images here are from Tenth Street, by Bill Binzen, a wonderful random find of mine. The book is a small 6 x 7" photographic record of the life of a street from river to river. I don't know much about Binzen but I like his style. Published in 1968, Tenth Street illustrates the early stages of that New York. Here's an almost-foreign Tompkins Square Park, in Binzen's words:

[people] relax on grass, on benches, on dirt. They bring their dogs, all sizes and shapes, cats, rabbits, snakes, lizards. Kids romp, fight, tease, swing, spray each other from the drinking fountains, toss dirt in the air. The dirt settles on chess players who never know the difference. Dr. Spock spoke there, the Grateful Dead played there. People talk with their hands...Tight bottoms, no bras. Big bottoms, iron bras. Music: drums, flutes, bongos, sticks knocking on beer cans, sticks on benches, sticks on coke (sic) bottles, bang, bang, bang Kids pile on seesaws, slides jungle gyms, each other. There are friendly drunks, nasty drunks, drunk drunks. Pigeons, squirrels, beards, Hippies, Yippies, beads, incense, grass, yogi. The Good Humor man going around and around. Benches, benches. Old People sitting, standing. MENS, WOMENS. Firecrackers. Handouts. Bikes. Chalk drawings... And under the chess tables at the end of a long day, matches, papers, butts, broken bottles, Vietnam leaflets, junk galore, all to be swept up...

Binzen mentions the "hot summer night" sound of boys clanking on garbage cans with sticks as they make their way down the street. There are no metal garbage cans anymore. There are no boys with sticks anymore either-- that I've seen.
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The image at top is called "Avenue A." I find the juxtaposition of eras particularly interesting: the pompadoured West Side Story-ish teen in his windbreaker is a pre-Assassination (whichever) holdout. He's living in a Frankie Avalon, Beatles at Shea Stadium New York. The Easy Rider chopper hippies are (anticipate really) pure Manson Family and Altamont. Looking at images of the late 60s-- crowd scenes in the subways for instance-- one can almost see the the social tectonic plates shifting. Men in hats, guys in ponchos, older ladies with white gloves, women in bell bottoms...

The third image, "Tompkins Park," is an Arbus-ian study in tension.

The fifth image down, "Third Avenue," notice the William F. Buckley for (Fuhrer!) Mayor posters. That was news to me.

The last image, "Between First and Avenue A" just kills me-- the crazy kids these days!

Also shown are a couple images (second, fourth) by Klaus Lehnartz from New York, a German publication from 1969, more coffee table souvenir than photo essay.
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And now I'm off to Iceland for a week.

museum day

I was fed up with everything the other day and decided I needed to go see the revamped Greek and Roman hall at the Metropolitan. Once there, I faced momentary sticker shock ($20) but reminded myself that the splendors of the ancient world were probably worth it. The Greek hall and the new Roman atrium area (site of the long-ago restaurant; hard to believe Dorothy Draper was ever there!) are soaring, beautiful, sky-lit spaces. Somehow they managed to envelope school groups and seniors and cranky babies and unruly throngs in a delicate calm. Sunlight gave the marble a beatific glow. I saw Cycladic and early Geometric Greek, Classical Greek, and Late Hellenistic, Early Roman, Classical Roman, and Late Roman, and, up on the mezzanine, a jumble of Etruscan for good measure. I also saw Tate Donovan, late of "the OC."

It is difficult to reconcile the (my) stereotypical notion of the Classical World: white, measured, Golden Mean, moderation in all things– with much evidence to the contrary. Polychromed, gilded, bawdy—the ancient world was loud in every sense of the word. Classical statuary, I would say, is quiet, pensive— even the heroic athletes or combatant youths. All the more so because it's often fragmentary and the viewer, receiving partial information, must pause and imagine. Objects like the colorful vase and box or the peculiar ring of painted ladies or even the fey fellow with wings (images above) seem to sing or laugh or cackle... {That "angel" really struck me— I don't think I've ever seen ancient winged adult figures, have I? Babies or sphinxes or harpies but not youths.}

