Filed under: technology
Meet Mr. Product : the art of the advertising character / Warren Dotz, Masud Husain.
San Francisco : Chronicle Books, c2003.
[MCL call number: 659.1 D725m 2003: one copy, no holds]
Those readers who know me personally do not need to be reminded of how appalled I am to see the food advertising itself. Probably the most dramatic horrors are the signs for barbecue restaurants that feature a cute, cartoonish pig salivating, wearing a bib, and waving a knife and fork — but there are countless other examples: anthropomorphized donuts, dancing fruits and vegetables, and hot dogs that walk and talk, just to name a few. Ironically, at the same time as these characters disgust me, I also find them fascinating and compelling, which is, I guess, part of why they make good advertisements. They’re adorable. They’re disturbing. They’re improbable. They’re funny!
I think some of my discomfort with the food advertising itself is that the adorable little pig at the barbecue stand and its colleagues are actually encouraging consumers to eat them, which seems unnatural and perverse. Products-brought-to-life which encourage consumption of other types are not so aberrant — for example, it used to be relatively common for muffler repair shops to have a gaily painted life-sized robot-like statue made of mufflers and other auto parts out front to advertise their services. Certainly the muffler man, who is made out of mufflers, is encouraging people to consume mufflers. But since real mufflers are inanimate, technological products, and since we’re not actually eating them, it seems less grotesque for the muffler man to invite us in to have our cars serviced. His plea is that we patronize his establishment, because his purpose is to quiet the exhaust of an automobile. The pig, on the other hand, has many interests of its own, and does not grace this earth solely to provide barbecue.
But, philosophical discussion aside, it is clear that the cute cartoon pig with a bib, the muffler man, the animated hot dog are all charming and unusual and make us notice the products they promote. Some are clever and engaging. Others are horrifically stereotyped. Still others are so uninspired as to be instantly forgettable, unless perhaps they survive as cautionary examples for future marketers. Meet Mr. Product attempts to give readers a tour of a wide swathe of the world peopled by these unlikely creatures. After a brief history of the use of imaginary characters in advertising, the book displays hundreds of examples of “spokescharacters” who have been used to hawk everything from breakfast cereal to light bulbs to natural gas utilities. Many are personifications of the products they sell, much like the little pig at the barbecue restaurant, but others are more akin to live product spokespeople — Betty Crocker, Little Miss Coppertone, Mr. Goodwrench, Aunt Jemima.
Many, many classic favorites appear in the book, including:
- Uniroyal’s Nauga (page 176), alerting shoppers that the object to which it is attached is genuine Naugahyde,
- the Jolly Green Giant (page 21)
Bibendum, the Michelin tire man (pages 14 and 207), - Manny, Moe, and Jack (page 213), of the Pep Boys auto parts stores, and
- the 1940s version of the Jantzen diving girl (page 254) in her iconic red strapless bathing suit.
And there are plenty who never achieved total nationwide household-name sort of fame:
- the little duckling with a bib (page 151) who once graced the sign for Waddle’s diner here in Portland (“Eat Now at Waddles,” it said, though the example in the book is a little less direct),
- Mr. Zip (page 224), a very sketchy, high-on-smack-looking postal carrier used to promote the US Postal Service’s new Zone Improvement Program in the 60s,
- Miss Curity, the first lady of first aid (page 255), promoter of Curity bandages and tape, and
- the dapper Wool Council lamb (page 249).
Unfortunately, there is no index, though the arrangement of the book might help readers locate the particular spokescharacter they seek — eight chapters focus on characters who advertised food, drinks, products aimed at children, restaurants, technology, car parts and automobile-related products, household goods, and personal and leisure products.
Filed under: art & entertainment
The look of love : the art of the romance novel / by Jennifer McKnight-Trontz.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c2002.
[MCL call number: 741.64 M159L 2002; one copy, no holds]
Lots of people enjoy romance, but few people in our culture would easily admit to being lovers of the straight-up romance novel, unless they fit a particular profile. Women can read them, but not feminists. Girls can read them, but not boys. You don’t read romances if you’re interested in “real” literature, and you don’t read them if you’re really smart and intellectual. Romances are formulaic and hackneyed, they present a narrow view of marriage, of love, of a woman’s ability to have a mind and a heart at the same time, and so on.
But still, millions of people read romances, and enjoy them. Part of the appeal, not surprisingly, is their evocative cover design — like their brethren in the rest of the pulp novel world, romances have long been sold on the strength of their beautiful illustrated covers. The Look of Love presents a nice exhibit of some of the best, and some of the most typical romance covers from the 1930s to the 1980s, along with a short history of the genre and some discussion of trends in cover design over the years. The explication is interesting and useful, but the covers are really the book’s reason d’être.
Some are so much of another era that it’s hard to see them as anything but arch and ironic: Nurse on the Run (1965, page 93) features a beautiful young woman in a whirling, startled pose, with red hair spilling out from underneath her nurse’s cap. Behind her are superimposed three calm, suave fellows, apparently the source of her turmoil (though none of them appear to have a care in the world). And the very first Harlequin (1949, page 11) is illustrated with a painting of a woman in evening dress at the top of a curving staircase. At the bottom is a man in a blue suit with a cap — he looks like a postal carrier to me, but here’s the title: The Manatee: Strange Loves of a Seaman. So he must be a sea captain, not a mailman; I trust the woman is not actually the manatee.
Irony aside, however, there is a particular beauty about these illustrations. Some of this is due to the vintage, nostalgic quality of the art, no doubt enhanced by the plain fact that these days it’s unusual for newly published books of any sort to have pulp-style hand-painted covers*, but I think the idea love itself is part of the appeal. The cover evokes the feeling that the story promises to bring out in the reader. The cover painting shows just a glimmer, a teensy frame out of the story — a longing glance at the unrequited beloved; a bit of labor shared by colleagues who maybe want to know one another better; the second two doomed lovers who are nonetheless magnetically attracted are just about to kiss. All of these moments are worth looking at, worth fantasizing about, worth mention in life generally; even if the particular situation being described in the cover painting is highly improbable and stereotypical, and even though novel itself might not be so great.
* Though there are counter-examples to this point — one I think of immediately is Hard Case Crime, which publishes both reprints and new novels in the mystery/crime genre, each with a specially commissioned painted cover. I have found their books very much worth reading, as well as worth appreciating as lovely objects.
Filed under: art & entertainment
I shot a man in Reno : a history of death by murder, suicide, fire, flood, drugs, disease, and general misadventure, as related in popular song / Graeme Thomson.
New York : Continuum, 2008.
[MCL call number: 782.42164 T483i 2008; two copies, no holds]
When I was a teenager, my mother made a mix tape labeled “Death” on one side and “Suicide” on the other. It was for a road trip, but she had it for years and I always loved it. Ever since I first heard this tape, I’ve been building a play list in my mind of all the other death and suicide songs I’d use, if I were to make my own tape. I don’t think I’ll ever actually record my own version, but the songs are lodged in a special place in my brain, asserting their relatedness to me every time the subject arises. I have other lists — songs about living through a violent revolution, songs that list lots of place names, songs appreciating difficult women, songs about sex that rely entirely on metaphor to get their nasty across, songs describing famous disasters, songs about the historical Jesus Christ, and so on — but the death and suicide songs are the most assertive, and the longest, list.
Graeme Thompson shares this interest in death songs. I Shot a Man in Reno is his take on the history, meaning, and social significance of death songs. He considers songs about suicide, murder, drinking yourself to death, the afterlife, mourning, and songs people want to have played at their funerals. Overall, it’s a pretty useful tour of death songs and what they mean in a cultural context, but I can’t say I loved the book. Really I think it’s just a question of taste — I didn’t find Thompson to be the most intriguing or well-rounded cultural or musical observer, so his critical analysis didn’t jazz me. I’m not going to recommend him enthusiastically, but I wouldn’t tell you not to read the book either. I’m sure it would suit other readers just fine.
However, I didn’t like it much. The thing I really couldn’t get over is actually quite petty.
Thompson promises in his introduction that I Shot a Man in Reno will not be merely a list disguised as a book. It is in fact a thematic history, not simply a list, but still it is true that when he gets really in the thick of his subject, Thompson tends to resort to listing songs, and it pretty much sucks. I can hardly cry foul very loudly here — when it comes to lists-posing-as-meaningful-prose I do, as regular readers have no doubt noted, live in something of a glass house. But really, Thompson’s listy bits seem designed specifically to invoke a mood in the reader. It’s as if he wants you to remember the songs, hear their melodies, recall their words. Great, if you’re familiar with them all, but kind of lame if you’re not. And I have a hard time imagining how anyone who is not a music critic or historian could possibly know all or even most of the specific songs Thompson mentions. It’s a pretty widely-ranging catalog.
