May 30, 2002
Kilroy was here.
Who was Kilroy? Despite the ubiquity of the slogan "Kilroy was here" -- it was common enough during World War II to have served as the title of a period humor collection, not to mention a Styx album -- there's debate over the phrase's origin. In 1946, the New York Times (or a radio program, or both, depending on the account) declared Massachusetts shipyard inspector James J. Kilroy to be the Kilroy, but the phrase may predate the war; Chad, the little peering face who often appears with the phrase, may have been a British contribution. Chad tended to appear with a three word question, often related to rationing ("Wot, no bread?"; "Wot, no petrol?") and seems to have first been drawn by a British cartoonist, George Chatterton. Kilroy was briefly topical (Isaac Asimov wrote a pointless Kilroy story) and never quiet forgotten (more for Chad and the opportunities for visual puns than anything else). But unlike the smiley face (invented by Harvey Ball), Kilroy's creator may never be fully known; he belongs to all of history.
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May 28, 2002
Baker Street Irregulars
In 1893, a tragedy shook London. The greatest detective England had ever known had met his match. The Napoleon of Crime, Professor James Moriarty (once merely a professor of mathematics at one of England's smaller universities), had wrestled with amateur violinist, anthropologist, chemist, swordsman, and consulting detective Mr. Sherlock Holmes at Reichenbach Falls; both men had fallen to their deaths. Ten years after Doyle published "The Final Problem", however, a miracle was revealed to the world; Holmes had survived and, deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, sequestered himself in Tibet under the name of Sigerson. Doyle's attempt to kill off a character he was no longer terribly fond of had failed. But what if it had succeeded? Would legions of Holmesians have had to explain on their own, outside the Canon, just how Sherlock had survived and why he had hidden himself from Watson? And what about Mycroft, Inspector Lestrade, and the long-suffering Mrs. Hudson? Someone would have filled the void, and it would have been fan fiction (link via Making Light).
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May 26, 2002
No ramian with spikes is to be trusted.
Some recent discussion on fantasy novel cover art led to a post about old TSR artists on MetaFilter (thanks Aaaugh!); the theme meant I couldn't toss in some artists like Thomas Canty, a one-man pre-Raphaelite tribute band, or Charles Vess, the comic book artist probably best known for his work with Neil Gaiman. On the other hand, the thread prompted some folks to dig up information on Dave Trampier, the artist behind Wormy, the most successful comic to ever come out of Dragon magazine. Trampier simply dropped out of sight one day, leaving behind an unfinished plotline and, more surprisingly, unclaimed paychecks. Given that Wormy hasn't been published in 14 years (Larry Elmore's SnarfQuest and Phil Foglio's What's New are back in print), I'm surprised that anyone remembered enough to check, but I suppose that role-playing games are one of those small obsessions that people nurture.
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May 23, 2002
Julie Christie, the rumors are true
In 1980, Photoplay faded to black. The last of the great movie magazines, Photoplay dated back to the days of the silents, back to the days before movies were called movies. It's only been twenty years, but Photoplay and its ilk -- The New Movie, Motion Picture -- seem more like something an archaeologist would dig up than cultural ephemera contemporary with E.T. and 48 Hours.
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May 21, 2002
Twenty mules and a maker
Death Valley isn't really dead; it contains the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere and is damned hot, but small animals come out at night to feed off the almost one thousand varities of plant life that call the valley home. But once it crawled with animals that aren't natural desert dwellers: people and mules. The famed 20 mule teams that hauled millions of dollars worth of the miracle cleaner out of Death Valley, the "Borax Desert" (and gave birth to a brand name still used today). Francis "Borax" Smith, the mining and railroad magnate, began building his fortune off Death Valley borax. Smith made his mark on dozens of towns between his mines and his markets. Ghost towns dot the West; there are over 1600 in Nevada alone. Today borax powers concept cars and, along with other borates, in the manufacture of glass and ceramics. Borax Smith's financial empire collapsed with the East Bay real estate market in 1913; he left his mansion to the city of Oakland, but his railroad rusts away. Except for hawks and desert miceand the occasional history buff, no one watches as it returns to the desert.
May 19, 2002
Dedicated followers of fashion
Recently the Guardian was atwitter over the revelation that William Shakespeare might have had a relationship with a young man, the Earl of Southampton. I can't speak to whether or not Shakespeare slept with men; as far as I know, the idea of Shakespeare as queer dates back to Oscar Wilde's "The Portrait of Mr. W.H.", an amusing story but not anything resembling serious scholarship, and there's not really anything in the historical record to make definitive statements one way or the other. But there seems to be a real desire on the part of the semi-scholarly (where I myself reside) to reexamine Shakespeare's sex life, and this Southampton portrait is providing an opportunity to do it, history be damned.
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May 16, 2002
A few fries short of a Happy Meal
V., with what is sure to be sporadic assistance from me, has started a food blog, The Hungry Tiger. It will be, we hope, opinionated, well-written, and useful. There are recipe sites out there, both professional and homegrown. There are weblogs devoted to bacon and soup and cocktails. Newsletters have sprung up, while older ones have come online. But the Internet is a notorious breeding ground for cranks and obsessives! Chuck Taggart may be a devoté of traditional Cajun food, but he's hardly a lunatic about it. Jan and Michael Stern get worked up about greasy spoons and pancake houses, but they aren't lunatics. Where are the eight-page-long rants about the proper way to grill a steak or oysters Rockefeller made with spinach? There are funny food pages, like the pork martini or Stinkfactor, and I can find opinionated (perhaps even surly) reviews of beer or wine, but over a dozen pages devoted to Dr Pepper knockoffs? Where is the person who will obsess about artisan cheeses as though they were as important as GI Joes or the Transformers, much less something really important like vi versus emacs? Somewhere in the world, there's someone with a fondness for heirloom tomatoes and aged range-fed beef, a copy of Dreamweaver, and far too much time and attention to spend explaining why everything we know about food is wrong. I eagerly await his or her arrival.