Another thing I never truly noticed before was how mutable form was for the Greeks and Romans et al. Again, this flies in the face of the measured, symmetrical rationality that supposedly defines the Greeks. Double-faced ("janiform") heads, heads split down the center (like that astounding ram-donkey headed drinking cup), human figures sprouting horses, extra heads or an accretion of limbs. Vases in the shape of legs, heads, phalluses, birds, even lobster claws (above). It's as though corporeal form, for them, was a transient state: often recorded, in bronze or terra cotta, in mid-transformation...
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That tremendous bronze statue of Some Later Roman Emperor (I was bad with recording what it was I was looking at) was so ludicrous, so ghastly, I was embarrassed for it. Ungainly, oafish and truly cringe-worthy it was as though some crazy uncle finally went unhinged and took off his clothes at Thanksgiving dinner.
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Some things are just so powerful in their fragmentary state (hand holding a rod, above) I think the whole would be somewhat disappointing.
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Finally I wended my way to the dour comfort of the Northern Renaissance to see some Old favorites when I came upon a man (and woman) wearing the tightest jeans I have ever seen. But what nearly floored me were his white kid skin dance shoes, which, back in the day, were generically called "Capezios." These two were studying a Bosch-inspired landscape so intently they didn't notice me gaping and snickering.
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I laughed out loud at this particular Christ ascending into heaven, which I don't suppose was the desired effect. But really, it's as though stage hands were sloppily hoisting him from the frame...

cameo cards and the great rescue

I found the slim and rather clumsily titled "Cameo Cards and Bella C. Landauer" while snooping around on the desk of collagist and master printer Robert Warner. He was kind enough to overlook that fact and lend the booklet, which was published by the Ephemera Society of America, to me. The Society describes itself within the booklet in endearing terms as

concerned with the preservation, study, and educational uses of printed and handwritten ephemera... These bits and pieces of everyday life have held a strange fascination for all those who have rescued the minor documents of society from obscurity.

I especially love the designation of "rescuing" – I often feel just that when I'm debating over yet another postcard/ billhead/ticket stub. I sometimes get slightly panicky if I pause to think about the countless "minor documents" that casually slipped into obscurity...

Cameo cards, strictly speaking, are embossed commercial calling cards. So called because with their light figures on dark ground they bear a passing resemblance to carved cameo jewels (see top image, above, with its particularly high-relief portrait). Especially popular in the decade or so before the Civil War, they continued to be produced through the end of the 19th century.

This booklet, likely out of necessity, is a sadly low-budget affair and the very poor black and white reproductions only hint at what must be gorgeous reality. (Color pairings and variants are noted and reeled off: light blue and pale red, blue with bronze and copper, violet with brown, and so on). The booklet also reveals the obsessive cataloging and redundant cross-referencing that seems endemic to fervent collectors...

Much of the credit for making the world of ephemera, well, less ephemeral goes to Bella C. Landauer (1874–1960) who amassed such a tremendous collection that the portion of her archive donated to the New-York Historical Society alone numbers 850,000 pieces. Mrs. Landauer, who looked like an extra from a Marx brother's film, was tireless and somewhat manic-- she apparently presided over her collection in a disused kitchen in the attic of the Historical Society until more genteel showrooms became available. She glued, cataloged, and added to the archive several days a week, until her death.

I tried to understand what it is that I find so enchanting about these cards: the juxtaposition of minute detail and crudeness; fanciful shapes and awkward word breaks, the idiosyncratic phrasing and of course, rampant commas!
"Adams, Hotel"
"Practical Steam Marble Works"
"Cracker and Variety Bakery"
"Theodor Kay, fancy turner in Meerschaum..."

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On reviewing this post a few days later I find it necessary to highlight 2 proprietor names that are worth a pause: first row just under the large portrait, left and center.

Also, anyone have ideas about what the mound-like structure in the last card is supposed to represent...A bee hive of carpet attracting all the ladies?

best regards

A small spotlight cast onto to a few of the best blogs I frequent. First installment:
Le Divan Fumoir Bohemien, where I pilfered this beautiful miniature, is a mystery. This is only partially so because it is entirely in French. Even if it were in English I imagine the site would still be suffused in a dreamlike wunderkammer atmosphere. The author gathers striking details from 18th and 19th century paintings, haunting bits of illustration, a series on ribbons, unusual scenes from abroad, a meditation on ice and winter imagery, and sugar glazed flowers...The last post I checked was a brief investigation into the origin of "Happy Birthday to You," prompted by recognizing the passing "notes mécaniques" in the air one night on a trip to Vietnam . The "about" page appears to refer to "Florizel, Prince of Bohemia" and to a Robert Louis Stevenson quote but that really gets one nowhere. I imagine her somewhere between Orlando and Ophelia...

the Forgotten Ideal

My friend John lent me a book last week, Hudson Valley Ruins by Thomas Rinaldi and Robert Yasinac. It took me several days to get beyond the academic publisher production values to finally see the beauty that this book is. Encyclopedic research — breadth and detail of truly heroic proportions — is spun into sensitive and occasionally haunting narrative.