It’s ironic, really, that this is the part that chafes — I was sort of hoping, when I picked up the book, that I would be exposed to some new songs, right along with a nice bit of analysis of death songs, a history of their roots, some stories about what they have meant to us, why they matter, and so on. Really I was hoping to learn about songs I’d never heard of before. And I did, but all I really learned about the songs Thompson lists is who wrote and sang them, their titles, and a teeny tiny bit about how they relate to the subject of death. I don’t know how popular they have been or what effect they’ve had on society, I don’t know the lyrics, and most importantly, I don’t know what they sound like.
It might be that Thompson listed lots of songs so that one or two of them would catch in the reader’s mind, and they’d be able to see the specifics of his point at that moment in the narrative. But for me, reading the list was like the literary equivalent of a conversation with someone who knows tons and tons about something, but can’t lay off the jargon enough to be able to talk with someone uninitiated with that subject. Perhaps I Shot a Man in Reno could benefit from a companion CD? It is hard to imagine getting the rights for all those hopelessly copyrighted songs, but it might help solve the problem.
Filed under: technology
Everyday drinking : the distilled Kingsley Amis.
New York : Bloomsbury USA, 2008.
[MCL call number: 641.21 A517e 2008; nine copies, no holds]
If you are already a drinker, no doubt you can carry on without the aid of experts — the imbibing of alcohol is not an art that requires any particular level of elegance or finesse. But, if you desire advice, or if you are interested in refining your skills, or if you’d benefit from a modest amount of humorous diversion, you might take a look at Everyday Drinking.
In this volume, Kingsley Amis, known as an author of fiction, but also a rather notorious lush, provides instruction on every aspect of drinking: choosing and buying alcohol, learning the facts you’ll need to discuss it with actual wine or liquor snobs, assembling bar equipment, planning a cocktail party, making the drinks, serving the drinks, fooling your guests into thinking the drinks are better than they in fact are, cleaning up, and managing your hangover. Amis’s advice is often helpful and the majority of it is quite sincere, but it is his snotty-pants tone that really makes the book worth reading. For example, in the section listing the most essential tools for the bar:
“1. A refrigerator. All to yourself, I mean. There is really no way round this. Wives and such are constantly filling up any refrigerator on which they have a claim, even its ice-compartment, with irrelevant rubbish like food.” (page 38)
Amis goes to lengths to educate readers about the various French and German wines, how they are made, how they ought to be drunk, and when it is better to remember that if you are British, you could just as well drink beer. He describes in detail a weight-loss diet for the drinking man, provides general advice to the drinking traveler, repeatedly cautions readers against imbibing too many sweet drinks (they are, in his view, sure-fire hangover-producers), and gives an artfully constructed plan for successfully posing as a booze expert in mixed company.
But his in-depth chapter on dealing with a hangover may be the best part of the book. It includes a helpful dissection of the hangover into its constituent parts. These are, chiefly: the physical, which, obviously, consists of the physical symptoms, headache, sensitivity to light, stomach upset, achiness, excessive thirst, etc.; and the metaphysical: “the psychological, moral, emotional, spiritual aspects: all that vast, vague, awful, shimmering metaphysical superstructure that makes the hangover a (fortunately) unique route to self-knowledge and self-realization” (page 79). Amis follows with practical advice for dealing with each aspect of the hangover. For the physical hangover, rest, liquids, a hot shower and/or bath, etc. For the metaphysical hangover, an initial affirmation that the ravages of the hangover are just that, rather than evidence of a greater moral or social failing on the part of you, the afflicted person; followed by a course of hangover reading and listening, carefully chosen to guide you from misery through to calm, without having to linger too long with self-reflection and self-pity.
Everyday Drinking collects three previously long-out-of-print volumes: On Drink, Every Day Drinking, and How’s Your Glass? The first is a compendium of drinking advice, arranged in topical chapters, the second is a collection of newspaper columns on various drinking topics, and the third is a series of drinking tests (multiple choice and essay) intended to gauge and improve the reader’s knowledge of drinking subjects. This newly reprinted and collected edition begins with a brief introduction and glossary for American readers — the glossary is a real relief to anyone who is not familiar with the odd Briticisms (and perhaps Amisisms?) Amis employs: “hock,” “the local,” “Malvern water,” “stroppy,” etc. The book also has a decent index, and although there is no bibliography following the text, the second chapter of On Drink (page 9 in this volume) is really a bibliographic essay on drinking literature (current to the early seventies, when this part of the book was originally written).
Filed under: art & entertainment
Lavoirs : washhouses of rural France / Mireille Roddier ; foreword by Billie Tsien.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c2003.
[MCL call number: 720.944 R686L 2003: one copy, no holds]
In the 17th century, local governments in France began to build a new kind of municipal facility: lavoirs, or washhouses. They were simple, solid affairs (usually built of stone) designed to channel water for from streams and rivers into large basins, or catch it when it rained. Housewives and professional wash-women came to these communal facilities to launder clothing and linens, and they remained in use, in some places, until the time of the Second World War.
Many, many lavoirs have been demolished, but some remain, especially in smaller and more remote towns, and in towns where the lavoir was built together with another facility such as the town hall. For those of us who cannot make a tour of lavoirs, Mireille Roddier carefully and beautifully photographed several dozen for her book Lavoirs: Washhouses of Rural France.
I found the images startling — the buildings themselves are lovely in a utilitarian way, but noticing this, I also can’t help but notice that they are not being used. In every picture, the water in the basins and channels are still, and the large rooms are empty of people and laundry. The photographs look quiet, exactly the opposite of how they must have been when in use, full of women working, talking, splashing water; maybe laughing or singing or arguing. It’s eerie to see pictures of these lovely buildings with their picturesque pools and rills glassy and smooth in a way they would originally have been only at the start of the workday, or at night.
The bulk of Roddier’s photographs are preceded by an essay explaining the history of lavoirs as buildings and as civic facilities, regional variations in architectural style, and other architectural matters. The essay also discusses the social impacts of lavoirs, together with a brief history of their use and a bit of explanation of the place laundresses held in French society during the period when lavoirs were common and in regular use. All this is fascinating, and useful for explaining just what is represented in Roddier’s photographs, but the book would be worthwhile just for the beauty of those photographs.
Filed under: art & entertainment
45 RPM : a visual history of the seven-inch record / edited by Spencer Drate.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c2002.
[MCL call number: 741.66 F745 2002; one copy, no holds]
The 45 was once the very height of pop music cool. Singles were cheap, easy to carry around, and provided a quick musical fix without the commitment of an LP. If you wanted a hit, it came on a 45, adulterated only by a (usually) forgettable song on the B-side; whereas LPs were full of all kinds of non-hit nonsense you’d never hear on the radio.
But in addition to filling a particular musical niche, 45s were physical objects as well. Albums have album covers, where great strides in graphic design can be made. Or sometimes, not made. 45 RPM chronicles the evolution of singles’ cover art, from the 1950s when classical, jazz, dance music, and pop were all put out on seven-inch records; through the 60s, 70s, and 80s when Top 40 hits were all available as singles; and finally to the 1990s, when 45s were an important medium of the alternative music scene.
The images in 45 RPM are widely varied. Two Frank Sinatra records (on facing pages) feature lovely painted covers that look like nothing so much as hard-boiled pulp novels. Duke Ellington is caught in a terribly modern candid photograph, hatted, smoking while sitting at his piano and not looking at the camera at all. Fabian, Elvis Presley, Chubby Checker, Paul Anka, and Roy Orbison gaze directly at us, gorgeous and wholesome but maybe a little dangerous with their hair pomaded and sweet smiles on their faces. The Rolling Stones and Sam the Sham and the Pharos are all dressed up in costume. The Foundations, The Yard Birds, The Impressions, and America are just standing around in very stylish looking groups, as if their carefully arranged portraits were wholly candid. Al Green is relaxing in a white chair in a white room wearing a white suit and white shoes, radiating calm and cool. The B-52s are half cartoons. The Clash have assumed the position, hands up against the wall and facing away from the camera. In the selection of covers from the 90s, artists don’t appear at all — Instead there are cartoons, mock newspaper advertisements, photo montages, and a little more artsy irony than is perhaps truly necessary.
The record cover images are arranged in groups, by decade. Within each section, however, there is no firm logic apparent in the arrangement — if there are several records from a particular artist or group within a decade, they’re usually shown one after another, but that seems to be it. This is unfortunate, especially in the first decade during which the range of genres is broad. Also, each 45 cover is shown solo, with no caption or explanation accompanying it. This successfully highlights the visual aspect of the covers, but since some of them are completely wordless, it’s a little frustrating if you don’t recognize the band or the record. There is a discography in the back of the book readers can use to track down which record is what, but it doesn’t list page numbers or other clear identifying data, and flipping back and forth is inconvenient.
