the past is another country
Thursday, January 31, 2002
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec may be more famous today for his life -- a dwarfish, disaffected, aristocratic, womanizing drunk, he seems tailor-made to serve as a symbol for the seedy artistic demimonde of late nineteenth century Paris -- than his art. At the peak of his fame, however, he was the toast of Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec's advertisement for the Moulin Rouge nightclub, where he was a regular, featured Louise Weber, la Goulue (that's "the glutton", a reference to her hard-drinking ways) dancing a scandalous can-can and flashing her scandalous knickers, making him instantly the best known poster artist in Paris upon its release in 1891. Toulouse-Lautrec would die ten years later, having produced a number of well-regarded oil paintings, over three hundred lithographs, and no heirs; the Toulouse family line, which could be traced back to the time of Charlamagne, ended with Henri. (more...)
12:53 am 
Monday, January 28, 2002
Last weekend included a trip to the mall. I escaped with the purchase I had come for, a lingering headache, and an urgent need for a nap. Why had I spent so long in there? Perhaps it was due in part to the "Gruen transfer", the term for shifting from targeted buying to impulse buying that seems to have been publicized by anti-consumerism scold and Media Virus author Douglas Rushkoff. Architect Victor Gruen was one of the creators of the modern mall (and not, despite what you may read, the cannibalistic leader of Uganda); he designed America's first modern strip mall, Southdale Shopping Center in Minnesota, which is still in business today. Gruen had ideas about the new American city which were seized upon by Walt Disney, but while Gruen, like my home town's founder, shopping mall and suburban developer James Rouse, seems to have genuinely wanted to improve urban America, his invention ended the era of the downtown department store and directly contributed to the demise of the city as an everyday destination. Gruen's employer, the Dayton-Hudson department store chain, is still around, but it's evolved as the department store declined and the big box retailers (usually located in strip malls) arose to replace them; the company is now known as Target, and I can't seem to leave its stores without buying something I didn't intend to.
10:55 pm
Saturday, January 26, 2002
Peggy Lee, the impassive "Is That All There Is?" singer, passed away last week, and I'm sure some people out there are happy, not because they hated Peggy Lee or because they were traumatized by the Siamese song in Lady and the Tramp but because they had picked her in a dead pool. The dead pool -- a contest based on predicting celebrity (or perhaps corporate) deaths in a certain period -- is a game of long standing; one called the Game has been running since 1971, and they trace the idea back to either Maupassant's Bel-Ami (in which a character tries to guess which members of the Academy will be the next to die) or the wagering on Papal lifespans in the 16th century. (more...)
11:47 pm
Wednesday, January 23, 2002
Juliet at Eclogues has come out as a fan of creeping, eldritch horror, posting some great Weird Tales links, including a collection of Clark Ashton Smith short stories. Smith is really a lesser writer in the Lovecraft vein, but one of the great things about the Internet is that it only takes one fan of cult books (link via Baraita) to help spread the word. Unsurprisingly, Lovecraft's friends and correspondents are well-rerpesented on the web: Fritz Leiber (best known for the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories, Leiber also wrote the subtle tale of architectural horror, Our Lady of Darkness); Robert W. Chambers, author of "The King in Yellow"; Conan creator Robert E. Howard, who discussed ice cream flavors and turkey dinners with Lovecraft; Arkham House founder and posthumous Lovecraft editor August Derleth; and, of course, the man himself. I've always found Lovecraft's life (his feelings of inadequacy after dropping out of school and failure to attend Brown University; his xenophobia and racism; his failed marriage and the role of his aunts in its failure; his slow descent into poverty; and his convivial spirit in the face of these adversities and a literary career he assumed would be entirely forgotten) and what I've read of his correspondence more interesting than Lovecraft's fiction, but going to school in Providence gave me more of an appreciation for his work. I cannot think of a city that would be more appropriate for tales of decay and the haunting past. Lovecraft died of cancer in 1937, having maintained a clinical journal of his symptoms that he thought might benefit research. He was buried in an unmarked grave; forty years later, fans took up a collection to buy him a headstone. It reads "I AM PROVIDENCE", and on nights when fog wrapped College Hill, I could believe it.
10:05 pm
Saturday, January 19, 2002
Graham Leuschke has been reading A Book of the Book and points to book artist Kevin Smith. Smith has a modest proposal for self-destructing art:
Construct a Western Codex book consisting of images on thirty transparencies. Process the film-negatives by developing, short stop but no fix. Wash, dry, and under proper safelight, hand bind as a leather case bound book. Place completed book in light-tight box.