The forgotten ideal referred to above is, the authors say, the 18th and 19th century conception of the Picturesque which had all but gone out of favor in the 20th. Ruins and relics that had once been valued, even cherished, were seen as blight or nuisances at best.
 
The Picturesque**, as I personally interpret it, is a cousin to aspects of Romanticism**. The Romanticism of the Keats/Shelley/Byron is a melancholy of majesty-- a meditation upon Antiquity. The temporal aspect is a transportive state of mind. Washington Irving noted, "I longed to wander over scenes of renowned achievement...to meditate on the falling tower...to escape, in short, from the commonplace realities of the present." (As quoted in Hudson Valley Ruins)
Proponents of the Picturesque rhapsodized the beauty, the "sublimity," of the interaction of the forces of man and nature. Americans of the 19th century were especially proud of the country's vast landscape-- which, to them, embodied the potential and the freedom of the "young and vigorous" nation. The effects of wear of were prized for their evocation of the fleeting passage of Time. Ultimately, though, the eccentricities of the Picturesque seemed to become too easily subsumed by Victorian sentimentality and the "charm" of a passing scene:

... That beauty of ruins that is so rare with us in America— the nameless charm that.... always surrounds an old decaying structure that has played its part in the world, and seems resting and looking on dreamily, only an observer now, not an actor. –William Cullen Bryant, from Picturesque America (1874), as excerpted in Hudson Valley Ruins

In the 19th century, Rinaldi and Yasinac say, the Hudson Valley was lauded as the Rhine of the New World. And as the inspirational beauty of the valley became dotted with the moldering remains of Revolutionary-era forts and Dutch colonial manors-- all the better. The "modern" ruins of the recent industrial past hold a fascination too. Rinaldi and Yasinac discuss cement factories, mills, railway remnants, valve companies, pill manufacturers and ice works. They reveal a particular aspiration, I think, when they fleetingly touch on the appeal of industrial and utilitarian structures for artists like Charles Sheeler (see the authors' very Sheeleresque image above) and Bernd and Hilla Becher. The authors detail with equal enthusiasm a Wharton family residence, the Anaconda Wire and Cable Co. (a notorious former polluter*) and an old Dutch barn. I just love the masses of information in this book, told with a Humanist sensitivity.
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A quote about Ruskin particularly struck me:

Ruskin promoted the idea that the process of aging and weathering was what perfected good architecture. That age was a building's "greatest glory." He wrote of "the mere sublimity of the rents, or fractures, or stains, or vegetation which assimilate the architecture with the work of Nature... (emphasis is mine)

I talked about this last year in my post about inexhaustibility and wabi-sabi. I'd found a comment by British designer Russell Davies, “One of the things I hate about the design of most things ... is they're all designed to be new.” Obvious, but somehow I hadn't quite thought about it that way. And that pinpoints the problem I have with much of the really bad iterations of Modernism, and, (shiver) "Fedders" architecture– they won't make good ruins.

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* "I seen all kinds of oil and sulfuric acid, copper filings; my gosh, they were coming out of that company like it was going out of style. I've seen lubro oil and I've seen #2 oil. All over Anaconda, off the dock, you could see this stuff coming out....This was entering the river on a daily basis, you know." First hand commentary about the Anaconda Company from PBS/NOW documentary, The Hudson: America's First River
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**update/note: I'm amending my definition of Romanticism and Picturesque. A large component of Romanticism is about man and nature— as is the Picturesque. I think I'd emphasize the distinction between the two with a sense of action and turmoil (Romanticism) and its aftermath (Picturesque).  ----


Images, from top: The Course of Empire: Desolation, Thomas Cole, 1836; Alsen's Portland Cement Works, Smith's Landing; Oliver Bronson House, Hudson, NY. From Hudson Valley Ruins

Highlights from the Collection (part 3)

I am not a philatelist. Rather, this is another in the ongoing series of incidental favorites, ripped from storage and thrown on the web. Attractive sets of vintage US stamps from the 1960s and early 70s. Compare this handsome sampling with the current, ethically and aesthetically questionable "Hershey's" kiss postage.

Notable: the zip code guy; the quaint, almost folksy, "Mail Early in the Day" announcement at top; and the jarring use of the word "crippled" in the set second from bottom. My favorite: the 100th anniversary of Canada (1867-1967) at bottom, simple, abstract and bracing.