On the other hand, I will say that after looking through the book, I had a whole afternoon’s worth of songs playing in my head. Maybe visual stimulation is a really good way to get my brain to start replaying what it knows? I can’t say, but I will tell you that I as I type I’ve got Ella Fitzgerald doing “Cheek to Cheek,” Talking Heads with “Take Me to the River,” Tom Jones’s “She’s a Lady,” Aretha Franklin doing “Freeway of Love,” Nat King Cole singing “Unforgettable,” Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades,” and Elvis Presley’s “Are you Lonesome Tonight,” all playing in the jukebox of my mind. Catchy.
Filed under: art & entertainment
Soviet textiles : designing the modern utopia : selected from the Lloyd Cotsen Collection / Pamela Jill Kachurin.
Boston : MFA Publications ; New York : Trade distribution : Distributed Art Publishers/D.A.P., c2006. [MCL call number: 746.0947 K11s 2006; one copy, one hold]
Oh, it’s so easy to understand the pull of the Soviet dream of a workers paradise when looking at the cream of socialist-realist art/propaganda. Handsome tractors surging across uniformly fruitful fields, little stylized children in geometric smocks playing ball, gracefully belching smokestacks; all are repeated in bright, modern colors across expanses of plain, honest cotton fabric. The world depicted here is productive and prosperous. Children have time for play as well as learning, adults find joy in shared work; and no one knows want or cold or psychological despair.
In the brief period from about 1927 to 1933, Soviet designers engaged in a bold experiment — rather than continue to produce the floral patterns that had always been popular, they designed fabrics featuring collective farms and factories and their generous product, and other modern ideals. The notion was that these assertively socialist textiles, provided for everyday use, would help to radicalize and educate the population at large. Soviet Textiles provides a terse, cogent history of this movement, its origins, and its demise — gracefully illustrated, of course, with images of an idealized art deco cotton utopia on nearly every page.
Filed under: art & entertainment
Photobooth / Babbette Hines.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.
[MCL call number: 779.2 H662p 2002; one copy, one hold]
I’m not sure I have much to say about Photobooth — though I can describe it, and I will shortly — the main reason for mentioning it here is simply that it is lovely and surprising and you are many of you very likely to miss it unless you have it pointed out.
You’ve been to a photobooth; everyone has. It’s a big box, as big, perhaps, as a car. You slide into it (maybe you jam yourself in with several of your closest friends), decide which color of curtain you’d like behind you, feed your quarters into the slot, and sit, pose, or mug while the box flashes at you once for each pose. Then you clamber out and wait impatiently for roughly two minutes while the box processes your negatives, prints them, and finally ejects a thin strip of pictures. They are probably over- or underexposed, blurry, or unflattering in some way. The paper is wet. They’re cheap, entertaining, useful, and eminently ephemeral.
Babbette Hines collects other people’s photobooth pictures, and Photobooth is an exhibit of her collection. They cover roughly 200 pages. Some are shown front and back to show notes people wrote on them, some are set in frames or pasted on to cards bearing messages. They show babies, lovers, holiday-makers, soldiers and sailors, friends, and single individuals. Some are serious, some are silly, some are poignant. Some look as though they are meant to grace a passport or other official document, some were clearly taken only for amusement, some are completely inscrutable as to intent.
You must get this book, because you must see these pictures.
* * *
Or you could get this one:
American photobooth / Näkki Goranin ; foreword by David Haberstich.
New York : W. W. Norton & Co., c2008.
[MCL call number: 779.2 G661a 2008; five copies, no holds]
It has a smidge fewer photobooth pictures, but it begins with a much more substantive introductory chapter, with a technical and historical discussion of the invention of the photobooth and its development as a commercial enterprise. The author, Näkki Goranin, is herself an photobooth artist, and several of her self-portraits are included in the book.
Filed under: art & entertainment
The forgotten arts and crafts / John Seymour.
New York : Dorling Kindersley, 2001.
[MCL call number: 745.5 S519f 2001; five copies, no holds]
One side effect of a curious mind is that it can be difficult to shake off idle questions. How do you properly thatch a roof? Were there once different kinds of thimbles for different sewing tasks? Is there a non-electric ancestor to the vacuum cleaner? But there is hope if your idly questioning mind inclines this particular way — these and many similar questions can be answered by consulting John Seymour’s The Forgotten Arts and Crafts.
In straightforward prose and clear illustrations, Seymour explains how things used to be made and repaired, who did the work, and a bit about their daily experiences. The book includes traditional arts, crafts and homemade products primarily from the western Europe and the cultures it has spawned, but this narrow focus allows for greater depth – for example, there are two pages on boot and shoemaking, and an additional two pages on clog making. And there’s a nice sidebar in the clog section about clogs made entirely of wood (with no leather upper part), and how they were called sabots in France, which gave rise to the word “sabotage,” because a clog is a handy weapon when you’re an oppressed worker. Well, Seymour doesn’t put it exactly like that, but you see what I mean.
The Forgotten Arts and Crafts is nice to leaf through, but it might also prove useful if you really do have a question like “what sort of tools might one use to make large quantities of butter by hand?” And there is an index, as well as an detailed table of contents and lots of arresting illustrations, so you should be able to find what you need in short order.
* * *
If you need to know more about the workings of mundane technology, with a more modern bent, you would do well to consult David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work, which explains the how of everything from simple machines to the space shuttle.
Filed under: art & entertainment
The dawn of the color photograph : Albert Kahn’s archives of the planet / David Okuefuna.
Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2008.
[MCL call number: 779.092 K12o 2008: six copies, no holds]
In the first few years of the 20th century, brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière invented autochrome photography, a simple, inexpensive method for making color photographs with a standard glass-negative camera (the sort used by professionals at the time). The autochrome was a radical development — other color photography techniques existed, but they were expensive, complicated, and/or cumbersome.
Inspired in part by this technological development, French banker, pacifist, and philanthropist Albert Kahn conceived of an ambitious project — he recruited and financed professional photographers, provided them with autochrome plates and other equipment, and sent them around the world to photograph everyday life. From 1908 through the 1930s, these photographers recorded world events, wars (most notably the First World War), political change, religious practice, commonplace cultural events, national festivals, people at work, and of course the landscape of houses, streets, neighborhoods, cities, agricultural land, and the natural world. The project was named The Archives of the Planet, and eventually grew to more than 72,000 images.
The Archive’s photographers traveled far and wide, to teeny villages as well as important cities in nearly every corner of the world, and their work captures a world that is roughly a century old. European imperialism, the massive bombing campaigns of the Second World War, the spread of Western popular culture, industrialization, the Cold War, pollution, globalization and many other forces have made changes both to our cultural and physical geography. The Dawn of the Color Photograph collects hundreds of these pictures and presents them in a geographical arrangement, with David Okuefuna’s meticulous captions showing not only where and what is portrayed in each image, but often explaining how history has treated the buildings, cities, cultural traditions, and communities captured therein. It’s easier to understand what’s in the pictures with this bit of explication — at times Okuefuna reads quite a lot into the images, making assessments of people’s state of mind from their expressions, for example, but on the whole his captions are helpful and illustrative.
But the pictures themselves are frankly astonishing. The autochrome process* produces very different images than the color photographs we’re used to. The images are muted and romantic looking; a bit grainy. Even scenes that are brightly lit with full sunlight do not seem harsh – colors meld a little, and look more harmonious than they generally do in life. Autochromes require a long exposure time, so some of the images are clearly posed – and those that are not often include blurred shapes where people or animals moved during the exposure. The strange colors and long exposure combine to give the photographs a well-put-together look, a bit like theater promotion stills or fashion magazine shots. And yet most of the images are startlingly natural looking. The majority capture scenes of life as it is lived — marketplaces, people at work, street scenes — most of these seem as natural as they would captured in a fraction of a modern second by an amateur with a Brownie or an iPhone.
I looked through The Dawn of the Color Photograph several times before I felt ready to write about it. The first time, I simply flipped through and looked at the pictures. The second time, I read the introduction and the essays at the beginning of each chapter, and looked at the photographs more carefully. The third time, I went through the whole book and read each photograph caption. The fourth time, I flipped through again and revisited the images which had struck me most. I am not sure that I am done; I’m not sure I have seen even a substantial part of what is available to see in this collection of images. These pictures are very energetic and lifelike, and even though the people are mostly dead, many of the buildings and communities are scattered or destroyed, and the world is unalterably changed by time and other forces, these people and places do not seem gone. They seem real, alive, present. The people seem human, their cultures important, their habits interesting, their perspectives valuable. I think this is the magic that Albert Kahn was hoping to create.
* * *
* There is an appendix explaining the technical aspects of the autochrome process, which helps illuminate why the images look the way they do — and of course it’s also interesting because autochromes work so very differently than the photographic processes we typically use today.
Filed under: science
Rats : observations on the history and habitat of the city’s most unwanted inhabitants / Robert Sullivan.
New York : Bloomsbury : Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers, 2004.