Neuromancer author William Gibson tried something of the sort in a poem about his late father, "Agrippa." The poem came on a floppy, to be read via a self-destructing program (the previous link will indicate how well its protection stood up to the collective computer expertise of Gibson fans); the package also came with etchings by Dennis Ashbaugh printed on light-sensitive ink. Smith's self-destructing book is a great idea, but it would be doomed to failure in a digital medium; it's far too easy to make a copy. (more...)
10:37 pm
Wednesday, January 16, 2002
Stephen Ambrose is officially screwed. A politician might be able to survive a plagiarism scandal, but a historian? As examples of unattributed direct quotations throughout Ambrose's work continue to turn up, Ambrose's work -- more oral history than academic research, and, according to this Ambrose-bashing article I found linked on Talking Points, endlessly recycled -- Ambrose's career is going up in flames. I think, as Mickey Kaus puts it, "Ambrose's best defense may be 'I don't really write my books.'" Ambrose, like Tom Clancy or James Michener, employed a bevy of researchers. I'm not sure that it would salvage his reputation to be revealed as someone who relied on ghostwriters, but wouldn't that be better than being a thief? (more...)
11:18 pm
Sunday, January 13, 2002
In 1994, Marion Tinsley, the world's best living checkers player, took on Chinook, the world's best unliving checkers player, in the Second Man versus Machine Championship. Tinsley withdrew due to health concerns, and the man who replaced him, Don Lafferty, split the twenty game series at one win a side (with eighteen draws). In 1995, Chinook beat Lafferty in a thirty-two game series (one win, thirty-one draws) to become the undisputed world checkers champion. But two hundred years earlier, a Hungarian inventor named Wolfgang von Kempelen, had created a mechanical chess player that could compete against the Europe's strongest players. (more...)
10:22 pm
Thursday, January 10, 2002
Urban legends -- stories about $250 cookie recipies from Neiman Marcus or hippie babysitters putting babies in the oven -- are a sort of folklore. They get passed around via email, Ann Landers prints them now and again, they slowly change to fit current events, and they end up getting debunked on Snopes. I never thought that an entire urban oral tradition, an underground mythology about the battle raging between angels and the forces of Hell, might exist, but according to this fascinating 1997 article about "shelter folklore" among Miami's homeless children, it does. The Devil and his agent, Bloody Mary or La Llorona, hunt the children: "'If you wake at night and see her,' a ten-year-old says softly, 'her clothes be blowing back, even in a room where there is no wind. And you know she's marked you for killing.'" (more...)
9:24 pm
Tuesday, January 8, 2002
Somewhere between Kubrick's The Killing and Peckinpah's The Getaway, something happened to American culture. Crime novelist Jim Thompson wrote The Getaway and helped Kubrick spice up the dialogue of The Killing. But while Sterling Hayden can't outthink fate in The Killing, Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw make it over the border to Mexico and freedom in The Getaway, escaping the nightmarish end their characters meet in Thompson's novel. You could attribute the difference between novel and movie to the fact that Thompson was fired from The Getaway, part and parcel of his years of Hollywood failure. Thompson, variously a Catholic and a Communist, had a decidedly grim view of human morality and a rough sense of justice. You could attribute it to the decline in the Hays code. But I'll attribute it to James M. Cain. (more...)
11:05 pm
Thursday, January 3, 2002
The end of the old year and the ringing in of the new is often a time for lucky food. In China you might eat a plate of dumplings looking for one with a coin inside -- shades of the bean-sized Jesus doll baked into king cakes eaten before the onset of Lent, the sixpence in Christmas pudding, or the coin Greeks bake into Vasilopeta for New Year's Day. Germans can ensure their luck with pork and sauerkraut, while the Japanese eat herring roe for luck. Poles sometimes eat pickled herring, and those lucky Scots have the traditional Hogmanay haggis. But for my money, the best lucky New Year food is hoppin' John or a plate of black-eyed peas. (more...)
8:31 pm
Tuesday, January 1, 2002
The redoubtable Miss Manners says that when you get down to it, people really only tell two stories: "My, how bad things have gotten!" and "My, how clever I am!" A book on the dumb things college students say is therefore a timeless idea. However, various people inside and outside the university are telling us that American colleges are being overrun by humorless, dronelike knobs -- even at rarefied campuses such as MIT and Princeton. (more...)
11:46 pm