"consanguineity": notes

I realize I have no tag or label for this post. Light research based on passing thoughts? Odd "thought clusters"? It was a passage from an article in last week's New Yorker about language and a remote Amazonian tribe that got me thinking about today's note cluster:

"'Besides,' Gordon said, 'if there was some kind of Appalachian inbreeding or retardation going on, you'd see it in the hairlines, facial features, motor ability.'

Aside from the stunningly un-PC articulation of "Appalachian inbreeding" what struck me was the noting of hairlines. Hairlines? I tried doing a little googling about inbreeding and physical characteristics but didn't come up with much about hairlines. Jawlines, though, is another matter. The Hapsburg jaw, as classically manifested in Phillip IV of Spain, at top, is "mandibular prognathism" or severe lantern jaw and underbite. The Hapsburg dynasty was rife with this and other unfortunate conditions, with Phillip's son Charles II apparently reaching the apotheosis of inbreeding. The effluent of generations of close intra-family marriage (his father and mother were uncle and niece), Charles was impotent, mentally deficient, and unable to chew properly.
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The famous Goya portrait of the Spanish royal family of 1800 is an excruciatingly unidealized representation of mental sluggishness, close marriage, political commentary and the just plain fugly.
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I then revisited old cyber-research haunts at the fascinating and not-as-creepy-as-it-sounds Eugenics Archive (where the next image down is from). The Archive has a terrific educational site that's admirably thorough, beautifully cross-referenced and simply well-done (a quick guide to themes here). A description of the Archive from their site:

Eugenics was, quite literally, an effort to breed better human beings – by encouraging the reproduction of people with "good" genes and discouraging those with "bad" genes. Eugenicists effectively lobbied for social legislation to keep racial and ethnic groups separate, to restrict immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and to sterilize people considered "genetically unfit." Elements of the American eugenics movement were models for the Nazis, whose radical adaptation of eugenics culminated in the Holocaust.We now invite you to experience the unfiltered story of American eugenics – primarily through materials from the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, which was the center of American eugenics research from 1910-1940.... It is important to remind yourself that the vast majority of eugenics work has been completely discredited. In the final analysis, the eugenic description of human life reflected political and social prejudices, rather than scientific facts.

I'd found the Archive when doing a search about a book I'd read of: "The Jukes; a Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity," by Richard Dugdale. First published in 1877, it was a study of the lineage of a certain (NY State) family perceived to be mired exclusively in prostitution, thievery and indigence, through several generations. The story continues:

A.H. Estabrook, of the Eugenics Record Office, resurveyed the Jukes (1915) and the Ishmaelites [another pseudonymous family] (1923), and found continued evidence of hereditary feebleminedness and other dysgenic traits. The Jukes and Ishmaelites joined the Kallikaks and Nams as examples of eugenical family studies that were widely taught to social workers and college students during the 1920s and 1930s.

The Archive has riveting field photos, case notes and truly mind-boggling commentary. It also documents Estabrook's other book, "Mongrel Virginians." Enough said.
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Lastly, I was moved to rediscover the work of Shelby Lee Adams whose photograph of the Napier family, "The Hog Killing" (1990), is shown above. He was born into Appalachia-- Hazard, Kentucky-- and gradually, over 30 years, became known for documenting it on film. I have a book of Adams' work and find it fascinating, but difficult, viewing.
He states:

I have not shied away from what and who has been presented to me. Only an insider could share in this world and I've worked with that knowledge all along. Indeed understanding my place within this culture has been part of my motivation. ...In my opinion this mountain culture should be applauded. Many examples of my work illustrate tolerance of others, resiliency, and acceptance with dignity of conditions others would abhor.

Scalamandre: a brief tour, or, My Determined Effort

About four years ago I visited the Breakers, the Vanderbilt “cottage” in Newport, RI. It was explained that in restoring the building several elaborate fabrics and wallpapers had to be recreated from original 100+year-old damaged remnants. Scalamandre, a name I was vaguely familiar with, had undertaken analysis of fiber content, color and patterning and then reproduced these fine specimens of Gilded Age excess. With a little research I discovered that company excelled at small-run bespoke fabrics and high-end hand-screened wallcoverings of up to sixteen colors. Most importantly, the 75-year-old concern that had created custom silks for the White House, fringe for Big Bird, and tassels for the Old Merchant’s House museum was also responsible for the brilliantly zany zebra wallpaper* in the Red Sauce Italian landmark, Gino’s of Lexington Avenue. And at the time (this was late 2003) they were taking shipments of sticky, raw silk to finished dyed and woven fabric all under one roof—in a mill in Long Island City. I was astounded. Someone still did this? In New York City, no less?
I then made a determined effort to get a look inside the place… Long Island City**, a former industrial center, home to stapler factories, printing plants and shellac distributors, is now in the process of being radically transformed. At the time of my visit, the Scalamandre mill was probably among the last light industrial holdouts.

