DID THEATRE CREATE THE CIVIL WAR?

Yes, my guess is that media of all kinds, but especially theatre and adventure novels,  contributed to the outbreak of the American Civil War and influenced our behavior right up to the Hippie Revolution in the 1960s.

Beginning with the invention of melodrama in France in the 1780s Americans were increasingly steeped in romantic hero stories that made ordinary trades seem unappealing and dull. The appearance of Dumas' ground breaking actioner "The Three Musketeers" in the 1840s was like kerosene poured on an already raging fire. The appearance of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" pushed it over the edge.

We have an image of the 19th Century America as one of unrelieved physical labor, but was it? There were melodramas, classical music concerts and opera. Shakespeare played even in small towns in the American West. In 1847 the "Shakespeare Riots" occurred when fans of different Shakespeare companies clashed violently on the city streets and people were killed.

There were showboat shows, Vaudeville, and saloon concerts.

There were minstrel shows, Hippodrome spectacles, and human and animal fights.

Add to that medicine shows, recitals, church theatre, races, state, local and world fairs, circuses, magic shows, dances, and Vaudeville.

And did I mention burlesque, public lectures and readings, debates, political rallies, rousing band concerts, sports, penny dreadfuls and magazines, romance stories, and increasingly illustrated newspapers?

Let us not forget Fourth of July celebrations, Christmas pageants, puppet shows and temperance plays.

Oops! I forgot equestrian shows, harvest celebrations and revival meetings. Geez, it's a wonder that anyone ever found time to work!

My guess is that nearly everybody, even the relatively poor, attended shows at least once a week, probably more. It's almost as if the people who lived in the 1800s had television, just like we do. People then were saturated with media, only for them it was an edgy new thing that stimulated new desires.

One last thought: people wonder how a thug like Hitler managed to come to power in the most educated country in the world. The standard reasons offered are no doubt correct but I'll add a minor reason to the list: adventure media.  For over a century the public was exposed to an unprecedented number of romantic plays and hero stories and they unwittingly did propaganda for the idea that any individual, if sufficiently bold, could live a life of adventure, excitement and pageantry. When millions of people were converted to this belief it was only a matter of time before somebody found a way to base a political system on it.

Interesting, eh?

TRIP TO ITALY

I just saw "Trip to Italy" on Netflix and enjoyed it immensely. There's not much plot. It's just a travelogue about two British actors who are paid to take a motor trip through Italy and write about it. Here's a few framegrabs.

Italian landscapes differ from American ones. We have beautiful hills too but our roads are often cluttered with signs and cars, and Italian landscapes seem to have a more pleasing layout than ours.

I'm dying to know how they do it. The landscape looks like it has an overall plan, as if an artist figured it out, yet I'm guessing that the land is owned by different families, with no artistic co-ordination.

The car in the film enters a town and we discover that people build very close to the roads here. You walk outside the door and you're practically out in the street...but it works.

The buildings are shaped like kids blocks. The greenery is a nice counterpoint. How did that come about? Did the townspeople have an artist who had to approve the type and location of every building and tree?

 

The town is situated on a bay.

Houses look great when they appear to cascade down a hill. Even so, you have to pity the pedestrians who have to walk uphill every day. Is this practical? Maybe. After all, people pay whatever it takes to live on San Francisco hills that are steeper than this.

I wish my house was built below road level like this restaurant.

Skipping ahead, our guys are now ensconced in a hotel with a marvelous view and a pretty and poised guide.

The visitors are stunned into silence by the immensity of the scene.

After a bit they bit begin to talk. Only the biggest and smallest subjects seem appropriate.

Byron stayed in this town, maybe even in this hotel. He loved hearing the Italian language spoken. The film quotes him:

I love the language, that bastard Latin / That melts like kisses from a female mouth / 'Sounds as if it should be writ on satin / And syllables that read like sweet sounds.

NEW IDEAS FROM IKEA

"I was at IKEA yesterday and I thought I'd put up a few of the pictures I took there. Most of them are from an exhibit showing how IKEA might furnish really tiny apartments and homes. I thought they did a good job. See if you agree."

Here's (above) the living room, dining room and kitchen, all in one continuous space. It's a bit claustrophobic, but not nearly as much as you'd expect. Having white furniture and white walls makes the area seem bigger. 

 You'd need a bigger table than this, even with the extender up. Even so, it might be okay if you're eating alone.

 
 Extra chairs hang from hooks on the wall.

Off the kitchen, on the other side of the wall behind the sofa, is a corridor containing the bathroom and closets.

  

There's (above) the bedroom. It's pretty minimal. The bed looks like it only sleeps one.

One last picture: here's (above) the living room as seen from the dining table. You see another glimpse of the bed in the background. Storage boxes on top of the right hand bookshelves are black which hides them in shadow and reduces the storage clutter. Interesting, eh?

"I wonder if IKEA sells many of those "small space" suites? Maybe there's a lot of people who'll sacrifice space to live in exciting, expensive places.

I used to know a magazine editor who worked in Manhattan and she lived in a very tiny but well-furnished apartment. She seemed happy. Hmmmmm. Maybe it does work for some people."

Before I close I'll throw in a couple of unrelated IKEA pictures. I like this craftsman, "Seven Dwarves" style oak table. It would make a good desk. No...wait a minute... you couldn't slip file drawers under there. Maybe something simpler would be better.

I also like this idea (above) for a womans sewing room. The idea of a movable clothes rack situated in front of a three-part mirror is an interesting one. You'd have to roll the rack away to use the mirror, but that's okay.

I'll add that this is the way I imagine rooms must be like in the garment industry.  I like rooms for the home that are informed by working areas in the real world. I like to be reminded of commerce, of making things to sell.

