March 29, 2004
Moving pictures
It started, of course, with a bet. Before the Edison Trust and movie stars, there was Occident. Occident was a prize horse owned by railroad baron, former California governor, and wealthy horselover Leland Stanford, and Stanford wanted to settle an argument. When Stanford argued with some of his colleagues about whether a horse in full gallop took all four hooves off the ground, he didn't mess around. Stories of a $25,000 bet are probably apocryphal, but Stanford was still willing to spend thousands of dollars -- a positively enormous sum in the 1870s -- to prove himself right. He turned to a well-known photographer Eadward Muybridge, probably the most respected name in the still-new field then working west of the Mississippi. Muybridge was born Edward Muggeridge; he had worked, earlier in his career, under the name "Helios", taking landscape photographs and scenes of California life as well as doing survey work for the railroads. Several years later, the great experiment was complete. Muybridge's photographs were taken using wet slides, which are terribly slow compared to modern film but were the fastest then available; the pictures of the horse were little more than faint blurs, but they proved the point. A galloping horse did, in fact, leave the ground entirely.
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March 23, 2004
The king of Marvin Gardens
Atlantic City owns a small and curious space in the American imagination. Despite Louis Malle's best efforts, it's not location of gangster fantasies; the city has a storied and criminal past, including a 1929 conference of East Coast bosses that lead to the carving up of regional territories among mob bosses in 1931. But for gritty gangster stories, we look to Vegas, to New York, to Jersey and Miami Beach. Atlantic City is the home of Miss America, but increasingly no one cares. Donald Trump reshaped the skyline and destroyed his company. And, alas, nobody has heard of Lucy the Elephant. But as America turns to other places for lost weekends and reminiscing about the good old days of organized crime, Atlantic City will always have one thing that no other city does: Rich Uncle Moneybags.
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March 17, 2004
Thousands are sailing
"Thousands are sailing across the western ocean," sang the Pogues, and they were right. The Irish diaspora dispersed the starving Irish throughout the world: in the Pacific, in South America, to Canada, and, of course, to America. Other poor sections of the British Isles, notably Scotland and Cornwall, had mass migrations in the nineteen century, but the Scottish and the Cornish didn't plan foreign unrest and stoke fearful nativism. That was the role of the Irish; a conquered people whose way of life had been taken from them. The Irish were a cow-owning people: beef eaters, cattle thieves, and (according to 17th century visitor John Stevens), "the greatest lovers of milk I ever saw, which they eat and drink about twenty several sorts of ways and what is strangest, for the most part love it best when sourest." But the English had come and taken their land and, for the most part, taken their cattle; what they had given the Irish in return was the potato (and possibly not even that; although most credit Walter Raleigh for introducing the potato to Ireland, it may have arrived via trade with Catholic Spain; the English didn't really know what to do with the newfangled American root). The potato became the centerpiece of Irish cuisine from sheer necessity:
The centerpiece of a cottage's batterie de cuisine was a huge cast-iron pot: huge because it had to cook very many potatoes indeed (twenty pounds of them or more easily required for a meal); so huge that it regularly performed the duties of a table itself. Depending on the season, a child was sent either to dig up the potatoes from the ground or to gather them from under the bed. Sometimes they were scraped (not peeled, an act that slices away too much of the nutritious layer next to the skin), but often they were not. They were scrubbed clean of dirt and put into the pot; the pot was put directly on the fire and the potatoes boiled until they were done.
Potatoes and buttermilk make delicious champ, but they're not the food of a rich people. A household could grow enough potatoes to feed itself ten or eleven months of the year, however, with scrimping and a little luck, and visitors such as Asenath Nicholson were struck by Irish generosity with what they had. Sometimes luck runs out, however; the potato blight ruined the ability of poor Irish freeholders to feed themselves as their potatoes withered and died in the ground, blackened and turned to rot in their cellars. The boll weevil destroyed cotton plantations in the South and ushered in a new age of diversified farming (via Your Pocket Guide); the potato famine sent millions of Irish hurtling across the ocean to wherever they could, wherever there was food and a chance at a better life There are more Irish-Americans today than there are Irish. And, the Pogues sang, "Their bellies full, their spirits free, they'll break the chains of poverty. And they'll dance."
March 16, 2004
On the shoulders of giants
There were giants in the earth in those days. That's what the book of Genesis says about the post-Fall world of the sons of Adam. These were the nephilim; the origin of the word is somewhat unclear, and although many Bible scholars advance the perfectly sensible interpretation that the nephilim were great in the sense that they were the descendants of antediluvian kings and heroes, a whole mythology of the nephilim, complete with a family tree, sprung up. If nephilim were giants and not "sons of Adam", where did they come from? Were they demons? Extraterrestrials? British goths? One thing was sure to true believers, though: there were giants in the earth in those days. And if there weren't, George Hull would put them there.