I found it on a non-descript and fairly bleak street: a relatively small 19th-century brick building with strangely beautiful skylit spaces and worn plank floors.

It was an idiosyncratic manufactory mixing pedal-powered wooden looms, Eisenhower-era machinery, handwork, and modern computer-run technology. I was fortunate to get a quick tour of the mill that day, learning a little about warps, swifts and loom cards in the process. Very shortly thereafter Scalamandre announced they were moving out-of-state, and selling the building.
I later read they were having a kind of fire sale—a dream flea market of antiquated bits and pieces, fabrics and trimmings, emptying the place of its arcane and –to the outsider—inscrutable devices. I was so emotional about that building (true)—I couldn’t even bring myself to go.


An important part of Scalamandre’s work is historical research and reproduction. In an on site studio in that mill they analyzed samples soiled by coal and wood smoke, faded by sunlight, or brittle with age. Probing hidden seams for color and poring over contemporary publications for design documentation they resuscitated vibrant color schemes and completely reconstituted complex repeating patterns. I loved the notion of forensic design technology, a sort of CSI: Decorative Arts Unit.
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*The paper shows up, charmingly, in The Royal Tenenbaums, and, rather less interestingly, in Kate Spade’s bathroom.
**The 7 train’s elevated path through LIC into Queens, with its magnificent sight lines to Midtown Manhattan, is rather exciting and should probably be landmarked.

Images from top: the view from the 7 train; "the Old Mill"; hand-screening wallpaper, with the zebras in the background; swatches, and spools set up for weaving stripes; looms; some of the afore-mentioned Eisenhower-era machinery: a dying vat; quality inspection; patriotic passementerie; antique spinner, and spool boxes; classic zebra wallpaper at Gino's from the New York Times

recognized in passing

I came across this striking photo, top, taken by Lewis Hine in 1912, on the sentimental, sweet and sharply addictive Shorpy: the 100-year-old photo blog. I immediately recognized the balconied building and the small, much older gabled house at the corner at left, which remain today on Elizabeth Street at Houston. I went and took the update just yesterday.

I love the ragged density of the 95 year old image. The balcony (which is really a fire escape) serves as repository for all manner of domestic detritus: barrels, a child's rocking chair, a bird cage, and a cascade of laundry. The scene is chaotic and, paradoxically, alive. That little gabled building at the corner has been the restaurant Cafe Colonial now for several years. I've had several glasses of wine there... The tall corner tenement at extreme left mystified me for several moments. Then I realized that the entire block is no longer-- that is the middle of Houston Street.

In a successful ploy to avoid doing work, I've spent time coloring in part of the image. I've been considering how to best experiment with this: How do antique streetscapes, in all their foreignness, change once the sepia is turned into a more recognizable approximation of reality. How much more "accessible"can they become?

writer's block, mental torpor and Ed Kienholz

I'm stumbling over myself for quite a while, unable to compose a coherent post. A death in the family (and the long illness that led up to it) has, I think, really eaten away at my concentration. "Eaten away at" is not the right sense, more dissolved, mixed with and diluted. What was never really sharp-eyed or crystalline to begin with is now more of... a colloidal suspension. Little granules of thoughts and ideas, diffused and suspended in a sluggish mental matrix. How apt it is then that I've finally rediscovered Ed Kienholz, the master of polyurethane resin. His work is like opening someone's memory closet, an illicit, stolen view of thoughts suspended and things coated and gelled. Reified inertia.

For the longest time I couldn't recall his name, all I could remember was the immense impression this piece, Sollie 17, above, made on me, X-years ago at the Whitney. Then, just the other day, the name somehow came back--Kienholz, Ed Kienholz (not Kurzwiel, not Ed Gein) --and with that, the recollection of several other of his insistently disturbing pieces. Fantastical ugly things that are, to me, mesmerizing– a brash and experientially bullying version of Cornell. I love the materials list for this particular piece:

wood, plexiglass, furniture, sink, lights, photographs, plaster casts, pots, pans, books, cans, boxes, three pairs of underwear, linoleum, leather, wool, cotton, sound track, glass, metal, paint, polyester resin, paper, metal coffee can, sand, and cigarette butts

And then there's this description of kienholz at artnet.com: "George Segal's pristine white sculptures after an evening of intense carousing with Charles Bukowski."

how did I get here?