"Anyway, that's it! See you later!"

RECENT ASTRONOMY PHOTOS 8/2015 [EXPANDED]

Hold your hats because this (above) is a much more significant picture than it seems. It's the Andromeda Galaxy, AKA M31, as seen recently on a clear night over the Swiss Alps. "So what?" you say. "What's so special about this?"

The answer is that we've all seen good pictures of M31 taken with the aid of long  exposures, pictures like the small colorful one above,...but the large picture at the top was taken with an ordinary camera. It's what the naked eye would have seen. In other words, the rounded disk of another galaxy was visible to the unaided eye in the night sky over Switzerland, not as a pinpoint of light, but as a hazy blue disk with a bright center. It'll be visible in American skies starting in September and lasting through the Fall. Amazing, eh?

Here's (above) a shot taken from the Curiosity Rover on Mars. The camera was about four feet high.

Above, layered Martian rocks, also taken by Curiosity. The layers are believed to be deposits made a couple of billion years ago near the shore of an ancient, long-gone river.

Here (above) a comet has just "turned on" as its orbit takes it closest to the Sun.

Lastly, here's (above) a small cluster of galaxies which is independent of our own Local Group of galaxies.

Our own group is a much larger one consisting of 54 galaxies, many of them dwarf galaxies that orbit the two local giants, Andromeda and The Milky Way.  According to Wikipedia the center of our local group is a point between these two galaxies.

CHILDREN OF OTHER LANDS

I'm packing up my books in preparation for a move and to make the load lighter I have to sell books that have been on my shelf for decades. Geez, it's hard. It's like getting rid of old friends. These are books that have guided my thinking for decades and determined the course of my life. Yikes!

A typical book in the "sell" pile is this old-fashioned one (above and below): "Children of Other Lands" by Piper and Holling. I can't justify keeping it because it has no immediate utility but I've frequently thumbed through it over the years and have been seduced by its charm every time. I'll miss it when it leaves the house.

By way of an example of Hollings' work, here's a black and white picture that always reminds me how important culture is to a family. This modest room with it's dutch door and plates arrayed on a ledge, and the beautiful costumes worn daily by the women, reminded me how people who are steeped in culture have an easier time in life than the rest of us. They know where they fit in and what's expected of them, and that frees them to think about other things. Well...that's my admittedly romantic take on it, anyway.

   

It must be nice to live in a part of the world (above) where architectural styles are somewhat set and homes are expected to reinforce the culture of the whole community.

Of course I live in modern America and part of my culture is to change styles constantly. Here's (above) a beautiful picture (above) of a cluster of pueblo buildings nestled in a pocket of towering hills. If such a landscape actually exists I wouldn't change a single stone, but the picture compels me to imagine what would happen if the mountains were skyscrapers and the river a highway.

In my minds eye I see a modern city where clusters of tall, modern buildings are punctuated by rolling hills capped with Montemare-type bohemian villages.

But....the book has to go. You have to be ruthless when you're undertaking a long move.

COMIC BOOKS VS. ILLUSTRATED KIDS BOOKS

I've been busy today so I had to reprise an older article to stay on schedule. I hope nobody minds. I think you'll find the subject interesting:

Before I begin this piece I want to apologize for ripping into kids book illustrator Lane Smith so hard in a previous post. I deliberately chose his least-appealing book so it wasn't a fair appraisal. Sorry Lane! Maybe I can make up for it by illustrating this new piece with the best book my local library had (above) by another artist, Mark Teague. It's a pretty appealing book, I admit, but I have to criticize it to make a larger point.



The point I want to make is that books of this type are trying to compete with comic books and they can't. In a comic book the picture of the two kids above would have rated a single panel on a single page. In Teague's big, expensive picture book, the kind that only has a few pages, it gets an entire two-page spread. All that for a picture of two kids talking on a porch? That seems odd to me.

Kids picture books always give too much weight to minor events and too little to major events. There simply aren't enough pages to tell a good story correctly and the artist is burdened with the necessity of trying to make each page, no matter how trivial in content, an artistic masterpiece. Is that really what kids want?

  Any one of these Carl Barks comic book panels (above) might have been a full-page illustration in a Mark Teague book, but all that elaboration would have gotten in the way of the story. My experience with my own kids is that kids definitely want stories, but the expensive illustrated books aren't geared for that. They're geared to deliver a simple artistic impression. Kids want stories but the expensive picture books we give them deliver objects of art instead.


Mark Teague is a really talented guy but he's working in a medium...thin illustrated kids books...that doesn't tell stories very well. I bought a couple of Teague books for my kids when they were still young, and all these years later I still have them. They're almost in mint condition. The hardcover Cochran Barks collection, on the other hand, is falling apart from my kids frequent reading. What does that tell you about what kids like to read?

One last point: we all have favorite illustrated books that we actually did read often when we were kids. My admiration for those old illustrators knows no bound because they managed to entertain in such an uncongenial medium. I'm glad I had those books and the illustrators that created them deserve a lot of credit. Even so, it's my belief that really young kids would learn more and have more fun if the bulk of their illustrated reading favored cheap, well-done pulp comics rather than pricey illustrated books.

ANOTHER WALLY WOOD MASTERPIECE

Wally Wood fans might be familiar with this (above) puzzle Wood did in the late 50s. It illustrated a Mad Magazine article called "Mad Visits Corny Island." 

I have an original copy of the Mad that contained the article,but I never put the puzzle together, probably because I didn't want to cut up the magazine. I don't know why it didn't occur to me to Xerox the picture and cut up the copy, or to simply look it up on the net. Well, it occurred to me yesterday, so here it is...in both versions. 

That's (above) a detail from the cut-up xerox...

...and here's (above) the original artwork, which I found on the net. Nifty, eh?