[MCL call number: 599.352 S951r 2004; 14 copies, no holds]
Rats are bad. They inhabit our nightmares. In fairy tales and children’s books, rats are often cast in an evil light, in the company of wolves, crows, vultures, bears, cobras, and other scary animals. They are night-dwellers, their teeth are sharp and nasty, they infest ships and tenements and scavenge humanity’s leavings, they’re skittery when we startle them but vicious when their backs are against a wall; they are dangerous, they’re vermin, they don’t share our interests and we cannot have any kind of meaningful communion with them. These are the lessons of our culture. Rats are bad.
But human culture has more than folklore, more than tradition and street smarts and history. We have also science. The core methodology of western science is the trajectory of hypothesis, careful observation or test, and reasoned analysis. It is difficult to shake the fear, the nightmares, and the fairy tales about rats, but if we can do so, and follow this relaxation of basic emotional response with methodical examination, we may learn to understand rats a bit, predict their actions, appreciate their virtues, and maybe even modify our own systems to accommodate rats a bit better while still meeting our own needs.
And this is what Robert Sullivan set out to do. He spent a year observing the rats indigenous to a particular alley in lower Manhattan at night, while during the day he researched rat biology and natural history, rats’ impact in New York and other cities, rat extermination, and other rat-related topics. This makes for more of a history and less of a scientific study, but it is still true that Sullivan began with the premise that he should do his best to observe first, and analyze and judge second.
In the long run, the story is sadder than it is hopeful. Reading the first few chapters, Sullivan’s observations in the alley inspired in me a respect for rats and their abilities, their strengths. Sullivan’s diary of rat observations were like those of a naturalist in the wild — careful, methodical notations of events. He recorded patterns and attempted to identify individuals. When the rats did something he hadn’t seen before, he considered the environment around them and looked for rationales for their behavior, all the while trying to think like a rat might — or at least trying not to think only like a human. But Sullivan’s record of his observations is only part of the book: another significant portion of the text reports Sullivan’s interviews with professional exterminators and municipal rat control authorities. I found this depressing. Reading Sullivan’s reports of scores of conversations with people whose careers focus on killing rats, I began to teeter between sympathy for the hapless rodents (who, after all, are nocturnal scavengers because it is their nature, not because they are actually evil or vicious or sent by an enemy to vex humans), and a sort of generalized civic interest in their eradication from cities, for the benefit of urban humanity and to create a more harmonious urban ecosystem. Not a pleasant fence to find oneself sitting on.
Anyone fascinated, interested, or horrified by rats should find something in Sullivan’s text to pique their interest — but if you, like most people, already have a conception of rats as bad vermin, or as cuddly pets, beware that neither side wins in this narrative. Rats are shown as fascinating, even noble wild creatures; they are also shown as dangerous pests who will bite children’s faces as they sleep.
* * *
If you are looking for an book that takes a different line about rats, a book that casts them as intelligent creatures with a meaningful social network and complex interactions with the world around them, you can hardly do better than the children’s classic Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, by Robert C. O’Brien (many publishers, 1971-present). It is the story of a widow mouse with a sick child who seeks the help of a community of super smart, super scary rats who live in a bramble bush. Mrs. Frisby’s husband had known these rats; they had all escaped from a National Institute of Mental Health laboratory together after several years of experiments. These experiments, and their results, are an important feature of the story — the rats and their mouse friends are bigger, stronger, smarter, and more long-lived than other rats and mice, because of their time at NIMH. So they’re not just rats, they’re special rats. But I’ll tell you, when I read this book as a child, I came away feeling sure that rats were more complex and admirable than I’d previously thought. And after reading Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, I was plenty pissed off that humans are so often too lazy to find a way to do genetic research without torturing rats and mice.
Filed under: technology
The fruit hunters : a story of nature, adventure, commerce and obsession / Adam Leith Gollner.
New York : Scribner, c2008.
[MCL call number: 641.34 G626f 2008; 13 copies, no holds;
also in audiobook format at: CD- 641.34 G626f; five copies, no holds]
Probably all of you have encountered a mysterious fruit at some time in your lives. Perhaps you met it in the produce section of an grocery store specializing in imports from afar, perhaps you ate it while traveling abroad or even just in another part of your own country. Perhaps you’ve never eaten this fruit; you’ve only read about it and wondered what it might be like to actually taste it.
Adam Leith Gollner traveled widely, ate every new fruit he could find, and scouted out scientists and farmers and weirdos who are obsessed with fruit — and recorded his experiences in The Fruit Hunters. It’s not really a book about fruit; it’s about people and fruit. In talking about the people, he has to talk about the fruits, of course, so you get some of both; but it’s the fruit crazies, the obsessives, the true believers who are really the focus. These people’s stories are so varied and bizarre that it’s hard to characterize them, but here’s a terse sampling of a few of the remarkable fruits and fruit-lovers you’ll find in Gollner’s text:
Fruitarians eat only fruit: for increased health, to build a closer communion with God, or to maintain a connection to primeval man. Some vary the fruit-only rule by eating a “caveman diet;” fruits and air-dried raw meat. Others eat fruits and mineralized rock dust. But all maintain that eating a diet overwhelmingly composed of fruit is the best, the purest, the most compelling. Gollner visits several fruitarians and dines with them, while discussing spirituality, the practice of traveling around the world following the ripening cycle of durian fruit (see below), and other topics.
Gary Snyder, an apple grower in Wenatchee, Washington, has invented a fruit product called the Grapple. This horrifying concoction begins as a Gala or Fuji apple, which is then permeated throughout with artificial grape flavoring. It’s available in blister packs of four at big box stores, and in some places, pre-sliced in baggies. Gollner visits Snyder and tours his facility, though the secret method for turning apples into Grapples is not revealed.
Eat a miracle fruit, a berry grows in the sub-tropics, and everything — seriously, everything — you put in your mouth for the next couple of hours will taste sweet. Gollner meets fruit people around the world who grow the berries themselves and are willing to share a few with him, but in the U.S. they’re almost unknown. The berries contain a protein called miraculin, which acts as a short-term befuddler for taste buds, making sour things taste sweet. Miraculin is banned by the FDA, very possibly due to secret pressure from sugar company lobbyists.
The durian is renowned as the foulest-smelling fruit on earth. Durians are famously banned from the subway system in Singapore, and they are unwelcome in many refined public places, such as fancy hotels, throughout Asia. And yet the durian is a beloved fruit in its home territory, and fruit tourists seek it out. Durian-scented condoms, Gollner reports, are popular in Indonesia.
The Fruit Hunters acts a bit like a history of fruit, but Gollner is a journalist and it shows. His writing style is informative while still a bit breezy, and the book is something like a very long lifestyle piece of the sort you might find in a highbrow magazine or newspaper. The facts-and-figures addict in me was a little frustrated at times, but on the whole I found the book quite captivating. And The Fruit Hunters easily passed one of the tests I use to see if I should review a book here in Duck Duck Book — while reading it, I often found myself wanting to read bits and pieces out loud to anyone who happened to be around, or sometimes, to a friend or colleague who I thought would enjoy a specific anecdote or factoid.
Filed under: technology
New York’s forgotten substations : the power behind the subway / Christopher Payne.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c2002.
[MCL call number: 625.4 P346n 2002; two copies, no holds]
Does it not seem that everything about a big city’s subway system should be underground? All the machinery and all the mechanisms to control the subway surely ought to fit neatly below the streets, as the stations and tunnels do. Even the transit system control room that sometimes features in action films is in a windowless room and therefore, filmgoers imagine, is probably underground along with all the other subway infrastructure.
But not everything that makes the trains go fits under the earth. Notwithstanding suburban lines and stations that are wholly aboveground, the power that electrifies the third rail or the overhead wire has to come from somewhere — usually somewhere well away from the tunnels and the tracks. In New York City, the subway system was built with strategically placed power substations near each line. In each one, electrical power from generating stations around the region was converted from high voltage alternating current to low voltage direct current, which ran the trains. In the early 20th century, each of these substations was filled with giant round machines called rotary converters, as well as a quantity of other mechanical equipment like switches, busses, gauges, and breakers.
These substations have now been taken out of service, or had their equipment replaced with more modern technology — but in the late 1990s as the last manual substations were being scrapped, photographer Christopher Payne visited as many as he could, and took pictures of the buildings and their equipment. In this slim volume, some substations are shown with modern electronic equipment side by side with out-of-date manual equipment. Some are disused hulks filled with crumbling machinery, weeds, and peeling paint. Some photographs focus on the incredible workmanship and decorative detail in utilitarian structures like cast iron staircases, window frames, and building facades. All of Payne’s pictures highlight the inherent beauty of the machines and their environment.
Payne introduces his photographs with a series of short essays on the history of New York City’s transit substations, the machines they employed, the methods of their operation, and the basics of how they worked. The essays are supported by dozens of historical and contemporary photographs of substation buildings and workers running the power conversion machinery, and many diagrams explaining the layout of the machinery and the principles by which it operated. Payne’s history and technical explanations are fantastically clear, and his own photographs are both beautiful and interesting. So you should find the book educational, if you want to learn more about the power that runs the trains; and should also find it engaging, if you are interested in the beauty that can be found in practical things.