Verbatim Google searches that have led people to this blog:

what is olfactory
what is tyranny
london's national treasures a red pillow box
ancient rome street scenes
morgue slab
what did Karl Blossfeldt do as a child
peevishness
onion skin paper
Love's Baby soft
wow man far out
greetings from anywhere
crystal palace favorite dessert poo recipe

• • • •

On the subject of lists, a beguiling selection of card games:
whist, piquette, cribbage, euchre, pinochle, bezique, canasta, fantan, mah-jongg

and, real-life business names:
Operative Cake Corp., Scientific Foods, Boring Business Systems, Aggressive Glass and Mirror, Dent Hardware, MS Carriers (think on that one a bit, the tagline: "delivering your future")

and also, bird names:
little grebe, cormorant, coot, curlew, whimbrel, magpie, jackdaw, rook, crow, bittern, lapwing, nightjar, thrush, bunting potoo, limpkin, petrel, snipe, shrike, crake, grackle,loon, dotterel, ouzel

Kangaroo, Brooklyn, 2005

'vibrant', yes, 'artful' too

In a comment on a previous post of mine ("the vibrant line") regarding fashion illustration (appreciation; death of) "Robin" mentions an illustrator I hadn't heard of and so I did a little googling. Sorry to say I didn't come up with all that much of substance for Kenneth Paul Block but I did retrieve something unexpected: display pages for an intriguing exhibit held at FIT in 2004 called, The Artful Line. While the site is nothing to look at it does feature a few choice things from the special collections in FIT's Gladys Marcus Library. At top, George Barbier's frontispiece for the magnificently titled Falbalas et fanfreluches, 1924. With its very contemporary-seeming winding tendrils and graphic silhouette it's difficult to believe the drawing is 83 years old. Directly above is an amazing cover for the Surrealist magazine, Minotaure, 1936, by Matisse. Below, what Carl Erickson was doing for Vogue the year before (from a good visual selection at something called the American Art Archives). It was in the air I suppose.

"on vacation"

My mother has been going through old slides. "What do we do with all of these," she said, meaning the 20 or more antique-looking metal boxes stored at the top of the closet in my old room at home. Most of these had been fixtures in the closet for as long as I can remember. Each box, a paper label fixed tenuously with yellowed tape, had a cursory jotting of a place-name or two and dates. There was no logic behind either cataloging or labeling and one box might read, "Rome 1962" and "Jerusalem 1966" and "England '75." Once, perhaps, years ago, we'd taken out a tank of an old slide projector and looked at some scenes, overexposed, familiar faces squinting and smiling against a backdrop of notable classical antiquities, but most have never left their boxes.

The other day, my mother handed me about 12 slides and asked if I could "make pictures out of them." They were of, I suppose, an important occasion, at least to my parents: my baptism, and attending scenes, in Jerusalem. The fact of this event was often mentioned to me over the years, as though it was supposed to be momentous for me, give me some defining insight. But no particular details stuck in my mind from the repeated tellings (and I'd never seen anything of the actual trip) except the bare cast of characters: me, my parents, "the Archbishop," and a kindly nun who took a liking to me. That and the fact that a bus load of German tourists evidently filmed the proceedings (which took place in a row boat in the Jordan River) from the shore. No documentation of that mind-boggling scene exists in our collection unfortunately, most likely because my father, who does not swim, was afraid of dropping the camera. Of the slides we do have of that expedition, this one, above, struck me immediately. Its far more spontaneous and ... exhilarating than any of the others. There I am, a comically oversized infant, surely larger by half than any local child-- unwitting emissary of the American Good Life; a triumph of vitamin-enriched formula and fluoridated water. But its the kindly nun— that kindly nun—looking ancient and very foreign and captivating in her black garb, that is the center point of that image.

Many years after that photo was taken my aunt, on a tour of the Holy Land, stopped in at this convent. She told my mother that she'd inquired after the kindly nun but was told she was "on vacation." It was only later we realized, in the amazing and somehow beautiful elision of that reply, that the nun had died.

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.'"

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