May 14, 2002
A nation of shopkeepers
Somewhere out there, the MoneyMaker Plus is earning its keep. It's a water pump designed for irrigation in Kenya, and despite its noble goals, it's also designed to turn a profit. It's marketed by a marketing guy, designed by design people (the next generation will be designed by Ideo) and sold by salespeople. Simultaneously, the builders, Approtec, hope to demonstrate a new approach for how the First World can help the Third, massively improve Kenyan agriculture, and help build a Kenyan middle class from the ground up. It reminds me of The Ugly American; despite what the term has come to mean, the title character of Burdick and Lederer's prescient pulp novel about a fictionalized Vietnam on the eve of Communist takeover was an American engineer (physically unattractive, but a swell fellow nonetheless). Against the backdrop of continuing failures on the part of the American diplomatic corps, he learned the language, travelled the country, built dams, and talked to the peasants about what they really wanted. Sadly, his bicycle-mounted water pump didn't save Sarkhan for democracy, perhaps because it didn't have a name remotely as catchy as "the MoneyMaker Plus".
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May 11, 2002
The wire, the pay-off, and the rag
If you were approached by an ex-con, a high school dropout who said that he had used a little-known and poorly understood property of physics to create a means of transmitting video that was twenty times faster than the fastest method on the market, would you believe him? If so, you're in good company; Intel networking subsidiary Level One, the video chain Blockbuster, and a handful of venture capitalists also fell for what seems to have been an intricate scam run by a man named Madison Priest (link via Lake Effect). If you approach a situation like that with skepticism, you might miss dealing with the next Philo Farnsworth, but when a someone out of the blue starts promising deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars, it should set alarm bells ringing.
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May 08, 2002
A book from the sky
Readers Martha B. and Bob, quick on the draw the both of them, read last night's post on alphabets and pointed me to the work of Chinese artist Xu Bing, whose current exhibit is showing at the Sackler through this weekend. The square word caligraphy is neat enough -- English words represented as pseudo-Chinese ideograms; there's apparently an OS X program at the exhibit which will do the trick for arbitrary user input -- but the installation "A Book from the Sky", in which Xu created a thousand plausible but nonexistant Chinese-style ideograms then wrote a book using them. The idea of a real book in a fake language reminds me of "The Library of Babel", Borges' story of the universal library which contained not just every book but every possible book. The idea of combinatorial writing, works that spanned the word-space, was taken up in the '60s by France's avante-garde OuLiPo group (thanks, Mark!), who wrote poems based on things like linear algebra and repeated permutations of lines and stanzas. And Xu apparently is an immaculate craftsman, using beautifully realized caligraphy, bookbinding, and printing in service of his nonsensical works. I'll have to stop by Saturday before I head out to a barbecue, because it sounds like a wonderful blend of concept and craft. Also, there are monkeys, and monkeys can only improve art.
May 07, 2002
The gamut from A to B
In 1821, a former French army officer, Charles Barbier de la Serre, took his new invention to the Royal Institution for Blind Children; he had created a means by which his fellow artillerymen could read messages at night without betraying their position by lighting a lamp or candle. The director of the Royal Institution, Dr. Guillié, was unimpressed. Fortunately, Dr. Guillié was fired a little more than a week later after a scandal involving his affair with a female teacher at the school; André, who replaced him, was much more interested when Barbier showed him sonography, and resolved that Barbier's "sonography", in which sounds were represented by patterns of raised dots, would be on the curriculum for all of the school's students, including young Louis Braille. Braille would go on to survive tuburculosis, which left his health fragile for the rest of his life and the burning of his Braille-system books by a future headmaster of the Royal Institution, P. Armand Dufau, who would later become a champion of the alphabet when he decided it was better for his career. His work survived his early death and spirited attacks from champions of other writing systems for the blind, such as New York Point, to become the worldwide standard.
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May 05, 2002
Honor upon themselves and their art
It was not until he was in his forties that Jean Dubuffet devoted himself to his art. An art school dropout, Dubuffet had devoted time to his family's wine business between stints of sculpting marionettes and painting portraits, but in 1942 he quit his job to paint full-time and in 1944 he received his first show. His work from the '40s and '50s flouts every rule he learned during his brief stint at the Academie Julian: his figures are disproportionate, childish; the textures of the paint and canvas are highlighted at the expense of the composition; he painted faces that were barely recognizeable as human. Something had happened to Jean Dubuffet, something he thought wonderful. He had discovered that he admired the work of madmen.
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May 01, 2002
Hey hey, the first of May!
Happy Loyalty Day! Today is a "a special day for the reaffirmation of loyalty to the United States and for the recognition of the heritage of American freedom." I'm all for the heritage of American freedom, but forgive my cynicism in questioning why May 1 is the day we officially celebrate it. Loyalty Day seems to have been an early instance of counterprogramming, offering a contrasting holiday to celebrate for the millions of Americans unwilling to participate in May Day parades and rallies. Those parades were haunted by a specter: the specter of Communism.
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