Filed under: history & geography
Chaining Oregon : surveying the public lands of the Pacific Northwest, 1851-1855 / by Kay Atwood.
Blacksburg, VA : McDonald & Woodward Publishing Company, 2008.
[MCL call number: 917.9504 A887c 2008; one copy, no holds; one copy reference only at Central Library]
When the United States expanded west, it was a major element of public policy to encourage settlers to go out there and carve their names into the land. Farming, ranching, and even mining all marked the territory as belonging to settlers — and land controlled by settlers was more American, in a cultural sense as well as a political one. Measuring the land, marking boundaries, and drawing maps showing what was there and who controlled each piece were important foundational steps that helped transform what was seen as wild space into a civilized, productive, and law-abiding nation. The first U.S. maps elucidating land ownership were drawn by draftsmen working for the General Land Office (later absorbed by the Bureau of Land Management), and they worked from measurements and notes taken by surveyors. The first surveyors in what is now Oregon and Washington began their work in 1851 after the passage of the Oregon Donation Land Act.
Land surveyors in the 1850s did much the same sort of work surveyors do now — except that these first surveyors in the Oregon and Washington territories were the pioneers of mapping in our region. If you look at a modern map showing land use and ownership in any part of Oregon or Washington, you’ll see properties measured with lines that were originally drawn by General Land Office surveyors in the 1850s. And here’s how they did it: they took basic (though often delicate) mechanical measuring equipment out into the valleys and the wilderness and measured. Teams of about five to eight men surveyed by hand, mostly in the rain and mud, often working from dawn till dusk. They walked survey lines in an area twelve to sixty miles wide from the southern end of the Puget Sound south to the California border in the space of five years. Chaining Oregon is a history of this project. Kay Atwood carefully and clearly explains the scientific and institutional history of the first surveys of the Oregon Territory — the bureaucracy, the technical challenges, local and national politics, the difficulties of weather and staffing and getting paid, and interactions between settlers and Oregon’s Surveyor General — while at the same time sharing relevant pieces of the broader history of Oregon.
In addition to their work of measuring and describing the land, surveyors kept detailed journals of their field work. These journals included notes about the weather, names of people they met or lodged with, conversations they had, meals they ate, and so on, as well as subjects more germane to the work, like where fences were, the quality of the soils, and the prevailing species of timber in forested areas. The bits more clearly connected to the work of surveying often show up on the maps — for example, a great swath of what is now east Portland is described on the map of Township 1N Range 1E Willamette Meridian as: “Land gently rolling soil good rate clay loam / Timber Fir a little Maple Cedar and Hemlock.” Atwood uses the whole range of information in the surveyor’s field notes (not just the businesslike parts), as well as the first survey maps and the correspondence and other records of the office of Oregon’s Surveyor General to build the core of a riveting history of a specific part of the Pacific Northwest’s past. She connects her basic source material to other documentation of life and civilization in early Oregon, and to secondary histories of the region and its people, but her most remarkable achievement is that she has made a largely technical story read like a completely human one.
The men who did the actual work, and those who administered it, are Atwood’s chief characters. The places they traveled and the land they described are also important to her story. Atwood did not set out to relate any of the many other interesting stories that are secondary to this central thread — the development of urban centers in Oregon, for example, or the struggles settlers faced when their individual situations did not neatly line up with federal land claim regulations. But she does make modest reflection on many of these other stories an important part of her narrative. Her descriptions of daily life in the towns of Oregon City, Portland, and Jacksonville are vivid. She clearly explains local and national party politics (normally an exceedingly confusing topic) in so far as they affected the project of surveying Oregon. And Atwood’s quotes from surveyors’ field notes about physical features of a specific spot are often followed by a brief but careful discussion of how white settlers had already irrevocably changed that piece land, and how this affected the lifeways and future prospects of the Indians who already lived there.
Many readers, even those interested in Oregon’s history, might expect a history of the state’s first land surveys to be dry and uninteresting. Perhaps other histories of surveying projects are indeed dry, but Chaining Oregon is engaging and clear, and reading it invites further study of many interesting facets of our region’s past and the people and events that shaped it.
Chaining Oregon is supplemented by extensive endnotes, a thorough if somewhat dry bibliography, and an index. As usual, I think the index is only minimally useful — it has almost no entries for surveying equipment and techniques, and neglects to provide access points for memorable subjects that are secondary to the narrative but which are so often the parts readers will remember later. However, the index provides adequate access to proper nouns and it is better than nothing.
* * *
The University of Oregon Map and Aerial Photography Library has a lovely collection of General Land Office maps of Oregon on its website. You can’t view the maps online; instead you have to download them. But they’re pretty small files and it doesn’t take too long for them to download.
The Portland Planning Bureau has the two earliest General Land Office maps showing the townships were central Portland is now, in pdf form, as a part of its collection of online historic resources. Township 1N Range 1E is the map I quoted from above; Township 1S Range 1E shows the area south of what is now SE Stark St. (which used to be called Baseline Road, because it follows the Willamette Baseline!).
Since you’re reading this, I’m fairly sure you’re interested in books and information — and more particularly, that you appreciate recommendations about what to read next or thoughts about why a book, an article, or a film is interesting, how it connects to the rest of the world of literature, what it promises, and whether these promises are delivered on. You must, or why would you be reading Duck Duck Book? And so. I am pleased to recommend that you visit another couple of places where you can get suggestions about what to read and why: Multnomah County Library’s two new blogs, News Notes and An Embarrassment of Riches.
(Before I get one step further I must disclaim: as you know I work at Multnomah County Library as a reference librarian. So I’m biased in favor of these two blogs. And further, I am one of the authors of News Notes, which makes me even more biased in its favor. Now that I have confessed, I will go on to describe the joys of reading about reading in these particular spots, and you may judge the size of the grain of salt you need to take with my enthusiasm.)
News Notes recommends books and other diversions inspired by current news stories — sometimes providing an avenue for background research or suggesting reading that can help you put the news in context — and sometimes offering more of a stream-of-consciousness beginning with a bit of news, and moving on to whatever comes next in the mind of a librarian.
An Embarrassment of Riches is something of a free-for-all — it opens a little window into the minds of dozens of library staff people who share intelligent observations about a broad range of literature. As its authors say, An Embarrassment of Riches alerts readers to “the best of what the library has to offer.”
Take a look at both; my guess is that you’ll find some surprises.
Edward R. Murrow and the birth of broadcast journalism / Bob Edwards.
New York : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2004.
[MCL call number: B-Mu968e 2004; 4 copies, no holds;
also in audio format at CD- B-Mu968e; five copies, no holds]
In 1937, when Edward Murrow first arrived in London to assume his new post as the European Director for CBS, he tried to join the American Foreign Correspondents Association. They refused his application — after all, they were journalists, and everyone in 1937 knew that radio had nothing to do with journalism. Of course if they had a crystal ball, they would likely have rushed to recruit Ed Murrow, who was soon to be radio’s first news star, the man who brought the European war home to American living rooms, live and out loud. (In fact, in 1944, the Foreign Correspondents Association went beyond recruiting and made Murrow their president.)
Bob Edwards’s biography of Murrow focuses largely on Murrow’s professional life, his effect on journalism, and his work as an innovator in both radio and television broadcasting. Murrow is the person, Edwards argues, who created radio news. In those few years between 1937 and 1944, Murrow had led radio news away from a limited venue for 15-minute headline broadcasts to a complex medium of live interviews with powerful people, first-person reporting on current events, and synchronized news and commentary roundups from correspondents in several cities simultaneously.
It is interesting to consider this in light of more recent developments in journalism. In the 1960s and 70s, the “underground press” movement spawned hundreds of independent, low-budget newspapers that published stories and commentary — stories that would never have seen print in the mainstream daily newspapers or on network television. In the 1990s, new software allowed anyone with a computer and an internet connection to publish weblogs on any topic and entirely without editorial or publishing oversight. Each of these two new phenomena carved out space that wasn’t present before, and regardless of the direct impact blogs or the underground press have had on corporate journalism, that space still exists. And, both bloggers and journalists of the underground press have inspired real scorn among their fellows in the mainstream media world — they’re not real journalists, they don’t follow professional standards, they shouldn’t be allowed press credentials, and similar complaints.
The book satisfies on other levels too, though Edwards’s description of Murrow’s personal life, family history, and other private details are terse. These features are provided in service to the story of Murrow the professional man. For example, Edwards explains that when Murrow was fresh out of college, he worked as president of the National Student Federation of America (NSFA), and then assistant to the director of the Institute of International Education (IIE). Stories of this part of Murrow’s career help to explain his overall commitment to his values, and his unwillingness to compromise except under specific, strategic conditions.