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March 14, 2004
Diabolical instruments
Wet your finger and run it around the edge of a wine glass just right, and you can make a strange keening sound. Adjust the amount of wine in the glass, and you can change the pitch of the sound. That's the principle behind an instrument developed by Benjamin Franklin, the glass harmonica; Franklin's version eschewed the water, using a series of glass tubes of different diameters, but the principle is the same. The glass harmonica (alternately the "glass armonica") and its descendents -- "the melodion,the eumelia, the clavicylindre, the transpornierharmonica, the sticcardo pastorate, the spirafina, the parnasse instrument, the glassharfe..., the uranion, the hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica" -- enjoyed quite a vogue at the end of the eighteenth century, until the work of Franz Mesmer, who used the glass harmonica as background music in his fashionable mesmerism sessions, led people to associate the instrument with madness. But hundreds of works had been written for the glass harmonica. The composer Donizaetti scored an opera's mad scene for it. What could music purists do when faced with demands for a keyboard glass harmonica for an authentic Mozart piece? People usually arranged the piece for a different instrument, but that often wouldn't do. The dance of the sugarplum fairies wouldn't be the same without the tinkling celesta. Early music enthusiasts giving historically informed performances can do all the research in the world, but if results from more modern artists are any guide, guesswork is always going to play a factor. The new gospel compilation Goodbye, Babylon asserts that Texas gospel singer Washington Philips is heard accompanying himself on the Dolceola; painstaking research by Dolceola enthusiasts (it's a cousin of the Autoharp, apparently, and only obscure instrument fans have ever heard of it) shows that he was playing no such thing, although blues giant Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter apparently used one in a few sessions. And that's for a commercially produced instrument used after the dawn of recorded music. Trying to reproduce the rattling sounds of Tom Waits' Bone Machine or a Skeleton Key album would be nigh impossible, as the percussion is largely generated by a motley collection of random junk. There's a thriving theremin community that's been keeping that electronic instrument's sound (the backbone of "Good Vibrations" and a thousand B-movie soundtracks) alive since Leon Theremin was kidnapped and forced to build listening devices for Lenin, but the electronic music pioneers the Silver Apples used and still use a homemade synthesizer "consisting of 12 oscillators and an assortment of sound filters, telegraph keys, radio parts, lab gear and a variety of second hand electronic junk." And in the spirit of the Silver Apples, more and more synth enthusiasts are turning to circuit bending, rewiring cheap electronic gadgetry to do things that it was never intended to, all in the name of science. Pity the music historian of the twenty-third century, reduced to tears by an effort to find just the right antique to perform primitive yet stirring twenty-first century compositions on. The audience won't know the difference between a real Electronic Rap Pad and a clever reproduction, but she will, and she'll wish we had stopped at plainsong.
March 11, 2004
Canned meat
Who can tell when they're living through history? On April 12, 1994, people who logged on to their Internet providers and checked Usenet (which, in the days before widespread adoption of the Web and bulletin board websites, was the preeminent means of mass communication on the Internet). In addition to the usual -- the cranks on sci.physics, the discussion of future Squiddy winners on rec.arts.comics, the bizarre talk on talk.bizarre -- people had an exciting message awaiting them: "THE DEADLINE HAS BEEN ANNOUNCED". An Arizona law firm, Canter & Siegel, had targeted an ad at anyone on the Internet trying to enter the American green card lottery. Whether this service was useful was beside the point; Canter & Siegel had figured out how to abuse the system to contact hundreds of thousands of potential customers. As one somewhat bewildered user reported, "Everywhere you went, it was Green Card, Green Card, Green Card." The green card lawyers had, for all intents and purposes, invented spam.
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March 10, 2004
East Coast born, West Coast raised
In early 1964, the Beatles came to America, and they hit the ground running. Three nights of appearances on Ed Sullivan, following a dazzlingly successful American publicity campaign (that led the Herald Tribune to call them "75% publicity, 20% haircut"), stirred up a genuine frenzy of teenage excitement. Seventy-three million people watched the first night of Sullivan, then a record; when George Harrison celebrated his twenty-first birthday at the end of February, he got 30,000 birthday cards from fans. Liverpool had been a center for teenage pop music since the skiffle craze of the late '50s, and the Merseybeat sound -- three guitarists harmonizing and a drummer in back -- had made it to America. The larger "British invasion" of the Kinks, the Who, the Troggs, and the Rolling Stones, would soon follow. The names said it all: this was not American music.
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March 06, 2004
Masked men
They sought him here, they sought him there, those Frenchmen sought him everywhere, but they never quite figured out that the damned annoying Scarlet Pimpernel was neither in Heaven nor in Hell but right under their noses. Baroness Orczy wrote other books, but none as popular as The Scarlet Pimpernel; perhaps it was the scintillating prose or perhaps everyone really likes rooting for a swashbuckling Englishman who fights for the French aristocracy, but I think the answer is more simple:
"The Scarlet Pimpernel, Mademoiselle," he said at last, "is the name of a humble English wayside flower; but it is also the name chosen to hide the identity of the best and bravest man in all the world, so that he may better succeed in accomplishing the noble task he has set himself to do."
A novel about wealthy sniveller Sir Percy Blakeney is doomed and a novel about a dashing counter-revolutionary might soon be forgotten, but a novel about a freedom fighter who disguises his true mettle underneath a foppish exterior is pure gold.
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