For example, while at the NSFA, Murrow recruited historically black colleges to membership in the organization, and held a racially integrated convention in Atlanta. When he worked for the IIE, Murrow started an exchange program that brought American college students Soviet Moscow for summer courses, and coordinated a relocation project that matched German scholars displaced by Nazi politics with American universities willing to hire them as professors and researchers. These are interesting stories, but their job in Edwards’s book is not merely to educate and entertain. They show that Murrow was a man who strove to create opportunities to make his work as an educator also do service to his political and ethical ideals. These are the qualities, Edwards argues, that made Murrow a great journalist, and that gave him the tools to shape an emerging medium.
Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism has a modest index and a short bibliography. The book itself is quite short, and very readable. It might make a nice companion on a trip, or a good choice to read on a quiet afternoon alone. I read it on my commute to work, on the bus, where it sped my journey, diverted me from the flow of conversation around me, and, on one occasion, even made me almost miss my stop.
Filed under: art & entertainment
One thousand years of manga / Brigitte Koyama-Richard ; [translated from the French by David Radzinowicz].
Paris : Flammarion ; [New York] : distributed in North America by Rizzoli International Publications, c2007.
[MCL call number: 741.5952 K88o 2007; one copy, no holds; one copy reference only at Central Library]
If you pick up a brand-new Japanese comic book and read it, my guess is that you are more likely to enjoy the story, the writing, or the art than you are to consider its historical antecedents.
If I am wrong, or if my pointing this out inspires you to explore the history of manga, Brigitte Koyama-Richard is at your service. Koyama-Richard traces manga’s roots back to the magnificent story scrolls painted 800 to 1,000 years ago exclusively for the enjoyment of elite audiences, through the establishment of printmaking as a popular art, the “golden age of caricature” and the opening of Japan to the west in the 1800s, the rise of the comic strip in the early 1900s, the work of the highly influential writer/artist Tezuka Osamu, and finally, contemporary Japanese comics.
Throughout this tour of artistic formats, political and technological developments, and cultural change, Koyama-Richard provides comparisons between the Japanese artworks that are her main focus, and well-known examples of European art that are contemporary to them. These comparisons are helpful for western readers who are ignorant of the existence and significance of major Japanese works, allowing a gentle introduction that encourages a developing understanding of the significance and context of seminal Japanese cultural icons — from treasures of history like the thousand year old scroll Choju jinbutsu giga (Frolicking Animals and People), to modern masterpieces like Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy).
A large percentage of the text in One Thousand Years of Manga is in its carefully written picture captions, which provide bits of history, biography, and thoughtful criticism of the images that appear on nearly every page. But the essays explaining each chapter in manga’s long history are clear and interesting as well, and the pictures — reproductions of scrolls, paintings, prints, comic strips, books, sketches, and many other incredible artworks — are incredible.
At the back of the book are a series of interviews with manga artists, a short essay about western influences on Japanese comics, a glossary of Japanese terms used in the book, a very brief overview of historical Japanese political eras, a biographical glossary of artists, a manga chronology, some selected manga statistics from Japan, and a bilingual bibliography. Even with all this magnificent endmatter, there is no index; but the book is well organized enough that it is hardly to be missed.
Filed under: comix
Incognegro [comic book] / written by Mat Johnson ; art by Warren Pleece ; lettered by Clem Robins.
New York : Vertigo, DC Comics, c2008.
[MCL call number: GN JOHNSON; eight copies, no holds]
Over time, racism and white supremacy have given us many stories that white people like to forget, and people of color can’t help but remember. One very horrific example from the United States’s own history is the story of the lynching of thousands of people of color, mostly African-American men, mostly in the south, and nearly always with the tacit consent of law enforcement and the pillars of the local community.
Lynching was common as dirt in the 1920s, and perpetrators nearly always went free. The white press largely ignored news of lynchings, but Black newspapers often reported on it. Incognegro is set in this context: light-skinned Zane Pinchback, a writer for the New Holland Herald (an African American newspaper based in Harlem) uses his ability to pass for white to attend lynchings and report on them first-hand in his “Incognegro” column. As the comic opens, Pinchback is expressing intense frustration with his success that is not success. He wants to participate in the literary and artistic flowering he’s surrounded by every day in 1920’s Harlem — and although everyone who’s anyone (and lots of folks who are no one in particular) reads “Incognegro,” no one has heard of Zane Pinchback.
During a confrontation on this question with his editor, Pinchback learns that his brother has been arrested for the murder of a white woman in a small Mississippi town, and he agrees to go incognegro one more time to cover the story and try to save his brother’s life. And then the shit really hits the fan. Excellent detective/reporter skills, feats of stupid bravery, the brotherhood of man, happenstance, and straightforward luck help Pinchback to survive an intense couple of days, several plot twists, a bullet wound, and lots of chit chat with racists, Klansmen, and town fathers. Incognegro is a real page-turner, with beautifully expressive art and a completely human (though of course also ghastly) story.
Filed under: technology
Manhole covers / Mimi Melnick ; photographs by Robert A. Melnick ; foreword by Allan Sekula.
Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c1994.
[MCL call number: 628.24 M527m 1994; one copy, no holds]
Have you ever looked down while crossing the street, and been shocked by the venerable age, or even the simple artistic grace of a manhole cover? They’re on nearly every city street. Some are plain, but intriguing because they are marked with the names of long-departed utility companies or municipalities; others are elegant works of art illustrated with flowers and geometric designs. Some are more pedestrian, covered with simple grids, plain over-all patterns of dots, or radial designs. But once you start to really see them you are likely to find a wide variety of different designs and patterns.
One reason is that although they are walked on and driven over every day, manhole covers are made of cast iron, and are incredibly heavy and durable. So they can have very long lives. Another is that utility companies, businesses, and local governments have had different rules about what manhole covers should and shouldn’t be like over time, and when the rules and fashions change, so do the new manhole covers. It is now generally required that manhole covers be marked with the name of the company or agency that operates whatever it is they provide access to. But, a hundred years ago, they were more likely to be marked with the name of the foundry where they were made.
Mimi Melnick and Richard A. Melnick’s book of photographs of manhole covers offers an engaging tour of manhole covers in many cities in the United States — it is not a comprehensive survey by any means, but there is much to savor in their selection of portraits. (Manhole Covers could be improved by an index to the locations in which each photograph was taken, but even though I am fervently devoted to the importance of indexes, I found that this oversight was quickly forgotten as I leafed through the book.) Mimi Melnick’s introductory essay traces the history of manhole covers, their manufacture, and their role in the infrastructure of American cities, and the 121 pages of manhole cover photographs that follow may well start you on the habit of looking down as you walk.
Filed under: art & entertainment
Self portrait in a velvet dress : Frida’s wardrobe : fashion from the Museo Frida Kahlo / [editors, Denise Rosenzweig, Magdalena Rosenzweig].
San Francisco, CA : Chronicle Books, 2008.
[MCL call number: 759.972 K12s 2008; three copies, one hold]
Frida Kahlo’s house, the Casa Azul, is now a museum. It is the house where Kahlo was born, and it is where she died. Kahlo’s husband, Diego Rivera, stipulated that her bedroom and bathroom should not be opened until fifty years after her death. So the rooms were locked and their contents left in place until 2004. When the museum’s staff finally entered Kahlo’s rooms, they found nearly 150 articles of clothing, dozens of household linens, a goodly collection of orthopedic equipment and hospital miscellanea, dozens of bottles of cosmetics and medicine, and a huge lithograph showing human embryonic development.
Kahlo’s clothes were the most notable prize. They were not so much a wardrobe in the normal sense as they were a collection — although it is certainly true that she wore these clothes, rather than collecting them as mere objects. And this makes the collection, and the book about it, feel rather strange. On the one hand, a museum devoted to a great personage is almost guaranteed to make relics out of any mundane object associated with that person, and the reverence with which this is done can border on the ridiculous. On the other hand, it is clear that Kahlo herself valued her wardrobe as more than simply a collection of garments to cover her nakedness and keep her warm. There is no doubt that part of what makes Frida Kahlo such an icon is that her attitude toward dress, style, art, and personal presentation was so enigmatic. Of course we would celebrate and carefully examine her clothing, now that we can. They have so much to say to us about
Kahlo as a person, and as an artist.
A large portion of Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress is taken up with Marta Turok’s essay on the ethnic roots of Frida Kahlo’s wardrobe. Turok discusses the sources of Kahlo’s clothes in different regions of Mexico, Guatemala, and examines what dressing chiefly in folk costume meant in Kahlo’s Mexico. This section contains many facing page illustrations: on one page, a photograph showing Kahlo wearing an article of clothing, or a reproduction of one of her paintings in which it figured; on the page opposite, a photograph of the item (or a similar one) after museum staff entered Kahlo’s rooms to observe and catalog her personal things. Other essays discuss Kahlo’s style of dress, the discoveries museum staff made the day they opened Kahlo’s rooms, and the restoration of the clothing and objects found there.
Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress is like a biography of Kahlo, with an emphasis on a specific part of her approach to the world: it is about Kahlo’s blouses, her shoes, her skirts, her belts, her scarves; and the way she used them to create a specific presentation of “Frida Kahlo” to her self, her family, her friends, and the public. Of course the book is beautiful; it’s full of lovely photographs of beautiful objects, it has the glitter of Kahlo’s fame and the sharp taste of her public tragedies. But it is also interesting as an exploration of a slender but important piece of a powerful artist’s creative vision, and the tools she employed to practice it.
Filed under: art & entertainment
Unbuilt America : forgotten architecture in the United States from Thomas Jefferson to the space age : a book / by Alison Sky and Michelle Stone ; introd. by George R. Collins.
New York : McGraw-Hill, c1976.
[MCL call number: 720.973 S629u; one copy, no holds; one copy reference only at Central Library]
Architects are planners — they are not traditionally responsible for doing the work of organizing and carrying out construction of their designs. In the course of their training and professional lives, most architects have designed buildings, monuments, or even whole cities that have never been built. Unbuilt America collects more than 200 designs that remain in the idea stage, each with illustrations and a description written by the architect, a contemporary critic, or a later historian.
The book’s contents are heavy with unbuilt creations of the 1960s and 1970s, for example: General Electric’s undersea community Bottom-Fix (page 100), Bruce Goff’s design for a Cowboy Hall of Fame shaped like a pile of horseshoes around a stake (page 106-107), James Lambeth’s hillside passive-solar village (page 158), Claes Oldenburg’s Design for a Tunnel Entrance in the Shape of a Nose (page 196), and several fascinating designs for structures celebrating the United States bicentennial (pages 248-261). But older unrealized plans are included too, notably Jacques J. B. Benedict’s Summer Capitol for President Wilson (pages 42-43), Frank Hemle and Harvey Wiley Corbett’s Restoration of King Solomon’s Temple and Citadel (pages 128-131), and Robert Stacy-Judd’s plans for cityscapes based on ancient Mayan architecture (235-237). All in all, it is an intriguing orientation to a series of curious and beautiful buildings and city plans.
Filed under: history & geography
You are here : personal geographies and other maps of the imagination / Katharine Harmon.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c2004.
[MCL call number: 912 H288y 2004; three copies, no holds]
A map is a compelling thing, and it does not have to be true in scientific terms to give powerful testimony. It is relatively common for novels to begin with a map, showing something like the neighborhood in which the murder occurred, or the geography of a fairyland. And we encounter nongeographical and other conceptual maps regularly in other places too — the zodiac that is sometimes featured on Chinese restaurant paper placemats, or the diagram of the path to clarity displayed in Church of Scientology storefronts.
You need a map to understand the geography of a completely imaginary place, especially if you’re not the imaginer. Here are some examples from my own cultural influences: What if I want more information about the assets of the four countries of Oz? How can I get a feel for the lake in which the Swallows and Amazons sailed, see where Christopher Robin and Pooh had their adventures, or find out that Professor Plum did it in the library, with the candlestick? I need a map.
Diagrams of human anatomy, religious maps showing the dangers of loose morals and the benefits of a virtuous life, battle maps, and even those Family Circus cartoons showing little Billy’s path all around the house and yard in one afternoon are still more examples of imaginative maps revealing shapes and relationships in much the same way as traditional “real” maps show national interests, property, routes of travel, and weather predictions.
In You Are Here, Katharine Harmon has collected scores of maps and map-like representations of ideas, feelings, states of being, relationships, time, and more. Each chapter collects maps on a particular theme, with an introductory essay by a different writer. Some of the book’s examples are very clearly maps; others require some suspension of disbelief, some allowance for creative license. Some are in fact self-conscious works of art; others were created for humorous purposes, to teach, to inspire, or to convince others of a deeply held belief. Here are some of the maps I found most notable:
- “Falls of Eternal Despair,” a map showing the river of death as it slides off the plain of sin and wretchedness over the waterfall into the depths of hell. (page 44)
- “Map of Americana,” a 1929 map by illustrator John Held, Jr. shows the 48 contiguous states as vast central area thinly populated with gas stations, hot dogs, and opportunities to purchase orange drink, surrounded on all sides by a dense ring of rum runners and bootleggers. (page 84)
- “Surrealist Map of the World,” another 1929 map showing the countries of the world, centered on the pacific, but with Ireland dwarfing the island of Britain, a giant Easter Island looming over a teeny Australia, just two cities marked (Paris and Constantinople), and no sign of the contiguous United States. (page 118)
- A map of Los Angeles with cartoon faces showing affluence, the unemployment rate, urban stresses, and the proportional representation of race in each part of town. (page 138)
- A nice lithographic-style poster of a restaurant table surrounded with the evocatively lettered names of the various components of a meal, two friends, their chairs, napkins, meals, drinks, conversation, and warm feelings of friendship. (page 134)
Filed under: history & geography
Archaeology in Washington / Ruth Kirk and Richard D. Daugherty.
Seattle : University of Washington Press, c2007.
[MCL call number: 979.7 K59a 2007; two copies, no holds]
It’s not always obvious at first, but there is a lot hidden in any inhabited land to show evidence of the people who have lived there over time. The area now occupied by the state of Washington is large, and it has supported human communities for many thousands of years. The exact range of time is a matter of some dispute, since scientists have competing theories about how people arrived there, and many indigenous peoples maintain that they have lived in their homelands from the beginning of time. But regardless of whether archaeological exploration in Washington can reveal traces of human habitation stretching back 14,000, or 20,000, or uncountable years, there is no doubt that there is plenty of evidence to show that people have been there, and have made an impact on the land.
Archaeology in Washington provides a friendly, sensible introduction to archaeological sites in the state, as well as to the state’s history of archaeological exploration, controversy, and accomplishment. One interesting story relayed in the book is the discovery and excavation of the Manis mastodon. In 1977, a couple living in the northern Olympic Peninsula began excavating a mucky portion of their land with a backhoe, with the intention of creating a pond where migrating water birds could rest. When Emanuel Manis dug up a pair of what seemed to be tree trunk sections from about six feet below the original surface of the site, he and his wife Clare Manis noticed the broken tips of the two chunks were white at the tips. They realized the chunks could be tusks, and called the an archaeologist at Washington State University who happened to be working on an excavation at another site on the peninsula. Seven years of excavation work later, bones of three mastodons had been recovered, along with seeds, bits of wood, other animal remains, and various human tools. Clare Manis eventually donated the site to the National Archaeological Conservancy.
Overall, Archaeology in Washington has the mainstream, open minded sort of bias familiar to readers of well-written American middle school text books — information is presented clearly, in a logical order that is meant to encourage the acquisition of knowledge, nearly every page contains at least one beautiful and useful photograph or illustration, the bibliography is helpful and the index decent, and although the writers definitely present their own perspective in subtle ways, matters of scientific and political debate are laid out in a more or less objective fashion that allows readers to mostly make up their own minds. You don’t have to know anything much about archaeology, or about Washington’s human past to understand this book, but you should know quite a bit about both when you have finished reading it, and it is interesting just to leaf through and look at the pictures.
Filed under: fiction
The latke who couldn’t stop screaming : a Christmas story / by Lemony Snicket ; illustrations by Lisa Brown.
San Francisco : McSweeny’s Books ; c2007.
[MCL call number: j Holiday SNICKET; 17 copies, no holds]
Sometimes it is difficult to review a book with only words as tools. This book is short enough that if you were here, I could read it aloud to you, showing the pictures along the way like any good parent, babysitter, auntie, or children’s librarian. You would laugh, you might cry, and you would definitely learn some basic facts about the miracle of Hanukkah and how frustrating it is to be misunderstood.
But since this is not possible, perhaps you will take my very terse introduction to heart, seek out the book, and read it aloud to someone you know. Or ask them to read it to you.
[thanks, Markrid]
Filed under: art & entertainment
Berlin Games : how the Nazis stole the Olympic dream / Guy Walters.
New York : William Morrow, c2006.
[MCL call number: 796.48 W235b 2006; one copy, two holds]
In the spring of 1931, twenty powerful men made their way to Barcelona for a meeting of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Their task was to decide which city would host the 1936 Olympic Games. Four were under serious consideration: Rome, Budapest, Barcelona, and Berlin. Italian members demurred that Rome was not ready to host the games in 1936, and the Hungarian representative voiced support for holding the games in Berlin. When the votes were finally counted (gathering them took several weeks, as many representatives voted by mail or telegram), Berlin was the clear winner, with 43 of 59 votes cast for the German capital.
In 1936, Spain held a general election, which resulted in the formation of a left-wing Popular Front government. The new Spanish government was sharply opposed to the politics and policies of Nazi Germany, and forbid Spanish athletes from participating in the Berlin Olympics — so they organized an alternative festival, to be held in Barcelona: the People’s Olympic Games. The People’s Olympics were planned for July 19-26, but a few short days before the games were to commence right-wing Nationalists, who controlled most of the Spanish army, began the rebellion that became the Spanish Civil War. By July 19, they held several cities and fighting had broken out across the country. The war was to last three years. Mexico and the Soviet Union were the only countries to come to the aid of Republican Spain, although tens of thousands of leftists from around the world traveled to Spain to fight against General Francisco Franco and the Nationalists, as international volunteers.
I initially turned to Guy Walters’s history of the 1936 Berlin Olympics to learn more about the People’s Olympics. Who planned them? Was any part of the festival salvaged? What countries hoped to participate? What happened to foreign athletes who were already in Spain when the war broke out? Walters answers these questions, but his larger project of relating the history of the Nazi games is worthy of attention as well.
Like most Olympic festivals, Berlin’s was a major national endeavor. Vast sports complexes were erected, armies of young translators were trained, and towns along the route visiting athletes took to the games were prettied up. But the young regime had an awfully big chip on its shoulder too — after all, the 1916 Olympics had been slated for Berlin, only to be cancelled by the IOC after World War I lost its gentlemanly edge with Germany’s introduction of mustard gas as a weapon. The German establishment needed this Olympics to come off perfectly to show how much the country had changed. And so, German prosperity was highlighted — butter and other foods were hoarded in advance so there would be plenty for the athletes and international visitors. The sharp edges of Nazi policies about racial purity were softened up temporarily, for show. Jewish athletes who had been forced out of participating in German sport under the Nazis were compelled to compete for their country, to prove that Germany was playing fair. A few weeks before the games began, Sinti and Roma people in the Berlin area were rounded up and placed in a special camp in a suburb. Homeless people and beggars were cleared from the city’s streets, and more than two thousand prostitutes and women working in the edges of the sex trade were forcibly examined for venereal disease.
Distasteful as this sounds, no doubt the stories of other nations’ Olympic preparations are nearly as shameful. What contrasts the 1936 Olympics from others is the German government’s neat takeover of the entire administration of the games from the International Olympic Committee.
Here’s a taste of the intrigue: in early 1936, it looked as though the two front runners for the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize were Barron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, and Carl von Ossietsky, an anti-Nazi journalist who was then languishing in a German forced labor camp. One of Germany’s representatives to the IOC attempted to use the influence of the IOC to pressure the Nobel committee to award the prize to Coubertin, and bribed the financially stricken Coubertin to formally endorse the Berlin games. Walters says on page 145: “Not only were the games being organised by the regime, but they were also being run according to Nazi rules and not those of the IOC. Four thousand athletes would shortly be attending a celebration not only of sport, but of fascism.” (Despite the German IOC members’ machinations, the peace prize was eventually awarded to Ossietzky, in December 1936, well after the games were over.)
Walters tells many other tales of this very politicized Olympiad — of athletes, government ministers, sports officials, businessmen, human rights activists, journalists, intellectuals, and the glitterati, and their role in the actual events of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and the public debate that accompanied it.
The text of Berlin Games is followed by a collection of incredibly readable endnotes, a thorough bibliography, and an excellent and helpful index.
Filed under: history & geography
Greetings from Portland / Mary L. Martin & Kirby Brumfield.
Atglen, PA : Schiffer Pub. Ltd., c2007.
[MCL call number: 979.549 M382g 2007; 20 copies, no holds; two copies reference only at Central Library]
If you are a collector, or a public librarian, or a generalist bookseller, you are certainly familiar with the sort of books published especially for people who collect things. Recent versions of this type of book display lavish illustrations from someone’s collection of whatever-it-is, with price estimates and minimal information about each object’s date of origin, history, and perhaps its context. For people interested in history, collectors’ books are inherently frustrating for the things they deliberately leave out, as well as for their rather casual attitude to the responsibility of citing sources for information — it is expected that the author and/or publisher of a book for collectors is such an authority that readers need no other information than their pronouncement of an object’s definition, its cultural context, its historical significance, and of course, its current value.
Greetings from Portland is a collectors’ book of postcards, and although it is lovely and fascinating, like its brethren it offers little to no information about when each postcard was made, where it would have been sold, or anything else about the history of each object. Many of the captions describing postcards include historical bits and pieces such as the date the bridge in the picture was finished, but these details are spare and unsatisfying. To be fair, the book’s preface does include some instruction on dating postcards (pages 4-5), but since most of the advice is about the information on the address-and-stamp side of the cards, it’s not much help to folks who are simply enjoying the book.
So, if you’re really reading this for my critical opinion, you should know: I’m interested in Greetings from Portland because of its subject rather than simply because of the medium it describes. I do happen to think that postcards provide a particularly interesting angle on the history of the places they portray, but it is still true that it’s essentially the Portland bit that compels me to examine this book about postcards. And I am frustrated by the book’s relative lack of historical context for the cards it portrays.
The view on the past in Greetings from Portland is awfully varied — the book is arranged thematically in chapters showing postcards of fashionable houses, Portland roses and rose gardens, schools, churches, schools, hospitals, parks, statutes, hotels, bridges, harbor traffic, government and commercial buildings, the stockyards, Union Station, street scenes and city views, and the Rose Festival. Several chapters are devoted to peculiarities of the Rose City such as the old Forestry Building (“World’s Largest Log Cabin”), The Grotto, and Council Crest Amusement Park. And there are a few chapters showing of postcards that aren’t of Portland at all — one covers the bounty of Oregon’s fields, orchards, and pastures (pages 87-93), and two chapters display postcards of places luckier Portlanders might have once visited on day trips (pages 103-113). The postcards are mostly in radiant, unlikely-looking full color (thanks to the hand-tinting they so often employed), and are reproduced at nearly their original size.
And the images themselves are beautiful. On page 43, a southbound passenger train makes its way off the east end of the Steel Bridge, its elegant curve along the track accentuating the heavy, graceful lines of the bridge. On page 79, a view from the east bank of the Willamette shows the old public market building with, amazingly, six small seaplanes resting peacefully in the river, all facing west and apparently unaffected by the current. On page 127, a thrillingly gothic portrait of SW 5th Ave. features artificially gloomy streets and glowering dark clouds penetrated by a gleaming full moon. Hundreds of other postcards show the River City in a glory its real past no doubt never quite attained, with blue skies, stately houses, exuberant pink roses, and shapely modern industry gleaming from every page.
Greetings from Portland has no index or bibliography, though as I mentioned it does have an introduction with some advice about how to date postcards.
* * *
Greetings from Portland is but one of a whole series of city-themed postcard collecting books published by Schiffer Publishing, all with titles beginning “Greetings from. . .” Unfortunately, Multnomah County Library only owns this one. But, readers with an interest in postcards may also wish to consult Gideon Bosker and Jonathan Nichols’s Greetings from Oregon (Portland, OR : Graphic Arts Center Pub. Co., c1987; reviewed in Duck Duck Book number 45). It, too, is lovely.
Filed under: science
The bone woman : a forensic anthropologist’s search for truth in the mass graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo / Clea Koff.
New York : Random House, c2004.
[MCL call number: 599.9 K78b 2004; four copies, no holds;
also in Spanish under the title El lenguaje de los huesos: S- 599.9 K78L 2004; three copies, no holds]
I have never had a serious desire to be a doctor, but I must admit that since childhood I’ve been fascinated by forensic medicine. It seems so amazing that someone with the right training and experience can cut apart a deceased person’s body, look at their insides, test their tissues and fluids, and come away several hours later with a clear idea of what exactly caused the person to die. But how much more fascinating is it that forensic anthropologists can do the same when the person’s body has been reduced, more or less, to nothing but a skeleton?
Clea Koff was a student forensic anthropologist working on her master’s degree at the University of Arizona and doing field work at the Pima County, Arizona Medical Examiner’s Office when she had the opportunity to travel to Rwanda to work for the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal examining the evidence in mass graves left after the Rwandan genocide. Koff jumped at the chance, and after two missions for the Tribunal in Rwanda, she joined four more in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo. In each place, Koff and her colleagues worked sixty-hour or longer weeks in awkward, sometimes dangerous conditions with poor supplies and patchy institutional support, coaxing little bits of people’s stories from their bones, bodies, clothing, personal possessions, and surroundings.
The dead, their relatives, their killers, and the horrible circumstances that allow people to draw lines and rise up wholesale against their neighbors are always present in Koff’s narrative; as is Koff’s own struggle with the tension between her broad responsibility as special kind of human rights worker and her role as a scientist, a servant of truth and discovery. But in many ways it is a beautiful story, too. The search for answers is an important part of what makes us human, and Koff takes that quest seriously. She considers scientific, social, historical, philosophical, and political questions as she hones her vocation so that it will add value, satisfaction, and meaning not just to her own life, but also, at least a tiny bit, to the lives of others as well.
The Bone Woman has an appendix listing completed and commenced trials that used evidence from the missions described in the book, which is interesting but on the whole rather dry and unsatisfying. Unfortunately, there is no index, and no bibliography.
